Have you ever heard the adage – “Empty vessels make the loudest noise”. You probably have and that is exactly what China is doing through its state sponsored media outlets. And the PLA in Chumbi Valley is sitting ducks for Indian artillery now. Read on to understand everything behind this stand-off. Oh yes, Doklam is not Doka La/Dhoka La as many have reported.
Even standing still in the bitterly cold and windswept Doklam plateau, which is being lashed by periodic sharp showers now, will tax the fittest of men. At that altitude (more than 16,500 feet), oxygen is rare and breathing takes work; many layers of clothing are never enough to ward off the chill that threatens to freeze even the bones.
But hundreds of Indian army soldiers, their arms locked and the automatic rifles on their shoulders pointed towards the ground, have been standing in Doklam and some areas further south for two to three hours at a stretch to form a human chain. The Indian human chain confronts a similar one by Chinese soldiers, and is separated by about 10-12ft of sandy soil on which little can grow. The human chain – soldiers have rotating duties – has been in place for more than three weeks now.
The standoff is necessary – a withdrawal will result in Chinese troops advancing and occupying not only the entire Doklam plateau, which is Bhutan’s territory, but also extending the tri-junction of India-Tibet-Bhutan about 10 kilometres south of the present position. And that would make the Siliguri corridor, which connects North East India with the rest of the country, vulnerable.
Behind the human chains, both sides have amassed troops and military hardware. China has even been conducting military exercises simulating battlefield scenarios. The Chinese have also reportedly tested the Xinqingtan, a new 35-tonne battle tank with a 105 millimetre tank gun, a 35mm grenade launcher and a 12.7mm machine gun. Sounds of artillery and gunfire can be heard from the Indian side many miles away. The Chinese are, obviously, making a lot of noise on Ground Zero.
It is not as if the Indian Army (IA) and the Royal Bhutanese Army (RBA) have been sitting pretty. A lot of armoured, artillery, mechanised infantry and infantry units have been amassed. The IA and RBA are conducting joint exercises to test their combat readiness and coordination. The coordination between the two armies is smooth; not only do the two share extremely close ties and hold regular exercises, the RBA is also trained by the IA itself.
IA officers are, however, not quite impressed by the sound that China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is making at Doklam and further south at their side of the existing tri-junction.
Indian and RBA troops and units have dug in their heels and are well prepared for the long haul. But its not only that. Both the IA and RBA occupy the higher ground at Doklam and Doka La. And, thus, they have a significant strategic advantage over Chinese troops, who are amassed at the narrow Chumbi Valley.
The Chinese have not been able to encroach much into the Doklam plateau and beyond the present trijunction into Doka La area. The Chinese started encroaching slowly and stealthily into Doklam plateau from Chumbi Valley a few years ago. A part of that plateau – about 89 sq km of it, according to Bhutan – is disputed territory between Bhutan and China. But even though treaties exist between the two nations to maintain status quo in such areas, the PLA has been surreptitiously encroaching into Bhutan’s territories.
China has built roads from Chumbi Valley to a high mountain pass called Senche La that leads to Doklam plateau in Bhutan. This road then enters Bhutan before turning west to return to Chumbi Valley. The Chinese have also extended this road down southwest till Doka La, a few kilometres into Indian territory. As they have been doing in other sectors, the Chinese now cite the existence of this road, and their own bunkers and temporary positions in encroached-upon territories, to claim them as their own.
As can be seen on the map given below, China wants to push the India-Tibet-Bhutan tri-junction further south to make Doka La, which is now well within India, into a pass that opens to the Chumbi Valley. The blue line in the map is the present boundary between Bhutan and Tibet; the blue line marks the Chinese claim on Bhutan’s territory that would push the tri-junction further south.
The Chinese want to do this for many reasons, the primary being strategic. If the Chinese can push the tri-junction south and occupy the Doklam plateau, they will gain tremendous advantage over the IA and RBA. The vital rail and road links passing through Siliguri corridor would then come within easy range of Chinese artillery from the new tri-junction. That will give China a huge advantage over India since India, aware that China can easily snap links between the North East and rest of India, will then be at the mercy of China. Beijing will be able to bend New Delhi to do its bidding.
