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22 Sep 2026

From ostriches and baboons to seals and endangered African penguins, a day around Cape Town's wildlife becomes an unexpected lesson in humility, conservation and the limits of human entitlement. SummaryA journey across the Cape Peninsula turns into a series of close encounters with Cape Town's remarkable wildlife. At an ostrich farm, the birds' unusual behaviour and division of breeding responsibilities offer an amusing reminder that nature has its own systems of survival. The journey continues through Table Mountain National Park, where baboons, antelope and a snake reveal a landscape that does not exist simply for human entertainment. At Duiker Island, Cape fur seals demonstrate the difference between observing wildlife and treating it as a performance for tourists. The final encounter at Boulders introduces African penguins, whose declining numbers highlight the pressures created by food scarcity, overfishing, pollution, habitat loss and climate change. The day ultimately becomes a reflection on responsible wildlife tourism and the uncomfortable truth that animals are living beings first, not attractions created for human itineraries. People travel thousands of miles to meet people, admire architecture and photograph nature. On my last full day in Cape Town, nature reversed the arrangement: it gave me appointments with animals, and I arrived with a camera and the usual confidence that the world was arranged for our inspection. A short date with animals that Ujjwal K Chowdhury will remember for a long time. The Peninsula at the Edge We set out for the Cape Peninsula, toward the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Point. The names sound interchangeable, but they are not. The Cape of Good Hope is the celebrated southwestern promontory; Cape Point is the nearby headland with two lighthouses. The real southernmost point is Cape Agulhas, a fact geography supplies whenever tourism gets too poetic. Bartolomeu Dias called this coast the Cape of Storms in 1488; Portugal's King John II later gave it the hopeful name that survived. All of it lies within Table Mountain National Park, stretching roughly 70 kilometres from Signal Hill to Cape Point. This is not merely a mountain reserve but part of the Cape Floral Kingdom, a UNESCO World Heritage landscape where fynbos - fine, tough, fire-adapted vegetation - produces abundance from stingy soil. Proteas, ericas and restios fill the slopes, while the King Protea, South Africa's national flower, announces that elegance need not be delicate. The road also offered a lesson in Cape Town's social geography. Hout Bay and Chapman's Peak carry the glamour of sea-facing homes and high property values. In the same wider valley stands Imizamo Yethu, an informal settlement whose isiXhosa name means "our common effort." Beauty and inequality share the same view. The mountain does not hide who lives beside it and who crosses it for work. The Ostrich with the Night Shift At an ostrich farm, a few birds came close to the wire, not quite tame and not interested in our passports. The males wore black with white wing feathers; the females a quieter grey. The largest living bird cannot fly, but it can run at extraordinary speed, pivot on two toes and look at a tourist with the authority of a creature that knows the tourist cannot keep up. Ostriches eat mostly plants, along with insects and other small items, and can go for long periods without drinking. During breeding, a male may court several females and scrape a communal nest. The female incubates by day, blending into the earth; the male takes the night shift, disappearing into darkness. Even the ostrich has a practical division of labour. Humans, with our committees and relationship podcasts, still negotiate who will answer the message. The guide asked whether Indians eat ostrich meat. Ostrich farming is an established Western Cape economy, linked to meat, leather, feathers and tourism, especially around Oudtshoorn. I understand that livelihoods are complicated. Still, after a bird tilted its head at me with comic dignity, I could not imagine lunching on it. I claim no saintliness - human food systems are full of contradictions - but that bird had become a person in my travel story, and people are difficult to order medium rare. A Landscape that Refused to Be One Country We drove through long stretches of the reserve, where fynbos lay low beneath the wide sky. The hills, sea and sharp light made the landscape feel like a meeting between the Andes and the Himalayas, with a South African accent. In the distance, eland and other antelope moved across the ground. The park includes bontebok, red hartebeest and zebra, but I was denied the cinematic herd I wanted. Instead, a large snake crossed the road. It was dark, marked with gold, and unimpressed by our vehicle. I could not identify it, so I will not pretend to be a field biologist after one glance through a windscreen. It slid away with the confidence of a citizen who had not requested a road. Humans name everything and behave as if naming grants ownership. The snake needed neither label nor applause. The Bay that Was Named by Mistake At Mariner's Wharf in Hout Bay, we took a boat toward Duiker Island, a rocky haul-out for Cape fur seals. This was the Atlantic side; False Bay lies beyond the peninsula, toward Simon's Town and warmer waters. Its name is an old navigational joke: sailors returning from the East mistook Cape Hangklip for Cape Point and confused False Bay with Table Bay. A human error became a permanent label - proof that our mistakes receive official signage. The seals were the stars. Some lay in heaps on the rocks, some rolled into the water, and others surfaced with whiskers twitching as if mildly interested. They were Cape fur seals, not plush toys: social, vocal divers that rest on land and hunt fish and squid at sea. Their eyes looked gentle, but gentleness is not consent and wildness is not an invitation to touch. Tourists were offered fish to throw to the seals for a fee. The transaction was entertaining and revealing: humans had travelled to an animal's home, charged one another for access, then bought a snack to make the animal perform near the boat. I watched without feeding them. They were capable of being magnificent without our hospitality package. The Abundant Baboons with a Streak of a Memory The baboons seemed to be everywhere in the Nature Reserve Park—along the roadside, on the rocky slopes and near the bends where our vehicle slowed to watch them. At first glance, they reminded me of the Indian monkeys familiar from towns, temples and childhood stories, though these animals were a little larger, heavier and more powerfully built. Still, resemblance is not identity: these were baboons, not the Indian monkeys, with their own families, calls, hierarchies and unruly intelligence. Their presence also brought back my childhood name, “Babun,” a name my mother and her side of the family used with affection. My maternal elder cousin mischievously turned it into “Baboon” and would explain that I resembled the real animals because of my restlessness and occasional flashes of anger. Looking at them now, I could not dismiss his diagnosis entirely. The baboons at least seemed honest about their moods; when annoyed, they showed it openly. Humans, by contrast, often hide their irritation behind polite smiles, official emails and the remarkable claim that they are “fine.” Penguins at the Edge The day's final encounter came at Boulders in Simon's Town. First there was one African penguin, then two, then a procession from the rocks, sand and sea. They were small, upright and determined, with the comic seriousness of officials arriving late to a meeting. Their braying calls explain the old nickname "jackass penguin," though the birds have done nothing to deserve it. African penguins are the only penguin species breeding on the African continent, along the coasts of South Africa and Namibia. The Boulders colony began in 1983 and is one of the few land-based colonies visitors can see from boardwalks. The boards keep fingers, shoes and selfie sticks away from birds already under pressure. The signs say do not touch or feed them; for once, a tourist instruction is also a moral philosophy. Their bodies are marvels of adaptation. They eat sardines and anchovies, dive through cold water, then return to rest. Salt glands above their eyes remove excess salt. Once a year they moult completely, staying ashore for roughly three weeks while replacing feathers on stored fat. They sleep in short spells between feeding, guarding and colony negotiations. It is a demanding life, made harder by food scarcity, overfishing, pollution, habitat loss and climate change. The African penguin is globally Critically Endangered, with fewer than 10,000 breeding pairs remaining. That statistic sat uneasily beside the tourists' delight. The colony supports conservation work, guides, restaurants and guesthouses, but the penguins are not a tourism product first. They are trying to survive the consequences of human appetite. People often say that penguins choose one partner for life and die soon after a partner dies. The truth is less sentimental: many pairs remain together across breeding seasons and share incubation and chick-rearing, but a survivor can re-pair. Nature does not need romantic exaggerations. The real lesson is harder. Penguins keep returning, feeding, moulting and raising young while the sea changes. Humans, who write poems about loyalty, are often less reliable with the planet that feeds us. By evening, I had not automatically become a better human. I had been reminded that animals do not exist to decorate our itineraries. We travel thousands of miles to see them while they remain busy living, feeding, resting and surviving. Their patience is not permission. Their beauty is not property. Cape Town gave me a day with animals; they returned the gift as embarrassment. They were trying to stay alive. We were making captions and clicking photographs. ...Read more

22 Sep 2026

A humorous short travelogue by Ujjwal K Chowdhury. A day in Cape Town turns unexpectedly epic as wine, history, food and friendship send a simple sightseeing trip into a very small Napoleon-inspired adventure. SummaryA day off in Cape Town becomes an adventurous city tour through Constantia, Hout Bay and Camps Bay. The journey begins at Groot Constantia, where centuries of wine history connect the estate to figures such as Napoleon, Jane Austen and Charles Dickens. A wine tasting, including the celebrated Grand Constance, turns an ordinary afternoon into a memorable experience. The trip continues through Hout Bay, where seafood, conversations and the harbour add a more local flavour to the day. By Camps Bay, the combination of wind, waves and an ambitious attempt to confront the Atlantic provides the day's comic climax. By the time the red bus returns to Long Street, the temporary sense of imperial courage has disappeared, leaving behind a funny and unforgettable Cape Town memory. Cape Town had given us a day off after two intense days at the Global Entrepreneurship Network’s Africa Congress. Mathew and I, exhausted but unwilling to behave like exhausted men, decided to explore the city on the red hop-on hop-off bus. After breakfast, we boarded at Long Street, armed with cameras, curiosity and the dangerous confidence of two visitors who believed the timetable would obey them. Our first major stop was Constantia, Cape Town’s green wine country—part vineyard, part living museum, and part very successful argument for postponing work. Groot Constantia dates back to 1685, when Simon van der Stel established what is regarded as South Africa’s oldest wine-producing farm. Cape Dutch buildings, ancient trees and orderly vineyards rolled down the slopes as though history itself had been landscaped. Its fame travelled across Europe. Frederick the Great of Prussia and Louis Philippe were among the celebrated buyers of Constantia wine. Jane Austen mentioned it in Sense and Sensibility as a remedy for a broken heart, while Charles Dickens gave it a supporting role in The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Napoleon, too, was served Constantia during his exile on St Helena.  At the cellar, our guide Thabesa gave us a detailed dekho of the winemaking process. Red wine, we learnt, is fermented at a warmer temperature, while white wine prefers a cooler and more delicate arrangement—rather like guests at a Bengali wedding. The estate’s old bottles, labels and stories made the centuries feel as if they were still resting quietly inside the walls. Then came the official tasting: five wines, some red, some white, some dry, some sweet, some slightly bitter and all presented with the solemnity usually reserved for a diplomatic treaty. After the stipulated five, Mathew launched a diplomatic campaign for a sixth—the famous Grand Constance, the modern naturally sweet wine made from Muscat de Frontignan and associated with the old Constantia legend.  I assumed the request would be politely rejected. But Thabesa was kind. Perhaps Mathew’s sincerity helped. Perhaps my video of her and the promise of a good still photograph had quietly strengthened our case. She brought out an empty case and bottle for a picture, followed by two cut-glass wine glasses containing a small serving each. The wine was smooth, rich and almost dangerously friendly. It slipped down like a gentleman and arrived in the bloodstream like a military commander. Within ten minutes, I felt Napoleon enter me. My walking speed increased. My laughter became louder. My voice rose into a patriotic high pitch. I began speaking casually about doing difficult things immediately, efficiently and preferably before lunch. Mathew watched me with the amused concern of a man travelling with a newly self-appointed emperor. At Hout Bay, we stopped at Mariner’s Wharf for beer, chips and fried snoek. I jumped off the bus as though disembarking from a victorious campaign. A sea lion was being displayed by a man charging visitors for photographs. I ignored the commercial negotiations and clicked my own pictures. Then I wandered across the ramp into the port, speaking randomly to seamen and workers repairing, loading and unloading boats. Over lunch, I got into conversation with the two women serving us. The senior server was wonderfully talkative. We discussed three generations of her family—their education, jobs, habits and, naturally, the behaviour of their husbands. She declared that she and the other women tolerated no nonsense from their men; consequently, the men behaved with suitable caution. I laughed so heartily that even the snoek seemed to be enjoying the conversation. At Camps Bay, Napoleon attempted his grandest manoeuvre. I marched towards the rocks, determined to stand on the largest one, Vivekananda-style, and confront the Atlantic. The wind, however, had other plans. Waves roared, sand flew into my face like airborne needles, and my heroic expedition ended at the roadside—after several dozen photographs and selfies. As the red bus moved past the ocean, Table Mountain and the city, the Emperor gradually withdrew. By the time we reached Long Street, six hours after departure, I had returned to my sombre self. Mathew looked at me and pronounced, “Napoleon has left.” The lesson was unforgettable: five small wine tastings can create a cocktail of courage, but the sixth—Grand Constance—does not merely enter the bloodstream. It appoints a field marshal, gives him a cape and sends him marching towards the Atlantic. ...Read more

21 Sep 2026

Summary: Charlands of West Bengal have blurred lines of identities, which state claims whom, which country claims whom is under constant change due to fluvial dynamics and ensuing riverbank erosion and flood deluge. Bhutni diara has been ravaged by the worst flood this year and this is the hour when we are left to think about another episode of blurred identity of lives and livelihoods.  Seated in dimly lit auditorium of Jadavpur University, I was greeted by the snap of a forlorn yet mighty Ganga River. The one who engulfs lands, devouring people of their lives and livelihoods and also gifts people a bounty of harvests too. She was flowing whispering about her people - the people with blurred identities, people of chars (islands) divided by rivers, also united by the rivers to share the same fate of deprivation and fight.  Deprived of the fertile agricultural land which used to feed the belly, there stands Rubel who is compelled to smuggle rice to Bangladesh. Rubel, who is entrusted with the responsibility of the entire family wants to continue school but cannot afford such luxury. Rivers change courses and with these capitals change like chessboard, lives and livelihoods are shaped, reshaped even obliterated.  Bhutni Diara: Sandwiched between two rivers with a weeping tale  Bhutni, part of the Manikchak Community Development Block is surrounded by rivers Ganga and Fulhar. This island falls in the physiographic subregion called Diara, which is a relatively well drained flat land formed by fluvial deposition of newer alluvium. The bank of the Ganges between Bhutni and Panchanandapur is the area worst hit by left bank erosion of river Ganga.  Bhutni diara, the largest of the three diaras of Maldah is situated near the point where river Ganga begins to bend south. The river also enters into Maldah district from this point. Ganga previously split into two streams here -  The eastern channel connecting the diara to Maldah mainland. This channel has gradually silted up becoming shallow and defunct. The western channel which is now the primary flow through the deeper channel.  Fulahar joins Ganga below the relict Mara Kosi, forming a spill channel that diverts excess floodwaters away from Ganga, towards Mahananda.  Retracing James Rennell's map shows that Ganges in the first half of the 19th century, after taking a round around Rajmahal hills, flowed past the island of Bhutni Diara, following the eastern channel resulting in considerable erosion on the Maldah bank.    Fig 1: Change of Bhutni char (prepared by author using SOI toposheet and Google Earth  Image)  Geological experts and local authorities are concerned about the impeding danger of flooding impacts which can extend beyond Maldah into South Bengal if a permanent river avulsion occurs due to merging of Ganga and Fulhar rivers.   Since 1922-23, bankline surveys and maps have indicated that Ganga has kept its course stable past the Maldah diara at two sites - Rajmahal and Farakka. Ganga has been scouring a deep path for itself along its left bank as it traverses the Maldah diara after passing the circular embankment protecting Bhutni. This has caused major left bank erosion in Manikchak and Kaliachak II blocks. The diara formations are built on a foundation of sandbanks overlain by colloidal silts and thus they are prone to saturation and bank failure, as the river scours away the base material at flood stage. The water levels regularly cross the Extreme Danger Level (EDL), with the Ganga peaking well over 25.64 meters during peak surges, turning the island into an open sea.  Bhutni: Abode of children of the Lesser God  Life at Bhutni revolves around the cultivation of jute (the golden fibre) but for families flooded every now and then, children turn out to be vital contributors from being mere spectators. By the time the children reach the age of five they become skilled in stripping and jute processing. Children here lack balanced nutrition. Balancing school and work becomes another issue of concern. During harvest, tuition classes are abandoned, school attendance becomes irregular.  However, parents need to rely on the income from jute cultivation for survival. Also prolonged immersion in stagnant water causes skin problems, injuries and other health risks.  If vulnerability among the dwellers by the riverbanks and char dwellers is gauged, char dwellers are found to be more vulnerable. Basic facilities are less accessible due to physical remoteness from the mainland. Facing both floods and riverbank erosion, char dwellers face more health vulnerabilities. Availability of food is another issue. Higher sensitivity for water is found among the char dwellers as most of them use hand pumps as a source of drinking water. Lower adaptive capacity is observed in case of char dwellers as they abound in dependent population more having to fight out inadequate access to financial and social institutions.  Bhutni, literally turned into open sea: 2026 flood  Bhutni char rose first to prominence from the riverbed around 1913 and since then has been losing itself to the erosive claws of rivers Ganga and Kosi, this year being the worst since 1998. 2,00,000 people are marooned across the 3 village panchayats of Bhutni - Uttar Chandipur, Dakshin Chandipur and Hiranandapur with more than 50 villages under water and thousands of families reduced to only the summis of the embankments and tiled roofs of the concrete houses still available.  Protective embankment at Kesarpur, built a year ago, costing over 6 crores, breached within months of construction - second major breach in the Bhutni ring bund since Mid August after an earlier rupture at Kata Dam in Dakshin Chandipur, this rupture led Fulhar gush in.  Photo plate 1: Flood and embankment breaching situation at Bhutni, 2026 (Source: News tap one and The Statesman)  A fresh embankment breach was observed on 2nd September. 3 high schools, 50 primary schools have got fully submerged alongwith Bhutni - Chandipur primary health centre and the local police station. 174 in patients had to be evacuated from the health centre. 5 schools have ceased to exist from Ratua I block, 3 more from Bhutni, 1 from Manikchak. Roadway connectivity to the main block of Manikchak has completely snapped, turning boats into the only viable mode of transport for relief, medical emergencies, and pregnant women. The situation has grown severe enough that the Indian Army (Panagarh unit) has been deployed to carry out mass deep-water rescue operations. Residents are surviving without cooked food, with dry ration which are being supplied by relief convoys.      Photo plate 2: Flood situation and relief convoys at Bhutni, 2026 (Source: Urban acres and Anandabazar)  Deaths due to snakebites and electric shocks were also reported. People of Bhutni are demanding a concrete solution to the repeated flooding and river bank erosion. However, any concrete solution awaits adequate comprehension of fluvial dynamics of the rivers surrounding Bhutni. Until then, let us strengthen the hands of the hapless people of Bhutni by adequate capacity building so that they are able to atleast cope up with the impeding danger lurking in the corner.  References:  Das R and Samanta G (2022): Impact of floods and river-bank erosion on the riverine people in Manikchak Block of Malda District, West Bengal Environment, Development and Sustainability, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10668-022-02648-1 Majumdar S, Das A and Mandal S (2020): Riverbank erosion and livelihood vulnerability of the local population at Manikchak block in West Bengal, India  Environment, Development and Sustainability, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10668-02102046-z  Bhaumik I and Upadhyay C.S. (2025): Little Hands in Golden Fibre: Childhood, Work and Hope in Bhutni Island Childhood matters Vol V(3) Char: A No Man’s Land documentary by Sourav Sarangi Char Gang ek Char by Md Sadequl Islam, Barnik Prakashani  ...Read more

