The Tricky Path to a Global Climate Agreement

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Authors: Samir Saran, Senior Fellow and Vice President, Observer Research Foundation; Vivan Sharan, Associate Fellow, Observer Research Foundation, Nov 24, 2014, Council of Councils

Lights on the Eiffel Tower read, “Paris Climat 2015” to mark the selection of the Paris to host the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Conference of Parties in 2015 (Jacky Naegelen/ Courtesy Reuters).

The Conference of Parties (COP 20) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) will convene a critical session in Lima December 1–12. It precedes COP 21, to be held in Paris in December 2015, at which a post-Kyoto global agreement (post 2020) on climate change must be finalized, in accordance with the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action. The outline of the Paris agreement is expected to begin to take shape in Lima. This agreement will determine the ambition and contours of the global response to climate change in the years ahead.

Expectations and Challenges in Lima

The Ad Hoc Working Group on the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action (ADP) is mandated with reaching a global agreement by COP 21. Such an agreement would include a vast range of issues including mitigation, adaptation, finance, technology development and transfer, transparency of action, and support for capacity building.

Since the ADP is under the convention, the contours of a new agreement will need to be in consonance with the principles of the UNFCCC, including Common but Differentiated Responsibilities and Respective Capabilities (CBDR/RC). While the principles are meant to guide efforts toward the ultimate objective of the Convention —to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations—they have not necessarily been fully observed by Annex 1 countries, the countries that had committed to take the lead in these efforts, per Article 4 of the Convention.

Alongside eliciting a renewed commitment from all parties to the mandate from Durban, the Lima meeting should also establish robust processes to consider scientific assessments andreviews (on climate change effects and responses) that are being developed or have recently been submitted to the convention, including the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The Lima meeting is also expected to lead to decisions on the contours, time lines, and anchoring in ADP, of the so-called Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs).

Factors Conditioning a Global Agreement

There are at least four developments that may influence any global agreement on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. These include the domestic political challenges in the United States, the evolving global energy scenario, the European impulse to reindustrialize and regain competitiveness, and the dynamic and evolving role of emerging powers.

Today there are 192 parties to the Kyoto Protocol, yet the world’s second largest emitter, the United States, has failed to ratify the protocol. It has, however, in a submission to the UNFCCC stated that it “supports a Paris agreement that reflects the seriousness and magnitude of what science demands.” Earlier in the year, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency unveiled ambitious regulations on emissions mitigation for new and existing power plants as part of President Barack Obama’s Climate Action Plan.

While a global agreement without U.S. participation cannot be considered a success, Republican leaders including Senator Mitch McConnell—who is likely to become Senate Majority Leader in the new Congress in January 2015—have publicly criticized the Obama administration’s climate change policies. The U.S. submission on the elements of a 2015 agreement outlines clearly that the country expects certain elements of the Paris agreement to be internationally legally binding. Yet the possibility of the U.S. Congress agreeing to commitments that fulfil the ambitious policy response envisioned in the AR5 remains bleak.

The United States is the world’s largest oil consumer, and oil prices are at multi-year lows. For the first time since January 1994, the United States imported less than three million barrels of crude oil from the members of the Organization for Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in February 2013. In addition to the shale gas revolution that has inevitably led to an impulse to industrialize in the United States, there is weak demand from China and the EU that has added to the downward pressure on the price of oil. OPEC members are split on establishing a floor price for oil in this scenario, and high energy prices cannot be expected to act as a trigger for industrialized countries to invest heavily in alternative energies.

Adding to the energy sector realities is the fact that the European Commission has explicitlystated that industry will be brought back to the core of European policies. In the midst of burgeoning unemployment, particularly among the youth, the EU agenda is set on bringing industry’s weight to 20 percent of GDP by 2020, from around 16 percent today. To fulfil this agenda, EU member countries are already consuming more hydrocarbons.

According to recent reports, Germany has increased coal consumption by 13 percent and the UK by 22 percent in the last four years. The EU is also negotiating an expansive free trade agreement with the United States
(the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership) that could give further impetus to reindustrialization. In the midst of these fundamental structural shifts, it is unlikely that EU leaders will commit to aggressive and bold climate change measures required of developed countries.

