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Internet users in India to cross 300 mn by Dec: Report

The number of Internet users in India is expected to cross the 300 million mark by the end of this year, overtaking the US as world’s second-largest Internet market.

According to a report by the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) and IMRB International, the number of Internet users in India is expected to grow 32 per cent to 302 million this year from 213 million at the end of December 2013.

Presently, India has the third-largest Internet user base in the world. While China leads with more than 600 million Internet users, the US has an estimated 279 million users. It is estimated, the report said, that by December 2014, India will overtake the US as the second largest Internet users’ base in the world.

The user base in India is further estimated to grow to 354 million by June 2015.

“The Internet in India took more than a decade to move from 10 million to 100 million and 3 years from 100 million to 200 million. However, it took only a year to move from 200 to 300 million users. Clearly, Internet is mainstream in India today,” IAMAI-IMRB said in a statement.

The report said of the 278 million users Indian had in October this year, 177 million are in urban India, higher by 29 per cent from last year. In rural India, the number of Internet users increased by 39 per cent to reach 101 million in October 2014.

About 119 million users access the Internet on mobile devices in urban India, while rural mobile Internet user base stood at 40 million in October this year. This is further estimated to touch 128 million (urban) and 45 million (rural) by December-end, it said

ISRO wins Indira Gandhi Prize

Forty years of pioneering work culminating in the successful launch of India’s first Mars orbiter this September has won the Indian Space Research Organisation the Indira Gandhi Prize for Peace, Disarmament and Development for 2014.

“ISRO has shown how much Indian scientists and talent can be harnessed to international levels, catching up with much more advanced nations in a highly technical and sophisticated field,” the Indira Gandhi Memorial Trust’s secretary, Suman Dubey, said in a statement.

“It has shown what true self-reliance is, often working in adverse circumstances… It has demonstrated that in space technology, Indians stand shoulder to shoulder with the best in the world.”

The prize was also for ISRO’s contributions in strengthening international cooperation in the peaceful use of outer space and for the organisation’s role in addressing the needs of rural Indians in remote areas, he added. A jury chaired by Vice-President Hamid Ansari chose ISRO for the award, given to individuals or organisations who promote international development, a new international economic order or make scientific discoveries for public good.

For a public policy road map

India’s global competitiveness is inextricably linked to its ability to formulate and implement sound public policies, the making of which is one of the most ignored aspects of governance

The Global Competitiveness Report 2014-15 published by the World Economic Forum (WEF) has ranked India 71 in its Global Competitiveness Index (GCI). This report assesses the competitiveness of 144 global economies based on 12 points. These include institutions, infrastructure, health and education, labour market efficiency, technological readiness, innovation and business sophistication. India was ranked 60 in 2013-14. Now, it occupies the lowest position among the BRICS countries. Russia was ranked 64 in 2013-14, four ranks below India, but is 53 in 2014-15. China is 28. The GCI rankings for 2014-15, followed by , in brackets, the 2013-14 rankings, which were for 148 economies are: Brazil 57 (56); Russia 53 (64); Indian 71 (60); China 28 (29) and South Africa 56 (53).

India’s global competitiveness is inextricably linked to its ability to formulate and implement sound and effective public policies. Public policymaking is one of the most ignored aspects of governance in India. In fact, we have mastered the art of adhocism for governance, with little or no effort to seek empirical analysis in formulating public policy. While all empirical analyses have their inherent limitations, they are indispensable in weighing different options from the point of view of policy effectiveness. Public policy is critical in every aspect of governance, not least for making laws, rules, regulations, executive orders and administrative directions, and for formulating policies of the government. The purpose of public policy is to not only provide answers to all questions, but also to do so by helping the government to ask the right questions in the first place.

Using empirical analysis

In recent times, public policy as a discipline has brought to bear many fields of inquiry with a view to addressing the central problems of governance. Public policy analysis requires a more rigorous approach in which many fields of inquiry, including, but not limited to sociology, political science, law, anthropology, ethics and history besides economics, remain relevant. This kind of analysis and approach to public policy is indispensable for good governance. An example of such a multidisciplinary approach to assessing public policy effectiveness is the recent India Public Policy Report 2014.

