After the brazen killing of 26 tourists by terrorists in Pahalgam, India and Pakistan unleashed a series of war salvos, which were aired in real time and amplified by social media and television. A shaky ceasefire of sorts was finally brokered, with US President Donald Trump claiming credit for it.

One wondered what had happened to the voices of reason—the mediators and the pacifists. The discourse leading up to the ceasefire and beyond was directed by hate-spewing TV news anchors and motivated social media warriors who are bent on spreading disinformation and malice. Statements issued by the government and military spokespersons have been interpreted at will by self-appointed analysts with hot takes.

In the midst of the click-baiters and the dis/misinformation peddlers, a cross-section of people in the two nations remain deeply invested in peace. But they are not being heard in the din of conflict.

Full article: https://frontline.thehindu.com/politics/india-pakistan-peace-cross-border-dialogue-kashmir/

A mere handful of women are in top positions in politics and government across the world. According to recent data published by the United Nations, just 18 countries have a woman Head of State, and 16 countries have a woman Head of Government.

“I think what the world is suffering from is too much male leadership,” said Ireland’s first woman president, Mary Robinson, who served from 1990 to 1997. “We need 50 per cent of the governments to be women-led and that would help all the discussions at global level. The best leadership is when there is a balance between women and men because we bring different perspectives, different experiences,” Robinson said during a recent visit to India.

Robinson feels that “a woman’s way of leading” is essential in a fractured world.  What is a woman’s way of leading? Can specific values be ascribed to female leadership which make it distinct from a male brand of leadership?  The evidence is mixed, with women leaders holding an entire range of views from progressive to reactionary and the spectrum in between.

For example, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, a conservative, has strengthened anti-abortion lobbies in Italy and increased stigma around the practice. Meloni was also instrumental in dropping the clause on safe and legal abortion from a statement of G7 countries.

German politician Alice Weidel is a study in contrasts. Weidel, who is gay and has a Sri Lankan partner, is a prominent member and leader of Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which opposes same sex marriage and takes a belligerent position on immigration. “Burqas, headscarf girls and subsidised knifemen and other good-for-nothings will not secure our prosperity, economic growth and, above all, the welfare state,” Weidel said with reference to immigrants.

Angela Merkel was Germany’s first female chancellor, a position she would occupy for 16 years. Merkel was labelled a ‘reluctant feminist’ – one of the grounds on which her legacy is examined is whether she did enough for women. Merkel would concede she was a feminist only at the very end of her term. Women leaders are willy-nilly judged on whether they did enough for their own kind, a criterion which would be unheard of for men to be subjected to.

Closer home, Rekha Sharma, former chairperson of the National Commission of Women who is now a member of the Rajya Sabha (upper house of Parliament), accused wrestler Vinesh Phogat of lying to enter politics (she is a member of the Haryana Legislative Assembly, having won a seat in the 2024 state polls). Phogat, an internationally acclaimed wrestler, was one of several women who accused Wrestling Federation of India chief Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh of sexual harassment. This is not the only instance where Sharma blundered by being less than supportive to survivors of sexual harassment.

In contrast, former Prime Minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern picked a diverse cabinet with representation from women, people of colour, the LGBTQ+ community and indigenous MPs. Ardern made history as the first female leader to bring her baby to the General Assembly of the United Nations in 2018. Ardern was also the first New Zealand PM to march in a gay pride parade the same year. Ardern is admired for being compassionate and kind. Her government’s response while tackling COVID-19 invited a mix of plaudits and criticism.

Her decision to resign as Prime Minister generated surprise and shock. While many praised it as a selfless act and as an example of how politicians should conduct themselves, there was also speculation about whether or not Ardern crumbled under the pressure of misogyny and online hate. The BBC reported her resignation in an article with a controversially titled headline, ‘Can Women Have it All?’ – which the broadcaster later withdrew and republished with a different title.

Mexico’s first female President, Claudia Sheinbaum, who is Jewish, made headlines for extending a warm welcome to Palestinian ambassador Nadya RH Rasheed. Sheinbaum is the country’s first female president in more than 200 years of independence. She has stood out for her adroit diplomacy with Donald Trump, ensuring that Mexico neither fawns over nor is in the bad books of the US President. A climate scientist, she was also part of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change team that shared a Nobel Peace Prize with former US Vice President Al Gore in 2007.

In South Asia, leaders like Indira Gandhi of India and Benazir Bhutto of Pakistan have left defining legacies despite their chequered records. In Bangladesh, the now ousted Prime Minister, Sheikh Hasina of the Awami League and Khaleda Zia of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party – who served as PM thrice – have been the most popular contemporary political leaders of the country. Both regimes have been accused of corruption and nepotism.

In 2024, Harini Amarasuriya was elected Prime Minister of Sri Lanka, making her the first woman to hold this position in 24 years. Sirimavo Bandaranaike was not just Sri Lanka’s first female Prime Minister but also the world’s first woman to hold such a position when she took office in 1960. Then, in 1994, Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga was elected Sri Lanka’s President, a position she held till 2005. She is Sri Lanka’s longest serving President and survived an assassination attempt in 2000.

There have been prominent female political leaders in other parts of the world, too. In March 2025 Sara Zaafarani became the second woman Prime Minister of Tunisia, following Najla Bouden, who took office in October 2021. In June 2024 Judith Suminwa became the first woman in the history of the Democratic Republic of Congo to assume the role of Prime Minister.

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the first female democratically elected head of state in Africa, became President of Liberia in 2005 and remained in the post till 2018. She was awarded the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize, along with two other women, Leymah Gbowee and Tawakkol Karman, for their non-violent efforts to promote peace and her struggle for women’s rights. Widely known as Africa’s Iron Lady, she led Liberia through reconciliation and recovery following the country’s decade-long civil war and the Ebola health crisis.

Michelle Bachelet, twice President of Chile (2006-10 and 2014-18) is one the most widely recognised Latin American female politicians on the world stage. Dilma Rousseff of Brazil (2011-2016), Cristina Fernández de Kirchner of Argentina (2007-15, then Vice President 2019-23) and Laura Chinchilla of Costa Rica (2010-14), all elected Presidents of their respective countries, have left behind defining and powerful legacies.

History suggests that women-led regimes are not necessarily more or less peaceful, collaborative, or progressive than their male counterparts. In order to prove their mettle as heads of nations, women have needed to appear ‘strong,’ authorise warfare and command militaries. It is worth noting that several women leaders have been described as ‘Iron Lady” – most famously, perhaps, ‘Iron Lady’ Margaret Thatcher, but also Ellen Johnson Sirleaf (along with the women in her cabinet), Indira Gandhi and Golda Meir, the fourth Prime Minister of Israel and the first (and so far only) woman to hold the post (1969-74).

Women in general are traditionally considered more peace-loving, humane and caring than men. But such perceptions tend to essentialise gender values and reduce men and women to certain opinions and behaviours based solely on being male or female.

The issue at the heart of this is the exercise of power. When an individual is appointed to a country’s top executive post, power, responsibility and accountability come with it. Ultimately, they must be evaluated on their record on governance.

This is not to suggest that the gender of a head of state and government does not matter. The very idea of a woman at the pinnacle of government is powerful and inspiring. It is a message to society that younger women and girls need not settle for junior or middling positions at work and that it is possible for women to reach the very top. It is also a message to men that women cannot be dismissed or treated as inferior counterparts.

There is enough evidence to suggest that when women are represented in politics, there are positive spillover effects on health and education parameters, as well as on livelihood prospects for girls and women of the country and region. Women are needed in politics and government now more than ever. More women decision-makers are required to pave the way for gender justice and peace, as well as better outcomes in health, education, the environment and employment.

Originally published: https://nwmindia.org/gender-lens/gender-media-elections/political-leadership-does-gender-make-a-difference/

The world is burning.

In September 2024, thousands of pagers exploded in Lebanon in public streets, grocery stores and people’s homes. The next day, walkie-talkies were blown up. At least 37 people died and 2,931 people were injured. The attacks were carried out by Israel to target Hezbollah supporters known to carry pagers and walkie-talkies for communication and planning military operations.

Hezbollah, a Shia militant group and movement in Lebanon, against whom Israel has a long-standing armed conflict, has been using old-fashioned pagers and walkie-talkies to avoid interception and hacking by Israeli forces. Israel managed to embed explosives in the pagers, which then exploded in Lebanon and Syria. The dystopian attack was widely condemned, especially since it did not account for harm to civilians, and spotlighted concerns about the rise of new types of cyber warfare.

The world is burning.

In September 2024, thousands of pagers exploded in Lebanon in public streets, grocery stores and people’s homes. The next day, walkie-talkies were blown up. At least 37 people died and 2,931 people were injured. The attacks were carried out by Israel to target Hezbollah supporters known to carry pagers and walkie-talkies for communication and planning military operations.

Hezbollah, a Shia militant group and movement in Lebanon, against whom Israel has a long-standing armed conflict, has been using old-fashioned pagers and walkie-talkies to avoid interception and hacking by Israeli forces. Israel managed to embed explosives in the pagers, which then exploded in Lebanon and Syria. The dystopian attack was widely condemned, especially since it did not account for harm to civilians, and spotlighted concerns about the rise of new types of cyber warfare.

In the Russia-Ukraine theatre of conflict, Ukraine began using facial recognition to identify Russian targets as well as dead Russian soldiers. The technology was offered to Ukraine by Clearview AI, a facial recognition company, free of cost.

The detonation of pagers and walkie-talkies, drones that deceive and kill, and the use of facial recognition to fight wars sound like hellish episodes from the pages of science fiction books or sub-plots of action movies. This isn’t fiction to be consumed vicariously from a distance, but a reality that we live and breathe.

Wars Equipped With AI

Clearly, war is no longer confined to the traditional remits of land, air and sea. The weaponisation of information flows and cyberspace, and the use of artificial intelligence (AI) are changing how wars are being conceived and implemented. We are already seeing the rise of technology-driven surveillance, cyber hacking and implanting of spyware, most infamously Israeli-origin Pegasus, on phones.

The use of autonomous weapons, where critical functions of weapon systems are automated, throws up entirely new dimensions to conflict. According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, “Autonomous weapons can select (including search, detect, identify, track) and attack (use force against, neutralise, damage or destroy) targets without human intervention. After initial launch or activation by a human operator, it is the weapon system itself—using its sensors, computer programming (software) and weaponry—that takes on the targeting functions that would otherwise be controlled by humans.”

Rise in Drone Warfare

The war between Russia and Ukraine saw their armies use tanks, bombs, missiles and conventional artillery, but also the use of drones writes Dominika Kunertova in the journal of Contemporary Security Policy. “Russia and Ukraine have been using drones of all sorts from scouts collecting intelligence to lethal drone bomblets, one-way attack drones, loitering munition, and long-distance strike drones,”Kunertova writes. While these systems are not independently groundbreaking, the proliferation of low-cost drones shows the pace at which such technology is developing.

For some time, drones have been equipped with stealth technology wherein they can evade being detected by enemies. Swarm drones include a group of drones that collectively perform tasks such as surveillance or coordinate attacks. Swarm drones are able to communicate with each other and act in coordination. These too were seen in action in the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

Developments in CBRN Weapons

Swift-paced developments in chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) weapons (more commonly known as weapons of mass destruction) are also unfolding. Annually, governments across the world are spending billions of dollars to finesse and fine-tune these weapons.