The rise of rapidly growing developing countries and their different development trajectories will also complicate a global agreement. These countries, including China and India, which together account for nearly three billion people, face domestic imperatives to develop further, albeit of different dimensions and scale. India for one has to provide energy to 300 million of its people that have no access and millions more who have only notional access. It also has to provide jobs to nearly twelve million people who enter the workforce every year; a large share of those jobs will need to be generated by the manufacturing sector. This means that India will continue to negotiate for space and time to ensure its broad-based economic development and would ideally like to have the support of Brazil, South Africa, India, and China on this.

It remains to be seen how the recent bilateral agreement between the United States and China could impact the group dynamics and whether this club of countries will continue to weigh in on the climate debate together in the run-up to the Lima and Paris meetings.

The Way Ahead

The COP 20 at Lima will be an exercise in creating trust and credibility mechanisms under the convention. To avoid replicating mistakes from COP 15 at Copenhagen—where negotiations on the draft text fell through in the final hours—the discussions at Lima should be aimed at producing the draft negotiating text for the COP 21. This will enable a transparent and goal oriented process, which will be able to meet many of the expectations and constraints outlined above, at least in the short term.

The factors discussed above indicate that the national contributions as agreed in Paris must be substantive without being burdensome. This can be achieved through an innovative global response that targets three low hanging fruits, assuming the Annex 1 countries demonstrate a new willingness toward fulfilling their commitments on financial and technological flows as per Article 4 of the Convention:

Improvement of energy consumption efficiency per unit of revenue earned (energy intensity) of large, energy-intensive corporations operating in industrial and energy sectors across the globe. Industry and energy sectors account for 45 percent of global emissions. Even relatively nominal gains in these sectors through policy incentives for enhanced energy intensity performance can yield large emission mitigation gains. Only corporations that are over a certain predetermined revenue, profitability, or turnover threshold, across the globe, should be considered within an incentives framework to ensure that actions are commensurate with respective capabilities.
Realization of end-use efficiency through demand-side management. For instance, India’s Bureau of Energy Efficiency estimates that up to 50 percent efficiency gains (relative to current levels) can be realized through such processes domestically in case of commercial buildings alone. Given that the buildings sector accounts for around 8 percent of global emissions, there is significant scope for purposeful collaboration between developed and developing countries in demand side management.
If it is understood that the principles enshrined in the UNFCCC should act a barometer for success, the conception of these principles must not be limited to procedural matters. An example would be the equitable transfer of financial and capacity building assistance from first-tier cities toward towns and rural areas within and across national geographies. Initiatives such as the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group show that multi-stakeholder responses can be leveraged toward an ambitious climate change response and private sector stakeholders are ready to participate. Such initiatives both between countries and within countries would act as a robust means toward achieving sustainability.

In Lima and Paris, the global community must ensure that obsession with the legal nature of the post-Kyoto agreement does not detract from achieving what is eminently possible. The next year will in any case determine whether or not climate multilateralism will work.

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Digital Debates — The CyFy Journal 2014

SAMIR SARAN

India is one of the biggest beneficiaries of the IT and communications revolution with roughly 25% of India’s GDP growth over the past two decades having been created in the IT and ITES sector. There is little doubt that a larger share of India’s future growth will originate from or be dependent on this digital medium. Therefore, India must be at the Internet governance high table when agreement is reached on managing this most vital global commons. Would India shed the reticence, characteristic of its 20th century approach to multilateralism and re-imagine itself as part of the ‘global management’ with attendant responsibility and rights? Or will the perceived virtuosity of nonalignment continue to see India lead the global outliers and minority stakeholders in this global governance debate? The chapters in this volume does not offer all the answers, but it does raise a series of questions and provides analysis that will allow us all to engage more deeply with this most important element of our contemporary lives.

