Q10 Development and Vision of India
Investigating Infrastructure: Ecology, Sustainability and Society - Webinar https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmA1rIFKBGU Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung India Jan 27, 2022 Rajni Bakshi , (Journalist/Writer), Kanchi Kohli, (Senior Researcher @Centre for Policy Research), Dolly Kikon, (Anthropologist @University of Melbourne)
Dossier - Investigating Infrastructure: Ecology, Sustainability and Society, bringing together different approaches and perspectives to infrastructure development in India. https://in.boell.org/en/investigating-infrastructure-ecology-sustainability-and-society
Project potential and sustainability is in question. In the public debate are the extreme and unviable forms of infrastructure financing with a dependence on controversial models such as public-private partnerships. Then, there is a critique of the enormous scale and the extreme ‘kind’ of capitalist production and consumption promoted by ‘big-infra’ as ‘race to the bottom’. The elitist top-down politics in the planning and governance of massive projects has been known to sideline democratic local processes. There is fear of regulatory dismantling and harmonization of policies and of technological ‘lock-ins’. Not in adequate focus, and thus increasingly given short shrift are land, livelihoods, environmental and social impacts. Local concerns over these now plague India’s infrastructure landscape resulting in project disruptions and disputes.
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For an alternative paradigm of development https://in.boell.org/en/2019/02/25/alternative-paradigm-development By Rajni Bakshi 25 February 2019 In terms of tangible steps forward, perhaps, the most notable one is to make regeneration of local economies the cornerstone of Sarvodaya.
The emerging discourse on ‘Degrowth’ calls for a new framework in which the emphasis shifts from gross domestic product (GDP) to that which generates actual social, material and ecological well-being. It also prioritises the values of sufficiency and subsistence rather than equating development with the fulfilment of endless wants.
Degrowth or re-growth has broadly five dimensions:
Development is equated with actual well-being, not just throughput of materials
Steady-state economics are prioritised, instead of systems in which growth is a survival imperative
The aim is to foster a solidarity economy through sharing and cooperation so that the same resources can serve far more people
Consumption is reconfigured to make more judicious use of resources with social pressure and laws to discourage or prevent business models based on planned obsolescence. Instead products are designed to last and be reused.
Value is redefined so that the value of anything is not just what it is worth to a potential buyer in monetary terms, but rather in terms of the actual well-being it generates immediately as well as in the long term.
The Extractive Circuit https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-extractive-circuit-singh-chaudhary
An exhausted planet at the end of growth Lead article in the Baffler issues "The squandering Earth".
accumulation-crazed multinationals ransack the planet for profit, making us all feel like used-up bottles of stuff while they amass exponentially more indestructible bottles of stuff. This waste-producing apparatus is vast, Ajay Singh Chaudhary writes in “The Extractive Circuit,” “the leaden reality of a global human ecological niche organized for maximal profitability—no matter how difficult or costly to maintain.” This circuit, he stresses, “is not a metaphor,” but an accelerating systems-crash that steals time and resources from zones of least resistance, like fragile habitats.
Some extracts:
The extractive circuit is the leaden reality of a global human ecological niche organized for maximal profitability—no matter how difficult or costly to maintain.
Eighty-three percent of the emissions occur at the point of production. The majority of such phones are produced in China, whether their end-use destination is the United States, Germany, Japan, or any other country on Earth. And, if we start looking at the other ways phone production exceeds planetary boundaries, in purely ecological terms, we find all measurable boundaries breached.[2] It’s not just a matter of carbon dioxide and other production emissions but also the processes of resource extraction (mining) itself: excessive freshwater use, eutrophication from biogeochemical flows, deforestation of nearby lands, biodiversity loss from land-use and others. At the same time such extraction is dependent, for just one component, on cobalt found primarily in mines in the DRC. The labor in such mines is, almost without exception, either slave labor, child labor, or both.
there are two simultaneous and related phenomena: value extraction and nodal exhaustion. Value is extracted not only through human labor but also through a series of natural and social inputs. Ecologically speaking, value at the simplest level can be drawn from the “free” use of water or air and other “commons.” But it’s also the value derived from their commodification, from so-called “externalities” in waste flows and mountains; in complex socioecological processes like industrial agriculture where not only are soils exhausted but output is dependent on massive fossil fuel, unsustainable pesticide and chemical-fertilizer inputs, or with the “free” exploitation of flora and fauna, from simple use as with logging to the patenting of DNA strands...
Financialized supply chains are structured to allow firms to ignore or skirt local, national, international legal.or even physical attempts to restrict the flow of extraction.
Neoliberalism’s matryoshka doll of financialization, international economic governance, risk shifting, state policies, and adjustments in cultural logic helped nurse profitability out of its 1970s doldrums. It did so through the redistribution of labor income to capital; through creating historically unprecedented speed and mobility for transnational capital flows, business-to-business commerce, and firm-level debt/currency creation; and through transforming the social functions of states into profit generating enterprises, diminishing democratic sovereignty, inhibiting decolonization, and quite a lot more.
