governance, political economy, institutional development and economic regulation
Humans 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 BottledThe path to net zero is not just long but also likely to be a twisted, winding mountain road, full of uncertainties and expensive, risky alternatives, necessitating doubling back often, technology hopping and nimbly stepping past geopolitical disruptions. Scientists, technologists, businesses, and politicians should lead The pilots for this enterprise are scientists, technologists, and businesses […]
Read More wield The stick to walk the Long Road to Net ZeroSeventy percent of Indians believe that their country is a world leader in climate action—the highest endorsement across 29 advanced, upper- and lower-middle-income economies excluding China, as per the IPSOS Global Survey. On average, only 31 percent globally and 41 percent of Swedes and 38 percent of Singaporeans share this belief about their own countries. […]
Read More IPSOS Global Survey 2023 on Climate Action PerceptionsBy 2070, India will go from spewing 2.2 billion tons of carbon dioxide annually to none at all — a near nirvana like, post-industrial wonderland called “Net Zero” — when a country’s carbon emissions from humans, animals and decaying plants equal the amount of carbon that forests and trees absorb to grow. Any additional emissions […]
Read More India Energy Transition: Who will lead?The “One Nation, One Election” (ONOE) proposal of the BJP is in the best traditions of zero-based budgeting, where nothing is off the table, so long as it makes sense and is profitable. Clearly, the BJP sees gains in the conflation of national and state-level elections, before four large states precede the Lok Sabha to […]
Read More Creative Disruption or Murder of Democracy?The government did well to publish the NITI Aayog Report on Multidimensional Poverty (2019-21), highlighting the decline in the poverty headcount from around 24.85 percent in 2015-16 to 14.96 percent in 2019–2021—showcasing a substantial fall from the earlier survey outcomes. Both are based on the data collected during the standardised National Health Status Reports for the […]
Read More Mapping India’s PoorThe Union home minister has said he wants to unshackle India from its colonial legacy by proposing to repeal three long-standing laws and to substitute them with three bills that were tabled in Parliament last week. Lest the public be misled into believing that this is just old wine in new bottles, he hastened to […]
Read More Unshackling Indian Criminal Law or Rebranding it?In 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 Workplaces
Opinion India 