If the Chinese game plan succeeds, Beijing would have effectively humbled India and delivered a debilitating blow to India’s ego and prestige. Beijing would also have demonstrated to India’s neighbours that China is the big brother in this neighbourhood and they can safely ignore India. Also, Beijing would be able to force Bhutan to deal directly with China instead of through India, as it happens at present.
But this scary scenario is highly unlikely. That’s because the IA and RBA still hold onto the strategic heights and China has not been able to move enough PLA troops and military hardware onto Doklam plateau to pose any serious challenge to Indian and Bhutanese armies. It would, say IA and RBA officers, be easy to push PLA troops and units back to Chumbi Valley. China has, admittedly, amassed a large number of troops, artillery and armoured units in Chumbi Valley. But these are sitting ducks for Indian artillery now. Chumbi Valley is also within easy range of Indian Air Force fighters based in the Siliguri corridor and south Bengal while IA and RBA positions in Doklam are quite out of range of the PLA’s Air Force stationed in Tibet.
This ground reality is what riles Beijing no end. China knows that it cannot start hostilities on this front since it is still at a severe disadvantage. And that is why the Chinese military, its foreign office and the state-controlled media as well as state-sponsored think tanks are spitting fire on India. The knowledge that if the PLA fires the first shot in Doklam, it will suffer huge losses there, and in the Chumbi Valley as well, is what proves to be a huge setback to China’s expansionism and severely dents its gargantuan ego. And hence all the angry noises emanating not only from behind Chinese positions in Doklam, but also from faraway Beijing.
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Petrol in India is cheaper than in countries like Hong Kong, Germany and the UK but costlier than in China, Brazil, Japan, the US, Russia, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, a Bank of Baroda Economics Research report showed.
Rising fuel prices in India have led to considerable debate on which government, state or central, should be lowering their taxes to keep prices under control.
The rise in fuel prices is mainly due to the global price of crude oil (raw material for making petrol and diesel) going up. Further, a stronger dollar has added to the cost of crude oil.
Amongst comparable countries (per capita wise), prices in India are higher than those in Vietnam, Kenya, Ukraine, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Venezuela. Countries that are major oil producers have much lower prices.
In the report, the Philippines has a comparable petrol price but has a per capita income higher than India by over 50 per cent.
Countries which have a lower per capita income like Kenya, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, and Venezuela have much lower prices of petrol and hence are impacted less than India.
“Therefore there is still a strong case for the government to consider lowering the taxes on fuel to protect the interest of the people,” the report argued.
India is the world’s third-biggest oil consuming and importing nation. It imports 85 per cent of its oil needs and so prices retail fuel at import parity rates.
With the global surge in energy prices, the cost of producing petrol, diesel and other petroleum products also went up for oil companies in India.
They raised petrol and diesel prices by Rs 10 a litre in just over a fortnight beginning March 22 but hit a pause button soon after as the move faced criticism and the opposition parties asked the government to cut taxes instead.
India imports most of its oil from a group of countries called the ‘OPEC +’ (i.e, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Russia, etc), which produces 40% of the world’s crude oil.
As they have the power to dictate fuel supply and prices, their decision of limiting the global supply reduces supply in India, thus raising prices
The government charges about 167% tax (excise) on petrol and 129% on diesel as compared to US (20%), UK (62%), Italy and Germany (65%).
The abominable excise duty is 2/3rd of the cost, and the base price, dealer commission and freight form the rest.
Here is an approximate break-up (in Rs):
a)Base Price | 39 |
b)Freight | 0.34 |
c) Price Charged to Dealers = (a+b) | 39.34 |
d) Excise Duty | 40.17 |
e) Dealer Commission | 4.68 |
f) VAT | 25.35 |
g) Retail Selling Price | 109.54 |
Looked closely, much of the cost of petrol and diesel is due to higher tax rate by govt, specifically excise duty.
So the question is why government is not reducing the prices ?
India, being a developing country, it does require gigantic amount of funding for its infrastructure projects as well as welfare schemes.
However, we as a society is yet to be tax-compliant. Many people evade the direct tax and that’s the reason why govt’s hands are tied. Govt. needs the money to fund various programs and at the same time it is not generating enough revenue from direct taxes.
That’s the reason why, govt is bumping up its revenue through higher indirect taxes such as GST or excise duty as in the case of petrol and diesel.
Direct taxes are progressive as it taxes according to an individuals’ income however indirect tax such as excise duty or GST are regressive in the sense that the poorest of the poor and richest of the rich have to pay the same amount.
