There’s a balance between the cost of the thing, and the cost to destroy the thing, and that balance is changing dramatically. This isn’t new, of course. Here’s an article from last year about the cost of drones versus the cost of top-of-the-line fighter jets. If $35K in drones (117 drones times an estimated $300 per drone) can destroy $7B in Russian bombers and other long-range aircraft, why would anyone build more of those planes? And we can have this discussion about ships, or tanks, or pretty much every other military vehicle. And then we can add in drone-coordinating technologies like swarming.
Fighter jets, ships, tanks, … and information. It’s common knowledge in journalism that if it takes X amount of time to come up with misinformation and Y amount of time to debunk it, Y will always be greater than X. In other words, misinformation takes less time (and likely effort) to produce than legitimate information. Network modelling exercises have also found repeatedly that false information travels faster. Taken together, the cost asymmetry experts are beginning to perceive between a fighter jet and the means to destroy it has been around for a long time vis-à-vis information, and in fact the only reason the ‘information side’ hasn’t lost the war, such as it is, is that there exists in the population a certain (but admittedly diminishing) level of awareness that it’s possible to manipulate people into echo chambers as well as to look past the chamber wall to find a whole different reality.
Generative AI has of course added considerably to this problem but as a tool it isn’t limited to producing noisy or bad information — that propensity comes from the humans in the loop. I think if we’re to keep our heads above the water, it’s important for journalists to recruit gen AI to the task of rebutting misinformation then and there rather than wait for journalists to manually pieces articles together. Articles of the latter variety are capable of important change when done right but they take time. When a former ISRO chairman says Sanskrit is a language suited for computer science, a coherent and complete rebuttal that’s also clearly written will need at least two or three hours to come together. At least. This process can be accelerated by a journalist in the loop cobbling a rebuttal together with, say, ChatGPT o3 (the “advanced reasoning” model), making sure the sources are legitimate and reputable, and finally checking the text (or visual) for inappropriate language — all in minutes.
There are legitimate apprehensions about journalists using AI. For me, personally, using AI-generated text is a moral offence against the act of a person communicating with their community, with human and public interest at heart. There are injustices embedded in the training and operationalisation of generative AI models that no one, journalists or otherwise, should help perpetuate and that everyone should help address and resolve. At the same time, however, the corpus of annotated data that animates these models represents a substantial amount of human-made knowledge that we should be able to draw on — especially without having to be mediated by profit-minded technology companies — to negotiate a precarious information landscape ready to prey on an iota of ignorance. Open-source bespoke models in particular could a long way by being free to use and having their information sources (e.g. “just thehindu.com”) restricted by default.
Engineering as a methodology … contains a fundamentally materialist kernel, even if its present incarnation as a bourgeois science drives engineers to think and behave otherwise.
After school, I studied mechanical engineering against my will. Most engineering students at the time did, and probably still do. Almost every Indian family not in the top 1% of the top 1% (it’s still a large number given the population) of society by wealth would like to get there. And to this day studying to be an engineer or a doctor seems like the safest bet to ensure families get onto and/or stay on that path.
My family was the same way in 2006. I insisted I wanted to study English literature but my folks were having none of it. When push came to shove, I yielded and said I’d study mechanical engineering only because my father had, too, 24 years earlier. The next four years turned out to be terrible. While it might seem straightforward enough from the outside, having to endure four years of something one is not at all interested in, especially when one is keenly aware that four years amounts to fully one-fifth of one’s life by that point, is corrosive to the spirit. It certainly made my future seem quite bleak to me, more so since I’d internalised my stream of poor grades to mean I was unfit to make it in this world.
Fortunately (such as it was), my folks relented in my third year and faced me with the freedom to decide what I’d do after engineering college. Thus I picked journalism, figuring I could combine my fondness for writing with the prospect of making some money, at least more than a career in English literature in India might have yielded. It remains among the best decisions I’ve ever made — but as it would later turn out, thanks in no small part to my background as a trained engineer.
A recurring motif I’ve observed in journalism as it is practised is that people who enter it with skills from a completely different field almost always have an advantage right away (while those who came in after having studied only journalism don’t). There are many ways to classify the activities and rituals of journalism and one is in terms of generalists and beat-experts. (I’m using ‘expertise’ here to mean the “temporary expertise” as Bora Zivkovic defined it.) I for example am a beat-expert: I focus on science, environment, and space journalism. I regularly commission articles from freelancers, among whom there are generalists and beat-experts as well. The generalists here will be comfortable covering a variety of topics (often as long the subject matter in each case isn’t too involved) whereas the beat-experts might be restricted to, say, RNA viruses, radio astronomy, solar power economics or number theory. Even at the newsroom level, there are generalist reporters who can hammer out news reports with all the right details in the right order and beat reporters who are better equipped to dive deep into specific topics.
Notably, however, beat-experts are generally valued more. There are a few reasons why. Beat-experts can if required competently put together a copy on a completely different beat; depending on the beat, they can be hard to come by; and — this is perhaps most important — by virtue of understanding a topic more deeply than others, they can communicate ideas and developments therein much better. It’s even better if through one’s work as a journalist one is able to bring together the “two cultures” à la CP Snow, that is to draw on insights and wisdom from both science and the humanities to inform the way one covers different subjects. Then one’s value will soar (assuming there are also editors or employers that are able to discern that value).
In the last week alone, in fact, my regret over having spent four years studying the physics and mathematics underlying engineering has been significantly mitigated by the particular events in the news. Air India flight AI171 crashed shortly after take-off in Ahmedabad, killing 241 of the 242 people onboard and concluding as one of India’s worst air disasters. To quote from my piece in The Hindu, “The engine design is an important reason for 787-8 aircraft’s higher fuel-efficiency per seat… The other factors contributing to this feature include the use of carbon composite structures of lower weight and low-drag aerodynamics. [Thus] a 787-8 aircraft burnt around 20% less fuel than earlier twinjet models of a similar size. This allowed the aircraft to undertake nonstop flights between cities with lower passenger traffic than that required to fill Boeing 777 or Boeing 747 aircraft.” Depending on what investigators find from the black box, there’s a nontrivial chance one of these three components was part of the cascade of problems leading up to the crash, and may in turn reveal the processual failures that preceded it.
The Axiom-4 commercial mission to the International Space Station was delayed for a fourth time before SpaceX called it off altogether following a gas leak onboard the rocket. The engineering factor here is less obvious, especially as it relates to a curious statement ISRO issued on June 13: that ISRO had recommended to SpaceX that the latter — the company that actually built the rocket for the mission and has flown it hundreds of times before — “carry out in-situ repairs or replacement and conduct a low-temperature leak test to validate system performance and integrity, before proceeding with launch clearance”. ISRO may not be lying but why, given how rockets are tested and certified for flight, would SpaceX care for ISRO’s opinion on the way forward here?