Despite the destruction of chemical weapons stockpiles by member states of the Chemical Weapons Convention, the re-emergence of certain chemicals continues. Recent history is testimony to the use of toxic chemicals by states and non-state actors. A prime example is Syria, where chlorine gas was deployed by the Syrian government and sulphur mustard by terror group ISIL. Both Gaza and the Russia-Ukraine war are theatres where chemical weapons are being deployed with impunity with civilians suffering the worst of it.

he use of chemical weapons isn’t new by any means. The US sprayed millions of gallons of ‘Agent Orange’ in the 1960s and 1970s during its invasion of Vietnam, with lasting repercussions for health and environment. AI is the new worrying addition to chemical warfare. Combined with chemistry and biology, AI is being used to develop and deploy newer toxic chemicals.

Nuclear Weapons Proliferation

After the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, people hoped that its horror and aftermath would be enough to deter nations from using nuclear weapons. In fact, A grassroots movement of the survivors of those atomic bombings, the Hibakusha, was awarded the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize for “its efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons and for demonstrating through witness testimony that nuclear weapons must never be used again”.

But here we are in 2025, perched on the nuclear precipice with nuclear flashpoints between Iran and Israel, North and South Korea, India and Pakistan, to name a few. Consider how advances in AI are being used to finesse nuclear energy production and what this means for the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

Oklo Inc, a California-based company worth $3.33 billion in market capitalisation, started trading on the New York Stock Exchange in 2024. Its chairman is Sam Altman, the CEO of Open AI, the pathbreaking generative AI company. Why is Altman investing in nuclear energy? One reason is that the AI industry is eager to shed the ‘dirty’ label since it uses massive amounts of electricity to process data.

AI’s alliances with the nuclear industry, as documented by physicist MV Ramana in his recent book Nuclear is Not the Solution: The Folly of Atomic Power in the Age of Climate Change allow whitewashing or greenwashing of AI and its power requirements and present itself as a clean technology.

But there is another reason too, as Miles Pomper and Yanliang Pan suggest in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Advances in nuclear reactors, such as the micro-reactors being built by Oklo, clubbed with the application of AI increases the chances for proliferation of nuclear weapons. It could “increase the availability” of fissile materials such as weapons-grade uranium needed to build nuclear weapons in “less time, and lower detectability”.

Bioweapons

The use of bioweapons, not new by any means, presents an entire gamut of ethical and moral concerns. Biological weapons disseminate disease-causing organisms or toxins to harm or kill humans, animals or plants. They can be deadly and highly contagious. Diseases caused by such weapons may not be confined to national borders and could spread rapidly.

CRISPR, a gene editing technology allows the rewriting of DNA sequences in any cell and has positive applications such as cancer therapy and exploring how to remove genetic illnesses. But then, CRISPR could also be weaponised to enable easier and widespread manipulation of pathogens and make targeted populations resistant to vaccines and treatments.

At least three reasons exist for the current state of war. A giant military industrial complex where arms companies profit from wars through government contracts, a United Nations held hostage by the veto power of a narrow clique of countries, and the unchecked rise of technology for destructive purposes are taking conflict into deadly, uncharted waters.

Originally published in Outlook Magazine.

Enemy At The Gates: How Technologies Are Redefining Modern Warfare

A string of new technologies is promising to change the very character of war and is poised to take the nature of conflicts into uncharted waters

Outlook India

Fisherwomen in the mangrove forests of Sundarbans grapple with complex health issues and are very hindered by their lack of access to healthcare.

En Inde, le changement climatique affecte la santé des femmes - Regarder le documentaire complet | ARTE

<p>La crise climatique touche les femmes de façon disproportionnée, conclut le rapport du fonds des Nations unies pour la population publié en octobre. En Inde, dans les Sundarbans, le plus grand delta du monde, la sécheresse ralentit le débit du fleuve, et les courants de l’océan prennent le dessus…

ARTE

Reported with Lea Delfolie for France 24

It’s a Sunday morning, but Jyotirindra Narayan Lahiri is busy. In a corner room of his apartment in Hooghly district, the 50-year-old is poring over the first map of the Sundarbans prepared by Major James Rennel in 1778.

“This is the first authentic map of the Sundarbans based on a survey by the British. This map shows mangroves extending right up to Kolkata. So much has changed since then,” Lahiri says, his finger tracing the map. Straddling both India and Bangladesh, the Sundarbans, the site of the world’s largest mangroves, is known for its immense biodiversity and, of course, the Royal Bengal Tiger ( Panthera tigris ).

The bookcases lining the walls of his room are packed with hundreds of titles on every conceivable subject about the Sundarbans – flora, fauna, daily life, maps, atlases, and children’s books in English and Bengali. This is where he researches and plans issues of Sudhu Sundarban Charcha , a quarterly publication about the Sundarbans that he started after Cyclone Aila left a trail of devastation in the region in 2009.

“I made repeated trips to see the condition of the area. It was frightening,’’ he recalls. “Children were out of school, people had lost their homes, masses of men had migrated, and everything was left to the women to take care of. The people’s fate entirely depended on whether the river embankments would stay in place or collapse.”

Lahiri found media reports on the disaster sparse and superficial. “The media recycles stereotypes about the Sundarbans. Typically, you will find accounts of tiger attacks or rain. When it isn’t raining or flooded, the Sundarbans is rarely in the news,” he says. “Disaster, wildlife and tourism – that is the sum of what interests the media.”

PHOTO • Urvashi Sarkar

PHOTO • Urvashi Sarkar

Lahiri holds the first map of the Sundarbans (left) prepared by Major James Rennel in 1778. In his collection (right) are many books on the region

PHOTO • Urvashi Sarkar

PHOTO • Urvashi Sarkar

Lahiri has been collecting news (left) about the Sundarbans for many years. 'When it isn’t raining or flooded, the Sundarbans is rarely in the news,' he says. He holds up issues of Sudhu Sundarban Charcha (right), a magazine he founded in 2010 to counter this and provide local Indian and Bangladeshi perspectives on the region

He founded Sudhu Sundarban Charcha (loosely translated as ‘Just Sundarbans Discussions’) to comprehensively cover the region from both Indian and Bangladeshi perspectives. Since 2010, he has published 49 issues of the magazine and the 50th issue is slated to be published in November 2023. “Past issues have focused on everything, from how paan is grown, to maps of the Sundarbans, the lives of girl children, profiles of individual villages, piracy and rainfall,” he says. One issue even discussed how media covers the Sundarbans, featuring perspectives from journalists in West Bengal and Bangladesh.

The magazine’s last issue published in April 2023 – its 49th – is dedicated to mangroves and tigers. “Sundarbans are possibly the only mangroves in the world where tigers live. Therefore, we planned an issue around this.” he says. Planning has also begun on the 50th issue, which will focus on the work of a retired university professor who has extensively researched how climate change and rising sea levels impact the Sundarbans.

“Our readers are usually students and university researchers seeking specific data or information, and individuals genuinely interested in the region. We even have 80-year-old patrons who read our issues line by line,” says Lahiri.

Approximately 1,000 copies of the magazine are printed each quarter. “We have 520-530 regular subscribers, mostly in West Bengal. The magazine is couriered to them. Some 50 copies go to Bangladesh – we do not directly courier these copies as that becomes too expensive,” Lahiri explains. Instead, Bangladeshi booksellers purchase copies from Kolkata’s popular book market in College Street and carry them back to their country. “We also publish Bangladeshi writers and photographers,” he says.

PHOTO • Urvashi Sarkar

PHOTO • Urvashi Sarkar

Left: An issue of Sudhu Sundarban Charcha that focuses on women in the Sundarbans. Right: Forty nine issues have been published so far

PHOTO • Urvashi Sarkar

Jyotirindra Narayan Lahiri with his wife Srijani Sadhukhan. She along with their two children, Ritaja and Archisman help in running the magazine

Bringing out the magazine is a costly exercise as every edition is typeset before being printed in black and white on glossy paper. “Then, there are ink, paper, and transport costs. However, our editorial costs are not high because we do everything ourselves,” says Lahiri, who is assisted by his wife Srijani Sadhukhan , 48, daughter Ritaja, 22, and son Archisman, 15. The editorial team consists of around 15-16 members who pitch in with their time and effort free of cost. “We do not have the means to employ people. Those who contribute their time and labour do so because they care about the issues we raise in the magazine,” he says.

A copy of the magazine is priced at Rs. 150. “If our own cost is 80 rupees, we must sell [each copy] at 150 rupees because we need to straightaway give [news] stand owners a 35 per cent commission,” says Lahiri, explaining the economics of publishing.

Nearly every day, Lahiri and his family monitor six Bengali and three English newspapers for news on the region. Since he is himself a recognised voice in the area, news – of tiger attacks, for example – often reaches him directly. Lahiri also collects letters written by readers to the editors of newspapers. “The readers may not be rich or powerful, but they know their subject and ask relevant questions,” he says.

The magazine is not his only responsibility. Every day, he travels 180 km to the adjoining Purba Bardhaman district to teach Geography to Classes V-XII students in a government school. “I leave home at 7 a.m. and return only at 8 p.m. The printing press is in Bardhaman city, so if there is work to be done there, I stop by the press and return home late evening,” says Lahiri who has been teaching since the last 26 years. “Teaching is my passion, just like the magazine,” he says.

Published in the People's Archive of Rural India.

Link to original article:

Beyond disaster and wildlife in the Sundarbans

Jyotirindra Narayan Lahiri’s quarterly publication ‘Sudhu Sundarban Charcha’ talks about the world’s largest mangroves in ways that defy mainstream media’s stereotypes around this region #RuralIndiaOnline

Urvashi SarkarPeople's Archive of Rural India

Photographers Azimul Hasson and Omal Khair useInstagram to show  everyday life in Bangladesh's Rohingya refugee camps

A devastating fire ripped through Balukhali refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh on a hot summer day in March 2023. The fire which was attributed to a ‘planned act of sabotage’ left nearly 15,000 Rohingya refugees homeless and set ablaze 2,800 shelters including Azimul Hasson’s house which he shared with his parents, two brothers and a sister. The 21-year-old watched helplessly as the deadly fire consumed his home and those of his friends and relatives. “The fire was big and had set ablaze many shelters. People were crying and running,” said Azimul, remembering the day. He wanted to act but didn’t know what to do.

Azimul then did what he knew best. He took out his phone and started taking photos and a video of the billowing smoke and destroyed shelters which he posted on his Instagram account where he has 3,000 plus followers. “I took some photos, not many, because I was terrified,” he added. Azimul and his family later shifted to another site where they constructed a fresh shelter made with bamboo, thatched material, tarpaulin and tin sheets.

Omal Khair, a resident of the same camp, and a budding photographer like Azimul, took photos of the fire’s aftermath. Her photos, posted on Instagram where she too has over 3,000 followers, revealed destroyed structures and people labouring to reconstruct their shelters. Her own house was mercifully spared from the fire.

Hasson, 21, and Khair, 20, are Rohingyas refugees who along with their families fled mass killings and persecution of the Rohingya community in Myanmar in August 2017, crossing over to neighbouring Bangladesh where they now live. Hemmed in by the barbed wire fences of the refugee camp where they share space with an estimated 600,000 plus refugees in one of the world’s largest refugee camps, Hasson and Khair’s window to the world beyond is through Instagram and their way of telling the world that they exist, through photographs of everyday life in the camps.

When I speak to Hasson on a video call, his eyes show fatigue and the longing to escape his confines. “I feel as if we are trapped in a cage. I want to go back and live in harmony,” he says. True to his words, Azimul’s photos are often of barbed wire which runs around the camp, and which Azimul hopes to escape one day.
Azimul sends me a recently taken photo where dozens of empty cans, buckets and aluminium pots are lined up against each other. “We have a shortage of water in the camp and therefore we must constantly store water,” he explains and adds, “I want the world to see what I see through my eyes.”

