Category: Analysis

Unless the West copies us, we’re irrelevant

We have become quite good at dismissing the more asinine utterances of our ministers and other learned people in terms of either a susceptibility to pseudoscience or, less commonly, a wilful deference to what we might call pseudoscientific ideas in order to undermine “Western science” and its influence. But when a matter of this sort hits the national headlines, our response seems for the large part to be limited to explaining the incident: once some utterance has been diagnosed, it apparently stops being of interest.

While this is understandable, an immediate diagnosis can only offer so much insight. An important example is the Vedas. Every time someone claims that the Vedas anticipated, say, the Higgs boson or interplanetary spaceflight, the national news machine – in which reporters, editors, experts, commentators, activists and consumers all participate – publishes the following types of articles, from what I have read: news reports that quote the individual’s statement as is, follow-ups with the individual asking them to explain themselves, opinion articles defending or trashing the individual, an editorial if the statement is particularly pernicious, opinion articles dissecting the statement, and perhaps an interview long after to ask the individual what they were really thinking. (I don’t follow TV news but I assume it is either not very different in its content.)

All of these articles employ a diagnostic attitude towards the news item: they seek to uncover the purpose of the statement because they begin with the (reasonable) premise that the individual was not a fool to issue it and that the statement had a purpose, irrespective of whether it was fulfilled. Only few among them – if any – stop consider the double-edged nature of the diagnosis itself. For example, when a researcher in Antarctica got infected by the novel coronavirus, their diagnosis would have said a lot about humankind – in their ability to be infected even when one individual is highly isolated for long periods of time – as well as about the virus itself.

Similarly, when a Bharatiya Janata Party bhakt claims that the Vedas anticipated the discovery of the Higgs boson, it says as much about the individual as it does about the individual’s knowledge of the Vedas. Specifically, the biggest loser here, so to speak, are the Vedas, which have been misrepresented to the world’s scientists to sound like an unfalsifiable joke-book. Extrapolate this to all of the idiotic things that our most zealous compatriots have said about airplanes, urban planning, the internet, plastic surgery, nutrition and diets, cows, and mathematics.

This is misrepresentation en masse of India’s cultural heritage (the cows aren’t complaining but I will never be certain until they can talk), and it is also a window into what these individuals believe to be true about the country itself.

For example, consider mathematics. One position paper drafted by the Karnataka task force on the National Education Policy, entitled “Knowledge in India”, called the Pythagorean theorem “fake news” simply because the Indian scholar Baudhayana had propounded very similar rules and observations. In an interview to Hindustan Times interview yesterday, the head of this task force, Madan Gopal, said the position paper doesn’t recommend that the theorem be removed from the syllabus but that an addition be made: Baudhayana was the originator of the theorem. Baudhayana was not the originator, but equally importantly, Gopal said he had concluded that Baudhayana was being cheated out of credit based on what Gopal had read… on Quora.

As a result, Gopal has overlooked and rendered invisible the Baudhayana Sulbasutra as well as has admitted his indifference towards the programme of its study and preservation.

Consider another example involving the same fellow: Gopal also told Hindustan Times, “Manchester University published a paper saying that the theory of Newton is copied from ancient texts from Kerala.” He is in all likelihood referring to the work of G.G. Joseph, who asserted in 2007 that scholars of the Kerala school of mathematics had discovered some of the constitutive elements of calculus in c. 1350 – a few centuries before Isaac Newton or Gottfried Leibniz. However, Gopal is wrong to claim that Newton “copied” from the work from “ancient texts from Kerala”: in continuation of his work, Joseph discovered that while the work of Madhava and Nilakantha at the Kerala school pre-dated that of Newton and Leibniz, there had been no transfer of knowledge from the Kerala school to Europe in the medieval era. That is, Newton and Leibniz had discovered calculus independently.

Gopal would have been right to state that Madhava and Nilakantha were ahead of the Europeans of the time, but it’s not clear whether Gopal was even aware of these names or the kind of work in which the members of the Kerala school were engaged. He has as a result betrayed his ignorance as well as squandered an important opportunity to address the role of colonialism and imperialism in the history of mathematics. In fact, Gopal seems to say that unless Newton copied from the “ancient texts,” what the texts themselves record is irrelevant. (Also read: ‘We don’t have a problem with the West, we’re just obsessed with it’.)

Now, Madan Gopal’s ignorance may not amount to much – although the Union education ministry will be using the position papers as guidance to draft the next generation of school curricula. So let us consider, in the same spirit and vein, Narendra Modi’s claim shortly after he became India’s prime minister for the first time that ancient Indians had been capable of performing an impossible level of plastic surgery. In that moment, he lied – and he also admitted that he had no idea what the contents of the Sushruta Samhita or the Charaka Samhita were and that he didn’t care. He admitted that he wouldn’t be investing in the study, preservation and transmission of these texts because that would be tantamount to admitting that only a vanishing minority is aware of their contents. Also, why do these things and risk finding out that the texts say something else entirely?

Take all of the party supporters’ pseudoscientific statements together – originating from the Madan Gopals and culminating with Modi – and it becomes quite apparent, beyond the momentary diagnoses of each of these statements, that while we already knew that they have no idea what they are talking about, we must admit that they have no care for what the purported sources of their claims actually say. That is, they don’t give a damn about the actual Vedas, the actual Samhitas or the various actual sutras, and they are unlikely to preserve or study these objects of our heritage in their original forms.

Just as every new Patanjali formulation forgets Ayurveda for the sake of Ayurveda®, every new utterance about Ancient Indian Knowledge forgets the Vedas for the sake of the Vedas®.

Now, given the statements of this nature from ministers, other members and unquestioning supporters of the BJP, we have reason to believe that they engage in kettle logic. This in turn implies that these individuals may not really believe what they are saying to be true and/or valid, and that they employ their arguments anyway only to ensure the outcome, on which they are fixated. That is, the foolish statements may not implicitly mean that their authors are foolish; on the contrary, they may be smart enough to recognise kettle logic as well as its ability to keep naïve fact-checkers occupied in a new form of the bullshit job. Even so, they must be aware at least that they are actively forgetting the Vedas, the Samhitas and the sutras.

One way or another, the BJP seems to say, let’s forget.