Last: Israel launched what it called a “preliminary” attack against Iran in order to dissuade it from pursuing its nuclear weapons programme. The attack followed a day after the International Atomic Energy Agency resolved that Iran had failed to comply with the terms of a 1974 agreement that, among other things, demanded the country be accountable at all times about the use of enriched uranium for civilian v. military applications. Now, I’ve been interested in nuclear news from around the world since a brief interaction with MV Ramana more than a decade ago, but my background in engineering — which I was now forced to dust off and retrieve from the recesses of my mind — certainly helped lubricate my comprehension of uranium enrichment. And that in turn revealed like little else could how rapidly Iran was advancing towards possessing nuclear warheads, how and why the IAEA safeguards are limited (and why Iran’s willing participation in inspectors’ surveillance is so important), and ultimately why Israel is so nervous.
Broadly, having a degree in X field and getting into Y field confronts you more often than otherwise with situations where you’re forced to learn on the fly, using your own mental models but often with models you’ve acquired learning something entirely different. In my case at least, this switch allowed me to think about certain ideas in ways that others weren’t. English literature followed by journalism could have had the same effect, although I only know that in hindsight. Just like I was forced to adapt engineering thinking to social issues and vice versa, English literature, which is after all a literary window into history, certain geographies, certain peoples, and the writers, readers, philosophers, and politicians among them, could allow one to compare/contrast whatever is happening today around us with what we know did in the past — an exercise I’ve always found to be illuminating.
(Edit: my friend Chitralekha Manohar helped me see that I also presumed a certain willingness to learn in order for an X-to-Y switch to manifest all its benefits. Chitralekha is a professional editor who runs The Clean Copy in Bengaluru. As she put it: “What I mean to say is, it’s very easy for an English literature student to find science writing by a scientist to be boring. But I really like it. And it might have something to do with a personal project to understand language and communication at a level more than is necessary to get the degree. It’s the recurring question of why some of us are like this…”.)
Engineering offers yet another lens through which to observe the world as long the observer doesn’t lose sight of everything else, especially the social, political, economic, etc. aspects. This is hardly new information but perhaps the corollary is: all these other lenses through which to observe the world may also offer an incomplete picture if they overlook what engineering is uniquely equipped to reveal. Of course I presume here a particular kind of engineering education: learning the basics of physics, chemistry, and mathematics followed by specialised training in the principles and techniques of the specific ‘branch’, i.e. mechanical, chemical, biotechnological, electrical, software, etc.
In fact, I grudgingly admit that even though I barely cleared all these papers, the residues of lessons on calculus, metrology, vector algebra, fuzzy logic, and so on have sufficed to maintain a picture in my mind of how the world works and, importantly, how it can’t, won’t or shouldn’t — although defining these three boundaries also demands political awareness and a sense of social justice. Thus for example one becomes able to spot pseudoscience but also understands that sometimes it needs to be treated with compassion if for no other reason than that it was born of the failure of science to meet particular human needs.
More broadly, materialism has historically exerted a sizeable influence on human societies, their institutions, and their aspirations, and continues to do so. As a result, to go back to the engineer and communist Chavez, “the social relations tying global industry together are obscured underneath an engineering methodology”. Even for its contemporary identity as a “bourgeois science”, then, the engineer’s enterprise is arguably necessary if we’re to retool human industry.
Closer home, I think I’m finally not resenting those four years.
NASA/SpaceX/Axiom will make their next attempt to launch the Axiom-4 mission to the International Space Station on June 11. Axiom Space’s tagline for the mission is “Realizing the Return”, alluding to three of the mission’s four crew members, including India’s Shubhanshu Shukla, will be taking their respective countries back to orbit after at least four decades (figuratively speaking).
Shukla of course has a greater mission to look forward to beyond Axiom-4: ISRO had purchased Shukla’s seat on the flight for a princely Rs 548 crore reportedly to expose him to the operational aspects of a human spaceflight mission ahead of Gaganyaan’s first crewed flight in 2027. So obviously there’s been a lot of hoopla over the Axiom-4 launch in India on TV channels and social media platforms.
Of course, the energy levels aren’t anywhere near what they were for Chandrayaan-3 and that’s good. In fact I’m also curious why there’s any energy vis-a-vis Shukla’s flight at all, at least beyond the nationalist circles. Axiom-4 is all NASA, Axiom, and SpaceX. Following Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s state visit to the US in early 2023, the White House issued a statement in which it said the two countries would strengthen “cooperation on human spaceflight, including establishing exchanges that will include advanced training for an Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO)/Department of Space astronaut at NASA Johnson Space Center”.
This astronaut turned out to be Shukla, and he will be joined by Prashant Nair — another of the four astronaut-candidates — as one of the two back-up crew members on Axiom-4. However, I don’t understand why this required Prime Minister Modi to meet US President Joe Biden. ISRO could have set Shukla and Nair up with the same opportunity by directly engaging with NASA, the way its Human Space Flight Centre did with Russia’s Glavcosmos in 2019 itself. More importantly, it’s not clear how Shukla’s participation in the Axiom-4 mission entails “cooperation on human spaceflight” between the US and India, which many commentators in India have been billing it as.
India has done nothing here other than purchase the seat on Axiom Space’s flight and fly Shukla and Nair over. In the same vein neither ISRO nor the overarching Department of Space, which is overseeing Gaganyaan’s development, have said what exactly Shukla (and Nair) stand to learn from Axiom-4, i.e. the justification for spending Rs 548 crore of the people’s money and how this particular mission was judged to be the best way to acquire the skills and knowledge Shukla (and Nair) reputedly will.
I’ve been following spaceflight news as a journalist as well as have held managerial jobs for a long time now to understand that Axiom-4 represents the sort of opportunity where one is very likely to learn something if one becomes involved and that Axiom-4 offers something to learn at all because of the articles I’ve read and lectures I’ve heard about why NASA and Roscosmos human spaceflight protocols are the way they are.
However, what exactly is it that the two astronaut-candidates will learn that isn’t post facto (so that there is a rationale for the Rs 548 crore), why was it deemed important for them to have to learn that (and who deemed it so), how will they apply it to Gaganyaan, and how exactly does the Axiom-4 mission represent India-US “cooperation”?
India’s space establishment hasn’t provided the answers, and worse yet seems to be under the impression that they’re not necessary to provide. The public narrative at this time is focused on Shukla and how his time has come. I sincerely hope the money represented more than a simple purchase, and I’m disappointed that it’s come down to hope to make sense of ISRO’s and the Department of Space’s decisions.
Ride-hailing platform Rapido is under fresh scrutiny from [Bengaluru] users for introducing a charge that penalises passengers if their ride is delayed by traffic. Several commuters in Bengaluru have flagged this new fee levied after 10 minutes of delay due to traffic as unfair and exploitative, especially when traffic congestion is beyond a passenger’s control.
