governance, political economy, institutional development and economic regulation
India is at an inflection point. Realizing our long dormant economic potential is happening faster than our institutions are adapting to the new challenges. Becoming the fastest growing large economy this year with an unanticipated GDP boost of around 0.7 percentage point above our long-term growth rate of 6.6 percent over the past three decades […]
Read More “Big Government” & “High Growth”in IndiaEnergy transition projections remain open ended about phasing down coal mining and coal-based power generation. This is, unsurprisingly, the most difficult segment of the transition for India because coal reserves are the only fossil energy resource India has in abundance. Ten coal producers account for about 90 percent of global coal production—China-50 percent, India-10 percent, Indonesia-7 […]
Read More Reality check: Coal CCUS Key for Energy TransitionHumans have faced existential threats before during the 300,000 years they have been around. Self-inflicted harm exceeds damage from natural calamities. Science has grown our understanding of how human progress itself seeds new existential threats. And yet, humans have proliferated and benefited from each scientific iteration that outsourced work to machines. Is Artificial Intelligence (AI) […]
Read More AI: Keep the Genie BottledIn India, biomass—the fallen leaves in your garden, crop residue at your farm, organic garbage, and waste from your house—are just shy of around one third of the available primary energy, mostly in rural areas, where agricultural residue is generated. Some of it is collected and stored for later use. Burning biomass in a cook […]
Read More A Bright Red Line Between Social and private costs and BenfitsDifferential time horizons for net zero imply that there is no universal price for mitigating carbon emissions. Decarbonisation plans are proliferating globally, including in India. First came the plan to electrify vehicles, even before electricity supply standards had reached international levels of 0.999 reliability. Next, the near-term goal of having 50 percent of electrical energy […]
Read More Decarbonisation VignettesBOOK REVIEW Work 3.0 By Avik Chanda and Siddhartha Bandyopadhyay Penguin Business 2023 466 pages Rs 524 The central concern of the authors is how to retain human-centric workplaces in the face of the expected tech onslaught increasingly making machines central to the design, implementation and monitoring of most functional tasks catering to human needs. […]
Read More Cyborg WorkplacesIndia, like the rest of the world, is not yet visibly on the freeway to net zero. Greta Thunberg and others of her persuasion believe this is because young people—future victims of climate change—are not in charge. This could well be true. But consider the recklessly fast-forwarded track for Artificial Intelligence (AI), Fintech, or social […]
Read More On the Freeway to net zeroAn India, more populous than China this year, and growing to 1660 billion people by 2050, is touted as good news by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) – an agency which monitors population trends and its implications for the economy. Most Indians though, have mixed feelings about adding 240 million odd people to what […]
Read More Think before you have a babyIf you get your news and views from Twitter or Google search, you correspond via Gmail or Slack, your files are stored on a cloud, your friends and associates are on LinkedIn, Facebook, Snapchat or Tumblr, your music on Spotify, iTunes or YouTube, your entertainment is from Amazon or Netflix, your date is from Tinder, […]
Read More Social Media savior Or dystopiaIndia is sparingly built. Satellite mapping of urban areas globally shows an average urban built-up area of 170 cubic meters per capita, with significant variation–600 cubic meters in the US versus 20 cubic meters in Bangladesh. The average for the Global South is 108 cubic meters, one-third of the average of 300 cubic meters in […]
Read More Plucking Carbon out of Built Structures
Opinion India 