The problem that ‘crypto’ actually solves

From ‘Cryptocurrency Titan Coinbase Providing “Geo Tracking Data” to ICE’, The Intercept, June 30, 2022:

Coinbase, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the United States, is selling Immigrations and Customs Enforcement a suite of features used to track and identify cryptocurrency users, according to contract documents shared with The Intercept. … a new contract document obtained by Jack Poulson, director of the watchdog group Tech Inquiry, and shared with The Intercept, shows ICE now has access to a variety of forensic features provided through Coinbase Tracer, the company’s intelligence-gathering tool (formerly known as Coinbase Analytics).

Coinbase Tracer allows clients, in both government and the private sector, to trace transactions through the blockchain, a distributed ledger of transactions integral to cryptocurrency use. While blockchain ledgers are typically public, the enormous volume of data stored therein can make following the money from spender to recipient beyond difficult, if not impossible, without the aid of software tools. Coinbase markets Tracer for use in both corporate compliance and law enforcement investigations, touting its ability to “investigate illicit activities including money laundering and terrorist financing” and “connect [cryptocurrency] addresses to real world entities.”

Every “cryptocurrency is broken” story these days has a predictable theme: the real world caught up because the real world never went away. The fundamental impetus for cryptocurrencies is the belief of a bunch of people that they can’t trust their money with governments and banks – imagined as authoritarian entities that have centralised decision-making power over private property, including money – and who thus invented a technological alternative that would execute the same solutions the governments and banks did, but sans centralisation, sans trust.

Even more fundamentally, cryptocurrencies embody neither the pursuit to ensure the people’s control of money nor to liberate art-trading from the clutch of racism. Instead, they symbolise the abdication of the responsibility to reform banking and finance – a far more arduous process that is also more constitutive and equitable. They symbolise the thin line between democracy and majoritarianism: they claimed to have placed the tools to validate financial transactions in the hands of the ‘people’ but fail to grasp that these tools will still be used in the same world that apparently created the need for cryptocurrencies. In this context, I highly recommend this essay on the history of the socio-financial forces that inevitably led to the popularity of cryptocurrencies.

These (pseudo)currencies have often been rightly described as a solution looking for a problem, because the fact remains that the ‘problem’ they do solve is public non-participation in governance. Its proponents just don’t like to admit it. Who would?

The identity of cryptocurrencies may once have been limited to technological marvels and the play-things of mathematicians and financial analysts, but their foundational premise bears a deeper, more dispiriting implication. As the value of one virtual currency after the next comes crashing down, after cryptocurrency-based trading and financing schemes come a cropper, and after their promises to be untraceable, decentralised and uncontrollable have been successively falsified, the whole idea ought to be revealed for what it is: a cynical social engineering exercise to pump even more money from the ‘bottom’ of the pyramid to the ‘top’. Yet, the implication: cryptocurrencies will persist because they are vehicles of the libertarian ideologies of their proponents. To attempt to ‘stop’ them is to attempt to stop the ideologues themselves.

What the bitcoin price drop reveals about ‘crypto’

One of the definitive downsides of cryptocurrencies raised its head this week when the nosediving price of bitcoin – brought on by the Luna/Terra crash and subsequent cascading effects – rendered bitcoin mining less profitable. One bitcoin today costs $19,410, so it’s hard to imagine this state of affairs has come to pass – but this is why understanding the ‘permissionless’ nature of cryptocurrency blockchains is important.

Verifying bitcoin transactions requires computing power. Computing power (think of processing units on your CPU) costs money. So those bitcoin users who provide this power need to be compensated for this expense or the bitcoins ecosystem will make no financial sense. This is why the bitcoin blockchain generates a token when users provide computing power to verify transactions. This process is called mining: the computing power verifies each transaction by solving a complex math problem whose end result adds the transaction to the blockchain, in return for which the blockchain spits out a token (or a fraction of it, averaged over time).

The idea is that these users should be able to use this token to pay for the computing power they’re providing. Obviously this means these tokens should have real value, like dollar value. And this is why bitcoin’s price dropping below a certain figure is bad news for those providing the computing power – i.e. the miners.

Bitcoin mining today is currently the preserve of a few mining conglomerates, instead of being distributed across thousands of individual miners, because these conglomerates sought to cash in on bitcoin’s dollar value. So if they quit the game or reduce their commitment to mining, the rate of production of new bitcoins will slow, but that’s a highly secondary outcome; the primary outcome will be less power being available to verify transactions, which will considerably slow the ability to use bitcoins to do cryptocurrency things.

Bitcoin’s dropping value also illustrates why so many cryptocurrency investment schemes – including those based on bitcoin – are practically Ponzi schemes. In the real world (beyond blockchains), the cost of computing power will but increase over time. This is because of inflation, because of the rising cost of the carbon footprint and because the blockchain produces tokens less often over time. So to keep the profits from mining from declining, the price of bitcoin has to increase, which implies the need for speculative valuation, which then paves the way for pump-and-dump and Ponzi schemes.

A permissioned blockchain, as I have written before, does not provide rewards for contributing computing power because it doesn’t need to constantly incentivise its users to continue using the blockchain and verify transactions. Specifically, a permissioned blockchain uses a central authority that verifies all transactions, whereas a permissionless blockchain seeks to delegate this responsibility to the users themselves. Think of millions of people exchanging money with each other through a bank – the bank is the authority and the system is a permissioned blockchain; in the case of cryptocurrencies, which are defined by permissionless blockchains, the people exchanging the money also verify each other’s transactions.

This is what leads to the complexity of cryptocurrencies and, inevitably, together with real-world cynicism, an abundance of opportunities to fail. Or, as Robert Reich put it, “all Ponzi schemes topple eventually”.

Note: The single-quotation marks around ‘crypto’ in the headline is because I think the term ‘crypto’ belongs to ‘cryptography’, not ‘cryptocurrency’.

How do you measure peacefulness?

The study was conceived by Australian technology entrepreneur Steve Killelea [in 2007], and is endorsed by individuals such as former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, the Dalai Lama, archbishop Desmond Tutu, former President of Finland and 2008 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Martti Ahtisaari, Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, economist Jeffrey Sachs, former president of Ireland Mary Robinson, former Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations Jan Eliasson and former United States president Jimmy Carter. The updated index is released each year at events in London, Washington, DC, and at the United Nations Secretariat in New York.

This is a passage from the Wikipedia article on an entity called the ‘Global Peace Index’, which “measures the relative position of nations’ and regions’ peacefulness”. Indices are flawed but useful. Their most significant flaw – and it’s quite significant – is that they attempt to distill out of the complex interactions of a host of factors a single number that, compared to another of its kind, is supposed to enable value judgments of ‘better’ or ‘worse’.

