If Dr. Venkataraman Ramakrishnan, who shared the Nobel Prize for Chemistry this year with two others for mapping ribosomes at the atomic level, could not entertain the flurry of requests for an interview from the media after he won the Prize, he more than compensated for it on November 24. He participated in a web chat organised by the U.S. Department of State, Office of Global Digital Programs. The web chat that lasted more than an hour saw him answering a range of questions. The participants included journalists, students and others.

His responses to most of the answers were forthright and were marked by remarkable clarity.

It is true that currently top class research in India is limited to a few good institutes. But that needs to change, he said to R. Prasad.

Dr. Ramakrishnan, unlike some scientists, sees science and religion as two completely different entities. Rather than making him more spiritual, dwelling at the atomic structure of ribosomes only taught him that there was a rational explanation for most things.

The full transcript of the web chat will become available at CO.NX by the end of this week.

You were quoted as saying that India today offers good opportunities, and students need not have to shift to the U.S. to do top class research. But how much of path-breaking research is done in India compared with the U.S.?

This is a very good question and one on which people could differ.

There was a very interesting piece by Prof. M. Vijayan in your paper [ The Hindu] recently. I think it is true that there is more money in the system. Once Prof. C.N.R. Rao told me that when he returned to India he really had to struggle to get things done, but now he has tried to make sure that young investigators have the facilities they need.

But except for people like Prof. Rao, Prof. G.N. Ramachandran and several others, the number of world class scientists is not what one would expect in a country the size of India, and in some ways, you could argue (as Prof. Vijayan has done) that pre-independence India produced more world-class scientists proportionately. I think that these things take time. I see very bright young scientists in my field in India who are publishing very good papers. Eventually these people will create an atmosphere of excellence, and then from that a culture of tackling the hardest problems (rather than a defeatist attitude of “we can’t compete”, etc) will emerge.

Considering the number of top class researchers, Nobel laureates included, in many universities in the U.S., and the benefits of being a part of such a research group, do you still hold the view that there is no compulsion for a young researcher to move to the U.S. to do top class research?

I think it is easier to do top class research in the U.S. (and the UK and Europe) because of the scientific culture of excellence. However, there are people in India who are now regularly publishing in top journals and doing very good work. So if you want to be trained well, it isn’t absolutely necessary to move to the U.S. What you make of the training is then up to you. I think it is always hard to do really original work, and there is also quite a bit of luck involved. One important thing is that information now is easily accessible, and thanks to the internet, scientists in India are less isolated from the latest ideas than they used to be. This is going to have a huge impact on the future.

More and more biotechnology students are compelled to pursue research in the U.S. and other countries as in India, barring very few institutes, work on cutting edge areas is not done. Your comments.

It is true that currently top class research in India is limited to a few good institutes. But that needs to change. One idea I have come across is embedding research institutes within universities, so students have a direct experience of first class research from a very early stage.

Science teaching in India is more bookish and theoretical. Can such a system ever produce path-breaking research?

I agree this is a problem, and there is too much cramming for exams that have very formal questions. My own experience in Baroda was very different. For Pre-science, we had the PSSC physics course from the U.S., and for my B.Sc. we studied the Berkeley physics course as well as the Feynman lectures. This was due to a handful of dedicated teachers, especially Prof. S.K. Shah, many of whom had returned from the U.S.

Do you think that it became possible for you to switch from Physics to Biology since the research environment in the U.S. allows it? Or do you suppose that a lateral shift was possible as science in general, and Biology, in particular, has become interdisciplinary?

I think the U.S. environment is much more flexible with respect to allowing people to change fields. However, I think you are right in saying that science, especially biology, has become more inter-disciplinary and is attracting people from all sorts of fields like physics and mathematics.

Do you still see a large number of students taking up basic sciences? That is not the case here in India, and what can be done to promote basic sciences?

One thing that encouraged a lot of very bright students in my generation was the National Science Talent Search Scholarship. This was prestigious, had special summer programs, etc. and was restricted to basic sciences. Perhaps something along those lines will help.

How difficult is it to get sustained funding (even in the U.S.) for basic research in sciences compared with applied research?

I have to say that although there is a lot of money in the U.S. system, it is sometimes hard to get sustained funding because the grants are typically for 3-5 years.

This is actually one reason [why] I moved to the MRC laboratory of molecular biology, which has a tradition of providing not exorbitant but very stable funding.

Is it fair to expect students to take up research when the salary is not attractive at all?

I absolutely believe that scientists (and even PhD students) should be paid more than they are currently.

How right is it to measure the quality of one’s work by the number of papers published in high-impact journals? Many institutes use this as a measure while deciding on promotions. Your comments.

This is a terrible worldwide problem. It is because those deciding on promotions etc. do not want to spend the time and energy to make an informed judgement of their own.

The worst thing about this is that one can publish a mediocre paper in a high impact journal and get more credit than for an outstanding paper in a less prestigious journal.

The co-ordinates of ribosome structures are available in the public domain. Companies use them for making drugs (and huge profits). Your comments.

So far nobody has made money on it. However, the coordinates are also licensed by Yale and the MRC, so if they do, we will get some return on the 16 investments.

But more generally, the U.S. and U.K. have found that without the profit motive, it is very hard to translate basic discoveries into useful applications and so in the long run it benefits society.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/KK10Df04.html

By Peter Lee

India has engaged in high-profile hand wringing over the Barack Obama administration’s renewed focus on developing the United States’ relationship with China, as New Delhi perceives a pattern of diplomatic, economic and military encirclement by Beijing.

A Chinese threat is seen in the “string of pearls” – China’s access to maritime facilities in Myanmar, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and the Maldives – and in the military buildup on India’s eastern border that threatens to sever the “chicken’s neck”, the narrow Siliguri Corridor between Nepal and Bangladesh that connects India’s landlocked eastern boondock to the national heartland.

In July 2009, one pundit predicted war with China “by 2012″, in the article “‘Nervous China may attack India by 2012′” [1], published by the Times of India: “China will launch an attack on India before 2012. There are multiple reasons for a desperate Beijing to teach India the final lesson, thereby ensuring Chinese supremacy in Asia in this century,” Bharat Verma, editor of the Indian Defense Review, wrote in the article.

But a look at prevailing trends in South Asia indicates that China’s adventurism will be moderated by its own vulnerabilities. The fate of Tibet could emerge as Asia’s defining security issue – to Beijing’s detriment – if China and India can’t manage their differences.

An adjustment of the special Indo-American relationship consummated under president George W Bush was inevitable once the Obama administration entered office in January 2009.

One of the most erratic and destabilizing initiatives of Bush’s erratic and destabilizing presidency was his opening to India. Bush and his national security advisor, Condoleezza Rice, entered office determined to upgrade relations with Delhi. To do so, a key diplomatic and legal impediment to intimate security cooperation had to be swept aside: India’s development of its civilian and military nuclear programs outside of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) structure. This initiative was not popular, even inside the Bush administration.

Robert Blackwill, the abrasive, arm-twisting (literally – he left government in 2004, shortly after he allegedly yanked the arm of a female embassy functionary in a rage over a missing airline reservation) US ambassador to India was a mentor to Rice and one of the most aggressive advocates of the new relationship.

He described his struggles with non-proliferation types and the pro-Pakistan former secretary of state, Colin Powell, and his deputy, Richard Armitage, in colorful terms in the article: “What are the origins of the transformation of US-Indian relations?” [2]

… [T]he non-proliferation “ayatollahs”, as the Indians call them, who despite the fact that the White House was intent on redefining the relationship, sought to maintain without essential change all of the non-proliferation approaches toward India that had been pursued in the [Bill] Clinton administration. It was as if they had not digested the fact that George W Bush was now president. During the first year of the Bush presidency, I vividly recall receiving routine instructions in New Delhi from the State Department that contained all the counterproductive language from the Clinton administration’s approach to India’s nuclear weapons program. These nagging nannies were alive and well in that State Department labyrinth. I, of course, did not implement those instructions. It took me months and many calls tothe White House to finally cut off the head of this snake back home.

Assisted by Blackwill’s persistent insubordination and the determination of India’s foreign secretary at the time, Shyam Saran, Bush cut the Gordian knot in a manner that suited his world view of the US and its allies unconstrained by the international system and its network of treaties and instead dispensing instruction to it.

The US unilaterally concluded a nuclear deal with India that made a mockery of the NPT and logic by exempting eight Indian reactors capable of generating fissile weapons material from inspection. Then the United States orchestrated acceptance of the deal by the International Atomic Energy Agency and, after considerable arm twisting, the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group. The deal was ratified and signed by the US and Indian governments in late 2008, in one of the last acts of the Bush presidency.

The deal, enshrined in US law as the United States-India Nuclear Cooperation Approval and Non-proliferation Enhancement Act, was sold as a reward for India’s good record as a democracy and as a non-proliferator as it developed its nuclear program outside the NPT. India’s less-than-stellar record as contributor to nuclear tensions in South Asia – it had danced to the brink of a nuclear exchange with Pakistan as recently as 2002 over Kashmir – was pointedly ignored.

India was overjoyed at its good fortune, having gained an undeserved pass for its nuclear program and recognition of a privileged role as an American security partner at the expense of its detested rival, Pakistan.

Bush remains a popular figure to the Indian establishment. Tellingly, after he emerged from the traditional one-year hiatus of presidents who have left office, one of his first stops was the hospitable venue of the Hindustan Times-sponsored Leadership Initiative Conference in New Delhi.

The Hindustan Times concluded its interview with Bush, “India’s voice on the global stage very important: Bush” [3] with the following question/statement: There are some who believe you have been the best US president for India.

In his reply to the newspaper, Bush – while modestly stating that he would await history’s verdict – did not presume to disagree.

When asked what the United States got out of the nuclear deal, Bush jocularly cited reduced import barriers for India’s luscious mangoes in the US market as justification.

A more realistic case was made that US suppliers of nuclear gear would benefit from India’s entry into the global market for plants and equipment, though Russian and French suppliers, with their proven export records, would be expected to fare better selling to India than America’s civilian nuclear plant builders.

Beyond its shortage of unambiguous benefits, the deal brought a number of negatives with it.

The Indian transaction – and the inescapable conclusion that the United States had institutionalized a double standard of forgiveness for its allies and selective enforcement against its enemies – has created inevitable problems for the United States in its attempts to create a united front against Iran.

When the Bush administration declined to extend similar nuclear privileges to the (admittedly, undemocratic, serial-proliferating) government of Pakistan, it contributed to the sense of anxiety and suspicion of the US within the Pakistani military that dogs American efforts to gain Islamabad’s wholehearted participation in its bloody AfPak strategy to this day.

It also brought the security tensions implicit in the Sino-Indian relationship to the surface. China vigorously if fruitlessly opposed the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group waiver to India, earning considerable resentment from India in the process.

The primary significance of the Sino-American relationship was, apparently, geostrategic. In its official statements, the Bushadministration never alluded to a significant rationale for the Indo-American alliance: China.

After he left government, Blackwill was considerably less circumspect. While he acknowledged that there was no sense of immediate existential threat underlying from Beijing underpinning the relationship between Washington and New Delhi, he went on to say:

Like some in Washington, India is enormously attentive to the rise of Chinese power … as the Indian military thinks strategically, its contingency planning concentrates on China. It is partially in this context (as well as energy security) that India plans a blue-water navy with as many as four aircraft carriers. India will also eventually have longer-range combat aircraft and is working on extending the range of its missile forces. What other US ally, except Japan, thinks about China in this prudent way? On the contrary, witness the current widespread eagerness within the European Union tolift its arms embargo against China. As a Chinese general said to me a few years ago, European policy toward China can be summed up in a six-letter word: Airbus.

The American conservative’s platonic ideal of confrontational Sino-Indian relations driven by border disputes (and a unique interpretation of the phrase “honest broker”) was supplied in aWall Street Journal op-ed: “The China-India Border Brawl” [4] by Jeff Smith of the right-wing American Foreign Policy Council in June 2009:

What is Washington’s role in this Asian rivalry? … Washington should leverage its friendly relations with both capitals to promote bilateral dialogue and act as an honest broker where invited. But it should also continue to build upon the strategic partnership with India initiated by former president George W Bush, and support its ally, as it did at the Nuclear Suppliers’ group and the ADB [Asian Development Bank], where necessary. Washington must also make clear that it considers the established, decades-old border between the two to be permanent.

Most importantly, though, the Sino-Indian border dispute should be viewed as a test for proponents of China’s “peaceful rise” theory. If China becomes adventurous enough to challenge India’s sovereignty or cross well-defined red lines, Washington must be willing to recognize the signal and respond appropriately.