The Problem | Samir Saran
A New Paradigm for Cyber Security | R. Swaminathan
Secrecy, Transparency and Secrecy | Peter Grabosky
Ensuring Privacy in a Regime of Surveillance | Mahima Kaul
A Superpower for an Information Society | Sandro Gaycken
Indo-US Cyber Security Cooperation | Jennifer McArdle and Michael Cheetham
The Civilian Sector | Gabi Siboni
Lessons from Russia | Oleg Demidov
Global and National Security Imperatives | Rajeswari Pillai Rajagopalan
Negotiating Cyber Rules | C. Raja Mohan
Further Reading | Darshana M. Baruah
Labour — Blessing or a Curse? | Mithun Dey

To read the full journal click here

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India First: Modi’s Approach to Foreign Policy

SEPTEMBER 24, 2014 – WASHINGTON, DC

During Prime Minister Modi’s first 100 days in office, the words muscular, nimble, imperious and obdurate have all been used by commentators to describe his foreign policy. Prime Minister Modi’s special emphasis on India’s neighborhood, whole-hearted embrace of Japan, and successful performance at the BRICS summit are beginning to recast some of the old assumptions and positions that have defined India’s recent engagement with the world. While the prime minister has been able to instill a certain energy and purpose in Delhi, some key domestic imperatives and his own personal preferences are beginning to define India’s global play.

Samir Saran discussed the how the prime minister’s preferences, legacy imperatives, and ambitious agenda to transform the Indian economy could finally define a new and pragmatic approach to the region and the world. Original link is here

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India, the ITU and Unbundling Internet Governance

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Indo-US Cooperation on Internet Governance and Cyber Security : A Joint Research Project of The Observer Research Foundation And The Heritage Foundation October 2014

1st page

Indo-US Cooperation on Internet Governance and Cyber Security

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Modi party tightens grip on power with Indian state election wins

Bharatiya Janata party of Indian prime minister expected to form state governments in Maharashtra and Haryana

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Agence France-Presse in Mumbai
The Guardian, Sunday 19 October 2014 15.03 BST

BJP celebrations in Mumbai. Photograph: Rafiq Maqbool/AP
The Indian prime minister Narendra Modi’s rightwing party claimed victory in elections in two key states on Sunday, tightening its grip on power after winning national elections in May.

The Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) was leading in Maharashtra, of which the financial hub Mumbai is the capital, beating its centre-left rival Congress party which has ruled the western state for 15 years.

“BJP will definitely form the government in Maharashtra,” the BJP’s state president, Devendra Fadnavis, told reporters in Mumbai as the vote count continued.

The BJP also won in northern Haryana, which borders New Delhi, after 10 years of Congress rule of the state. The state’s outgoing chief minister, BS Hooda, said: “Like the Congress earlier got the mandate, now the BJP got the mandate and will form the government.”

Modi campaigned doggedly for the elections held last week, and the victories are likely to encourage him to push ahead with promised reforms. He won the general election on pledges to revive the ailing economy and clean up endemic corruption, but many of the reforms have yet to be introduced.

On the eve of the state results, Modi’s government lifted controls on diesel prices, aiming to give market forces greater influence on the economy, attract investment and cut subsidies.

The victories will strengthen the party’s power in the national parliament’s upper house, crucial for the passing of contentious laws. The BJP currently lacks a majority in that chamber, whose composition is based on seats won in regional assemblies.

The Delhi-based political analyst Samir Saran said the victories “allow greater space to Modi to accelerate his reforms agenda. In many ways the results signify the continuing rejection of the brand of politics on offer from the Congress and its allies at the centre and in the states. It also is confirmation of Narendra Modi as the leader with momentum.”

The BJP is expected to fall short of an outright majority in Maharashtra and could need a partner to form government. It is expected to mend ties with its ally of 25 years in Maharashtra, the far-right Shiv Sena, after deciding to campaign alone following an acrimonious split.

“I hope that the old alliance is restored once again in a crucial state like Mahrashtra,” the BJP veteran leader LK Advani said.

The BJP had won or was leading in 120 seats in Maharashtra, in tallies on the election commission’s website, while Congress was trailing with 43 in the 288-seat state assembly. Shiv Sena was leading in 59 seats.

In Haryana, the BJP was ahead in 49 of the 90 seats up for grabs, while Congress was leading in 15.

