On ghost gear and seaweed stirfry

For the last few months, we’ve been building up towards a project on abandoned, lost and otherwise discarded fishing gear, more commonly known as ghost gear. This began with a conversation with a conservation scientist working on the issue of marine debris in India. He had read an academic paper describing the creation of a map depicting the zones where there was a high probability of turtles getting entangled in ghost gear off the Australian coast. This map could then be used to target areas for ghost gear removal, and thus reduce the threat to the turtles. . Could we do something similar for India? What do we know about ghost gear off the Indian coast? The fact that there does not seem to be enough data about marine debris off the Indian coast to begin answering these questions shaped our discussions, and concluded with us being brought on as researchers to answer one question: given the current state of technology, what is the best method to locate and detect ghost gear in Indian territorial waters?

Abandoned, lost or otherwise discarded fishing gear.

Once we completed the contractual work with the NGO, we dove head first into the project. We were on a tight schedule, so went looking for some external assistance; we were very lucky to be able to convince Gabriella D’Cruz, a lovely and passionate marine conservationist, to join us for this project. We began by structuring the workflow and assigning tasks to each member of the team. We would be conducting reviews of academic literature, non-academic material and interviews with experts, to ensure we covered the subject comprehensively, and would then be summarising the information, analysing it and submitting our recommendations to our client.

We took a beach-break on of the days and found some ghost gear washed up on the shore.

Once the research itself began, the next few weeks just whizzed past. We spent all our energy looking for and reading through the available information on our subject. The work was very motivating, as the eventual conservation impact was evident, and there was also a steep learning curve; while we were familiar with the technology being considered, its application to ghost gear detection was new to us.

Working together as a team was lovely; we all bonded over discussions of food, Goa and conservation. One particular day was memorable, for Gabriella (who loves sea-weed, to say the very least) brought a few different varieties of seaweed seasoning to work. We ended up cooking stir-fry noodles that day with the sea-weed which was just delicious; but it didn’t stop there. A few hours later, tea-time consisted of black tea with seaweed, accompanied with cashewnuts roasted in butter and seaweed!

Seaweed stirfry.

On another day, we had to take a break because one of us found a video recording of a conference where they’d live-streamed the proceedings over Facebook, but had mistakenly put the cat filter on; we couldn’t see our screens because of our tears of laughter.

Over the first weeks of this project, we collated all the information we could find on this topic, had filtered and summarised it and had begun making our primary assessments. In the last weeks, we brought all of this information together and prepared the report. We spent a few days reading through our information summaries, identifying patterns, concerns and potential recommendations. We spent one long day at our whiteboard, discussing and condensing all the information we had on the topic.

Working things out on the whiteboard.

It was lovely to be able to work through the information, have a structured debate (shout-out to Brooklyn 99 S06e12), construct flow-charts and discover what we agreed to as a team. It was a tiring but particularly rewarding day, because at the end we had identified a clear workflow, specific recommendations for our client and potential areas for innovation in the location and detection of ghost gear. Over the last few days, we completed writing and editing the report before sending it to our clients. We’re now working on our other projects, but know that we’re going to be doing more work on eliminating ghost gear from the oceans soon!

Careful planning for an eco-friendly road network

(Cross-posted from the Hindu Business Line, April 11th 2017.)

India needs its roads. Our road network is essential to the free flow of goods and people across the country and connects rural villages to the rest of the nation. India’s roads, together with the railways, make us one. The question that should be asked, however, is how many roads does India need? It is obvious that there is an upper limit to the area that any nation can allocate to its road network. Aside from the fact that building roads is expensive, the opportunity cost must also be considered; the land given over to building a road can now no longer be used for other purposes. There are other factors to consider as well. Building a road requires contiguous stretches of land, and in a country like India where there is a mixture of public and private property, land acquisition has its own financial and political costs.

Road building also has long-term ramifications, especially on the environment and ecology. Road construction necessitates the altering of ecosystems; mining of construction materials and the clearing of the road’s planned alignment result in the cutting of trees and the disposal of excavated rock and debris.

While ecosystem alteration itself can have persistent impacts, the mere presence of a road also has long-term effects, modifying environmental variables such as the groundwater recharge rate, the local biodiversity, and even the local temperature. They also make previously wild areas more accessible, increasing incidences of poaching and illegal timber felling. And once we factor in traffic movement, the number and severity of impacts only increases. Wild animals using roads are often hit by vehicles, commonly being injured or killed. Over time, entire animal populations may start avoiding roads, restricting their access to food, water, and shelter, and setting them on the path to local extinction.