Alas for India, its privileged position near the heart of American security calculations did not survive the global financial crisis, the deterioration of the situation in Afghanistan, and the Obama administration.

Obama, who won his Nobel Peace Prize in part for his efforts towards world nuclear disarmament, not the granting of deals to ostensibly right-minded and responsible nuclear democracies, pledged during his presidential campaign to obtain ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

Indian experts promptly announced that India’s first hydrogen bomb test had been a dud, implying that enmeshing India in international nuclear agreements would be an unacceptable compromise of India’s ability to perfect its weapons and ensure its security. (See India reels under explosive nuclear charge, Asia Times Online)

More significantly, the Obama administration has embarked on a policy of “strategic reassurance” towards China, intended to obtain China’s active assistance in resuscitating the global economy and to ensure it will not dump its massive holdings of US public debt.

The US-India relationship remains, but for the time being it is stripped of the China-pushback elements that imbued the Bush administration’s initiative with its appeal, sense of urgency, and bilateral recklessness.

In South Asia, the US no longer has the Bush administration’s luxury of cultivating relations with India while a medium-intensity conflict festers in Afghanistan. Instead, the US has found itself desperate for effective cooperation from Pakistan as it attempts to forestall a political and military collapse in Afghanistan that, aside from its strategic implications, would be a considerable embarrassment for the current US president.

The Obama administration made an effort in good faith to square the US/Afghanistan/Pakistan/India circle by promoting a grand bargain involving the disputed region of Kashmir. In an attempt to win the support and gratitude of the Pakistan military – and enable the shift of resources to the Afghanistan border – the US tried to put negotiation of Kashmir on the regional agenda and revealed the first conspicuous fissures in the Sino-American relationship.

The Indian government is resolutely opposed to internationalization of the Kashmir issue, since the demographics are against it. The area is overwhelmingly Muslim – even more so now that a terror campaign has uprooted almost 300,000 Hindu residents and turned them into internally displaced persons – and the inevitable destination of a good faith negotiation would appear to be the alienation of a large part of India’s current holding of Jammu and Kashmir.

At New Delhi’s vociferous insistence, Kashmir was deleted from US special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan (AfPak), Richard Holbrooke’s portfolio, and the US State Department sent him off to try to solve the AfPak mess without explicit reference to the central preoccupation of Pakistan’s army.

Beyond assuring that the desperately distracted Pakistan government would be deprived of the good offices of any third party to overcome the entrenched Indian position on Kashmir, the decoupling of Pakistan from India’s geopolitical concerns also confirmed a more subtle shift: the near-total marginalization of Pakistan as a Chinese asset in South Asian affairs.

Although the Pakistan security establishment retains its loyalty and appreciation of China as a genuine ally, it is enmeshed in a bloody, distracting struggle with the Taliban while its civilian leadership finds itself desperately reliant on US arms, aid, and diplomatic good offices.

The Obama administration has also provided signal assistance to India in dealing with another nettlesome ally of Beijing on its border: Myanmar.

Myanmar has been courted by India for years, even as persistent US advocacy of democracy in Myanmar and the cause of Aung San Suu Kyi pushed the junta deeper into Beijing’s embrace. Now, the United States has adopted a policy of engagement marked this week by the visit of US Undersecretary of State Kurt Campbell – whose primary objective appears to be to help India wean Myanmar away from China.

It is perhaps not a coincidence that India now finds – with its western and eastern headaches reduced if not eliminated – that it has the leisure to involve itself in a border spat with China on the matter of Beijing’s claim on a remote ethnic-Tibetan enclave in the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh and, specifically, the little town of Tawang, the town that the Dalai Lama - to considerable Chinese tooth-gnashing and with the full-throated support of the Indian government – arrived in on Sunday for a five-day visit.

Although Western observers tend to dismiss the Sino-Indian border dispute as a matter of juvenile posturing by two aspiring superpowers who ought to know better, there is a deadly serious element to the dispute over these remote areas – the destabilizing and, to Beijing, profoundly threatening problem of the hostile Tibetan diaspora on the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) borders with India, Nepal and Bhutan.

Beijing’s top Indian affairs boffin, Ma Jiali, has identified the border dispute, not economic competition or maritime security, as the central problem of Sino-Indian relations.

As demonstrated by the unrest in 2008 throughout the vast ethnic-Tibetan areas of China and South Asia, the PRC has been unable to get a grip on its Tibetan problem, despite 60 years of assiduously working the military, security, political, economic and diplomatic levers at its disposal.

Over the past four decades, China has profited in its clumsy grappling with the Tibetan issue from forbearance by the international community, especially its neighbor to the south, India.

Despite hosting the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, since his flight from Lhasa in 1959, the Indian government has refused to allow the Tibetan diaspora to engage in activities that directly attack PRC rule in the Tibetan Autonomous Region and the Tibetan areas of Qinghai, Gansu and Sichuan.

China has exploited the Dalai Lama’s commitment to a “Middle Way” of negotiated autonomy, to entangle the Tibetangovernment-in-exile in endless, fruitless and seemingly insincere negotiations.

However, it appears that generational changes within the Tibetanmovement, the evolving geopolitical and economic stature of India, and Washington’s willingness to partner with New Delhi are converging to introduce elements of instability and dangerous unpredictability into China’s relationship with India.

To forestall Chinese interference in the selection process, the Dalai Lama has indicated that his successor may be found outside of China, and may even be selected before his death.

Whoever succeeds the Dalai Lama, and however he is chosen, increased militancy by proponents of Tibetan independence within the diaspora is virtually assured. Explicit independence activists like the Tibetan Youth Congress (TYC) have historically respected the desires of the Dalai Lama and moderated their activities. They are unlikely to show the same deference to the young man who is rumored to be the Dalai Lama’s preferred successor, Ugyen Thinley Dorjee, the 17th Karmapa.

The Karmapa, a charismatic 22-year-old who escaped Tibet dramatically in 1999, may serve his people well as as telegenic, intelligent and pious face of Tibetan Buddhism to the West, but he is unlikely to command authority within the movement. He comes from the competing Black Hat sect and has been locked into an embarrassing struggle with a powerful leader within his own sect who has recognized a competing Karmapa. He has been locked out of the sect’s monastery and denied access to his customary regalia. Instead, he resides at Dharamsala in India with the Dalai Lama and is seen as little more than his protege.

In the context of the South Asian status quo, in which all nations subscribe to the “One China” policy, as well as discourage Tibetan political activity and monitor and suppress Tibetan militancy with various degrees of enthusiasm, the loss of the Dalai Lama’s moderating influence and an uptick in rhetoric and violence by angry Tibetan emigres would not concern Beijing overmuch.

What concerns the PRC is the possibility that India, flush with economic development and US backing, would be willing to confront China and roll back its influence in South Asia by choosing to play “the Tibet card” with the help of Tibetan militants operating from havens located in the cross-border territories of India and its allies.

The Christian Science Monitor in “Rivals China, India in escalating war of words” [5], sought out Chinese and Indian pundits in the context of the Dalai Lama’s visit this week to Tawang:

The fierce People’s Daily editorial was “a message showing Beijing’s intention”, says Han. “They don’t want the Indian side to do anything to play the Tibet card.”

New Delhi, however, “has no bargaining leverage with China except the Dalai Lama”, says Dr Pant. “He is the last thing they can use against China …”

The Times of India, in the article “India and the Tibet card” [6] provided some additional background information by recounting the result of China’s continual fishing in the troubled waters of India’s increasingly disgruntled and independent-minded satellite state on the Tibet border, Nepal:

India has also played the Tibet card, at least twice in recent times. Kondapalli [of Jawaharlal Nehru University] points out that “in 1987 and 2003, whenChina began supplying arms to the Royal Nepalese Army, India did play the Tibet card. In 2003, foreign secretary Shyam Sharan went to Dharamsala to meet the Dalai Lama. It was a message to China: Don’t interfere in our backyard.”

The desire to display and deter on their contested border in the area of Tibet has led both China and India to develop and militarize the remote communities there even beyond the expected investments of two burgeoning regional powers that wish to secure and integrate their most remote territories.

The Sino-Indian border has never been fixed by mutual agreement between the two nations. In the 1950s, China proposed a swap in which China would keep a desolate stretch in western India called the Aksai Chin, claimed by India, over which the Chinese had constructed a strategic road linking Xinjiang and Tibet. In return,China would recognize Indian control of a piece of land in what was then known as India’s North East Frontier Agency (NEFA) nestled against the Myanmar border and China.

Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, miscalculating China’s willingness to go to war, refused the deal and instead sent troops into Aksai Chin to expel the Chinese.

Disagreement escalated into a full-scale war in 1962. China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) administered a thorough drubbing to the unprepared Indian army, expelling Indian units from Aksai Chin, and occupying contested areas in the NEFA.

The Chinese leadership, wary of becoming embroiled in a prolonged war with India on top of problems with the Soviet Union, the US and Kuomintang leader Chiang Kai-shek, fatefully decided to withdraw unilaterally from the territory it had taken in NEFA, instead of continuing military operations and occupation to bargain the border dispute towards a final conclusion.

Today, the swap – actually, the acknowledgement of de facto control of territories each side already occupies – is still on the table. The PRC has the (virtually) uninhabited Aksai Chin tightly in its grasp, while India has reorganized the NEFA and created the state of Arunachal Pradesh on the land China claimed.

There’s one wrinkle. For several years, China has indicated that it would surrender its claims over all of Arunachal Pradesh except Tawang – the same Tawang that the Dalai Lama visited on November 8. That is the same Tawang that the Dalai Lama - in 2008, in a statement that possibly reflected frustration at serving as a punching bag for duplicitous Chinese negotiators and aggrieved Tibetan militants in the aftermath of the bloody unrest inside China - stepped into the political arena and identified not as “Tibetan” (as he had done previously in an acknowledgment of its cultural character while sidestepping the political issue of whose territory it should belong to) but as “part of India”.

To be fair to the Chinese, Tawang is indisputably Tibetan.

In a twist that probably accounts for Tawang’s existence as a Chinese negotiating point, in 1947, the Tibetan government asked for only one modification to the border arrangements that the British had made (and China has consistently refused to recognize): it explicitly asked that India acknowledge Tibetan authority in Tawang. That is a persuasive indication that the district – which protrudes into the president-day Tibetan Autonomous Region like an inconveniently extended thumb – falls outside what India might construe as its natural Himalayan boundary.

Nevertheless, it is difficult to believe that the Chinese are serious about recovering Tawang. Tawang is the site of the Tawang Monastery, known as Galden Namgyal Lhatse, founded in the 17th century. It calls itself the “second-oldest Buddhist monastery in the world after Lhasa”, hosted the Dalai Lama when he fled the Chinese occupation in 1959, and the Tibetan spiritual leader has visited it four times since then. The Dalai Lama has chosen at least one of Tawang’s abbots and provides financial support to the monastery, which provides political as well as religious leadership for a community of 20,000 Monpa tribespeople of Tibetan extraction.

Turning Tawang over to the tender mercies of the PRC in the face of the horror, outrage and resistance of a large, powerful Buddhist monastery, an aggrieved population, the global Tibetan community, and a large swath of Indian and world opinion would appear to be a political impossibility for New Delhi and utter folly for Beijing.

Given Beijing’s current anxieties over the future direction of the Tibetan independence movement and India’s increased assertiveness, it will probably persist in its claim to Tawang simply to have a convenient casus belli at hand if and when it wants to escalate tensions in a relatively controlled manner and lay claim to the Indian government’s attention.

In an indication to Chinese, Tibetan and world opinion that the contested border is not a place where China can provoke India at little diplomatic and military cost, the Indian government announced in June the stationing of a squadron of nuclear-capable Sukhoi 30 MKI fighters within striking distance of Arunachal Pradesh, and has mooted raising another two divisions of mountain troops to serve there.

To emphasize the state’s status as an integrated and inalienable part of India, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh made a campaign visit to Arunachal Pradesh in October 2008 during the run-up to the parliamentary elections. The Chinese retaliated with an unsuccessful attempt to block an Asian Development Bank loan to India that included flood control in the state.

The Tawang situation benefits from the fact that each side has occupied and fortified its positions for decades and not too much can happen there that can surprise and threaten. More importantly, as India’s ability to project power into its border areas improves, the situation has benefited from the discrete restraint of the Congress Party’s Manmohan and Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao.

Manmohan characterized the Dalai Lama’s trip as a response to a local invitation extended to the Dalai Lama that he wasn’t involved in, an absurdity considering the close attention New Delhi pays to every issue surrounding the Tibetans.

