On Valmik Thapar, Radheyshyam Bishnoi and Ngugi wa Thiong'o - Issue #136
News of the week
Last week, just as this newsletter was walking out of the door, news came that the US Court of International Trade had struck down Trump’s tariffs as illegal. In the days since, the government has appealed and won a temporary pause from the US Appeals Court.
Along the way, a confusing picture had gotten muddied further. Even as Trump’s administration doubles down, saying it has “other options for imposing tariffs”, the country stands weakened in bilateral negotiations for a trade reset. Other countries will now want to wait. Japan, for instance, has said it is in no rush for a trade deal with the US.
In other news from the US, its Energy Department announced $3.7 billion worth of funding cuts last week for clean-energy and climate projects, with a large portion of the canceled grants focused on carbon capture and sequestration. The government is rolling back tax credits for solar, hydrogen and other clean-energy sources. “The move marks a sharp reversal to the policies of the previous administration, which pumped billions into the sector, supercharging startups in the field and attracting automakers, battery manufacturers and solar producers from across the globe to set up shop in the U.S. because of the generous incentives offered by the government,” wrote WSJ. “Now those companies are figuring out how to do it on their own, as funding is pulled.”
Some of the firms affected by these cuts are marquee names. “Li-Cycle, a Canadian battery recycling startup that had aimed to build large facilities in Rochester, N.Y., filed for bankruptcy, while Climeworks, a Swiss direct air capture startup, said it was cutting nearly a quarter of its staff amid uncertainty over whether millions of dollars in grants from the Energy Department would remain in place for its joint venture plant in Louisiana,” the newspaper wrote.
Even as the US declares war on renewables, one of the positive possibilities is coming into being.
Between Trump’s war on clean energy and his tariff war with China, countries like Pakistan are getting battery storage systems on the cheap. “The combination of a glut of lithium, a key battery material, and overcapacity of lower-tier China-made batteries has created a flood of cut-price battery energy storage systems for lower-income countries such as Pakistan,” reported FT.
Turning to India, it has been a relatively low-key week. Which is to say, large things went by barely noticed.
WHO, for instance, is shuttering its disease surveillance network in India. The National Public Health Support Network provided data collation assistance and field support for the Indian government since 1999. “This includes support for immunisation programmes and monitoring for measles, rubella, diphtheria, and neonatal tetanus,” wrote BMJ. “But the network has been winding down since 1 April, with nearly 200 of its offices facing imminent closure.”
The costs run deep. In states like Bihar, where the health system passed away years ago, it is this team that tracked the spread of outbreaks like dengue. One wonders if the Indian government has a Plan B in place.
After batteries, the PLI programme for solar module manufacturing is missing its timelines. Out of the 48.3 GW of module manufacturing capacity approved by the government, just 17.5 GW has been completed. Of the 44.9 GW cell manufacturing capacity awarded out, just 6 GW has been completed. And, of the 37.5 GW of awarded capacity for wafer and ingot production, just 2 GW has been completed. “A key reason for the delay has been lack of supply of components and technology transfer from China, and also the curb on travel of technicians from there,” an industry executive told Mint.
The naivete is striking. India is trying to position itself as an alternative manufacturing location to China. At the same time, its chosen firms are sourcing technologies from elsewhere instead of investing in R&D. Why would any country share its knowhow?
In other news, Adani’s Dharavi Redevelopment Plan is drawing flak for leaving out many residents. The group also hit headlines two days ago after the WSJ reported that the US Department of Justice was reviewing the activities of several LNG tankers that seemed to be covertly shipping Iranian LNG to Adani's port at Mundra. “The investigation revealed that several LPG tankers shipping to Adani Enterprises’ Mundra port displayed suspicious behaviour typical of sanctions evasion, including manipulating their Automatic Identification System (AIS) signals,” reported CNBCTV18, citing the WSJ report. The group denied it had evaded sanctions.
In yet other news, tigers’ prey-base is falling across key tiger landscapes in east-central India, particularly in Odisha, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh. “Ungulates form the bulk of a tiger’s diet and are also critical to the forest ecosystem,” reported the Indian Express. “Yet, across tiger habitats in these regions, they are facing increasing pressure from loss of habitat due to deforestation, development, agricultural expansion, urbanisation, human-wildlife conflict, and subsistence hunting.”
Flagged by a joint report by the National Tiger Conservation Authority and the Wildlife Institute of India, the report warns of rising human:animal conflict as a result. “To revive prey populations, the report recommends on-site breeding of chital and sambar in secure enclosures designed to keep out predators,” said the Indian Express. There are two points to be made here. One, in recent years, India has seen the rise of a new gravy train in conservation circles — that of in situ breeding for species after declaring them as endangered. Two, despite loss of habitat and dipping prey numbers, tiger populations are rising in Jharkhand and Odisha while falling steeply in Chhattisgarh.
Those tiger numbers might be worth a relook. Or perhaps these cats have come from Madhya Pradesh. If so, why are tiger numbers rising there? All this needs a closer look. What is happening to wildlife numbers in India?