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India’s climate change strategy: Expanding differentiated responsibility

Samir Saran and Will Poff-Webster
07 October 2014

Original link is here

Link of Global Policy Journal

Introduction

As the world prepares for the upcoming climate change negotiations in Lima in 2014 and Paris in 2015, there is an expectation that the talks be more decisive than previous attempts at consensus from Kyoto to Copenhagen. Yet the assumption that the undeniable science of climate change will by itself compel action on an issue that has thus far proved the mother of all collective action problems ignores the failures of past conferences. For Lima and Paris to succeed in achieving consensus, the issue of equitable response to the climate crisis must be creatively reimagined. Equity has been a challenge for climate consensus since the 1992 Rio Earth Summit first articulated that, “In view of the different contributions to global environmental degradation, States have common but differentiated responsibilities.”¹

In meeting this challenge of articulating responsibilities for a climate that all share but only some have impacted substantially, India’s challenge is increasingly the world’s challenge. How can India acknowledge and respond to existing trends—the increasing urgency of confronting climate change, the energy-intensive process of achieving a semblance of development, and widening wealth gaps between rich and poor—while maintaining its focus on bringing its hundreds of millions of citizens out of poverty? In a larger sense, how can the world prevent climate degradation amid existing inequality and the aspiration of billions to rise out of poverty?

Maintaining equity between India and earlier developers

For India, the actualisation of differentiated responsibility remains central to any climate agreement. Developed countries and China have already undergone energy-intensive industrial development (and largely coal-fired electrification) to bring their people out of poverty, consuming much of the world’s carbon budget in the process. From Britain’s use of the steam engine in the early nineteenth century to China’s exponentially increasing coal capacity over the last decade, carbon-polluting energy has been essential to providing jobs for the millions who seek them in each successive industrial revolution.² India’s coming industrial revolution and necessary shift to manufacturing, with twelve million new workers entering the workforce each year, cannot be avoided lest those millions lose the possibility of a better life.³ India’s economic transition, coming at a time when the world is finally moving toward a collective response to climate change, represents a great challenge to maintaining economic equity between India and previously industrializing powers. After all, the cost of access to prosperity must not be the highest for latecomers to industrialization. In other words, poverty cannot be frozen by a dateline.

India has acted to engage these contrasting priorities, by committing to a 20-25 percent reduction in carbon intensity by 2020—a natural consequence of increasing efficiency in the energy sector, but also a step to ensure the government’s promise that India’s per capita emissions will not go above those of wealthy countries.⁴ But equity suggests that India resist any effort to tie its energy intensity reduction to China’s, as the two countries have vastly different existing energy consumption and generation footprints. India starts from a lower polluting baseline compared to China and even to developed economies that have shed manufacturing—India’s use of energy per purchasing power parity dollar of economic output is 0.33 kg CO2, compared to China at 0.60 and developed countries like the United States at 0.48.⁵ The tendency to see China and India in hyphenated terms as large economies with growing emissions ignores the fundamental differences in their current contribution to climate change and to their vastly different economic and development landscapes.

Toward an Indian strategy

The need for global action against climate change has prompted diplomats in the developed world to speak of “win- win” situations—that transitioning to renewable energy will allow economies to reap the benefits of green jobs growth while reducing emissions. At least in India, this rhetoric rings false. Barring as-yet-insufficient technology, stuttering monetary transfer, or commercial funding from the developed world, coal will remain significantly cheaper than all other sources of energy through 2030 and perhaps beyond.⁶Renewables suffer from high variability in supply and base load restrictions on Indian power grids. Renewable energy development, which would be appealing from a simplistic “first, do no harm” perspective, collapses upon closer scrutiny: how should India assess the harm of more of its citizens remaining in poverty for every increase in marginal energy cost? The ethical aspect has a political dimension as well: India’s parliament will not countenance ratifying the Paris proposal unless it allows maximal focus on poverty alleviation. And even if it does, democracies have other ways to negate bad agreements, federalism being chief among them. While this is a matter for another study in itself, it must be noted that in the Indian context, the country must be viewed as a collection of thirty nations in a union. The Paris proposal must work for Indian states, or it will fail the ultimate test of implementation.