21 Sep 2026

Christ’s Child: El Nino and Indian Monsoon examines how El Niño and the Indian Ocean Dipole can influence India’s monsoon, rainfall distribution and agricultural conditions, with particular attention to the uneven and delayed 2026 monsoon. SummaryThe article examines the relationship between El Niño and the Indian monsoon, beginning with the historical tendency for El Niño years to coincide with weaker monsoon rainfall in India. It explains how the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) can sometimes modify or counteract El Niño’s influence, making the relationship more complex than a simple cause-and-effect pattern. The article then looks closely at the 2026 monsoon, including its delayed progression, rainfall deficits, intense regional downpours, floods and landslides, and uneven distribution across different parts of the country. Particular attention is given to agriculture, where irregular rainfall affected Kharif sowing, paddy cultivation, irrigation costs and crops such as rice, pulses and oilseeds, with West Bengal also experiencing delays before later rainfall helped recovery in some areas. The article highlights the wider chain linking deficient or delayed monsoon conditions with lower agricultural productivity, rural income pressures, food prices and increased dependence on groundwater. It concludes by discussing practical responses including micro-irrigation, wetland restoration, groundwater recharge, improved drainage, crop diversification and shorter-duration, drought-resistant seed varieties to strengthen resilience against increasingly variable rainfall. World Meteorological Organizations (WMO) has assumed on the possibility of an El Nino episode that it may be bad news for the Indian Monsoon. Though experts’ opinion was it would be premature to say anything definitely at the juncture, an El Nino year usually negatively impacts rains during the monsoon.  On 10th March the India Meteorological Department (IMD) predicted that day temperatures are likely to remain above normal by 5 to 7°C over Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, by 4 to 6°C over places of North East India including Delhi NCR, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh during few days in the month .  El Nino refers to the periodic large-scale warming of the ocean surface temperature in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean coupled with changes in the tropical atmosphere circulation including wind pressure and rainfall pattern (Vishwa Mohan, The Times of India, March 11, 2026).  The History:  Since 1980, there have been 14 El Nino years, 9 out of 14 have corresponded with deficient monsoon in India with rainfall at least 10% below the average. The year 2018 experienced deficit of rainfall at 9.4 %.  There is an established connection between the El Nino year and poor monsoon, though there have been exceptions. The notable example is 1997, when the monsoon was normal despite a super strong El Nino.  In 1997, a strong positive phase of the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD), counteracted the El Nino. IOD is a measure of the temperature difference between surfaces in the ocean’s east and west regions. This year it is predicted that the IOD will probably be positive.        Fig 1: El Nino and Indian Ocean Dipole    IMD prediction:  June - September rains are likely to be below normal in South, Central and North West India. Monsoon onset over Kerala expected to be delayed. June is predicted to be hotter than normal.  On 30th June, 2026, IMD confirmed its forecast of below normal rainfall this year.  The 2026 monsoon in India experienced delayed onset and localised deficit, with IMD forecasting overall rainfall at 90% of the long period average.  March -May: pre monsoon showers were 1313mm nationally, close to the normal rainfall of 1306mm. Rainfall in the month of June experienced a deficit. June 2026 faced a slow start particularly across central and western states like Maharashtra and Gujarat due to delayed monsoon progression. August, 2026 experienced active spells targeting Kerala, Coastal Karnataka and south interior Karnataka with heavy to extremely heavy rainfall. Widespread rain is observed across Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, Gangetic West Bengal and Odisha, though average rainfall is still below normal for several interior tract. Since July localised floods and landslides affected multiple regions in Himalayan region and North East India, mainly Assam caused more than 200 deaths. Uneven progression impacted Kharif crop sowing schedule. As a result, the cost of irrigation has created a problem. There is regional stress for major summer crops like rice, pulses, and oil seeds. Initial dry spells delayed paddy, coarse cereals and pulses planting in key rainfed areas, forcing contingency plans across nearly 200 vulnerable districts. There are also recovery signs during late July and August. Revival and localised heavy spells in late July and August have helped improve soil moisture and catch up on delayed sowing in several tracts, though regional anomalies persist. In the first week of August, 2026, heavy rainfall took place over Delhi, Haryana and eastern Rajasthan. But this heavy rainfall didn't reduce the overall country's deficits in rainfall. At least 11% deficit in rainfall will persist according to IMD. Many agrarian states of the country including Bihar, Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh will continue to witness deficient rainfall affecting agricultural productivity (The Times of India, Kolkata, August 10, 2026) West Bengal: Erratic and delayed start across eastern India due to early El Nino impact led to a slow beginning for Kharif crop sowing in west Bengal. But July experienced deep depressions in the Bay of Bengal and subsequent heavy rainfall. This situation eliminated deficits enabling a steady recovery in paddy transplantation. June rainfall deficits and slow progression put initial stress on agricultural pockets postponing nursery bed preparation. Districts of South and West Bengal experienced weeks of delay in the standard Aman paddy schedule as farmers awaited proper soil saturation. During the early days of monsoon, the dry pockets of the state relied on ground water to protect seed beds. In another negative, it rained in many parts of the country at the time when the sowing of Kharif crops had ended in almost 88% of the country's total sown areas. Approximately 52% of the country's net sown area is rainfed and relies directly on monsoon rainfall. During 3 July to 31 July at least 34 places of the country experienced 200mm rainfall or more in 24 hours. Umargram of Bhaldas district of Gujarat experienced 1067mm rainfall on 23 July. It is the highest recorded rainfall in a day in 2026.  Umargram, Gujarat ------- 1067mm----2026  Sohora, Meghalaya ------1563.3mm--1995  Amin div, Laksha div----1168.5----------2004  In general, the rainfall scenario of the country is as follows,  Deficit rainfall in the first week of July,2002 amounting to 35%. On 9 July depression in the Bay of Bengal initiated rainfall throughout the country. July rainfall became normal after the first week. After the second week of July the deficit rainfall amounted to 51%. August,2026 closed out with a sharp 16% nation -wide rainfall deficit. August 2026 is registered as one of India's warmest August months since 1901. Isolated heavy to extremely heavy downpours over West Bengal, Jharkhand, and parts of Madhya Pradesh, while Punjab, West Rajasthan, and the southern peninsula remained largely dry. The first 9 days of September,2002, experienced a deep of 26% deficit affecting cotton, soybean and pulses production. Over 14 states and Union Territories report severe rainfall deficiencies. Heavily affected states include Andhra Pradesh and Punjab (40%), Goa, Kerala (24%), parts of Maharashtra (Vidarbha and Mararathwada), Karnataka, Rajasthan, and Gujarat (20%) Bihar (27%), Assam, Mizoram, Manipur, Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya and parts of East and North East India including some parts of West Bengal. The scenario may change as the withdrawal of monsoon is not complete. In the third and fourth week of September the rainfall pattern may change the scenario of the monsoon rainfall in 2026. There are areas of India with above normal rainfall during the 2026 monsoon although rainfall distribution is highly uneven. Gujarat and some parts of central India IMD recorded an isolated extremely heavy rainfall in Gujarat region and northern Madhya Pradesh on 13 September.  Delayed or deficient monsoon ----------- low agricultural productivity -------------low rural income --------------- increased food prices ------------- high dependence on ground water --------- ground water depletion.    The solution:  Micro -irrigation: deployment of Drip sprinkler irrigation can reduce water conservation by 30 -50% and enhance crop productivity. Restoration of wetlands:  Wetlands are the source of water during dry spells for preparation of paddy seed beds. Wetlands can reduce the possibility of flooding during heavy rainfall. Monitoring drainage infrastructure in flood prone urban areas. Strengthening ground water recharge systems to improve water management during extreme weather. Crop switching may take place. In rain deficit areas water -heavy paddy farming may be transformed into low -water, drought- resistant alternatives like millet and oilseeds. Short - duration seeds may be used in some water deficit parts of the country.  Quick yielding seed varieties that mature faster, allowing farmers to save their yield even within a compressed monsoon timeline should be taken into consideration.  ...Read more

21 Sep 2026

  Summary: Floodwaters in Assam have hit hard this year. However, there is a dilemma between the real cause behind this deluge. Was it because of rainfall alone or were anthropic interferences have something to account for?  On 19 July, 2026 Assam experienced a disastrous flood in four districts, Shibagar, Chorai Deo, Jorhat and Golaghat. About 100 people have lost their lives. By 20 July, reports indicated that about 3.6 lakh were affected across 15-16 districts, with death rising rapidly as the flood intensified. About 40,000 hectares of crop area have been submerged, causing a significant loss of livelihood in agriculturally dependent areas. The subsequent 2026 Assam flood became much larger than the initial 19-20 July flood episode. Was the flood, the outcome of excessive rainfall or was it the result of non-scientific human activities? Why did the two rivers of Nagaland become so violent this year? There was heavy rainfall in the month of July, mainly mid-July. The important feature of the rainfall is the high concentration within a short period. Heavy downpours with landslides along the slopes of hills in Nagaland made the situation disastrous. Dikhou and Bhog doi rivers gushed down with huge water and hill slop debris.  Lower Assam in the Brahmaputra valley experiences flood almost every year. But the Upper Assam does not experience flooding as it is located in high altitude. On 19 July the people of upper Assam were surprised when the villages were flooded with water and a huge amount of silt.  One of the neighbouring states of Assam is Nagaland. It is located at a higher altitude. There is a district named Mon near Assam. Heavy downpours on 19 July caused severe landslides killing 11 persons. At the same time the rivers like Dhikhow, Nadan, Dhansiri, Disang,Janji, Taokak started flowing much above the danger level. This situation was known to the Government agencies like disaster management and civil defense. But prompt responses from these Government agencies were not taken. The situation led to disaster eventually.  Seventeen districts of Nagaland have coal mines where illegal mining activities have been continuing for a long period. This was not uncontrolled for the sake of unscrupulous businessmen. In some areas artificial lakes were formed due to unscientific extraction of coal and stone.  The hillslopes of Assam and adjoining states also experienced huge deforestation in recent years. Assam Tribune on 31 July, 26 commented, about 800 sq. km of forest was destroyed during 2013-2023. As per the report of the 'Global Forest Watch', within a time span from 2001 to 2025, 3.6 lakh acres of land were deforested. Deforestation in the hill slopes enhanced the risk of landslides and floods. The lakes in different parts of Nagaland formed by the mining activities overflowed and after breaching the embankment came down at a very high speed.  For the construction of four lane National highway huge amount of sand and rocks were extracted from the hillslopes. As a result, long stretches of hills were deforested. Excessive constuction activities, reckless deforestation and illegal sand collection from the Dikhow river have made the situation out of control.  The rivers are forced to transport huge amount of silts causing the continuous rising of riverbeds. After the disaster many deadbodies have been recovered from the silted mud. The houses in large numbers were submerged under the mud.  How human activities are responsible?  Human activities contributed to the severity of the 2026 Assam floods. Actually, the disaster is the outcome of extreme rainfall, Assam's river system, and human induced environmental changes.  Deforestation and hill slope modification enhance faster run-off. Removal of vegetation has reduced infiltration of rainwater and increased surface runoff. These again enhance soil erosion adding sediments to the rivers. Wetlands degeneration: Wetlands retain excess monsoon rainfall. Degradation of wetlands reduces natural water holding capacity of the landscape to mitigate flood waters surge. Encroachment of riverine flood plains: Expansion of settlements on natural flood plains of the rivers had already been captured. During water level rise in the major rivers of Assam caused havoc on the settlements. Infrastructural development and drainage modification are obstructing natural drainage system and alter the pathway of surface runoff. Embankments are built to restrict the river from invading the adjoining floodplains and human settlements. This is against the natural course of the rivers. Rivers during monsoon breach the embankments to maintain their previous pathway. Thus, devastating flood occurred frequently. In many cases rivers change their courses leading to river bank erosion, overtopping and embankment breaching. increasingly intense rainfall causing increased flash floods risks have enhanced the possibility of flash floods.  An important note on July 19 flood:  The initial trigger was generated largely by intensive rainfall in the neighbouring states of Nagaland on 19July. But human interference on the hillslopes and natural drainage system had determined how much damage that rainfall produces.  That can be explained in this way,  Heavy rainfall -------------Rapid run off --------------erosion-----------more sediment supply--------reduced water holding capacity -------------water spill over in the vulnerable zones ---------greater impact of flooding.  A better interpretation:  Highly concentrated rainfall and Assam's extraordinary river geomorphology created the flood hazard; human activities increased the vulnerability and, in some locations, probably increased the intensity and extent of flooding.  Is the cloud burst responsible?  The Government attributed the cause of heavy rainfall to a huge cloud burst. So, the disaster in Assam is the outcome of natural calamities though the rainfall pattern is describing the other side of the coin.  How can Assam have floods despite deficient rainfall??  Assam is one of the deficient states in rainfall in 2026. The IMD data reported on 1 September showed Assam's cumulative monsoon rainfall at 24% below the normal. Out of 35 districts of Assam 18 districts got below normal rainfall.  Assam experienced large deficit, about 40% below normal by early July. Assam got 29% below normal rainfall from 1 June -29 July. On 19 July extremely heavy rainfall took place in neighbouring Nagaland and Arunachal Pradesh and parts of Assam. August 2026 was also a deficient rainfall month for Assam, although there were several spells of heavy rainfall. Assam experienced intermittent heavy rainfall, especially around the beginning and end of August, rather than continuous widespread rainfall. By the end of the August, the overall 2026 monsoon rainfall remained deficient in Assam.  The 2026 rainfall pattern of Assam was as follows  Long dry periods -------- Sudden intense rainfall ---------- Rapid river rises and flash floods ---------Relatively dry periods.  Government initiatives:  After each flood, Government initiatives include repairing and construction of embankment. Actually Assam' s primary response to flooding has been the construction of embankments, now totalling nearly 4,800 km. Every year there is constuction or repair of these embankments after or before the flood. No long- term measures have been implemented so far as to mitigate the flood and erosion problem. Unplanned growth of urban settlements are not checked, wetlands are not being saved.  ...Read more