For all the pros of building roads, there are also clear cons. This is true across the world, but is felt especially hard in India, where we face the unique circumstance of having both a highly dense human population, as well as high densities of biodiversity in specific regions. While people need roads, they are also dependent on ecosystem services such as clean air and clean water, which originate from the same wild areas being damaged by roads.

Twin needs

This should not be an either-or situation. Indians require both roads and intact ecosystems, and hampering the development or function of one for the sake of the other will not benefit the nation. To maximise the benefits of roads and minimise their impacts, far more time and effort should be spent on determining exactly where roads should be built.

A spatial study by Laurance et al (‘A Global Strategy for Road Building’; Nature, 2014) attempts this at the global scale by comparing the potential impacts of roads on the environment against their benefits to agricultural productivity. In India, studies of this sort, taking into account the requirements of the nation, would be extremely valuable, as they enable planners to clearly assess the pros and cons of road construction before any action is taken.

In those cases where it is deemed necessary to construct new roads that may have adverse impacts on the environment, decision-makers must follow the mitigation hierarchy. This is ideally a transparent step-wise process whereby the impacts of any given road on the environment are assessed, and efforts are made to prevent or alleviate them. Identifying those impacts that can be avoided or minimised, and then mitigating or compensating for those that cannot, would go a long way toward preserving ecosystem services, while also allowing for road development.

Unfortunately, since the political imperative is to build more roads faster, agencies responsible for road construction have little time or effort to allocate toward long-term planning. Recent proposals to build roads through formerly inviolate forested areas or prime wildlife habitat are short-sighted and bring to mind the era of big dams, whose construction resulted in disastrous impacts on human communities and the environment which far outweighed the over-hyped benefits these dams were built to provide.

However, politicians believe that the promise of building roads attracts votes, as can be seen from the political discourse at all levels; Members of Legislative Assemblies promise small villages road connections to the nearest towns while Central Government Ministers claim that roads will be constructed at the rate of 40km/day across the entire country. As they also tend to think in the short term, chained to the election cycle as they are, the effectiveness of political advocacy on this matter seems self-limiting.

The task thus falls to India’s civil society, India’s judiciary, and to the development banks that fund road projects, to ensure that the costs and benefits of proposed roads are well thought through before implementation. Those government agencies and private agencies responsible for road construction can help by making proposed road alignments available for public debate and discussion.

Eliciting constructive feedback from the public — including wildlife and environmental experts — at the planning stage will help prevent delays and the resulting escalations in costs due to legal challenges or protests during the actual construction phase. It is only by wisely planning for the future that we will be able to ensure that India has a world-class road network that takes into account the needs of all its citizens.

[ This article was commissioned by the Centre for the Advanced Study of India at the University of Pennsylvania and is also available on their blog. ]

India’s Hydropower Investments in Bhutan: Environmental Impacts and the Role of Civil Society

Supriya Roychoudhury and Shashank Srinivasan

[ Cross posted from the Hindu Business Line, April 26th 2016]

India is jostling for space in the global marketplace with other rising powers and needs robust energy supply to compete effectively. Implementing new power projects to harness domestic natural resources is one way to achieve this. However, in India, large-scale infrastructure projects have been hard to undertake due to their perceived adverse social and environmental effects. Today, strong internal environmental regulations and an activist civil society have raised the costs of implementing such infrastructure projects within India.

In this context, it is not surprising that India is looking to international markets to service its growing energy needs. Experiences from across the globe suggest that firms — whether state-owned or private — will opt to invest in countries where national regulatory frameworks are most conducive to business. India’s decision to support investments in large-scale, low-cost hydropower in Bhutan is a case in point.

Bhutan, landlocked and sandwiched between Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh, has significant potential for hydropower production. Together with an enabling business environment, the absence of an active judiciary and a relatively nascent civil society makes it a seemingly ideal destination for Indian energy investments.

What makes India’s energy investments in Bhutan unique, however, is its professed commitment to a set of organising principles now popularly framed as ‘South-South Cooperation’. As a key development assistance provider from the Global South, India believes that its development partnerships with other countries in this grouping must align with the principles of respect for national sovereignty, equality, non-conditionality and mutual benefit.