There are some pointers in a road map for public policy-based governance. Here are four points, the first being ‘evaluating policy effectiveness through empirical analysis’. It is essential that empirical analysis forms the basis for determining policy effectiveness. For far too long, public policy formulation has been based on anecdotal evidence, perceptions of what might work and what would not, conventional wisdom of our political and bureaucratic hierarchies, and specious forms of populism. But, as we develop and become a more mature democracy in which reasonable people can disagree as to what is the best way to govern India, there is a need to develop a stronger and sounder empirical basis for policy formulation. Policy formulation should move beyond the whims and fancies of power holders or the good intentions of a few individuals. It should rest upon sound institutional basis in which there is both continuity and change over time. A potential advantage of policy formulation through empirical analysis is that it reduces the risk of dramatic changes in policy due to changes in government after elections.

One of the unfortunate aspects of governance in India is that whenever any new government comes to power, be it in a State or at the Centre, it spends considerable time undoing many things that the previous government had done. The strange thing in this approach to public policy formulation is that many a time, the same officers who were involved in policy formulation in previous regimes advocating these policies then end up working to justify why these policies are not good. The root of this problem can be traced to the fact that in the first place, these policies were not thought through properly and were not based upon sound empirical foundations to justify their formulation.

Issue of scrutiny

The second is ‘rigorous legal and constitutional scrutiny before law and policy formulation’. The last few decades of governance in India have demonstrated the growing importance of courts and quasi-judicial institutions. Today, more than ever before, every law, policy, rule and regulation formulated by governments and regulatory bodies is being increasingly subject to rigorous legal and constitutional scrutiny. The typical government response has been that this is judicial activism which is hindering the process of executive decision-making and policy formulation. However, if the executive and the legislature accords more time, thought and reflection before passing laws or making policies, the risk of them being challenged in the courts and the courts declaring them to be in violation of the law or the Constitution, can be considerably reduced. Adhocism, vested interests, biases and prejudices, discrimination and arbitrariness in policy formulation and implementation have made laws and policies more vulnerable to judicial negation. It does not augur well for a mature democracy when every decision of the government ends up being challenged in a court of law. The effective functioning of democracies through constitutional governance presupposes a minimal degree of trust among institutions exercising their respective constitutional duties and responsibilities.

Building linkages

The third aspect is in ‘building linkages among government agencies and academic institutions’. Public policy formulation has been an exclusive domain of government departments and agencies. Historically, anybody outside the government giving suggestions to people in government was not only frowned upon but also strongly resisted. Government agencies including ministries in the Central government and departments in the State government are woefully preoccupied with a range of day-to-day matters of governance. Their capacity and ability to think and reflect on sound public policymaking is minimal not because of any inherent limitations of competence, but due to a lack of time and attention, while dealing with the sheer magnitude of bureaucratic procedures of their own making. Under these circumstances, it can only help the government if it develops strong and substantive linkages with academic institutions, research centres and independent experts. But for these linkages to be effective and meaningful, they should be backed by significant changes in the internal governance structures of government bodies. The advisory role that is hitherto played by people outside the government should give way to a stronger and executive role so that those providing advice feel that their arguments and analysis will be taken seriously and not be set aside after the pretence of consultation leading to an empty and sham exercise in the quest for legitimacy. Public policy should enable people to “speak truth to power.”

“One of the unfortunate aspects of governance in India is that whenever any new government comes to power, be it in a State or at the Centre, it spends considerable time undoing many things that the previous government had done.”

Establishing centres

The fourth is in ‘building public policy schools and research centres’. If there is one specific area that is crying for reform, it is the need to establish several world-class public policy schools in India. Interdisciplinary studies relating to public policy, both as an academic programme as well as a research programme leading to cutting edge, empirical and pioneering research in various fields are absent in India. This void is particularly felt in the humanities and social sciences more than in sciences, medicine and engineering. Public policymaking in India, whether it is about building roads, bridges, airports, sea ports, or for that matter, launching rockets and creating nuclear power stations requires not only well-trained engineers and scientists, but also sociologists, anthropologists, lawyers and, most of all, public policy practitioners who can ensure a consultative dialogue among all stakeholders, including government representatives. The heart of a sound public policy programme lies in the amalgamation of qualitative and quantitative methods for training professionals in public policy; a study of economics and sociology, which is critical to the understanding of social and economic development; law, ethics and governance, which are relevant for examining the institutions that are responsible for public policymaking and to what extent transparency and accountability inform policymaking.