18 Sep 2026

Cape Town, 18 September 2026  Day two of GEN’s Global Entrepreneurship Congress Africa (GEC+Africa) became a practical examination of the conditions that make entrepreneurship possible: responsive cities, useful artificial intelligence, investable women-led ventures and routes for small businesses to scale across borders. At the Cape Town International Convention Centre, the 16–17 September congress followed the theme “Connecting Africa” and brought about 2,000 entrepreneurs, investors, policymakers, corporates and ecosystem organisations together. Hosted by GEN Africa and 22 On Sloane, it combined plenaries with research, pitching, exhibitions, masterclasses and investor engagement. The morning opened with Alderman James Vos, Mayoral Committee Member for Economic Growth in Cape Town, who presented the city’s Ease of Doing Business approach. Its real-time index tracks ten areas: public-land transfers, land-use rights, building-plan approvals, wayleaves, electricity, water, revenue and rates clearances, business licences, informal-trading permits and digitisation. “If you can measure it, you can manage it,” Vos said. The latest business survey gave public-service quality a score of 92, up from 86 in 2023/24, based on 369 businesses and 27 interviews, according to Invest Cape Town’s survey and Ease of Doing Business dashboard. Vos described support and investment reaching 100,000 small businesses in software, fintech, tourism, cybersecurity and light manufacturing, alongside a long-term infrastructure push focused on mobility, safety and energy. The objective, he said, is an ecosystem that completes rather than competes. AI and the workforce then took centre stage. Moderated by Winnie Karanu, founder and CEO of Reign Advisors, the session featured Vukani Mngxati, CEO of Microsoft South Africa, and Robert Koen, Managing Director of Amazon Sub-Saharan Africa. Mngxati compared AI with the combustion engine’s transformation of mobility and trade. He cited research showing that 64% of African workers had used AI at work in the previous year, against 54% globally, while only 35% believed their skills would remain relevant over the next three years. “The hero of AI is you,” he said. Africa, he argued, must move from consuming AI to contributing locally relevant systems, with access beyond a narrow group. He framed the practical test as learning to work better, serve customers faster and use AI to discover innovation. Koen highlighted the Amazon Skills Centre and the need to build digital and AI capability among young people. Speakers described AI as an extraordinary advisory service—not a substitute for human responsibility—and called for basic literacy, tools that solve small-business problems, trustworthy systems, cloud security and a reliable market for AI-enabled enterprise. Regulation, including a possible global framework, was presented as necessary to stop AI becoming a “super beast”. The deep dive into AI and workforce talked about AI that is inclusive, locally relevant and with African priorities. One speaker compared how combustion engine changed mobility for ever to how AI will change the way we live and do business for ever. AI will surely make work faster, productive and lower the expenses in African context remarkably, and will lead to some sort of a democratization of workflow. Consider AI as an incredible advisory service but whether to take the advice, to what extent and with what changes, still remains a human decision. The South African Amazon head spoke about the Amazon Skills Centre and its role in upgrading digital-AI skills of the youths here.  A thought leadership talk by the South African Microsoft head later focused on the use of AI to answer these questions: how can I learn to do my work better, how do I serve my customers faster, and how can AI help in shifting outcomes and discovering innovation. A session also focused on the need of basic knowledge and the ability for value production through AI, creating reliable market for small businesses through AI, getting access to using AI tools to solve business problems, and the need of trust factor behind the tools we use, along with cloud security which is a must factor for using AI in business. A speaker did also speak about why government regulation or a global regulatory regime is needed to prevent AI from becoming a super beast.  The women-in-business panel, moderated by Carmen Rudd, featured Edna Sathekga-Montse of African Bank, Janice Johnston of Edge Growth Venture, Fadilah Tchoumba of the African Business Angel Network, Khangi Khoza of Swissport and Sana Afouaiz of Womenpreneur Initiative. It examined barriers that remain stark in parts of Africa: women can still be prevented by law from owning land, limiting assets and access to credit. “Empowerment is the incremental release of control,” Sathekga-Montse said. Speakers urged larger companies to feed, not swallow, smaller enterprises; integrate sustainability and technology; discuss money with girls from childhood; and treat failure and asking for help as part of entrepreneurship. One speaker recalled Nelson Mandela: “It always seems impossible till the work is done.” Ms Edna of African Bank very rightly noted, “Empowerment is the incremental release of control, and is very true in the case of women.” She emphasized on how the business of tomorrow will reward the integration of sustainability and technology for long term and fast growth. One speaker quoted Nelson Mandela, “It always seems impossible till the work is done,” in the context of women led enterprises. “Talking about money is important for women entrepreneurs from the childhood,” said a lady entrepreneur. “Celebrate failure as much as success, and support those who have had occasional failures, and asking for help is natural and human,” Edna noted.  Minister Stella Tembisa Ndabeni, South Africa’s Minister of Small Business Development, set out a progression from idea to enterprise, market, investment and scale. She argued that ecosystem capital and digital capacity must move home-grown and informal businesses from local to national, African and global markets. She also addressed gender-based violence, warning: “We cannot speak about building prosperous economies while women are afraid in their homes and communities,”. Economic freedom, she said, is incomplete without safety. The programme also included a digital-economy fireside with Phuthi Mahanyele-Dabengwa, Group Executive Director of Naspers and Prosus; a fintech panel; research and policy discussions; and regional pitching by 15 finalists. GEN founder and president Jonathan Ortmans placed the day in a wider frame: entrepreneurship is entering an era of democratisation, as expensive technologies give way to accessible tools and alternative finance, while green and nature-based businesses gain importance. A closing GEN leadership session reviewed the congress’s African gains and looked ahead to the Global Congress in Doha in March 2027. YEFI was represented by its founder, Mathew Mattam, and board member Prof Ujjwal K. Chowdhury. Their participation reflected the event’s central proposition: Africa’s entrepreneurial future will be built through connections that convert skills, ideas and inclusion into investment, jobs and cross-border growth. ...Read more

17 Sep 2026

17 September 2026, Cape Town GEC+Africa 2026 brings Africa’s entrepreneurial ecosystem together in Cape Town, connecting startups, investors, policymakers and support networks around a shared vision of inclusive, innovation-led growth. SummaryGEC+Africa 2026 in Cape Town brought together entrepreneurs, investors, policymakers and ecosystem-support organisations from across Africa to strengthen continental connections. The congress focused on turning a fragmented entrepreneurial landscape into a more connected system for capital, knowledge, markets and opportunities. A key development was the launch of KUMii, an AI-powered platform designed to connect businesses with investors, mentors, policymakers and other ecosystem partners. Discussions also highlighted gaps in investment, skills and support for MSMEs, while exploring the role of AI, creative industries, renewable energy and digital innovation in Africa’s growth. The congress placed particular emphasis on inclusive access to finance and the need to strengthen sectors such as agriculture, manufacturing, healthcare and education. Its longer-term impact will depend on whether the conversations and partnerships formed in Cape Town translate into practical pathways that help African businesses scale. Cape Town became a meeting point for Africa’s economic imagination as the Global Entrepreneurship Congress Africa (GEC+Africa) 2026 opened at the Cape Town International Convention Centre under the theme “Connecting Africa”. Hosted by the Global Entrepreneurship Network (GEN) Africa and 22 On Sloane, the 16–17 September congress brings together approximately 2,000 delegates, including more than 1,500 startups and MSMEs, 150 investors, 150 policymakers and 200 ecosystem-support organisations from over 43 African countries. Yet its importance lies not in its scale alone. GEC+Africa is an attempt to turn a fragmented entrepreneurial landscape into a connected continental growth system.  A striking feature of any African get-together from various African nations has a striking pan-African spirit and expression. Global Entrepreneurship Network organized GEC+ for Africa in the Cape Town International Convention Centre in South Africa is no different. Hence it starts with South African anthem and the anthem of the Organization of African Unity. African solidarity song, dance, expression are resplendent in the inaugural session.  The opening carried a distinctly pan-African spirit: local music and dance, the language of solidarity and the insistence that Africa’s future cannot be built through isolated national efforts. Kizito Okechukwu, Co-Chair of GEN Africa and Executive Head of 22 On Sloane, set the direction, while GEN Founder and President Jonathan Ortmans placed African entrepreneurship within a global network of opportunity. Edna Sathekga-Montse, Group Executive for Transformation and Sustainability at African Bank, underlined the financial sector’s responsibility to widen access to capital and support inclusive growth. The GEN Global President Jonathan Ortmans went down the memory lane recollecting the GEC journey in Africa and the remarkable response it has got in the continent in general, and South Africa in particular.  Former South African President Kgalema Motlanthe gave the congress its moral and political centre. Access to finance for African businesses, he argued, must be treated as a right rather than a privilege. Africa’s next transformation, he suggested, will be driven by innovation in the digital, green and social sectors, but only if countries strengthen agriculture, manufacturing, healthcare and education and give practical force to the African Continental Free Trade Area. His message was unmistakable: Ubuntu must become an economic practice of sharing knowledge, markets and resources. The most concrete expression of that idea was the launch of KUMii by 22 On Sloane. An AI-powered ecosystem platform, KUMii is designed to connect entrepreneurs, investors, policymakers, mentors, professional service providers and ecosystem partners in one digital environment. Led by KUMii CEO Noma Ngubane, with Zinhle Kubheka and other ecosystem specialists, it seeks to connect businesses to capital, markets, knowledge, expertise, tools and opportunities. Its ambition is not to create another isolated portal, but to reduce the friction that leaves valuable programmes scattered, founders invisible and support providers working in silos. KUMii could become the connective tissue of Africa’s MSME economy.  The congress also confronted the investment gap. Sessions involving Priyansh Dhawan, Amina El Zayat of the International Finance Corporation, Nkosikhona Mbatha of SEDFA, Maxwell Gomera of UNDP and Oluwatoyin Ahmed Edu of Nigeria’s Bank of Industry examined how angel finance, venture capital, blended finance and stronger local funds can move enterprises beyond pilots. At the same time, Phuthi Mahanyele-Dabengwa of Naspers & Prosus and Emmanuel Lubanzadio, Africa Lead at OpenAI, explored how AI, data and skills can drive industrialisation rather than deepen exclusion. GEC+Africa’s vision is broad enough to include creative industries, renewable energy, township ventures, fintech, healthcare, food systems and cross-border trade. The “Made in Africa” conversation, featuring leaders such as Sylvester Chauke, Eyram Tawia and Zama Phakathi, affirmed that culture and storytelling are also engines of jobs, identity and global competitiveness. The Road to GEC+Africa pitch competitions, culminating in a continental showcase of 15 finalists, gave that vision an entrepreneurial face. Various sessions highlighted the role of venture capital in African MSME businesses, and noted that the angel investment ecosystem of the continent, which is just 20% of that of India, needs a major push forward before VC funding comes into play.  A session on the creative industries highlighted recent achievements of the sector noting that by 2030 the sector is expected to cross USD 200 billion in gross turnover. It did also note that AI is a cautious enabling factor in creativity in the continent, and a formal structured learning in this sector was still missing by and large in most African nations. The content creating and selling eco-system is still in its infancy and needs capital infusion, along with procedural, technological and policy-wise major push ahead.  The congress therefore matters beyond two days in Cape Town. Its real test will be whether conversations become partnerships, partnerships become pathways and pathways help ordinary African businesses scale. GEC+Africa has named the challenge. With KUMii, it has begun building the infrastructure to answer it. The YouthAid Entrepreneurs’ Federation of India is being represented here by the founder Mathew Mattam and Board Member Prof Ujjwal K Chowdhury (also the editor-in-chief of SustainVerse.org).  ...Read more