To negotiate action on climate change despite these challenges, India should promote a more fine-tuned form of differentiated responsibility — not just between countries, but within them as well. International debate thus far has been dominated by equity between countries, yet recent globalisation has caused increasing intra-national inequality as global inequality decreases.⁷ Even proposals for differentiated responsibility within federal systems, whether EU members, Chinese provinces, or American or Indian states, suffer from inadequate consideration of the far greater inequality within each of these smaller entities.⁸ India should solve this problem by introducing international emissions standards for large corporations. For instance, all corporations valued above $1 billion (or another suitable cut-off) should be subject to internationally binding efficiency standards, regardless of national origin. By decoupling protection of the poor from protection of wealthy corporations that reside within the same borders, India will focus its negotiating power on protecting its most vulnerable citizens, while also addressing large multinational corporations often unconstrained by state power. Allegations that India’s wealthy corporations hide behind its government’s focus on poverty would be allayed, and the world would be able to address climate change with differentiation and therefore equity—targeting those able to pay rather than the global poor. This would also compel the “rich” countries to act against the “carbon gaming” of their transnational corporations.

Market-oriented change

Such a negotiation strategy would enshrine an expanded differentiated responsibility, helping to solve equity concerns. Corporate emissions standards would nonetheless face several practical obstacles—balancing mandatory and transparent compliance with national sovereignty; preventing economic distortions that might inefficiently incentivize corporations to remain below $1 billion valuation or break into subsidiaries; and solving the larger challenge of corporate tax havens that would be ripe for exploitation under any international standards. As these are important issues for global governance to solve regardless, an equitable response to climate change can provide the impetus.

India can supplement this new proposal with more traditional methods of reducing emissions. India is leading the way in developing countries’ efforts on energy efficiency, a key opportunity for the eventual low-carbon transition—and one that remains truly “win-win” because energy saved from low-cost sources further reduces cost. In the latter part of the last decade alone, India’s Bureau of Energy Efficiency (BEE) doubled its energy savings in avoided generation capacity each year.⁹ New economic instruments like demand-side management hold the potential to reduce energy use by up to 25 percent, and the Bombay Stock Exchange’s GREENEX Index on energy-efficient stocks shows that the private sector is already taking action through market mechanisms to improve its energy efficiency.¹⁰ Lima and Paris can capitalize on such early beginnings to turn India’s ideas and experimentation into global systemic change.

Summing up

India’s challenge at the upcoming global climate talks is twofold. First, it is now time to look beyond the India-China hyphenation; it is unhelpful to India’s cause and situation. It is time to walk alone and seek specific exemptions or exceptions for India’s scale and diversity of realities.

Second, India needs to take leadership and identify constructive ways to move forward on climate change mitigation while not sacrificing the imperative of poverty alleviation. By the same token, the world’s challenge is to develop a holistic global framework that can manage the climate change threat in a world of differentiated responsibility.

By introducing intra-national differentiation between wealthy corporations and impoverished populations, Indian negotiators can help move the upcoming talks beyond past failures. These big corporations also account for a large carbon treasury and can be a low hanging fruit for both emissions reduction imperatives and to fashion a new sustainable business paradigm. Through leadership on this and other issues like energy efficiency, India can ensure its commitment both to the development of its citizens and the maintenance of the ecosystem.

1. “Rio Declaration on Climate and Environment,” The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development,http://www.unep.org/Documents.Multilingual/Default.asp?documentid=78&articleid=1163.

2. “China Approves Massive New Coal Capacity Despite Pollution Fears,” Reuters, http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/01/07/china-coal-idUKL3N0K90H720140107.

3. “Why India Must Revive Its Manufacturing Sector,” The Diplomat, http://thediplomat.com/2014/02/why-india-must-revive-its-

4. “India Vows 20-25% Carbon Intensity Cuts,” The Times of India, http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/India-vows-20-25- carbon-intensity-cuts/articleshow/5298030.cms; “India to Reduce Carbon Intensity by 24% by 2020,” The Guardian,http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/dec/02/india-carbon-intensity-target.

5. “An Assessment of India’s 2020 Carbon Intensity Target,” Grantham Institute for Climate Change,https://workspace.imperial.ac.uk/climatechange/Public/pdfs/Grantham%20Report/India_2020_Grantham%20Report%20GR4. pdf.

6. “Energy in India: The Future is Black,” The Economist, http://www.economist.com/node/21543138.

7. “Global Income Distribution: From the Fall of the Berlin Wall to the Great Recession,” Centre for Economic Policy Research,http://www.voxeu.org/article/global-income-distribution-1988.

