Topic 1 : Heat warning
Introduction: The effects of climate change on the Indian summer have been obvious for at least a decade. In most parts of the country, the spring season has shrunk. In 2022, the country experienced its hottest March since 1901.
What is a Heatwave?
- A heatwave is a period of abnormally high temperatures, a common phenomenon in India during the months of May-June and in some rare cases even extends till July.
What are the Criteria for Declaring a Heatwave?
- The Heatwave is considered when the maximum temperature of a station reaches at least 40°C for Plains and at least 30°C for Hilly regions.
- If the normal maximum temperature of a station is less than or equal to 40°C, then an increase of 5°C to 6°C from the normal temperature is considered to be heat wave condition.
- Further, an increase of 7°C or more from the normal temperature is considered a severe heat wave condition.
- If the normal maximum temperature of a station is more than 40°C, then an increase of 4°C to 5°C from the normal temperature is considered to be heat wave condition. Further, an increase of 6°C or more is considered a severe heat wave condition.
- Additionally, if the actual maximum temperature remains 45°C or more irrespective of normal maximum temperature, a heat wave is declared.
The status of heatwaves in India
- Last year, too, heatwaves started in early March, and many areas reported temperatures that were higher than average.
- This year, several parts of south India experienced a hotter-than-usual March.
- Climate change is also increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events.
- The India Meteorological Department (IMD) warned that heatwave spells could last 10-20 days, instead of four to eight days.
- The health effects of heat waves is still a nascent field of study and data on mortality caused by it varies — the IMD, National Disaster Management Agency (NDMA) and National Crime Records Bureau cite vastly divergent figures.
- However, experts concur on the need to put in place measures to protect the most vulnerable from the scorching temperatures.
Measures to tackle the heatwave disaster in India
- In one lethal week in May 2010, a heat wave claimed more than 800 lives in Ahmedabad.
- The tragedy pushed the city’s municipality to partner with the Indian Institute of Public Health and American academies to develop the country’s first heat action plan (HAP) in 2013.
- It focused on creating an early warning system, increasing the capacity of healthcare professionals, promoting adaptive measures in workplaces and creating awareness.
- Experts reckon the strategy has saved 1,000 lives every year.
- Since then, more than 20 states have coordinated with the NDMA to develop HAPs.
Limitations of heatwave mitigation measures
- Critics say that these policy (heat action plan (HAP)) instruments have, by and large, remained on paper.
- They are not updated regularly and do not have regular budgets and are impervious to the needs of the most vulnerable — families living in slums or poorly constructed houses, the elderly, pregnant women, and those who work outdoors.
- Under-resourced municipalities do not have the wherewithal to deal with the challenges posed by the elements.
- Last year, a sunstroke-related tragedy in Navi Mumbai, which claimed 13 lives, shone a light on the need for more local-level weather observatories — the satellite city sources its data from a station about 30 km away.
The way forward
- In recent years, studies have underlined the need to fine-tune the maximum temperature-based criteria to declare a heat wave.
- There is a growing realisation that thresholds to declare heat waves must be tailored for local conditions — for instance, factoring in humidity while estimating the stress exerted by extreme heat.
- Dealing with climate change will require several course corrections.
Conclusion: The IMD alert should spur local-level strategies, and help create robust data to protect the most vulnerable. A comprehensive heat action plan with capacity development at the local level must be taken up.
Topic 2 : How Delhi maps the world
Introduction: Delhi’s surprising focus on Katchatheevu, an island in the narrow strip of waters between India and Sri Lanka, is a part of the ruling BJP’s determination to break into Tamil Nadu’s electoral map. Hopefully, the potential negative consequences for Delhi’s improving ties with Colombo are manageable.
Indo-Pacific – from ‘American plot’ to maritime orientation
- Whether it is the Maldives that now occupies much Indian mind space in the growing maritime joust with China, or Delhi’s new engagement with the resource-rich Papua New Guinea in the Pacific Islands, the joint development of infrastructure on the Agalega island of Mauritius, the collaboration with Australia in the eastern Indian Ocean islands, or the NDA government’s focus on developing the Andamans to our east and the Lakshadweep to the west, islands have emerged as an important part of India’s new geopolitics.
- More broadly, India’s strategic imagination of the world’s regions and how we describe them has altered significantly over the last decade.
- Consider, for example, the “Indo-Pacific”. The idea was first proposed by the late Japanese Premier Abe Shinzo, in a speech to the Indian Parliament in 2007.
- Abe urged us to reflect on the “confluence of the two oceans” — the Indian and the Pacific.
- It ran into much bureaucratic and political resistance in Delhi.
- Sceptics in Delhi saw the Indo-Pacific as an “American plot” to “entrap” India into “containing” China.
- It took over a decade after Abe’s call for India to formally embrace the Indo-Pacific idea — in a speech by Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the annual Shangri La Dialogue in Singapore during the summer of 2018.
- India’s deteriorating relations with China, marked by a series of military crises in 2013, 2014, and 2017, was an important factor in Delhi’s rethink; so was the growing strategic partnership with the US.