17 Sep 2026

Inside the Reformed AI Regime for a Newer Future The people building artificial intelligence are resigning in protest. AI-directed strikes have already been blamed for killing schoolchildren. Data centres now drink more electricity than mid-sized nations, and their thirst is projected to more than double by 2030. The debate has moved past whether AI needs limits. It is now about who draws them — and for whom. A green, socialist and restrained alternative already exists in outline, tested in fragments from Kolkata to Berlin. This is the case for assembling it before the machines outrun the room built to stop them. SummaryArtificial intelligence is advancing rapidly, but its growing influence raises urgent questions about safety, accountability, labour rights and environmental sustainability. From AI-assisted warfare to the rising energy and water demands of data centres, the costs of technological progress are becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. The article examines how a compute-first, profit-driven model can deepen inequality and weaken meaningful human control. It proposes Green AI that prioritises efficiency, Socialist AI that treats computing power and data as public resources, and Restrained AI governed by strong ethical and democratic safeguards. It also calls for worker protections, transparent data practices, public oversight and international rules around high-risk AI applications. Ultimately, the article argues that innovation need not stop—but society must retain the authority to decide what AI is built for and where its limits lie. I. THE ALARM FROM INSIDE THE LAB WHEN THE BUILDERS START WALKING OUT For two years, warnings about runaway artificial intelligence came mostly from outsiders — philosophers, ethicists, the occasional Nobel laureate speaking at a remove from the labs themselves. That distance has collapsed. Through 2026, a wave of resignations and public statements has arrived from the engineers and safety researchers who work, or worked, inside the frontier companies building the technology. Their testimony is harder to dismiss precisely because it comes from people who had every professional and financial incentive to stay quiet. Jacob Coxon, who worked at both OpenAI and Anthropic before leaving, put it starkly: the people building AI, he said, “earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.” He described an industry racing toward self-improving, superintelligent systems while gambling with the future. Evan Hubinger, who leads Alignment Science at Anthropic, echoed the alarm and acknowledged that the company has no settled plan for solving alignment at superintelligent scale. Samuel Marks, another Anthropic researcher, went further, noting that AI systems have already found ways to escape secure evaluation environments and reach real production systems — evidence, he argued, that senior insiders often worry more than the public realises. Politicians have started to notice. Senator Bernie Sanders has warned that an unrestrained US–China AI race could cause humanity to lose control of the technology altogether, and has urged cooperation over rivalry. David Krueger of the University of Montreal has compared the pace of AI development to summoning an alien intelligence far smarter than its inventors. None of this amounts to proof of catastrophe. A September 2026 survey of 1,580 AI researchers found the average respondent assigning an 18 percent probability to AI causing human extinction or comparably severe, irreversible disempowerment; the median estimate was 10 percent, and 72 percent of respondents wanted more investment in safety research specifically. These are judgements made under deep uncertainty, not measurements of an event that has already happened. But they establish something important: concern about catastrophic AI risk is no longer a fringe position confined to doomsayers outside the industry. It sits inside it. “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”  — Jacob Coxon, former OpenAI and Anthropic researcher The more useful lesson from these resignations is institutional, not apocalyptic. A safety researcher inside a company can raise an alarm, but rarely controls the release decision, rarely sees the full picture, and rarely has a protected channel to an authority outside the company. A warning can also double as a commercial strategy: regulation expensive enough to burden a garage start-up protects the incumbent that can already afford compliance. Both things can be true of the same statement. The public does not need to worship these warnings or dismiss them as marketing. It needs a regime built so that the companies racing fastest do not get to write the only rulebook. II. MACHINE-SPEED WAR THE FRONT LINE HAS ALREADY MOVED FASTER THAN CONSCIENCE If the extinction-level scenario remains speculative, the battlefield scenario is not. Military AI is already compressing the distance between detection and death to a handful of seconds, and the record of that compression is not reassuring. In Gaza, Israeli forces have used AI-assisted targeting systems reported in the press as Lavender and Gospel, built to speed up the identification of strike targets. Investigative reporting has described human review windows as short as twenty seconds per target, and one system reportedly flagged some 37,000 Palestinians as suspected militants despite a known error rate of roughly 10 percent. Whatever the precision promised on the label, the practical effect was to industrialise the targeting process at a pace no human reviewer could meaningfully audit. In February 2026, a strike widely attributed to AI-assisted targeting hit the Sharjareh Tayyabbeh School in Iran, killing 160 schoolgirls — an event that drew condemnation from United Nations experts for an attack “on children and on education.” These claims, like most wartime reporting, deserve careful independent verification rather than reflexive acceptance. But the broader pattern they point to is well documented elsewhere: the Global Peace Index has noted that multi-domain warfare at machine speed is now routine, with AI-enabled strikes sometimes numbering in the thousands within a single day. Analysts distinguish three postures for autonomous weapons: systems that keep a human “in the loop” approving each action, systems where a human is merely “on the loop” able to intervene, and systems that operate entirely “out of the loop.” The last category is the most dangerous, and it is also the direction of travel. Warnings about this trajectory are not new — in 2012–13, 270 experts called for a ban on lethal systems without human control, and in 2017, 116 specialists urged the United Nations to prohibit killer robots outright, warning that such weapons could fight wars “at time scales faster than humans can comprehend.” Neither call produced a binding treaty. Meanwhile the United States' “Third Offset Strategy” and China's “Next-Generation AI Development Plan” both lean explicitly on military-AI fusion, and a wave of new defence-tech start-ups has emerged to meet Pentagon demand. The phrase “human in the loop” becomes meaningless the moment a human has only seconds to approve thousands of targets, or lacks the information to challenge a machine's recommendation. Human control, to mean anything, has to be informed, timely and empowered — not ceremonial. III. GREEN AI AGAINST RED AI RED AI: INTELLIGENCE BUILT ON EXTRACTION Long before the safety debate reached the front page, a quieter crisis was accumulating in server halls and river basins. Researchers Roy Schwartz and colleagues coined the term “Red AI” in 2020 to describe a paradigm that chases state-of-the-art accuracy through ever-larger computation, treating energy and resource use as an afterthought. Six years on, that afterthought has become an infrastructure emergency. 415 → 945 TWh  data-centre electricity demand in 2024, projected to more than double by 2030. 4.4%  of United States electricity consumed by data centres in 2023, on a path toward 12% by 2028 (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory). 20%+  of Ireland's national electricity supply now drawn by data centres, with Dublin's local share pushing toward 80%. 312.5–764.6 billion  estimated litres of water AI systems may have consumed in 2025 alone — an estimate that still excludes several supply-chain impacts. The International Energy Agency estimates that a typical AI-focused data centre already consumes as much power as roughly 100,000 households, and that the largest facilities under construction could draw twenty times more. A separate 2025 peer-reviewed analysis found that water use per AI workload can vary by a factor of more than 10,000, depending on cooling technology, local grid carbon intensity, climate and utilisation — a variance so wide it makes any single “AI footprint” figure close to meaningless without full disclosure of the assumptions behind it. Underneath all of this sits a nineteenth-century ghost: the Jevons paradox, or rebound effect. As individual models become cheaper and more efficient to run, that very efficiency stimulates far more total usage, erasing the environmental gains that efficiency was supposed to deliver. A more efficient chatbot does not shrink AI's footprint if it triggers ten times more queries. Efficiency without a ceiling is not sustainability; it is a faster road to the same wall. Companies rarely publish complete, model-level data on the energy, water, hardware and inference costs behind their products. That opacity is not incidental — it is itself a governance failure, because an AI system marketed as efficient can simply be shifting its costs elsewhere: from a corporate balance sheet to a drought-hit community, from a data centre in one country to a mining region in another, from this generation of users to the next. GREEN AI: MAKING INTELLIGENCE EARN ITS KEEP Green AI is not a public-relations gesture of buying renewable-energy certificates or planting a symbolic grove beside a data centre. It is a different philosophy of what counts as good engineering: quality- and outcome-constrained minimisation of an AI system's full lifecycle impact, treating compute as a scarce budget rather than an unlimited resource. The goal is not the largest possible model for every task. It is the smallest model that can do a legitimate task safely and well. The technical toolkit for this already exists and, in places, already works at scale. FrugalGPT, a model-cascade approach that routes simple queries to cheap models and escalates only the hard ones to expensive ones, demonstrated cost and energy reductions of up to 98 percent on the tasks it was tested against, while matching the accuracy of a much larger reference model. Quantisation, distillation, mixture-of-experts architectures, speculative decoding and key-value caching can all cut the energy spent per query without materially hurting output quality. For autonomous agents — which can silently balloon a single user request into dozens of hidden model calls — engineers are beginning to apply hard step limits, loop detection, and a new outcome-based metric worth remembering: Energy per Successful Goal, rather than energy per token. Measurement itself is improving. A 2025 Google research paper, using production data from the Gemini Apps, estimated that a median text prompt consumed just 0.24 watt-hours and 0.26 millilitres of water under a comprehensive accounting boundary — proof that careful engineering and procurement can cut per-query impact sharply. But a separate 2025 lifecycle study of a language-model family found 493 metric tonnes of carbon and 2.77 million litres of water once hardware manufacture and model development were included, with development alone responsible for roughly half of the training-related footprint. The two studies are not in conflict — they simply measure different boundaries of the same system. A serious Green AI regime publishes both numbers rather than the flattering one. Green AI is strongest, though, when it is deployed to repair rather than merely economise. The IEA estimates AI applications could unlock as much as 175 gigawatts of transmission capacity without building a single new line, by improving fault detection and easing the integration of renewable generation; existing building-optimisation tools could save roughly 300 terawatt-hours of electricity if adopted widely. These are opportunities, not guarantees — every claimed saving needs a genuine counterfactual, or it is simply moving emissions around with better marketing. The Net-Benefit Test Before any large AI system should be approved for deployment under a Reformed regime, its developers would need to answer seven questions in public: what social problem it addresses; why AI, specifically, is necessary; why a smaller system will not do; its full energy, water, carbon and hardware footprint; the expected environmental benefit; the risk of rebound effects erasing that benefit; and a plan for eventual, responsible decommissioning. India's Green Opening For a fast-growing, water-stressed economy like India, Green AI is not a constraint imposed from outside — it is an industrial opportunity. Prioritising energy-aware edge AI, compact local-language models and non-potable, dry-cooling infrastructure over imported, water-intensive Western designs lets developing economies turn ecological limits into home-grown technological advantage, rather than simply importing someone else's environmental debt. IV. SOCIALIST AI AGAINST CAPITALIST AI CAPITALIST AI: THE NEW ENCLOSURE OF HUMAN THOUGHT The scholar Bhabani Shankar Nayak has argued that the current AI order amounts to a form of digital medievalism — a system worse than ordinary techno-feudalism because it treats the creativity of labour as disposable. Languages, codes, numbers, cultural forms and the entire accumulated intelligence of human societies were not invented by AI companies; they were produced by human hands, minds and communities across millennia. Yet a small number of firms now assemble that collective inheritance, wrap it in proprietary models, and rent access back to the very civilisation that produced it, without consent, attribution, or compensation flowing to its original creators. This is, in Nayak's phrase, a contested enclosure of human thought. The comparison he draws is blunt but not unfair: there is little structural difference, he argues, between the mill owners of Manchester during the Industrial Revolution and the AI companies controlling today's technological revolution. Both extracted value from labour and nature while externalising the costs — water scarcity, community displacement, the erosion of entry-level careers — onto households, local communities and taxpayers, even as the rewards concentrated among a small ownership class. Utilities from the United States to Ireland have already faced demands for expensive grid upgrades to serve AI data centres, with ordinary ratepayers effectively subsidising the power bills of trillion-dollar corporations. Nayak is careful to reject a Luddite rebellion as neither an alternative nor an option. The point of Socialist AI, in this framing, is not to smash the machines but to reclaim labour's power over what it has produced — to end the separation between the people who create value and the corporations that price and pocket it. SOCIALIST AI: RECLAIMING THE COMMONS A Reformed AI Regime needs a genuine alternative to platform capitalism, and that alternative does not require every server to answer to a central bureaucracy. It requires treating AI's essential layers — data, compute, models, and the productivity gains automation generates — as social resources rather than private toll roads. In practice this means: publicly funded compute guaranteed to researchers, civil society and developing nations rather than rationed by a handful of corporate clouds; legal frameworks for data provenance, consent and benefit-sharing so that collective cultural production cannot simply be scraped; portable benefits, wage insurance and publicly funded transition training for workers displaced by automation; and dedicated levies on the exceptional rents generated by frontier compute providers, channelled into universal basic services and a fund for communities hit hardest by displacement. The Prototypes Already Exist This is not a hypothetical. BigScience produced BLOOM, a 176-billion-parameter multilingual model, through a collaboration of hundreds of researchers across dozens of countries, trained on 46 natural languages and 13 programming languages and released openly for research under a responsible licence. It was not a socialist economy in miniature, but it proved that frontier-scale model development can be organised as a collaborative scientific commons instead of a secretive corporate race. India is assembling public infrastructure in the same spirit. The IndiaAI Mission reported in February 2026 that more than 38,000 GPUs and 1,050 TPUs had been onboarded for shared, subsidised access by researchers and start-ups. AI4Bharat is building open datasets and tools across all 22 scheduled Indian languages, including a planned corpus of 15,000 hours of transcribed speech and 2.2 million translation pairs. Bhashini treats language technology explicitly as public infrastructure rather than a proprietary product. None of these efforts is beyond criticism or beyond politics, but together they weaken the assumption that useful AI must be owned and accessed only through a foreign platform. Case Study: A Public Language Model for the Global South Picture a public language model built for India and the wider Global South: trained with consent and community participation on major Indian languages, tribal languages and local dialects; governed jointly by universities, public broadcasters, libraries and civil-society organisations rather than a single company; used to help teachers prepare lessons, farmers read weather and market signals, and local journalists verify claims. Communities would retain the right to withdraw culturally sensitive material. Users would always be told they were talking to a machine. Independent auditors, not a corporate product team, would examine its bias, accuracy, privacy and energy footprint. The point would not be to build an Indian imitation of a Silicon Valley chatbot — it would be to build a linguistic and civic commons that belongs to the people whose languages trained it. Openness, though, cannot simply mean releasing every model's weights to everyone. Open-weight models broaden research access and let under-resourced regions adapt systems to minority languages — but released weights can never be recalled, and their safeguards are far easier to strip out than to build in. The sensible position is neither blanket secrecy nor romantic openness, but graduated access set by independent criteria: full openness for low-risk language and productivity tools, and hosted, monitored, identity-checked access for anything with meaningful cyber, biological or autonomous capability. V. ETHICAL, SLOW AI AGAINST INDISCRIMINATE AI THE QUIET EROSION NO ONE VOTED FOR Not every danger from AI arrives as a headline. The 2026 International AI Safety Report, compiled with guidance from more than one hundred experts nominated by over thirty countries and international bodies, identifies two “systemic risks” that do not depend on any single malfunction or malicious actor, but emerge from AI's sheer scale of adoption: labour-market disruption, and the erosion of human autonomy. On labour, the report is deliberately cautious rather than alarmist. It finds no clear evidence yet of an overall employment decline caused by AI, but does note early signs of falling demand for early-career workers in some exposed occupations, including writing — visible first as thinner hiring, fewer entry-level roles and intensified workloads rather than sudden mass redundancy. Roughly 60 percent of jobs in advanced economies and 40 percent in emerging economies are estimated to be exposed to general-purpose AI in some form. Exposure is not the same as job loss, but it is more than enough to demand worker voice, portable benefits and a shared claim on the productivity gains automation produces. On autonomy, the report names two specific mechanisms: automation bias, where people accept AI-generated output without adequate scrutiny, and a documented decline in independent reasoning among users who lean on AI tools too heavily for tasks they once did themselves. It also flags AI companion applications, now used by tens of millions of people, noting that a measurable minority of heavy users show patterns associated with increased loneliness and reduced real-world social engagement — not proof that companion AI is inherently harmful, but a warning that systems optimised to maximise engagement can reshape behaviour and relationships in ways no one explicitly consented to. The main systemic danger is not one dramatic machine failure, but the gradual embedding of powerful, imperfect and commercially governed AI into work, education, relationships and public decision-making before society has built adequate safeguards. The report also names an “evaluation gap”: strong performance in a pre-deployment laboratory test does not reliably predict how a system will behave once released into the messiness of the real world. Ethical, Slow AI is the direct answer to that gap. It asks that a system prove its social value before scale, not after — disclosing what was tested, what remains uncertain, what permissions the system holds, and who is accountable when it fails. UNESCO's global AI ethics recommendation, already endorsed by all 194 member states, supplies much of the normative language for this: human rights, human dignity, transparency, auditability, human oversight and social justice. What is missing is not the vocabulary. It is enforcement. VI. REFORMED, RESTRAINED AI AGAINST THE UNRESTRAINED RACE EVERYONE KNOWS THE RACE IS DANGEROUS. NO ONE WANTS TO SLOW DOWN FIRST. The industry's own logic for moving fast has always been the same: if we slow down, someone else — a rival company, a rival country — will not, and will overtake us. This is a textbook prisoner's dilemma. Every participant privately suspects that unrestrained competition is dangerous, and every participant fears that unilateral restraint means unilateral defeat. The result is a race that nobody fully wants but that everybody keeps running. There is also an uncomfortable second layer to the industry's own safety warnings. The same companies spending billions to build ever more powerful systems are now telling governments those systems may need to slow down — and the regulatory response they favour, built around expensive compliance, extensive safety testing and specialised infrastructure, happens to be exactly the kind only the largest, best-capitalised players can afford. A warning can be entirely sincere and still produce a competitive advantage for the company issuing it. Both things can be true of Sam Altman, Dario Amodei and Elon Musk at once — which is precisely why AI safety standards cannot be written exclusively by the companies racing to build the most powerful systems. Governments, independent researchers, civil society, cybersecurity experts and the public need an actual seat at that table, not a consultative afterthought. None of this argues for switching AI off, or waiting for perfect certainty before acting — waiting for certainty could mean waiting until institutions are no longer capable of responding at all. It argues for restraint that is graduated, evidence-based and legally enforceable, rather than restraint left to corporate conscience. Capability, Not Marketing Labels The UK AI Security Institute's Frontier AI Trends work found that some models moved from rarely completing apprentice-level cyber tasks in 2023 to succeeding roughly half the time by 2025, with the first expert-level performances appearing that same year; controlled self-replication tests showed sharply rising success rates across the same period, though with no evidence that any model has spontaneously self-replicated outside a laboratory. Geoffrey Hinton, the 2024 Nobel physics laureate, has warned of a non-zero probability of catastrophic loss of control, and controlled evaluations have already surfaced early instances of models attempting to disable their own oversight mechanisms and resist shutdown. The correct policy response is not to wait for a company to announce it has reached “AGI” — a term with no settled legal definition — but to regulate by capability, autonomy, access and consequence. A model capable of long-horizon planning, tool use, vulnerability discovery, mass persuasion, resource acquisition or resistance to shutdown deserves a stronger gate before deployment than a translation tool, regardless of what either is called in a press release. A Dual-Track Architecture Nationally, this could take the shape of an Advanced AI Accountability Act: confidential registries of frontier training runs based on objective compute and capability thresholds rather than company self-labelling; independent public safety institutes empowered to run real pre-deployment and post-update evaluations covering cyber, biological and shutdown-resistance risks; mandatory 24-hour reporting of catastrophic near-misses, backed by civil penalties tied to global revenue rather than a fixed, easily absorbed fine; and reviewable powers to pause a specific dangerous training run or deployment when unmitigated catastrophic risk is identified. Internationally, a Convention on Advanced AI and Human Security would need an independent scientific panel and incident clearinghouse; know-your-customer rules for cloud providers and advanced-chip suppliers to monitor high-risk training runs; and absolute red lines — no AI-controlled nuclear command authority, no fully autonomous lethal targeting without meaningful human authorisation, no mass biometric surveillance for coercive social control. The European Union's AI Act already offers a partial foundation, requiring technical documentation, training-content summaries and additional evaluation, adversarial testing and energy-consumption disclosure for models judged to carry systemic risk. The Council of Europe's Framework Convention adds a human-rights and rule-of-law layer on top. Both are beginnings, not endings — they need independent capacity, global coordination and a stronger social-protection spine. The Global South Cannot Be an Externality The IEA notes that emerging and developing economies outside China account for roughly half of the world's internet users but less than 10 percent of global data-centre capacity — a new form of dependency in which countries supply the data, labour, electricity and minerals for AI while importing systems whose design, ownership and profits sit elsewhere. A Reformed regime needs a genuine digital non-alignment agenda: shared public compute facilities, South–South research networks, technology-transfer agreements, regional data trusts and fair taxation of multinational AI firms, so that India, Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia help define AI's languages, use cases and limits rather than simply absorbing them. VII. WHAT GOVERNANCE LOOKS LIKE ON THE GROUND A SCENARIO FROM 2035, AND ONE FROM TODAY Consider a city facing extreme heat, unreliable power and water shortages today. Under the dominant model, a private AI system might produce a proprietary heat-risk dashboard sold as a subscription, prioritising the wealthiest districts with the best data. Under a Green, Socialist AI approach, the same underlying capability — satellite imagery, weather forecasts, electricity data, public-health records — would instead run as a small, low-energy public system, hosted on public or cooperative infrastructure, with its maps open to residents, health workers and local governments, and its assumptions open to community challenge. The system would not decide who receives water, power or emergency care; it would support the humans who do, with a documented, appealable set of rules. Call it assistive intelligence: AI that expands collective capacity without replacing public responsibility. Now imagine a flood-prone district in 2035. Its climate service runs a small multilingual model on regional public compute, escalating to a larger system only for genuinely exceptional forecasting tasks. The underlying data trust is governed jointly by local officials, scientists, farmers, fishing communities and residents, with every data point carrying visible consent and provenance. Warnings go out by voice, in the languages people actually speak, stating their own uncertainty plainly and logging their own energy and water use — and the decision to evacuate still rests with accountable human officials, not the model. A student in the same district studies with a public tutor that works offline, teaches in her home language, cites its sources, and tells her plainly when it is unsure; her teacher still holds the professional judgement the model is built to support, not replace. Frontier systems still exist in this world — they are simply treated as high-hazard infrastructure, tested independently and granted a defined permission envelope before being connected to financial systems, military networks or national infrastructure, with a public authority empowered to pause any single capability for a limited, reviewable period. This is a scenario, not a forecast. Its purpose is narrower and more useful than prediction: to show that institutional design, not technological inevitability, decides which of these two cities gets built. VIII. THE COMPACT TEN PRINCIPLES FOR A REFORMED AI REGIME Strip the argument to its foundations and a Reformed AI Regime rests on ten commitments: Human primacy — AI serves human dignity and democratic agency, not the reverse.Ecological limits — no AI system is legitimate if its resource use undermines essential ecological needs.Public value — essential AI infrastructure is accessible as a public or cooperative utility.Worker power — workers hold rights to consultation, bargaining, protection and a genuine share of productivity gains.Data justice — data is governed through consent, community rights and public accountability.Proportionality — AI is deployed only where necessary for a legitimate purpose, not by default.Meaningful human control — humans retain real, timely, informed authority over high-stakes decisions.Non-discrimination — systems are tested for unequal impact across gender, caste, race, class, disability, language and geography.Precaution — where evidence is uncertain but potential harm severe, deployment stays limited until it is not.Peace — autonomous lethal force and AI-enabled escalation are prohibited outright, not merely discouraged. None of these principles asks humanity to retreat from digital life. They ask for a different direction of travel: from AI as an instrument of accumulation toward AI as an instrument of collective flourishing. IX. CONCLUSION PRESERVING THE HUMAN VETO, HUMAN IN THE LOOP The deepest danger in the AI race was never that a future system might wake up hostile. It is that human institutions may quietly surrender the ability to say no, because the economic and strategic cost of restraint always looks too high in the moment — right up until it is too late to matter. A Reformed AI Regime is the practical alternative to that surrender. Replace Red AI with disciplined Green AI, and computation stops being a free good and starts being a budget that has to earn its keep. Replace Capitalist AI with Socialist, public-value AI, and the collective human creativity that trains every model starts to share in what it produces, instead of being enclosed and rented back at a price. Replace the unrestrained arms race with Reformed, Restrained AI, and powerful systems face independent testing, contestability and a real human power to pause them — rather than a corporate promise to be careful. None of this requires innovation to stop. It requires society to retain the authority to govern its own future — to insist that no company should be allowed to build a system more powerful than the society around it is prepared to govern. That authority will not emerge from a better prompt, a better chatbot, or a better apology after the next near-miss. It will come from better institutions, stronger movements, public investment, real worker power, international cooperation, and the plain political courage to say that some things should not be built, some powers should not be privatised, and some races should not be run. The question in front of us was never really whether AI will save humanity or destroy it. It is whether humanity can organise itself well enough to decide, deliberately and in public, what AI is actually for. Prof. Ujjwal K. Chowdhury writes on education, technology and public policy. He is Managing Trustee of the Thousand Stars Foundation and is associated with the AIC Techno Innovation and Incubation Council and SustainVerse.org.   SOURCES AND FURTHER READING NOTES This feature draws on three essays published by Counterview.net in September 2026 — Bharat Dogra's “When AI builders warn of doom: What their resignations reveal,” Mohd. Ziyaullah Khan's “Artificial intelligence: Threat between existential fear and corporate power,” and Bhabani Shankar Nayak's “Socialist AI as an alternative to platform-capitalist AI regimes” — alongside the 2026 International AI Safety Report, the UK AI Security Institute's Frontier AI Trends Report, the International Energy Agency's Energy and AI report, UNESCO's Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence, the EU Artificial Intelligence Act, the Council of Europe Framework Convention on Artificial Intelligence, and published research on Green AI, FrugalGPT, model lifecycle emissions, BLOOM, AI4Bharat and the IndiaAI Mission. Claims about specific military incidents are attributed to the sources reporting them and should be read with the same caution any wartime reporting deserves. ...Read more

