BacktoCricaddict Posted January 27 Posted January 27 This is heartwarming. Forget the culture wars. Every breath that India takes should be about Development. Energy. Self-reliance. https://zionlights.substack.com/p/why-india-keeps-betting-on-nuclear If India continues down this path, the country may eventually end up with a cleaner power grid than some much richer countries that chose to abandon nuclear altogether (Germany) or ban it outright (Australia). That might sound counterintuitive, but it’s not completely unlikely. Those countries are now on the back foot, as they’ve lost nuclear expertise, allowed supply chains to atrophy, and boxed themselves into vulnerable energy systems that compromise reliability and energy security. India’s nuclear strategy is also evolving at the institutional level. Late last year, the government introduced the landmark Sustainable Harnessing and Advancement of Nuclear Energy for Transforming India (SHANTI) Bill to unwind six decades of exclusive state control over the sector. If passed, private companies, including foreign firms operating through joint ventures with Indian partners, will be allowed to build, own, and operate nuclear power plants for the first time. More broadly, this fits with India’s push to deepen its industrial base, and it signals growing confidence that nuclear isn’t a niche or stopgap solution, but a core pillar of the country’s clean energy transition. So - what India achieved is actually quite remarkable. From the very beginning, its nuclear program was less about quick wins and more about where the country wanted to be decades down the line, energy-wise. A common complaint in rich democracies is that politicians only think in short-term electoral cycles. India, at the dawn of the atomic age, made a genuinely long-horizon bet. That choice may not have paid off immediately, or exactly as planned, but it’s paying dividends now. In some important ways, India is better positioned than more developed countries that chose to phase nuclear out altogether. While others let domestic expertise wither, India kept building its nuclear ecosystem. It developed a full fuel cycle, including mining, fuel reprocessing (something only a handful of countries do), and waste management. And although thorium reactors have not been commercially deployed, India’s established expertise, research capacity, and institutional knowledge in the technology will be a significant advantage if they become commercially viable in the future. There’s also a broader lesson here about human capital. Investing in engineers, scientists, and domestic technical capacity tends to compound over time, even when access to cutting-edge Western technology is limited. India trained generations of people who learned how to solve hard problems under constraints, which is exactly the kind of capability that matters for long-run technological independence. India still burns a lot of coal, which means that decarbonisation efforts are going to require immense ambition. If India ever achieves its long-standing goal of energy independence, that outcome won’t be an accident. It will be the result of a strategy that put evidence above ideology, embraced ambition, and was explicitly about playing the long game - and playing it well. IndianRenegade and Tillu 2
G_B_ Posted January 29 Posted January 29 Rupee depriciation seems deliberate to gain exports. IndianRenegade 1
coffee_rules Posted February 5 Posted February 5 Another co-op , hoping it gives a run for its money to Ola Uber
diga Posted February 5 Posted February 5 (edited) 10 hours ago, coffee_rules said: Another co-op , hoping it gives a run for its money to Ola Uber In Bengaluru, Rapido is used by many and also namma yatri popular with autos Edited February 6 by diga
coffee_rules Posted February 6 Posted February 6 3 hours ago, diga said: In Bengaluru, Rapido is used by many and also namma yatri popular with autos I could not install namma yatri last time . They have a geo lock on IOS. Heard it is pretty good .
Tillu Posted February 23 Author Posted February 23 Read these comments from the Chinese on the internet about their life in the 80s and 90s which caught my interest. China was not too different from India. I really hope we too could progress like China. When I was a kid in china in the 80s, all you had during winter was cabbage for vegetables. Everyone’s balconies were stacked with cabbages. Little to no meat, restrictions on eggs, flour, rice, and other essentials. My birth certificate has an official stamp that allowed my mother to be able to purchase 2.5kg of meat. Nowadays it’s become the other way, too much opulence. I'm only in my 30s but I remember a lot. When I was a kid in Shanghai in the 90s I remember: power rationing. There would be mandatory blackouts past 9pm until around 5am in order to save electricity. water rationing. The plumbing and taps would also turn off at night. You couldn't flush the toilet or wash your hands if you got up in the middle of the night. There used to be a lot of low level street crime. I remember my grand-aunt having her necklace snatched from her neck by thieves. I also remember a huge scene at a market in Shanghai where cops were sprinting through an open market to chase down a thief who ducked into a clothing store. It's almost unheard of these days, as people are generally well taken care of enough not to resort to this (or policing got better with the pervasive cameras, who knows?). In public, my grandma and grandpa would always be on high alert for thieves and kidnappers (people used to kidnap children, apparently, in broad daylight. Scary stuff.) Street vendors everywhere was the default mode of commerce. There were basically no shopping malls and most vendors did not have a dedicated building, but just operated from a rolled out carpet or street cart. Nowadays it's the opposite, where street vendors only exist in certain specific clusters or in rural areas, but shopping malls are everywhere. censorship was so incredibly loose compared to post-Xi Jinping. I remember watching Evangelion, uncensored (blood, tits, and all), on primetime, as a 10 year old. Very inappropriate, but also formative and I loved it. Chinese cinema was also domianted by Hong Kong back then, and there was just an energy of freedom and experimentation that is now simply missing. Watching Chinese TV nowadays and it's just endless recycled garbage, or propaganda war movies, or endless recycled propaganda war movies. I hear young Chinese do not ever watch TV anymore, and I'm not surprised to hear that.
Tillu Posted March 14 Author Posted March 14 Found this on Reddit about the outrage over India sending diesel to Bangladesh. Good read. Several news outlets have run stories with headlines like “5,000 tons of diesel have arrived from India” and “Bangladesh has asked India for fuel assistance!” The framing makes it seem as if India is giving away diesel for free. The reality is that under the Bangladesh-India pipeline agreement, which was launched in December 2022, India will sell diesel to Bangladesh: 200,000 tons per year for the first three years, 300,000 tons for the next three years, 500,000 tons for the following four years, and then 1,000,000 tons per year thereafter. Bangladesh will pay the international market price. The diesel that Bangladesh buys from India is not produced by refining crude oil brought from the Middle East. India has oil fields in Assam. By refining the crude oil from there, India meets the diesel demand of the eastern and northeastern regions. Transporting this diesel by road to western, northern, and southern India is very costly. Therefore, India has to import 85 percent of its total oil needs from abroad. With the oil from Assam, it meets the demand of the eastern and northeastern regions and exports the remainder to Bangladesh, Nepal, and Bhutan. This is not a case of aid or charity. India bore 75 percent of the cost to build the 130-kilometer pipeline to export diesel to Bangladesh. The pipeline was criticized because at that time the premium (the per-barrel transportation cost) was set at $5.50. Normally, transportation costs via a pipeline should be zero. But India set the premium by factoring in the cost of building the pipeline. The premium on the diesel Bangladesh buys from the international market is $2.50. Because of transportation costs, diesel from Assam is more profitable for the country to export to Bangladesh than to transport to other parts of India. And even though it has to be sold at international market prices—and the premium is higher—due to global shortages, it's now profitable to buy from India. It's a win-win situation for both. Bangladesh also bought 180,000 tons of diesel from India last January as per the agreement. It purchased 79,000 tons in the 2024-2025 fiscal year. But the diesel, bought at a hard cost in dollars, is being framed as ‘fuel assistance from India,’ as if it's being given for free.
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