8. “New Players on the World Stage: Chinese Provinces and Indian States,” The Brookings Institute,http://www.brookings.edu/research/essays/2013/new-players-on-the-world-stage.

9. “Verified Energy Savings with the Activities of Bureau of Energy Efficiency for the year 2009-10,” National Productivity Council,http://220.156.189.23/miscellaneous/documents/energy_saving_achieved/document/Verified%20Savings%20Report%20for%202009-10.doc.

10. “BSE S&P-Greenex,” Bombay Stock Exchange, http://www.bseindia.com/indices/DispIndex.aspx?iname=GREENX&index_Code=75&page=19D7C1A5 -BE2B-43EC-AD77- CE539070D72F; “Calibrating India’s Climate Change Response,” Courier, http://www.stanleyfoundation.org/articles.cfm?id=797.

(The writers are with Observer Research Foundation, Delhi. This paper was presented at the Council of Councils Sixth Regional Conference, September 28-30, 2014)

Courtesy : Council of Councils Sixth Regional Conference (Conference Papers: Council of Councils Ottawa Regional Conference)http://www.cfr.org/councilofcouncils/events/p33386

Politics / Globalisation

US wants stable, durable relation with India: Experts

India Today, New York Global Roundtable , September 26, 2014

Original link is here

Samir Saran, Lisa Curtis and Bruce Jones

The United States is looking for a stable and durable relation with India but a lot will depend on how both sides will align themselves on various global issues be it Ukraine, climate change or terrorism, experts said at the India Today Global Roundtable in New York on Friday.

India has the financial and diplomatic resources today to take forward its interests but Washington will want a stable relation with New Delhi, Bruce Jones, the director of Project on International Order and Strategy, Brookings Institution, said.

The US will like to see how India contributes on global issues. The nuances are tricky but a lot will depend on how New Delhi responds to Washington’s aspirations, he said.

Referring to the BRICS grouping, he said there is a lot of positivity in that initiative, for instance, the BRICS Bank project is a good move but Russia has also created problems in Ukraine and India cannot afford to overlook these issues which will cost its ties with the US.

The World Bank certainly needs a competitor; the Western model of development is pretty poor, he said, adding India’s penchant to ignore Russia’s excesses may hinder its ties with the US.

Lisa Curtis, senior research fellow at Heritage Foundation, said India being a multi-religious multi-ethnic democracy there is a lot of converging interests between India and the US.

The recent trade agreement between India and Japan is quite significant. Japan has committed $35 billion to India. Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit, however, did not go so well due to the border tensions. The US, however, would never commit such huge sums of money. It is for the private sector to do so, she said.

In the News

Embrace of Social Media Aids Flood Victims in Kashmir

By NIDA NAJAR and ELLEN BARRY Sept 12, 2014

Asia Pacific, New York Times

Original link is here

SRINAGAR, Kashmir — Early this week, as the flooding in Kashmir was entering a new and terrifying phase, the Indian Army’s public information office received a call from Raheel Khursheed, a former journalist and digital obsessive who serves as the director of news, politics and government at Twitter India. He had a proposal.

Over the weekend, floodwaters had inundated ground-floor equipment rooms for most of the region’s telecommunications service providers, crashing cellphone networks across the state. Local officials had no way to contact the federal government, or one another, or the army, which had been mobilized as part of a rescue effort. Though the army has satellite phones, they were of little help without knowing where people were waiting for rescue.

There was one place where information was flowing at a nearly unmanageable volume, and that was on social media.

Distributing relief goods in Srinagar, Kashmir, on Friday. With telecommunications largely knocked out, social media has helped rescuers locate people.

So many messages were surging into Twitter under the hashtag #KashmirFloods that on Tuesday Mr. Khursheed’s colleagues commissioned a piece of code that could winnow out those that identified stranded people. He then called the Indian Army — which has only two officers permanently assigned to monitor social-media postings — to offer the authorities a slimmed-down, organized feed that he described as “a continuously updating stream of ‘save me’s”.

More than 400 people have died in the disaster in India and Pakistan, while some 130,000 have been rescued from the flood zone, authorities said.

“We are always organizing data at Twitter,” said Mr. Khursheed, 31. “It just seemed to me to be the most obvious thing to do: How is it that we can, as a platform, make it easier for the army to do what it needs to do?”

