21 Dec 2023 : The Hindu Editorial

Editorial 1 : Climate action needs an updated lexicon.

Context: There is need to move away from the constraints of collective memory and community knowledge to enable a better official response to future challenges.

Introduction

• Multiple districts in south Tamil Nadu received an astonishing amount of rainfall earlier this week. In 24 hours from 6 a.m. on December 17, Thoothukudi recorded 361.4 mm and Tiruchendur 679 mm.
  • What was until December 16 a northeast monsoon deficit for the State swung overnight to a 5% excess.
• That these areas didn’t suffer as much damage as Chennai (although the final picture isn’t yet clear) is only because they’re smaller and less built-up.
  • Chennai received 500 mm from noon on December 2 to pre-dawn on December 5, due to Cyclone Michaung, and suffered greatly.

Shifting baselines

• The question of what we consider to be ‘devastating’ is deceptively simple because of the shifting baseline syndrome. A syndrome is a collection of symptoms, and this one exemplifies those pertaining to memory, community knowledge, and language.
• For example, a community may consider a particular amount of forest cover — defined, say, by the knowledge handed down to them — to be the ‘original’. But the community may be unaware that at an earlier time, there was greater forest cover and what it has inherited is really a small remnant.
• Shifting baselines cause us to underestimate how much we have lost over time. This distortion subsequently affects how much we believe we have of that resource, how much there can really be, and how much loss we are prepared to tolerate.

Uncharted territories

• Our meaning-making about the future is currently led by words that come to us as jargon from reports of various government and international agencies.
  • For example, the worst warming scenario the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change contends with is RCP 8.5. Countries are on one of five possible Shared Socio-economic Pathways (SSPs).
• As such, these definitions are restricted to people who have a conceptual understanding of various terms.
• Governments translate them to actions and decisions on the ground through early-warning policies.
  • But these are also often imperfect, such as the definitions of heatwaves not including the wet bulb temperature or indoor living conditions and rainfall alerts not accounting for real-estate development.
• All other words that don’t find mention in these definitions and reports are potentially susceptible to shifting baselines.

Role of officialese

• Revising our baselines as we go along is desirable, but doing so too rapidly could get in the way of reliable communication and be resource-intensive as well.
• People might collectively remember something terrible they experienced, such as 500 mm of rain and 750 mm of rain, both in 24 hours, plus their respective effects, but without helpful language in the official record, only be able to differentiate between the two as time passes based on their memories.
• An official vocabulary, or officialese, is crucial because it gives us a way to translate between knowledge of scenarios that are otherwise trapped within communities, by languages that typically evolve under the influence of unrelated constraints.
• Officialese that’s localised, say by State-level laws or the State government, is better because then people can use it to memorialise their lived experiences with more context about the bigger picture.
• Officialese also needs to be updated as often as possible. Consider, for example, the effects of our sense of what constitutes ‘bad’ pulling away from definitions put together at a time when it was less severe, reducing trust in institutions charged with helping people prepare for an impending weather anomaly.
• For 24-hour periods, the India Meteorological Department has one classification for more than 204.4 mm of rain: ‘extremely heavy’. But while both Chennai on December 4 and Thoothukudi on December 17 received ‘extremely heavy’ rainfall, equating them would be laughable.

Understanding the human toll

• Of course, the State’s own accountability is important to understand ‘devastation’ in as much as it relates to the human toll. For example, the State’s response to a disaster is determined to an important degree by the medical certificate of cause of death (MCCD).
• During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Indian government’s policy for a significant period was to list a comorbidity, e.g. heart disease, as the cause in MCCDs even if a person died with COVID-19, even though the viral disease was known to exacerbate some comorbidities.
• Similarly, State government officials descending on Ballia in Uttar Pradesh in June were eager to attribute a spate of deaths there — that a medical superintendent had blamed on heat — to comorbidities instead.
• Officialese also has significant global implications. Developing countries have pushed back on developed countries’ efforts to exclude India and China from the ‘loss and damage’ fund by asserting that money from the fund should be disbursed based on the severity of climate-related disasters rather than where they occurred.