For example, an academic freedom report published in 2020 gave India a score of 0.352 and Pakistan a score of 0.554. Does this mean all academic centres in India are less academically free than all of those in Pakistan? No. Does this mean Pakistan has 1.5x more academic freedom than India does? Not at all. Indices are useful in a very narrow context, but within that niche, they can be a force for good. There’s a reason the puffy-chested Indian government gets so worked up when the World Press Freedom Index and the Global Hunger Index are published.

In particular, indices are most useful when they’re compared to themselves. If India’s press-freedom index value dropped from X in 2020 to Y in 2022 (because the government is going around demolishing the homes of dissenters), it’s a snapshot of a real deterioration – a problem that needs fixing by reversing the trend (less by massaging the data, as our leaders have become wont to do, and more by improving freedom for journalists). But there’s an index on the block whose usefulness by all counts, even in the self-referential niche, seems dangerous. This is the Global Peace Index. The 2022 edition was published earlier this week, and based on which a Business Insider article lamented that violence was costing India just too much money (Rs 50.36 lakh crore) and that this is why the country had to get a grip on it.

A crucial thing about understanding peace (in a given place and time), and which lies squarely in the domain of those things that indices don’t record, is how peace was achieved. For example, India’s freedom struggle might have pulled down the country’s score on the Global Peace Index but at the same time it was justified and led to a better kind of peace for the whole region. Peace is not just the absence of violence but the absence of conditions that give rise to violence, now and forever, in sustainable fashion. This is why it’s possible to justify some forms of violence in the pursuit of some constitutionally determined forms of peace.

Recently, a couple of my friends, who work in the corporate sector and whose shared philosophy is decidedly libertarian, argued with me over the justification of protest actions like rail roko and bandh. They contended that these activities constituted a violence against the many people whose livelihoods required the affected services. However, their philosophy stopped there, refusing to take the next logical step: it’s by disrupting the provision of these services that protestors get and hold the governmnent’s attention. (Plus the Indian government has the Essential Services Maintenance Act 1968 to ensure not all of the affected services become unavailable.) Why, through his Dandi march, M.K. Gandhi sought to encourage people to not pay their taxes to the British government – a form of economic violence.

To be sure, violence isn’t just physical; it’s also economic, social, cultural, linguistic; it’s gendered, caste-based, class-based and faith-based. The peace index report acknowledges this when it highlights its ‘Positive Peace Index’ – a measure of “the attitudes, institutions and structures that create and sustain peaceful societies”; Its value “measures the level of societal resilience of a nation or region”. According to the report’s website, the lower the score, the better.

But then, China and Saudi Arabia have lower scores than India. This is bizarre. KSA is a monarchy and China is an autocracy; in both countries, personal liberties are highly restricted and there are stringent, and in many cases Kafkaesque, punishments for falling afoul of state policy. The way of life imposed by these socio-political structures also constitutes violence. Yet the scores of these countries are comparable to those of Cuba, Mexico and Namibia. I would rank India better because I can (still, with some privileges) speak out against my government without fear of repercussions. Israel’s score, in fact, is lower than that of Palestine, while Russia has a marginally lower score than does Ukraine. It’s inexplicable.

The India-specific portions of the peace index’s report also illustrate the report’s problems at the sub-national level. To quote:

Some of the countries to record the biggest deteriorations [in violent demonstrations since 2008] were India, Colombia, Bangladesh and Brazil. … [India] ranks as the 135th most peaceful nation in the 2022 GPI. The country experienced an improvement of 1.4 per cent in overall peacefulness over the past year, driven by an improvement in the Ongoing Conflict domain. However, India experienced an uptick in the violent crime and perceptions of criminality indicators. … In 2020 and 2021, Indian farmers protested against newly introduced laws that removed some guarantees and subsidies on agricultural products.

First, the report has obtained the data for the ‘level of violent crime’ indicator from the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU). The EIU’s scoring question for this indicator is: “Is violent crime likely to pose a significant problem for government and/or business over the next two years?” It’s hard not to wonder if, from the right-wing’s point of view, “violent crime” includes that perpetrated by “urban naxals” when they protested against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act 2019. Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath thought so before he was forced to refund Rs 22 lakh he had collected from the protestors. The Delhi police thought so when its chargesheet for the 2020 riots was composed of people whose houses had been burnt down, whose bones broken and whose temples desecrated – and people who had called on the police to arrest BJP leader Kapil Mishra for instigating the riot. How do you figure “perception of criminality” here?

Second, the report discusses the protests against the three farm laws in a paragraph about “violent demonstrations”, in the same breath and without any qualifications that the protests were peaceful but turned violent when its participants had to defend themselves – including when the son of a national leader ran some of them over with his vehicle and when their attempt to enter Delhi was met with a water cannon and a lathi charge, among other incidents.

The farmers were demanding higher minimum support prices and lower input costs – hardly the sort of thing that requires violence to fulfil but did because Prime Minister Narendra Modi had no other way to walk away from his promises to Ambani/Adani. Who perpetrated the real violence here – the national leader who doomed India’s farmers so industrialist tycoons would continue to fund his campaigns of communalism or the farmers who blocked roads and highways demanding that he not? Was the ‘Bharat Bandh’ that disrupted activities in several crucial sectors on March 28, 2022, more violent than the “anti-people policies” of the same national leader that they were protesting?

A peace index that can’t settle these questions won’t see the difference between a spineless and a spineful people.

Tech solutions to household labour are also problems

Just to be clear, the term ‘family’ in this post refers to a cis-het nuclear family unit.

Tanvi Deshpande writing for Indiaspend, June 12, 2022:

The Union government’s ambitious Jal Jeevan Mission (JJM) aims to provide tap water to every household in rural India by 2024. Until now, 50% of households have a tap connection, an improvement from August 2019, when the scheme started and 17% of households had a tap connection. The mission’s dashboard shows that in Take Deogao Gram Panchayat that represents Bardechi Wadi, only 32% of the households have tap connections. Of these, not a single one has been provided to Pardhi’s hamlet.

This meant, for around five months every summer, women and children would rappel down a 60-foot well and spend hours waiting for water to seep into the bottom. In India, filling water for use at home is largely a woman’s job. Globally, women and girls spend 200 million hours every day collecting water, and in Asia, one round trip to collect water takes 21 minutes, on average, in rural areas.

The water pipeline has freed up time for Bardechi Wadi’s women and children but patriarchal norms, lack of a high school in the village and of other opportunities for development means that these free hours have just turned into more time for household chores, our reporting found.

