Prashant Vaze

I’ve enjoyed immersing myself in the local media and it’s an easy way of familiarising myself with India.  Luckily loads of material is available in English, making it very easy. Here are the things I’ve stumbled across to help me get acquainted.

Films

I’m not a big consumer of Indian movies so I’ve gone for two recent box office hits which are streaming so easy to locate.

RRR (Rise, Roar, Revolt) – was India’s top-grossing film in 2022. It’s basically a team-up of two badasses, one a tribal villager avenging the abduction of a young girl by the British governor’s wife. The other, seemingly a local British police officer, is revealed to be another irate Indian wanting to avenge the genocide of his village by the evil Brits. It was apparently inspired by Inglorious Basterds and is if anything even more violent.

Pathaan – a Mission Impossible-style vehicle for the ubiquitous Shah Rukh Khan who plays a disgraced RAW agent (India’s CIA). There is an unlikely partnership/relationship between a Khan and an ISS agent (Deepika Padukone) to fight off a smallpox armageddon from the bad guy. Great fun.

TV shows

There are some really good Indian shows streaming on Netflix and Prime. My two favourites touch the vast gulf between the urban elite and the rural majority.

Panchayat: A bitter-sweet comedy about a metropolitan engineering graduate who takes a job as an official in a remote village while studying for entry to a prestigious university. It’s a gentle satire on rural politics. He works for the local Pradhan (village mayor) and feuds with the imperious MLA to pull resources into the village to build latrines, pave the road and sort out trifling disputes.

Decoupled: is a hilarious account of a collapsing marriage between two Delhi hi-flyers, writer Arya and his financier wife Shruti, who decide to continue living together for their daughter. Arya’s arrogance and outspokenness constantly get him into trouble, and Shruti delights in deflating his massive ego. In one episode, their disgruntled driver tired of their condescension abandons them and returns to his village. When our couple goes to the sticks to retrieve him, they are so unknowing of local customs, they almost get lynched. The finale episode was shot in Goa just a short walk from where we live.

Documentaries

The Elephant Whisperers is an Oscar-winning documentary about two south Indian tribals in Tamil Nadu who foster orphaned elephants Raghu and then Ammukuttu raising them from infancy. The outdoor photography is beautiful, and the bond between humans and elephants is so strong it’s impossible not to feel the wrench when the elephants are rehoused by the forestry service (their employer). The film gives some idea of the resources the national and state forestry service pours into Indian nature conservation – around a fifth of India is designated as forest including reserves for tigers, desert species, and mangroves.

Saxtticho Koddo (The Granary of Salcete) is a short film about Goa’s rice farming culture chronicling the ceremonies, songs and dances that predate the arrival of the Portuguese. High rice yields were maintained for many generations by the collectively organised creation of canals and terraces, which represent human endeavour equivalent to building the Grand Pyramid many times over. Farmers had a repertoire of rice cultivars for local palates and to combat pests and disease. Now few young Goans, especially once educated, wish to remain in the fields. The film mentions intermediate technology inventions to semi-automate the back-breaking planting and harvesting of rice seedlings in the tiny plots, and the arrival of more middle-class lifestyle farmers into the countryside.

Novels

I liked Chetan Bhagat’s Nick Hornby-esque One night @ the call centre (2005). The title’s a bit of a giveaway. Still, if you’ve ever wondered about the lives and ambitions of Hari and Sacha on the other end of the helpline, this book gives a cheerful account of the five staff taking advantage of a computer hitch during their shift to motivate one another to pursue their real passions.  Bhagat’s first novel, which covered the stresses of India’s famously competitive but creativity-destroying Indian Institute of Management course, was adapted into the famous movie 3 Idiots.

A complete antidote to Bhagat’s slushy silliness is Deepti Kapoor recent crime saga Age of Vice (2023). This literary state-of the-nation is set in Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Goa has a cast of mafia, journalists, politicians and idealists. The accounts of the character’s dissolute destruction are painful to read, especially since much of the suffering is dished out on princeling hero Sonny by his crime-overlord father. His crime was plotting to redeploy the family’s ill-gotten wealth to transform Delhi rather than just accumulate. Netflix has bought the rights to the book.

Podcasts

Given the amount of Indian Youtubers, I’ve found it hard to find a good local Indian podcast. Maybe it’s the clampdown on independent journalists. Both my picks are supported by USA endowments but hosted by Indian journalists.

Grand Tamasha (big fuss in English) is hosted by Milan Vaishnav (based out of George Town) and supported by the Carnegie Foundation. Every week it spends an hour interviewing authors of major new books or creatives. I picked up a lot of book suggestions from this.