- The Indo-Pacific is now well-established in the Indian discourse, and so is its institutional anchor, the Quad, which brings together Australia, India, Japan and the US.
From Eurasia to Europe
- The idea of “Eurasia”– the continental cousin of the maritime Indo-Pacific — has not gained equal currency in the Indian strategic discourse but is now part of India’s new diplomatic vocabulary.
- If Japan and the US popularised “Indo-Pacific”, Russia has driven the “Eurasian” idea.
- As a great power straddling Europe and Asia, Russia sees the vast Eurasian landmass as its natural sphere of influence.
- The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, built jointly by Russia and China, was the institutional expression of the Eurasian idea.
- Given India’s stakes in continental Asia, its long-standing ties to Russia, and its quest for a multipolar world, Delhi was eager to join SCO.
- Its campaign concluded successfully in 2017 when it became a full member.
- But India’s thinking on Eurasia began to change amid Delhi’s deepening problems with Beijing, the growing conflict between Russia and the West, and the deepening Sino-Russian alliance.
- India’s interest is no longer limited to inner Asia but has expanded to include Europe in the far western corner of Eurasia.
- Europe has long been a neglected geography in independent India’s international relations.
- That has changed in the last decade. High-level exchanges offer one indication.
- According to the foreign office, Modi has travelled to Europe 27 times in the last 10 years and received 37 European heads of state and government; External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar has travelled 29 times to Europe and received 36 counterparts in Delhi over the last five years.
Trade grows, agreements await
- Trade is another indication. While a free trade agreement with the European Union remains elusive, the flow of commerce, investment, technology, and people between India and Europe is growing steadily.
- Europe is India’s second-largest trading partner and third-largest export destination.
- Last month, India signed a free trade agreement with the EFTA, constituted by four small but significant countries — Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland.
- The last decade has seen France’s rising political salience as a bilateral partner and collective Europe’s growing weight in India’s great power relations.
- Even as India is learning the complex art of economic engagement with the European Union in Brussels, it also recognises that Europe is not a political monolith but a continent of regions.
- The Nordic region, the Nordic-Baltic coalition, the Med 9 of southern European nations, and the Caucasus have emerged as new geographies of consequence for India in Europe and around it.
- Last week’s visit of Dmytro Kuleba, the first by Ukraine’s foreign minister, underlines India’s potential role in shaping war and peace in Central Europe, whose turbulent politics have triggered two world wars and threatens to unleash a third.
- The plans for an economic corridor between India and Europe via the Middle East, the Abraham Accords, the Gaza war, the rise of the Arab Gulf, India’s deepening partnership with the UAE and Saudi Arabia, the presence of nearly 20 Indian naval ships outside the Red Sea region today, and the growing engagement with Africa is producing a more integrated view of the Middle East, Africa, the eastern Mediterranean and the Western Indian Ocean.
- These were often seen as separate categories in the past.
South Asia, an idea lost
- Amid the expansion of India’s geographic vocabulary, there is one unfortunate loser, “South Asia”.
- SAARC’s failure has persuaded India to focus on sub-regional cooperation in the eastern Subcontinent and trans-regional cooperation in the Bay of Bengal littoral.
- Pakistan, in turn, has sought deeper economic integration with China through the CPEC corridor.
- Islamabad is now looking to UAE and Saudi Arabia to monetise its national assets and overcome the current economic crisis.
- “Regions” are not fixed geographic units. Politics, economics, and ideology have a big role the making and unmaking of regions.
- Regions are also elastic; they expand and shrink depending on the circumstances.
- Many familiar regions, “South Asia”, “South East Asia”, “East Asia”, “Asia-Pacific” — were all politically “invented” in the last eight decades.
- The “Indo-Pacific” is only the latest.
- As we look ahead, two new geographies — “Zomia” and “Khorasan” — might draw more of our strategic attention amid the growing pressure on the Subcontinent’s eastern and western frontiers.
- In the east, the Burmese army is losing ground to a coalition of opposition militias in the country’s north.
- The potential political vacuum in upper Burma could spell trouble all across Zomia– an academic term for a region where the high lands of North East India, South West China, and South East Asia meet.
- It’s a region where centralised state control has been traditionally weak and is full of minority populations, some of whom straddle across formal state borders.
- The ethnic restiveness, the return of violent religious extremism, and growing military tensions on Pakistan’s western borderlands raise questions about the sustainability of the current frontiers in what we might call the “Khorasan”.
- Although extremist groups like the Islamic State have imbued it with expansive religious and territorial content, Khorasan in Persian means the land of the rising sun.
- It refers to Persia’s eastern borderlands, including parts of modern Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia.
- Few in Delhi would want to bet that the political and territorial orders in Zomia and Khorasan will endure in their current form.
- India, then, will inevitably be drawn deeper into the geopolitics of the Zomia and Khorasan.
Conclusion: An audit of Indian foreign policy over the last decade shows that island states and territories from the South Pacific to the African coast have become new nodes in India’s changing strategic geography