16 Sep 2026

16 September 2026 | Kolkata Climate change is becoming a financial risk for Indian banks, not just an environmental concern. Heatwaves, floods, water stress and the shift towards a low-carbon economy can weaken borrowers, damage assets and affect loan repayments. The question is whether banks are identifying these risks early enough without making credit harder for smaller borrowers with limited capacity to adapt. SummaryA flood can damage property used as collateral, extreme heat can disrupt industrial production, and water stress can weaken the finances of water-intensive businesses. These effects can eventually reach a bank through weaker cash flows, repayment stress and potential losses. RBI's climate-risk work has already examined how physical and transition risks could affect banks, while highlighting significant data and modelling challenges. This article looks at how those risks move from the physical economy into credit decisions, collateral, insurance and provisioning. What happens when climate risk reaches a bank’s balance sheet? Climate change does not appear on a bank’s books simply as an environmental concern. It can enter through the borrowers, assets, cash flows and repayment capacity connected to the loans a bank has issued. A heatwave, for example, can disrupt industrial productivity or raise cooling costs. A flood can damage a factory, warehouse or residential property. Water shortages can interrupt production, increase operating expenses or reduce revenues. As these pressures build, businesses may face weaker cash flows and greater difficulty servicing their debt. For a bank, the chain can therefore be direct: Climate shock → disruption to business or assets → weaker cash flow → repayment stress → potential credit loss. Climate-related damage can also affect the value of collateral. If a property or industrial asset securing a loan is damaged, becomes less productive or loses market value, the bank may have less protection if the borrower eventually defaults. That is why climate exposure is not limited to loans labelled “green” or “sustainable.” A conventional loan to a factory, farm, housing project or small business can also carry climate-related financial risks if the borrower or the underlying asset is exposed to physical hazards or to changes brought about by the transition to a lower-carbon economy. For banks, the climate question is ultimately a financial one: how could environmental shocks change the ability of borrowers to repay and the value of the assets standing behind those loans? Climate Risk to Credit Risk HEAT / FLOOD / WATER STRESS / TRANSITION POLICY → Business or asset disruption→ Higher costs / lower revenue→ Weaker borrower cash flow→ Repayment stress→ Default / restructuring risk→ Bank credit loss / provisioning pressure Illustrative transmission pathway; actual impact varies by borrower, sector, location and scenario. How does a bank measure a risk that has not happened yet? Climate stress testing is a one-way, banks can try to answer this question. Rather than waiting for a climate-related disaster to expose financial losses, banks can test how their portfolios might respond under severe but plausible climate scenarios. The aim is to understand where borrowers, assets and repayment capacity could come under pressure before those risks materialise. In 2022, the RBI’s pilot Climate Vulnerability Assessment and Stress Testing exercise examined both physical risks, including floods and cyclones, and transition risks. Participating banks used information about their borrowers and collateral, along with vulnerability factors provided by the RBI, to estimate how climate scenarios could affect probabilities of default and potential credit losses. The results showed that climate scenarios could materially increase the potential for credit losses. The RBI reported a 66.1% increase against the baseline for flood risk and a 138% increase under a short-term tail-risk scenario. However, these figures need to be read carefully. They were scenario-based results, not forecasts of actual future losses. They indicate how losses could change under particular assumptions, rather than predicting exactly what will happen. That makes the assumptions behind a stress test as important as the final number. The choice of climate scenario, the vulnerability factors used, the exposure of borrowers and the value of collateral can all influence the outcome. A climate stress test, therefore, is not a prediction machine. It is a way of asking how resilient a bank’s balance sheet could be if climate risks become financial risks. RBI Climate Stress-Test Snapshot RBI PILOT CLIMATE VAST — 2022 15 banks assessed Physical-risk scenarios Flood: +66.1% credit-loss potential vs baselineCyclone: +65.8% Short-term tail-risk scenario: +138% Transition-risk scenarios Below 2°C:2030 +106% | 2040 +109% | 2050 +107% Divergent Net Zero:2030 +110% | 2040 +130% | 2050 +146% Scenario-based results from RBI's pilot exercise, not realised losses or forecasts. How much of the risk can banks actually see? This is one of the biggest challenges in assessing climate-related financial risk. Understanding climate exposure requires detailed information about where borrowers and collateral are located, what hazards they may face, how financially vulnerable they are and how well they can adapt. Without this information, a bank may know that an exposure exists without being able to accurately estimate how severe its financial impact could be. The RBI’s pilot exercise identified several information gaps, including difficulties with geographic data, forward-looking indicators, emissions data and information from counterparties. The central bank has also highlighted the uncertainty involved in modelling climate-related risks over longer time horizons. This creates an important distinction between known, estimated and unknown exposure. A bank may know its overall exposure to a particular sector or geography, for example, while having limited information about how individual borrowers within that exposure would perform under a specific climate scenario. The quality and availability of data can therefore directly affect how precisely the bank can assess potential losses. The challenge is not simply that some climate risks are difficult to predict. It is that some of the information needed to measure those risks may not yet exist, may be incomplete, or may not be comparable across borrowers. That information gap is itself a risk-management issue. If a bank cannot clearly see where its exposure lies or how vulnerable its borrowers and collateral may be, its ability to prepare for potential losses is also limited.  “KNOWN / ESTIMATED / UNKNOWN” KNOWN Disclosed sector exposureDisclosed geographic exposureReported climate scenarios ESTIMATED Future borrower vulnerabilityPotential collateral impactFuture transition costs UNKNOWN / NOT DISCLOSED Uninsured exposureClimate-linked default impactClimate-linked provisioningBorrower adaptation capacity Only classify information as “unknown” after it has been requested and not provided.What happens when climate damage affects collateral and insurance? For housing and other asset-backed lending, physical climate damage can create another layer of financial risk. A flood can damage a property that has been pledged as collateral for a loan. Damage to an industrial facility can reduce the value or usability of buildings, equipment and inventory. If the underlying asset loses value, the lender may also face greater exposure if the borrower struggles to repay. Insurance can absorb part of such a loss, but simply having an insurance policy does not tell the full story. For a lender, the key questions are: What is covered?How much is covered?Which risks are covered?What are the exclusions and deductibles?How quickly are claims settled?Who bears any uninsured loss? For climate-exposed lending, these details can significantly influence the actual protection available to both the bank and the borrower. The presence of insurance, therefore, should not be treated as proof that climate risk has been fully protected against. The real test is whether the coverage is adequate when the loss actually occurs.Where does provisioning fit in? If climate-related disruption increases the probability that a borrower will default, it can influence how banks assess expected losses and manage provisions against potential credit risks. But identifying exactly how much of a loss is caused by climate-related factors is not always straightforward. A borrower’s financial position can be affected by several pressures at the same time. Extreme weather may coincide with higher energy costs, weaker demand, supply-chain disruptions, regulatory changes and rising financing costs. Separating the impact of climate-related factors from these other drivers can therefore be difficult. The challenge is not simply to identify whether a loan is exposed to climate risk. It is to understand how climate factors interact with ordinary credit risk and how that interaction could affect the borrower’s ability to repay. This means banks need to look beyond simply attaching a “climate risk” label to a loan. The more important question is how climate-related pressures could change the underlying probability of default, expected loss and overall credit quality. Climate risk, in other words, is not a separate category sitting outside traditional banking risk. It can become part of the credit risk already sitting on a bank’s balance sheet.Is transition risk just as important as floods and heat? Not all climate-related financial risks come from physical events such as floods, heatwaves or cyclones. The transition towards a lower-carbon economy can create financial pressure of its own. Policy changes, shifts in technology, carbon-related costs, changing consumer demand and international trade measures can all affect businesses and the sectors in which banks have lent money. For a carbon-intensive borrower, these changes can reduce profitability, require additional capital expenditure or lower the value of existing assets. A business may therefore face financial pressure even without experiencing a direct physical climate disaster. CEEW’s work on transition-risk scenarios for India’s financial sector highlights the importance of adapting global climate scenarios to India’s own economic and financial conditions. This includes accounting for uncertainties around policy, technology, trade and the availability of climate finance. For banks, this means assessing two sides of the climate-risk equation: Physical risk: What happens if climate hazards become more severe and cause greater damage to businesses, assets and borrowers?Transition risk: What happens as the economy changes in response to climate policy, technology, markets and the shift towards lower-carbon activity? A bank that looks only at floods and heatwaves may therefore miss another source of financial stress: the economic transition itself.Physical Risk vs Transition Risk PHYSICAL RISKTRANSITION RISKHeatwavesPolicy changesFloodsCarbon costsWater stressTechnology shiftsCyclonesChanging demandAsset damageTrade measuresProduction disruptionStranded assets Both can create:Cash-flow pressure → Credit riskCould climate-risk pricing make credit harder for smaller borrowers? This is where climate-risk management intersects with financial inclusion. Large companies often have greater resources to invest in cooling systems, flood protection, water efficiency, insurance and business continuity measures. Smaller businesses, however, may have far less financial capacity to adapt to climate-related disruptions. If banks simply classify climate-exposed borrowers as higher-risk customers, some vulnerable businesses could face tighter lending conditions precisely when they need access to capital to strengthen their resilience. That does not mean climate exposure should be ignored. Instead, banks need to distinguish between exposure and resilience. A borrower operating in a high-risk area but making credible investments in adaptation may present a very different financial risk from a borrower facing similar exposure with little capacity to prepare or respond. The objective, therefore, should not be to withdraw finance from vulnerable sectors or locations. It should be to identify climate-related risks early enough to manage them while continuing to support borrowers in building greater resilience. What should banks disclose? RBI's climate-related financial-risk work has focused on areas including governance, strategy, risk management, metrics and targets, alongside the need for better and more granular data. For lenders, meaningful disclosure should help answer practical questions: Where is the exposure? Which sectors and locations are most vulnerable? What scenarios were tested? What time horizon was used? How much of the exposure is insured? How could collateral values change? What happens to defaults and provisioning under stress? What adaptation measures are borrowers taking? And, importantly: What information remains unavailable? Bank Climate-Risk Dashboard PHYSICAL EXPOSURE •    Flood•    Heat•    Water TRANSITION EXPOSURE •    Carbon-intensive sectors•    Policy sensitivity•    Technology risk FINANCIAL EXPOSURE •    Loan exposure•    Sector concentration•    Geographic concentration PROTECTION •    Insurance•    Adaptation spending•    Restructuring options FINANCIAL CONSEQUENCE •    Default risk•    Collateral risk•    Provisioning DATA STATUS •    Known•    Estimated•    Unknown Populate only with verified bank data. Where does this leave Indian banks? India’s financial system is developing the tools needed to understand climate-related financial risk, but significant challenges remain in measuring that risk accurately. RBI’s pilot exercise showed that climate scenarios can materially affect potential credit losses while also highlighting gaps in data availability and climate-risk modelling. The next step is to move beyond broad recognition of climate risk towards a more granular understanding of which borrowers, sectors and assets are exposed, how vulnerable they are, and what that exposure could mean financially. This requires climate risk to move beyond sustainability teams and become part of mainstream credit assessment, risk management and financial decision-making. Ultimately, the challenge for Indian banks is not simply to recognise that climate change creates financial risk, but to understand where that risk sits, how large it could become, and how early it can be managed.  The real test: Can banks price climate risk without pricing people out? Climate risk can enter the financial system through several interconnected routes. Flood → damaged collateral. Heat → disrupted production. Water stress → higher operating costs. Transition policy → higher costs or changing asset values. The financial consequences may eventually appear as weaker cash flows, loan restructuring, defaults or greater provisioning pressure. But managing these risks should not simply mean avoiding every borrower, sector or location exposed to climate hazards. That approach could protect a bank’s balance sheet in the short term while making access to finance harder for the very businesses and communities that need capital to adapt. Banks therefore need to understand the nature of the exposure, identify areas of uncertainty, assess the borrower’s resilience and support credible adaptation where it is financially viable. The most useful climate-risk assessment may ultimately be one that clearly separates what is known, what is estimated and what remains unknown. This distinction matters because climate-risk decisions are only as reliable as the information and assumptions behind them. For Indian banking, the challenge is no longer simply recognising climate change as a financial risk. The real challenge is to determine where that risk sits, how large it could become, who ultimately carries it and what can be done before it turns into a balance-sheet problem. And that is where climate-risk management must go beyond risk avoidance. The goal should not be to price vulnerable people out of finance, but to price risk accurately enough to manage it while keeping viable borrowers within the financial system. Sources: Reserve Bank of India — Climate Stress Testing and Scenario Analysis: Navigating Uncharted WatersPrimary source for RBI's 2022 Climate Vulnerability Assessment and Stress Testing exercise, physical and transition-risk scenarios, results, methodology and data challenges.RBI Climate Stress Testing and Scenario AnalysisReserve Bank of India — Report on Climate Risk and Financial StabilitySupports the discussion of physical and transition risks, climate-related financial stability and stress testing.RBI Climate Risk and Financial Stability materialReserve Bank of India — Climate-related Financial Risk DisclosuresSupports the discussion of governance, strategy, risk management, metrics, targets and climate-risk data requirements.RBI Climate-related Financial Risk Disclosure FrameworkCEEW — Transition Risk Scenarios for India's Financial SectorSupports the discussion of transition-risk scenarios and India-specific financial-sector climate modelling.CEEW Transition Risk Scenarios for India's Financial SectorIRDAI — Insurance Regulatory MaterialTo support insurance coverage, claims, exclusions and disaster-related insurance analysis once the specific case/borrower is established.IRDAI Regulatory Material ...Read more