Ideas of India is hosted by economist George Mason University-based economist Shruti Rajagopalan. As the title suggests every two weeks, she interviews some of the smartest thinkers usually, but not exclusively from India, ranging from central bank governors (Dr C. Rangarajan) to spatial planners (French World Bank consultant Alain Bertaud). These aren’t interviews, these are proper discussions with Shruti debating their evidence and offering her own libertine insights.

Non-fiction

I’ve picked up a lot of non-fiction books about recent Indian affairs but there’s only one I can wholeheartedly recommend.

India After Gandhi by Ramachandra Guha is a 944-page political and social treatise. The third edition covers the period between Independence and finishes with Prime Minister Modi’s handling of COVID. It’s a wonderful book, with warts and all, treatments of the major political figures and their major pollical challenges, religious and linguistic schisms. Reading it you start to appreciate the formidable challenge Nehru and his able deputy Vallabhbhai Patel faced creating a secular, democratic country from the bloody disintegration of the sub-continent and the integration of the nominally independent princely states (which accounted for a third of India’s area). It’s hard living in the West to appreciate how fractious relationships have been with neighbours (four wars with Pakistan including one to create Bangladesh, two with China) a skirmish with Portugal to liberate Goa. The economy has switched from a highly nationalised ‘socialistic’ state, a deliberately ambiguous term adopted by Nehru, which his daughter Indira Gandhi extended to the slow economic liberalisation started by Naramsimha Rao which continued under Congress and BJP to this day.

I’d love to hear further suggestions in the comments.

Who am I?

Don’t worry, this article isn’t going to go all jingoistic or introspective. It tackles the knotty issue Indian returnees face accessing numerous online and offline services – proving they are, who they claim. Authentication of IDs hinges on a handful of critical documents – PAN cards to prove their (financial) existence, Aadhaar Card to prove their address, a driving licence and an Indian mobile number which provides traders an entry point to unending marketing texts. (I am not joking; some cash registers need a valid phone mobile number to complete a sale.)

India has fused its obsession with tech with its love of needless bureaucratic complexity to make life with these documents less predatory, and life without like an episode of Black Mirror.

So, what are these documents, why were they developed, and how easy are they to get hold of. And what happens to those on the wrong side of the ID face-off?

The Permanent Account Number (PAN) is a ten-digit alphanumeric number, issued by two private companies – NSDL for online applicants, and UTI-TSL for paper-based applications – on behalf of the Income Tax Department. The UK equivalent is a National Insurance Number. (An interesting aside is that the code’s fourth character identifies the class of the applicant. ‘H’ signifies Hindu Undivided Family, and ‘J’ an Artificial Juridical Person, gratifying ChatGPT but leaving fractious, non-Hindu families beleaguered). You need a PAN to open a bank or savings account, purchase a car, insurance, jewellery, or property, apply for a phone number, and pay more than Rs 50,000 (£500) at a hotel or restaurant. The rationale for demanding PAN numbers is that India has a big problem with black money, and making buyers disclose PAN numbers cracks-down on crooks’ efforts to clean their loot.

On paper, all that’s needed to acquire a PAN card are two photos, proof of address (PoA) and proof of identity (PoI). In February, I first tried the online method but got stuck finding an acceptable PoA. I went to the UTI-TSL office to see if my bank account statement or tenancy agreement worked. The scrum of people outside the office would have terrified the All Blacks. I couldn’t get close enough to the counter even to pick up an application form. Reluctantly, I did what I had vowed not to do – got an agent. She deemed my bank account statement and tenancy agreement were useless. Only government-issued documents could be used, or affidavits by elected politicians. The agent instructed me to use a relative’s address as proof of an Indian address. My application got rejected twice before the resolution of my relative’s Aadhaar card satisfied the NSDL. After ten weeks, I was a proud owner of a PAN card enabling me to pay income tax.

The Aadhaar card (a twelve-digit number and small booklet) started in 2009 as a voluntary scheme of rationalising government citizen databases. UIDAI administers it. Enrolment has been a wild success, and 99.9% of Indians have a card. Name, address, gender and date of birth are included alongside photos, fingerprints and iris scan biometric identifiers. Routine use of the card has reduced parasitic intermediaries from inserting themselves between Indian citizens and their entitlements to welfare benefits, work schemes like MG-REGA, food rations, and subsidised fuel (LPG). The government is linking Aadhaar to PAN cards and India’s electronic payment systems allowing millions of unbanked Indians with a secure payment system. It was used 2. 31 billion times in March 2023 alone. In the UK, HMRC and DWP maintain separate and unlinked databases of taxpayers and claimants.