When I speak to Omal, it is late at night and she looks tired after studying through the day. Omal was studying in Class 10 when she was forced to drop out and flee Myanmar. In the absence of formal schooling, Omal tutors herself in maths, English and social sciences by studying online. Omal too wants to return. “I miss my home so much”, she says, but admits that “Rakhine state is still not safe for us.”

Omal’s images are most often of smiling and hopeful faces of girl children with captions expressing their desires and aspirations such as becoming a doctor and her concern about the lack of formal education in the camps. In a striking photo, a young Rohingya woman is seen sitting on the ruins of her house destroyed by a fire which broke out in March 2021 while her toddler rests its head on her lap, holding on to a UNICEF bag. Omal, Azimul and Dil Kayas - another Rohingya refugee photographer - who could not be reached for the story were introduced to photography in 2018 through a training programme conducted in the refugee camps by Fortify Rights, a human rights organisation which works with Rohingya refugees and Doha Debates, a platform that hosts debates on current affairs.

Matthew Smith, Chief Executive Officer of Fortify Rights said the trio had emerged as the most exceptional participants during the initial training. “They’ve since amassed online followers, published their first book, and had a major art opening in Doha. Their work is extraordinary and powerful, and also a testament to the fact that Rohingyas are more than genocide survivors. In this case, they’re photographers, artists, authors, and more,” Smith said in an email.

Omal and Azimul capture the hardships of refugees through their images, but the focus is also on everyday life - whether children laughing with abandon, the sobriety of a funeral procession, fires erupting in the camps, refugees performing odd jobs, or mourning crowds observing Rohinga genocide remembrance day. They also shoot Rohingya cuisine and rituals like applying thanaka, a paste made from tree bark, and even occasionally caption their photos in Burmese script.

While the two are not paid for the content they post on Instagram, they receive requests for photos through which they earn some money. “Sometimes journalists contact me for stories for which they want photos. I take photos of life in the camps, the suffering of my people, the shortage of water and the lack of education,” Azimul says.

Both use smartphones rather than cameras to shoot images to avoid attracting attention from security personnel. Azimul uses an iPhone which he purchased with his earnings while Omal uses Samsung Galaxy A51 given to her by Fortify Rights. Despite owning a good quality phone Azimul rues the lack of a camera.

“Sometimes, my photos captured with a phone are not of good quality. A camera would have been convenient but unfortunately as I’m surviving in a cage and trapped, using a camera would bring trouble for me. But I hope I can do it one day,” he says. The duo’s photographs have been compiled and published in a book titled ‘A Chance to Breathe’, published by Fortify Rights and Doha Debates. Even as their work was being exhibited in Doha and Bangkok, with the help of Fortify Rights and Doha Debates, none of the photographers could physically attend the exhibitions because of restrictions on their movements as refugees.

Their journey as young and rising photographers with a growing social media following hasn’t been smooth. Omal explains that it was especially difficult when she started photography as a 16 year old by participating in the media training organised by Fortify Rights and Doha Debates.

In the early days of her photography, Omal encountered both online and offline harassment. She prefers not to dwell on specific instances of harassment but says she is at the receiving end of comments as a hijab wearing woman working outside her home. “Traditionally, Rohingya girls who reached adulthood were discouraged from venturing out alone to work. Those who did, faced criticism, and were accused of not adhering to Islamic rules, despite Islam allowing females to study and work while wearing a hijab.”

Omal says she took time to explain her purpose to her critics: documenting the suffering and dire conditions faced by Rohingya refugees. “Over time, more people understood the importance of my work and now I receive encouragement and appreciation,” she says. Omal lives with her mother and two siblings in a cramped house in the camp. “My family members appreciate my work and support me but it is challenging to live in this crowded and unsafe camp,” she says.

Both Omal and Azimul want to become professional journalists and spread the message about injustice to their community and hope to receive scholarships which would allow them to study and travel. Despite a modest following on Instagram, the two refuse to feel discouraged while desiring more followers.Omal wishes for “millions of followers” while Azimul is content that his followers like both him and his work and wants “more and more” in future.

Originally published in Boomlive

Link to article: https://www.boomlive.in/decode/the-rohingya-refugees-who-show-life-in-bangladesh-through-instagram-23333

India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi (R) with US President Joe Biden (C) as India's Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar looks on at the G20 leaders' summit in Bali on 15 November 2022 (AFP)

"My reputation is not decided by a newspaper in New York,” India’s foreign minister, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, declared in 2019, referring to foreign press criticism about the revoking of article 370 which nullified Kashmir’s autonomous status.

Jaishankar has repeatedly accused the US media of being biased and ideological on Kashmir and defended the move as India’s internal business. Jaishankar belongs to the right-wing Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP), which forms the national government headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

This week, Modi is in Washington for a historic state visit.

While his government publicly and robustly rebuffs American criticism of its domestic matters, behind the scenes it has been lobbying hard through the Indian embassy in Washington to present its version of events to US policy-makers.

In May, the US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), a government body, recommended for the fourth time that India be designated by the US State Department as a "country of particular concern", citing systematic violations of the right to freedom of religion. The Indian government rejected the USCIRF charges as motivated and biased.

The BJP’s blunt responses to international criticism on Kashmir and India’s increasingly problematic human rights record have resonated with large sections of the party's right-wing nationalist voter base.

But tough postures aside, how India is perceived among US policymakers and media matters greatly to the Modi government, much as it mattered to preceding Indian governments. This is because the US has emerged as one of India’s most important bilateral partners, seen in steadily increasing trade ties and a burgeoning defence partnership.

The Indian diaspora in the US is 4.9 million strong and influential in American politics. Therefore, when US congresspersons wade into domestic Indian issues, it is with an eye on Indian diaspora voters.

Behind the scenes

Shortly after the August 2019 abrogation of Article 370, Democrats Rashida Tlaib and Pramila Jayapal sponsored resolutions 724 and 745 denouncing human rights violations in Kashmir.

Reacting to the resolutions, a former Indian ambassador to the US, Harsh Vardhan Shringla, wrote a letter in December of that year to the US House Foreign Affairs Committee (HFAC).

In it, Shringla argued that life in Kashmir had returned to normalcy. However, Kashmir at that time was in the middle of a lengthy internet blackout and a continuing security clampdown, with Kashmiri political leaders still under house arrest.

Documents filed under the US Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) show that India also hired several lobbying firms to represent its stance to US lawmakers. Foreign governments routinely utilise lobbying firms in the US to advocate their interests.

FARA laws require entities working in the US on behalf of foreign interests - such as the governments of foreign countries and foreign political parties - to disclose their work and register with the US government. In December 2019, the Indian embassy hired a lobbying firm to provide “strategic counsel, tactical planning and government relations assistance”.

According to FARA filings, several communications have been established between the lobbying firm with US congresspersons on the subject of Kashmir. For example, emails with the subject "Kashmir update" were sent to several Democrat congresspersons in January 2020.

Lobbying contracts

Later that year, Indian farmers began mass protests against a set of new farming laws, which they saw as a threat to their livelihoods. In this instance, too, US lawmakers took note and expressed support for the farmers.

Two lobbying firms working for the Indian embassy, sent emails to US lawmakers on the subject and shared background information on the protests.

The Modi government signed lobbying contracts worth over $4.41m between June 2019 and September 2022.

It was the period during which the Observer Research Foundation, a think tank created by Indian conglomerate Reliance Industries and which has close ties to the Ministry of External Affairs, established its Washington DC affiliate.

Dhruva Jaishankar, the son of India's foreign minister, was appointed as director of the initiative in September 2019 while ORF America was incorporated in Washington, DC, in 2020.

The US chapter of the Overseas Friends of BJP, the foreign arm of the BJP, registered as a foreign agent in August 2020.

Strained US ties

This is not the only instance when the Indian government has felt compelled to accelerate its lobbying efforts. India’s ambition of being a nuclear weapons power in the 1990s majorly strained ties with the US, which imposed sanctions on India (and Pakistan) for conducting nuclear weapons tests in 1998.

In 1996, lobbying constituted 10.51 percent of the total budget of the Indian embassy in Washington, according to a statement in the Indian parliament. Between 1994 and 1999, the Indian embassy spent approximately $3.56m in lobbying fees and expenses with a range of lobbying firms, according to FARA records.

In 2001, the US government lifted sanctions on India and in 2005 the two countries signed a 10-year defence partnership agreement, widely regarded as a turning point.

Under Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, India lobbied hard for the US-India Civil Nuclear Agreement 2008, which enabled India to import uranium and nuclear technology for its reactors despite not being a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and resulted in major contracts for US energy companies.

Alongside lobbying firms, the Indian diaspora in the US played a major role in enabling the agreement, contributing with dollars and clout.

Lack of transparency

FARA documents show the Singh government spent approximately $4.93m between 2006 and 2010 in contracts with lobbying firms. The government further spent approximately $2.2m from 2010 to April 2012 on lobbying firms, according to Indian parliament data.

Doubtless, India’s lobbying expenditures are a tiny drop in the vast lobbying ocean of the United States. The Open Secrets database points out that countries such as China, Japan, South Korea, Russia and Saudi Arabia spend millions of dollars annually lobbying the US government and decision-makers such as the media, universities and think tanks.

However, the lack of transparency under the Modi government is stark. So far, it has not disclosed any information on lobbying abroad, whether in parliament or under the Right to Information Act.

In February 2019, the Caravan magazine reported the existence of an obscure entity called the "Democratic Party of India", which was operated by a lobbying firm hired by the Indian embassy. No questions about this were raised in India's parliament.

The Indian government wants citizens to believe that it is capable of retaliating against western criticism and will not brook interference in the country’s internal affairs. But the behind-the-scenes lobbying, especially on Kashmir, suggests a starkly different reality.

Published by The Middle East Eye

Link to original article: https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/india-us-kashmir-tough-talk-lobbying-support

The fisherwomen of Sundarbans wandering into dangerous territory

“How do I describe my fear? My heart races in terror. My thoughts are always on when I will escape back to open spaces,” says 41-year-old crab hunter and fisherwoman Parul Haldar, about the cold fear she feels during the days that she searches for crabs to catch in the dense mangrove forests of the Sundarbans. During the crab-hunting season, she rows a boat up and down the rivulets and creeks through the mangrove forest, always in a state of high alert for lurking tigers.

Now directing her wooden boat down the Garal river, Parul, a resident of Luxbagan village, squints in the direction of the criss-cross net fence beyond which lies the Marichjhapi forest. It was in this forest, near her village in the Gosaba block of the South 24 Parganas district, that Parul’s husband, Ishar Ronojit Haldar, was killed by a tiger seven years ago.

She rests the oars on the edges of the boat in which she and her mother Lokhi Mondal, 56, are out on a scorching summer day. Like her daughter, Lokhi is a fisherwoman too.

Parul was only 13 years old when she married Ishar. Her marital family was poor, but they had never gone into the forest to fish or catch crabs. “I convinced him to come and brought him to the jungle,” she recalls. “Seventeen years later, he died in the jungle.”

Parul lapses into silence at the memory. Ishar was 45 when he died, leaving Parul to raise their four daughters.

Parul and Lokhi pull the heavy oars again, sweating. The women steer the boat a safe distance away from the mangrove forest, now closed for fishing. Fishing activities in the mangrove forest are closed for three months, from April to June, to allow regeneration of fish. When the fishing season is paused, Parul usually sells fish from her pond for a living.