…
Pavithra Rao, a resident of Hebbal, was travelling by auto from Shanthinagara to Palace Guttahalli on Monday when she was hit with an additional fee for being stuck in traffic. “While I don’t have a problem with fair compensation for drivers, charging customers for traffic seems like extortion. I had already selected a Rs 40 tip for my ride as it was peak hour. Traffic is not in my control, and I do not agree with paying extra for it,” she told The Hindu.
Rapido operates by levying from auto drivers a fee of up to Rs 29 per ride, with the precise rate varying by city. Similarly, Uber announced in February this year that it was shifting from being a commission-based to a subscription-based service for auto drivers à la Rapido, although it hasn’t said how much the daily fee is.
Imagine a scenario in which neither platform existed. In life before around 2015, which was such a time, auto drivers charged different amounts to the same people to travel the same route depending on whether they figured a person was a long-time resident of the city. They also charged (non-linearly) more if it was raining, too late in the day, the destination was in a population-wise less-dense area, and, of course, how much traffic there was.
Since the advent of apps like Rapido and Uber — and more so since they adopted a subscription-based model that gave auto drivers more agency as well as commuters the option to walk away from unaffordable rides without a penalty — many of the uncertainties inherent to pricing have vanished.
I regularly take autos to and from work, especially on hot or particularly wet days. Given the specifics of when I leave and the prevalence of one-way routes in each direction, it costs me X rupees to go, 1.2X rupees to return just before peak traffic time, and 1.4X during the peak, all on average. But every single time I’ve had to hail an auto directly (just before peak time), the driver has asked for at least 2.1X rupees. I’m certain thousands of other commuters have had the same experience.
Rapido, Uber, etc. are also constantly responding to location-specific demand. While this means surge pricing at times of higher demand, it has also meant lower base rates when demand is much lower than usual. In April-May in 2023, 2024, and 2025, for example, Rapido set a base cost of 0.75X for my house-to-work route at noon, when it’s been blazing hot outdoors. (I still pay X.)
If only because the apps limit the number of variables in determining the fare, and that this limitation has always only had the effect of lowering the cost of travel, most commuters in cities have an incentive to use them. Axiomatically, if a critical mass of commuters uses them, auto drivers have a strong incentive to use them as well. Note that the uncertainty is lower for auto drivers too (in the subscription-based service scenario): they’re spared the stress of haggling with every commuter and know the app has controlled the price for the length of the route to a precisely marked destination.
(There are many unscrupulous auto drivers out there and there are many unscrupulous commuters as well. I’ve heard from more than a few drivers so far stories of commuters skipping out on UPI payments at the end of trips, hailing autos but not cancelling when their plans change, expecting drivers to drop them off half a kilometre or more from the indicated destination for no extra fee, threatening to lodge complaints after paying less than the predetermined fare, using abusive language, and so on.)
This post benefited from feedback from Srividya Tadepalli.
Even though Rapido has come under the scanner for suggesting commuters ‘bid’ for autos at the time of hailing them via the app by adding extra amounts to the base cost, knowing that the base cost is X has allowed both auto drivers and me — and I imagine other commuters — to develop a shared sense of proportionality. Negotiations from that point are much easier to conduct: an addition of up to 0.4X may be okay for a base cost of X (in non-extenuating circumstances) but expecting an extra of X itself, if a driver is particularly unscrupulous, is grounds for a cuss word.
Further, both commuters’ and drivers’ willingness to use the apps means both parties avail a mechanism — albeit one provided by a third and private party — that sanctions them for misbehaviour. Drivers can rate commuters and vice versa. (Thus I don’t board autos with a rating lower than 4.6 stars.) Commuters can raise complaints with the app, although how each app platform chooses to deal with them isn’t fully clear.
In this scenario, Rapido has come under a second scanner for levying a traffic penalty from commuters. I think it’s fair to the extent that drivers are paying with an opportunity cost — the amount of time spent in traffic — for (i) a commuter’s decision to travel by auto with foreknowledge of traffic en route; (ii) commuters’ (collective) decision to use a particular app; (iii) the app’s decision to recommend a particular route, which is crucial when the passengers’ sense of safety is concerned; (iv) and whose pricing model is beyond both the commuters’ and the drivers’ control. Improving access to autos also means there will be more autos on the road, after all.
But I also agree that it’s unfair to the extent that commuters are expected to pay for the city’s urban planning choices and poor roads and the state government’s under-provision of public transport options and its decision to license so many motor vehicles.
In fact, the crux of the problem is what that extra ‘bid’ at the time of hailing a ride stands for. In my (considerable) experience taking autos in Chennai, drivers almost always ask or expect a few tens of rupees extra because they know a given route is traffic-heavy. Adding the extra cost at the time of hailing the app and later paying for being stuck in traffic is tantamount to commuters double-paying the ‘traffic tax’.
If the additional cost over the base fare is re-justified as a traffic tax to begin with, Rapido won’t have to revive that old source of uncertainty: how much the fare for a trip will ultimately be. The commuter and the driver will both go back to knowing the total eventual fare at the outset. This said, if the extra cost is explicitly related to the tax, and if the overarching goal is to help drivers opt for more rational fares for their rides, Rapido may also reconsider how it is determined rather than allowing it to be arbitrary. Even now, per The Hindu: “The app offers the first 10 minutes of delay during the ride without charge, but thereafter charges Rs 0.50 per minute up to Rs 30, according to the users.”
(If the point really is to rationalise prices, Rapido will also need to explain how it determines the base rate, considering the ‘deficit’ — depending on the drivers’ expectations — is left to commuters to meet.)
In fact, commuters presume more often than not that the government’s responsibility is to lower prices for them — whereas it’s really to rationalise prices for both commuters and drivers. And when the prices are abruptly and after a long time rationalised for drivers as well, the net effect on commuters’ expenses may resemble extortion.
But it’s not extortion: in fact the prices haven’t increased, at least according to the base rates on Rapido and Ola (and gave the impression of having dropped on Uber before February 2025). Between 2014 — when I was taking autos to make many of the same trips I am these days — and 2025, the fare for the X-valued route has remained X. Yet in this time petrol has become more expensive, access to loans more difficult, the cost of living higher, the competition greater, and the roads more congested. Commuters are typically loath to consider the true value of a ride for themselves, which can be higher, and fixate instead on the value for the driver, which they expect as if by default to be lower.
The bigger problem here is the city and the state being okay with chasing a particular slice of commuters towards privately operated ride-hailing apps whose pricing mechanisms are overall unclear and whose services are not infrequently undermined by their own profit motives. But at a more local scale, and especially if the administration doesn’t mediate the disputes between drivers and the apps, its attitude only risks pitting commuters against drivers.