In this week’s frantic rescue effort, one unexpected development is thearmy’s use of Twitter, WhatsApp, a messaging service, and Facebook to reach families. Twenty years ago, when social media first emerged, India’s government — like its counterparts in Beijing and Moscow — regarded it warily, as a force that could undermine state power. In the restive, majority-Muslim region of Kashmir, in particular, state authorities have been swift to block access to material they considered incendiary.

However, as this week’s rescue efforts suggest, “the government is now seeking to conduct its business through these media,” said Samir Saran, a policy analyst who worked as telecommunications executive in the early 2000s. One driver of this change, he said, is the new prime minister,Narendra Modi, who regards social media as a central link to the public. Mr. Modi’s example has filtered through the system.

“If they see a man at the top embracing this form of communication — when you have someone who is bypassing traditional media and communicating this way — that is a sign,” said Mr. Saran, a senior fellow at the Observer Research Foundation, a policy research group based in New Delhi. “You don’t have to be told more.”

Relief efforts continued on Friday in Srinagar, where rescue workers described watching people tie bodies to trees and electrical poles to keep them from washing away. Facing mounting public anger, Omar Abdullah, the chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir State, told NDTV, an Indian news channel, that during the first days of the crisis, as floodwaters inundated the capital, “I had no government.”

“My secretariat, the police headquarters, the control room, fire services, hospitals, all the infrastructure was underwater,” he said. “I had no cellphone and no connectivity. I am now starting to track down ministers and officers. Today I met ministers who were swept up by the floods.”

The authorities said Friday that 130,000 people had been rescued from the flood zone. More than 400 have died in the disaster in India and Pakistan.

In a near communications vacuum, 3G Internet connections remained usable, and those lucky enough to have them found themselves inundated with distress calls.

Manisha Kaul, 21, who was carried to safety on a raft on Tuesday, discovered that her telephone number had been published on Facebook. She receives five or six text messages a day from strangers, describing their relatives and asking her to let them know if she spotted them. She delivers a daily list to a search-and-rescue headquarters. “Under the circumstances,” she said, “this is the best we can do.”

At Twitter India, the goal was to prune some 400,000 flood-related messages into a “smartfeed,” something that has been done for sports, news and live events, but never for an emergency. The list of distress calls would then be sent in multiple directions, feeding into a “Person Finder” built byGoogle and provided to the army’s public information office, which had previously consulted with Mr. Khursheed about using social media.

Maj. Gen. Shokin Chauhan, who leads the office, said the stream of information was reviewed by “a dedicated team of two young officers who handle the social media,” and who were “working practically around the clock.”

He said the army had assisted about 12,000 people whose cases were reported over social media.

This week, Mr. Saran recalled that some Indian leaders had inveighed against social media as recently as February. The home minister then, Sushil Kumar Shinde, who was upset by reports that the Congress party would perform badly in parliamentary elections, vowed to use state intelligence to “crush such elements in the electronic media, which are indulging in false propaganda.”

But that resistance faded as political parties adopted social-media strategies, again as a result of Mr. Modi’s election.

The number of Internet users in India is expected to surpass that of the United States this year, according to a study released by Google India and A. T. Kearney. It also predicted that the number of mobile-Internet users in India would triple by 2017, to 480 million from 155 million. As a platform, Mr. Saran said, social media is already integrated into India’s often lively public debate.

“We enjoy it, because India loves melodrama,” Mr. Saran said. “Unless we can hear people screaming and shouting and abusing each other, we aren’t happy. We are bitter, we are angry, we are loud, and at the end of the day, everyone in his own way is loving to be an Indian.”

Hari Kumar contributed reporting from New Delhi.

Columns/Op-Eds, Uncategorized, Water / Climate

As communications infrastructure collapses, social media is saving lives in J&K

Published: 20:32 GMT, 9 September 2014, Mail Online India

Original Link is here

Tragedy has struck Kashmir once again.

That it is perhaps the severest since Independence is undeniable.

The human despair, spirit and resolve are all on display, and the entire country (real and virtual) seems affected by nature’s cruel intervention.

The efforts to rescue those stranded are feeble as the institutions, infrastructure and administrative resilience have been found wanting – yet precisely because of this, the courage and heroic efforts of individuals and some organisations stand out in stark contrast.