PHOTO • URVASHI SARKAR

PHOTO • URVASHI SARKAR

Left: Parul Haldar recalls the death of her husband, Ishar Haldar. Right: A picture of Ishar Ronojit Haldar who was killed by a tiger in 2016

PHOTO • URVASHI SARKAR

PHOTO • URVASHI SARKAR

Left: A cross netted fence, beyond which lie the Marichjhapi forests in South 24 Parganas district. Right: Parul (background) learned fishing from her mother and Lokhi (yellow sari foreground) learned it from her father

“Many accidents are happening,” Parul says, referring to attacks by the Bengal tigers in the Sundarbans, the only mangrove forest in the world inhabited by tigers. “Too many people are entering the forest and accidents are increasing. This is another reason why forest authorities are not allowing us to enter the forest.”

Tiger-related deaths are not uncommon in the Sundarbans, especially during the fishing season.  The government reported only 12 deaths in the Sundarbans Tiger Reserve Between 2018 and January 2023, but actual numbers may be higher, with local residents reporting more instances of attacks.

According to the government’s Status of Tigers Report, the Sundarbans was home to 100 tigers in 2022 , compared to 88 in 2018.

*****

Parul has been fishing since she was 23 years old, having learnt how to fish from her mother.

Lokhi started fishing when she was only seven years old, accompanying her father to the forest. Her husband Santosh Mondal, 64 fought off a tiger in 2016 and managed to return home alive.

“He had a knife in his hand and fought the tiger. But after that incident, his courage broke, and he refused to go to the forest any more,” says Lokhi. She, however, did not stop. Once her husband stopped going, she began to make the journey into the forest with Parul and her son-in-law, Ishar, who later died.

“I don’t have the courage to go to the jungle with anyone else. Nor do I allow Parul to go alone. As long as I am alive, I will accompany her,” she says. “Only your own blood can protect you in the jungle.”

PHOTO • URVASHI SARKAR

As the number of crabs decrease, Parul and Lokhi have to venture deeper into the mangrove forests to find them

PHOTO • URVASHI SARKAR

Parul and Lokhi rowing across the River Garal

The two women row in tandem, without needing to converse. Once the crab hunting season starts, they will need to obtain passes from the forest department and rent a boat to take to the forest.

Parul pays Rs. 50 per day in rent. Usually, they are joined by a third woman. The three women must stay in the forest for at least 10 days. “We sleep and eat in the boat and cook our meals on it. We carry rice and dal, drinking water in drums and a small stove. We do not leave the boat under any circumstances, not even to go to the toilet,” Parul says. The rising incidence of tiger attacks, she says, are the main reason.

“Tigers now even climb on to the boats and take human beings away. My own husband was attacked in a boat.”

For the ten days that they are out fishing, the women live on the boats even in  the rain. “The crabs are in one corner of the boat, the humans in another, and the cooking in a third corner,” Lokhi adds.

PHOTO • URVASHI SARKAR

"We do not leave the boat under any circumstances, not even to go to the toilet,” says Parul

PHOTO • URVASHI SARKAR

Lokhi Mondal demonstrating how to unfurl fishing nets to catch crabs

Like their male counterparts who frequent the jungles, women are also vulnerable to attacks by tigers while out fishing. However, there are no estimates of how many women have been killed in the Sundarbans, considered a hotspot for man-animal conflict.

“Most of the recorded deaths are of men. Women too are attacked by tigers but the data hasn’t been collected. Women go to the forests, of course, but in fewer numbers compared to men,” says Pradeep Chatterjee, convenor of the National Platform For Small-Scale Fish Workers. Proximity to the forest is an important factor. Women whose villages are located a good distance away from the forest tend not to go. They also undertake the journey only when enough other women are making the trip too.

In Parul and Lokhi’s village of Luxbagan, whose population was 4,504 according to the Census 2011 including  approximately 48 percent women, nearly every household has women who go to the Marichjhapi forest, just 5 km from the village.

The good prices that crabs fetch are also a major draw for this high-risk work. “Selling fish doesn’t earn me much. Crabs fetch the main income. I can earn anything between Rs. 300-500 daily when I go to the forest,” Parul says. The bigger crabs fetch Rs. 400-600 a kg while the smaller ones go for Rs. 60-80 per kg. The combined catch of three women on a trip can be anything between 20-40 kg.

*****

Apart from the risk posed by tigers, the other big challenge faced by crab-catchers in the Sunderbans is the dwindling catch. “More people are coming to the jungle to catch crabs. Earlier crabs would be in plenty, now we have to work harder to find them,” says Parul.

As the number of crabs shrink, fisherwomen are forced to go deeper into the forests where the risk of being attacked by a tiger increases.

Chatterjee said the fisher-people of the region have begun to venture deep into the mangrove forests to find an adequate quantity of fish or crabs and there they are coming into confrontations with tigers. “Forest authorities only focus on tiger conservation. But if the fish don’t survive, tigers won’t survive either,” Chatterjee says. “Human-wildlife conflict can reduce if the fish in the rivers increases.”

After returning from the river, Parul busies herself in making lunch. She cooks  fish that she has caught from her pond, boils the rice and stirs sugar into a mango chutney.

She doesn’t like eating crabs, she says. Her mother Lokhi joins the conversation. “Neither me nor my daughter eat crabs,” she says. Asked why, she doesn’t provide details, but mentions “accidents”, a reference to her son-in-law Ishar’s death.

PHOTO • URVASHI SARKAR

PHOTO • URVASHI SARKAR

Parul at home in her village Luxbagan, South 24 Parganas. None of her daughters work in the forest

None of Parul’s four daughters, Pushpita, Paromita, Papiya, and Papri, works in the forest. Pushpita and Papiya work at people’s houses in other districts of West Bengal while Paromita works for a private company in Bengaluru. The youngest, Papri, 13, stays in a hostel near Luxbagan but is sickly. “Papri had typhoid and malaria, so I had to spend Rs. 13,000 on her treatment. I also pay for her hostel fees of Rs. 2,000 each month,” Parul says.

Parul herself is unwell. She has chest pains and cannot go fishing or crab hunting this year. She now lives with her daughter Paromita Mistry, in Bengaluru.

“A doctor in Kolkata asked me to do MRI scans that cost Rs. 40,000. I do not have so much money,” she says. She decided to travel to the southern city and live with her  daughter and son-in-law, who both work for private companies. Parul also consulted a doctor in Bengaluru, who prescribed rest and medicines for six months.

“I think the pains in my chest started due to the fear I constantly feel, especially when I go to the forest. My husband was killed by a tiger, and my father too was attacked. That is what caused the chest pains,” she says.

India has plans for adding several nuclear power plants but has not laid out how any of them will be insured [File: Adnan Abidi/Reuters]

India has barely half the insurance amount it needs in the event of a nuclear disaster, raising concerns among experts about the lack of oversight on the nuclear sector.

The India Nuclear Insurance Pool (INIP) has collected around 7 billion to 8 billion rupees ($84.5m to $96.6m) of the 15 billion rupees ($182.9m) required under the Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Act, 2010 (CLND), indicating a critical shortfall in funds that will be needed to compensate victims and pay for cleanup in case of a nuclear disaster.

The funds disclosure was made at the nuclear insurance session of the India Nuclear Business Platform in December where the speakers included representatives of Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited (NPCIL), which operates the country’s nuclear reactors, and leading insurance companies including New India Assurance and GIC Re.

The INIP was set up in 2015 under the CLND legislation. Under that law, operators and suppliers of nuclear power plants are liable in case of an accident, and both must obtain insurance through the INIP.

At the time, India’s Department of Atomic Energy in its frequently asked questions (FAQs) on the CLND Act stated that GIC Re and four other public sector insurers would collectively contribute half of the total required amount of 15 billion rupees ($182.9m), with the government filling in the balance for the first few years “till the insurance companies are able to maintain it on their own”.

“The fact that the nuclear insurance pool has not even met what is required by law is concerning — it shows that the Parliament is not overseeing how the nuclear sector is operating,” said MV Ramana, professor at the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, University of British Columbia and author of The Power of Promise: Examining Nuclear Energy in India. “My greater concern is the approach of NPCIL and other parties involved, which seem to think of liability requirements as a box to check off, rather than something they need to prudently plan for.”

“They seem to be victims of the same ‘safety myth’ that was at the root of the inadequate preparations for nuclear accidents revealed in the aftermath of the multiple reactor accidents at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan [in March 2011],” Ramana said.

India currently has 22 reactors, all of which are operated by the NPCIL. The INIP provides insurance to all of them. Apart from this, it has 10 reactors that are at various stages of construction (one of which has been connected to the grid) and New Delhi has sanctioned another 10 — all of which are expected to start functioning by 2031. But how these plants will be insured is unknown.

Nuclear pools

Nuclear pools were first set up in the 1950s in the United States by insurance companies to deal with potential accidents at civilian nuclear reactors. A number of insurers come together to jointly underwrite civil nuclear risks since a nuclear accident has catastrophic potential with enormous costs – beyond the capacity of individual risk insurers to take on.

The INIP, which is made up of India’s national re-insurance company GIC Re in association with 11 domestic non-life insurance companies, is managed GIC Re. Of the amount raised, public sector insurance companies have so far contributed 86 percent, with private insurance companies bringing in the rest. GIC Re’s contribution is the largest, with 6 billion rupees ($73m).

“The insurance companies might have paid their share if the reinsurance market had supported them,” said Shreyas Jayasimha, co-founder of Banglaore-based Aarna Law. “Just as individuals seek insurance for their risks, insurance companies too require to cover their risks.”

Inadequate cover

There is also concern about whether the insurance cover of 15 billion rupees ($182.9m) is enough to insure all of NPCIL’s 22 reactors annually.

“If there is a nuclear incident where the annual limit of 15 billion rupees of the policy issued under INIP is partially or completely utilised, the other nuclear installations would be without full or any cover for that year,” said Pallavi Bedi, partner at Phoenix Legal and a specialist in energy projects.

The Indian nuclear pool’s genesis can be traced to a 2008 agreement between India and the US for civilian nuclear cooperation. Under the agreement, India was allowed to start importing nuclear technology and materials and enabled the entry of private firms into the Indian civilian nuclear market.

But India lacked a regime that assigned legal liability in the event of a nuclear accident. The CLND Act 2010 was brought in to resolve that, amidst much debate and wrangling in the Indian Parliament. The question of whether suppliers should be held liable emerged as a serious point of contention, with critics in India accusing the government of providing a shield to US firms in an effort to get them on board as suppliers, at the expense of Indian citizens.

Fukushima, Chernobyl and Bhopal

While the insurance industry refers to nuclear incidents as the “rarest of rare”, the last major nuclear disasters were in 1986, when there was a leak at a plant in Chernobyl in Ukraine when it was still a part of the Soviet Union, and in 2011, when a major earthquake and a tsunami caused a nuclear accident in Fukushima in Japan.

The explosion and fire at the Chernobyl nuclear reactor released radioactive material into the atmosphere, affecting thousands and having ramifications across Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and several European countries. The economic costs of the accident ranged anywhere between $235bn and $700bn, including compensation worth hundreds of billions of dollars, not to mention far-reaching costs to the environment and health.

The costs of Japan’s Fukushima disaster have been estimated at more than $200bn, of which compensation costs included $72bn. The Fukushima disaster displaced thousands, with cleanup activities continuing for a decade.