Increasingly the private sector demands an Aadhaar card, with its reliable biometric identifiers, to prove ID. Employers are said to use the card to track employee workplace attendance.

So how do I get one? The success of the enrolment programme meant that most Aadhaar centres were closed just before we arrived, and the rules governing new applications were quietly removed. I travelled twenty miles to the nearest remaining centre in Goa and was told (at 11 am) that the officer had gone for lunch, and to come back after lunch. I bullied the receptionist into showing me the latest staff circular, which essentially said to come back in March, maybe April when the new rules would be revealed. It turns out, foreigners can apply for an Aadhaar card once they have lived in India for 182 days. So now I wait.

Indian mobile phone numbers are another must-have. All sorts of online and offline transactions require you to submit one-time passwords (OTPs) to complete the sale. Officials use texts to communicate time-critical information. For my sleeper train ticket to Delhi, carriage and seat number were delivered via text. So too updates about my PAN application. No wonder India has 1.2 billion active mobile phone numbers, a higher penetration rate than Europe. The competition between Indian mobile providers is ferocious, with four major suppliers. Two were set up by the warring Ambani brothers Airtel (Anil till bankruptcy in 2019) and Jio (Mukesh), Vodafone-Idea (now divested from Vodafone UK) and one other no-ones heard of.

Getting an Indian SIM card is less straightforward than in the UK, but not hard. You quickly hit the familiar chicken-and-egg issue of supplying an Indian address and PAN card which many foreigners won’t possess. Luckily the telephone service providers were happy with my wife’s PAN card and property documents, and I got in on her shirttail. This paved the way for localised (and vastly cheaper) versions of Spotify, Apple Store and Google Pay.

I can legally drive in India for a year using an international license. I hope this will give me enough time to obtain an Indian license. This should be issued to holders of a valid international license. The online application took five-minutes and I got a reassuring email saying I should “visit the concerned office with required forms and documents along with this receipt”. Again an acceptable Proof of (Indian) Address will be needed, which sometimes gums up the process. An American neighbour who moved to India a year ago needed an ‘agent’, assisted by a Rs 14,000 under-the-counter payment, which overnight sorted out the mysterious obstacle holding up his nonconforming address. Such under-the-table payments to agents are all too often needed to access public services and licenses. According to a 2007 academic article by IFC staffers, which included a fascinating behavioural experiment, the likelihood of passing a driving test was unrelated to the ability to drive. The arbitrary failing of test candidates was simply to steer them towards ‘agents’. Sadly, for the bureaucrats, much of the bribe went to the agent rather than the bent bureaucrats.

Life without valid ID documents is possible, but awkward.  At a car showroom, I asked what I needed to buy and register a car: PAN number to pay the road tax…fair enough, but the Aadhaar card was needed to prove my ID. I have plenty of other identification documents I protested. The salesman said he’d give his permitting contact in the RTO (regional transport office of which Goa has ten employing 350 staff!) a call. He got back a few days later, saying a small fee could be paid to smooth the way for such an irregular application. He was being blunt, that’s how things work here.

The diktats about better regulation and plain English which swept over UK and the EU public sectors haven’t made it to India yet. It carries on with its pre-Independence mindset. These processes are a throwback to the Raj, when the bureaucracy was a weapon of subjugation and rent extraction, rather than a service provider. IT permits India’s bureaucracy to become more streamlined, but it faces resistance from the vast army of people employed (and sometimes profiting) from the old license Raj. David Graeber would have developed a more textured and nuanced Bullshit Jobs thesis had he done his fieldwork in India. This sort of makework, a term commonly used in India, but I’d not heard before, is frustrating for us and often for many public-minded officials too.

And therein lies the conundrum for India, the obstacle to better public services isn’t technology but what to do with the army of bureaucrats and agents that evolved before the streamlining provided by the technology. And this is before ChatGPT sends another shock wave of redundancy to many of the pen-pushing rigmaroles of obtaining ID documents. 

On 12 April 1912 the Titanic set sail. Two days later, while in the Arctic seas Captain Edward Smith received 7 iceberg warnings over the course of the day. But he followed standard procedure which was to proceed at full speed on the basis that the lookout would provide sufficient warning and the ship could steer or smash its way through. Based on backward looking historic data this was smart thinking. He had a schedule to keep, he was expected in New York in three days, and he was after all captain of the largest and newest boat in the world.

At 11.40 pm the lookout spotted an iceberg dead ahead. The engines were stopped and the ship attempted to evade. At 11.50 it struck the iceberg.  At 12.05 the order was given to abandon ship. At 2.05 am the last life boat departed. 700 people were saved 1500 died. There were still plenty of space on the lifeboats but there hadn’t been enough time to get off.