Now these women don’t face the risk of death while fetching water but, as Deshpande has written, the time and trouble that the water pipeline has saved them will now be occupied by new chores and other forms of labour. There may have been a time when the latter might have seemed like the lesser of those two evils, but it is long gone. Today, in the climate crisis era – which often manifests as killer heatwaves in arid regions that are already short on water – the problem is access to leisure, to cooling and to financial safeguards. When women are expected to do more chores because they have the time, they lose access to leisure, which is important at least to cool off, but better yet because it is a right per se (Universal Declaration of Human Rights, article 24).

This story is reminiscent of the effects of the introduction of home appliances into the commercial market. I read a book about a decade ago that documented, among other things, how the average amount of time women (in the US) spent doing household chores hadn’t changed much between the 1920s and the 2000s, even though it coincided wholly with the second industrial revolution. This was because – as in the case of the pipeline of Bardechi Wadi – the purchase and use of these devices freed up women’s time for even more chores. We need the appliances as much as we need the pipeline, just that men should also do household chores. However, the appliances also presented and present more problems than those that pertain to society’s attitudes towards how women should spend their time.

1. Higher expectations – With the availability of household appliances (like the iron box, refrigerator, washing machine, dish washer, oven, etc.), the standards for various chores shot up as did what we considered to be comfortable living – but what we expected of women didn’t change. So suddenly the women of the house were also responsible for ensuring that the men’s shirts and pants were all the more crinkle-less, that food was served fresh and hot all the time, etc. as well as to enliven family life by inventing/recreating food recipes, serving and cleaning up, etc.

2. Work + chores – The introduction of more, and more diverse, appliances into the market, aspirations and class mobility together paralleled an increase in women’s labour-force participation through the 20th century. But before these women left for their jobs and after they got home, they still had to household chores as well – including cooking and packing lunch for themselves and for their husbands and/or children, doing the laundry, shopping for groceries, etc.

3. Think about the family – The advent of tech appliances also foisted on women two closely related responsibilities: to ensure the devices worked as intended and to ensure they fit with the family-unit’s ideals and aspirations. As Manisha Aggarwal-Schifellite wrote in 2016: “The automatic processes of programming the coffeemaker, unlocking an iPad with a fingerprint, or even turning on the light when you get home are the result of years of marketing that create a household problem (your home is too dark, your family too far-flung, your food insufficiently inventive), solves it with a new product, and leaves women to clean up the mess when the technology fails to deliver on its promises”.

In effect, through the 20th century, industrialisation happened in two separate ways within the household and without. To use writer Ellen Goodman’s evocative words from a 1983 article: “At the beginning of American history …, most chores of daily life were shared by men and women. To make a meal, men chopped the wood, women cooked the stew. One by one, men’s tasks were industrialized outside the home, while women’s stayed inside. Men stopped chopping wood, but women kept cooking.”

The diversity of responsibilities imposed by household appliances exacts its own cost. A necessary condition of men’s help around the house is that they – we – must also constantly think about which task to perform and when, instead of expecting to be told what to do every time. This is because, by expecting periodic reminders, we are still forcing women to retain the cognitive burden associated with each chore. If you think you’re still helping by sharing everything except the cognitive burden, you’re wrong. Shifting between tasks affects one’s ability to focus, performance and accuracy and increases forgetfulness. Psychologists call this the switch cost.

It is less clear to me than it may be to others as to the different ways in which the new water pipeline through Bardechi Wadi will change the lives of the women there. But without the men of the village changing how they think about their women and their ‘responsibilities to the house’, we can’t expect anything meaningful. At the same time, the effects of the climate crisis will keep inflating the price these women pay in terms of their psychological, physical and sexual health and agency.

What arguments against the ‘next LHC’ say about funding Big Physics

A few days ago, a physicist (and PhD holder) named Thomas Hartsfield published a strange article in Big Think about why building a $100-billion particle physics machine like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a bad idea. The article was so replete with errors things that even I – a not-physicist and not-a-PhD-holder – cringed reading them. I also wanted to blog about the piece but theoretical physicist Matthew Strassler beat me to it, with a straightforward post about the many ways in which Hartsfield’s article was just plain wrong, especially coming from a physicist. But I also think there were some things that Strassler either overlooked or left unsaid and which to my mind bear fleshing out – particularly points that have to do with the political economy of building research machines like the LHC. I also visit in the end the thing that really made me want to write this post, in response to a seemingly throwaway line in Strassler’s post. First, the problems that Hartsfield’s piece throws up and which deserve more attention:

1. One of Hartsfield’s bigger points in his article is that instead of spending $100 billion on one big physics project, we could spend it on 100,000 smaller projects. I agree with this view, sensu lato, that we need to involve more stakeholders than only physicists when contemplating the need for the next big accelerator or collider. However, in making the argument that the money can be redistributed, Hartsfield presumes that a) if a big publicly funded physics project is cancelled, the allocated money that the government doesn’t spend as a result will subsequently be diverted to other physics prohects, and b) this is all the money that we have to work with. Strassler provided the most famous example of the fallacy pertinent to (a): the Superconducting Super Collider in the US, whose eventually cancellation ‘freed’ an allocation of $4.4 billion, but the US government didn’t redirect this money back into other physics research grants. (b), on the other hand, is a more pernicious problem: a government allocating $100 billion for one project does not implicitly mean that it can’t spare $10 million for a different project, or projects. Realpolitik is important here. Politicians may contend that after having approved $100 billion for one project, it may not be politically favourable for them to return to Congress or Parliament or wherever with another proposal for $10 million. But on the flip side, both mega-projects and many physics research items are couched in arguments and aspirations to improve bilateral or multilateral ties (without vomiting on other prime ministers), ease geopolitical tensions, score or maintain research leadership, increase research output, generate opportunities for long-term technological spin-offs, spur local industries, etc. Put another way, a Big Science project is not just a science project; depending on the country, it could well be a national undertaking along the lines of the Apollo 11 mission. These arguments matter for political consensus – and axiomatically the research projects that are able to present these incentives are significantly different from those that aren’t, which in turn can help fund both Big Science and ‘Small Science’ projects at the same time. The possibility exists. For example, the Indian government has funded Gaganyaan separately from ISRO’s other activities. $100 billion isn’t all the money that’s available, and we should stop settling for such big numbers when they are presented to us.