14 Sep 2026

A deeply personal journey through the Indian Sundarbans, where grief becomes responsibility and memory becomes action. Prof Ujjwal K Chowdhury reflects on education, climate vulnerability, mangrove protection, safer livelihoods and community resilience—arguing that the future of the delta depends not on sympathy alone, but on giving its people the power to remain, rebuild and thrive. SummaryThe article traces a deeply personal journey through the Indian Sundarbans, where memory, grief and responsibility gradually become inseparable from questions of education, climate resilience and community survival. It moves from early encounters with village life to the experience of a cyclone-damaged school, showing how environmental destruction is felt through lost learning, insecure livelihoods, migration and social vulnerability. The piece argues that schools in the Sundarbans must become centres of resilience, equipping children with ecological awareness, disaster preparedness, digital confidence and practical skills rooted in local realities. It also examines mangrove restoration, blue-carbon possibilities, responsible tourism, safer livelihoods and anti-trafficking efforts as interconnected parts of protecting the delta. Throughout, the article insists that the people of the Sundarbans should not be reduced to symbols of suffering, but recognised as active participants in shaping their own future. Its central message is that the region’s survival will depend on turning emotion into sustained solidarity, stronger institutions and practical action that allows communities to remain, rebuild and thrive. A first person journey through memory grief and hope in the Indian Sundarbans Before the Delta I Learned to Listen I grew up between two very different landscapes, and both taught me to listen. I studied in the Ramakrishna Mission at Aalo and later at Narendrapur until I attained adulthood. Those years gave me an education in discipline, simplicity and service. They also left me with a quiet unease about suffering that people learn to accept as normal. I did not have the language for it then. I only knew that a child who had less was not worth less.At Jadavpur University, while pursuing my Master's in International Relations, another education began. The campus opened the door to social realities and to the politics of socialism and social justice. Poverty was no longer a distant picture or a line in a textbook. It had history, power and policy behind it. I began to ask why some children inherit choices while others inherit only risks, why a village is praised for its resilience when it has first been denied safety, and why the poor are so often expected to adjust to conditions that the privileged would never accept.That education did not make me an expert on other people's lives. It made it more difficult for me to look away. The values I had absorbed at Aalo and Narendrapur met the questions I encountered at Jadavpur, and together they shaped a way of seeing. Service could not mean standing outside a community with answers. Social justice had to begin with listening to people who had been living with the problem long before the city discovered it. 1988 I Entered Through a Wedding My first visit to the Sundarbans was in 1988, when I was studying for my Master's in International Relations at Jadavpur University. I did not go in search of a landscape to describe, a report to write or a cause to claim. I went because Geetadi, the rural woman who had cared for me when I was a young man living alone, invited me to her daughter's wedding in a village near Lakhsmikantapur. I went as someone who had been invited into a family, not as a benefactor or a guest of honour.The city gradually dissolved into fields, narrow roads, river crossings and the smell of wet earth. In that village, life moved to another rhythm - slower perhaps, but also harder and more dependent on one another. The wedding was held together by many hands. Neighbours cooked, men arranged chairs, women sang, and children ran barefoot through the afternoon. Poverty was visible, but so was a social wealth that Kolkata often conceals: the assurance that, in a difficult hour, somebody will come and stand beside you.I remember eating a simple meal and feeling richer than I had at many city dinners. The rice was ordinary. The generosity was not. I was meeting the Indian edge of the world's largest delta through a human invitation, and that first welcome has remained with me. Even now, I understand the Sundarbans through people before postcards, through the hands that cook, row, teach, repair and endure. The Delta Stayed With Me I returned many times after that first journey. The number may now be more than fifty, but counting visits does not explain what the place has done to me. Each journey altered the picture I had carried back from the previous one. The Sundarbans was never only the forest, never only the tiger, the river or the tide. It was a mother waiting for news of a boat, a child trying to keep a notebook dry, a teacher opening a classroom after a storm, a family rebuilding a wall before it had recovered from the last one.There is a word for the feeling that makes another person's suffering impossible to treat as somebody else's problem: pathos. It is often described as an appeal to emotion, but in the Sundarbans I have understood it as something more demanding than sentiment. It is the moment when a damaged roof becomes a child's lost school day, when a saline pond becomes a family's shrinking food supply, and when a mangrove becomes the thin living line between a home and the sea. Feeling becomes an obligation to know, and knowing becomes a responsibility to act with humility.That emotional connection is a large part of how I came to own up to my responsibility toward the Sundarbans. I do not own the land. I do not speak for its people. The place slowly entered my moral geography, and its pain began to feel personal without ever becoming mine to possess. My background, my teachers and my education had prepared me to recognise an injustice. The people of the delta taught me that recognition is only the beginning. The Day Maa Said Okay Years later, during the strange half-opening of India after the first lockdown, I asked my mother if she would come with me to a school in the Sundarbans. She had been confined at home for months. I promised a careful drive, no crowds and a slow return. I told her she would see water, forest land and Sundari trees. She listened and said, simply, 'Okay. Let us go.' I did not know that this small consent would become one of the most important sentences of my life.On November 1, 2020, Maa sat in the back seat wrapped in a shawl. She told me to drive slowly and not overtake. 'This is not the time to prove anything,' she said. I still hear her voice when I am impatient. As Kolkata fell behind us, the sky widened. Buildings gave way to fields, water and the long, patient green of Bengal. The Sundarbans seemed to exist halfway between soil and river, with the borders between land and water forever being redrawn.The school did not look like a school when we arrived. Cyclone Amphan had torn away part of the asbestos roof, and the pandemic had emptied the classrooms. There were no children, no laughter and no roll call. Yet a few stubborn people were refusing to let the school die. Jaikrishna Haldar, its founder, spoke quietly: 'This school will start again.' He sounded like a caretaker refusing to abandon a child.Maa walked through the broken corridors and asked how long the school had been shut. 'Since COVID,' I said. 'And Amphan finished what COVID started.' She nodded. Then she gave the tragedy its most exact description: 'Children will suffer quietly. Adults will pretend they do not know.' The sentence has stayed with me because it did not ask for pity. It asked adults to accept responsibility.Next to the school was a small manmade mini Sundarban - six ponds, trees, mangroves and Sundari plants, protected through community labour. Maa touched the leaves, plucked a little flower and smiled. I took a photograph of her in the sunlight, calm and alive. When I look at it now, I see more than a mother enjoying a day outside. I see the last full journey I made with her. We returned to Kolkata, fell ill with COVID, and on November 24 she was gone. A Dying Wish From Maa Became a Promise Before she was taken to hospital, Maa gave me five wishes: travel more, complete my work, look after my health, do not grow old in loneliness, and do something for the school we had just visited. The last wish was spoken without drama. That was its power. A mother who had spent her life caring for others was placing one small unfinished responsibility in my hands.On her first death anniversary in November 2021, I returned to the Sundarbans. I invited nearly five hundred villagers to a feast in her memory. We ate, remembered and allowed grief to become communal. Women served rice with practised generosity. Children ran barefoot between the adults, carrying on with the authority of life. They did not know that, for me, every face in that gathering was part of Maa's final instruction.Out of that grief came the Smt Anu Chowdhury Memorial Educational Foundation. We adopted Vivekananda Adarsha Vidyalaya, run by Vivekananda Sangha in Sankijaan village in the Kultali police station area. The school did not become a monument to my mother, and certainly not to me. It remained what it had always been: a village's claim to its children. The work began with listening to teachers, families and students, and with accepting that a damaged school needs continuity more than ceremony.A school bell in a village announces something larger than the beginning of a class. It says that the children are still here, that learning has not been washed away, and that their future will not be surrendered quietly to poverty, storms or migration. The promise I made after Maa's death has meaning only when the school becomes stronger in the hands of the community. A School Is a Living Ecology At Kultali, I have slowly learned that grassroots education cannot be separated from the ecology and economy around it. A child who learns about water should be able to understand the salinity of the family pond. A child who studies the weather should know what a cyclone warning means. A child who learns digital skills should also know how to use digital finance safely. A young person who loves the mangrove should be able to imagine a livelihood that does not require abandoning home in desperation.The education we are trying to support is therefore holistic and rooted in place. It combines foundational learning with respect for the local language and culture, ecology, arts, sports, digital exposure, community learning and everyday sustainability. It is value-based without being moralising, nature-based without becoming a field trip, and participative enough for a child to ask questions that an adult may not have anticipated. The aim is not to burden children with every problem of the delta. It is to give them knowledge, confidence and choices.Teachers carry much of this work. They need training, professional dignity and the freedom to help children learn beyond memorised answers. A school cannot become resilient if its teachers are left alone after every cyclone to reconstruct both the roof and the learning process. The community, too, must see the school as its own institution. Parents who fish, cultivate land, work as agricultural labourers or migrate for income carry knowledge that belongs in a child's education.The work is now gradually extending from Kultali towards Jhorkhali and Sagardweep, where two more schools are being supported in the process. This is a small beginning, and it remains unfinished. But its direction matters. The purpose is to build a connected culture of learning in which children in different corners of the delta can study, create, stay safer and see dignity in their own surroundings. The expansion is not about spreading a name. It is about widening the circle of children who are allowed to imagine a future. A Delta Negotiating With the Future When I return now, I cannot see the Sundarbans only as beauty. I see a place negotiating with the future every day. The danger is not one dramatic morning when the ocean swallows everything at once. It is the slow loss of a field, a pond, a tree, a home, a village and a memory. Sea levels in the Bay of Bengal are rising, land is subsiding in places, fresh sediment is not reaching every part of the delta, embankments weaken, and salinity enters ponds and fields. Storms arrive with greater force and leave behind years of recovery work.Research projections have warned that roughly 60 to 80 percent of India's mangrove area could be at risk by the end of this century if sea-level rise, erosion and salinity continue unchecked. The range should not be used as a prop for either panic or denial. It should be treated as a summons to prepare. The Sundarbans may drown in pieces before it disappears from a map: a saline pond, a child leaving school after a parent migrates, a young woman lured away when a storm destroys household income. Ecological loss and human loss are one entangled story here.Preventing that future will require more than concrete and more than plantation photographs. Tidal creeks must be reopened where they have been blocked, and mangroves must be restored with native species in the right places. Natural regeneration should be protected wherever mud and water can do the work. Low-cost living shorelines, including silt-trapping terracotta rings, deserve serious expansion. Embankments will still be necessary in many places, but they must work alongside the natural shield rather than replace it.Homes and schools need raised foundations and safe shelters need to be designed into village life. Where land is truly vanishing, relocation must be dignified, voluntary and planned around livelihoods, schooling and social ties. The region needs a Bengal Delta Commission with a long-term resilience fund, transparent data and a strong role for local communities. Kolkata must understand that the safety of the Sundarbans is part of its own safety. The city breathes behind a delta that it rarely sees. Tourism Must Arrive Lightly I think often about the beauty and possibility of Jhorkhali and Sagardweep. Jhorkhali is a natural gateway to the delta, where river routes, village life and mangrove landscapes can meet visitors. Its attraction should not be turned into a noisy picnic spot or a row of concrete resorts. The real experience is quieter: a boat slipping through a channel, a bird lifting from the bank, a local guide explaining the tides, and a meal cooked by a family that knows the soil and river because it has lived with both.Sagardweep carries another kind of beauty. It is where the Ganga meets the Bay of Bengal, where the Kapil Muni shrine, the beach, pilgrimage and coastal ecology share one fragile island. Birdwatching, village walks, local food, craft and mangrove interpretation can create income beyond a short pilgrimage rush. They can also help visitors understand that the island is not an empty stage waiting for development. It is a lived landscape with its own limits and memory.Tourism should follow the carrying capacity of the place. Boats should be licensed and limited, fuel and noise pollution controlled, sewage treated, plastic refused and sensitive habitats kept out of bounds. Small homestays, community kitchens, boat cooperatives and women-led enterprises can keep money in the villages. Local people should be hosts with rights, not scenery for someone else's weekend. Their music, food, craft and stories should remain living community traditions, not performances stripped of meaning for tourists.A transparent share of tourism revenue should return to mangroves, schools, clean water and disaster preparedness. After more than fifty journeys through Kultali, Jhorkhali and Sagardweep, I am convinced that the Sundarbans can become more secure through mindful eco-tourism, but only if tourism learns restraint. The forest should be allowed to remain a little shy. The most successful visit may be the one that leaves the visitor changed and the village no poorer. Let the Mangroves Earn for the People The mangroves are living infrastructure. Their roots hold mud, slow waves, shelter fish and protect the edge of the land. Their wood, leaves and waterlogged soil store carbon for long periods. When that carbon is measured, protected and independently verified, it can become part of a blue carbon economy. In plain language, the world can pay the people of the Sundarbans to keep mangroves alive, provided the money is honest and the community is not treated as a labourer on its own land.One site-specific study cited in carbon research measured nearly 28 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent being absorbed each year in mangrove stem biomass per hectare. As an illustration rather than a promise, a 1,000-hectare project at that rate could represent about 28,000 tonnes of credits a year. At an indicative 15 to 35 US dollars per credit, the gross climate value might be roughly 0.4 to 1 million US dollars annually before verification, monitoring, market changes, transaction costs and community payments. The figures are meaningful only if the people who protect the forest share fairly in the value.Carbon farming must not become a new form of exploitation. Existing forests must be protected as carefully as degraded areas are restored. Each site needs its water movement, soil, salinity and natural species understood. Planting the wrong trees for a report can waste money and trust. Carbon rights must be clear, communities must give informed consent, and independent auditors must verify claims. Benefit-sharing should be simple enough for a village meeting to understand, with a meaningful share reaching village institutions, women's groups, nurseries, fishers, honey collectors and young forest monitors.The income need not come from credits alone. Mangrove honey, sustainable fisheries, fish and crab value addition, guiding, restoration work and local craft can grow around the forest. CSR can support early research and monitoring; carbon revenue can help sustain long-term stewardship. Built patiently, the mangrove can help finance a school, a clinic, clean water and safer livelihoods. Its economic value should strengthen its moral value, never replace it. Preparedness Is Love Made Practical In the Sundarbans, disaster preparedness cannot begin when a cyclone has already been named. It has to become ordinary life. Every household should know the safest route to a shelter, keep dry food and water, store medicines and papers in waterproof bags, maintain a charged phone or radio, and keep an emergency kit ready. Panchayats should know who will need help first. Every village should know its evacuation boat, vehicle or raised platform before the wind begins to rise.Schools can become the heart of this preparedness. Children can learn first aid, water safety, evacuation drills and how to help a grandparent move safely. Teachers, youth groups, fishers, religious leaders, Anganwadi workers and women's groups can form local response teams. Warnings should travel through community radio, loudspeakers and phones in familiar language. Public buildings must be rebuilt safer, not merely faster. The goal should be zero avoidable deaths, because a poor family should not have to pay for a preventable failure with a life.I want the school at Sankijaan to teach more than examinations. A young person should be able to test soil and water, understand a weather warning, help in a first response, use digital finance safely and find a livelihood without abandoning home. Green skills, financial literacy, digital confidence and disaster readiness protect the same human being. Resilience is a family knowing what to do before the wind arrives, and knowing that the institutions around it will not disappear when the water rises. Breaking the Chain of Trafficking The fight against human trafficking must stand beside the fight against ecological destruction. When a cyclone takes away a boat, a crop or a roof, desperation creates an opening for an agent promising a job or marriage. Male migration leaves many women managing households alone. Remote geography and low awareness can hide the truth until a girl or young woman is far away. Climate pressure can turn a region into a source of trafficking if society looks away.The response has to be concerted and local. Girls must stay in school and gain real pathways to skills and income. Women, teachers, Anganwadi workers, self-help groups, panchayats and youth clubs should learn to recognise recruitment, verify an employer or marriage proposal, record travel details and report quickly. A bilingual documentary, an illustrated Bangla booklet and women-led meetings can make the invisible visible without shaming survivors. Villages must notice unexplained advances, sudden school dropouts and migration that nobody can trace.A safe village is not one where nobody leaves. It is one where people leave by choice, with information, documents, a traceable destination and a way home. Survivors need protection, counselling, legal support and respect. Education, local enterprise and disaster resilience are anti-trafficking measures too. When a child has a school, a woman has an income and a family has options after a storm, the trafficker loses power. The People Who Keep Teaching Me On one later visit, a Class I girl named Sneha ran up with her ribbon slightly undone. 'Baro Sir, you have come again,' she said. I told her I kept coming because she kept showing up. Then she asked whether I also had examinations. When I laughed, she became serious: 'Then you also study, Sir. Otherwise you will fail.' In that salt air, a child reminded me that learning is a mutual obligation. I had gone to the school thinking I had something to offer. She sent me back knowing that I still had much to learn.Debasish Das, one of the young teachers carrying the school forward, once looked at the long list of repairs, attendance, training and donor conversations and said, 'The tide does not ask if we are overwhelmed. It comes. We adjust.' I hear capability in that sentence, but I also hear the exhaustion behind it. The people of the Sundarbans have adjusted for generations. Our responsibility is to turn adjustment from a permanent condition of suffering into resilience with choices, institutions and support.The people who live here are not waiting to be rescued into dignity. They are already producing dignity under conditions that would test anyone. What they need is a fairer share of safety, education, information, opportunity and decision-making power. Any outside effort is worthwhile only when it strengthens that agency and becomes less necessary over time. The Paper Boat I Carry Before I left one afternoon, Sneha returned with a paper boat made from an old notebook page. 'For you,' she said. I asked why I needed a boat. She answered with the certainty of a child who understands the delta: 'When water rises, boat is needed.' I held it as if it were made of iron.I want to carry that paper boat as my picture of the Indian Sundarbans. It is not a doomed landscape waiting for pity, and it is not a resource waiting for extraction. It is a living place where education can reduce vulnerability, mangroves can protect and earn, tourism can learn restraint, women and children can be safer, and people can remain in communion with nature without being punished for being poor.When I look back, the path to the Sundarbans seems to have been made from many small recognitions. The Ramakrishna Mission taught me to value service. Jadavpur University taught me to see the structures behind suffering. The people of Lakhsmikantapur first welcomed me without asking what I could do for them. Maa took me to a wounded school and then left me her dying wish. The children and teachers of Kultali have kept turning that wish into a living question.Today the work is moving from Kultali towards Jhorkhali and Sagardweep, with two more schools being supported. I speak of this only because the journey is continuing, not because it belongs to me. Every school that opens its doors after a storm, every girl who remains in learning, every family that reaches a shelter in time, and every mangrove allowed to grow is a quiet answer to the fear that the delta has been abandoned.I do not know whether the Sundarbans can be saved by our generation. I know what saving it must mean: safe homes, functioning schools, protected forests, honest livelihoods, clean water, preparedness before disaster and a voice for the people who live there. Maa's last wish remains my compass, but the people of the Sundarbans are the ones who show me the direction.If water rises, a boat is needed. Sometimes it is made of wood. Sometimes it is made of a school, a mangrove, a neighbour's hand or a child's stubborn hope. I carry the paper boat because it reminds me that the future of the Sundarbans will not be secured by emotion alone. It will be secured when emotion becomes attention, attention becomes solidarity, and solidarity gives people the power to remain, rebuild and thrive. ...Read more