In an apparent attempt to diffuse or redirect tensions as the date of the trip approached, the Chinese government cannily noted Manmohan’s bland statement, and decided to construe and condemn the trip as the Dalai Lama’s affront to Sino-Indian ties instead of an insult to Beijing by New Delhi.

For India’s part, in order to lower the temperature for the Dalai Lama’s visit to Tawang – which had already received in-depth coverage in the New York Times, Time magazine, the Christian Science Monitor and a host of other media outlets, its Foreign Ministry canceled visas for foreign journalists looking to cover the trip.

Disappointed foreign journalists – deprived of the opportunity to observe the Dalai Lama sipping butter tea in calm defiance of the Chinese dragon – might as well instead journey a mere 640 kilometers westward to find the true epicenter of Sino-Indian tension: Kathmandu.

The burgeoning crisis in Nepal – and the frantic competition between New Delhi and Beijing for influence in this volatile, nascent democracy cum impending failed state – has attracted remarkably little international attention.

Nepal is an independent country stretching across the Himalayas between India and China. Predominantly Hindu, it is a major destination for Tibetans fleeing China. How many Tibetans reside in Nepal is unknown. While 30,000 are officially registered, thousands more entered the country after 1989 illegally. At the same time, the Nepalese government has bowed to Chinesepressure and began to refuse asylum to Tibetan refugees.

The Tibetans – and the Nepalese government – aroused China’s displeasure in 2008 when Nepal’s capital of Kathmandu was rocked by angry anti-Chinese demonstrations in the aftermath of the June unrest. An unexpected turn of political events providedChina with a much more enthusiastic Nepalese partner just in time to harass Tibetan anti-Olympic demonstrators in August of the same year.

India’s Foreign Minister, Shyam Saran – the same Saran who was architect of India’s alliance with the Bush administration - decided to do something about Nepal’s independent-minded but ineffective monarchy, which was not only floundering in its attempts to suppress an extensive Maoist insurgency but also buying arms from China in the process. Saran midwifed an alliance of the Maoist insurgents and disaffected Kathmandu insiders that toppled the king and brought Nepal’s 240-year old monarchy to an end.

But then, in a shocking development that neither Saran norNepal’s self-styled revolutionary vanguard likely expected, the Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) – instead of becoming a marginalized junior partner destined for disarmament and irrelevance in a pro-Indian regime of cooperative Kathmandu fat cats – carried the day in the parliamentary elections and won enough seats to form the government with its chairman, Prachanda as prime minister.

The Nepalese Maoists, despite their name, are not allies of the CCP. They are ideologically closer to US Marxist Robert Avakian and Peru’s Shining Path than Hu Jintao and the CCP (which had been supplying Nepal’s King Gyanendra with weapons to fight them and which they describe as “revisionist”).

Nevertheless, the Maoists recognized India’s fundamental hostility toward their movement and extended a hand of friendship toChina. Prachanda rejected the traditional pilgrimage to New Delhi for his first overseas trip and went to Beijing instead to attend the closing of the Beijing Summer Olympics. He also announced that his government intended to renegotiate the friendship treaty between Nepal and India, which he termed unequal.

China accepted with alacrity. During Prachanda’s one-year tenure as prime minister, China dispatched a dozen delegations toKathmandu, including two PLA delegations bringing securityassistance and a visit by China’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Yang Jiechi.

A think-tank funded by the Indian Ministry of Defense, the Institute for Defense Studies and Analysis, highlighted in “Nepal: New ‘Strategic Partner’ of China?” [7] a series of Chinese statements that were qualitatively different from the usual barrage of flattery and economic aid that China concentrates on impoverished potential junior allies, and which undoubtedly set alarm bells ringing in New Delhi – Beijing seems to have provided something that sounds very much like a security guarantee to Nepal.

The increasing level of bilateral engagement also indicates that China is wooing Nepal as a new strategic partner. This has been confirmed by the statements made by various Chinese officials. For example, on 16 February 2009, Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi said in Beijing that China would prefer to work with Nepal on the basis of a strategic partnership. In fact, Vice Minister of International Department of the Central Committee of Communist Party of China, Liu Hongcai said in Kathmandu in February 2009 that ‘we oppose any move to interfere in the internal affairs of Nepal by any force.’ Similarly, on November 4, 2008, Liu Hong Chai, International Bureau Chief of the ChineseCommunist Party, stated that ‘China will not tolerate any meddling from any other country in the internal affairs of Nepal- our traditional and ancient neighbor.

Prachanda reaffirmed Nepal’s One China policy, declared his government would not permit Nepal to be used as a base for anti-China activity, vigorously suppressed Tibetan demonstrations, harassed Tibetan residents, and apparently turned a blind eye when ten Chinese security personnel crossed the border intoNepal to demand that a photographer from the Agence France Presse news agency erase his camera’s memory chip.

It was too good to last.

Through an unknown combination of domestic incompatibility and foreign interference, the Maoists were frozen out of the Nepalese government in May 2009 as the result of a scuffle over removal of the pro-Indian army chief of staff, and an unpopular but pro-Indian moderate communist took over. (See Maoists isolated over army chief, Asia Times Online, April 28)

The Maoists went into opposition and have carried out their threat to gridlock all government business - through a parliamentary boycott – until matters are ordered to their satisfaction.

The small and incestuous world of Kathmandu politics has been diverted by the non-stop bustle of Nepalese politicians to New Delhi and Beijing to consult with their patrons.

The Maoist leadership visited China for an eight-day visit in October 2009, obtaining a statement from Beijing stating that the Maoists should not be frozen out of the constitution-writing and peace process activities that the Nepalese Constituent Assembly is supposed to be pursuing, despite their absence from the ruling coalition.

At the beginning of November, the Maoists announced their push for power, albeit within the context of Nepal’s murky combination of post-insurgency power-sharing and democracy.

They have promised to bring the current government to its knees and return to power through a program of mass action conducted over the next two weeks, ostensibly non-violent but undoubtedly accompanied by intimidation and harassment courtesy of the bullyboys of the Maoists’ Young Communists League.

Signs are that they will succeed.

The Nepalese government, which unwisely exhausted its budget several months ahead of schedule despite the knowledge that the Maoists had gridlocked the budgetary process, rather abjectly requested the Maoists not to engage in their mass action. Prachanda also rather magnanimously agreed not to shut downKathmandu’s international airport at the urging of the Western embassies, and predicted he would shortly be back in power.

As Nepal threatened to descend into chaos, the Chinesegovernment threw another $200 million dollars at the mess, in the form of a credit from its Export Import Bank for hydropower and infrastructure projects at a concessionary interest rate of 1.75%.

The Maoists are keenly aware that they cannot push things too far and Nepal will not become a Chinese satrapy or a communist paradise.

The implicit shadow over all Nepalese actions that displease New Delhi is the memory of what India did to Sikkim in the 1970s: destabilization of the regime of an inconvenient monarch, followed by riots, request for assistance by pro-Indian local politicians, the arrival of Indian troops in the capital, and a plebiscite in which, by a margin of 97.5% to 2.5%, voters chose to join the Indian Union.

In a tribute to the instincts of moderation and business as usual, India’s Congress Party, China, and the US administration appear jointly determined to keep a lid on things in Nepal - and in South Asia.

In an exercise in political triage that provided hostile advocates with opportunities for outraged posturing but reflected a sober understanding of geopolitical realities and US interests, President Obama postponed his meeting with the Dalai Lama until after his visit to Beijing, and allocated the first state visit by a foreign leader to Washington to Indian Prime Minister Manmohan.

For its part, China knows that India holds the cards – especially the Tibet card – in South Asia. It is looking for a modus vivendi that keeps the focus on economic growth instead of military adventurism. The successful continuation of the current regionalsecurity regime in South Asia – based on denial of Tibetan aspirations avoiding destabilizing actions at the Sino-Indian border – relies to a significant extent on New Delhi.

The current system will be put to a more stringent test if the bellicosely nationalistic Bharatiya Janata Party were to replace the relatively lamblike Congress party as the majority party in India’s parliament. By entering into an equal alliance with the US and obtaining international validation of India’s treasured nuclear program, the Congress party effectively stole the BJP’s national security thunder and trounced it in the most recent elections.

Unable to score political points against the Congress party at this date for its closeness to the US, the aggrieved BJP has directed its fire at the ruling party’s sensible and moderate China policy as insufficiently protective of India’s security and honor.

The Chinese ambassador paid a formal call on the head of the BJP, no doubt hoping for reassurance that the BJP’s outbursts were mere cynical posturing and Beijing could expect the usual pragmatism if and when the BJP regained power. What he received instead was a detailed rehashing of India’s security grievances against China.

If the BJP takes power and decides to exploit China’s vulnerabilities in South Asia, the world might indeed get that 2012 war that Bharat Verma was talking about.

Notes
1. China may attack India by 2012, Times of India, July 12, 2009
2. What are the origins of the transformation of U.S.-Indian relations?, Article in “The National Interest” by former United States ambassador to India Robert D Blackwill, Summer 2005
3. India’s voice on the global stage very important: Bush Hindustan Times, October 30, 2009
4. The China-India Border Brawl, Wall Street Journal Asia, June 24, 2009
5. Rivals China, India in escalating war of words, Christian Science Monitor, October 20, 2009
6. India and the Tibet card, Times of India, November 23 2008
7.) Nepal: New ‘Strategic Partner’ of China?, Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, March 30, 2009

Peter Lee writes on East and South Asian affairs and their intersection with US foreign policy.

http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/k-subrahmanyam-homi-bhabha-scientist-visionary-dreamer/373938/

Bhabha would have welcomed private sector participation in nuclear energy.

The country will celebrate the birth centenary of Homi Bhabha next week, on 30th October. Very few Indian scientists have been so closely identified with a field of science as Homi Bhabha has been with atomic energy. Very few scientists had such an intimate association with both business and government as he did. He conceptualised the birth and role of atomic energy in India. As early as in 1944 he got the Tata Trust to fund the establishment of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. He was the founder of the Department of Atomic Energy and the Atomic Energy Commission. He was a rare scientist who could sell a dream to both JRD Tata and Jawaharlal Nehru.

Bhabha was an early ‘prophet’ of the peaceful uses of the atom. In a grand leap of faith he visualised the three-stage atomic energy development programme for India which in the second stage would utilise thorium, abundantly available in India, as fuel. While there were and are skeptics about the programme — Dr Meghnad Saha led a crusade against it — it is an idea that has found revival with the renaissance in nuclear energy development due to concerns about climate change.

It is a tribute to Bhabha that in his centenary year India is announcing plans for nuclear energy expansion up to 470,000 Mw of energy by 2050 and the design of an advanced heavy water reactor using thorium fuel. This target cannot be achieved without opening the nuclear power sector to private industry and without commensurate expansion in the private sector engineering industry. The reluctance in certain quarters to open up to the private sector is likely to slow down the expansion of nuclear power in the country and make it difficult to reach the envisaged target.

One could say in retrospect perhaps that Bhabha was too optimistic about the pace of development of fission and fusion energy, but his vision for India is beginning to be realised after a 40-year interregnum when India was subjected to technology denial by the international community. At this stage private sector phobia should not be allowed to come in the way of realising his vision. Bhabha would have welcomed private sector participation in nuclear energy.

Bhabha was also an internationalist in the development of nuclear energy for India. His acquisition of the first light water reactor for Tarapur at a time when the technology was new even in the industrial world demonstrated his confidence in international cooperation. Though Cold War considerations interrupted such technology cooperation, it is a tribute to his vision that we are once again able to get back to such cooperation in his centenary year.

Though he coined his oft-quoted aphorism in the early sixties, that “no power is costlier than no power”, our parlous energy situation today is a testimony to his foresight. Bhabha was also a pragmatist. He opposed the creation of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) as originally proposed, as it had very stringent controls on fissile materials in all non-nuclear countries of that time. He succeeded in getting the safeguards system modified to what it is today, with the right of civil nuclear energy and autonomous R&D on it for non-nuclear nations. Glenn Seaborg, the former Chairman of the US Atomic Energy Commission, said of Bhabha: “He was very self-assured. He was not easy to argue with. Polite, but very sure of himself, he was never at a loss for words and was most articulate. He was a very imposing presence.”

Could Bhabha have played the role he did if Jawaharlal Nehru had not been the prime minister and had not given him the access he enjoyed? There is no doubt that the personal relationship between the two was largely instrumental in ensuring that the atomic energy programme had all the support it needed. When Bhabha came to meet Lal Bahadur Shastri as prime minister and minister for atomic energy in June 1964, he had to wait for three days for his first appointment. He was not amused.