The future of governance in India is bound to become more complex leading to disputes and disagreements over different visions of growth and development. In responding to these challenges, the urgent need is for public policy-based analyses in which every stakeholder has a voice and where every voice adds dimension and meaning to the development discourse. The need for ensuring public policy effectiveness is essential to achieve good governance. Otherwise, this goal will remain elusive and our global competitiveness will further decline, as it has been the case for many years.

The soldier as state actor

In conflict-ridden areas of India, governance has increasingly come to be seen through the lens of the counterinsurgency paradigm. These are abnormal conditions of governance

In the aftermath of the shooting of two young Kashmiri men by the Army on November 3, it is imperative to draw attention to the conditions of governance that control the everyday lives of millions of citizens. In several parts of India — the Northeastern States, Jammu and Kashmir and Chhattisgarh — the coercive arm of the state is also tasked with the creation of conditions under which civilian governance can proceed. This has not been perfectly achieved.

Since 2008, I have been researching India’s counterinsurgency campaigns in the Northeast, Jammu and Kashmir and the Maoist belt in Central India, particularly Chhattisgarh. In 2011, I spent a few months in Chhattisgarh. I recall here part of an interview with a Border Security Force (BSF) officer stationed in Bhilai, Durg district. The officer said, “We [the BSF] have been providing security for about one year. In this one year, there has been no development work. [The] State government has not undertaken one project. So now the BSF is doing civic action. We are providing resources. We have been distributing medicines, clothes, essentials, food, blankets, seeds for farming, utensils, sports items to children, school supplies. We have even given local panchayats and tribal leaders TV sets and DTH [direct to home] facilities. They need to have some information about the outside world … We have been providing security to the contractors, saying now get the work done. But no development has happened. We provide security, but no one carries out the job. This is the problem with our system. The Naxals are fighting this system. Their final target is the politician.”

Layering of roles

During a visit to Kashmir in September 2014, I found ‘Sadbhavna’ schools set up by the Indian military around the Line of Control (LoC) in villages like Dawar in Gurez sector, which are poor and lack much infrastructure. In an attempt to “win the hearts and minds” of people, by following U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine, the Indian Army had launched in the late 1990s “Operation Sadbhavna” (Goodwill) that is aimed at providing health services, undertaking women’s empowerment, operating schools under asbestos roofs, and, providing relief and rehabilitation.

What these accounts reveal is a layering of roles for the coercive state apparatus.

Schools and medicine aside, these are also the same state actors that possess the power to barge into local houses at will, arrest or kill people in fake encounters, impose curfews, order crackdowns and commit sexual offences against women with impunity. This is all done in the name of counterinsurgency. I argue here that in conflict-ridden areas of India, governance has increasingly come to be seen through the lens of the counterinsurgency paradigm. These are abnormal conditions of governance that I call garrison governance.

Garrison governance is governance conducted under the protection of the coercive arm of the state. The logic that underpins garrison governance rests on an assumption that without the presence of soldiers, normal state institutions will be severely crippled in their everyday functioning because of the threat of anti-state groups operating in the region.

Garrison governance is the enmeshment of the bureaucratic with the coercive. This leads to a governance outcome that privileges the everyday coercive over the bureaucratic avatar of the state. This code switching of roles that the Army and paramilitary play, also creates various levels of cognitive dissonance on the ground among locals. The uniformed state actor is not only creating the conditions for governance, but is also governing, while the regular bureaucrats are missing or incapable of governing. Local political representatives appear with their political party paraphernalia around election time and then disappear. The only constant state actor in such areas is the uniformed soldier from one of the various paramilitary forces, the Army or the police.

Uniformed actors

The Indian state has had to invest heavily in a security apparatus to facilitate incorporation and control of dissenting populations. But how did the Indian state reach this point? I argue here that a combination of factors has precipitated garrison governance. India had to become a counterinsurgent state along with becoming an independent democracy. Because the police forces were not adequate to address hostile rebel groups in the Northeast in the 1950s and 1960s and the local State’s bureaucratic apparatuses were underdeveloped at the time, the state relied heavily on the military and on special regiments like the Assam Rifles and Manipur Rifles, leading to an early institutionalisation of garrison governance. This over time became path-dependent, i.e., it was easier to allow garrison governance in the hands of uniformed actors to continue, than to actually try to find political solutions to persistent problems of insurgency. Political solutions only came with regard to Mizoram and, to a limited extent, in Tripura with the Tripura National Volunteers and in Bodoland. Several other ceasefires or “Suspension of Operations” agreements with insurgent groups in the northeast have only reduced levels of violence against the Army, but not between insurgent groups and have also not contained violence by the Army against unarmed locals.

