What to Read in Indian Express Editorial( Topic and Syllabus wise)

EDITORIAL 1: Why even moderate rainfall leads to flooding in Gurgaon

Context

Gurgaon, home to nearly 2 million people and with third highest per capita income among cities in India is highly vulnerable to monsoon flooding

The Evolution

• The Delhi Master Plan of 1962 saw Gurgaon (Gurugram) as a place of modest urban growth, primarily because the area has no groundwater resources.
• In 1980, with Maruti setting up its factory in Manesar, Gurgaon emerged as an industrial hub.
• A decade later, with liberalisation and the promise of rapid economic growth and infrastructural development, the mythical village mentioned in the Mahabharata became India’s Millennium City,a model for 21st century urbanisation in India — and everything that is wrong with it.
• Every monsoon, Gurgaon witnesses extreme flooding: hours-long traffic jams, cars floating in the deluge, and people being electrocuted are common occurrences.
• All this happens even though Gurgaon receives only about 600 mm of rain on average every year. In comparison, Kochi receives well over 3,000 mm of rain annually without going under every monsoon.

Reasons- Ignoring topography

• The Aravalli ridge, on the southern edge of Gurgaon, is the natural high ground for the city.
• From there, the land slopes down towards the north, which is at a lower altitude. Rainwater in Gurgaon thus flows mainly from the south to the north, towards the Najafgarh Jheel in West Delhi.
• These were natural drainage channels, which carried runoff towards what is now the western edge of Gurgaon, from where water would travel further north.
• But these channels have all but disappeared, and subsequent urban expansion has not kept the city’s topographic reality in mind.
• Topography was not only ignored but also abused.

Piecemeal planning

• One reason why urban expansion in Gurgaon has not kept up with topographic realities is the piecemeal nature of city planning. This is borne out of the city’s unique land acquisition model which is central to Gurgaon’s growth story.
• From the 1970s onwards, the Haryana government introduced a series of laws, which enabled private firms to acquire land on a large scale to develop townships. The Haryana Urban Development Authority (HUDA) was created in 1977 to streamline the process.
• As other players came along, land acquisition was not carried out in a uniform manner. This led to irregular plots, and roads that led to nowhere.
• Allocative decisions form the very core of conventional urban planning, which was missing in Gurgaon’s story from the beginning,
• The “plug-and-play” mode of urban expansion meant that roads were not built with proper gradients,nor was there any big picture thinking behind basic planning decisions for the city.

Concrete everywhere

• In Gurgaon, mustard fields have long made way for highways and highrises. Aregion which once had 60 natural canals, critical to absorb its excess rainwater, barely has four today.
• But as concrete, impervious to percolation, has covered Gurgaon, civic authorities have failed to build a robust drainage system to deal with the problem. Concrete drains only add to the flooding due to their inability to absorb water.
• According to Biswas, India’s engineering codes have no reference beside steel and concrete — earth is simply not something that planners consider while building a city.

Common sense solutions

• Identifying local green areas where there is waterlogging,which can then become water harvesting sites where runoff can be captured and allowed to seep into the ground through aquifers or filters. Urban planning should be as localised as possible.
• Creating soft drains beneath pavements and along the road: these will allow for percolation of rainwater into the soil.
• Building “French drains” —trenches that are filled with gravel and perforated pipes to redirect surface and groundwater away from waterlogged areas.
• Sloping the roads such that water can drain off. If land is surveyed efficiently, swales can be created such that large drainage channels with gently sloping sides can decrease surface water from collecting.

Conclusion

Gurgaon floods due to poor planning, lost drains, and unchecked concretisation. Respecting topography and using sustainable solutions can prevent this.

 

EDITORIAL 2: A world of our making

Introduction

Indian foreign policy is in a deep morass that is often difficult to see. Our hyper-nationalism prevents us asking tough questions. The daily news cycle is caught in tactical matters or image management for the government. Behind our failures lies a refusal of true realism, or a genuine confrontation with our predicament.

The current state of diplomacy

• India is rightly concerned, and is somewhat shocked, that it lost the diplomatic high ground after Operation Sindoor.
• We got boilerplate costless condemnations of terrorism, but also felt that no one stands with us.
• It was fascinating to contrast the breathless self-proclaimed triumphs of the parliamentary delegations and our government with what other countries from the Global North and South were actually saying, behind our backs, as it were.
• We can blame other countries’ self-interest and their anti-India dispositionfor the failure to politically capitalise on Operation Sindoor.
• But we were so besotted with our sense of our case that we did not honestly confront how the case might appear to others.
• The rest of the world may be mistaken. These days, no country has much of a moral leg to stand on.
• But it is worth asking why the moral distinction between India and Pakistan was diplomatically much harder to convey than we thought.

The moral distinction

• The violence in Balochistan and Kashmir, for the rest of the world, gets connected, in a chain of associations.
• In the backdrop of the fact that we have a government that does not exactly have a stellar reputation on moral condemnation of targeting people on account of their religion, it makes it easy for the world to say that these horrendous killings are, as one diplomat once put it, “one of those periodic South Asian things”. This is condescending, but we invited it.
• Second, we are missing the point on anxieties on the nuclear front.Both sides may be right in thinking that, in principle, they can control an escalatory ladder.
• But focus on rational control of escalatory ladders does not address genuine worries about accidents.
• Third, wasn’t it a matter of pride among our diplomats to say to Europe and the rest of the world that Ukraine was their problem?
• Terrorism is also not “their” problem. What is their problem is the risk of nuclear accidents.
• And finally, India’s absolute loss of credibility in the Global South. A country that cannot so much as morally squeak on what is now almost universally acknowledged as an ongoing genocide in Gaza, obsessing over terrorism adds narcissism to the charge of moral abdication.
• Add to this the fact that we botched our credibility as a state on meaningless operations allegedly targeting useless Khalistan activists in Canada and the US. Further add to this the fact that not allowing an open domestic discussion even on the bare facts of the war furthers our credibility crisis. Even our truths become less credible.
• So, India’s moral claims now invite a long “meh” at worst. And since our foreign policy establishment is easily satiated with the meaningless communique that makes the evening headline, that is at best what we get.

The actual realism

• The other disposition impeding clear thinking is our approach to realism. The current dispensation’s interpretation of realism is not actual realism about the state of the world.
• It is a simple inversion of some perceived past of Indian foreign policy. This supposed realism, with its fantasies of transcending India’s South Asian context, has led to such a spectacular misreading of the neighbourhood that we have lost much of the neighbourhood.
• This is a realism that thought that the excessive courting of America was a sign of machismo. America is important to India. India’s political economy might yet save India from selling the entire store to the US.
• But one of the deepest ironies in the recent excessive craving for validation from the US is that the pro-America lobby has never had confidence about building India’s own strengths.
• But to think these deals will be our salvation, or that they will miraculously be a catalyst for domestic reform, make us secure against China, enhance our global moral standing, allow us to sort out our problems in the neighbourhood, is sheer fantasy.
• And it prevents us from seeing what the American project is: A project of global dominance. Resisting it will require a different tool kit.

Conclusion

Our lack of realism comes from the fact that our establishment has come to believe the lies it is trying to tell the people.