2. These days, big machines like the one Hartsfield has erected as a “straw man” – to use Strassler words – aren’t built by individual countries. They are the product of an international collaboration, typically with dozens of governments, hundreds of universities and thousands of researchers participating. The funds allocated are also spent over many years, even decades. In this scenario, when a $100-billion particle collider is cancelled, no one entity in the whole world suddenly has that much money to give away at any given moment. Furthermore, in big collaborations, countries don’t just give money; often they add value by manufacturing various components, leasing existing facilities, sharing both human and material resources, providing loans, etc. The value of each of these contracts is added to the total value of the project. For example, India has been helping the LHC by manufacturing and supplying components related to the machine’s magnetic and cryogenic facilities. Let’s say India’s Departments of Science and Technology and of Atomic Energy had inked contracts with CERN, which hosts and maintains the LHC, worth $10 million to make and transport these components, but then the LHC had been called off just before its construction was to begin. Does this mean India would have had $10 million to give away to other science projects? Not at all! In fact, manufacturers within the country would have been bummed about losing the contracts.

3. Hartsfield doesn’t seem to acknowledge incremental results, results that improve the precision of prior measurements and results that narrow the range in which we can find a particle. Instead, he counts only singularly positive, and sensational, results – of which the LHC has had only one: the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012. Take all of them together and the LHC will suddenly seem more productive. Simply put, precision-improving results are important because even a minute difference between the theoretically predicted value and the observed value could be a significant discovery that opens the door to ‘new physics’. We recently saw this with the mass of a subatomic particle called the W boson. Based on the data collected by a detector mounted on the Tevatron particle accelerator in Illinois, physicists found that the mass of the W boson differed from the predicted value by around 0.12%. This was sufficient to set off a tsunami of excitement and speculation in the particle physics community. (Hartsfield also overlooked an important fact and which Strassler caught: that the LHC collects a lot more data than physicists can process in a single year, which means that when the LHC winds down, physicists will still have many years of work left before they are done with the LHC altogether. This is evidently still happening with the Tevatron, which was shut down in 2011, so Hartsfield missing it is quite weird. Another thing that happened to Tevatron and is still happening with the LHC is that these machines are upgraded over time to produce better results.) Similarly, results that exclude the energy ranges in which a particle can be found are important because they tell us what kind of instruments we should build in future to detect the same particle. We obviously won’t need instruments that sweep the same energy range (nor will we have a guarantee that the particle will be found outside the excluded energy range – that’s a separate problem). There is another point to be made but which may not apply to CERN as much as to Big Science projects in other countries: one country’s research community building and operating a very large research facility signals to other countries that the researchers know what they’re doing and that they might be more deserving of future investments than other candidates with similar proposals. This is one of the things that India lost with the scuttling of the India-based Neutrino Observatory (the loss itself was deserved, to be sure).

Finally, the statement in Strassler’s post that piqued me the most:

My impression, from his writing and from what I can find online, is that most of what he knows about particle physics comes from reading people like Ethan Siegel and Sabine Hossenfelder. I think Dr. Hartsfield would have done better to leave the argument to them.

Thomas Hartsfield has clearly done a shoddy job in his article in the course of arguing against a Big Physics machine like LHC in the future, but his screwing up doesn’t mean discussions on the need for the next big collider should be left to physicists. I admit that Strassler’s point here was probably limited to the people whose articles and videos were apparently Hartsfield’s primary sources of information – but it also seemed to imply that instead of helping those who get things wrong do better next time, it’s okay to ask them to not try again and instead leave the communication efforts to their primary sources. That’s Ethan Siegel and Sabine Hossenfelder in this case – both prolific communicators – but in many instances, bad articles are written by writers who bothered to try while their sources weren’t doing more or better to communicate to the people at large. This is also why it bears repeating that when it comes to determining the need for a Big Physics project of the likes of the LHC, physics is decidedly one non-majority part of it and that – importantly – science communicators also have an equally vital role to play. Let me quote here from an article by physicist Nirmalya Kajuri, published in The Wire Science in February 2019:

… the few who communicate science can have a lopsided influence on the public perception of an entire field – even if they’re not from that field. The distinction between a particle physicist and, say, a condensed-matter physicist is not as meaningful to most people reading the New York Times or any other mainstream publication as it is to physicists. There’s no reason among readers to exclude [one physicist] as an expert.

However, very few physicists engage in science communication. The extreme ‘publish or perish’ culture that prevails in sciences means that spending time in any activity other than research carries a large risk. In some places, in fact, junior scientists spending time popularising science are frowned upon because they’re seen to be spending time on something unproductive.

…

All physicists agree that we can’t keep building colliders ad infinitum. They differ on when to quit. Now would be a good time, according to Hossenfelder. Most particle physicists don’t think so. But how will we know when we’ve reached that point? What are the objective parameters here? These are complex questions, and the final call will be made by our ultimate sponsors: the people.

So it’s a good thing that this debate is playing out before the public eye. In the days to come, physicists and non-physicists must continue this dialogue and find mutually agreeable answers. Extensive, honest science communication will be key.

So more physicists should join in the fray, as should science journalists, writers, bloggers and communicators in general. Just that they should also do better than Thomas Hartsfield to get the details right.

A tale of two myopias, climate change and the present participle

The Assam floods are going on. One day, they will stop. The water will subside in many parts of the state but the things that caused the floods will continue to work, ceaselessly, and will cause them to occur again next year, and the year after and so on for the foreseeable future.

Journalists, politicians and even civil society members have become adept at seeing the floods in space. Every year, as if on cue, there have been reports on the cusp of summer of floodwaters inundating many districts in the state, including those containing and surrounding the Kaziranga national park; displacing lakhs of people and killing hundreds; destroying home, crop, cattle and soil; encouraging the spread of diseases; eroding banks and shores; and prompting political leaders to promise all the help that they can muster for the affected people. But the usefulness of the spatial cognition of the Assam floods has run its course.

Instead, now, we need to inculcate a temporal cognition, whether this alone or a spatio-temporal one. The reason is that more than the floods themselves, we are currently submerged by the effects of two myopias, like two rocks tied around our necks that are dragging us to the bottom. The first one is sustained by the members of our political class, such as Assam CM Himanta Biswa Sarma and Union home minister Amit Shah, when they say that they will avail all the support and restitution to displaced people and the relatives of those killed directly or indirectly by the floods.