Closer to home, India’s variant of an industrial disaster – the 1984 Bhopal gas leak – killed more than 15,000 and caused serious health problems in about half a million people when a pesticide plant leaked toxic methyl isocyanate gas into the atmosphere, subjecting generations of people to adverse health effects such as cancer, congenital malfunctions, and lung and heart diseases.

Union Carbide Corporation, a US company that built the damage-causing Bhopal plant, paid a paltry $470m in compensation to victims and their families. In the US, Union Carbide was altogether cleared of any direct liability towards victims.

Liability regimes

As far as the nuclear industry is concerned, liability is usually chanelled towards operators of power plants while suppliers remain shielded. This practice began in the 1950s in the US, where in order to encourage private sector participation in the nuclear industry, operators are held almost wholly liable. Many other countries followed suit, with the US also influencing the shaping of the international Convention on Supplementary Compensation for Nuclear Damage (CSC). Even when operators are held liable, the economic liability is capped at a small figure at a fraction of actual costs.

“This cap varies by country, but is usually set below $1 billion — a number that is almost a hundred times smaller than the financial impact of a severe nuclear accident like Fukushima” the physicists MV Ramana and Suvrat Raju wrote in the New York Times.

India’s liability laws too fall in line with the global trend, barring Section 17 b of the CLND Act, 2010, which allows the operator the right of recourse in case the accident is found to be “the consequence of an act of supplier”, which includes the supply of defective or sub-standard equipment or material.

The operator of nuclear installations in India is the government-run NPCIL. Suppliers – which may not necessarily be foreign companies – provide manufacturing, supplies, building and design services

According to insurance companies, the reason for including such a clause is because of “bad experiences” in the aftermath of the Bhopal gas tragedy.

Liability beyond 15 billion rupees ($182.9m)

An updated version of FAQs on the nuclear liability act released by the Department of Atomic Energy in 2020 continues to stress the operator as the primary bearer of liability up to 15 billion rupees ($182.9m). In case compensation claims exceed this limit, the government is expected to step in.

“In case liability exceeds 15 billion ($182.9m), the government will have to pay the rest. The government owns and operates the country’s nuclear power plants for the people and is therefore responsible to them,” said Prabir Purkayastha of the Delhi Science Forum, who was an expert witness for the Parliamentary Standing Committee for the Nuclear Safety Regulatory Authority Bill, 2011.

The Indian government has also limited the maximum liability, including its own, in the event of a nuclear incident, to the rupee equivalent of 300 million Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) or over 33 billion rupees ($374m).

SDRs are a global reserve asset created by the International Monetary Fund. The SDR is based on a basket of five major currencies, and holders – including IMF member countries, among others – can exchange SDRs for currency when needed.

If liability exceeds 300 million SDRs in the event of a nuclear mishap, the government expects to meet balance claims by “access(ing) international funds under the CSC.”  India joined the Convention on Supplementary Compensation for Nuclear Damage (CSC) in 2016.

But how claims would play out at the CSC is unclear.

More recently, India’s Supreme Court in a decision that dismissed the federal government’s effort to seek additional compensation from Union Carbide in the Bhopal gas disaster said that it was India’s “responsibility” to “make good the deficiency [in compensation] and to take out the relevant insurance policy. Surprisingly we are informed that no such insurance policy was taken out. This is gross negligence.”

According to Jayasimha, the wording of the Supreme Court judgement is significant for the nuclear industry and all hazardous waste industries. “The court has indicated that there is a duty on the part of the state to ensure people are adequately insured.”

For now, it’s unclear if the judgement will be used to push for better insurance provisions.

Questions to NPCIL, the Department of Atomic Energy, New India Assurance and GIC Re about the failure of the INIP to accumulate the corpus of 15 billion rupees ($182.9m) and how the government plans to insure forthcoming nuclear reactors did not receive a response.

Managing director of the Nuclear Business Platform, Zaf Coelho, said via email: “In case of any nuclear disaster, the claim amount exceeding the accumulated corpus will be shared by the INIP consortium partners on a pro-rata basis based on their committed share in the pool.”

Originally published in Al Jazeera.

Read the full article here: https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2023/4/21/does-india-have-enough-insurance-coverage-for-a-nuclear-disaster

Wellwishers greet Narendra Modi as he arrives at the Indian embassy in Washington in September 2014.

THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY OF INDIA, an entity whose origins remain obscure, was used to influence US lawmakers’ views on Kashmir following the abrogation of Article 370 of the Indian constitution, documents show. The Democratic Party of India was represented by Cornerstone Government Affairs, a Washington DC-based consulting firm. Public records in the United States filed under the Foreign Agents Registration Act—which imposes public disclosure obligations on persons representing foreign interests—show that the Democratic Party of India was registered with the same address as the Indian embassy: 2107 Massachusetts Avenue. The records also show contracts between the embassy and Cornerstone for “strategic counsel, tactical planning and government relations assistance on policy matters before the U.S. Government, the U.S. Congress, and select state governments, as well as academic institutions and think-tanks.”

In August 2019, the Narendra Modi government in New Delhi announced an end to Article 370, stripping Kashmir of its constitutionally mandated limited autonomy. The move sparked international condemnation and searing reports in major US newspapers, including the Washington Post and the New York Times. By mid-December, prominent Democrats in the US Congress had sponsored two resolutions aimed at the Modi government, both calling on it to respect human rights and one expressing support for Kashmiri self-determination

In a letter dated 10 December 2019, Harsh Vardhan Shringla, who was then the Indian ambassador to the United States—and later served as India’s foreign secretary—wrote to two senior members of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the US House of Representatives. Shringla repeated the Modi government’s line that Article 370 had been abrogated in the interests of “good governance, economic opportunities and socio-economic justice” and that the situation in Kashmir “has returned to normalcy”—even as the security clampdown, internet blackout and a ban on foreign journalists in the valley continued...

Published by Caravan Magazine, 10 February 2023.

Read the full article: https://caravanmagazine.in/politics/s-jaishankar-indian-embassy-covert-us-lobbying-article-370-kashmir

Representational use only.Image Courtesy: Wikimedia Commons

Originally published by Newsclick. 12 January 2023

A little over ten years after an earthquake and tsunami caused the Fukushima nuclear meltdown, Japan has chosen to embrace atomic energy—again. Before the 2011 disaster, nuclear accounted for around 30% of the power generated in Japan. Subsequently, the country’s roughly fifty reactors were shut for maintenance, which meant Japan was deriving no electricity from nuclear energy.

Currently, nuclear generates 6.4% of power in Japan. But last December, Prime Minister Kishida Fumio declared his intent to raise nuclear’s shares to 20 or 22% by 2030.

What caused this dramatic shift?

“Energy security has been a long-standing preoccupation in Japan, where electricity generation is overwhelmingly dependent on imported fossil fuels. Natural gas has become an increasingly important part of the mix, as the country sought to shut down polluting coal-fired plants and mothballed much of its nuclear power industry after the 2011 meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi station,” the NYT reported last April.

Japan, one of the largest importers of liquefied natural gas (LNG), relies extensively on Russia for supplies. With the war in Ukraine—one of the biggest LNG suppliers—upsetting global energy calculations, Japan was not left unscathed. Energy sanctions on Russia following its invasion of Ukraine have strained supplies and sent costs spiralling. As energy supplies were hit worldwide, the International Energy Agency described the situation as a “truly global energy crisis”.

The war in Ukraine is, of course, not the lone factor. The climate change crisis has long required countries to clean up their act. With fossil fuels frowned upon, alternative renewable energy sources such as solar, wind, hydro and biomass are increasingly relied on. Nuclear energy, too, is being explored because of the perception it is clean and climate-friendly, primarily because of its supposed supposedly low carbon footprint.

However, the fortunes of the nuclear industry plummeted after the 2011 Fukushima disaster as public faith in the safety of nuclear energy diminished. Countries began shuttering nuclear reactors and abandoned plans for new nuclear power plants. Prominent names like United States-based Westinghouse, France’s Areva and Germany’s Siemens entered choppy waters, and the nuclear industry took a significant beating.

Westinghouse, Areva and Siemens

In 2017, Westinghouse Electric Company, a subsidiary of Japan’s Toshiba, filed for bankruptcy in the United States. Massive cost escalations and time overruns at its Georgia and South Carolina projects put it on this path. Toshiba and Westinghouse had overestimated demand for nuclear power plants, and a string of confounding technical difficulties at their AP-1000 reactors exacerbated their time and cost overruns. Westinghouse is supposed to supply India with six AP-1000 nuclear reactors under the 2008 India-United States Civil Nuclear Agreement. It should set anyone thinking why India is keen on reactors which flunked in the United States.

Not just Westinghouse, Areva’s financial debacle also added to the woes of nuclear power. In 2014, Areva posted a net loss of €4.8 billion after several preceding years of losses and technical, regulatory and legal problems. But the French government allowed Areva’s bailout in which it owned 90% of shares. The bailout occurred through French electricity utility EDF taking a majority stake in the company for €2.5 billion, and French taxpayers bore this cost. The French government owns about 84% of EDF. Nuclear energy has long been a symbol of French national pride though questions about sustainability and economics refuse to go away. Areva is a source of many jobs, which prompted France not to let the company sink.

France relies on nuclear power for a significant chunk of its electricity. However, that is on the decline. Nuclear energy was 69% of total electricity consumption in 2021, down from 76.4% in 2000.

All is not well with EDF, now France’s most prominent nuclear electric major. It is in debt for approximately $45 billion and has had recurring problems at its power plants, including outages. India is in talks with EDF to supply European Pressurised Reactors (EPRs), which have a very public troubling worldwide record of massive cost overruns and delays.

Germany’s Siemens, a prominent nuclear power name, also withdrew from the nuclear industry as the country decided to close its nuclear power plants after Fukushima.

When war struck Ukraine, the nuclear industry was staggering, its fortunes sinking. With heavy sanctions on Russian oil and gas exports, one outcome was an uptick in the preference for nuclear power. Some countries have started extending the life of existing reactors and planning new ones. This is despite well-known and mounting concerns that nuclear energy is neither clean nor environment-friendly because of long-term nuclear waste, nor even entirely safe—as Fukushima, Chernobyl, and the Three Mile Island disasters have proved.

Nuclear energy advocates hope it will play a larger role in addressing power needs. But their hope is overstated. One glance at the numbers shows the underwhelming share of nuclear energy in global electricity production. According to the BP Statistical Review, non-hydro renewables– solar, wind and biomass; gas, and coal accounted for the most significant shares of electricity production in 2021, with nuclear and oil bringing up the bottom. Similarly, the World Nuclear Industry Status Report (WNISR) observed that the share of nuclear energy in gross global commercial electricity generation in 2021 was 9.8%—“the lowest value in four decades”.

Against this backdrop, Japan hopes nuclear power will account for 20-22% of the electricity supply in 2030. In 2020, the figure was less than 5%. Japan’s decision to reinstate nuclear energy is not likely to get a groundswell of support since people have not forgotten the Fukushima disaster, and its aftermath continues to unfold. In the public memory, doubts persist regarding the efficacy of contingency and evacuation plans to address potential accidents. People anticipate colossal traffic jams, a lack of escape routes, and getting stuck for days without access to food, water or toilets in case of a mishap.

Weak economic rationale

It is not just continued public concern about the safety of nuclear power. The economics just does not cut it. Take the cost of under-development reactors, whose timelines and budgets are spiralling upward. For example, the Flamanville-3, a 1650 MWe reactor being built in France, was initially contracted to Areva and is now taken over by the electric utility EDF. Originally scheduled to start in 2012, the reactor is plagued with delays and snowballing costs. Its total cost is pegged at 13.2 billion Euros, more than four times the original estimate, and is likely to start in 2024.