Floods: The entire country (real and virtual) seems affected by nature’s cruel intervention.

Even as the embankments built in the times of the Maharaja have been breached by ravaging waters, the unfolding tragedy and response is also about the ‘angels or demons’, depending on your take on it – Social Media and the Armed Forces.

A recent report in a leading daily had one of the most powerful men in India, its Home Secretary, observe, “I simply cannot speak to anyone in J&K.”

The last 72 hours have seen the near total collapse of the phone network, and power lines have collapsed. This has complicated coordination and rescue, because stranded people have no way of telling rescue centres of their plight.

Worse still, Delhi is cut off from the Government of J&K, while the Government of J&K is cut off from the army, which is coordinating rescue efforts.

The army is the only body there that has managed to maintain some semblance of intra-organisational communications due to satellite phones. However, it has no way of knowing the location where people are stranded, or how many and how critical their situation is, since the normal method – air reconnaissance – is difficult at best given the cloud cover and weather.

And the much-vilified social media is coming to the rescue. Even as large parts of the mobile communication infrastructure have collapsed, some wireless communication and the traditional wire line communication networks have allowed people access to social media and various messenger services, websites, and some agencies.

To the rescue: Social media has helped save the stranded

It has also allowed a degree of dissemination of situational reports, videos and distress messages, many of which have reached the army.

Whatsapp, FB messenger, Twitter and others are the most potent tools for the rescue teams in the valley today.

As a result what we have is the army using satellite phones to communicate, but basing its rescue efforts significantly on guidance from Whatsapp, Facebook and Twitter.

In that sense these have effectively replaced the search helicopter, the emergency beacon and the communications network of the valley.

For the governments at the Centre and in the state of J&K, which have frequently demonised social media, this must be a moment of revelation.

In February this year, the then Home Minister, Sushil Kumar Shinde, had vowed to “crush social media” to great applause from within his party and some others.

Yet today the home secretary cut a sorry figure, claiming “there is no means to communicate with anybody” till the 15 wireless systems he has sent to be set up in the valley come online.

Social Media, angel or demon? Let the debate begin.

The second story is that of the ‘men in green, blue and white’. Among the nation’s armed forces, they are reviled by a few liberals and a section of those in Kashmir, at the receiving end of Pakistani venom and terror, and frequently derided by the political class in the state and centre.

Yet had it not been for the army’s rescue teams and its “infrastructure of occupation,” as secessionists would call it, how many more lives would have been lost?

At a time when the democratically-elected government of J&K has failed in its civic duties in buttressing the embankments (which they should have known about anyway) and a home ministry that is fumbling in the dark, it is this supposed villain that has come out as the knight in shining armour.

It is this same “infrastructure of occupation” – helipads built on apple orchards, hospitals built on peach orchards and supply dumps built on farm land – that are now being used so effectively to rescue the stranded, treat the wounded, and provide relief supplies to the displaced.

It is this same infrastructure with its bulldozers that is being used to clear roads, and the army trucks that sustain the “occupation” that are being used to ferry in essential supplies for the “occupied”.

Given the police, local government and central government networks failed within the first few hours of the flood and the Doordarshan system which could be used as an emergency communications system also collapsed in this period, it has been the army’s communication systems that have provided the only link between J&K and the rest of the country.

It is the maligned Armed Forces Special Powers Act used to “suppress” Kashmiris, that the army is using to deliver critical supplies to the “occupied”.

And yet vultures who some in Kashmir refer to as “freedom fighters”, would rather support infiltration even at this time, then help their brethren. The IAF, let this debate end.

This is not to say that social media and the deployment of the Armed Forces are always virtuous. The use of social media for malicious purposes is proven. The use of the medium to incite and radicalise is also rampant.

Yet it is a force for good as we saw this past week.

Challenge and vilify the user, do not condemn the tool.

Similarly, the deployment of armed forces has resulted in actions that are highly avoidable. Some of their heavy-handed interventions have resulted in justifiable anger and resentment.

Here again, challenge the political mandate and policy direction from the government, not the army, which remains a force for good.

The writer is vice president at the Observer Research Foundation. His twitter handle is @samirsaran

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