There is a view that Bhabha was the main driver behind India’s nuclear weapon ambitions and Jawaharlal Nehru was a dove totally committed to nuclear disarmament. The late historian, Sarvepalli Gopal, who had access to Bhabha’s papers, told me that in the wake of the First UN Conference on Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy, over which he presided, Bhabha wrote to Nehru proposing that India should amend its constitution, renouncing nuclear weapons. Nehru replied, advising Bhabha to concentrate on development of the nuclear programme and to inform him when the stage was reached when India could make nuclear weapons. He asked Bhabha to leave political and strategic issues relating to nuclear energy in his hands.

Bhabha came out in favour of Indian nuclear weapons once the Chinese conducted their nuclear test on 16th October, 1964. He persuaded Shastri to sanction the Subterranean Nuclear Explosive Project (SNEP) in November, 1964. Bhabha died in the Mont Blanc plane crash on 24th January, 1966, the day Indira Gandhi was sworn in as prime minister. Could Bhabha have conducted a nuclear test, if he had not died before the deadline of 1st January, 1967 stipulated in the Non-Proliferation Treaty? Hardly likely, for the simple reason that India had not accumulated enough plutonium to conduct a test by that time. However, it was his SNEP team, headed by Raja Ramanna, which conducted the first Pokhran test in 1974.

Bhabha has his share of critics. There is a section of the scientific community which believes his influence on Nehru benefited the atomic energy programme at the expense of other and more cost-effective scientific efforts. Anti-nuclear lobbyists would attribute the direction of the Indian nuclear weapon policy to his inspiration. They also feel he exaggerated the benefits of nuclear energy and downplayed its costs and environmental risks. Bhabha’s basic ideas about using the thorium fuel available in abundance in India, focusing on energy generation to alleviate poverty, keeping abreast of the rest of the world in science and technology, and international cooperation for that purpose, should be cherished and the nation must honour him for it.

]]> http://abhishek4420.wordpress.com/2009/10/21/homi-bhabha-scientist-visionary-dreamer/feed/ 0 abhishek4420 http://abhishek4420.wordpress.com/2009/10/21/india-china-and-water-security/ http://abhishek4420.wordpress.com/2009/10/21/india-china-and-water-security/#comments Wed, 21 Oct 2009 07:01:43 +0000 Socially Obnoxious http://abhishek4420.wordpress.com/?p=502 ]]> http://www.hindu.com/2009/10/21/stories/2009102155830900.htm

Ananth Krishnan

More than one year ago, China announced plans to build a series of dams in Tibet, including a hydel power generation plant at Zangmu on the middle reaches of the Brahmaputra. The plan was part of a larger initiative by Beijing to tap Himalayan rivers for hydropower. Tibet’s rivers have remained largely untapped because of the difficult terrain, but with improvements in technology in the past decade, China’s leaders have embarked on a damming spree in the mounta ins of Tibet and Yunnan in the southwest.

The plans will have an impact on the lives of millions in seven countries that lie downstream of these rivers — India, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, and Thailand. The dams on the Salween river in Yunnan, by some reports, have already resulted in flooding in the Mekong region downstream. How concerned should India, which lies downstream on the Brahmaputra, be? Work on the Brahmaputra, or Yarlung-Tsangpo as it is known in Tibet, is still in the early stages. China’s projects on this river are of two kinds — one, for hydel power generation, and the more ambitious kind, still in the works, a massive diversion project that envisages diverting the river’s waters to the arid north.

The Zangmu project, which has been in the news in India recently, was publicly announced a year ago, and the contract awarded this March. Some reports have alleged that Beijing was going back on its commitment to India to not divert the Brahmaputra. The Zangmu site is essentially a hydel power project — a ‘run of the river’ power generation project, which experts say is no cause for alarm as it will have little impact on the course of the river downstream.

The real worry for India, experts and officials say, is when China embarks on its diversion plan. The mammoth $62 billion “South-to-North Water Diversion” project, currently embroiled in debates and delays in Beijing, is the centrepiece of the Chinese government’s plans to address its northern water crisis. The spreading water crisis, which already affects more than half of the country’s 660 cities, is largely sourced in its strikingly uneven distribution of water resources. The arid north and northwest, home to 35 per cent of the population, has only 7 per cent of the country’s water resources.

The diversion project, first mooted by Mao Zedong in the 1950s, involves diverting water from the south to the north along three routes. The central and middle routes, which have no impact on India, will divert water from the Yangtze river to Beijing and Tianjin in the north. The western route, from the Brahmaputra, is the most ambitious and is of huge consequence to India and Bangladesh. It involves building a dam on the ‘great bend’ of the Brahmaputra — the spot where the river does a u-turn of sorts and begins its journey east to India.

Work has begun on the central and eastern routes. It is four years behind schedule because of increasing costs and problems with relocating millions of people along the routes. The eastern route will be completed by 2012, but has also been plagued with environmental problems. Officials said last week the government has begun to relocate 330,000 people along the central route, which also runs from the Yangtze.

The delays and costs of the first two routes have resulted in growing opposition to the western route, which is also the most technically complicated. Its fate is undecided. According to Wang Shucheng, former water resources Minister, Beijing is even considering abandoning the project. Technical feasibility studies are still under way. Mr. Wang argues that it is “unnecessary” and “infeasible” to include the Brahmaputra in the diversion project, and that the Yangtze was large enough to deal with the northern shortages. He has cautioned that the speed of the flow of the river, which is the world’s highest and fastest-flowing, would damage dams and embankments. The ‘bend’ is also an earthquake-prone zone.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh raised India’s concerns about the western route when he met with Chinese President Hu Jintao in Beijing in 2008. National Security Adviser M.K. Narayanan told The Hindu in a recent interview India was following a “trust but verify” approach on the diversion project. “Our information is, and satellite pictures also show, that there is no work which has taken place,” he said. “As of now, we have not seen any evidence of them doing the great bend so to say.”

Kenneth Pomeranz, an expert on China’s water issues at the University of California Irvine, says it is “hard to get a handle on” on the Chinese’s government’s views on the western route. There is clear dissent within the Ministry of Water Resources, with Mr. Wang leading the arguments against the project. But others among China’s leaders, including President Hu (a hydraulic engineer by training) and the influential former President Jiang Zemin, are thought to back the project. “A lot of people in government see it as a risky project, and kind of hope other things come along that make it unnecessary,” he says. But avoiding the project, according to him, would require massive improvements in water conservation in the arid north, the equivalent of “fixing a million leaky taps.”

The problem for India, Mr. Pomeranz says, is China has all the leverage in the issue, with weak international laws and no robust water-sharing arrangements between the two countries. The pressing concern for New Delhi, experts say, is to begin to actively engage with Beijing on water sharing issues. India needs to institutionalise a sharing mechanism before it is too late, and before Beijing presents New Delhi with a fait accompli about its dams.

“There is no ‘water-sharing’ arrangement between India and China,” Ramaswamy Iyer, former Water Resources Secretary of the Government of India, said in an email message. “Water has not figured in the India-China talks. It is now included in the agenda.” But Mr. Iyer argues the issue needs to be given more attention, and made as important a part of the agenda as the border issue. From India’s point of view the point to consider, according to him, is the “quantum of possible diversion and the impact it would have on the flows to India.” Hydel projects would not affect India “if the waters are returned to the river after they pass through the turbines”, but the Indian government needed to “keep questioning China constantly on their plans.”

“The issue for India and China is that there is no understanding, no agreement, on international rivers,” says Brahma Chellaney of the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi. “Between India and Pakistan, we have a treaty which provides for third party arbitration and defines what the rules and no-go areas are. But between India and China, there is a huge vacuum which is not good for stability and water security.”

“The run of the river projects [such as Zangmu] are of lesser concern to India,” he added. “I’m surprised at seeing the news reports now, as it is not a new issue… China has every right to use water resources for energy. International norms allow any country upstream to do so. The Indus river water treaty allows India to do the same.” But even hydel projects could have potentially disastrous effects, he said, if there are many dams that are large enough to decrease flow, which is not the case at present. In Yunnan, China built four hydel power dams along the Salween, which many experts say resulted in flooding downstream in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam.

Mr. Chellaney says the first requirement for India is “discuss and define what the no-go areas are, and arrive at basic rules,” something the two countries have not done. Officials have so far had three meetings through a working group mechanism that has been set up, but it does not have the mandate to come up with such a robust agreement. “As long as there are no institutional arrangements,” he observes, “India’s position depends on China basically coming to an agreement by doing us a favour. And that is not a position India should be in.”

http://beta.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/article31683.ece

There is no reason to assume that India’s rapidly rising neighbour, set to become the world’s largest economy in the next two decades, will not play the normal game of nations. But the current hawkishness and jingoism in sections of the media and strategic circles in India is without basis and uncalled for, argues a veteran strategic affairs specialist.

In the last few weeks a number of accounts have appeared in our media of ‘incidents’ on the Indo-China Line of Actual Control (LoAC) that portrayed China as exerting military pressure on India. There were also reports of China objecting to the Asian Development Bank loan to a development project in Arunachal Pradesh on the ground that it is a disputed territory and issuing stapled instead of stamped visas for travellers, of Kashmiri residence to China.

Very hawkish articles appeared in the media on both sides. In China, an analyst repeated the argument of the 1960s that India cannot stay united. In India, the ghosts of 1962 were resurrected and there were predictions that there was likely to be a Chinese attack on India by 2012. The retiring Naval Chief’s sober assessment that militarily India is not in a position to catch up with China on equality of forces and equipment in the conventional sense and therefore India should consider technological solutions to cope up with, and not confront a rising China, was misinterpreted as defeatist sentiment in certain media and strategic circles.

It is no doubt significant that while all this tension generation is in the media of the two countries the two governments have sought to reduce the tension and discourage the hype in the media. Some political parties, ex-service officers, and strategists have drawn totally inapt comparisons with 1962. I am one of the few surviving senior citizen civil servants who were in the Ministry of Defence at that time. I functioned as a member of the Joint Intelligence Committee from November 1962 till December 1964.

Year 2009 is not 1962. In 1962, China was isolated from the international system. It was conducting a ‘Hate America’ campaign annually and also denouncing the Soviet leadership as revisionists and capitalist roaders. The Chinese attack on India was launched to coincide with the Cuban missile crisis to make sure that the two superpowers would be preoccupied with each other and not be able to apply pressure on China. The Chinese also promptly withdrew from the Arunachal Pradesh territory they occupied back to the McMahon line.

At that time under the advice of American Ambassador J.K. Galbraith the Indian leadership did not use the Air Force for fear of superior Chinese retaliatory capability. The truth, which we did not know at that time, was that the Chinese Air Force was totally grounded as the Soviets had denied them spares and aviation fuel — not because of the attack on India but because of the ongoing ideological dispute. The debacle in Sela-Bomdila happened not because the Indian Army was outgunned and outmanned but because the divisional commander did not fight and attempted to withdraw from a well entrenched position due to sheer panic. There are books on the ‘unfought war’ by people who were there at that time. Since then the Indian Army has faced the Chinese under valiant leadership and acquitted itself very creditably.

China of today is not the Maoist country that argued that power grew out of the barrel of a gun and that even if 300 million Chinese perished in a nuclear war 300 million would survive to build a glorious civilisation. Times have changed since the ideology of countryside surrounding the cities was advanced during the Cultural Revolution. ‘Dig tunnels deep and store grain everywhere’ was the Maoist slogan in preparation for a nuclear war. China of the 1960s was an isolated country and today it is one of the largest trading nations of the world. Those who build skyscrapers and Three Gorges dam will not be thinking of war in the same way Mao did. China is energy-import dependent and its energy transit lanes through the Indian Ocean and Malacca Straits are very vulnerable

China has a much greater stake in Taiwan than it has in Arunachal Pradesh, which it totally vacated after occupying large sections of it in 1962. It has not risked a war on Taiwan over the last 60 years. It has been extraordinarily patient about it since it understands the risks involved in using force on Taiwan recovery. There was a time (the whole of the 1950s and 1960s) when U.S. aircraft and warships would violate Chinese airspace and Chinese territorial waters regularly. China issued the relevant 437th and 593rd serious warnings to the United States. That continued until it allied itself with the U.S. in 1971 faced with the perceived Soviet nuclear threat. Ideology did not stand in the way.

There are valuable lessons for India in China’s patience and purposive response, untrammelled by ideological baggage or the overburden of memory. When Henry Kissinger started his secret trip to make up with Beijing, he told the doubters that the Chinese were pragmatists.