The Kakrapar project, where the 700 MWe, Unit 3 has been commissioned, is expected to cost Rs 19,220 crore, up from Rs 11,460 crore. Two upcoming reactors at Rawatbhata, Rajasthan, are expected to cost Rs 17,080 crore, not the earlier Rs 12,320 crore.

The high capital and operating costs of nuclear power make it less attractive compared with renewable sources of energy, which are far more economical. In India, wind and solar each contributed more than 150% of nuclear to national power generation in India in 2021.

In India, the price of solar energy is between Rs 2.2 and 2.5 per unit and prices are expected to dip. For solar power, though, storage costs and the rising prices of solar photovoltaic (PV) cells must be considered. A Global Wind Energy Council study has projected the levellised cost of energy (LCOE) or the net present generation cost for a generator over its lifetime at Rs 2.8-3.3/Kwh for 2022. The difference is stark compared with nuclear power tariffs. For example, NPCIL projects a tariff of 5.31/kWh for its upcoming Kakrapar units 3 and 4.

The following numbers from WNISR 2022 shed more light on international developments:

Unsubsidised average electricity generating costs declined between 2009 and 2021 in the case of solar PV from US $359 to US $36 per MWh, a 90% fall. For wind energy, the costs dipped 72% from US $135 to US $38 per MWh. For nuclear power, costs rose from US $123 to US $167 per MWh—a 36% jump.

Nuclear Waste Management

And then, the elephant in the room—long-term nuclear waste—which often (conveniently) escapes acknowledgement.

“Despite decades of effort, the nuclear industry does not yet have a working solution for managing spent fuel and high-level waste, the most radioactive products generated by nuclear power plants,” writes physicist MV Ramana. The supposed answer is a long-term geological repository which will seal off nuclear waste for thousands of years. But there are significant uncertainties about the “long-term performance of repositories and behaviour of nuclear wastes” stored in such facilities and widespread public opposition at the prospect of nuclear waste repositories coming up near them. Therefore, Ramana writes, most countries have not yet been able to choose sites for nuclear repositories.

Nuclear waste, most of which is spent fuel, comprises many elements that emit radiation over different periods. Over time, radioactive materials are no longer radioactive, but some have relatively short half-lives, which means they could decay in seconds to weeks. This is the most dangerous aspect of spent nuclear fuel. Once its radioactivity lapses, some can be reprocessed for fresh reactor fuel or find other uses in medicine, radiation therapy and power production. Most of the material in spent nuclear fuel is the relatively stable Uranium-238, which exists in nature. But it can take hundreds of years for spent fuel to reach this level of radioactivity. And even after decaying to relatively safe radioactivity levels, the material can carry a complex chemical profile, making it difficult and expensive to store or deal with permanently.

Further, as reactors approach the end of their original lifecycles, they need to be decommissioned or permanently shut. This process, which requires a complete radioactivity clean-up and progressive dismantling, can run into decades and its costs mount to billions of dollars.

So the actual costs of nuclear power are not that of power production alone but also the effect on future generations, a timespan that engineering projects do not typically consider. As it is difficult to estimate the accurate cost of nuclear waste management, studies can minimise and underestimate those costs.

In a deep dive for The Guardian, journalist Samanth Subramanian writes about the timescales and costs of decommissioning the Sellafield nuclear power plant—the United Kingdom’s first atomic reactor, which started operations in 1950, manufacturing plutonium for nuclear weapons. Later, it generated electricity until 2003 and was also used to reprocess fuel or extract uranium and plutonium for used fuel rods. All of that has come to an end.

“From an operational nuclear facility, Sellafield turned into a full-time storage depot—but an uncanny, precarious one, filled with toxic nuclear waste that has to be kept contained at any cost,” Subramanian writes. The challenge of dealing with nuclear waste includes waiting thousands of years as radioactivity tapers off, especially in high-level waste. The spent fuel rods, radioactive metals and liquids cannot simply lie around all this time. It must be stored in sealed buildings and artificial ponds, which are not permanent. Ultimately, the waste must be safely hauled to an “ultimate strongroom”, a geological disposal facility or repository carved from boring hundreds of metres into rock. Timelines estimate the process will take approximately 120 years (until 2120) and cost £121 billion.

Sellafield presents the classic conundrum of the nuclear energy industry where countries embraced nuclear energy rapidly but are wrestling with nuclear waste, a by-product of that process.

As it weans itself off nuclear power, Germany still does not have a nuclear waste repository, which is unlikely to go smoothly. It has announced 90 possible locations for the nuclear repository, but strong opposition is expected in each place. Previous attempts did prove utterly divisive.

India’s nuclear waste

India has 22 nuclear power plants and a slew of proposed reactors. Villagers near the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant, built with Russian cooperation, have been protesting the storage of spent nuclear fuel from KNPP 1 and 2 at the plant premises. The political leadership of Tamil Nadu has demanded the spent fuel be transported to Russia. The government has demurred that the spent fuel is a “valuable recyclable fuel” that can be reprocessed to produce more fuel for next-stage reactors.

In December 2021, the government told the Lok Sabha that since a “very small quantity” of high-level waste is generated, there is no need for a deep underground geological disposal facility in the near future. SP Udayakumar of the People’s Movement Against Nuclear Energy warned in an editorial that the government cannot be haphazard or vague in nuclear waste management.

“If the Union and state governments, scientists and technocrats, have not managed to clean up the dangerous Bhopal waste that has been lying there for the past 38 years, how are they going to convince us about nuclear waste management? Nuclear waste management has to be planned from the beginning and not as we go along,” Udayakumar wrote.

There are tensions at KNPP over an Away from Reactor (AFR) store for spent nuclear fuel until a final repository is constructed. The uneasiness is because there seem to be no definite timelines for the final repository, without which the AFR may become permanent spent fuel storage. There are fears that other states may treat the Kudankulam AFR as a dumping ground for nuclear waste from their reactors.

Spent nuclear fuel, a part of which forms nuclear waste, can be highly radioactive. What happens to it, where, how it is stored, for how long, and the safety of storage arrangements are crucial public health questions the nuclear establishment must answer.

Kudankulam is not the only reactor generating spent nuclear fuel. At least 20 others in India generate spent fuel—what happens to that is a question.

It is unclear what lessons India learned from the Fukushima disaster. India’s nuclear regulatory authority, the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB), remains weak despite warnings from the Comptroller and Auditor General and the IAEA. Even the Nuclear Safety Regulatory Authority Bill 2011 has been effectively shelved.

Remarkably, countries have steered away from nuclear power after Fukushima, but Indian governments have pushed ahead. The adverse effects on energy supplies and prices of war in Ukraine made governments in Japan and Germany walk the nuclear power path again, but the economics and waste management problem of nuclear energy pose enormous hurdles for the sector.

A Massachusetts Institute of Technology study sums it up succinctly: “The prospects for the expansion of nuclear energy remain decidedly dim in many parts of the world. The fundamental problem is cost. Other generation technologies have become cheaper in recent decades, while new nuclear plants have only become costlier.” The costs make it a less attractive option as far as decarbonising is concerned.

Besides, the risk of geopolitical disasters at nuclear power plants can no longer be ignored, as when Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant was caught in the cross-hairs of the war in 2022. Hopes for a renewed nuclear industry stand on thin ice. Grand claims about its resurgence must be viewed with caution and scepticism.

Read the original article: https://www.newsclick.in/Why-Nuclear-Industry-Comeback-Hopes-Rest-Very-Thin-Ice

A BrahMos missile launcher, on display in a parade on the Indian Army Day (15 January 2013) | Wikimedia

Eyebrows were raised when the defence ministry informed Parliament in March 2022 that India’s defence exports had increased six times in value since 2014. Minister of State for Defence Ajay Bhatt stated that defence exports rose to Rs 11,607 crore by March 2022 from Rs. 1,941 crore in 2014–15.

Reports about India’s ability as an arms exporter are increasingly published in the media and the government goes the extra length to project grand perceptions of its success and release impressive-sounding figures. In a recent announcement, the Narendra Modi government stated that defence exports have risen 334% in the last five years with India exporting to more than 75 countries. The Press Information Bureau tweeted, “The Indian Defence sector, the second largest armed force is at the cusp of revolution.”

India’s entry last year to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s (SIPRI) list of the world’s top 25 arms exporters was celebrated by media commentators and strategic analysts alike. Home Minister Rajnath Singh declared that India had “transformed” from being one of the largest defence importers to “breaching” the list of the top 25 exporters in the world. SIPRI reports usually highlight India as a major arms importer. That the country featured on a top 25 arms exporters list was seen as a moment of victory. SIPRI recorded a 119% increase in the total volume of India’s arms exports between 2012–2016 and 2017–2021.

Such statistics are taken at face value by the media and have been promoted by the government as evidence of India’s imminent rise as an arms exporter. Yet, the picture becomes complicated when one actually scrutinises the numbers; the claims then appear to be embellished.

SIPRI’s data shows that India ranked 23rd among the top 25 arms exporters with a share of just 0.2% of the total global arms exports between 2017 and 2021.

Since coming to power in 2014, a key stated priority of the Modi government has been to increase self-reliance in defence production, including major arms and ammunition. India targets Rs 35,000 crore worth of defence exports by 2025.

These figures and rankings seem impressive, but SIPRI’s data shows that India ranked 23rd in the top 25 arms exporters with a share of just 0.2% of the total global arms exports between 2017 and 2021. The United States (39%), Russia (19%), and France (11%) were the top exporters during this period.

The data provided to Parliament in March 2022 showed that there are substantial hurdles in the way of India achieving its goal of Rs 35,000 crore worth of arms exports by 2025. Amit Cowshish, a former financial advisor to the defence ministry, listed several of these in February. He pointed to an over-reliance on exports of parts and components rather than major defence equipment, the very few indigenously built platforms and equipment on offer for export, and the reputational setbacks suffered by India’s defence industry with nations such as Nepal and Ecuador finding fault with their imports. He also referred to the government’s tendency to “pat oneself on the back” for its 'Make in India' rhetoric and pointed to the need for “an honest and objective assessment” of ground realities and the challenges to boosting exports.

India’s Arms Exports

A study by the Centre for Land Warfare Studies, a think tank of the Indian Army, noted that in 2017–2018 and 2018–2019 the value of “aircraft, spacecraft and parts thereof” imports was Rs 14,609 crore and Rs 9,215 crore respectively. The export of major arms and ammunition, including parts and accessories, pulled in just Rs 637 crore and Rs 580 crore in these two years.

“Exporting parts, components, and low-value, low-tech items is one thing; exporting high-value lethal equipment is altogether different,” Laxman Kumar Behera wrote in the Journal of Defence & Security Analysis in June 2022. “India’s major exports are to countries with low paying capacity, and with which it has strong political ties. Barring a few orders, most of the major items are through non-competitive arrangements.”

Geopolitical objectives are an important part of India’s defence deals.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine earlier this year and the sanctions on Russia have also cast a shadow on India’s defence exports. In January 2022, India signed a deal worth $375 million with the Philippines for the sale of three batteries of the BrahMos supersonic cruise missile system developed jointly with Russia. The missile can be launched from land, sea, and air. Its export marked a major landmark in India’s bid to position itself as an exporter of arms. However, according to an analysis by the Economist Intelligence Unit in April 2022, “The fulfilment of this commitment will now be delayed, while planned pitches to Indonesia and Vietnam will also be deferred.”