The first hydropower project supported by India (Chukha, 336 MW) was completed in 1988; over 80 per cent of the power it subsequently produced has been exported to India. India’s domestic demand for hydropower has increased dramatically since then, prompting a search for innovative financing tools.

India has promised to help Bhutan install power plants that will generate 10,000 MW of hydropower by 2020. In the early years, India provided funding to Bhutan as part-grant, part-concessional loan. However, this model was considered to be unsustainable as it relied solely on public funds from both countries.

To address this issue, and to meet its ambitious 2020 target, India has proposed a new ‘Joint-Venture’ (JV) model to raise funds for its hydropower investments in Bhutan. The JV model is a partnership between public sector undertakings of both India and Bhutan, with 70 per cent of finances to be raised as company debt, and 30 per cent to be equity from India. The latter contribution was initially intended to be shared equally by both countries, but upon Bhutan’s refusal to do so, India agreed to pay Bhutan’s 15 per cent share as a gesture of goodwill. There are currently 10 projects in various stages of progress under this model.

Another model that has been proposed is the public-private partnership (PPP). The Dagachhu project, a JV between Tata Power, Bhutan’s DGPC, and the National Pension and Provident Fund of Bhutan (NPPF), is Bhutan’s first PPP for hydropower development. Co-financing partners include the Asian Development Bank, Austria’s Raiffeisen Bank and the NPPF, making this a truly multi-stakeholder initiative.

This partnership will allow Tata Power Trading Company, an arm of Tata Power, to sell the power generated from the Dagachhu project to the Indian energy market. The PPP model thus offers India a way to support hydropower development in Bhutan without relying solely on its own finances. It is evident that a variety of sophisticated financing modalities, untied to any kind of political conditionality, has allowed India to pay for Bhutan to produce the electricity India needs to service its own economy.

In exchange, Bhutan profits from the revenues generated from selling this electricity to India, which, in turn, enables it to offset any unfavourable trade imbalances. It would seem, therefore, that India’s energy partnerships with Bhutan align with the basic principles of South-South Cooperation. On closer scrutiny, however, it seems that the actual implementation of these projects is not always guided by the values of mutual benefit and equality, especially with regard to Bhutan’s environment.

Despite Bhutan’s strong environmental and biodiversity protection regime, there have been irregularities regarding environmental impact assessments conducted by Indian agencies, resulting in decisions that are not always environmentally sound. For example, the construction of the Punatsangchhu-I (1,200 MW) and II (1,020 MW) power projects has allegedly jeopardised the habitat of the endangered white-bellied heron.

Some hydropower projects supported by India in Bhutan have also had adverse effects within India itself. For example, excessive releases from the Kurichhu (60 MW) project had severely damaged the downstream Manas National Park, a World Heritage Site, in 2004. Anticipating similar levels of destruction resulting from the Mangdechhu (720 MW) power project, which is also upstream of Manas, the World Heritage Committee has twice requested Bhutan for information on the estimated impact of this project.

Further, not all power projects have benefited the Bhutanese economy. It is primarily Indian companies that are subcontracted to conduct project work, often relying on Indian labour. Bhutan Chamber of Commerce and Industry President Ugyen Tshechup has remarked, “On the one hand, the government talks about giving equal opportunity and sharing the benefits equally. On the other hand, they give everything to foreigners.”

Hydropower is an essential and irreplaceable component of Bhutan’s strategy toward green socio-economic development. However, the judiciary and civil society in both countries should scrutinise the social and environmental impact of these projects, and create appropriate mitigation and accountability measures.

India must exercise leadership since it is ultimately responsible for generating these impacts. India must ensure that its investments in Bhutan, or in any other country in the Global South, align with the same standards that projects within the country meet. Adhering to these standards will help to strengthen and further legitimise the principles of “South-South Cooperation”

As India’s economy grows and its search for resources to fuel this growth continues, its development partnerships will expand in scale and geographical reach. Developing clear regulations that outline India’s strategy towards its investments overseas and institutionalising the principles of South-South Cooperation will be critical to ensuring that relationships with other countries in the Global South remain harmonious.

[ This article was commissioned by the Centre for the Advanced Study of India at the University of Pennsylvania and is also available on their blog. ]