Why policy-makers should read Retreat Of The Elephants, and more - Issue #5
The Big Picture
Even as the heatwave continued to make headlines, another environmental crisis manifested itself.
Incessant rains triggered floods and landslides across northeast India. As Rajeev Bhattacharyya reported for The Diplomat, Assam was the worst affected, with “at least nine people dead and nearly 0.7 million people affected across 27 districts... around 48,000 people compelled to leave their homes have been shifted to 248 relief camps established by the government.”
Visuals emerged showing the New Haflong railway station, built less than ten years ago, submerged in mist and mud. In one video, a train gently keeled over to its side, pushed by a mudflow at the station—tunnels on the line filled with water. Landslides also broke rail links between Assam and the border states of Tripura, Manipur and Mizoram. According to a Tripura government official, it will take two months to restore rail connectivity. In Arunachal Pradesh and Meghalaya, landslides snapped road links.
It’s a familiar story. On the one hand, the rainfall is atypically intense. On the other, some of this infrastructure has been built without accounting for vulnerabilities emerging from local geology and climate patterns.
Take the rail track. Built to replace the British-era metre gauge line, the new line had triggered concerns during construction itself. As The Hindu reported in 2010: the lower level of one tunnel -- on the Lumding-Silchar line, which passes through Haflong – was lower than the Dolong Nalla bed by about 8 metres. The audit report quoted by the newspaper called this “a fundamental error at the planning stage which is yet to be resolved to avoid flooding of tunnels during heavy rains in the hilly terrain.”
Bhattacharyya noted: “As it appears, the railways did not pay attention to the report.”
Such tales of neglect are legion. Hydel and road projects too violate environmental clearance conditions meant to minimise ecological costs. Indian cities are planned with little thought for climate stresses and shocks. These are lessons we are yet to learn. This very week, the hill state of Himachal Pradesh invited bids to build and run 27 new hydel projects. Like neighbouring Uttarakhand, where dams intensified the Kedarnath disaster in 2013, Himachal too has fragile geology plus a rising frequency of cloudbursts and landslides.
This newsletter will track adaptation/mitigation more closely in the coming instalments.
Heatwave News 🔥
After a brief respite, the heatwave returned last week.
The temperature in Mungeshpur, Delhi, touched an incredible 49.2 degrees celsius last Sunday. Similarly, high readings came from the rest of northern India -- Rajasthan, Haryana, Punjab, Madhya Pradesh, Vidharba, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Jharkhand. Bloomberg reported on how folks in Delhi were trying to cope.
The heatwave has created an outcome where peak power demand is shifting to mid-afternoon. With demand rising fast – and the grid staying under pressure – the centre’s attempts to meet demand continued.
Even as banks finally agreed to extend working capital loans to stranded power projects, the tussle between gencos and the government continued elsewhere. Having told generators to ensure timely imports of coal – to reduce demand on domestic coal – the Centre threatened to crack down on gencos that miss its 15 June target. As the Economic Times reported: “If blending with domestic coal is not started by June 15, then the domestic allocation of the concerned defaulter thermal power plants will be further reduced by 5 per cent.”
The Central Electricity Regulatory Commission too threatened to reduce power tariffs of plants that don’t maintain enough coal. Gencos are pushing back too. In April, while telling gencos to produce power at full capacity, the government had capped spot power tariffs at Rs 12. This week, Tata Mundra sought a higher tariff.
News of the Week
The Adani Group bagged Holcim. The conglomerate’s entry into the cement sector further underscores its rapid growth over the last twenty years. Its pace has been especially quicksilver since 2014 when Prime Minister Narendra Modi became prime minister. Much of this growth, however, is backed by borrowings. A report this week pegged the group’s debt at a whopping Rs 22 lakh crore rupees.
Other news. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is making Adani and Ambani even richer. The first is expanding his controversial mine in Australia to an annual production of 15 million tons. The second is buying discounted Russian crude. State-owned oilcos are getting into the act too. As firms like Shell, BP and Exxon-Mobil try to divest their investments in Russian oil- and gas fields, ONGC hopes to pick up their stakes.
Domestic LPG prices were hiked, crossing the Rs 1,000 mark in several markets. However, wary of inflation, the Centre has cut excise on petrol and diesel in tandem.