In 2020–2021, the main recipients of Indian arms imports were Myanmar (50%), Sri Lanka (25%), and Armenia (11%). African countries were also on the client list with Mauritius accounting for 6.6% of India’s arms exports between 2017 and 2021, followed by Mozambique (5%) and Seychelles (2.3%), according to a working paper by the Export-Import Bank of India in October 2022. India has the capacity to “fulfil Africa’s maritime, aerospace and defence requirements,” the paper said, mentioning the possibility of exporting indigenously developed maritime technologies, including unmanned underwater systems, unmanned aerial systems, and drones, to African countries.

The main defence equipment exported by India in the five years before 2021 included weapon simulators, tear gas launchers, torpedo loading mechanisms, alarm monitoring and control, night vision monoculars and binoculars, light weight torpedoes and fire control systems, armoured protection vehicles, weapons locating radar, high frequency radios, and coastal surveillance radars. India is also trying to get buyers for major defence platforms such as the BrahMos missile system, the Pinaka multi-barrel rocket launch system, the Akash air defence system, Tejas aircraft, various artillery guns, and radar and anti-tank missiles.

Geopolitical objectives are an important part of India’s defence deals. “The geopolitical intent of arms export was on full display when India decided to gift one of its submarines to Myanmar,” Behera wrote. The submarine, inducted into Myanmar’s navy in October 2020, was supposedly India’s response to China’s forays into Myanmar. India also entered into an agreement with Armenia on October 2020 for the supply of rockets, missiles, and ammunition to be used in its border conflict with Azerbaijan.

The import-export divide

Defence Secretary Ajay Singh recently made a tall claim at Defexpo, India’s flagship defence exhibition held in October 2022. According to him, India is witnessing a “transformational journey from being the largest defence importer to a net exporter.” A cursory look at India’s import figures put this claim to rest.

Consider these well-known figures. According to SIPRI data, India was the biggest importer of arms in the world in 2021 with its purchases constituting 11% of global arms imports. Its main suppliers were Russia, France, and the US. SIPRI identified 164 states as importers of major arms between 2016 and 2020. The five largest arms importers were Saudi Arabia, India, Egypt, Australia, and China, which together accounted for 36% of total global arms imports.

Between 2012–16 and 2017–21, Indian arms imports decreased by 21%. “Despite this, India was the world’s largest importer of major arms in 2017–21,” the SIPRI report said, describing the drop in India’s arms imports as “temporary” and attributing it to the country’s slow and complex procurement process and a shift in suppliers.

Critical weapons systems needed by India to replace old ones, and equipment such as diesel electric submarines and twin-engine fighters are yet to be manufactured in the country.

India will have to scale up arms imports because of growing threats from China and significant delays in the production of its own major arms. It is widely acknowledged that Prime Minister Modi’s pressure to indigenise India’s defence production and a ban on certain defence imports is leading to shortages of helicopters and fighter jets, compelling the armed forces to continue using obsolete equipment. Critical weapons systems needed by India to replace old ones, and equipment such as diesel electric submarines and twin-engine fighters are yet to be manufactured in the country. Even though there are projects in the pipeline, these will take years to develop.

Defence analyst Rahul Bedi told the Business Standard newspaper in September 2022 that the Modi government’s import substitution plans fail to factor in the billions of dollars and many years of research required to build world-class weapon systems. “Make in India for defence isn’t thought through properly,” he said. “It is a good slogan, beyond that there isn’t much to show as yet.”

SIPRI’s assessment of arms production capabilities in the Indo-Pacific region does not support the image of India as a behemoth arms exporter that the Modi government is trying to project. According to its report published in October 2022, India is highly dependent on imports of major arms, including those produced under licence or as components for its domestic production. Of India’s total volume of procurement between 2016 and 2020, 84% was of foreign origin.

Some products such as land-attack missiles and Arihant, a nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine, have Indian designs, as do some surface ships. But these domestic designs are dependent on key components that are imported such as engines and radars. There are “serious doubts about whether India will be able to significantly reduce its dependence on imports in the short or medium terms”, says the SIPRI report.

It is time we look into the government’s claims about burgeoning defence exports in a more critical manner than taking them at face value.

Urvashi Sarkar is an independent journalist based in Mumbai who focuses on international politics, nuclear energy, climate change and political-corporate lobbying.

Read the original article: https://www.theindiaforum.in/forum/india-arms-exporter-it-claims-be

Published by Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. 2 September 2022

The world was still deep in the clutches of the global COVID-19 pandemic in April 2021 when Vakisasai Ramany, a senior vice-president of Electricité de France (EDF), a major French electric utility company, traveled to India. The purpose of this unusually timed business trip? The delivery of a technical and commercial offer for nuclear reactors—in person.

During his visit, Ramany met with officials of the Indian Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) and the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited (NPCIL), the state-owned company that operates most of India’s nuclear power plants. The French executive submitted a long-delayed techno-commercial offer to supply engineering studies and equipment for the construction of six European Pressurised Reactors (EPRs) at the Jaitapur site in Maharashtra, India. The project, touted as “the most powerful in the world,” consists of a nuclear power plant with a total installed capacity of 9.6 gigawatts electric. That’s the offer on paper, anyway. But, EPRs so far have had a significantly troubling record of cost and time overruns. The proposed Jaitapur mega-project has faced strong protests from local residents and environmental activists. With the cost of these reactors likely to be in the tens of billions of dollars, stakes are high for the French nuclear company to conclude its deal in India.

The history of the French connection. In 2008, India and France signed a bilateral agreement for civilian nuclear cooperation on developing nuclear energy. The agreement was one result of an agreement with the United States that allowed India to conduct nuclear trade with other countries—which it could not do since the country conducted nuclear weapons tests in 1974 and 1998 and was placed under US sanctions.

India’s first nuclear test in 1974 provided the impetus for the creation of what was to become the Nuclear Suppliers Group, a trade consortium set up by countries involved in exporting nuclear energy technologies. The group set up the requirement that nuclear technology and materials should be exported only to countries that had signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which entered into force in 1970. By 1974, however, India was not a signatory of the NPT—and still is not. As such, it was not allowed to purchase reactors or uranium. Following an agreement in 2008 between India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and US President George W. Bush, the US government used its political power to force many reluctant members of the Nuclear Suppliers Group to execute a special waiver for India. Many countries, especially France and Russia, supported the waiver, sensing the business opportunities from India’s rapidly expanding energy market.

Following the India-France bilateral agreement, India’s NPCIL and the French nuclear-maker Areva signed an agreement in 2009 for the supply of two to six EPRs. But soon after Areva became in major financial trouble and was taken over by EDF in 2016.

EPRs are a type of pressurized water reactor built through French and German collaboration. The reactors are touted to have better safety features than earlier designs, including a double barrier to ensure the containment of radioactive materials in case of accidents. They are also supposed to resist extreme hazards like earthquakes, flooding, and extreme temperatures.

With its submission of a new techno-commercial offer to India, EDF’s Ramany says the company is moving toward “the concretization of the largest nuclear power plant in the world [with the] fully proven EPR technology.”

Despite EDF’s hope that the reactors would shortly become operational, negotiations with NPCIL have stalled over the last decade for several reasons, including cost, increasing doubts over their performance, disagreement over liability in the case of a reactor accident, and local protests.

And that’s not to mention the problems EPR projects—both under construction and in operation—have encountered in different parts of the world.

Delayed and over budget. The earliest EPR project (Olkiluoto-3) began in Finland in 2003 and was connected to the grid in March 2022—a full 13 years behind schedule. It has yet to begin operations. Two EPRs are under construction in the United Kingdom (Hinkley Point C-1 and C-2), and one in France (Flamanville-3) is also under construction. The proposed two-unit EPR plant at Hinkley Point, originally scheduled to start operations in 2025, has already been delayed to June 2027 and will cost £3 billion ($3.6 billion) more than initially proposed, taking the budget to an estimated cost of £25 billion ($29.6 billion). For its part, the Flamanville-3 reactor is over a decade behind schedule, and its budget has ballooned from €3.3 billion to €12.7 billion.

The world’s first two EPRs—Taishan-1 and Taishan-2—became operational in China in 2018 and 2019, respectively. However, unit 1 had to be shut down in July 2021 because of damaged fuel rods, in what an EDF spokesperson told CNN at the time was a “serious situation.”

A good fit for India? Physicists Suvrat Raju and MV Ramana have questioned the safety and economics of the EPR reactors proposed for the Jaitapur site. In 2013, they calculated that electricity from the proposed reactors at Jaitapur would cost 15 Indian rupees (18 US cents) per kilowatt-hour, based on the construction costs of EPRs in Finland and France. Since then the costs of EPR construction have escalated while the cost of alternatives, especially solar energy, has declined sharply.

In an interview for this article, Ramana said: “The costs of the EPRs being built in Western Europe have gone up, while costs of renewable sources of energy, especially solar photovoltaics, have declined. In 2020, one solar project developer offered to sell electricity at the especially low rate of Rs. 2 [Indian rupees] per kWh, and it is routine to find projects proposed for around Rs. 2.50 per kWh.”

Importantly, however, the total amount that the Indian government will spend on this project has still not been made public. In 2019, EDF said the cost is “confidential and may not be disclosed.” It also refused to release the cost per unit of electricity.

EPRs’ problems are not restricted to massive cost overruns and significant delays. “In addition to the high costs, safety problems with the reactor design and construction have emerged in several EPRs,” Raju and Ramana wrote in 2019. Serious problems occurred during the manufacture of the reactor pressure vessel of the EPR at Flamanville in France, with parts of the vessel found to have too much carbon. (A too-high carbon concentration in the steel of the reactor vessel can lead to lower than expected mechanical properties, which can thereby compromise its safety. The reactor vessel acts as a key barrier against radioactive materials escaping from the core.)

Moreover, the proposed site for the six EPRs in Jaitapur—a seismically active and fertile agricultural and fishing region—has left some 40,000 people in five villages concerned for their safety and impact on their livelihoods. Even though the villagers evicted from their land received monetary compensation, they regret losing access to their agricultural and fishing resources.

Why is India so interested in buying French reactors? Despite the questions about the performance of EPRs, successive Indian governments have expressed their commitment to the deal. But why is India pressing ahead? Raju and Ramana point to the unusually candid explanation offered by Anil Kakodkar, a former secretary at the India Department of Atomic Energy, who said: “We also have to keep in mind the commercial interests of foreign countries … America, Russia, and France were the countries we made mediators in these efforts to lift sanctions, and hence, for the nurturing of their business interests, we made deals with them for nuclear projects.”

Kakodkar was referring to the India-US nuclear deal of 2008. Three countries were supposed to particularly benefit from that deal: the United States, France, and Russia. The three countries signed agreements with India for the supply of foreign reactors. To date, Russia is the only foreign country to have operational reactors in India, which started even before the 2008 nuclear deal between India and the United States. US reactors, however, were not sold to India because of Westinghouse’s financial troubles. For its part, France was specifically allotted the Jaitapur site for building EPRs.

According to a 2009 diplomatic cable made public by Wikileaks, a representative from NPCIL admitted India was paying a “high price” for the French reactors. Indeed, Indian diplomatic sources have reportedly expressed discontent about the high cost of the French EPRs compared to US and Russian reactors. Yet, when Indian and French political leaders meet, they almost always reiterated their joint commitment to the EPR deal as when, in May 2022, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and French President Emmanuel Macron in France reaffirmed their commitment to “the success of the strategic Jaitapur EPR project.”