However, Army, police and paramilitary officers that I have interviewed over the last seven years express much displeasure with the Central state. One officer in particular said that the Army was sent in to control populations and directives that came from the Home Ministry were almost never clear. So, he said, the Army “just does what it is trained to do”. A high-ranking official similarly suggested that in the end, all solutions would have to be political. The Army, he said, was only stabilising certain areas and helping in conducting elections.

Rights violations

The formula for garrison governance is rather simple — boots on the ground combined with some feel-good handouts. This obfuscates a larger architecture of oppression. Soldiers are still protected by the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA) in Manipur and Jammu and Kashmir, which has led to several reported incidents of human rights violations and sexual assault. The landscape is dotted with armed soldiers and the police; civilian movement is filtered and controlled in shopping districts and government offices, curfews and crackdowns are imposed at the slightest suggestion of dissent, and phone tapping is common. An Intelligence Bureau official stationed in Kashmir told me that they were tapping 10 lakh phones in Kashmir alone by 2014. In the last two decades, most Governors of Northeastern States have been former military generals.

Even the police in places like Kashmir have become more militarised. Assault rifles have replaced traditional lathis, which are now deemed insufficient for crowd control. Alongside this, Special Police Officers are being locally recruited, trained and deployed in Kashmir. Visitors to certain States are often visited by the special branch of the State police, which can, at will, investigate individuals and their intentions for being in the State. Security forces routinely stop inter-State buses and local buses for spot checks. Travelling in trains in the Northeast means being willing to open up your baggage to the officials of the Railway Protection Force.

During election time, troop deployment doubles across the Northeast. At a higher level, General Officers Commanding (GOCs) in these States have a high degree of power in maintaining counterinsurgency strategy. As reported by one bureaucrat deployed in Manipur in 2011, the GOC and the Chief Minister of Manipur often got into disagreements about what needed to be done about the hill tribes. Often the GOC won.

In spite of six decades of counterinsurgency, insurgencies in India have thrived. I have personally counted at least 196 insurgent groups since 1950 in India, many of which are still active. It is clear that a strategy meant to secure sovereignty has instead led to a permanent state of exception in some areas, where the character of governance itself is at odds with democratic norms since the power of elected representatives and bureaucrats is circumscribed by and enabled only at the behest of soldiers. Some constitutional rights of people stand suspended under such governance because non-insurgent, democratic political dissent has also come to be seen as a form of anti-state activity. Under such conditions, it is vital to reopen a debate into India’s counterinsurgency strategies in different areas and start thinking about political settlements to insurgencies.

False promise of nuclear power

The need for costly upgrades post-Fukushima and for making the nuclear industry competitive, including by cutting back on generous government subsidies, underscore nuclear power’s dimming future.

New developments highlight the growing travails of the global nuclear-power industry. France — the “poster child” of atomic power — plans to cut its nuclear-generating capacity by a third by 2025 and focus instead on renewable sources, like its neighbours, Germany and Spain. As nuclear power becomes increasingly uneconomical at home because of skyrocketing costs, the U.S. and France are aggressively pushing exports, not just to India and China, but also to “nuclear newcomers,” such as the cash-laden oil sheikhdoms. Still, the bulk of the reactors under construction or planned worldwide are located in just four countries — China, Russia, South Korea and India.

Six decades after Lewis Strauss, chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, claimed that nuclear energy would become “too cheap to meter,” nuclear power confronts an increasingly uncertain future, largely because of unfavourable economics. The International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook 2014, released last week, states: “Uncertainties continue to cloud the future for nuclear — government policy, public confidence, financing in liberalized markets, competitiveness versus other sources of generation, and the looming retirement of a large fleet of older plants.”