It appears that the Centre’s plans to privatise BPCL are not going well – at one time, both Reliance and Saudi Aramco were in the running. Sale prospects have cooled partly due to political risk. Talking to Reuters, a government official mentioned India didn’t raise petrol prices between November and February, presumably because the country was heading into the UP elections. It’s unclear what happens next. Reuters had reported on 18 May that the government is now thinking of “inviting bids for a 20%-25% stake in BPCL, instead of an outright sale of its entire 52.98% holding”. Apollo Global Management and Vedanta were said to be the final bidders. However, a day later, another source told the newswire the sale was on hold. There was only one bidder, Reuters was told. It echoes what this newsletter reported last week. India’s plan to “monetise oil and gas pipeline assets" -- through InvITs -- has lost steam.
And now, renewables. Last week, GAIL announced a tie-up to work on hydrogen transportation in India. This week, automotive component maker Advik Hi-Tech entered the fray as well. It has tied up with Australia’s Pure Hydrogen Corp to produce and supply hydrogen in India to the transport sector.
For a while now, it has been said that the BJP-led NDA wants to boost India’s manufacturing competitiveness by creating a few large firms – like the chaebols of Korea. The PLI programme – launched for sectors like solar panels and batteries – is one of the key elements of that plan.
This week, despite being shortlisted for the programme, Ford said it would not make EVs in India. The company did not find the business case convincing. Tesla, too decided to stay out. The government’s understandable insistence on the firm bringing manufacturing to India was the deal-breaker, reported Economic Times. Other companies, however, are more bullish. Unwilling to let Tata Motors take the lead, Mahindra and Mahindra is trying to use Volkswagen’s components in their vehicles. Citroen is entering India as well.
It’s interesting. Even without PLI, they are bullish on the market. Does this raise questions about the current size of the incentive?
Other news. Greenko is setting up a 5,230 MW renewable energy storage project in Kurnool, Andhra Pradesh. This privately-owned energy storage project will focus on business customers. Economic Times reported: “Greenko has signed firm cloud energy storage contracts with NIIF backed Ayana Renewables, Arcelor Mittal, Adani Group and also signed an MoU with NTPC for storage services to deliver peak and 24x7 renewable energy to the Indian market.”
Climate Long-Reads
Where are India’s electric trucks? Read that. And then see this report which says Bharat Electronics will make batteries for US’ Triton’s electric truck plant in Gujarat.
China’s EV-startups are in trouble. Irrational exuberance is to blame.
From Two Conservationists, a Hopeful Look at Earth’s Five Largest Forests
Climate Watch 📺
IIT Delhi’s Rohit Chandra and Centre for Policy Research fellow Ashwini Swain discuss India’s power crisis – and its portent for the country’s energy transition.
Books of the Week (we have two)
The events at New Haflong leave one wondering if the older line, built by the British, fared higher on climate resilience. An argument can indeed be made that older societies handled the environmental constraints better, given their lower capacity for trucking in water from elsewhere. Back in 2017, when reporting on poor urban planning in Gujarat, this reporter had travelled to the Dholavira, the Harappan city. What I found was a city fringed by large, rectangular, inter-connected water tanks, not to mention drains for capturing run-off.
Dholavira is not an outlier. In
Lost Enlightenment
, his account of the rise and fall of the great Central Asian empire, Frederick Starr talks about water management in cities like Balkh.
There too, cities used dams to catch run-off; canals as long as sixty miles carried that water to the cities; to minimise evaporation, says Starr, Central Asians took these channels deeper and deeper, resorting eventually to baked clay pipes. Called Kerezes, these underground channels ran for “many miles”, “reached three hundred or more feet in depth, and passed under whole cities”, and had “periodic vertical shafts for ventilation and access”. He writes that the city of Merv had a staff of 12,000 to maintain its hydraulic system.
This civilisation, writes Starr, exploited resources intensively rather than extensively.
China, on the other hand, fell back on more dramatic water management. It built canals to divert water. It built embankments to try and get rivers like the Yellow to flow in a straight line – as opposed to flooding frequently. Environmental historian Mark Elvin taught himself classical Chinese and read old court histories and their ilk, trying to understand China’s many – and ill-fated – experiments to control rivers like the Yellow and the Yangtze, and emerged with The Retreat Of The Elephants – a sweeping environmental history classic that captures a 3,000-year history of human-environment relations in China.
Both books come with large lessons. Central Asia's hydraulic empire ran on science and maths (the calculations of gradients, etc.), helped establish the primacy of reason (over faith) and set the stage for a larger scientific flowering. As for the Chinese, their ambitious water management infrastructure comes with many lessons as well. Amongst them: the costs of maintaining almost hubristic infrastructure (like the embankments which wanted to force the Yellow to flow in a straight line) imposed heavy social and economic burdens and drained successive rulers.
Which is where we are. Build poor infrastructure – and we will be lumbered with all the accompanying costs.