China is a rising power and is most likely to overtake the U.S. as the country with highest GDP in the next couple of decades. It wants to be the dominant power of Asia in the immediate future and that will mean an unequal relationship with other major Asian powers. The only nation that is perceived to have the potential to challenge China, not in the short run but over the longer period, is India — with a comparable population, a similar civilisational heritage, and the advantage of a younger age profile. While a meaningful challenge from India to China is not likely to come for at least a couple decades, India is in a position to play the role of a balancer in the ongoing rivalry between China and the U.S.

Chinese policies towards India have subtle elements of sophisticated coercion to attempt to prevent a closer partnership developing between India and the U.S. China may also have plans to shape a final settlement of the Tibetan issue on the passing of the present Dalai Lama. The pressure on Arunachal and procrastination in finalising the border may be a part of a long-term strategy to compel India to accept a post-Dalai Lama dispensation in Tibet and bring the matter to a closure.

China asserts that it will be rising peacefully. There is no disputing that peaceful rise is in its interest. But that does not preclude the normal practices in the game of nations of pressure, influence, and dominance — economically, politically and even militarily but without recourse to the actual use of force. That has happened all through history and there is no reason to assume that China will not practise the normal game of nations.

India has to learn to cope with this challenge without getting hysterical. Nor should it hamper in any way the growing trade relations between the two countries. There is, in fact, a good case to develop mutual dependencies in a globalised world, with due care to ensure that the dependency does not become unfavourably one-sided against our interest. The most effective way of doing it is to step up our economic growth to 10 per cent by exploiting all available favourable factors in the international economic and political system, as China is doing; develop rapidly our border infrastructure; augment our military capability without delays; and attempt to develop stakes for all major powers in our growth and security.

While doing all this, there is no need to indulge in jingoistic rhetoric. There can be firmness in dealing with the LoAC or other issues where there are attempts at exploiting unequal advantages in situations. India has arrived at a stage in international politics when it has to demonstrate maturity in playing the game of nations.

(The author, a retired civil servant, is an internationally known strategic affairs specialist and commentator.)

http://beta.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/article29564.ece

I had the privilege of knowing and working with Norman Borlaug — who has been aptly described by the Nobel Peace Prize Committee as the greatest hunger fighter of our time — for nearly 50 years. I first heard him in 1953 outline an innovative strategy for combating wheat rusts at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

From 1963 onwards, he visited India in March every year to see the wheat crop. During his extensive travels by road, he used to stop frequently, talk to the farmers, and examine the state of the health of the plants. Plants and farmers became his life-long friends and companions. Eliminating the wheat rust menace became his unrelenting mission.

Dr. Borlaug started his research career in agriculture in Mexico at a time when the world was passing through a serious food crisis. During 1942-1943, nearly two million people died of hunger during the Great Bengal Famine. China also experienced widespread and severe famine during the 1950s. Famines were frequent in Ethiopia, the Sahelian region of Africa, and many other parts of the developing world. It was in this background that Dr. Borlaug decided to look for a permanent solution to recurrent famines by harnessing science to increase the productivity, profitability, and sustainability of small farms.

The work he did in Mexico during the 1950s in breeding semi-dwarf, rust-resistant wheat varieties and its extension to India, Pakistan, and other countries during the 1960s brought about a total transformation in the atmosphere for the possibility of achieving a balance between human numbers and the human capacity to produce food. Developing nations gained in self-confidence in their agricultural capability. He disproved prophets of doom like Paul and William Paddock and Paul and Anne Ehrlich — who even advocated the application of the ‘triage’ principle in the selection of countries that should and should not be saved from starvation through American assistance.

The introduction of Mexican semi-dwarf varieties of wheat in India in the early 1960s not only helped improve wheat production but also led to the union of brain and brawn in rural areas. The enthusiasm generated by the new technology can be glimpsed in the following extract from an article I wrote in 1969 for an Indian magazine: “Brimming with enthusiasm, hard-working, skilled and determined, the Punjab farmer has been the backbone of the revolution. Revolutions are usually associated with the young, but in this revolution, age has been no obstacle to participation. Farmers, young and old, educated and uneducated, have easily taken to the new agronomy. It has been heart-warming to see young college graduates, retired officials, ex-armymen, illiterate peasants and small farmers queuing up to get the new seeds. At least in the Punjab, the divorce between intellect and labour, which has been the bane of our agriculture, is vanishing.”

The five principles Dr. Borlaug adopted in his life were (to use his own words): give your best; believe you can succeed; face adversity squarely; be confident you will find the answers when problems arise; then go out and win some bouts. These principles have shaped the attitude and action of thousands of young farm scientists across the world. He applied these principles in the field of science and agricultural development, but I guess he developed them much earlier in the field of wrestling, judging from his induction into the Iowa Wrestling Hall of Fame in 2004.

Having made a significant contribution to shaping the agricultural destiny of many countries in Asia and Latin America, Dr. Borlaug turned his attention to Africa in 1985. With support from President Jimmy Carter, Ryoichi Sasakawa, Yohei Sasakawa and the Nippon Foundation, he organised the Sasakawa-Global 2000 programme. Numerous small-scale farmers were helped to double and triple the yield of maize, rice, sorghum, millet, wheat, cassava, and grain legumes.

Unfortunately, such spectacular results in demonstration plots did not lead to significant production gains at the national level, owing to lack of infrastructure such as irrigation, roads, seed production, and remunerative marketing systems. This made him exclaim: “Africa has the potential for a green revolution, but you cannot eat potential.” The blend of professional skill, political action, and farmers’ enthusiasm needed to ignite another Green Revolution as in India was lacking in Africa at that time.

Concerned with the lack of adequate recognition for the contributions of farm and food scientists, Dr. Borlaug had the World Food Prize established in 1986, which he hoped would come to be regarded as the Nobel Prize for food and agriculture. My research centre in Chennai, India [the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation] is the child of the first World Food Prize I received in 1987. Throughout his professional career, Dr. Borlaug spent time in training young scholars and researchers. This led him to promote the World Food Prize Youth Institute and its programme to help high school students work in other countries in order to widen their understanding of the human condition. This usually became a life-changing experience for them.

When Mahatma Gandhi died in January 1948, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru said: “The light has gone out of our life, but the light that shone in this country was no ordinary light. A thousand years later, that light will be seen in this country, the world will see it, and it will give solace to innumerable hearts. For that light represented the living, eternal truth, reminding us of the right path, drawing us from error, taking humankind to freedom from hunger and deprivation.” The same can be said of Norman Borlaug. His repeated message that there was no time to relax until hunger became history will be heard so long as a single person is denied the opportunity for a healthy and productive life because of malnutrition.

Norman Borlaug was a remarkable man who was supported by a remarkable family —wife Margaret, son William, and daughter Jeanie. To my mind, Margaret who died in 2007 is the unsung heroine of the Green Revolution. Without her unwavering support, Dr. Borlaug might not have accomplished nearly so much in his long and demanding career.

Dr. Borlaug was not only a great scientist but also a humanist full of compassion and love for fellow human beings, irrespective of race, religion, colour, or political belief. This is clear from his last spoken words on the night of Saturday, September 12, 2009. Earlier in the day, a scientist showed him a nitrogen tracer developed for measuring soil fertility. His last words were “Take the tracer to the farmer.” This life-long dedication to taking scientific innovation to farmers without delay set Dr. Borlaug apart from most other farm scientists carrying out equally important research.

I was present when he was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 2007. He pointed out that between 1960 and 2000, the proportion of “the world’s people who felt hunger during some portion of the year had fallen from about 60 per cent to 14 per cent.” But the latter figure still “translates into 850 million men, women and children who lack sufficient calories and protein to grow strong and healthy bodies.” So he added: “The battle to ensure food security for hundreds of millions of miserably poor people is far from won.”

This is the unfinished task Norman Borlaug leaves scientists and political leaders worldwide. It will be appropriate for the Norman Borlaug Institute for International Agriculture to become the flagship of the movement for a world without hunger.

(This article is based on the Norman Borlaug memorial address given by the author at the Rudder Auditorium, Texas A&M University, U.S., on October 6, 2009.)

The greatest hunger fighter of our time warned against complacency, observing even towards the end of his life that ‘the battle to ensure food security for hundreds of millions of miserably poor people is far from won.’

Ajai Shukla

American, Japanese and European nuclear non-proliferation officials are keenly aware that Hyderabad-based Mishra Dhatu Nigam (Midhani), supplies key materials for India’s nuclear, space and missile programmes. Midhani figures on all these countries’ ‘Entity Lists’, which have legally blocked supplies of materials, know-how and equipment.

But this international blockade has been in vain, I learn, during an exclusive visit to this most secretive of defence PSUs. “Despite the sanctions,” says Chairman and Managing Director (CMD), K Narayana Rao, “Midhani today manufactures the world’s best maraging steel, a critical component in nuclear reactors, fuel enrichment centrifuges, missiles and space rockets. The Indian Space Research Organisation’s GSLV rockets are clad in Midhani’s maraging steel.”

Such breakthroughs in strategic materials have placed Midhani in an unusual position. With international sanctions still in place, Midhani has joined one of the world’s most challenging, futuristic and expensive projects: The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, or ITER, a $10 billion, multinational project that aims to generate electricity through nuclear fusion by 2018. India joined the project in 2005.

“We have produced a material called Low Activation Ferretic Martinsitic Steel, which the ITER project urgently needs”, explains a Midhani scientist. “This steel must have very low activation, allowing it to be placed in a highly radioactive environment (e.g. inside a reactor) without becoming highly radioactive itself. The ITER authorities are presently evaluating it at the Institute of Plasma Research in Gandhinagar.”

This foray into ITER is a one-time thing. Midhani remains a boutique manufacturer, focused exclusively on high-performance materials for India’s space, nuclear and defence programmes, to save these from being hostage to a supplier abroad. This is production at the cutting edge, groping in the dark, mixing and matching elements to develop materials that users have defined only as a set of properties.

“We experiment, we play with Molly,” explains Narayana Rao, describing the search for special alloys. Noting my startled look, he elaborates, “Molly is short for molybdenum, an element that gives special properties to steel.”

Midhani works in close partnership with the Defence Materials Research Laboratory (DMRL), located next door. DMRL, focusing on fundamental research, develops new alloys and materials; Midhani scales up DMRL’s laboratory production into industrial production.

Set up in 1972, Midhani’s mandate was to indigenously produce materials for India’s strategic programmes, without regard to cost or profitability. Today, Midhani delivers not only critical materials but hefty profits as well. Midhani is now a Mini Ratna, Category-1 company; its profits have gone up six-fold in the past four years, to Rs 40 crore in 2008-09.

With Midhani’s regular customers ramping up operations, that bottom line is poised to grow. From an average of four to five launches a year, Indian Space Research Organisation is stepping up to eight launches per year. And since nuclear power generation is a growth sector, the demand for reactor materials is likely to rise sharply. “BHEL and L&T have got a steam generator order for the Indian 700 Mw Pressurised Heavy Water Reactor (PHWR),” says Narayana Rao. “I need to be ready with my equipment and materials.”

The older Indian reactors, such as those at Kalpakkam, are also replacing critical components. Only Midhani supplies the metals needed for this.

Midhani has begun a Rs 200-crore expansion plan, with Rs 100 crore from its internal accruals, supplemented by Rs 100 crore of equity participation by the MoD. It is adding a high-tech, 10-tonne vacuum arc refining (VAR) furnace, in which molten metal is purified by dripping it, drop-by-drop, through vacuum. The impurities, which become gas at those temperatures, are sucked away by the vacuum.

Also being procured is a 6,000-tonne forge press, to press steel into sheets as thin as four millimetres, needed for India’s rocket programme.

“Today, I’m running 2,000 tonnes of products per year,” says Midhani’s CMD. “When the expansion plan is completed by 2010-2011, our output will double to 4,000 tonnes. Turnover will go from Rs 300 crore to Rs 500 crore.”

]]> http://abhishek4420.wordpress.com/2009/10/05/strategic-national-producer-midhani-on-high-growth-curve/feed/ 0 abhishek4420 http://abhishek4420.wordpress.com/2009/10/04/us-doublespeak-on-proliferation/ http://abhishek4420.wordpress.com/2009/10/04/us-doublespeak-on-proliferation/#comments Mon, 05 Oct 2009 01:34:41 +0000 Socially Obnoxious http://abhishek4420.wordpress.com/?p=492 ]]> http://www.dailypioneer.com/205968/US-doublespeak-on-proliferation.html

G Parthasarathy

On July 8, 1996 the World Court held that states possessing nuclear weapons have not just a need, but an obligation to commence negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament. The court also held that the use or threat of use of nuclear weapons would be generally contrary to the principles of international law, though there was some doubt about the extreme contingency when “the very survival of a state was threatened”. Despite this World Court opinion, the United States, Russia, France and the UK reserve the right to use or threaten to use nuclear weapons whenever their interests so demand. The US and Russia together possess around 19,000 nuclear warheads; France has around 350 warheads and the UK 160 warheads.