Does not matter, if you are an auto-driver or owner of a Mercedes, end of the day both pay the same price for petrol/diesel-that’s why it is regressive in nature.
But unlike direct tax where tax evasion is rampant, indirect tax can not be evaded due to their very nature and as long as huge no of Indians keep evading direct taxes, indirect tax such as excise duty will be difficult for the govt to reduce, because it may reduce the revenue and hamper may programs of the govt.
Globally, around 80% of wastewater flows back into the ecosystem without being treated or reused, according to the United Nations.
This can pose a significant environmental and health threat.
In the absence of cost-effective, sustainable, disruptive water management solutions, about 70% of sewage is discharged untreated into India’s water bodies.
A staggering 21% of diseases are caused by contaminated water in India, according to the World Bank, and one in five children die before their fifth birthday because of poor sanitation and hygiene conditions, according to Startup India.
As we confront these public health challenges emerging out of environmental concerns, expanding the scope of public health/environmental engineering science becomes pivotal.
For India to achieve its sustainable development goals of clean water and sanitation and to address the growing demands for water consumption and preservation of both surface water bodies and groundwater resources, it is essential to find and implement innovative ways of treating wastewater.
It is in this context why the specialised cadre of public health engineers, also known as sanitation engineers or environmental engineers, is best suited to provide the growing urban and rural water supply and to manage solid waste and wastewater.
Traditionally, engineering and public health have been understood as different fields.
Currently in India, civil engineering incorporates a course or two on environmental engineering for students to learn about wastewater management as a part of their pre-service and in-service training.
Most often, civil engineers do not have adequate skills to address public health problems. And public health professionals do not have adequate engineering skills.
India aims to supply 55 litres of water per person per day by 2024 under its Jal Jeevan Mission to install functional household tap connections.
The goal of reaching every rural household with functional tap water can be achieved in a sustainable and resilient manner only if the cadre of public health engineers is expanded and strengthened.
In India, public health engineering is executed by the Public Works Department or by health officials.
This differs from international trends. To manage a wastewater treatment plant in Europe, for example, a candidate must specialise in wastewater engineering.
Furthermore, public health engineering should be developed as an interdisciplinary field. Engineers can significantly contribute to public health in defining what is possible, identifying limitations, and shaping workable solutions with a problem-solving approach.
Similarly, public health professionals can contribute to engineering through well-researched understanding of health issues, measured risks and how course correction can be initiated.
Once both meet, a public health engineer can identify a health risk, work on developing concrete solutions such as new health and safety practices or specialised equipment, in order to correct the safety concern..
There is no doubt that the majority of diseases are water-related, transmitted through consumption of contaminated water, vectors breeding in stagnated water, or lack of adequate quantity of good quality water for proper personal hygiene.
Diseases cannot be contained unless we provide good quality and adequate quantity of water. Most of the world’s diseases can be prevented by considering this.
Training our young minds towards creating sustainable water management systems would be the first step.
Currently, institutions like the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (IIT-M) are considering initiating public health engineering as a separate discipline.
To leverage this opportunity even further, India needs to scale up in the same direction.
Consider this hypothetical situation: Rajalakshmi, from a remote Karnataka village spots a business opportunity.
She knows that flowers, discarded in the thousands by temples can be handcrafted into incense sticks.
She wants to find a market for the product and hopefully, employ some people to help her. Soon enough though, she discovers that starting a business is a herculean task for a person like her.
There is a laborious process of rules and regulations to go through, bribes to pay on the way and no actual means to transport her product to its market.
After making her first batch of agarbathis and taking it to Bengaluru by bus, she decides the venture is not easy and gives up.
On the flipside of this is a young entrepreneur in Bengaluru. Let’s call him Deepak. He wants to start an internet-based business selling sustainably made agarbathis.
He has no trouble getting investors and to mobilise supply chains. His paperwork is over in a matter of days and his business is set up quickly and ready to grow.
Never mind that the business is built on aggregation of small sellers who will not see half the profit .
Is this scenario really all that hypothetical or emblematic of how we think about entrepreneurship in India?
Between our national obsession with unicorns on one side and glorifying the person running a pakora stall for survival as an example of viable entrepreneurship on the other, is the middle ground in entrepreneurship—a space that should have seen millions of thriving small and medium businesses, but remains so sparsely occupied that you could almost miss it.