The financial sectors response to climate change is alarmingly similar. Full speed ahead finding and exploiting new fossil fuel assets even though the atmosphere doesn’t have the capacity to safely absorb what we already know about. 30% of bonds and equity is in sectors vulnerable to stranding: natural resources and extraction, power utilities, chemicals, construction and industrial goods.

People in this room all know that these companies are going to have to take massive write-down at some time over the next 15-20 years. They are praying to God they’ll reach the lifeboat before the ship hits the fan. (Forgive my bad taste in jokes)

I am going to talk about the role financial regulators and central government need to play to avert catastrophe to turn the billions into trillions? I make three key points.

Embedding the TCFD’s [Taskforce on Climate-related Financial Disclosures] recommendations is a good foundational step. This report has yielded some important benefits: the financial regulators largely accept systemic risks to the banking and insurance sector and agree something needs to be done. TCFD provides a language for talking and thinking about them: transition risks, climate risks. It asks institutions to establish governance and strategy around climate and undertake scenario analysis which is disclosed to stakeholders.

Central Banks’ Network for Greening Financial Systems is the most important international forum. It shares experiences and best practice. The Network’s three work streams are: sizing the impacts of climate on the economy (including low probability tail risks), mapping how current supervisory practices should be changed, scaling up of green finance.

Finance ministries also have a major role to play, both as direct issuers of green bonds, and also in providing financial incentives for others to issue. The largest sovereign issuer is currently the French OAT with 5 billion Euro new issuance last year some 1% of French Government spending. Singapore and Hong Kong governments provide subsidies to cover some of the costs associated with issuing green bonds.

But that’s not what truly ambitious looks like. We need to look back to the war to see real intervention. Between 1942 and 1945 the US government debt rose from around 50% of GDP to 106% of GDP. Unlike climate change the war was commonly perceived as a clear and present existentialist threat and the country’s financial systems got behind it.

Was debt incurred to fight the war wasted? Of course not. As well as allowing the Allied countries to maintain their freedom this expenditure created a raft of technological benefits that transformed the 20^thcentury at least as much as the war itself: the Manhattan Project created fissile materials used in nuclear power and bombs, Bletchley Park produced the first pre-semiconductor computers and cryptographic algorithms. Then there was RADAR, jet engine aircraft.  What marvels will a green New Deal unlock? And without the body bags.

A month ago today a small number of left-leaning Democrat representatives signed a resolution to fund a Green New Deal to transform US energy, transport and buildings stock. In their resolution they say US wildfires would be twice as bad as now by 2050, and by 2100 US climate related losses would be $500 billion/yr ($2000 /person). Its opponents say the cost of implementing the Deal would be $5 to 9 trillion a year.

Turning to the Central banks. What are they doing? The ECB’s and BoE asset purchase programmes, which purchase some green bonds, are nothing to brag about. They are just business as usual. If anything they are biased against green bonds since so many fossil fuel issuers have high credit ratings based on their financial histories. But implementing TCFD is a useful first step.

What does an audacious supervisor look like? In China the central bank PBoC is intervening to allow green bonds to serve as collateral for medium term lending facility; there’s also discussion about using preferential risk weighting for green assets including green bonds and green loans. In India the Priority Sector Lending rules oblige banks to lend minimum volumes of money to agriculture, SMEs and renewable energy. These are out of step with OECD countries light-touch supervision, but are they really less bad than bank capital being poured into another asset bubble.

But supervisors could do even more. During the second world war the Fed was an agent for change, not a supervisor. The second world war was debt financed and the Fed purchased the equivalent to 3.2% of GDP in bonds to keep the yield low. Inflation coupled with high nominal rates of GDP growth in the 1950s allowed the then unprecedented levels of debt to erode away back down to pre-war levels.

But a properly audacious financial regulation would focus on the Tragedy of the horizon – the fact that that finance markets are still myopically rewarding yesterday’s business models. Finance should not be funding new fossil fuel infrastructure because of the halo effect of yesterday’s strong balance sheets. The market’s time myopia means the future stops mattering after 5-7 years once climate-misaligned assets are safely on some-one else’s balance sheet. We need to massively raise the cost of capital for brown assets so they are never built in the first place; and redirect this to green infrastructure. And we need to do this yesterday.

Audacious policy means large Green and brown adjustments to capital weights and bank lending targets set at a level sufficient for an orderly exit out of fossil fuels in the next decade or two. This is what many countries have signed up to, and what we need.

The Titanic had plenty of warning about the hazard it faced, if it’d had slowed down as had other nearby ships that fateful night, the momentum of its terrible coal engines might have been tamed. Spaceship Earth doesn’t have any lifeboats.