The 2005 US Doctrine of Joint Operations spells out several contingencies when the US could use nuclear weapons, including situations where it wants to “rapidly end a war on terms favourable to the US” or to ensure that American and international operations are successful. President Jacques Chirac announced in January 2006 that France reserves the right to use nuclear weapons against states supporting terrorism or seeking weapons of mass destruction. In 2003, British Defence Secretary Geoffrey Hoon warned Iraq that “in right conditions” the UK reserved the right to use nuclear weapons. China and India have ruled out the “first use” of nuclear weapons. Israel and Pakistan have indicated that they would use nuclear weapons if their very survival is threatened. President Barack Obama has indicated that the 2005 US Doctrine would be reviewed. But the US and its NATO allies will not rule out the use of nuclear weapons against states that do not possess such weapons, or give a “no first use” pledge against states possessing nuclear weapons.

Mr Obama has indicated that he does not expect to see the goal of a nuclear weapons-free world achieved in his lifetime. The so-called ‘nuclear weapons states’ may talk about arms limitations and undertake some token cuts in certain categories of strategic warheads. But they have no intention of eliminating nuclear weapons in the foreseeable future. Moreover, the American record on non-proliferation has been selective. In their book Deception: Pakistan the United States and the Global Nuclear Weapons Conspiracy, Adrian levy and Catherine Scott-Clark have revealed how the CIA and successive US Administrations covered up information they had about Pakistan’s relentless, China-assisted quest for nuclear weapons because of larger strategic considerations.

American ‘Non-proliferation Ayatollahs’ roar like lions when talking about proliferation by Iran and North Korea, but squeak like mice when it comes to proliferation by China. The Americans have long known that China has provided Pakistan with nuclear weapons designs, fissile material and enrichment equipment, but have deliberately turned a blind eye to China’s activities. Over the past decade, China has provided Pakistan with plutonium reactors and reprocessing technology to enable Pakistan to make lighter warheads for fitment on Chinese supplied ballistic and cruise missiles. Successive US Administrations have ignored this. Moreover, despite recent revelations about AQ Khan, the Obama Administration continues to maintain that Pakistan’s proliferation activities were carried out solely by a rogue “AQ Khan Network”, thus absolving the Pakistani Army establishment which was the prime culprit, of its culpability. If President Ronald Reagan overlooked Pakistani proliferation in the 1980s to keep Gen Zia-ul-Haq pleased, Mr Obama evidently wants to keep Gen Ashfaq Parvez Kayani in good humour. The Obama Administration remains tongue-tied on issues of the Pakistani Army’s role in nuclear proliferation, and on the ISI’s support for Taliban leaders and groups like the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba who kill American soldiers and nationals in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

New Delhi is not the only capital concerned by the Obama Administration’s efforts for ‘universalisation’ of the Non-Proliferation Treaty through demands that India, Israel and Pakistan should accede to the NPT. Responding to repeated statements on this issue by Obama Administration luminaries, Israel’s normally soft-spoken Defence Minister Ehud Barak retorted on September 7: “Until the Muslim world from Marrakesh to Bangladesh behaves like Western Europe, there can be no debate on nuclear non-proliferation.” Rarely, if ever, has Israel reacted in such terms to sermons on its security imperatives from an American President.

India has rejected the Obama-sponsored UN Security Council Resolution of September 24, calling on it to accede to the NPT. India should make it clear internationally that an important reason that the US is now focussing heavily on the NPT is that it is desperately keen to ensure that the NPT Review Conference scheduled for 2010 does not end in a fiasco like the review of 2005. But, the reasons why the non-nuclear weapons states stood firm in the 2005 review still remain valid, as the nuclear weapons states pay only lip service to nuclear disarmament, still insist on their right to use nuclear weapons against those who do not posses such weapons, and selectively deny technology for the development of nuclear energy. Moreover, while India would be prepared to join a multilaterally negotiated and non-discriminatory treaty on a fissile material cut-off, we cannot accede to the CTBT, which was accompanied by secret understandings and exchanges between five nuclear weapons states.

India-US relations saw a remarkable turnaround in the last two years of the Clinton Administration and throughout the eight years of the Bush Administration. The 2002 Bush National Security Doctrine resulted in the US regarding India as a partner in areas ranging from nuclear non-proliferation to climate change and global economic issues. The policies the Obama Administration has pursued since it assumed office on such issues give the impression that it regards India as a target, rather than as a partner. Including provisions in the UN Security Council Resolution of September 24 which are at variance with the letter and spirit of the 123 Agreement and the subsequent NSG waiver only accentuates misgivings and suspicions in India. Similarly, the threats held out about trade sanctions against countries that do not toe the US line on climate change, by Democratic Party Senator John Kerry, smack of crude intimidation. Given the Obama Administration’s approach to relations with China, can one see any prospect of the type of swift and effective India-US cooperation that followed the Indian Ocean tsunami? These misgivings and suspicions will have to be addressed when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh visits Washington, DC.

Published by Foreign Affairs

AN ECONOMY UNSHACKLED

Although the world has just discovered it, India’s economic success is far from new. After three postindependence decades of meager progress, the country’s economy grew at 6 percent a year from 1980 to 2002 and at 7.5 percent a year from 2002 to 2006 — making it one of the world’s best-performing economies for a quarter century. In the past two decades, the size of the middle class has quadrupled (to almost 250 million people), and 1 percent of the country’s poor have crossed the poverty line every year. At the same time, population growth has slowed from the historic rate of 2.2 percent a year to 1.7 percent today — meaning that growth has brought large per capita income gains, from $1,178 to $3,051 (in terms of purchasing-power parity) since 1980. India is now the world’s fourth-largest economy. Soon it will surpass Japan to become the third-largest.

The notable thing about India’s rise is not that it is new, but that its path has been unique. Rather than adopting the classic Asian strategy — exporting labor-intensive, low-priced manufactured goods to the West — India has relied on its domestic market more than exports, consumption more than investment, services more than industry, and high-tech more than low-skilled manufacturing. This approach has meant that the Indian economy has been mostly insulated from global downturns, showing a degree of stability that is as impressive as the rate of its expansion. The consumption-driven model is also more people-friendly than other development strategies. As a result, inequality has increased much less in India than in other developing nations. (Its Gini index, a measure of income inequality on a scale of zero to 100, is 33, compared to 41 for the United States, 45 for China, and 59 for Brazil.) Moreover, 30 to 40 percent of GDP growth is due to rising productivity — a true sign of an economy’s health and progress — rather than to increases in the amount of capital or labor.

But what is most remarkable is that rather than rising with the help of the state, India is in many ways rising despite the state. The entrepreneur is clearly at the center of India’s success story. India now boasts highly competitive private companies, a booming stock market, and a modern, well-disciplined financial sector. And since 1991 especially, the Indian state has been gradually moving out of the way — not graciously, but kicked and dragged into implementing economic reforms. It has lowered trade barriers and tax rates, broken state monopolies, unshackled industry, encouraged competition, and opened up to the rest of the world. The pace has been slow, but the reforms are starting to add up.

India is poised at a key moment in its history. Rapid growth will likely continue — and even accelerate. But India cannot take this for granted. Public debt is high, which discourages investment in needed infrastructure. Overly strict labor laws, though they cover only 10 percent of the work force, have the perverse effect of discouraging employers from hiring new workers. The public sector, although much smaller than China’s, is still too large and inefficient — a major drag on growth and employment and a burden for consumers. And although India is successfully generating high-end, capital- and knowledge-intensive manufacturing, it has failed to create a broad-based, labor-intensive industrial revolution — meaning that gains in employment have not been commensurate with overall growth. Its rural population, meanwhile, suffers from the consequences of state-induced production and distribution distortions in agriculture that result in farmers’ getting only 20 to 30 percent of the retail price of fruits and vegetables (versus the 40 to 50 percent farmers in the United States get).

India can take advantage of this moment to remove the remaining obstacles that have prevented it from realizing its full potential. Or it can continue smugly along, confident that it will get there eventually — but 20 years late. The most difficult reforms are not yet done, and already there are signs of complacency.

A 100-YEAR TALE

For half a century before independence, the Indian economy was stagnant. Between 1900 and 1950, economic growth averaged o.8 percent a year — exactly the same rate as population growth, resulting in no increase in per capita income. In the first decades after independence, economic growth picked up, averaging 3.5 percent from 1950 to 1980. But population growth accelerated as well. The net effect on per capita income was an average annual increase of just 1.3 percent.

Indians mournfully called this “the Hindu rate of growth.” Of course, it had nothing to do with Hinduism and everything to do with the Fabian socialist policies of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and his imperious daughter, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, who oversaw India’s darkest economic decades. Father and daughter shackled the energies of the Indian people under a mixed economy that combined the worst features of capitalism and socialism. Their model was inward-looking and import-substituting rather than outward-looking and export-promoting, and it denied India a share in the prosperity that a massive expansion in global trade brought in the post-World War II era. (Average per capita growth for the developing world as a whole was almost 3 percent from 1950 to 1980, more than double India’s rate.) Nehru set up an inefficient and monopolistic public sector, overregulated private enterprise with the most stringent price and production controls in the world, and discouraged foreign investment — thereby causing India to lose out on the benefits of both foreign technology and foreign competition. His approach also pampered organized labor to the point of significantly lowering productivity and ignored the education of India’s children.

But even this system could have delivered more had it been better implemented. It did not have to degenerate into a “license-permit-quota raj,” as Chakravarthi Rajagopalachari first put it in the late 1950s. Although Indians blame ideology (and sometimes democracy) for their failings, the truth is that a mundane inability to implement policy — reflecting a bias for thought and against action — may have been even more damaging.

In the 1980s, the government’s attitude toward the private sector began to change, thanks in part to the underappreciated efforts of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. Modest liberal reforms — especially lowering marginal tax rates and tariffs and giving some leeway to manufacturers — spurred an increase in growth to 5.6 percent. But the policies of the 1980s were also profligate and brought India to the point of fiscal crisis by the start of the 1990s. Fortunately, that crisis triggered the critical reforms of 1991, which finally allowed India’s integration into the global economy — and laid the groundwork for the high growth of today. The chief architect of those reforms was the finance minister, Manmohan Singh, who is now prime minister. He lowered tariffs and other trade barriers, scrapped industrial licensing, reduced tax rates, devalued the rupee, opened India to foreign investment, and rolled back currency controls. Many of these measures were gradual, but they signaled a decisive break with India’s dirigiste past. The economy returned the favor immediately: growth rose, inflation plummeted, and exports and currency reserves shot up.

To appreciate the magnitude of the change after 1980, recall that the West’s Industrial Revolution took place in the context of 3 percent GDP growth and 1.1 percent per capita income growth. If India’s economy were still growing at the pre-1980 level, then its per capita income would reach present U.S. levels only by 2250; but if it continues to grow at the post-1980 average, it will reach that level by 2066 — a gain of 184 years.

PECULIAR REVOLUTION

India has improved its competitiveness considerably since 1991: there has been a telecommunications revolution, interest rates have come down, capital is plentiful (although risk-averse managers of state-owned banks still refuse to lend to small entrepreneurs), highways and ports have improved, and real estate markets are becoming transparent. More than 100 Indian companies now have a market capitalization of over a billion dollars, and some of these — including Bharat Forge, Jet Airways, Infosys Technologies, Reliance Infocomm, Tata Motors, and Wipro Technologies — are likely to become competitive global brands soon. Foreigners have invested in over 1,000 Indian companies via the stock market. Of the Fortune 500 companies, 125 now have research and development bases in India — a testament to its human capital. And high-tech manufacturing has taken off. All these changes have disciplined the banking sector. Bad loans now account for less than 2 percent of all loans (compared to 20 percent in China), even though none of India’s shoddy state-owned banks has so far been privatized.

For now, growth is being driven by services and domestic consumption. Consumption accounts for 64 percent of India’s GDP, compared to 58 percent for Europe, 55 percent for Japan, and 42 percent for China. That consumption might be a virtue embarrasses many Indians, with their ascetic streak, but, as the economist Stephen Roach of Morgan Stanley puts it, “India’s consumption-led approach to growth may be better balanced than the resource-mobilization model of China.”