If we are to achieve meaningful economic growth in our country, we need to incorporate, in our national conversation on entrepreneurship, ways of addressing the missing middle.
Spread out across India’s small towns and cities, this is a class of entrepreneurs that have been hit by a triple wave over the last five years, buffeted first by the inadvertent fallout of demonetization, being unprepared for GST, and then by the endless pain of the covid-19 pandemic.
As we finally appear to be reaching some level of normality, now is the opportune time to identify the kind of industries that make up this layer, the opportunities they should be afforded, and the best ways to scale up their functioning in the shortest time frame.
But, why pay so much attention to these industries when we should be celebrating, as we do, our booming startup space?
It is indeed true that India has the third largest number of unicorns in the world now, adding 42 in 2021 alone. Braving all the disruptions of the pandemic, it was a year in which Indian startups raised $24.1 billion in equity investments, according to a NASSCOM-Zinnov report last year.
However, this is a story of lopsided growth.
The cities of Bengaluru, Delhi/NCR, and Mumbai together claim three-fourths of these startup deals while emerging hubs like Ahmedabad, Coimbatore, and Jaipur account for the rest.
This leap in the startup space has created 6.6 lakh direct jobs and a few million indirect jobs. Is that good enough for a country that sends 12 million fresh graduates to its workforce every year?
It doesn’t even make a dent on arguably our biggest unemployment in recent history—in April 2020 when the country shutdown to battle covid-19.
Technology-intensive start-ups are constrained in their ability to create jobs—and hybrid work models and artificial intelligence (AI) have further accelerated unemployment.
What we need to focus on, therefore, is the labour-intensive micro, small and medium enterprise (MSME). Here, we begin to get to a definitional notion of what we called the mundane middle and the problems it currently faces.
India has an estimated 63 million enterprises. But, out of 100 companies, 95 are micro enterprises—employing less than five people, four are small to medium and barely one is large.
The questions to ask are: why are Indian MSMEs failing to grow from micro to small and medium and then be spurred on to make the leap into large companies?
At the Global Alliance for Mass Entrepreneurship (GAME), we have advocated for a National Mission for Mass Entrepreneurship, the need for which is more pronounced now than ever before.
Whenever India has worked to achieve a significant economic milestone in a limited span of time, it has worked best in mission mode. Think of the Green Revolution or Operation Flood.
From across various states, there are enough examples of approaches that work to catalyse mass entrepreneurship.
The introduction of entrepreneurship mindset curriculum (EMC) in schools through alliance mode of working by a number of agencies has shown significant improvement in academic and life outcomes.
Through creative teaching methods, students are encouraged to inculcate 21st century skills like creativity, problem solving, critical thinking and leadership which are not only foundational for entrepreneurship but essential to thrive in our complex world.
Udhyam Learning Foundation has been involved with the Government of Delhi since 2018 to help young people across over 1,000 schools to develop an entrepreneurial mindset.
One pilot programme introduced the concept of ‘seed money’ and saw 41 students turn their ideas into profit-making ventures. Other programmes teach qualities like grit and resourcefulness.
If you think these are isolated examples, consider some larger data trends.
The Observer Research Foundation and The World Economic Forum released the Young India and Work: A Survey of Youth Aspirations in 2018.
When asked which type of work arrangement they prefer, 49% of the youth surveyed said they prefer a job in the public sector.
However, 38% selected self-employment as an entrepreneur as their ideal type of job. The spirit of entrepreneurship is latent and waiting to be unleashed.
The same can be said for building networks of successful women entrepreneurs—so crucial when the participation of women in the Indian economy has declined to an abysmal 20%.
The majority of India’s 63 million firms are informal —fewer than 20% are registered for GST.
Research shows that companies that start out as formal enterprises become two-three times more productive than a similar informal business.
So why do firms prefer to be informal? In most cases, it’s because of the sheer cost and difficulty of complying with the different regulations.
We have academia and non-profits working as ecosystem enablers providing insights and evidence-based models for growth. We have large private corporations and philanthropic and funding agencies ready to invest.
It should be in the scope of a National Mass Entrepreneurship Mission to bring all of them together to work in mission mode so that the gap between thought leadership and action can finally be bridged.