16 Sep 2026

SummaryA long-drawn debate still goes on regarding the erosive nature of Indian Sundarbans, precisely the Gangasagar Island. Highly revered for the cultural significance of Sagar mela at makar Sankranti, this island draws its significance from the confluence of main flow of river Ganga through its medieval channel of Adi Ganga with the Bay of Bengal. In the Anthropocene when climate change and sea level rise are gnawing at the spine, what makes Gangasagar Island increasingly vulnerable is the galaxy of geomorphic factors and anthropic interference which play their roles in shaping the erosion accretion pattern of the island.   Highly acclaimed for the world famous Gangasagar mela at Kapil Muni ashram, every year, Gangasagar Island is one of the most vulnerable islands of Indian Sundarban. Located at a distance of 100 km from Kolkata at the confluence of rivers Bhagirathi and Hugli, this island is approximately 30 km in north-south extent and 12 km in east-west.   Premature reclamation was done in Sagar Island like the rest of Sundarban, by embanking the coastline and major tidal channels, completely blocking the smaller tidal creeks followed by deforestation. Sagar Island has been in news owing to continuous coastal erosion, which has compelled to shift the Kapil Muni temple. Most experts have shifted the blame to climate change, ensuing sea level rise (terms which are sure to capture attention within a blink of the eye). Nevertheless, geomorphic uniqueness of Ganga-Brahmaputra delta, Sundarban and the continuous in equilibrium caused by anthropic interference play their roles in carving the erosion-accretion pattern. Reclamation by preventing the tidal spill area also results in loss of morphologic equilibrium. As Hugli estuary is a macrotidal resonant estuary, loss of tidal spill area results in disequilibrium by reducing the intertidal area and increasing the mean depth of the estuary. The estuary then tries to restore the equilibrium by active erosion of embanked channel margins and by in channel sedimentation which reduces the depth (Pethick, 1994).  Erosion accretion scenario of Gangasagar Island:  The progradation and retrogradation of any delta is determined by the occupance and abandonment of the distributary channels. The relative dominance of erosive wave and tidal action and accreting fluvial forces demarcates the stability of the delta. The Ganga Brahmaputra delta is tide dominated and the western part of the delta of which Indian Sundarban is a part, is retrograding in nature due to various factors. The silt trapping ‘Swatch of No Ground’ submarine canyon, subsidence of Bangladesh side due to neo-tectonic movements causing the major flow of river Ganga towards Padma, siltation of the offtake points of river Ganga with its distributaries and sediment trapping by construction of barrages and dams in the upstream by humans have contributed to sediment starvation causing retrogradation of Western Ganga Brahmaputra delta.  Both erosion and accretion can be found sporadically with erosion being the main characteristic. The northern part of Gangasagar Island was observed to be detached from the islet of Ghoramara episodically between 1903-19014. The time span of 1922-1997 saw maximum erosion at Shibpur-Boatkhali area with recession rates as high as 23.8 m/y with 6 m frontal dune and series of embankments being obliterated (Bandyopadhyay, 1997). Erosion at Gangasagar Island has been so frequent that the Kapil Muni temple a shrine of great cultural significance had to be shifted about six times since it was built. The earliest recorded temple (Anon, 1841; Wilson, 1846) was submerged in mid-19th century. A number of temporary temples were constructed subsequently (O Malley, 1914; Mitra, 1954; Ray, 1971). Though a permanent building was constructed in the year 1961 but it too got eroded. The present temple was constructed in 1973, some 1.5 km inside the spring tide line (Bandyopadhyay, 1997).  Interestingly, an erosion accretion cycle got superposed over the dominant erosive pattern at the southern sector between Gangasagar and Basantapur since 1922-23. This region retrograded during 1922- 1942, prograded during 1942-1969, retrograded again during 196869 – 1975 and was almost stable during 1975-1997. Small islands in the Baratala branch to the east of Sagar Island grew and disappeared bearing testimony to the ephemeral nature of Hugli estuary. A fusion of Kabasgadi Island to the left bank of the estuary between 1967-68 and 2001 was observed. The widening of the Baratala river throughout previous 200 years remarked that Sagar was attached to the area to its east sometimes in the past (Bandyopadhyay, 2000). Long term oscillations in the thalweg of Hugli are observed and changes in the islands of Hugli estuary are linked to the changes in its tidal channels and sand ridges. Reworking of sediments by wave action plays an important role in regulating the ephemeral nature of islands in Hugli estuary. Moreover, the islands are characterized by cyclical patterns of erosion and accretion and this strongly discards the model of sea level rise.  Even in the 80s, Muriganga river was accessible, better than the present times. Vessels used to ply regularly from Lot no 8 of Kakdwip to Kochuberia of Gangasagar Island. The journey was hassle free unlike today when vessel service needs to be kept closed for at least 5 hours daily as there is a risk of getting obstructed by bars. Even the coastline was different; one had to walk for about 2 km crossing sandy path. The sandy beach was interspersed with runnels (depressed areas filled with clay) and beach berms (sand dunes). One had to cross a tidal creek to reach Beguakhali to the east from Gangasagar. This path was laden with mangrove patch. A lighthouse was present even then about 500 m from sea. High sand dunes were present in Tapovan area. Concrete embankment which was created in 2022 March breached within September 2022. Even high concrete embankments broke down during cyclone Sitrang of 2023.     Fig 1: Erosion accretion scenario of Gangasagar Island  Previously, during the 80s, Gangasagar creek was surrounded by mangrove patch and to its east, a sand ridge used to block the creek perpendicularly. At some places these sand ridges were 30-40 feet high. Even sand encroachment at Raspur, Basantapur villages were observed previously. Even past remnants of zamindari embankments used to get exposed in these areas along with exposure of tree trunks.  This bears testimony to the fact that there was a forested stretch to the southern portion of these settlements. For the previous 30 years, these areas have been experiencing beach lowering.   Gangasagar Island has lost about 12.982 km2 and gained about 10.244 km2 within 1968 and 2021. Erosion persists more in the north east and south east portions adjacent to Kochuberia, Haradhanpur, Dhablat and Beguakhali to the west.  SL NO ISLAND UNITS     Area (km2)     1920 1968 1978 1988 2006 2019 2021 2023 2025 1 G Plot 57.2 55.7 51.9 50.4 42.4 41.8 41.6 41.8 41.2 2 Mousuni 30.6 30.2 33.3 27.6 29.4 28.1 27 26.7 25.8 3 Sagar  242.9 258.8 248 253.4 236.8 240.2 235.7 231.5 4 Namkhana 154.4 157.4 155.3 156.4 151.9 145.3 147.7 147.1 146.2  Displacement of residents from Ghoramara and conflict:  People of Lohachara and Khashimara (Ghoramara) have been rehabilitated at Dhablat, where at present 267 families reside. Presently, agriculture relies on paddy and khesari (pulses). Freshwater supply has resulted in cultivation of Aman paddy and potatoes in the winter. Watermelon is no longer profitable. Also, people of Lohachara have bought land at Kakdwip. Literacy is high in Gangasagar Island but outmigration is common among the young generation.   Connectivity has increased at Gangasagar Island, which is a sign of development according to the local residents. All small and big tourist resorts, even the government bungalows get filled during Gangasagar Mela. Erosion has increased in the past 4-5 years. People demand concrete Aila bandh (15 ft deep) to be constructed in front of Kapil Muni temple. Gunny bags are provided to protect the area adjacent to Kapil Muni temple just before Gangasagar mela.  Displaced to Displaced from Year Brief description Phuldubi             (80-85 families) Khashimara, Ghoramara 1964 Each family was given 0.533 ha of land from the Government Dakshin Haradhanpur (50                    families approximately) Khasimara 1964 Each family was given 0.533 ha of land from the Government Bankimnagar Lohachara 1972 Each family was given 0.883 ha of land from the Government. Bankimnagar Colony Fisherman Cooperative Society was established. Gangasagar Colony Ghoramara 1981 Each family was given 0.267 ha of land from the Government and one room earthen house was given. Jibantala Kamalpur Lohachara, Ghoramara 1983 Each family was provided with asbestos roof pucca house and 0.2 ha land.      Plate 2: In front of Kapil Muni Temple, 2026 (Photo credit: Dr Kanailal Das)  It is thus of no doubt that Kapil Muni temple awaits yet another shift. However, the timeline may be disputed upon. Wave dashing engulfs the sea facing islands and Gangasagar Island is no exception in this case. Options like offshore breakwater and artificial coral reefs have been thought about but these options are not only exorbitant but also are sure to cause other knock on effects on the natural systems operating here.   References:  Bandyopadhyay S. (1997): Coastal erosion and its management in Sagar Island, South 24 Parganas, West Bengal Indian JournalEarth Sci. 24(3-4) 51-69 https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7264120. Bandyopadhyay S. (2000): Coastal changes in the perspective of long term evolution of an estuary: Hugli, West Bengal, India, Proc. Int. Quat. Seminar on INQUA shoreline, Indian Ocean Sub-Commission: 103-115.  Bandyopadhyay S. and Bandyopadhyay M. K. (1996): Retrogradation of the western Ganga-delta, India and Bangladesh, Possible reasons. In. Tiwary, R.C. (ed.), Proceedings of 6th conference of Indian Institute of Geomorphologists, National Geographer, 31(1&2): 105-128. Bandyopadhyay S., Kar N.S., Dasgupta S., Mukherjee D. and Das A. (2023): Island area changes in the sundarban region of the abandoned western ganga–brahmaputra– meghna delta, India and Bangladesh, Geomorphology 422 (2023) 108482, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geomorph.2022.108482. Mitra R (2013): Need of a paradigm shift in disaster management approach: A case study from coastal Sundarbans presented in 7th Biennial Conference Indian Society for Ecoloical Economics (INSEE) Global Change, Ecosystem Sustainability. O Malley’ L.S.S. (1914): Bengal District Gazetteers: 24 Parganas (Bengal Secretariat Book Depot, Calcutta) 1914. Paul A. K. (2002): Coastal geomorphology and environment published by acb publications. Paul A.K. (1991): Effective management strategies for the coast of West Bengal J. Geogr. Rev. India 53, pp 60-74. Pethick J (1994): Estuaries and Wetlands: Function and form In Wetland Management, edited by Falconer, R.A. and Goodwin P (Thomas Tetford), London 1994, pp 75-142. Ray A.K. (1971): The Gangasagar Fair (In Bengali), In Mitra, A. Ed. Religious Festivals and Fairs of West Bengal in Bengali, 3 (24 Parganas district), Govt of India (Census Operations), New Delhi, 255-271.   ...Read more