Heavily subsidy reliant

Nuclear power has the energy sector’s highest capital and water intensity and longest plant-construction time frame, making it hardly attractive for private investors. Plant construction time frame, with licensing approval, still averages almost a decade, as underscored by the new reactors commissioned in the past decade. The key fact about nuclear power is that it is the world’s most subsidy-fattened energy industry, even as it generates the most dangerous wastes whose safe disposal saddles future generations. Commercial reactors have been in operation for more than half-a-century, yet the industry still cannot stand on its own feet without major state support. Instead of the cost of nuclear power declining with the technology’s maturation — as is the case with other sources of energy — the costs have escalated multiple times.

In this light, nuclear power has inexorably been on a downward trajectory. The nuclear share of the world’s total electricity production reached its peak of 17 per cent in the late 1980s. Since then, it has been falling, and is currently estimated at about 13 per cent, even as new uranium discoveries have swelled global reserves. With proven reserves having grown by 12.5 per cent since just 2008, there is enough uranium to meet current demand for more than 100 years.

Yet, the worldwide aggregate installed capacity of just three renewables — wind power, solar power and biomass — has surpassed installed nuclear-generating capacity. In India and China, wind power output alone exceeds nuclear-generated electricity.

Fukushima’s impact

Before the 2011 Fukushima disaster, the global nuclear power industry — a powerful cartel of less than a dozen major state-owned or state-guided firms — had been trumpeting a global “nuclear renaissance.” This spiel was largely anchored in hope. However, the triple meltdown at Fukushima has not only reopened old safety concerns but also set in motion the renaissance of nuclear power in reverse. The dual imperative for costly upgrades post-Fukushima and for making the industry competitive, including by cutting back on the munificent government subsidies, underscores nuclear power’s dimming future. It is against this background that India’s itch to import high-priced reactors must be examined. To be sure, India should ramp up electricity production from all energy sources. There is definitely a place for safe nuclear power in India’s energy mix. Indeed, the country’s domestic nuclear-power industry has done a fairly good job both in delivering electricity at a price that is the envy of western firms and, as the newest indigenous reactors show, in beating the mean global plant construction time frame.

India should actually be encouraging its industry to export its tested and reliable midsize reactor model, which is better suited for the developing countries, considering their grid limitations. Instead, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s government, after making India the world’s largest importer of conventional arms since 2006, set out to make the country the world’s single largest importer of nuclear power reactors — a double whammy for Indian taxpayers, already heavily burdened by the fact that India is the only major economy in Asia that is import-dependent rather than export driven.

Critiquing India’s programme

To compound matters, the Singh government opted for major reactor imports without a competitive bidding process. It reserved a nuclear park each for four foreign firms (Areva of France, Westinghouse and GE of the U.S., and Atomstroyexport of Russia) to build multiple reactors at a single site. It then set out to acquire land from farmers and other residents, employing coercion in some cases.

Having undercut its leverage by dedicating a park to each foreign vendor, it entered into price negotiations. Because the imported reactors are to be operated by the Indian state, the foreign vendors have been freed from producing electricity at marketable rates. In other words, Indian taxpayers are to subsidise the high-priced electricity generated.

Westinghouse, GE and Areva also wish to shift the primary liability for any accident to the Indian taxpayer so that they have no downside risk but only profits to reap. If a Fukushima-type catastrophe were to strike India, it would seriously damage the Indian economy. A recent Osaka City University study has put Japan’s Fukushima-disaster bill at a whopping $105 billion.

To Dr. Singh’s discomfiture, three factors put a break on his reactor-import plans — the exorbitant price of French- and U.S.-origin reactors, the accident-liability issue, and grass-roots opposition to the planned multi-reactor complexes. After Fukushima, the grass-roots attitude in India is that nuclear power is okay as long as the plant is located in someone else’s backyard, not one’s own. This attitude took a peculiar form at Kudankulam, in Tamil Nadu, where a protest movement suddenly flared just when the Russian-origin, twin-unit nuclear power plant was virtually complete.

India’s new nuclear plants, like in most other countries, are located in coastal regions so that these water-guzzling facilities can largely draw on seawater for their operations and not bring freshwater resources under strain. But coastal areas are often not only heavily populated but also constitute prime real estate. The risks that seaside reactors face from global warming-induced natural disasters became evident more than six years before Fukushima, when the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami inundated parts of the Madras Atomic Power Station. But the reactor core could be kept in a safe shutdown mode because the electrical systems had been installed on higher ground than the plant level.

