Himachal Pradesh is in trouble! – Issue #61
Heavy rainfall in Himachal has caused severe damage to infrastructure, including landslides, washed-out bridges, and closed roads. Ladakh, Uttarakhand, Punjab, and Delhi have also been affected
News of the week
As these words get typed out, the people of Himachal Pradesh are in deep trouble.
We know what happened. A western disturbance collided with monsoon clouds above Himachal, resulting in extraordinary amounts of rain getting dumped into the region’s mountains and valleys. The aftermath, as an unending supply of videos shows, has been brutal.
Critical highways have been hammered. One video shows a part of the road connecting Jammu and Srinagar has slid down the mountainside. Another video shows a landslide on the highway between Kullu and Manali. Elsewhere, the Beas has eaten into the road. The road between Manali and Leh is in trouble as well. It has been hit by landslides and unseasonal snowfall. Even the road connecting Kalka to Shimla has seen landslides – and rivers flowing over roads.
An unknown number of bridges have also been washed away. Here is the Parbati at the religious centre of Manikaran. And here, the Ravi taking down the bridge at Chamera, Chamba. At Manali, the Beas had washed away cars and chewed a hole in the highway. Sixty kilometres downstream, it hadn’t lost any power. It pulled down the steel bridge at Aut. Another 28 kilometres downstream, it also took down the bridge at Mandi.
In all, an estimated 40 major bridges in Himachal have been damaged – or lost entirely. About 1,300 roads are closed due to the rains. The human costs are yet to be calculated – rescue efforts are underway. Himachal wasn’t the only state to be affected. Ladakh got 100 times its usual complement of rain. In just 24 hours,, Rishikesh in neighbouring Uttarakhand received as much as 23 centimetres of rain. As this tweet shows, the rest of the state was no different.
As these swollen rivers hit the plains, states like Punjab also got flooded. Further to the south, the Yamuna in Delhi swelled as well, erasing the previous flood level record, which had stood for 60 years, and forcing residents to evacuate with little preparation and no warning. The situation across northern India is still developing, with meteorologists expecting fresh spells of rain this weekend.
Little is surprising here. IMD officials have been watching the western disturbances behave in increasingly atypical ways – like straying further south than they used to, colliding more frequently with monsoon clouds, etc. The cloudburst at Kedarnath too, had been traced back to a western disturbance anomaly. What is more severe this time is the scale.
It’s one more reminder that our development model for the hills – broad roads that destabilise mountain slopes, towns that edge ever close to the river – comes with large risks. One wonders if we will learn this time around. Or, as P Sainath showed in Everybody Loves A Good Drought, will the only real outcome be a fresh flurry of enthusiastic tendering?
On these rains, there is one more thing to say. In a matter of days, the rainfall map of India looks very different. Just two weeks ago, cyclone Biparjoy had pulled monsoon clouds away from the Gangetic plains towards Gujarat, leaving that region with very little rain and in the grip of heat waves. The south, in contrast, had seen relatively normal rains.
Then came last week. The tally now stands at 59% excess rainfall over northwest India; 4% excess over central India; 23% deficiency over peninsular India and 17% deficiency over east and northeast India.
And so, that was Himachal. What were the other consequential developments from last week?
A clutch of companies wants to return their commercial coal blocks to the government. They are unhappy because the government of Chhattisgarh has not given them mining leases yet. The state government, reported Business Standard, also wants to cancel coal blocks near Hasdeo Arand. Talking of forests, the Forest Conservation (Amendment) Bill has gone unchanged to the Parliament. The BJP-dominated parliamentary committee has rejected all the feedback it received.
In other news, India’s Make In India plans received a setback. Foxconn has exited its tie-up with Vedanta to manufacture semiconductors in India. It was a strange venture, to begin with. Neither entity had any previous experience in manufacturing chips.
Foxconn, says NDTV, will set up a chip manufacturing plant independently. In the meantime, undeterred India has gotten memory chipmaker Micron to set up shop in India. This proposal has run into controversy as well – in part because of the extraordinary subsidy being doled out to Micron.
Tucked inside this report is an interesting suggestion by author Prabir Purkayastha. “The Modi dispensation is finally beginning to understand that technology is not something that, if you have money, you can buy from the global market. It is the closely-held knowledge of companies and countries.”