The floods are not the product of climate change but of mindless infrastructure ‘development’, the construction of dikes and embankments, encroachment of wetlands and plains, destruction of forests and the over-extraction resources and its consequences. A flood happens when the water levels rise, but destruction is the result of objects of human value being in the waters’ way. More and more human property is being located in places where the water used to go, and more and more human property is being rendered vulnerable to being washed away.

When political leaders offer support to the people after every flood (which is the norm), it is akin to saying, “I will shoot you with a gun and then I will pay for your care.” Offering people support is not helpful, at least not when it stops there, followed by silence. Everyone – from parliamentary committees to civil society members – should follow the utterances of Shah, Sarma & co. (both BJP and non-BJP leaders, including those of the Congress, CPI(M), DMK, TMC, etc.) through time, acknowledge the seasonality of their proclamations, and bring them to book for failing to prevent the floods from occurring every year, instead of giving them brownie points for providing support on each occasion post facto.

The second myopia exists on the part of many journalists, especially in the Indian mainstream press, and their attitude towards cyclones, which can be easily and faithfully extrapolated to floods as well. Every year for the last two decades at least, there has been a cyclone or two that ravaged two states in particular: Andhra Pradesh and West Bengal (the list included Odisha but it has done well to mitigate the consequences). And on every occasion plus some time, reports have appeared in newspapers and magazines of fisherpeople in dire straits with their boats broken, nets torn and stomachs empty; of coastal properties laid to waste; and, soon after, of fuel and power subsidies, loan waivers and – if you wait long enough – sobering stories of younger fishers migrating to other parts of the country looking for other jobs.

These stories are all important and necessary – but they are not sufficient. We also need stories about something new – stories that are mindful of the passage of time, of people growing old, the rupee becoming less valuable, the land becoming more recalcitrant, and of the world itself passing them all by. We need the present participle.

This is not a plea for media houses to commoditise tragedy and trade in interestingness but a plea to consider that these stories miss something: the first myopia, the one that our political leaders espouse. By keeping the focus on problem X, we also keep the focus on the solutions for X. Now ask yourself what X might be if all the stories appearing in the mainstream press are about post-disaster events, and thus which solutions – or, indeed, points of accountability – we tend to focus on to the exclusion of others. We also need stories – ranging in type from staff reports to reported features, from hyperlocal dispatches to literary essays – of everything that has happened in the aftermath of a cyclone making landfall near, say, Nellore or North 24 Parganas, whether things have got better or worse with time, whether politicians have kept their promises to ameliorate the conditions of the people there (especially those not living inside concrete structures and/or whose livelihoods depends directly on natural resources); and whether by restricting ourselves to supporting a people after a storm or a flood has wreaked havoc, we are actually dooming them.

We need timewise data and we need timewise first-hand accounts. To adapt the wisdom of Philip Warren Anderson, we may know how a shrinking wetland may exacerbate the intensity of the next flood, but we cannot ever derive from this relationship knowledge of the specific ways in which people, and then the country, suffer, diminish and fade away.

The persistence of these two myopias also feeds the bane of incrementalism. By definition, incremental events occur orders of magnitude more often than significant events (so to speak), so it is more efficient to evolve to monitor and record the former. This applies as much to our memories as it does to the economics of newsrooms. We tend to get caught up in the day-to-day and are capable within weeks of forgetting something that happened last year; unscrupulous politicians play to this gallery by lying through their teeth about something happening when it didn’t (or vice versa), offending the memories of all those who have died because of a storm or a flood and yet others who survive but on the brink of tragedy. On the other hand, newsrooms are staffed with more journalists attuned to the small details but not implicitly able to piece all of them together into the politically and economically inconvenient big picture (there are exceptions, of course).

I am not sure when we entered the crisis period of climate change but in mid-2022, it is a trivial fact that we are in the thick of it – the thick of a beast that assails us both in space and through time. In response, we must change the way we cognise disasters. The Assam floods are ongoing – and so are the Kosi, the Sabarmati and the Cauvery floods. We just haven’t seen the waters go wild yet.

Some comments on India’s heat

On May 5, a couple people from BBC World reached out to me, presumably after reading my piece last week on the heatwave in North India and the wet-bulb temperature, for a few comments on a story they were producing on the topic. They had five questions between them; I’m reproducing my answers roughly verbatim (since I spoke to them on phone) below.

Are these high temperatures usual?

A: Yes and no. Yes because while these numbers are high, we’ve been hearing about them for a decade or so now – and reading about them in news reports and hearing anecdotal reports. This isn’t the first such heatwave to hit India. A few years ago, peak summer temperature in Delhi touched 47º C or so and there were photos in the media of the asphalt on the road having melted. That was worse – that hasn’t happened this time, yet. That’s the ‘yes’ part. The ‘no’ part has to do with the fact that India is a large country and some parts of the country that are becoming hotter are probably also reaching these temperatures for the first time. E.g. Bangalore, where I live, is currently daily highs of around 35º C. This is par for the course in Chennai and Delhi but it’s quite hot for Bangalore. This said, the high heat is starting sooner, on this occasion from mid-March or so itself, and lasting for longer. That has changed our experience of the heat and our exposure. Of course, my answers are limited to urban India, especially to major cities. I don’t know off the top of my head what the situation in other parts is like.

The government has said India has a national heat plan and some cities have adopted heat action plans. Are they effective?

Hard to say. Only two score or so cities have adopted functional heat action plans plus they’re cities, which is not where most of India lives. Sure, the heat is probably worse in the urban centres because of the heat island effect, but things are quite poor in rural areas as well, especially in the north. The heat also isn’t just heat – people experience its effects more keenly if they don’t have continuous power supply or access to running water, which is often the case in many parts of rural India. The benefits of these action plans accrue to those who are better off, typically those who are upper class and upper caste, which is hardly the point. When North India’s heatwave was underway last week, NDTV interviewed shopkeepers and small scale traders, vendors, etc. about whether they could take time off. All of them without exception said ‘no’. Come rain or shine, they need to work. I remember there being vicious cyclones in Chennai and waking up in the morning to find the roads flooded, trees fallen down and loose electric wires – and the local mobile vegetable vendor doing his rounds. Also, in urban areas, do the heat action plans account for the plights of homeless people and beggars, and people living in slums, where – even if they’re indoors – they have poor circulation and often erratic water and power supply?

What should the government do?

That’s a very broad question. Simply speaking, the government should give people who can’t afford to shut their businesses or take time off from work the money they’d lose if they did, and rations. This is going to be very difficult but this is what should be done. But this won’t happen. Even during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Indian government didn’t plan for the tens of thousands of migrant labourers and daily-wage earners in cities, who, once the lockdown came into effect, slowly migrated back to their home towns and villagers in search of livelihoods. This sector remains invisible to the government.