Even if the original sin — i.e. the easy-going relationships between a city or state government and the operators of ride-hailing apps — is greater than some commuters or drivers, it’s also cynical and unfair on both the governments’ and the commuters’ part to allow the culture of commuters underpaying drivers, who have even less power, to persist just so commuters can afford their auto rides. If the government has taken its hand off the wheel, is it so surprising or bad that Rapido is helping drivers opt for more rational fares instead?
Russia began its full scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. On March 8, a poll conducted by independent survey organisations in Russia among a randomly selected cohort of 1,640 people reported around 46% supported the war, 13% supported it somewhat, 23% opposed it, and the rest were undecided or didn’t answer. But also by March 9, the Vladimir Putin government detained more than 13,000 anti-war protestors, with police brutally assaulting many of them and even persecuting some of their children.
In October 2023, Israel began its ongoing reprisal against Hamas by launching what quickly became the deadliest conflict in the history of Palestine. The Hindu reported on April 9 that surveys in Israel have found fewer than half of all Israelis support the Benjamin Netanyahu government’s military actions.
Both Russia’s and Israel’s wars have been asymmetric, protracted, and met with accusations of human-rights violations. They also highlight an issue with the instruments available for other countries to pressure them into drawing down.
Following Russia’s invasion, more than 4,000 scientists and science journalists in the country addressed a letter to Putin asking him to reconsider:
“Having unleashed the war, Russia has doomed itself to international isolation. … This means that we … will no longer be able to do our job in a normal way because conducting scientific research is unthinkable without cooperation and trust with colleagues from other countries. The isolation of Russia from the world means cultural and technological degradation of our country with a complete lack of positive prospects.”
Countries that don’t clearly and routinely demarcate their military and civilian enterprises — especially in research as well as in inchoate ‘sunrise’ sectors like spaceflight — are more liable to experience the consequences of their military aggression across both domains. Thus, Tel Aviv University has been criticised for helping develop defence technologies deployed by the IDF in Palestine and the Radzyner School of Law for helping develop legal justifications for Israel’s military excesses, so their international reputation is lower than that typically reserved for academic centres.
In another example, misplaced suspicions of an absence of demarcation prompted the US to impose an embargo on ISRO under the Missile Technology Control Regime in the 1980s when the organisation received a tranche of cryogenic engines from the Soviet Union. The action was perceived to be meritless and radicalised public opinion so much so that, as former ISRO chairman UR Rao wrote, “even voluntary organisations, private individuals and newspapers started expressing their outrage.”
The incident is recognised as an early impetus for Indian self-sufficiency in space technologies. While it’s behind us, industry leaders and policymakers have liked to cite the incident as an example of what India risks as long as it isn’t self-sufficient. Just as well, similar sanctions by foreign governments against the civilian populations of Israel or Russia could sow public resentment and this may either weaken domestic opposition to war — or it could lead to democratic dissent that forces the government to withdraw from the conflict.
But Putin is an absolutist in all but name and has responded to opposition to his foreign policies by curtailing civil rights and using physical violence. In Israel, as journalist Gidi Weitz has written, “It will soon be five years since the 11-0 court decision that allowed Netanyahu to be prime minister despite his criminal trial — and Netanyahu is closer than ever to overpowering the state that put him on trial.” If a state is no longer swayed by public opinion, no matter how overwhelming, and in fact threatens debilitating violence against dissidents, is it worth reconsidering what sanctioning non-combatants can be expected to achieve?
In mid-April I tried to argue that the answer is ‘yes’. But I’ve since changed my mind to ‘no’. The text that follows is my attempt to argue the ‘yes’, concluding with an explanation of what changed.
Shortly after Russia’s invasion, some science journals stopped accepting papers authored or co-authored by Russian scholars. One editor of a journal that instituted a temporary ban had said:
“Let me insist, the decision is not directed to Russian scientists … but to Russian institutions, which support (and are funded by) the Russian government. Besides, the Russian Academy of Science has not given any official message in support of the innocent victims nor against the violation of international law by the Russian government.”
The vast majority of scientific research in the world is funded by governments. Is this sufficient reason to censor research institutions in the event one of them goes to war?
The European Broadcasting Union said “the inclusion of a Russian entry in [Eurovision] would bring the competition into disrepute.” The Royal Opera House in London cancelled the summer season of the Bolshoi Ballet while all the major Hollywood studios suspended the release of their films in Russian cinemas. The European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) suspended Russia’s ‘observer’ status and said it would cooperate with international sanctions against the country.
Similarly, Jhumpa Lahiri, Arundhati Roy, and many other authors have pledged to boycott Israeli cultural institutions while many scientists and social scientists have called for their peers to desist from collaborating with their counterparts in Israeli research institutes. Maldives said Israelis are banned from visiting the archipelago.
Israel has resisted almost all forms of intervention available to foreign states to tame its hand even as its aggression in West Asia scaled deplorable new heights (with considerable support from the US, of course). As a result, in 2005, Palestinian civil society organisations called upon their counterparts worldwide “to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel,” i.e. to declare their stance against institutions believed to be complicit in state violence and force a reckoning on their part, and to render reputational and/or economic damage to the state and force it to change policy.
Yet the question of defining complicity under an autocratic regime remains, as does the risk of further alienating these organisations’ natural allies within the country — e.g. pro-Palestine students and activists who already lack political power — and stinting academic collaboration.
Russia’s and Israel’s leaders are obviously aware of the contributions of various human enterprises, including culture, sports, and research, to the construction and maintenance of national identity and pride. As scholarly publishing commentator Joseph Esposito asked in 2022, “What is the meaning of academic freedom when the academy is itself put to work for the benefit of an imperial power…?” Yet it is an important detail because what a de facto total war response to these two unilateral aggressors achieves is unclear.
What changed?
As I wrote the post, I spoke to a bunch of people to understand the value of the boycott, divest, sanction (BDS) movement. Two of them made arguments I couldn’t ignore.
One, my friend R, said they couldn’t “dissociate the ethics from the value of these institutions”. They were right in a sense. In my foregoing arguments I was concerned about how BDS would affect the people that Netanyahu and Putin didn’t give two hoots about anyway but R indicated that it had to be that those people also had to speak up against Israel’s and Russia’s actions in Palestine and Ukraine. They couldn’t be in favour of their aggressor-governments’ actions and also enjoy the benefit of doubts as to their safety.
Another friend, S, who is also I think better informed in this matter, advocated for what they called “smart sanctions”, which helped me understand R’s conditionality argument better. Here’s what they said in full, shared with their permission:
We need smart sanctions. I am against fools who target, say, an Anna Netrebko or a David Shulman. In any case during apartheid, nobody boycotted Alan Paton, Joe Slovo or Nadine Gordimer. BDS will work — which is why Trump and Germany will make it a crime to advocate it. Starmer, too. Israel is petrified of it. But it has to be smart. One can’t say “oh, let’s boycott Amazon.”