Conclusion

• For this to be possible, we need new official words to describe unprecedented amounts of rainfall, lest India find itself struggling to explain why it could deal with ‘extremely heavy’ rainfall on December 4 but not on December 17.

Editorial 2 : India’s defence budgeting and the point of deterrence

Context: To have India’s defence Budget and national security goals examined through the prism of electoral imperatives would be unprofessional.

Introduction

• With India in election mode and sops being showered on the electorate (even more certain before the general election in 2024), the allocation for defence in Budget 2024-25, which starts getting planned now, could take a hit. This could impact India’s deterrence posture, which defence preparedness is all about.

Need for judicious assessment.

• The question is whether ‘affordable defence’ — due to the perennial guns versus butter dilemma — will be the driving factor. Or will ‘affordable effectiveness’ drive the defence Budget allocation?
• This is best illustrated by the IAF going in for 97 more Tejas Mk1A fighters to overcome the deficit in squadron strength, though this was to be achieved by the 114 multi role fighter aircraft project that the IAF has been pushing for.
• The threat on the northern borders is a live one, and it would be unprofessional to dismiss our western neighbour’s present benign stance as indicative of a lessening of risk.
• India needs to be prepared for both. The imperativeness of a judicious assessment of how India plans to prosecute the next war could not be more pressing in these days of electoral one-upmanship.
• Enough has been written on the inescapable necessity of accretion in sea power to deter China in the environs of the Malacca Strait and further east, as also in the Indian Ocean. The Army needs to modernise too and, considering its size, the Budget requirement would be considerable.
• The planning and budgeting in the Indian military before the Russia-Ukraine war was for a short sharp conflict. The logistics design was to stock up on 10i (10 days intense) war, and build up to a 40i scenario.
• The refrain has changed, with the leadership of the armed forces now visualising an extended war scenario, as seen in Ukraine.

The indigenous drive, R&D

• It needs no reiteration that the armed forces should be technologically modern at any given time. However, developing a local defence industry takes decades, necessitating a smart balance to be maintained between imports and indigenous accretions to ensure the required potency.
• The Atmanirbhar Bharat public relations drive notwithstanding, a hard clinical view is required on the realities of the armament supply chain that would be in place in the near to mid-term.
• India’s defence Budget, in real terms, has been more or less stagnant. Defence expenditure (revenue and capital), as a percentage of central government expenditure, has been declining — from around 16.4% in 2012-13 to 13.3% in 2022-23.
• The Ministry of Defence had asked for ₹1,76,346 crore in 2023–24 for capital acquisitions but only ₹1,62,600 crore was allotted, creating a deficit of ₹13,746 crore.
• In the sphere of research and development, the picture is not rosy either. The Global Innovation Index 2022 pegs India’s research and development expenditure at just 0.7% of its GDP which places it 53rd globally.
• The government’s emphasis on indigenisation through the Innovations For Defence Excellence (iDEX) scheme and service-specific projects such as the Baba Mehar Singh competition for unmanned aerial vehicles by the IAF, and similar ones in the other two services, are laudable.
• Similarly, the restructuring of the Ordnance Factory Board and promulgation of negative lists for imports instil confidence in the private sector for assured contracts.
• While all these are welcome, and the increase in defence exports heartening, it must be accepted that this drive still has a long gestation period.
• The momentum should be sustained with a continuum in policy making and adequate defence budgeting by making them election-proof in our boisterous democracy — bipartisan statesmanship would be key in this endeavour.

Conclusion

• China’s belligerence has resulted in the doubling of Japan’s defence budget, the increased arming of Taiwan by the United States, a reshaping of regional alliances and a historic U.S.-South Korea-Japan summit. It would be naive, nay unprofessional, if our defence Budget is not given its due and national security imperatives overridden by electoral imperatives.

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