[I also wanted to say but didn’t have the time:] the experience of heat is also mediated by gender, geography and caste forces, so state interventions should also be mediated by them. For example, women in particular, in rural India and especially in Central and North India (where literacy is relatively lower) operate in settings where they have few rights and little if any financial and social independence. They can seldom buy or own land and go out to work, and often labour indoors, performing domestic tasks in poorly ventilated residential spaces, venture out to fetch water from often distant sources – a task performed almost exclusively by women and girls –, often have to defecate in the open but do so early in the day or late in the evening to avoid harrassment and shame, which then means they may not drink water to avoid peeing during the day but which would render them vulnerable to heat stress, etc. If state interventions don’t bend around these realities, they will be useless.

The moment you mention data or figures that you say you obtained from this government, the first thought that comes to mind is that it’s probably inaccurate, and likely an underestimate. Even now, the Indian government has an ongoing dispute with the WHO over the number of people who died during the pandemic in India: India is saying half a million but the WHO as well as many independent experts have said it’s probably 3-5 million. For example, if the government is collecting data of heat-related illnesses at the institutional level (from hospitals, clinics, etc.) you immediately have a bias in terms of which people are able to or intend to access healthcare when they develop a heat-related illness. Daily-wagers don’t go to hospitals unless their conditions are acute – because they’d lose a day’s earnings, because their out of pocket expenses have increased or both.

Do you think parts of India will become unliveable in your lifetime?

This is a good question. I’d say that ‘unliveable’ is a subjective thing. I have a friend in Seattle who recently bought a house in what she said was a nice part of the city, with lots of greenery, opportunities to go hiking and trekking on the weekend, with clear skies, clean air and large water bodies nearby. Liveability to her is different from, say, liveability to someone living in New Delhi, where the air is already quite foul, summers are very hot and winters are likely to become colder in future. Liveability means different things to people living in Delhi, London and Seattle. Many parts of India have been unliveable for a long time now, we just put up with it – and many people do because they don’t have any other option – and our bar just keeps slipping lower.

The problem with giving “Mother Nature” rights and duties

Recently, the Madras high court passed a curiously worded order in which Justice S. Srimathy extended the Uttarakhand high court’s 2017 order, granting the rights due to citizens to the Ganga and the Yamuna rivers, to “Mother Nature” in toto.

It’s hard to say what this means (I haven’t read the order, only some excerpts), especially since “Mother Nature” is hard to define. For example, homosexuality is not proscribed in nature, so do homosexual tendencies qualify as a manifestation of “Mother Nature”? Or is the definition restricted to our natural resources?

Then there is the question of nature’s gender: it has been routinely cast as a motherly figure to invoke the image of an entity that gives, typically by birthing new life, but its use by a high court needs to be more careful and completely well-defined. That isn’t the case here.

This confusion is exacerbated by one portion in particular (emphasis added) of the court’s pronouncement:

It is right time to declare/confer juristic status to the “Mother Nature”. Therefore this Court by invoking “parens patriae jurisdiction” is hereby declaring the “Mother Nature” as a “Living Being” having legal entity/legal person/juristic person/juridical person/moral person/artificial person having the status of a legal person, with all corresponding rights, duties and liabilities of a living person, in order to preserve and conserve them.

Apparently, “Mother Nature” has duties. Does it – sorry, ‘she’ – have all 11?

Consider #6, for example: “To value and preserve the rich heritage of our composite culture”. Last year, the Government of Rajasthan denotified a part of Band Baretha Wildlife Sanctuary to allow builders to mine pink sandstone for use in the Ram temple under construction in Uttar Pradesh. The latter state government, like the one at India’s helm, is led by the BJP, according to which Hinduism is a superposition of religion, culture and economic policy, depending on what’s most convenient at any given moment. But the equation also effectively whitewashes the rituals of Hinduism as a matter of the country’s culture, evading the inconvenient demands of secularism.

Might these governments and/or that of Rajasthan now be able to argue in court that it was the duty of the trees and animals of Band Baretha to let themselves be cut down and killed in order to “preserve the rich heritage of our composite culture”?

Similarly, must the mountainsides flanking the Char Dham highway under construction let themselves be blasted off in order to “uphold and protect the sovereignty of India”? Will we be able to sue an avalanching mass of ice, mud, wood and stone for destroying a hydroelectric power project because the belligerent aggregate failed “to safeguard public property and to abjure violence”?

The possibilities are endless – probably because the high court’s pronouncement personifies what was never intended to be personified. The duty that seemed the oddest to this author vis-à-vis “Mother Nature” was “to strive towards excellence in all spheres of individual and collective activity so that the nation constantly rises to higher levels of endeavor and achievement”. ‘To strive’ implies intent, and here a part of a 2019 essay by philosopher Akeel Bilgrami may provide a useful perspective. Bilgrami writes:

The idea that nature makes demands on us is a metaphor. Nature contains values but their normative demands are not intentionally made. The reason is straightforward. It is a mark of what we mean by intentionality that subjects who possess intentionality are potentially appropriate targets of a certain form of criticism. I can criticize you for doing something wrong or for having destructive thoughts, as you can me. … I can criticize you for making certain normative demands of me—unreasonable ones, by my lights. But we don’t criticize elements in nature or artifice in the same sense. We may say “a hurricane was destructive” but that is a “criticism” only by courtesy, not the sort of criticism that you and I make of each other’s doings and thoughts and demands.

Bilgrami, currently a professor at Columbia University, New York, goes on to write that “elements in nature and things do not possess or carry out any such deliberative structure or process, so there is no similar ground for attributing intentionality to them, nor, as a consequence, intelligibly criticizing or punishing such elements”. He also writes that ascribing intent to nature is “unnecessary” because the intentionality can only be captured by a metaphor – that “nature names demands on us” – and that it is not dispensable, or real, as a result.

Instead, we may be better served by considering the rights of plants and birds and animals in a way, fundamentally, that acknowledges the differences between these domains of life and humans themselves. For example, Indians have rights to life and to free speech with reasonable restrictions. Plants instead might be accorded a right to evolve, to not be cut if they are older than 50 years, and to be planted only in places where they were native until the 20th century. Such rights would be much better than to say polluting rivers is wrong because rivers also have rights. Polluting rivers was wrong even before such pronouncements, so they only kicked the can down the road.

