In Focus by The Hindu

Ever since the English cricket team arrived in India, ‘Bazball’ is on the lips of every cricket buff. It is a unique style of play that paid rich dividends for the English team --until the India tour. England is trailing the five-match Test series 1-3, and there is a lot of debate around whether ‘Bazball’ has been overhyped, and if England has failed to adapt it to Indian conditions.

What are the elements of Bazball? How did it develop? Has India finally exposed its limitations?

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Engineered cross-voting to win extra seats in the Rajya Sabha and organized defection to bring down duly-elected State Governments appear to have been normalized in Indian politics.

The additional two seats that accrued to the BJP in Himachal Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh recently is a case in point. Though six cross-voting MLAs have been disqualified in Himachal Pradesh, the defeat of senior lawyer Abhishek Manu Sanghvi points to the dangers that lie ahead for the Congress government in the state.

Previously, the Congress lost three state governments in Goa, Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh, to organized defections.

So, is this a phenomenon that we will have to live with in Indian politics?

Guest: Radhika Ramaseshan, political analyst and columnist.

Host: Amit Baruah, Senior Associate Editor, The Hindu.

Edited by Sharmada Venkatasubramanian.

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From time to time, stories of the commercial dealings in organs, or cash for kidney scams, surface in the media. In December, one such possible organ racket was in the news, involving people from Myanmar, who had come to a private hospital in Delhi for transplant procedures. Organ transplants have been taking place in India since the 1970s, and after multiple instances of the commercial sale of organs, India brought in the Transplantation of Human Organ and Tissues Act, 1994. This law banned the sale of organs and only allowed organs to be given between close family members, or for altruistic reasons, with no money exchanging hands.

Over the last decade or so, some cities in India have increasingly become major hubs for life-saving transplant surgeries of several organs including the kidneys, heart, liver, lungs and pancreas. The deceased donor programme, where organs are harvested from brain-dead donors, has also taken off in some parts of the country.

As of 2022, India performed just over 13,300 living transplants and about 2,700 deceased donor transplants. And still, the country has over 3 lakh patients on the waiting list for organs and 20 people dying each day for want of an organ.

How do the transplant laws work, and do they have loopholes that need to be plugged? What are the laws in place for foreigners? How can donor rights be protected more stringently to weed out exploitation? And can the transplant programme be scaled up to meet the country’s needs?

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It’s now exactly two years since Russia invaded Ukraine. According to President Volodymyr Zelensky, so far 31,000 Ukrainian soldiers have perished in the war. Millions of Ukrainians have been displaced. The population in territories under Kyiv’s control has shrunk from 52 million to 30 million while the country’s economy has been devastated.

As for Russia, after initial setbacks – likely caused by an underestimation of Ukraine’s capacity for resistance – it has modified its tactics and settled into a long-term war of attrition. Its economy is doing well, despite Western sanctions. In the meantime, there are question marks over the West’s will to continue its military aid to Ukraine with the same intensity.

With no signs of the conflict ending any time soon, we look back at the past two years to understand what have been the gains and losses for all the sides in involved. What does the third year of this war have in store? Will it see one of the sides gaining a decisive advantage? And what needs to happen before either side decides that enough is enough?

Guest: Stanly Johny, The Hindu’s International Affairs Editor.

Host: G. Sampath, Social Affairs Editor, The Hindu.

Edited by Sharmada Venkatasubramanian.

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Housing is a basic requirement for dignity of life. But affordable decent housing remains a distant dream for most Indians, especially in urban India. Close to 17% of all households in urban India live in slums, with this percentage shooting up to 41% in a city like Mumbai and 29% in Chennai.

Over the years, the government has taken many initiatives to address this problem, with schemes such as Indira Awas Yojana, and the ongoing Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY), an interest subsidy scheme for lower and middle-income groups. But these subsidy schemes hardly seem to make a dent on the housing crisis. The gap between people’s incomes and price points of housing stock, especially for the aspirational classes, remains wide.