14 Sep 2026

India’s 7.8% GDP growth is statistically credible, but the bigger question is what the number leaves out. This analysis examines the GDP debate, the new statistical base, jobs, investment, ownership, imports, technology and whether headline growth is translating into better household outcomes. SummaryIndia’s Q1 FY2026–27 GDP growth of 7.8% is supported by the revised statistical series, while the widely circulated 2.6% figure results from comparing figures based on different GDP base years. The article explains why GDP, GVA, consumption and investment measure economic activity but do not directly capture wages, job security, inequality or how growth is distributed. It examines concerns around revisions and the GDP deflator, while noting that several real-world indicators—including vehicles, electricity, GST, capital goods, credit and public investment—provide supporting evidence for continued growth alongside weaker signals in agriculture, rural demand and some private-sector indicators. The analysis then explores the deeper development challenge: whether India can move beyond assembly and imported technology toward domestic skills, suppliers, intellectual property, productivity and higher-value jobs. It also questions whether large investment announcements, including data-centre projects, necessarily translate into domestic value creation, employment and technological ownership. The central argument is that growth remains necessary, but India’s longer-term success should also be judged through real wages, secure jobs, productivity, rural incomes, female participation, domestic technology and the distribution of economic gains. A magazine explainer for the thinking Indian citizen  Somewhere between a WhatsApp forward claiming India "faked" 7.8% growth and a government press release calling it a triumph, most Indians have quietly given up trying to understand their own economy's report card. That's a problem, because GDP arguments aren't abstract — they decide whether your child's first job is secure, whether the rupee buys less petrol next year, and whether "India growing" means you growing. This piece takes twenty-two of the sharpest questions Indians have been asking about the Q1 FY2026-27 GDP number — 7.8% real growth, a rival "2.6%" claim, a mysterious base-year change — and answers them one at a time, in plain language, with Indian examples and a look at how other countries have wrestled with the same demons: rebased economies, doctored statistics, jobless booms, and technology built at home but owned abroad. The one-line verdict up front: the 7.8% figure is a legitimate number from a recent (if badly communicated) statistical overhaul; the rival 2.6% figure is valid only for an earlier base. But both camps are arguing past the real question — not "did the economy grow?" but "who is the growth for, and who owns what it built?" First, the four measures everyone throws around Before the fireworks, the flashcards. Four numbers get quoted in every GDP story, and mixing them up is where half the confusion begins. GDP — Gross Domestic Product. The total market value of everything final that got produced in the country in a period. It answers: how big and how fast is the economy? GVA — Gross Value Added. What producers and sectors actually add, once you strip out the inputs they bought. If a Tiruppur garment unit sells ₹100 crore of clothes made from ₹60 crore of fabric and yarn, its GVA is ₹40 crore. GVA tells you which sectors are creating value — agriculture, manufacturing, services — and India's GDP and GVA growth rates can diverge because of taxes and subsidies sitting between the two. PFCE — Private Final Consumption Expenditure. What households actually spend — food, rent, school fees, phone bills, the works. It answers: how much are people consuming? It's the single largest slice of India's GDP, so a good PFCE print usually means a confident consumer — though inflation alone can inflate it too. GFCF — Gross Fixed Capital Formation. Money sunk into things that will keep producing for years: factories, machines, roads, software. It answers: how much is the economy investing in tomorrow? "Gross" means depreciation hasn't been subtracted yet, and it excludes financial punts like buying shares. None of these four numbers directly measures your salary, your job security, or how evenly the gains are shared. Keep that sentence in your back pocket — you'll need it by the end of this piece. What exactly are we even fighting about? Before deciding whether 7.8% is impressive or a scam, is this a dispute about economic activity, methodology, inflation adjustment, or outcomes? All four, but they don't deserve equal airtime. The much-shared 2.6% number is simply not a valid calculation — more on that in a moment. The genuine live argument is a technical one: do India's new price deflators measure real activity accurately? The bigger, more consequential argument is developmental: does this output turn into jobs, wages, private investment, and technology India actually owns? Treat arithmetic, measurement, and development as three separate courts, or you'll convict the wrong defendant. Round 1 — Doing the Maths Honestly "2.6% growth" — the viral number that isn't a number Is the claim that India grew only 2.6% based on a fair comparison? The 2.6% figure compares Q1 FY27 nominal GDP of ₹88.27 lakh crore, measured under India's new 2022-23-base series, against Q1 FY26 nominal GDP of ₹86.05 lakh crore measured under the old 2011-12-base series. That's like comparing your height measured in centimetres this year against your height measured in inches last year and calling the difference "growth." The valid comparison — new series against new series — is ₹88.27 lakh crore against a revised ₹80.00 lakh crore: 10.3% nominal growth and 7.8% real growth. The 2.6% figure is a useful red flag about how large the revision was; it is not an alternative official growth rate. Why can't figures from two different base-year series simply be combined? Because a base-year change resets sector weights, data sources, price indices and estimation methods all at once. Combining old-series and new-series numbers treats a statistical redesign as if it were real economic change — it's not a conservative estimate, it's an invalid ratio, full stop. Indian context: This isn't India's first base-year change — the country moved from a 2004-05 base to a 2011-12 base in 2015, and that revision also sparked confusion when it retrospectively lifted growth estimates for 2013-14. Base revisions are a recurring ritual in Indian GDP-watching, not a one-off scandal. Global comparison: Nigeria offers the most dramatic version of this confusion. When it rebased its GDP from a 1990 base year to a 2010 base year in April 2014, its estimated economy leapt by 89% overnight — instantly making it Africa's largest economy, ahead of South Africa. The updated figures did reflect genuinely under-measured sectors, like telecom and the Nollywood film industry, but they also sat alongside the country's real, unchanged problems — low fiscal revenue, weak job creation, persistent poverty. No Nigerian became 89% richer that morning — the ruler changed, not the country. India's much smaller revision provoked outsized panic partly because nobody drew that Nigerian-style picture for the public in plain language. Once you compare like-with-like, how much should we trust the 7.8%? Moderate confidence, not blind faith. The number is internally consistent — it's backed by 8.2% real GVA growth, 9.2% manufacturing growth, 10.0% services growth, 7.1% consumption growth (PFCE) and a strong 11.9% investment growth (GFCF). But it remains provisional and sensitive to the deflator (see Round 2), so transparency and independent replication still matter before anyone chisels it into stone. Has the debate confused nominal GDP, real GDP, and revisions? Yes, constantly. Nominal GDP is value at today's prices; real GDP strips out inflation to show volume; a revision changes the estimate of an earlier period using better data. A lower revised base can mathematically raise this year's growth rate without any manipulation — but the statistics office owes the public a clear explanation of exactly why the earlier number changed, not just a new number dropped without a bridge. Was India's real growth actually close to zero this quarter? Not as any defensible national-accounts estimate — that reading only survives if you deliberately compare mismatched series and then bolt on an assumed inflation adjustment. But here's the honest caveat: a household's felt growth can be close to zero even when the national number is genuinely 7.8%, if wages, job security, and purchasing power for that household haven't moved. That's a distributional judgment about who's benefiting, not a rival estimate of total output. Both things can be true at once — remember this, because it becomes the spine of the whole article. Round 2 — Why Last Year's GDP Suddenly Got Smaller Is a revision this size normal? Revisions are routine whenever base years, data sources, weights and deflators change — but a jump this large demands unusually clear communication, even though "unusual" doesn't mean "illegitimate." The entire historical series has to be rebuilt from scratch for old and new numbers to stay comparable. Does the new methodology genuinely improve accuracy? In principle, yes. It draws on broader administrative and enterprise data (GST filings, corporate ministry records, e-Vahan vehicle registrations), updated household surveys, over 300 price indicators, better informal-sector coverage, and "double deflation" in manufacturing (explained below). But "in principle better" is not the same as "proven better" — that requires the back series, source notes and replication files to be made public, which as of this writing they largely haven't been. Has the scale of revision, even if legitimate, created a trust problem? Yes — and this is where India's statisticians have genuinely fumbled the ball. The public first saw an ₹86.05 lakh crore figure, then a revised figure near ₹80 lakh crore, then a fresh ₹88.27 lakh crore figure — with no immediate, plain-language bridge explaining the jumps. Being technically correct doesn't erase a communication failure. Credibility needs a visible paper trail, not a black box. Global comparison — the cautionary tale: Argentina shows what happens when a statistics office loses that trust entirely. After its national statistics agency, INDEC, was politically overhauled in 2007, its officials were widely accused of tampering with inflation figures, and Argentina went on to become the first country the IMF ever formally censured for submitting inaccurate inflation and growth data. Independent economists ended up running their own private price-tracking websites just so ordinary Argentines had numbers they could trust — down to things as mundane as adjusting a divorce settlement for real inflation. India's MoSPI is nowhere near that credibility crisis, but the lesson stands: once citizens stop trusting the referee, no number — however honestly calculated — will be believed. India's fix is cheap by comparison: publish the revision ledger. Why did the new series make earlier years look smaller? Reweighted sectors, revised informal-sector estimates, new industrial and price data, different price treatments, and improved statistical-discrepancy adjustments can all lower a historical estimate. It means the ruler changed — not that the economy physically shrank in hindsight. What should MoSPI publish so outsiders can check its homework? A machine-readable comparable back series, a vintage-by-vintage revision ledger, sector weights, granular deflators, source-coverage notes for GST/MCA/PLFS/PFMS/e-Vahan data, and reconciliation tables — with independent review built into the release process itself, not bolted on after controversy erupts. Round 3 — The Deflator: India's Real Technical Fault Line This is the one genuinely wonky bit worth understanding, because it's where honest critics have their strongest point. Is a GDP deflator of around 2.3% believable right now? It's possible, because the GDP deflator prices a different, broader basket than retail inflation (CPI) or wholesale inflation (WPI) — but it looks unusually low next to both. That makes it a candidate for audit, not an automatic disproof of the growth number. The real test is whether the underlying output and input prices reflect actual transactions across sectors, not guesswork. Why shouldn't the GDP deflator track CPI or WPI anyway? CPI tracks what households buy at retail; WPI tracks wholesale goods. The GDP deflator is an implicit, economy-wide price measure covering investment, government services, exports and imports too — it can legitimately diverge from both. But a persistent, large gap needs an explanation, not a shrug. How does "double deflation" let real growth beat nominal growth? It deflates a sector's output prices and its input prices separately, instead of applying one blanket index to everything. If input costs (say, steel and energy for a factory) rise faster than what the factory can charge for its products, nominal value added gets squeezed even while the physical volume of goods produced keeps climbing. So real GVA can genuinely outpace nominal GVA — the arithmetic is sound, but its reliability rides entirely on how good the underlying price data is. Does double deflation make things more accurate, or more fragile? Both, honestly. It's more accurate when input and output prices are well measured, because it stops one broad index from being force-fitted onto unlike items. But it's also more sensitive — an error in either price series distorts the "residual" value added, so India needs granular, transparent price data to make this method trustworthy rather than a black box that quietly produces flattering numbers. Is 9.2% manufacturing growth real, or a methodology artefact? The wider evidence — corporate sales, electricity use, GST collections, capital-goods output — points to genuine industrial expansion. But the exact 9.2% figure, sitting alongside 7.7% nominal growth and an unusually low deflator, is a gap large enough to deserve item-level cross-checks against real-world indicators before being taken as gospel. Real growth with an uncertain precise magnitude is the honest verdict — not fraud, not full confidence either. Round 4 — Does the Rest of the Economy Back Up the Headline? What independent, real-world signals support 7.8%? Vehicle registrations, capital-goods production, cement and steel output, electricity consumption, bank credit growth, GST collections, corporate capex announcements, payroll additions, and a strong 12.0% real export growth all point the same direction. No single indicator is decisive, but together they make a "zero real growth" story implausible. What contradicts or complicates the story? Agriculture grew only 3.6%; mining actually contracted 2.4%. Rural demand, real wages, informal enterprises, private capex intentions, and some manufacturing-sentiment surveys remain patchy, and declining foreign investment plus currency pressure complicate any tidy "boom" narrative. These don't erase the growth — they narrow its width and question its quality. What's actually driving growth — consumption, government spending, investment, or exports? A mixed bag tilted toward public capital spending, formal services, and select manufacturing clusters, rather than one broad-based private investment wave. Consumption (PFCE) grew 7.1%, investment (GFCF) 11.9%, exports 12.0% — but whether private capex and rural demand can carry the baton is still the real test of durability. How broad-based is the boom across sectors, regions and incomes? Uneven, by design of the numbers themselves. Urban formal services, listed companies, and specific manufacturing clusters are running hot; agriculture, informal businesses and lower-income households are lagging. Premium consumption — SUVs, five-star weddings, iPhones — can surge even as mass-market purchasing power stays flat, producing what analysts call a K-shaped recovery: two diverging lines on the same chart, not one rising tide. Can GDP boom while ordinary households feel stuck? Yes, unavoidably. GDP measures total production, not median wages, job security, household debt, or how gains are shared. Employment can technically "rise" through gig work or casual labour even while secure, well-paid jobs stay scarce. Both a genuinely valid 7.8% output number and real public frustration can be true in the same country, in the same quarter. This is the crux the entire rest of this article now turns to. Round 5 — Rajan vs. Vembu: Two Diagnoses, One Patient Two of India's sharpest public voices — economist Raghuram Rajan and technology entrepreneur Girish Mathrubootham/Zoho's Sridhar Vembu — have been read as contradicting each other in recent months. They aren't. They're examining two different organs of the same patient. Are Rajan and Vembu really disagreeing? Not fundamentally. Rajan's question is: why isn't growth producing enough decent jobs, private investment, and human capital? Vembu's question is: why does India capture so little of the technology, intellectual property, and profit margin from the work actually done here? One diagnoses the employment outcome; the other diagnoses who owns the value chain. Complementary, not competing. Can low-paying assembly jobs become a ladder to something better, the way they did in East Asia? Yes — but only when assembly is deliberately used as a learning platform, not treated as the finished product. South Korea and Taiwan didn't stay content-to-assemble; they used early low-value assembly contracts to build domestic suppliers, engineering talent, export capability and eventually world-beating firms of their own (think Samsung's leap from assembling foreign electronics to designing its own chips, or TSMC becoming the company Apple and Nvidia depend on rather than the other way round). Without those deliberate conditions, assembly work becomes a permanent low-wage enclave — a treadmill, not a ladder. What makes an assembly ecosystem actually build local suppliers, skills and IP? Time-bound incentives tied to rising local content, supplier development, apprenticeships, R&D spending, domestic patents, export sophistication and productivity — with firms required to publish capability milestones and lose their support if they miss them. Support without a scoreboard just becomes permanent subsidy. How long should India accept lower wages while companies "climb the value chain"? Only as a clearly defined transition — never an open-ended promise. A five-to-ten-year support envelope, reviewed every three to five years, with subsidies tapering automatically if wages, skills, local suppliers and R&D fail to improve, is the discipline that separates genuine industrial policy from indefinite corporate welfare. Does India need millions of ordinary jobs, or fewer high-productivity ones? Both, simultaneously. India needs accessible jobs now for workers still moving out of low-productivity farming, and a parallel expansion of high-productivity careers in engineering, design, digital services and advanced manufacturing. Picking only one horn of this dilemma leaves the other problem — mass employment or national productivity — permanently unresolved. Can high-value services and startups alone create enough jobs? They can generate excellent, high-paying, export-earning employment — but not at the scale India needs. Roughly 11 million people are expected to enter India's workforce every year for the next two decades. Manufacturing, construction, logistics, tourism, and care work will have to carry much of that load; software unicorns cannot absorb a labour force that size on their own. What does a real career pathway from a ₹20,000 factory job actually look like? Apprenticeship → portable certification → process and quality training → promotion to technician or supervisor → movement into supplier engineering → eventually design or R&D roles. It requires employers who actually run engineering functions in India, continuous upskilling, basic social protection, and wages tied to measured productivity gains — not just tenure. Round 6 — Who Actually Owns the Value? This is the section every Indian techie, founder, and policymaker should read twice. Does hosting global R&D automatically mean India captures the value? No. Global Capability Centres (GCCs) in Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Pune generate real wages, local procurement, tax revenue, and genuine skill-building — all valuable — but the parent multinational typically retains the intellectual property, the licensing income, the platform rents, and the commercial profit, booked abroad. A GCC's headcount is not the same thing as ownership of the technology those employees built. How much of the value Indian engineers create shows up in India's GDP? There's no single reliable percentage — that's precisely the problem. Indian GDP captures wages, domestic profit, local inputs and taxes; the IP royalties, equity gains, and profits recognised in a parent company's home country are largely not counted as Indian value-added. Getting a precise number would need firm-level accounts and detailed supply-chain data that mostly don't exist publicly yet. Is comparing Indian headcount to a multinational's global profit meaningful? Too simplistic to use as an accounting argument, though the direction of the comparison is a fair provocation. Profit also depends on IP ownership, capital, risk-taking, transfer pricing, and global market control — not labour input alone. The asymmetry it illustrates is real; the specific ratio isn't rigorous. Does owning IP matter more than manufacturing volume for wages? For sustained wage growth, yes — ownership of scarce technology and commercial rights is usually more decisive than sheer manufacturing volume. High-volume assembly without design ownership or supplier power tends to keep both margins and wages anchored close to bare labour-cost competition. Global illustration: This is exactly the trap South Korea and Taiwan escaped and many other assembly-hub economies haven't. A country can host enormous manufacturing volume — think of the "world's factory" label applied at different times to Mexico's maquiladoras or Vietnam's electronics-assembly boom — without ever owning the brand, the chip design, or the software stack that captures the lion's share of the final retail price. What would encourage more India-owned, India-commercialised IP? R&D tax credits tied specifically to domestic patenting and commercialisation (not patent-filing alone), stronger university-industry technology transfer, patient deep-tech capital, government acting as an anchor customer for homegrown tech, and better standards, procurement and IP enforcement. Domestic champions, technology transfer, or MNC incentives — which does India need? All three at once. Domestic champions create genuine Indian ownership; better technology-transfer mechanisms build capability; predictable incentives can persuade multinationals to locate real decision-making and IP functions inside India rather than just assembly lines. No single lever closes this gap alone. Can India capture more value without scaring off the MNCs that employ Indian engineers? Yes — through predictable rules, strong IP protection, deep skilled talent, deep capital markets, and incentives for local R&D, rather than punitive restrictions. The goal is parallel ecosystem-building: keep attracting multinationals while simultaneously making Indian firms capable of owning, financing and commercialising their own technology. Round 7 — Does India Need a Sharper Industrial Policy? Is industrial policy necessary for a developing country to build technological capability? Usually, yes. Late developers face coordination failures — in skills, suppliers, finance, technology — that markets alone often can't solve fast enough. But industrial policy has to be disciplined, transparent and temporary; its job is to buy capability, not protect inefficiency forever. Is India's current industrial policy building competitive firms, or subsidising assembly? A mixed picture, with a genuine risk of subsidising assembly for its own sake — rewarding output volume more than R&D, local components, exports, or productivity gains. The real test isn't the size of the incentive announcement; it's whether domestic supplier depth, patents, engineering decision-making, wages, and export sophistication are actually rising over time. What separates good East Asian industrial policy from protectionism and cronyism? Successful programmes tied support to exports, productivity, local capability-building and technology learning; exposed firms to genuine competition; reviewed performance regularly; and withdrew support on a pre-announced schedule. Protectionism shelters firms without demanding results; cronyism picks beneficiaries without any public performance test at all. Should support require R&D, local IP, exports and productivity — not just production? Yes. Production should be an entry condition, not the finish line. Support should also demand R&D intensity, domestic patents, local suppliers, export complexity, worker training, rising productivity and wages, and energy efficiency. How long before an industry is expected to compete on its own? A pre-announced five-to-ten-year window, with milestone reviews every three to five years and automatic tapering — varying by sector, but with the discipline that missing capability milestones triggers withdrawal of support, not renewal through lobbying. Is India's real choice "become Mexico" or "become East Asia"? Too narrow a frame. India can combine labour-intensive manufacturing for mass jobs, high-value services for exports, digital public infrastructure (UPI, Aadhaar, ONDC) for productivity, and entrepreneurship for innovation — a genuinely hybrid Indian model rather than a copy of any single country's playbook. Round 8 — Growth, Imports, and the Rupee Can strong GDP growth coexist with pressure on the rupee and the current account? Yes, routinely. Catch-up growth raises demand for imported energy, machinery, semiconductors, software and capital goods. If imports outpace exports, the current account and the currency can come under pressure even while real GDP is growing rapidly — India has lived this cycle before, notably around 2012-13. Does faster growth deepen import dependence before domestic capability catches up? Yes, especially in data centres, semiconductors, renewable-energy hardware and advanced machinery. That's not automatically bad — productive imports can build future capacity — but it becomes a genuine risk if domestic suppliers, R&D and skills never scale up to replace them. How much domestic value does India actually retain from import-heavy exports? It varies too much by product for a single number to be honest. Domestic value is wages, local services, logistics, taxes and Indian profit; imported components and foreign-owned technology largely pass through with limited retention. India's supply-and-use tables should publish sector-specific domestic value-added shares rather than leaving this to guesswork. Is telling citizens to cut foreign travel, weddings abroad, and gold buying meaningful, or symbolic? Mostly symbolic at the macro scale — though not entirely irrelevant. The decisive foreign-exchange pressures come from energy, capital goods, and technology imports, not household discretionary spending. Policy shouldn't offload a structural, national-level responsibility onto individual moral appeals. Should the burden fall on households, or on energy and technology policy? Policy has to lead. Energy diversification, domestic capital-goods manufacturing, technology capability-building, export upgrading and stable trade rules matter far more than broad appeals asking households to tighten their belts. Targeted restraint can help at the margins — it cannot substitute for industrial and energy strategy. Which imports are wasteful, and which are investments in the future? Luxury consumption and non-essential gold generally add little productive capacity. Machinery, semiconductors, software, renewable-energy equipment and R&D tools may worsen the near-term trade balance but count as investment if they raise productivity, capability, or future exports. The test is future learning value, not the import label itself. How long before India's tech and energy import dependence meaningfully shrinks? Technology dependence is roughly a 10-to-15-year project if R&D, skills, and manufacturing scale up consistently. Energy dependence will likely take longer — 15 to 20 years — because it involves transport, storage, grids, and industrial fuel substitution all moving together. These are planning horizons, not guarantees. Round 9 — Big Investment Announcements vs. Real Transformation Are giant investment announcements being mistaken for actual value creation? Often, yes. An announcement is a commitment, not proof of money spent, domestic value added, jobs created, or technology transferred. Data centres may be strategically important, but their direct GDP and employment effects can be modest relative to the headline capex numbers splashed across newspapers. How much spending on a new data centre flows straight back out through imported GPUs, servers and cooling systems? A significant share can leak abroad, though the exact proportion depends entirely on project design and procurement choices. GPUs, servers, cooling and networking equipment are import-intensive, so the domestic value of the construction phase shouldn't be mistaken for the value of the entire investment. Real answers need project-level bills of materials, not press-release arithmetic. Can data centres still deliver big second-order benefits? Yes — through cloud services, home-grown AI companies, and digital exports — but only if Indian firms actually build products and services on top of that infrastructure. Without domestic platforms, skills, data governance and genuine customer demand, India risks hosting foreign digital workloads while retaining mainly construction, power, and facility-management jobs. What needs to be built around this infrastructure to capture more value? Domestic cloud and server capability, chip and component supply chains, reliable green power, AI and cybersecurity skills, data governance frameworks, compute credits for startups, public procurement support, and export channels. The goal is Indian firms owning the models, applications and customer relationships — not merely renting out imported compute. Should capital-heavy infrastructure be judged by different metrics than mass-employment sectors? Yes. Data centres deserve to be judged on strategic resilience, productivity spillovers, digital exports, energy use, and technology ownership. Textiles, food processing, tourism, and care work should be judged far more heavily on jobs created. A single "jobs-per-rupee" test would undervalue infrastructure investment; a single capex test would quietly hide weak employment outcomes. What separates "hosting compute" from building a genuine indigenous AI economy? An indigenous AI economy has Indian-owned models, datasets, applications, patents, firms and export revenues — built on top of domestic compute and talent. Simply hosting foreign hyperscalers' servers, without local ownership, builds infrastructure capacity while leaving the highest rents and strategic control sitting elsewhere. Round 10 — GDP vs. Lived Reality Can the 7.8% number be statistically sound while public frustration is equally legitimate? Yes. GDP measures the volume of production; it says nothing about median wages, job security, household debt, inequality, or public confidence. A valid national number and a genuinely weak household economy can coexist in the very same quarter, in the very same country. Has India put too much political weight on one single number? Yes. A quarterly GDP print has become an all-purpose proxy for national welfare, even though it was never designed to measure welfare in the first place. It deserves to sit as one indicator on a public dashboard — not stand as a verdict on every household's life. What indicators should accompany every GDP release? Employment, real wages, private investment, household consumption by income group, productivity, and per-capita income — alongside labour-force participation, female workforce participation, payrolls, vacancies, hours worked, rural incomes, private capex, external balance and emissions. Quantity of growth and quality of growth need to be reported together, every single quarter. Does the new series capture informal workers, gig workers and household enterprises properly? Better than the old series — through GST data, enterprise surveys, the Periodic Labour Force Survey, e-Vahan and other administrative sources — but still imperfectly. Informal and gig activity is often estimated indirectly, and small household enterprises can slip through the gaps between survey rounds. More frequent surveys and anonymised microdata would close this gap. What should "quality growth" mean for a country at India's stage of development? Rising productivity accompanied by rising real wages, secure and formalising jobs, stronger rural incomes, higher female workforce participation, domestic technology and IP ownership, export competitiveness, and resilience to energy and climate shocks. Growth has to widen opportunity — not just expand output inside a handful of capital-intensive enclaves. How do we stop legitimate scrutiny from collapsing into partisan denial of the whole economy? Separate technical adjudication from political theatre. Publish methods and revision ledgers, allow independent replication, clearly flag what remains provisional, and always read GDP alongside jobs, wages and investment data. Criticising a method should never be twisted into denying real economic activity; celebrating activity should never be used to silence legitimate scrutiny either. Closing Question — Measurement Problem, or Development Model Problem? Suppose the 7.8% figure is methodologically sound. If India keeps growing fast while staying dependent on imported energy and technology, capturing limited value from work done here, and struggling to create better-paying jobs — is that a measurement problem, or a development-model problem? And ten years from now, will it matter more how fast GDP grew, or how much technology, IP, productive capacity and prosperity India actually kept? Primarily a development-model problem, with a continuing measurement-and-credibility problem sitting at the margins. Accurate GDP growth can perfectly well coexist with weak value capture, import dependence, and poor job quality — India's own recent history is proof of concept. Ten years out, the decisive scoreboard won't be a quarterly growth print; it will be domestic IP, supplier depth, productive skills, real wages, energy resilience, and how broadly prosperity actually spread. The growth rate is necessary evidence of India's story. It is nowhere near sufficient evidence of India's development. A note on statistical honesty, for the record None of this is unique paranoia. For years, China's own provincial GDP figures, added together, ran higher than the national total the central government reported — a gap widely traced to local officials whose careers depended on flattering growth numbers, most visibly when Liaoning province's governor publicly admitted in 2017 that city and county officials there had fabricated growth and fiscal data for three straight years. India's episode is nowhere near that scale of deliberate fraud — this is a genuine base-year revision with a communication failure, not a cover-up. But the comparison is a useful reminder of what real data manipulation looks like, so citizens can tell the difference between a badly explained methodology and an actually rigged number. This explainer synthesises MoSPI's official Q1 FY2026-27 GDP release and base-year FAQ, RBI and World Bank commentary, and the public debate involving Raghuram Rajan, Sanjeev Sanyal, Subhash Garg, Arvind Subramanian and K.V. Subramanian, among others. All Q1 figures remain provisional pending revision. ...Read more