One hopes he is right. One striking feature of the PLIs for solar panels, batteries and the rest has been their focus on manufacturing and this assumption that technology can be bought off the shelf.
In yet other news, Maharashtra has become the first state in the country to have a green hydrogen policy.
Tamil Nadu wants to get a third of all EV investments India will attract by 2030. “We are looking at close to 30-35 per cent of whatever investment comes to India by 2030. That is our goal,” said state industries minister TRB Raaja. It’s not all bombast, though. The state has gotten Hyundai, Ola Electric, Ather, Renault-Nissan and TVS Motor to base their electric vehicle investment plans in the state, a planned EV investment of around Rs 43,000 crore.
While on electric vehicles, reports Techcrunch, India’s two-wheeler market has hit a speed bump.
It’s an interesting report. For a while now, we have been hearing that India has cut FAME-II subsidies for two-wheeler EV makers because they were importing parts – as opposed to sourcing them locally. According to Techcrunch, other factors were at work too.
It writes: “Sources say the change came as sales of subsidised electric two-wheelers crossed the million-unit mark faster than expected... The scheme carries a total subsidy outlay of $1.2 billion, including $244 million specifically for electric two-wheelers. The latter was depleted due to growing sales of electric scooters... “Because of the faster pace of growth, the money would have run out two months back. So, instead of stopping the subsidy, the government decided to reduce the subsidy level per vehicle,” a person familiar with the development told TechCrunch.”
Earlier, CarbonCopy commented that India’s outlays for PLI are actually pretty low. Rs 197,000 crore across 14 sectors works out to an average of Rs. 14,000 crore per sector (over multiple years). This has resulted in the country choosing to support a handful of companies in each sector – and setting manufacturing targets that are lower than needed.
In the meantime, with growth in the Indian market lower than that in other countries, India’s EV component makers are looking outside India. Epsilon, the maker of anodes, is boosting its production capacity in India to 10,000 TPA. It’s, however, setting up a 50,000 TPA unit in the US.
Video of the week
The Financial Times has a 22-minute documentary on Adani vs the short-seller.
Climate pieces of the week
India is not the only country where the weather is running amok. The whole world is.
“These extraordinary extremes could be an early warning of tipping points towards different weather or sea ice or fire regimes,” said University of Exeter climate researcher Tim Lenton. “We call it ‘flickering’ when a complex system starts to briefly sample a new regime before tipping into it.” Read the whole report.
Another piece last week takes a look at the mining boom around lithium. That is worth a read too.
Head-scratcher of the week
“India has discussed a possible deal to supply more than 11 million metric tons a year of green hydrogen to the European Union and Singapore, who in turn would invest in these Indian clean energy projects...New Delhi will consider bilateral agreements allowing countries to use carbon credits linked to producing so-called green hydrogen.”
John Goodenough no more
John Goodenough, inventor of the lithium battery, is gone. The Guardian has this tribute.
Climate reads of the week
On India’s Carbon Credit Trading Scheme. “In the enthusiasm to ensure the readiness of industry for CBAM, however, the power ministry has brought in complexity in the process that will likely make the cost of the carbon credit high for Indian companies.” (Business Standard) Also, see this report in Eco Business.
Despite falling gas prices, India’s purchases of imported gas are staying low. Rival fuels like naphtha and fuel oil continue to be cheaper. (Business Standard)
Is India’s Wind Sector poised for a revival? (Fortune India)
From US pellet mills to jungles in India, behind the scenes of Deforestation Inc. (ICIJ).
The 'Game-Changing' Technology The Nuclear Industry Is Betting On For A Revival (Huffington Post)
The G20 should forge a pact to support nations’ shifts to a low-carbon future, Navroz Dubash writes in Nature.
Why are Chhattisgarh’s solar-powered systems in a state of disrepair? In forested hinterlands of Chhattisgarh, solar-powered generators, which were pushed at a massive scale for nearly a decade, have fallen to disuse. Poor maintenance of solar units remains a huge problem. Maintenance technicians complain about irregular payments. (Gaon Connection)
How India made it harder to declare a drought. (Scroll.in)