Why is housing in India so expensive? Why do the prices never seem to come within reach for most? A recent research paper, titled ‘House prices in India: How high and how long?’ co-authored by three analysts from the Centre for Social and Economic Progress (CSEP), Shishir Gupta, Nandini Agnihotri and Annie George, offers some insights on these questions.

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Most of us are familiar with the plastic waste crisis and public awareness campaigns on the need to recycle plastic. Now a new report by the Centre for Climate Integrity, an international non-profit, says that plastic producers have been lying to the public for more than 30 years – it says that they knew all along that plastic recycling was not a viable solution, either technically or economically, and yet kept they promoting it to protect their interests.

How serious is the plastic waste problem? Why is plastic recycling not viable? And if recycling is not the answer, how do we address the mounting crisis of plastic waste? Tune in to find out.

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The headline in a recent article was arresting – India fears losing out to China in smartphone exports race. Another broke the news that Mexico had overtaken China for the first time in 20 years as the largest exporter to the US. One more said – loud and clear at t that – that India should realise that Vietnam, and not China, was the major competitor.  

There are a few dots we can connect to see a common thread in all these that should interest us – The world wants to move away from China but that cannot be done in entirety overnight because of the scale that the country has built. But there are some parts of the global supply chain that are indeed moving. Is India poised to benefit from this? What lessons does the China model hold for India? And what is it that countries such as Vietnam are doing right to bolster foreign investments that are in turn spurring those countries’ exports? 

Guest: Biswajit Dhar, Distinguished Professor, Centre for Social Development. 

Host: K. Bharat Kumar

Edited by Sharmada Venkatasubramanian.

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Farmers are back at the barricades, this time they have been stopped by the Haryana police at the Punjab-Haryana border. Twenty-two-year-old Shubhkaran Singh has died in the protests. Farmer leaders have suspended their protest till February 29 when they will announce their next course of action.

The agitating farmers are firm that there should be a legal guarantee for MSP purchases but the Centre has, instead, come up with a five-year contract to purchase pulses, maize and cotton from farmers.

So, where does the agitation go from here? To discuss these issues, Amit Baruah is joined by agricultural expert and analyst, Devinder Sharma.

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Controlling a computer with just your thoughts seems to be something straight out of a science fiction movie, but that’s exactly what scientific experiments are now doing. This week Elon Musk, founder of the startup Neuralink which implanted a brain chip, called Telepathy, into a human being last month, said that the patient’s progress has been good, and the patient is now able to move a mouse on a screen by just thinking. Exciting? Yes. A little scary too? Perhaps. The tech, at least for now, is aimed at treating paralysis and complex neurological conditions.

Putting electrodes into the brain is not new – scientists have been experimenting with this for years now, but refining and potentially commercialising this tech takes a lot of doing.

The brain is a complex organ that works by sending electrical impulses from one neuron to another every time we think, and we have 86 billion neurons. The brain-computer interface technology attempts to capture some of this activity through a chip that acts as a bridge between the brain and a digital device.

So what does brain-computer interface technology involve, and how does it work? How many of our brain signals can be read? What is its potential in medical applications to treat health conditions? And importantly, what are the ethical issues involved here?

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The Lok Sabha elections of 2024 are round the corner. The season of defections is also upon us. Party hopping has commenced in earnest.

An India Today poll suggested earlier in February that the NDA would win 335 seats in 2024 down from 353 in 2019. The Congress tally was put at 71.

A YouGov-Mint-CPR survey, also published in February, said that 51 per cent believed that construction of the Ram Mandir, on the site where the Babri Masjid once stood, was a rectification of historical wrongs while 49 per cent felt that it was an electorally motivated move to win Hindu votes.

So, with just about two months to go for Lok Sabha 2024, how does the political chess board look in India?

Guest: Gilles Verniers, Senior Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research, and Visiting Fellow at Amherst College in the United States.

Host: Amit Baruah, Senior Associate Editor, The Hindu.

Edited by Sharmada Venkatasubramanian.

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