The contrast between India’s entrepreneur-driven growth and China’s state-centered model is stark. China’s success is largely based on exports by state enterprises or foreign companies. Beijing remains highly suspicious of entrepreneurs. Only 10 percent of credit goes to the private sector in China, even though the private sector employs 40 percent of the Chinese work force. In India, entrepreneurs get more than 80 percent of all loans. Whereas Jet Airways, in operation since 1993, has become the undisputed leader of India’s skies, China’s first private airline, Okay Airways, started flying only in February 2005.

What has been peculiar about India’s development so far is that high growth has not been accompanied by a labor-intensive industrial revolution that could transform the lives of the tens of millions of Indians still trapped in rural poverty. Many Indians watch mesmerized as China seems to create an endless flow of low-end manufacturing jobs by exporting goods such as toys and clothes and as their better-educated compatriots export knowledge services to the rest of the world. They wonder fearfully if India is going to skip an industrial revolution altogether, jumping straight from an agricultural economy to a service economy. Economies in the rest of the world evolved from agriculture to industry to services. India appears to have a weak middle step. Services now account for more than 50 percent of India’s GDP, whereas agriculture’s share is 22 percent, and industry’s share is only 27 percent (versus 46 percent in China). And within industry, India’s strength is high-tech, high-skilled manufacturing.

Even the most fervent advocates of service-based growth do not question the desirability of creating more manufacturing jobs. The failure of India to achieve a broad industrial transformation stems in part from bad policies. After India’s independence, Nehru attempted a state-directed industrial revolution. Since he did not trust the private sector, he tried to replace the entrepreneur with the government — and predictably failed. He shackled private enterprise with byzantine controls and denied autonomy to the public sector. Perhaps the most egregious policy was reserving around 800 industries, designated “small-scale industries” (SSI), for tiny companies that were unable to compete against the large firms of competitor nations. Large firms were barred from making products such as pencils, boot polish, candles, shoes, garments, and toys — all the products that helped East Asia create millions of jobs. Even since 1991, Indian governments have been afraid to touch this “SSI holy cow” for fear of a backlash from the SSI lobby. Fortunately, that lobby has turned out to be mostly a phantom — little more than the bureaucrats who kept scaring politicians by warning of a backlash. Over the past five years, the government has been pruning the list of protected industries incrementally with no adverse reaction.

In the short term, the best way for India to improve the lot of the rural poor might be to promote a second green revolution. Unlike in manufacturing, India has a competitive advantage in agriculture, with plenty of arable land, sunshine, and water. To achieve such a change, however, India would need to shift its focus from peasant farming to agribusiness and encourage private capital to move from urban to rural areas. It would need to lift onerous distribution controls, allow large retailers to contract directly with farmers, invest in irrigation, and permit the consolidation of fragmented holdings.

Indian entrepreneurs also still face a range of obstacles, many of them the result of lingering bad policies. Electric power is less reliable and more expensive in India than in competitor nations. Checkpoints keep trucks waiting for hours. Taxes and import duties have come down, but the cascading effect of indirect taxes will continue to burden Indian manufacturers until a uniform goods-and-services tax is implemented. Stringent labor laws continue to deter entrepreneurs from hiring workers. The “license raj” may be gone, but an “inspector raj” is alive and well; the “midnight knock” from an excise, customs, labor, or factory inspector still haunts the smaller entrepreneur. Some of these problems will hopefully diminish with the planned designation of new “economic zones,” which promise a reduced regulatory burden.

Economic history teaches that the Industrial Revolution as it was experienced by the West was usually led by one industry. It was textile exports in the United Kingdom, railways in the United States. India, too, may have found the engine that could fuel its takeoff and transform its economy: providing white-collar services that are outsourced by companies in the rest of the world. Software and business-process outsourcing exports have grown from practically nothing to $20 billion and are expected to reach $35 billion by 2008. The constraining factor is likely to be not demand but the ability of India’s educational system to produce enough quality English-speaking graduates.

Meanwhile, high-tech manufacturing, a sector where India is already demonstrating considerable strength, will also begin to expand. Perhaps in a decade, the distinction between China as “the world’s workshop” and India as “the world’s back office” will slowly fade as India’s manufacturing and China’s services catch up.

RISING DESPITE THE STATE

It is an amazing spectacle to see prosperity beginning to spread in today’s India even in the presence of appalling governance. In the midst of a booming private economy, Indians despair over the lack of the simplest public goods. It used to be the opposite: during India’s socialist days, Indians worried about economic growth but were proud of their world-class judiciary, bureaucracy, and police force. But now, the old centralized bureaucratic Indian state is in steady decline. Where it is desperately needed — in providing basic education, health care, and drinking water — it has performed appallingly. Where it is not needed, it has only started to give up its habit of stifling private enterprise.

Labor laws, for example, still make it almost impossible to lay off a worker — as the infamous case of Uttam Nakate illustrates. In early 1984, Nakate was found at 11:40 AM sleeping soundly on the floor of the factory in Pune where he worked. His employer let him off with a warning. But he was caught napping again and again. On the fourth occasion, the factory began disciplinary proceedings against him, and after five months of hearings, he was found guilty and sacked. But Nakate went to a labor court and pleaded that he was a victim of an unfair trade practice. The court agreed and forced the factory to take him back and pay him 50 percent of his lost wages. Only 17 years later, after appeals to the Bombay High Court and the national Supreme Court, did the factory finally win the right to fire an employee who had repeatedly been caught sleeping on the job.

Aside from highlighting the problem of India’s lethargic legal system, Nakate’s case dramatizes how the country’s labor laws actually reduce employment, by making employers afraid to hire workers in the first place. The rules protect existing unionized workers — sometimes referred to as the “labor aristocracy” — at the expense of everyone else. At this point, the labor aristocracy comprises only 10 percent of the Indian work force.

No single institution has come to disappoint Indians more than their bureaucracy. In the 1950s, Indians bought into the cruel myth, promulgated by Nehru, that India’s bureaucracy was its “steel frame,” supposedly a means of guaranteeing stability and continuity after the British raj. Indians also accepted that a powerful civil service was needed to keep a diverse country together and administer the vast regulatory framework of Nehru’s “mixed economy.” But in the holy name of socialism, the Indian bureaucracy created thousands of controls and stifled enterprise for 40 years. India may have had some excellent civil servants, but none really understood business — even though they had the power to ruin it.

Today, Indians believe that their bureaucracy has become a prime obstacle to development, blocking instead of shepherding economic reforms. They think of bureaucrats as self-serving, obstructive, and corrupt, protected by labor laws and lifetime contracts that render them completely unaccountable. To be sure, there are examples of good performance — the building of the Delhi Metro or the expansion of the national highway system — but these only underscore how often most of the bureaucracy fails. To make matters worse, the term of any one civil servant in a particular job is getting shorter, thanks to an increase in capricious transfers. Prime Minister Singh has instituted a new appraisal system for the top bureaucracy, but it has not done much.

The Indian bureaucracy is a haven of mental power. It still attracts many of the brightest students in the country, who are admitted on the basis of a difficult exam. But despite their very high IQs, most bureaucrats fail as managers. One of the reasons is the bureaucracy’s perverse incentive system; another is poor training in implementation. Indians tend to blame ideology or democracy for their failures, but the real problem is that they value ideas over accomplishment. Great strides are being made on the Delhi Metro not because the project was brilliantly conceived but because its leader sets clear, measurable goals, monitors day-to-day progress, and persistently removes obstacles. Most Indian politicians and civil servants, in contrast, fail to plan their projects well, monitor them, or follow through on them: their performance failures mostly have to do with poor execution.

The government’s most damaging failure is in public education. Consider one particularly telling statistic: according to a recent study by Harvard University’s Michael Kremer, one out of four teachers in India’s government elementary schools is absent and one out of two present is not teaching at any given time. Even as the famed Indian Institutes of Technology have acquired a global reputation, less than half of the children in fourth-level classes in Mumbai can do first-level math. It has gotten so bad that even poor Indians have begun to pull their kids out of government schools and enroll them in private schools, which charge $1 to $3 a month in fees and which are spreading rapidly in slums and villages across India. (Private schools in India range from expensive boarding schools for the elite to low-end teaching shops in markets.) Although teachers’ salaries are on average considerably lower in private schools, their students perform much better. A recent national study led by Pratham, an Indian nongovernmental organization, found that even in small villages, 16 percent of children are now in private primary schools. These kids scored 10 percent higher on verbal and math exams than their peers in public schools.

India’s educational establishment, horrified by the exodus out of the public educational system, lambastes private schools and wants to close them down. NIIT Technologies, a private company with 4,000 “learning centers,” has trained four million students and helped fuel India’s information technology revolution in the 1990s, but it has not been accredited by the government. Ironically, legislators finally acknowledged the state’s failure to deliver education a few months ago when they pushed through Parliament a law making it mandatory for private schools to reserve spots for students from low castes. As with so many aspects of India’s success story, Indians are finding solutions to their problems without waiting for the government.

The same dismal story is being repeated in health and water services, which are also de facto privatized. The share of private spending on health care in India is double that in the United States. Private wells account for nearly all new irrigation capacity in the country. In a city like New Delhi, private citizens cope with an irregular water supply by privately contributing more than half the total cost of the city’s water supply. At government health centers, meanwhile, 40 percent of doctors and a third of nurses are absent at any given time. According to a study by Jishnu Das and Jeffrey Hammer, of the World Bank, there is a 50 percent chance that a doctor at such a center will recommend a positively harmful therapy.

How does one explain the discrepancy between the government’s supposed commitment to universal elementary education, health care, and sanitation and the fact that more and more people are embracing private solutions? One answer is that the Indian bureaucratic and political establishments are caught in a time warp, clinging to the belief that the state and the civil service must be relied on to meet people’s needs. What they did not anticipate is that politicians in India’s democracy would “capture” the bureaucracy and use the system to create jobs and revenue for friends and supporters. The Indian state no longer generates public goods. Instead, it creates private benefits for those who control it. Consequently, the Indian state has become so “riddled with perverse incentives … that accountability is almost impossible,” as the political scientist Pratap Bhanu Mehta reported. In a recent study of India’s public services, the activist and author Samuel Paul concluded that “the quality of governance is appalling.”

There are many sensible steps that can be taken to improve governance. Focusing on outcomes rather than internal procedures would help, as would delegating responsibility to service providers. But what is more important is for the Indian establishment to jettison its faith in, as the political scientist James Scott puts it, “bureaucratic high modernism” and recognize that the government’s job is to govern rather than to run everything. Government may have to finance primary services such as health care and education, but the providers of those services must be accountable to the citizen as though to a customer (instead of to bosses in the bureaucratic hierarchy).

None of the solutions being debated in India will bring accountability without this change in mindset. Fortunately, the people of India have already made the mental leap. The middle class withdrew from the state system long ago. Now, even the poor are depending more and more on private services. The government merely needs to catch up.

REFORM SCHOOL

India’s current government is led by a dream team of reformers — most notably Prime Minister Singh, a chief architect of the liberalization of 1991. Singh’s left-wing-associated National Congress Party was swept into power two years ago even though the incumbent BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) had presided over an era of unprecedented growth. The left boasted that the election was a revolt of the poor against the rich. In reality, however, it was an anti-incumbent backlash — specifically, a vote against the previous government’s poor record in providing basic services. What matters to the rickshaw driver is that the police officer does not extort a sixth of his daily earnings. The farmer wants a clear title to his land without having to bribe the village headman, and his wife wants the doctor to be there when she takes her sick child to the health center. These are the areas where government touches most people’s lives, and the sobering lesson from India’s 2004 elections is that high growth and smart macroeconomic reforms are not enough in a democracy.

Still, the left saw the Congress victory as an opportunity. Unfortunately, it stands rigidly against reform and for the status quo, supporting labor laws that benefit 10 percent of workers at the expense of the other 90 percent and endorsing the same protectionist policies that the extreme right also backs — policies that harm consumers and favor producers. Thus, Singh and his reformist allies often seem to be sitting, frustrated, on the sidelines. For example, the new government has pushed through Parliament the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, which many fear will simply become the biggest “loot for work” program in India’s history. Although some of the original backers of the bill may have had good intentions, most legislators saw it as an opportunity for corruption. India’s experience with job-creation schemes is that their benefits usually do not reach the poor; and they rarely create permanent assets even when they are supposed to: the shoddy new road inevitably gets washed away in the next monsoon. There is also the worry that the additional 1 percent of GDP borrowed from the banks to finance this program will crowd out private investment, push up interest rates, lower the economy’s growth rate, and, saddest of all, actually reduce genuine employment.

Singh knows that India’s economic success has not been equally shared. Cities have done better than villages. Some states have done better than others. The economy has not created jobs commensurate with its rate of growth. Only a small fraction of Indians are employed in the modern, unionized sector. Thirty-six million are reportedly unemployed. But Singh also knows that one of the primary reasons for these failures is rigid labor laws — which he wants to reform, if only the left would let him.