Climate change news of the week
In India, the south-west monsoon arrived eight days earlier than usual. In the days since, central India has recorded five times its usual May rainfall and south India has recorded more than two-and-a-half times the typical amount. IndiaSpend has a report on this atypical weather. (Spoiler alert: Western disturbances, yet again).
Along the way, the rains messed up India’s power sector planning. As heatwaves receded faster than expected, real-time power prices crashed, briefly even touching zero in May. “Although the country had projected a peak power demand of 266 GW for May, unseasonal rains and thunderstorms kept the actual peak lower, at 231 GW as of May 26,” wrote The New Indian Express. “Overall, India’s electricity consumption in May has declined by at least 4% year-on-year.”
It makes one think of power plants running on imported gas and those working on imported coal. Fearing another brutal summer, the government had pressed both into service, telling them to work at full capacity, which presumably means they lined up fuel contracts and awaited their turn to feed into the grid. Now to see what happens in June. In March, we were being told that the country’s power demand would touch 273 GW this month.
PS: For more on climate risk and India Inc., watch this Founding Fuel discussion anchored by Indrajit Gupta and Archana Chaudhary.
Gratitude and remembrances
Days after astrophysicist Jayant Narlikar passed away, India also lost two of its staunchest conservationists.
Radheyshyam Bishnoi was working for species like the Great Indian Bustard. Valmik Thapar was one of the most uncompromising defenders of the Indian tiger.
Mongabay has penned obituaries for both. On the first, it writes: “Dookia also added how, over the last few years, Radheshyam led the effort of creating 12 water points for animals in the harsh summer months around DNP. “Every alternate day, he would take his truck to these points and fill them with fresh water sourced from his tube well,” Dookia said, “Even when the India-Pakistan border tension escalated, he continued to go to these far-flung water points and refill them.” This project, although adopted through crowdfunding, involved many additional expenses that Radheshyam bore without hesitation.”
And then, there is Thapar. One of the producers of this newsletter had met him shortly after Land Of The Tiger was released as a documentary and as a book. His plain-speaking had left an indelible impression.
And so, this bit from his obituary on Mongabay rings very true. “Over the years, he authored more than 30 books and presented acclaimed wildlife documentaries, including Land of the Tiger for the BBC. Yet it was not the cameras or accolades that defined him—it was his relationship with the cats themselves. He named them, tracked them, and mourned them. His detailed chronicles of Ranthambhore’s tigers, particularly tigresses like Padmini, Machli, and Krishna, read less like field notes and more like family histories. In these accounts, he observed behaviors that helped rewrite scientific understanding of tigers: Males caring for cubs, hunting in water, and even complex territorial dynamics. His most constant companion in this pursuit was frustration. India’s forest bureaucracy, in his view, was chronically inert—often more concerned with paperwork than poaching, with formality over fieldwork. He served on more than 150 committees and task forces, only to see many of their recommendations shelved. He was unafraid to dissent, famously rejecting the conclusions of the 2005 Tiger Task Force, arguing that coexistence with people, while ideal in theory, too often meant slow extinction for the tiger.”
Climate longreads of the week
Shrinking Panchachuli Glacier: Tracking the retreat of Panchachuli Glacier in Kumaon over the past 25 years. (From geologist Suvrat Kher’s Rapid Uplift blog)
Heat is killing oil workers. The industry is trying to kill a rule for that. (EE News)
America’s Braudelian Autumn: Factions of capital in the second Trump administration. Aka, the Silicon Valley elite are slugging it out with the Wall Street lot (Phenomenal World)
Kendriya Vidyalaya Model is a Blueprint for Quality Public Schooling (The India Forum)
How India’s Corporate Whistleblowers Face Retaliation & Get No Protection From A Law Govt Keeps Dormant (Article-14)
Vanishing Island, Belated Action, Sinking Wildlife Sanctuary (Newsclick)
Book of the week
Ngugi wa Thiong'o has also passed away.
Like Chinua Achebe, he too wrote on colonialism and its instrumentalities.
Check out this tribute to him by Daraja Press, where he describes what drove him to writing. ‘Colonialism stole our land, but language was the theft of our dreams.’ As Firoze Manji writes: “He recounted how, as a child, British teachers beat Gĩkũyũ out of his classmates—‘not just with canes, but with the lie that our words were small, ugly things.’ His entire oeuvre, from his early writings as 'James' Ngugi, to Petals of Blood, Decolonising the Mind and Wizard of the Crow, was a counterattack: ‘I write in Gĩkũyũ not to be provincial, but to prove that the universal lives in the particular’.”
If you have not read him yet, now might be a good time to start. Check out this obituary by Ben Okri, this Guardian longread, and this interview in Paris Review.
PS: From PhD scholar Mirza Zulfikar Rahman, another book recco, this one on rivers. Rivers of the Asian Highlands: From Deep Time to the Climate Crisis.