Let’s boycott all direct Israeli products and institutions and apologists of genocide but not Israelis who oppose the genocide. Shulman’s and Netrebko’s cases are black and white. No one should sign agreements or MoUs with Israeli universities, but Shulman should not be boycotted even if he teaches at Bar Ilan or Hebrew University. I would not accept a speaking invite at an Israeli university today. But if Haaretz or +972 magazine run a seminar I would attend.
Let’s take a grey case. X isn’t vocally anti-genocide but not pro either. Is boycotting X okay? I would do some research before I decide. Of course the media can’t do the boycotting. The media can say ‘we will not run defences of genocide or racism’. But if the Israeli ambassador agrees to give an interview then the media would have to really put him through his paces, Karan Thapar-style.
“How would you decide in X’s case if they’re noncommittal down the middle?,” I asked.
I will probably avoid having anything to do with them.
“The Hindu recently did a data story on an independent survey in Israel finding around 60% of people were against its war in Palestine,” I said. “This government isn’t swayed by public opinion and those who oppose/disagree are met with police violence. My misgivings about BDS arose in this context.”
Yes, so smart boycotting is needed. BDS as a blunt instrument is pointless. Let’s use an analogy: the world should find a way to boycott Hindutva — but obviously not Hindus!
Featured image: At a protest against Israel’s Gaza blockade and an attack on a humanitarian flotilla in Melbourne, June 5, 2010. Credit: Takver/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA.
An underground cave in Meghalaya, in focus for a conflict over a Shivalinga-like stone formation, has yielded a new-to-science fish that adapts to streams overground.
A team of zoologists, led by Kangkan Sarma of Gauhati University’s Department of Zoology, has recorded Schistura densiclava as a new species of troglophile loach from Krem Mawjymbuin in the State’s East Khasi Hills district.
This is amusing yet sobering: while people are fighting about which god a rock looks like, there are fish millennia older we’re just realising we didn’t know of, and which are gracefully adapting in new ways to a world in unprecedented flux.
There’s a concept in quantum mechanics, and also in parts of classical mechanics, called the Berry phase. Say you’re walking around a mountain. You start off along a path and follow it all the way until you’re back to the point where you started. You’re at the same point, sure, but you’re probably facing a different direction now. The Berry phase works something like this. Say you’ve got a bunch of electrons that you’re manipulating using a magnetic field. As you vary the field in continuous increments, the electrons will respond continuously in some way. But as you vary the field through a cycle of changes and bring it back to the original setting, the electrons won’t exactly be at their original configuration as well. Or they will be in addition to some change. This ‘additional change’ is called the Berry phase.
Reading about the Kancha Gachibowli forest brought the Berry phase to mind. Yesterday, India’s new Chief Justice, B.R. Gavai, faced Telangana state with a choice: “between restoring the forest or having the Chief Secretary and [half a dozen] officials in prison,” per The Hindu. The latter people are being held responsible for attempting to divert mostly moderately and densely forested land to a planned campus for information technology companies. The court had no sympathy for Telangana counsel Abhishek Manu Singhvi’s argument that the state’s efforts had been good-intentioned. The principle reason: the state hasn’t been able to explain the fact that it organised a phalanx of bulldozers to bring down 104 acres of old trees during an extended weekend, when the courts were closed, leaving the felling’s opponents without access to legal recourse. A few telling passages from The Hindu:
The State had previously denied the land was a forest. The claim, it said, that the area was forest land had sprung up only after developmental activities commenced following the allotment of the land to the Telangana Industrial Infrastructure Corporation. Mr. Singhvi submitted that the processes regarding the allotment had been on since March 2024. He said the intention of the State was bona fide.
…
Mr. Singhvi maintained that “thousands” of trees were not cut. “We have seen the photographs,” Chief Justice Gavai responded.
Mr. Singhvi submitted that not a leaf has been moved on the site after the apex court ordered everything to be stopped on April 16. The State was complying with the court’s direction in letter and spirit. A huge afforestation programme was underway in the area.
Amicus curiae, senior advocate K. Parameshwar, drew the attention of the court to a finding in a Forest Survey of India report, which was forwarded to the Central Empowered Committee, that out of the 104 acres cut in two nights, over 60% had been moderately and heavily dense forest.
It’s worthwhile these days to treat the concept of afforestation as a yellow flag at best and a despicable idea at worst. In the last decade it has evolved regressively into a sort of olive branch offered up alongside casual excuses to divert forested land for non-forest uses, often in open defiance of India’s existing forest protection laws — which sadly have been increasingly enfeebled by the environment ministry. That the state is now afforesting the area is little consolation because the trees that have already been cut represent a greater ecological loss than that can be recouped by young plants anytime in the near future. We may have come full circle since the state first felled the trees but we bear the burden of an additional change as well.
In fact, this could be more like magnetic hysteresis than the Berry phase depending on the mode of afforestation. Quantum systems are said to have acquired a Berry phase when they undergo a reversible process in which entropy doesn’t increase*. But entropy, the amount of disorder, has indeed increased. We’ve lost energy. We’ve lost old trees and their ecosystem services. We’ve lost a sustainable carbon store. We’ve learnt that the Telangana government is willing to act in bad faith. We’ve learnt that our forest protection laws continue to not work. Why, we’ve been reminded that the Supreme Court remains the country’s last democratic institution, perhaps short of Parliamentary majority, prepared to measure the loss of green cover by the precepts of sustainable development. Every Supreme Court decision to stall a project that entails deforestation has been met with cheers in the conservation and environmental justice communities but each such verdict also serves a reminder that we remain at the mercy of the last line of defence. If someday the Supreme Court also yields, or is let down by Parliament passing a law that makes a mockery of protecting trees, we are only left with protest — like the brave students of the University of Hyderabad mounted to bring the Kancha Gachibowli issue to the whole country’s attention.
When you apply a magnetic field over a ferromagnet, like a block of iron, it becomes magnetised. If you remove the magnetic field, the block stays magnetised to some degree. This phenomenon is called remanence. Future attempts to magnetise and demagnetise the block will have to work against the remanence, causing the block to lose energy over time as heat. This macroscopic feature is called magnetic hysteresis**: it’s irreversible, dissipative, disorderly, and vexatious. Much like the state of Telangana, it claims to find value in the context of computers (disk drives in particular), and much like the trees of Kancha Gachibowli, there’s nothing a ferromagnet can do about it.
* I’ve used entropy here with reference to a quantum adiabatic process. In a thermodynamic adiabatic process, entropy isn’t produced only if the process is also reversible.