A clear subtext of these statements is the high stakes in the Jaitapur project for the French nuclear industry, especially EDF in which the French government has 84 percent ownership. EDF faces several problems in addition to its EPR woes: It is in debt for approximately $45 billion, and faces outages at some older plants and also declining power output from some plants, a result of hot temperatures and lack of rain that result in insufficient river water to cool nuclear reactors. Some of EDF’s reactors are also offline for planned maintenance and repairs. This makes it all the more crucial for France to want to seal the deal with India.

“If confirmed, it would be one of the biggest-ever export deals for the French energy giant,” Reuters reported in May.

After submitting the techno-commercial offer to the NPCIL, EDF promised the project would produce local jobs in India, not forgetting to mention the benefits at home: “The project would also generate significant economic benefits for the French nuclear industry over the entire duration of the project (approximately 15 years), with tens of thousands of jobs in the hundred or so involved French companies.”

As France stands to benefit greatly if the deal comes to fruition, it is no surprise an EDF vice-president traveled to India in the thick of a pandemic to submit an in-person binding techno-commercial offer. But if the purchase of six EPR reactors would be an obvious win for the French nuclear industry, it is less clear what benefits the people of India would obtain.

Read the original article: https://thebulletin.org/2022/09/french-nuclear-power-reactors-in-india-are-they-worth-the-wait-and-cost/#post-heading

The year is 1962. China had attacked India. In a friction-ridden meeting of India’s Atomic Energy Commission, the chairman, and scientist Homi J. Bhabha convinces the group to build India’s first atomic bomb. “We can stop any other country from ever thinking of attacking us again,” Bhabha tells the group forcefully. Not everyone agrees. Bhabha’s long-time friend and fellow Atomic Energy Commission member, Vikram Sarabhai, walks out of the meeting and resigns in protest. “How can you in good conscience do this?” he asks Bhabha.

These are the opening scenes to Rocket Boys, a web series released on February 4, that tells the story of three scientific leaders at the origin of India’s nuclear and space programs—Homi J. Bhabha, Vikram Sarabhai, and A.P.J. Abdul Kalam. Rocket Boys shows similarities with Parmanu, a movie that was released in 2018. Where Parmanu explores the run-up to India’s nuclear tests of 1999 and its aftermath, Rocket Boys depicts the circumstances in which India decided to adopt the path of nuclear energy. While Rocket Boys makes for engaging drama, does it tell this story with due diligence to scientific and historical facts? Unfortunately, the answer is resoundingly in the negative.

The web series received early positive reviews in the media. But scholars well-versed in the history of these programs soon exposed glaring flaws in the science and the problematic ways in which key personalities are presented. The narrative conveniently plays into the dominant hyper-nationalist narratives prevailing in India and deepens fault lines in Indian society.

Twisting reality. In a piece appropriately headlined “As a historian of the nuclear program, I can only laugh at the howlers in Rocket Boys,” political scientist Itty Abraham mentions a scene in which a fully-suited Bhabha jumps into a radioactive swimming pool reactor to repair malfunctioning fuel rods. He is supposed to get the reactor up and running in time for Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s visit. The scene is intended as suspenseful and nail-biting. But it is simply not credible; no nuclear physicist would do such a thing.

Abraham—author of The Making of the Indian Atomic Bomb: Science, Secrecy and the Postcolonial State—also criticizes the sequences showing the runup to India’s first rocket launch, scenes that portray India’s scientists as careless and inept. “Bhabha and Sarabhai would be horrified to think that their pioneering vision and extraordinary achievements were being reduced, decades later, to the celebration of last-minute screwdrivers and ropes pulling up launch platforms,” he writes. Journalist Gita Aravamudan, who has been closely associated with the Indian space program and personally knew several individuals portrayed in Rocket Boys, writes about being “appalled at the liberties that have been blithely taken. … [T]he science has been subsumed completely by the need to make the two main rocket boys cool.” The irony, Aravamudan adds, is that the actual story of India’s space program is so dramatic and intriguing that the fictional embellishments adopted by Rocket Boys were unnecessary.

Insidious script. Aravamudan wryly writes that watching Rocket Boys feels like a bad Bollywood movie in which iconic scientists have been turned into the worst of scientist stereotypes. To add further drama to the web series, Bhabha is pitted against an adversary, Mehdi Raza, a fictional character evidently inspired by the Indian astrophysicist Meghnad Saha. Yet the portrayal of Raza is immensely problematic, stealing from Saha’s formidable reputation and personality, only to twist it in egregious ways. Saha was one of India’s most towering scientists of the time, in the same league as Bhabha. He built India’s first cyclotron—which Raza in the series is shown as doing—and also established the Institute of Nuclear Physics in Kolkata.

Of particular note, Rocket Boys distorts Saha’s background in an insidious way. Saha was Dalit—the most repressed and discriminated social group in India, earlier known as untouchable and treated as outcaste. Yet the makers of the web series borrow from Saha’s professional background using it to flesh out an adversary who is Muslim, deliberately cashing in on dominant anti-Islamist currents in India. In a further manipulation of truth, the series shows Raza as cozying up with the CIA to subvert India’s nuclear program—when Saha was a socialist who was inspired by Soviet planning and tried to replicate it in India.

Rocket Boys does attempt to give a glimpse into the personal lives of Bhabha and Sarabhai, exploring their relationships with their families and the women in their lives. But since two men are the chief protagonists of the series, the women appear as largely romantic props instead of fully fleshed-out characters and fade out only to suddenly reappear in a few scenes.

Good acting. There is a redeeming feature in Rocket Boys—the superlative acting by Jim Sarbh and Ishwak Singh, who play Bhabha and Sarabhai respectively. The arguments between Sarabhai and Bhabha as best friends and sparring partners are some of the most watchable moments of Rocket Boys. The two scientists come to life as they debate an independent India’s future, scientific progress, their ambitions, and their love lives. Homi Bhabha is portrayed as a debonair maverick and prodigy and Sarabhai as his foil—quiet, razor-sharp, and unafraid to challenge his mentor, Bhabha.

Above all though, Rocket Boys eulogizes science’s role in elevating a poor and newly independent nation in the 1960s. “Science by the late colonial period was burdened with an unrealistic set of expectations. It came to be regarded as how India would reverse centuries of underdevelopment,” writes Sankaran Krishna in the 2009 edited volume, South Asian Cultures of the Bomb: Atomic Publics and the State in India and Pakistan. Indian elites offered to achieve nuclear power status as a response to the abysmal state of general economic development in the country, he adds.

The release of Rocket Boys earlier this year comes at a time when India’s growth, prosperity, and progress are seriously questioned. Its nostalgic tone and fetishizing of science—and the atomic bomb—match the beats of the ultra-nationalist and jingoistic media and political narratives dominating India’s present-day public discourse. Unfortunately, that discourse and the Rocket Boys series both play loose with facts and bend reality in potentially dangerous directions.

Read the original article: https://thebulletin.org/2022/06/review-indias-rocket-boys-series-fetishizes-science-and-the-atomic-bomb-in-a-dangerous-way/#post-heading

Published by BBC. 14 June 2022

Vijay Nallawala was 40 when his family noticed that something was not quite right with him.

"I would suddenly be euphoric. And then I would abruptly plunge into depression, getting up in the wee hours of the night and writing extremely dismal poetry. The swings were very abrupt," he says.

This wasn't the first time though - Mr Nallawala says he first started to experience such symptoms when he was 14. "But nobody quite knew what was the problem, except that something was amiss."

This time he sought medical help. In 2003, he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder - a condition that makes people go through extreme mood swings. People can suffer episodes of depression - which make them feel very low or lethargic - or mania - where they feel high and overactive.

Mr Nallawala, now 60, has been stable for the "last five or six years", he says. But his struggles made him realise the need to create awareness about the condition.

In 2012, he began blogging about it. A friend then encouraged him to set up Bipolar India, a website which creates awareness about the disorder, collates mental health resources and gives others with the condition a platform to share their experiences. Today it has over 500 members.

At least 0.3% of Indians live with bipolar disorder, data from India's National Mental Health Survey 2016 shows. But stigma and lack of awareness around it continue to have a devastating impact on the lives of patients who routinely face discrimination.

A dearth of qualified professionals - India has just 0.75 psychiatrists per 100,000 people - makes matters worse.

Nine years after he set up Bipolar India, Mr Nallawala spends a chunk of his day checking messages on the community's main Telegram group. It has members from all big cities including Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru, and Chennai and regularly organises in-person meets.

Mr Nallawala says he wanted to build a sense of community and offer emotional and sometimes financial support to those living with the condition.

"Our community could actively avert four suicide situations though we aren't trained as suicide gatekeepers. In one instance, we managed to raise funds for someone who needed urgent hospitalisation," he says.

Patients often suffer because of the lack of access to healthcare. India's laws make it mandatory for insurance companies to provide coverage for mental illnesses. But firms rarely do that, Mr Nallawala says.

Bipolar India has tried to bridge the gap. The group has launched a programme which connects its members to organisations that are willing to offer them jobs.

"We firmly believe that recovery from mental illness is incomplete without rehabilitation," Mr Nallawala says.

The group has helped people such as Tripti Mishra, 57, who had to see 13 doctors before she found someone who could explain the disorder to her.

"I don't think [the earlier doctors] were really listening. I wanted to know what was happening to me and why it was happening," says Ms Mishra, who lives in Durgapur city in West Bengal state.

A retired professor of computer science, Ms Mishra still considers herself lucky - she says she had an extremely supportive family.

She says that joining Bipolar India changed her life. "I realised I am not alone and this is a powerful feeling. I could talk to other people, discuss coping strategies, and share mutual fears, guilt, and insecurities," she says. "In families, these feelings may not be completely accepted or acknowledged."

The group is also open for caregivers to join.

Mumbai-based Venkateshprasad Narayan Iyer and his wife are caregivers to their 31-year-old daughter who is bipolar with schizoaffective disorder. They joined BipolarIndia because they felt that they "have to take care" of themselves.

"We realised that apart from dealing with the emotional, spiritual and financial crisis of your child, we have to take care of ourselves. The caregiver also falls into depression but needs to have continued love and compassion for their child and also a zest for living," Mr Iyer says.

But this is hardly easy in the absence of reliable, affordable institutional facilities to help take care of patients, especially when they are experiencing particularly low phases.

This means that there is no respite for caregivers, who also worry about the future of the people they love.

Debashish Ghosh and his wife Supriya (names changed), based in Gurgaon city, have been full-time caregivers for 15 years to their 38-year-old daughter who has schizophrenia. But they still find it hard to come to terms with their daughter being "a little different from others".

"She desires a career, marriage and child but her fluctuating moods prevent her from stability. She cannot earn despite wanting to. Who will take care of her after us?" Mr Ghosh asks.

The couple say that ever since their daughter was diagnosed, they have avoided meeting friends and families, afraid they would judge her.

Experts say people with mental illnesses are stigmatised because references to bipolar disorder and schizophrenia are still rare in India.

"There is more openness and acceptability about depression than before. But depression is spoken about in a generic sense and people may not really understand the illness being discussed," says Dr Milan Balakrishnan, a consultant psychiatrist and former secretary of Bombay Psychiatric Society.

Dr Balakrishnan says initiatives like Bipolar India can go a long way in changing such attitudes.

"Such groups have a powerful impact because they provide support and checks in different situations, say if medication is stopped, or if people are experimenting with substances that can trigger relapses. Caregivers burn out very fast," he says.

"The group offers a beacon of hope for these communities."

Read the original article: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-61741813