The one-day or one-hour delivery, the expedited shipping, the synthesis of business and “leisure” hours: all of this is a lifesaver to the single parent, the double-shift employee in a food-desert, the downwardly mobile twelve-hours-a-day professional, the hustling informal or aspirational employee, hoping to claw their way out of generalized precarity.
“services” provided for consumers.,.. instead as facilitating the frenzy of these lives, as shifting literal time and energy not to these individual consumers but rather to the needs of an “always-on” capitalism, creating the very crises to which these services respond. Such services are dependent on the speed and ungovernability of GVCs which can, to a degree not possible before, dice up a production process into its most minute parts, spread them as far a global distance as comparative advantage dictates, limited, in strictly economic terms, by the current state of communications technology and the price of oil.
At every node of the extractive circuit, we find speed, coercion, and the inevitable stressors on the individual. One of the best analytic lenses we have for this intersection of affect, environment, psychosocial pathology, and neurology is the psychology and political theory of Frantz Fanon. The extractive circuit is a “divided society . . . characterized by a predominant nervous tension leading quite quickly to exhaustion.”
At every node of the extractive circuit, we find speed, coercion, and the inevitable stressors on the individual. One of the best analytic lenses we have for this intersection of affect, environment, psychosocial pathology, and neurology is the psychology and political theory of Frantz Fanon. The extractive circuit is a “divided society . . . characterized by a predominant nervous tension leading quite quickly to exhaustion.”
the extractive circuit is not a metaphor. It works through real people, specific geographies, economically strategic areas organizing, linking, and connecting our global human ecological niche. The granular level I began with in my paradigmatic example is the very real, material workings of this system. Imperialism does not vanish in such a system, but it is now a layer beneath. Colonization is more generalized. States (in a wide variety of forms) still play a crucial if dramatically changed role even when considered over the course of the last fifty years.
Capitalism Is Making You Lonely https://janataweekly.org/capitalism-is-making-you-lonely/ Colette Shade September 5, 2021
In a 2019 poll, 22 percent of millennials reported that they had “no friends.” The World Health Organization has found that loneliness affected 20-34 percent of older people in places ranging from Europe to India to Latin America.
While excessive social media use can be harmful, moderate use can help people stay connected – especially during unique times like the COVID-19 lockdowns. And there is a bigger impediment to intimacy, anyway: capitalism.
In a capitalist system, many people don’t have time to see family and maintain existing friendships — let alone create and nurture new ones. It is difficult to make time to see people when you are, for example, working multiple jobs (often with irregular shift times), commuting, caring for children and family members, and doing basic tasks like cooking, going to the grocery store, and doing laundry, sometimes all at once. Social time often necessarily gets bumped to the bottom of the to-do list.
If we want to have a less lonely society, we need to put human needs — and human relationships — at the center. Under the existing system, that won’t happen.
https://sdgs.un.org/gsdr/gsdr2023 the 2023 Global Sustainable Development Report (GSDR), finds that at this critical juncture, midway to 2030, incremental and fragmented change is insufficient to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in the remaining seven years. Implementation of the 2030 Agenda requires the active mobilization of political leadership and ambition for science-based transformations.
The GSDR 2023 highlights key transformations needed in different sectors and provides key findings from the literature, practical examples and tools for progress towards the SDGs. It provides a stylized model to help unpack and understand the transformation process over time and outline the roles of different levers in facilitating various stages of transformation through a systematic and structured approach
, the report outlines how the knowledge enterprisehas to evolve to best serve transformation processes. This will be achieved by both generating knowledge from a broader spectrum of society and connecting that knowledge to decision-making in a more robust and inclusive manner.
the second quadrennial Global Sustainable Development Report prepared by an independent group of scientists Full Report TIMES OF CRISIS, TIMES OF CHANGE: SCIENCE FOR ACCELERATING TRANSFORMATIONS TO SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT https://sdgs.un.org/sites/default/files/2023-09/FINAL%20GSDR%202023-Digital%20-110923_1.pdf
PUSH TRANSFORMATION BY ACTIVATING SYNERGIES IN THE SIX ENTRY POINTS
1: Human well-being and capabilities
2: Sustainable and just economies
3: Sustainable food systems and nutrition patterns
4: Energy decarbonization with universal access
5: Urban and peri-urban development
6: Global environmental commons
TRANSFORM SCIENCE FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
Performance indicators –on impact
Empirical researchon implementation
capacities Support for low-income countries
Open science
Mechanisms for knowledge sharing
Too early to pass verdict on impact of demonetisation: Ex-SBI Chairman Rajnish Kumar
Oct 21, 2021 https://youtu.be/8uIufmbYETE?t=776 In ThePrint SoftCover, Rajnish Kumar, author of ‘The Custodian of Trust, a Banker’s Memoir,’ published by Penguin India, the NPA crisis and the inner workings of the SBI.