** The term ‘hysteresis’ comes from the Greek ‘hústeros’, meaning ‘later’. This is a reference to the shape of the curve on a graph with the strength of the magnetic field H on one axis and the magnetisation M on the other. As the H curve rises and falls, the M curve starts to fall behind. The seemingly closely related ‘hysteria’ comes from the Greek ‘hustéra’, for ‘womb’, and is thus unrelated. However, the well-known Cornell University physicist James P. Sethna wrote sometime before 1995:
There seems to be no etymological link between hysteresis and either hysterical (fr. L hystericus of the womb) or history (fr. Gk, inquiry, history, fr. histor, istor knowing, learned). This is too bad, as there are scientific connections to both words. (There is no link, scientific or etymological, to histolysis, the breakdown of bodily tissues, or to blood.) … Many hysteretic systems make screeching noises as they respond to their external load (hence, the natural connection with hysteria).
‘Hysteria’ has of course rightly fallen out of favour both within and without clinical contexts.
Every once in a while, I dive into a topic in science for no reason other than that I find it interesting. This is how I learnt about Titan, laser-cooling, and random walks. This post is about the fourth topic in this series: solitons.
A soliton is a stable wave that maintains its shape and characteristics as it moves around. In 1834, a civil engineer named John Scott Russell spotted a single wave moving through the Edinburgh and Glasgow Union Canal in Scotland. He described it thus in a report to the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1844 (pp. 319-320):
I was observing the motion of a boat which was rapidly drawn along a narrow channel by a pair of horses, when the boat suddenly stopped—not so the mass of water in the channel which it had put in motion; it accumulated round the prow of the vessel in a state of violent agitation, then suddenly leaving it behind, rolled forward with great velocity, assuming the form of a large solitary elevation, a rounded, smooth and well-defined heap of water, which continued its course along the channel apparently without change of form or diminution of speed. I followed it on horseback, and overtook it still rolling on at a rate of some eight or nine miles an hour [14 km/h], preserving its original figure some thirty feet [9 m] long and a foot to a foot and a half [30−45 cm] in height. Its height gradually diminished, and after a chase of one or two miles [2–3 km] I lost it in the windings of the channel.
Such, in the month of August 1834, was my first chance interview with that singular and beautiful phenomenon which I have called the Wave of Translation, a name which it now very generally bears; which I have since found to be an important element in almost every case of fluid resistance, and ascertained to be the type of that great moving elevation in the sea, which, with the regularity of a planet, ascends our rivers and rolls along our shores.
Russell was able to reproduce a similar wave in a water tank and study its properties. American physicists later called this wave a ‘soliton’ because of its solitary nature as well as to recall the name of particles like protons and electrons (to which waves are related by particle-wave duality).
Solitons are unusual in many ways. They are very stable, for one: Russell was able to follow his soliton for almost 3 km before it vanished completely. Solitons are able to collide with each other and still come away intact. There are types of solitons with still more peculiar properties.
These entities are not easy to find: they arise due to the confluence of unusual circumstances. For example, Russell’s “wave of translation” was born when a boat moving in a canal suddenly stopped, pushing a single wave of in front that kept going. The top speed at which a wave can move on the surface of a water body is limited by the depth of the body. This is why a tsunami generated in the middle of the ocean can travel rapidly towards the shore, but as it gets closer and the water becomes shallower, it slows down. (Since it must also conserve energy, the kinetic energy it must shed goes into increasing its amplitude, so the tsunami becomes enormous when it strikes land.)
In fluid dynamics, the ratio of the speed of a vessel to the square root of the depth of the water it is moving in is called the Froude number. If the vessel was moving at the maximum speed of a wave in the Union Canal, the Froude number would have been 1.
If the Froude number had been 0.7, the vessel would have generated V-shaped pairs of waves about its prow, reminiscent of the common sight of a ship cutting through water.
Image created with ChatGPT
Then the vessel started to speed up and its Froude number approached 1. This would have caused the waves generated off the sides to bend away from the prow and straighten at the front. This is the genesis of a soliton. Since the Union Canal has a fixed width, waves forming at the front of the vessel will have had fewer opportunities to dissipate and thus keep moving forward.
Since the boat stopped, it produced the single soliton that won Russell’s attention. If it had kept moving, it would have produced a series of solitons in the water, and at the same have acquired a gentle up and down oscillating motion of its own as the Froude number exceeded 1.
Waves occur in a wide variety of contexts in the real world — and in the right conditions, scientists expect to find solitons in almost all of them. For example they have been spotted in optical fibres that carry light waves, in materials carrying a moving wave of magnetisation, and in water currents at the bottom of the ocean.
In the wave physics used to understand these various phenomena, a soliton is said to emerge as a solution to non-linear partial differential equations.
The behaviour of some systems can be described using partial differential equations. The plucked guitar string is a classic example. The string is fixed at both ends; when it is plucked, a wave travels along its length producing the characteristic sound. The corresponding equation goes like this: ∂2u/∂t2 = c2 • ∂u2/∂x2, where u is the string’s displacement, x is where it was plucked, c is the maximum speed the wave can have, and t is of course the time lapsed.
The equation itself is not important. The point is that there’s a left-hand side and a right-hand side, and one side can equal the other for different combinations of u, x, and t. Each such combination is called a solution. One particular solution is called the soliton when the corresponding wave meets three conditions: it’s localised, preserves its shape and speed, and doesn’t lose energy when interacting with other solitons.
The “non-linear” part of “non-linear partial differential equations” means that these equations describe ways whose properties that have different properties depending on their amplitude. The guitar string equation is an example of a linear system because u, the string’s displacement, has a power of 1 (i.e. it isn’t squared or cubed) nor are the other terms of the equation multiplied with each other. Another famous example of a non-linear partial differential equation is the Schrödinger equation, which describes how the wave function of a quantum system will change over time given a set of initial conditions.
(The Austrian-Irish physicist Erwin Schrödinger postulated it in 1925, which is one of the reasons the UN has designated our current year — a century later — the International Year of Quantum Science & Technology.)
An example of a non-linear partial differential equation is the Korteweg-de Vries equation, which predicts how waves behave in shallow water: ut + 6u • ux + uxxx = 0. The second term is the problem: ux is a way to write ∂u/∂x and since it is multiplied by 6u the equation is non-linear, i.e. a change in its character induces changes in itself that may also change its character.
But for better or for worse, this is the only milieu in which a soliton will emerge.
(If you’re really interested: for example a soliton solution of the Korteweg-de Vries equation looks like this: u = A sech2 [ k (x – vt – x0) ], where A is the soliton’s amplitude or maximum height, k is a term related to its width, x0 is its initial position, and vt is its velocity over time. ‘sech’ is the hyperbolic secant function.)
Physicists are more interested in particular types of soliton than others because they closely mimic specific phenomena in the real world. Sometimes it’s a good idea to understand these phenomena as if they were solitons because the mathematics of the latter may be easier to work with. This lucid Institute of Physics video starring theoretical physicist David Tong sets out the quirky case of quarks.
I myself was more piqued by the Peregrine and breather solitons.