Singh’s challenge is to get the majority of Indians united behind reform. One of the reasons that the pace of reform has been so slow is that none of India’s leaders has ever bothered to explain to voters why reform is good and just how it will help the poor. (Chinese leaders do not face this problem, which is peculiar to democracies.) Not educating their constituents is the great failure of India’s reformers. But it is not too late for Singh and the reformers in his administration — most notably finance Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram and the head of the Planning Commission, Montek Singh Ahluwalia — to start appearing on television to conduct lessons in basic economics. If the reformers could convert the media and some members of Parliament, the bureaucracy, and the judiciary to their cause, Indians would be less likely to fall hostage to the seductive rhetoric of the left. If they were to admit honestly that the ideas India followed from 1950 to 1990 were wrong, people would respect them. If they were to explain that India’s past regulations suppressed the people and were among the causes of poverty, people would understand.

PEOPLE POWER

Shashi Kumar is 29 years old and comes from a tiny village in Bihar, India’s most backward and feudal state. His grandfather was a low-caste sharecropper in good times and a day laborer in bad ones. His family was so poor that they did not eat some nights. But Kumar’s father somehow managed to get a job in a transport company in Darbhanga, and his mother began to teach in a private school, where Kumar was educated at no cost under her watchful eye. Determined that her son should escape the indignities of Bihar, she tutored him at night, got him into a college, and, when he finished, gave him a railway ticket for New Delhi.

Kumar is now a junior executive in a call center in Gurgaon that serves customers in the United States. He lives in a nice flat, which he bought last year with a mortgage, drives an Indica car, and sends his daughter to a good private school. He is an average, affable young Indian, and like so many of his kind he has a sense of life’s possibilities. Prior to 1991, the realization of these possibilities was open only to those with a government job. If you got an education and did not get into the government, you faced a nightmare that was called “educated unemployment.” But now, Kumar says, anyone with an education, computer skills, and some English can make it.

India’s greatness lies in its self-reliant and resilient people. They are able to pull themselves up and survive, even flourish, when the state fails to deliver. When teachers and doctors do not show up at government primary schools and health centers, Indians just open up cheap private schools and clinics in the slums and get on with it. Indian entrepreneurs claim that they are hardier because they have had to fight not only their competitors but also state inspectors. In short, India’s society has triumphed over the state.

But in the long run, the state cannot merely withdraw. Markets do not work in a vacuum. They need a network of regulations and institutions; they need umpires to settle disputes. These institutions do not just spring up; they take time to develop. The Indian state’s greatest achievements lie in the noneconomic sphere. The state has held the world’s most diverse country together in relative peace for 57 years. It has started to put a modern institutional framework in place. It has held free and fair elections without interruption. Of its 3.5 million village legislators, 1.2 million are women. These are proud achievements for an often bungling state with disastrous implementation skills and a terrible record at day-to-day governance.

Moreover, some of the most important post-1991 reforms have been successful because of the regulatory institutions established by the state. Even though the reforms have been slow, imperfect, and incomplete, they have been consistent and in one direction. And it takes courage, frankly, to give up power, as the Indian state has done for the past 15 years. The stubborn persistence of democracy is itself one of the Indian state’s proudest achievements. Time and again, Indian democracy has shown itself to be resilient and enduring — giving a lie to the old prejudice that the poor are incapable of the kind of self-discipline and sobriety that make for effective self-government. To be sure, it is an infuriating democracy, plagued by poor governance and fragile institutions that have failed to deliver basic public goods. But India’s economic success has been all the more remarkable for its issuing from such a democracy.

Still, the poor state of governance reminds Indians of how far they are from being a truly great nation. They will reach such greatness only when every Indian has access to a good school, a working health clinic, and clean drinking water. Fortunately, half of India’s population is under 25 years old. Based on current growth trends, India should be able to absorb an increasing number of people into its labor force. And it will not have to worry about the problems of an aging population. This will translate into what economists call a “demographic dividend,” which will help India reach a level of prosperity at which, for the first time in its history, a majority of its citizens will not have to worry about basic needs. Yet India cannot take its golden age of growth for granted. If it does not continue down its path of reform — and start to work on bringing governance up to par with the private economy — then a critical opportunity will have been lost.

Jayshree Bajoria, Staff Writer

India and China have long maintained their economic growth will suffer if they accept binding emission targets under an international agreement on climate change. Instead, they have called for mitigation commitments by the developed world and financial support from rich countries to help developing countries adapt to climate change. India’s environment minister, Jairam Ramesh, says India and China are coordinating closely ahead of the December conference in Copenhagen, during which world leaders will negotiate a successor to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.  For a successful agreement at Copenhagen, Ramesh says, developed countries must commit to a 40 percent reduction in emissions by 2020 from 1990 levels. Separately, he says, India is considering a domestic plan specifying greenhouse gas emission cuts.

After your recent visit to China, you said India and China were “standing 100 percent together” on issues of climate change. Could you talk a bit about what China and India jointly decided on global climate change negotiations?

I met my Chinese counterpart Xie Zhenhua. Both of us agreed that the essential prerequisite for a successful agreement [at Copenhagen] is a very substantial commitment on mitigation by the developed countries, which calls for a 40 percent reduction in emissions by the developed world by 2020 with 1990 reference levels. We also talked about the limitations of the two-degree Celsius proposal (Spiegel) [to limit the rise in global temperatures by 2050 to less than 2 degrees Celsius or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit] that was embodied in the L’Aquila agreement of the G8. Without a burden-sharing formula, the two-degree Celsius upper-limit for the temperature increase by the year 2050 does not make any sense. It would in fact jeopardize the development aspirations and objectives of the developing countries. On October 21, the Chinese team is going to come to India. We’re going to exchange views on each other’s national action plans on climate change. So on international negotiations, we are coordinating our positions very closely, whether it relates to forestry, adaptation, financing technology and so on. Although there is a major difference between India and China: China is today the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter, accounting for something like 23 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, whereas India accounts for less than 5 percent of greenhouse gas emissions.

Are you concerned that China might go bilaterally to the United States and strike a deal?

I did talk to my Chinese counterparts about the agreement they signed with the United States [in July 2009]. [They] pointed out to me that it was a bilateral agreement they had on cooperation in renewable energy and energy technology, and in no way compromises their international negotiating position. I did ask them, “Are you going to leave India alone in Copenhagen?” They laughed about it, and they said that they’ll let us know before they do anything of that sort. But on a more serious note, I was assured that they have no such desire.

While India has been resistant to any binding caps on emission levels, is there something else that you would consider on emission cuts? What steps is India taking on controlling emission levels?

The words “resisting cuts” would be applicable if you were a major emitter. It’s really surprising to me how the international community is trying to paint India as a recalcitrant or an intransigent player when it accounts for 16 percent of the world’s population  and accounts for less than 5 percent of world greenhouse gas emissions. We are at about 1.1 to 1.2 tons per capita of CO2 equivalent. We have estimated that even if we grow [in terms of gross domestic product (GDP) growth] at 8.5 percent per year, by 2020 our per capita emissions are not going to cross 2.5 tons of CO2 equivalent. And by 2030, our per capita emissions are not going to cross 3.5 tons of CO2 equivalent. So at all points of time, we are far below the per capita emissions of the developed nations. But we realize the impact that global warming can have on our own. We are vulnerable. What we are saying is, “Look, the starting point of a fair and equitable agreement is for the developed countries, which have caused the global warming in the first place, to take on their assigned responsibilities which were assigned to them as part of the Rio Convention, Kyoto Protocol, the Bali Action Plan.” And now there is a determined effort to undercut the entire United Nations process through G8 and G-20 and all these various permutations and combinations of Gs. We don’t have to be defensive. We want a fair and equitable agreement. We are conscious of our responsibilities. India is contemplating taking unilateral mitigation cuts over the next fifteen to twenty years as a part of its development process, without jeopardizing economic growth. [India is considering making such cuts] part of a domestic legislative framework.

Could you talk a little bit about that?

We realize that from a purely domestic viewpoint, we ourselves are vulnerable. And since a precursor for any successful international agreement is an enduring domestic political consensus, I have proposed very recently that we quantify some of the emission cuts that we could make. These are implicit targets, not explicit targets. For example:

• We’re saying let’s build a mandatory fuel efficiency standard by law by 2011.
• Let’s build mandatory building codes which are energy efficient compliant by 2011.
• Let’s say that by 2020, [a certain] percent of our electricity supply will come from renewable energy. It’s 8 percent now; maybe it can go up to 20 percent by 2020 or 2030.
• Say 5 to 10 percent of our gross cultivated area could be under organic farming so methane emissions from our agriculture could reduce.
• Today 10 percent of our annual greenhouse gas emissions are being sequestered by our forests. By 2030 we could increase this proportion to 15 percent by increasing the area under forest and tree cover.
• We could also say that over the next fifteen to twenty years, energy intensity [energy used per unit of GDP]–which today in India is on par with Germany–would further come down by another 10 to 15 percent.
• We are saying 50 percent of all coal-based power generation must come from clean coal technology.

Let’s take a year for which we’ll be held accountable, 2020 or 2030, and let’s give broadly indicative targets for some of these mitigation activities. We are an open democracy; we have an active civil society, an active media. They will ensure that these are monitored, and the government can’t pull the wool over people’s eyes. This will be enshrined in a domestic law.

These are all activities that ultimately impinge on the emission of carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases. However, if the United States and the developed world were somehow, by some stroke of  unanticipated good fortune and miracle, to say that by 2020 they are going to cut their emissions by anywhere between 25 percent and 40 percent on 1990 reference levels, I will then think of converting my domestic responsibilities into international commitments. Because the starting point is the developed world’s responsibility. They are the ones that have to show the way first and then we will follow.

So these are plans under consideration. By when do you think they will become a reality?

In the next few months. The parliament is meeting in November, December. I’m hoping that [then] we’ll have a discussion on this. And this is autonomous of what happens in Copenhagen. Whether there’s an agreement or not [at Copenhagen], this is what we’re determined to do.

Developing countries are asking developed countries to commit to cutting their greenhouse gas emissions by over 40 percent from 1990 levels to 2020. How do you propose the developed countries meet that goal?

In the United States and the developed world, emissions are lifestyle emissions. For us, emissions are developmental emissions. If you take income class to income class, social strata to social strata, the carbon footprint of an Indian is far lower than the carbon footprint of an American or a European. Change your lifestyle. You’re asking us to compromise on development. You change your lifestyle and then we’ll think of compromising on development.

In Copenhagen, if all countries stick to their positions and question the entrenched positions of the other countries, how likely will we see a global climate change agreement?

The perfect should not become the enemy of the good at Copenhagen. We should be modest and realistic in our expectations. Rather than waiting for a blockbuster of an agreement at Copenhagen, we should look at Copenhagen as a beginning process. But meanwhile, let’s identify the low-hanging fruit and let’s move on [those policies].

What’s the low-hanging fruit?

India has made a number of submissions to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. I mentioned this to [U.S. Secretary of State] Hillary Clinton when she came to Delhi in July. We [can] have, for example, an international agreement on forestry. [This is very important] to countries like Brazil, Indonesia, China, and India. An international agreement on technology cooperation is eminently doable at Copenhagen. Let’s clinch an agreement on the extension of the Clean Development Mechanism [CDM]. CDM has worked very well. India, by the way, is one the countries that has benefitted very extensively from the CDM.

India actually has more than 345 registered CDM projects, more than any other country. But now some experts are calling for streamlining the CDMs to focus on the least developed countries. How will that impact India?

I have no problem with that. The problem is every time the world sets up a mechanism, India and China [benefit most.] But if we are 40 percent of the population, 40 percent of the benefits will go to India and China. So I have no problem if you extend the CDM mechanism and say that you want to earmark something for the least-developed countries. But let’s make that agreement on the extension of the CDM. I’m not arguing for CDM from India’s point of view, I’m arguing for CDM as a principle.

What expectations do you have from the civilian nuclear program and how it can help in greater energy efficiency?

It’s great. Right now about 3.7 percent of our power supply comes from nuclear power. By 2020 we are hoping to increase this to about 5 percent and by 2040 we’re expecting about 25 percent of our electricity to come from nuclear energy. India is a world leader in fast-breeder [reactor] technology. We have a good understanding with the French, with the Russians, and with the Americans following the civilian nuclear agreement. Nuclear is GHG [greenhouse gas] free technology. A faster expansion of nuclear technology in India’s energy portfolio would certainly have a very salutary impact on the emissions of greenhouse gases.