One-sided

Dr. Singh invested so such political capital in the Indo-U.S. civil nuclear agreement that much of his first term was spent in negotiating and consummating the deal. He never explained why he overruled the nuclear establishment and shut down the CIRUS research reactor — the source of much of India’s cumulative historic production of weapons-grade plutonium since the 1960s. In fact, CIRUS had been refurbished at a cost of millions of dollars and reopened for barely two years when Dr. Singh succumbed to U.S. pressure and agreed to close it down.

Nevertheless, the nuclear accord has turned out to be a dud deal for India on energy but a roaring success for the U.S. in opening the door to major weapon sales — a development that has quietly made America the largest arms supplier to India. For the U.S., the deal from the beginning was more geostrategic in nature (designed to co-opt India as a quasi-ally) than centred on just energy.

Even if no differences had arisen over the accident-liability issue, the deal would still not have delivered a single operational nuclear power plant for a more than a decade for two reasons — the inflated price of western-origin commercial reactors and grass-roots opposition. Areva, Westinghouse and GE signed Memorandums of Understanding with the state-run Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited (NPCIL) in 2009, but construction has yet to begin at any site.

India has offered Areva, with which negotiations are at an advanced stage, a power price of Rs.6.50 per kilowatt hour — twice the average electricity price from indigenous reactors. But the state-owned French firm is still holding out for a higher price. If Kudankulam is a clue, work at the massive nuclear complexes at Jaitapur in Maharashtra (earmarked for Areva), Mithi Virdi in Gujarat (Westinghouse) and Kovvada in Andhra Pradesh (GE) is likely to run into grass-roots resistance. Indeed, if India wishes to boost nuclear-generating capacity without paying through its nose, the better choice — given its new access to the world uranium market — would be an accelerated indigenous programme.

Globally, nuclear power is set to face increasing challenges due to its inability to compete with other energy sources in pricing. Another factor is how to manage the rising volumes of spent nuclear fuel in the absence of permanent disposal facilities. More fundamentally, without a breakthrough in fusion energy or greater commercial advances in the area that the U.S. has strived to block — breeder (and thorium) reactors — nuclear power is in no position to lead the world out of the fossil fuel age.

New clarity to ties with Australia

While the invitation to Brisbane for the G-20 summit took Mr. Modi there, the decision to travel to three other Australian cities, when he had other pressing domestic commitments, was well considered.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Australia was long overdue, coming 28 years after Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi travelled to the continent. While the invitation to Brisbane for the G-20 summit took Mr. Modi there, the decision to travel to three other Australian cities, at a time when he had other pressing domestic commitments, was well considered. His address to the diaspora in Sydney generated much enthusiasm among the often ignored but influential community, and his address to parliamentarians was well received. As a result, his meeting with Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott has seen relations being upgraded and imparted with clarity. The focus was much required. Even as India and Australia work towards a free trade agreement by 2016, bilateral trade between the two countries has lagged considerably behind the potential. The actual trade languishes at just $15 billion, against a $40 billion target by 2015, set during former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s bilateral meeting with former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in 2012. Smoothening investment procedures for Australian businessmen even as Indian businessmen are invited into Australia to buy coal mines and invest in infrastructure for other mineral resources, must be taken up as a priority. Another worry: after many years of negotiations, the civil nuclear deal has been signed to allow Australia to sell uranium to India, but the last mile has not yet been reached, and the rising price of Australian uranium might make it unviable by the time the agreement is operationalised.

On the strategic side as well, the two countries have little time to lose. India and Australia may have declared a strategic partnership in 2009, but the relationship has been undefined and vague for the most part. The much talked about India-Japan-Australia-U.S. quadrilateral came a cropper, partly due to Australia’s hesitation in joining any front that may be perceived as ‘anti-China’. Mr. Modi’s bilateral meetings came after Chinese President Xi Jinping’s meetings in Canberra where China and Australia announced an FTA and enhanced strategic cooperation. The newly announced India-Australia strategic framework, that structures annual meetings between the leaders, defence ministers and regular exchanges between the armed forces and non-defence forces on counter-terrorism, piracy and cybersecurity, is a positive step that focusses on the shared strengths of India and Australia. It must not be seen as a ‘defensive position’ against any other country. Given the drift of the past, it is to be hoped that the upgraded framework will also give New Delhi a clearer line of sight to Canberra, and not the position at the “periphery of our vision,” as Mr. Modi said during his address to the Australian Parliament.