The Peregrine soliton isn’t a soliton that travels. Its name comes from its discoverer, a British mathematician named Howell Peregrine. In fact, one of the things that distinguish a Peregrine soliton is that it’s stuck in one place. More specifically it emerges from pre-existing waves, has a much greater amplitude than the background, and appears at and disappears from a single location in a blip.
Peregrine solitons are interesting because they have been used to explain killer waves: freakish waves in the open sea that have no discernible cause and tower over all the other waves. One famous example is the Draupner wave, which was the first killer wave to also be measured by an instrument as it happened. It occurred on January 1, 1995, near the Draupner platform, a natural-gas rig in the Norwegian part of the North Sea. This is the wave’s sounding chart:
Credit: Ingvald Straume/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA
That’s one heck of a soliton.
The breather soliton is equally remarkable. It’s a regular soliton that also has an oscillating amplitude, frequency or something else as it moves around. Imagine a breather soliton to be a soliton in water: it might look like a wave with an undulating shape, its surface heaving one moment and sagging the other like the head of a strange sea monster breathing as it glides along. This is exactly the spirit in which the breathing soliton was named. Here’s an animation of a particular variety called the sine-Gordon breather soliton:
Credit: Danko Georgiev/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA
The Peregrine soliton is a particular instance of a breather soliton. Breathers have also been found in an exotic state of matter called a Bose-Einstein condensate (which physicists are studying with the expectation that it will inspire technologies of the future), in plasmas in outer space, in the operational parameters of short-pulse lasers, and in fibre optics. Some researchers also think entities analogous to breather solitons could help proteins inside the cells in our bodies transport energy.
If you’re interested in jumping down this rabbit hole, you could also look up the Akhmediev and the Kuznetsov-Ma breathers.
At first blush, solitons seem like monastic wanderers of a world otherwise replete with waves travelling as if loath to be separated from another. Recall that one wave in 1834 gliding ever so placidly for over half a league, followed by a curious man on a horse galloping along the canal’s bank. But for this venerable image, solitons are the children of a world far too sophisticated to admit waves crashing into each other with little more consequence than an enlivening spray of water and the formidable mathematics they demand to be understood.
Featured image: A scan of a print of Hokusai’s ‘The Great Wave off Kanagawa’. Credit: H. O. Havemeyer Collection, 1929.
There was an intriguing outpouring of concern worldwide when Sunita Williams and Barry Wilmore returned to Earth after 280-something days in space. People were particularly concerned about Williams’s health and how she was doing, as if Wilmore hadn’t been there with her living through the same mission.
Researchers are still studying the effects of prolonged spaceflight on human bodies and don’t yet have enough data to say with confidence that some effects are more pronounced in women’s bodies. More than a few astronauts have also flown longer missions. NASA also has exercise and medical check-up regimens in place for astronauts to follow during long-duration missions as well as once they return to the ground. Taken together, while the mission profile was unusual, the duo didn’t present NASA with challenges it didn’t already know how to address.
Williams likely received the attention she did because she is more popular and, in some parts of the world, for her Indian ancestry. Other than her being a veteran astronaut, a NASA scientist, and a good ambassador for human spaceflight, I don’t think she’s special in a way that could justify the world’s, including India’s, tunnel vision.
In fact, while there was considerable interest in the astronauts’ well-being onboard the International Space Station (ISS) after their original mission profile had been stretched from eight days to nine months, the world has a much better case study to focus on now — yet few seem bothered.
On April 20 (IST), Roscosmos cosmonauts Alexey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner and NASA astronaut Donald “Don” Pettit returned from the ISS onboard a Soyuz capsule on its MS-26 mission. Of them, Pettit turned 70 years old today. He is NASA’s oldest active astronaut. His most recent ISS expedition lasted 220 days and so far he has accumulated 590 days in space.
When the Soyuz MS-26 capsule touched down in Kazakhstan, NASA tweeted:
According to NASA officials at the landing site, @Astro_Pettit is doing well and in the range of what is expected for him following return to Earth.
What's expected for him? In his own words during an April 16 pre-departure interview, "This is a physiological thing. It affects…
Here’s the April 16 interview, where you can also listen to him talking about what the first thing he’s likely to do once he lands: poop. “It affects different people different ways,” he goes on to say about long space stays. “Some people can land and go out, eat pizza, and dance. When I land, it takes me about 24 hours to feel like I’m a human being again.”
According to Russian journalist (and a good source of spaceflight details coming out of that country) Anatoly Zak, Pettit didn’t look good coming out of the Soyuz capsule.
…The commentary indicates that Pettit was in a bad shape after extraction from the capsule…
That cameras at the landing were asked to point away from Pettit because he was in “bad shape” is so wholesome. Jonathan McDowell put it in terms we’d understand:
… thank goodness no one is around to video me on global TV as I collapse on the couch, close my eyes and groan feebly for about ten minutes…
Right now, Williams, Wilmore, and Pettit will be going through NASA’s physical and mental rehabilitation programme for astronauts wrapping up long-term missions (as defined by NASA’s Office of the Chief Health and Medical Officer). It will last for at least 45 days and will be extended if an astronaut needs more help.
Once the rehabilitation is done, it will be good to hear from Williams, Wilmore, and Pettit about their missions. I do hope they will speak up and NASA will allow them to be candid.
A few weeks ago, Ars Technicapublished an article based on an intimate interview with Barry Wilmore. Both the fact of the article being published and the details that populated it were evidence of good journalism. But I’d rather astronauts who have been on such high-profile missions share all the details they’re allowed to with everyone in a public forum and that their government employers facilitate such interactions. This way what the people find out about doesn’t depend on which questions they already know to ask.
Of course, health possesses a tricky identity in this information landscape. I’m reminded of an article journalist Anoo Bhuyan wrote in 2018, after Bollywood actor Irrfan Khan revealed he had been diagnosed with a neuroendocrine tumour. In one evocative passage, Bhuyan laid out the starkly different ways in which Bollywood stars and Indian political leaders addressed public concerns about their medical state.
Bollywood celebrities have no responsibility to be accountable to the public about their health. Yet, they have often been transparent. However, same cannot be said about Indian politicians across parties and across the country. Sonia Gandhi, J. Jayalalithaa, Manohar Parrikar, Sushma Swaraj, Amar Singh and a number of other prominent figures have all been and continue to be tight-lipped about their health. More importantly, they are unaccountable about their inability to perform the jobs for which they were elected.
The empathetic coverage of Pettit as he exited the Soyuz capsule struck an edifying contrast with a lot of media coverage of Sunita Williams that sought details about her health that, should anyone have acquired them, would have constituted a violation of her privacy.
At the same time, human spaceflight is becoming an increasingly prominent preoccupation of many countries. It is both very expensive and, the way it is organised in India (guided as much by political ambitions as by scientific ones and with rarely proactive outreach), is hard to hold accountable.