Giving either individual rivers or the natural universe as a whole the rights given to Indians is at best protection against destruction. But even then, the government has only needed reconstituted responsibilities, verbal gymnastics, suppressed data and research and an absolute majority in Parliament, finally garnished with some fantasies, to claim that the environment ministry is really protecting the environment by nuking environmental safeguards.

India – where repairing a bad road could make life worse

There is a long road that runs from Mantri Mall to Sankey Road, in Malleshwaram, Bengaluru, called Sampige Road. There are eighteen smaller roads that branch off from it on either side (straightforwardly numbered one through 18), and both the main stem and almost all of these side roads, or crosses, are full of shops selling everything from flowers to clothes, from SIM cards to electronic goods. Sampige Road is an excellent neighbourhood shopping destination. So it was true to experience when the city government decided to ruin it. (I live nearby and have firsthand details.)

The tree-lined line marked ‘Sampige Road’ runs from the bottom to the top of this Google Earth screenshot.

Some years ago, the then AIADMK government in power in Tamil Nadu, as well as in Chennai, wanted to revamp the city’s Pondy Bazaar area, a very popular shopping destination (with bigger stores than on Sampige Road and its Chennai counterpart, Ranganathan Street), under the Indian government’s mega-gentrification project, a.k.a. the ‘Smart Cities’ mission. The mayorate collected all the roadside hawkers and pushed them into a building in Pondy Bazaar, which defeated the point of why roadside hawking is successful (opportunistic buying) while the building also quickly turned squalid, and it repaved the sidewalks and widened the mainstem road.

On November 6, 2021, Chennai received 23 cm of rain; two days later, it received 21 cm more. These were both previously unreported quantities of rain in 24 hours in the city for many, many years, and thus it flooded almost everywhere. But one of the places that flooded first, the most and the longest? Pondy Bazaar. City officials had relaid the mainstem in the market not with asphalt but with concrete. Chennai has an average elevation of 16 m but the part of the district hosting the urban complex is almost entirely flat relative to the sea, which means water poured over the city isn’t eager to run into the Bay of Bengal. The concrete road and the repaved sidewalks in Pondy Bazaar exacerbated this problem: all the surfaces held the water there like a big bowl.

The roughly square shaped area cut by the diagonal mainstem in this Google Earth screenshot is Pondy Bazaar.

A similar fate awaits Sampige Road, which the local government plans to re-lay from 1st cross to nearly the 15th cross with concrete – including the sidewalks, which have until now been a medley of roadside vendors and pedestrians.

There are four more things that make matters much worse. The first two are unique to Sampige Road. First, it is sloped, climbing upward at about 30º from 1st cross onwards and plateauing around 16th cross. This means rain that falls over this stretch of the road will run off into the crossing roads or, more likely, pool into the four-way junction at the origin of Sampige Road – a point that is already notorious for awful traffic jams.

Second, Chennai has historically received more rain than Bengaluru but most of the former’s rainwater arrives in just two months (October and November) while the latter receives it more uniformly, from May to November. Put another way, Pondy Bazaar will be a watery hellscape for two months but Sampige Road, and/or its immediate neighbourhood, is at risk of being that way for more than half the year.

Third, ‘Smart Cities’ or not, concrete roads are a symbol of lazy governance. Their prime advantage is that they last for longer before requiring repairs. Asphalt roads are more easily damaged by rain because the water seeps into and destabilises the undersoil, which adversely affects the integrity of the asphalt. But on the flip side, asphalt roads can be patched, whereas concrete roads – which are often reinforced with embedded steel rods – need to be replaced block by giant block. Additionally, in Pondy Bazaar at least, the road is already bumpy and coarse. Concrete roads also reflect most of the incident light and heat (leading to glare and hot environs) and are more slippery when it rains.

The fourth problem is the most important. By opting for concrete roads over asphalt ones, both cities are solving for road repairs – the one consequence of heavy rain for which governments are most accountable. But in both cases, the governments are making problems worse for the people using these roads. Both a single, intense burst of rainfall as is typical in Chennai and a sustained campaign of showers as in Bangalore will lead to flooding. The only option for this water to drain will be stormwater drains.

In Pondy Bazaar, once the flood waters had drained, experts found that the area’s new stormwater drains, installed/refurbished at a cost of Rs 110 crore under the ‘Smart Cities’ mission, were insufficiently voluminous and, crucially, in almost a dozen areas, were located higher off the ground than where the water collected. This combination caused water to flow out of stormwater drains in the area, maintaining the mainstem in a constant state of floodedness. There is a related problem (the real fourth problem) that many news reports at the time didn’t address, and is likely to affect the new Sampige Road as much as it did Pondy Bazaar: garbage.

Stormwater drains around India’s cities are routinely choked with plastic trash quite simply because people litter where they feel like, with no regard for public or, for that matter, infrastructural hygiene. The drains around Pondy Bazaar were already poorly planned; they’re also highly likely to have been loaded with trash, leaving the rainwater with fewer opportunities to move away from the area.

Similarly, in the near future, the people of Sampige Road will enjoy easier walking, driving and shopping experiences for a little while longer than if the city had relaid the road with asphalt – but at one point, the area will confront the same state of dysfunction towards which the road is already barrelling today: stagnating water, traffic jams and unsafe conditions for pedestrians. The garbage problem is harder to solve because it’s not a technological problem but a social one: it’s more wicked, requires ‘soft’ solutions like raising awareness and changing people’s attitudes, needs carefully designed incentives that – among other things – will require people to repose more faith in the government, and will ultimately improve living conditions without translating into bursts of revenue from a contractor hired to build the road and later to undertake expensive repairs.

Concrete roads do have another advantage: manufacturing asphalt required for road-laying is more harmful to the climate than manufacturing concrete (although both materials are up there in terms of their carbon footprints), but I’m yet to read of city officials alluding to this benefit in their statements. I’m also curious about the respective carbon footprints for the entire lifecycle of both materials in use, especially considering asphalt can be made in smaller quantities and asphalt roads are amenable to being patched.

Perhaps more importantly, both Bengaluru and Chennai are endowed with well-funded, well-staffed research institutes (IISc and IIT Madras). Couldn’t city officials have commissioned them to develop road-laying materials that last longer, can be patched and are absorbent or porous? Such a material, together with changed social attitudes towards littering and a ban on cars on Sampige Road, will be the ideal solution.

Featured image credit: Credit: Liam Riby/Unsplash.