What astronauts as prominent as Williams, Wilmore, and Pettit say — who are also experienced in ways that few others are — will go a long way towards allowing anyone with an internet connection to participate, learn, and keep up rather than become disengaged and left behind.
Yet the simple fact of an astronaut being a public figure doesn’t mean all their personal details should be availed for public consumption.
Shatrugan Sinha’s advice, as he provided it in Bhuyan’s article, is fitting here: that anyone should be able to share information about their ailments without fear of being removed from their current posts and of being discriminated against for it. The former is currently easier because it is techne — determined by the technical prowess of the times to cure a disease or ‘remove’ a condition’ — while the latter is harder for being episteme, a way of thinking and thus more firmly enmeshed In the mores of the time. Perhaps political leaders are tight-lipped because they know this better than anyone. It is nonetheless unfortunate.
Astronauts are more like film stars here: they owe us no accountability about how they are faring, but if they do elect to share, it can go a long away towards destigmatising the public perception of their work as well as understand what astronauts everywhere, including budding ones at home, are expected to go through.
Featured image: Astronaut Donald Pettit uses a camera during extra-vehicular activity on the International Space Station (ISS), January 15, 2003. Credit: NASA.
The maximum daytime temperatures in the Kalaburagi and Belagavi districts of Karnataka this week are expected to be 41º C and in the late 30sº C, respectively. Research has found that if the relative humidity is high enough to render a wet-bulb temperature exceeding 30º C, outdoor exposure of even a few minutes can prove fatal.
Yet many workers, especially in the country’s informal sector, routinely work outdoors in extreme heat with poor access to clean cool water, breaks from work, and medical attention. State-level policies and district-level heat-action plans are crucial to catch individuals who ‘slip’ through the protections available to the formal labour force.
In this spirit, Tamil Nadu and Telangana recently notified extreme heat as a state-specific disaster. Earlier this month, Karnataka also said government offices would close by 1.30 pm in April and May and that workers employed under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) in the Kalaburagi and Belagavi revenue divisions — comprising 14 districts — would receive a workload concession of 30% without any reduction in wages. From The Hindu:
“Labourers who work in open fields during the summer months are advised to take precautions such as wearing loose cotton clothes and consuming buttermilk, coconut water, and green vegetables instead of spicy food, tea, coffee, and junk food. They should drink enough clean water. The officers concerned are also directed to provide the workers with clean drinking water, first aid box, tent, and other basic facilities at the MGNREGA worksite,” [State Rural Development and Panchayat Raj Minister Priyank Kharge] said in a press note.
The decision aims to protect rural labourers from the harshest heat during working hours.
These initiatives are all on the right track because they’re cognisant of the fact that climate change will force the cost of economic growth to increase. For example, sans the concession granted by Karnataka — a notably substantive state-level policy for working in less-than-ideal conditions — workers may have had to set aside a larger fraction of their incomes to pay for medical care for heat-related injuries.
However, some media outlets have since cited a recent survey by a non-governmental organisation, ActionAid India, to report that many workers in Belagavi were unaware of the state’s announcement nor had been accorded the promised infrastructure. From Deccan Herald:
Out of 124 recently surveyed workers in 10 villages from Chikkodi taluk, Belagavi, 72.5 per cent of people work between 10 am and 5 pm and in 68.5 per cent of cases, no tented or shaded areas were provided where workers could take a break. …
In Raichur, where temperatures in the day can reach anywhere between 42 to 45 degrees Celsius, Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) workers continue to start their shifts only at 10 am, working through peak-time heat. …
Additionally, considering extreme heat conditions, the government had announced a 30 per cent concession on workload, with full payment, for workers in the Belagavi and Kalaburagi revenue divisions. This includes Belagavi, Dharwad, Gadag, Haveri, Bagalkot, Vijayapura, Uttara Kannada, Bidar, Kalaburagi, Raichur, Yadgir, Koppal, Ballari and Vijayanagar. However, the survey notes that 75 per cent of surveyed workers were not aware of such a provision and were not provided with any concession.
“We have found that when such workload concessions are announced, only those who are aware and ask are provided with concessions,” says Mahantesh Hosamani, an activist from Bagalkot.
Aside from leaving the Act’s beneficiaries bereft of social protections, the lacuna recalls that the enforcement of state- and district-level plans remains at the mercy of local bureaucrats and that there is no democratic mechanism to ensure state governments keep their promises. In this way, the additional cost imposed by extreme weather is passed to a population already dangerously vulnerable to high heat and the social welfare dimensions of climate adaptation efforts continue to stay on paper. As science journalist Mahima Jain reported in Mongabay India in 2022:
Despite the strong evidence of climate impacts, the state and central governments are not ready to combat these issues as there are institutional changes required to fight against, Prakash said. … During summer, workers avoid working in the heat by starting before dawn and finishing by late mornings. “We need an MGNREGS plus. We need to move on from such a knee-jerk solution, as this can’t go on for years. People need to be upskilled, we need agro-based or other industries set up in the vulnerable areas so that people have alternate employment,” Prakash explained…
Goswami too said that during heatwaves, the nature of work has to change. “We need to provide work which can be done in some shade. The working conditions are inhuman. How does one work in 49-50C?” he asked. Prakash explained, currently none of India’s social protection programmes have a climate angle. These are general programmes protecting people from different vulnerabilities. But given India’s diverse ecological zones, the impacts are different, and a one-size fits all social protection programme won’t work, and there’s a need to re-evaluate programmes from a climate lens.
Ultimately, the Act’s goals are themselves ill-served. To quote developmental economist Gerry Rodgers writing in Economic and Political Weekly in 2024:
… [MGNREGA] was an important part of Indira Gandhi’s 20-point programme to eliminate poverty in the early 1970s. Later in that decade, the Maharashtra Employment Guarantee Scheme changed the underlying premise from one of emergency relief to one of the right to employment, with the obligation of the state to satisfy that right. But that too was not new. The notion of the right to work has a venerable history. It is a key element of Gandhian philosophy, it is addressed in the Indian Constitution, and it is included in the United Nations International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. …
In the literature and news reports, there are also suggestions that the MGNREGA has also been used by the central government as an instrument of pressure on states governed by opposition parties, for instance, delaying allocations; or that it has been used as a vehicle to support other state policies, such as financial digitalisation or the extension of the Aadhaar card system, even when these interfered with the operation of the MGNREGA programme. Another important question about a programme such as MGNREGA is how well it integrates with other government social and redistributional policies.
Today, rather than epitomise the ‘right to employment’, and thanks to the Centre’s repeated interference with its conduct and both the Union and state governments’ failure to upskill workers to look for less injurious employment, its workers now risk a ‘right to exploitation’.
Featured image: MGNREGA workers remove mud from a village pond in Asir, Haryana, on February 17, 2023. Credit: Mulkh Singh/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
