# 35 A Lament for Clear Water, Supply Chains Chain-Sawed

Lake Bled

Swimming in Clear Waters

That’s me clowning around in Lake Bled, a glacial lake in Slovenia. An old colleague of my wife’s had driven across the border from Austria, armed with an inflatable canoe and a water-proof camera. 

The blue of the water is a gift of nature, owed to its glacial origins, specifically to the limestone in the surrounding mountains. But, as tourist traffic to Bled has trebled in the last two decades, the clarity of the water cannot be left to nature alone. The municipality has laboured to ensure that sewage facilities keep up with the hotels and homestays around the lake; teams of volunteer divers regularly clear litter from the lake floor, and zoologists have been studying the impact of fishing and bird-feeding practices on water quality.

On our first morning in Bled, a news item from Punjab opened up in my newsfeed. “Punjab chief minister Bhagwant Mann was admitted to Delhi’s Apollo hospital, two days after he drank water from Kali Bein, a holy rivulet in Sultanpur Lodhi. He was reportedly diagnosed with a stomach infection and has now been discharged.” The AAP government declared that he was in hospital for a routine check-up. Be that as it may, India has met with little success in cleaning up its water bodies - in Delhi, the Yamuna is a sewer; at Varanasi, the fecal coliform content of Ganga water is several thousand times higher than acceptable standards, and in Nainital Lake, the Lake Bled of Uttarakhand, water quality “has degraded severely due to anthropogenic activity and there is no regular monitoring of the lake in terms of the quality index”. 

Each of these water bodies have attracted some amount of attention, and government funding for their cleansing. The Kali Bein, from which the Punjab CM drank water, had been heralded as a major success; in 2008, Baba Balbir Singh Seechewal, the environmentalist who led the regeneration efforts, was celebrated as an eco-warrior by the TIME magazine. Since then, however, the initiative lost steam, untreated sewage finds its way into the stream, and a CM finds himself in a Delhi hospital.

The arc of history would lead one to expect this outcome. In the early stages of economic development, our increased consumption, and the processes that provide it, pollute our water and our air. The technologies required to address this are expensive and sophisticated, and a poor nation does not have those economic resources. As people begin to get wealthier, and their basic needs are met, the quality of their surroundings begins to matter to them, and political pressure mounts to address environmental issues.

All this I get, but a couple of days earlier, we had  walked around another water body, in another country - the Drazniak lake outside Bratislava, in Slovakia. Unlike Lake Bled, there is nothing particularly fetching about Drazniak - it is a gray-brown body of water, in a hollow lined with gravel. As far as I could ascertain, it is a man-made hollow, formed when the land was mined for construction sand. The lake is ringed by mass housing, with access roads leading off the expressway to Vienna. Closer to the edge of the lake, young people were playing beachball, muscle-men were strutting their stuff in outdoor gyms, a pedal-boat concessionaire was notching up his take for the day, and food vans sold beer, lemonade, ice-cream, and hotdogs. Hundreds of groups picnicked around the shallows, and as I swam towards the center of the lake, I watched a group of paddle-boarders do yoga asanas in the golden light of dusk. My wife and walked a complete parikrama of the lake. As she pointed out to me - not one scrap of litter on the entire periphery.

I contrast that with my utter dismay every time I visit the isolated water bodies in the Aravalis around Delhi. I rarely spot another visitor, but they leave their visiting cards. Beer and whisky bottles, often shattered in some bizarre display of machismo, shiny snack packets, cigarette stubs, empty sachets of shampoo and almond oil….

This, I don’t get. Taking your trash away requires no sewage treatment plants, no assistance from the central government or the World Bank. All it requires is a minimal awareness of our impact on our surroundings. Till we can find this in ourselves, the bigger goals will recede further and further, and India continue to be the hotspot for environmental degradation.

Chainsaw - Hans, on Pixabay

Inflation and Supply Chains

“A gravel bike? We haven’t seen one of those in two years” the floor manager in one of Vienna’s largest cycle stores told me last week.

“And I doubt we’ll see one in the next two years either, the way things are going”

I’ve been looking to buy a gravel bike for my mountain home for a while now - with the down-turned handles and slim frame of a road (or racing) bike, but broader tires and disc brakes for rough and hilly terrain. In the early days of the pandemic, cycle stores in Delhi were emptied of their stock, as gyms were shut, and those in pursuit of fitness turned to outdoor sports. Imports were held up, and at The Bike Shop in Delhi’s Yusuf Sarai, Gaurav Wadhwa waved at an emptied showroom. But, even as our ports opened up, and the gym-rats went back to their weights and machines, the racks remained thinly stocked. 

I spoke to Jaymin Shah, the head of consumer sales at Scott Cycles, India. He was extremely responsive, and helped me identify the gravel bike best suited for my needs and budget. But, he warned, it could be a while coming. Last summer, after visiting the company’s headquarters in Switzerland, he texted, 

“I am still awaiting confirmation from the Belgium warehouse. It’s a mess.”

This March, when I nudged him, he texted back,

“Hi Mohit, I am really sorry. It’s a shit-show on allocations.”

Over the last twenty years, virtually all western cycle brands shifted the manufacture of frames to China, part of the shift in the centre of manufacturing gravity. With the government’s insistence on zero-COVID, and the clogging of Chinese ports, the backlog of orders has not yet been cleared. Some niche American brands, the Viennese store manager told me, have started building cycle frames in the US. 

“I think I can get you a Surly frame in a week or so, but it’s not easy gathering up all the parts - chains, gears, wheels, you name it, there’s a shortage. It will take me a minimum of two weeks to put it all together.”

US firms are talking of near-shoring - sourcing not just for low cost, but also for reliability and speed. This will take time, and increase costs - the bike built around the Surly frame would cost me a good 33% more than the list price of the made-in-China brand. Globalisation was a major cause for low inflation over the last few decades. As firms de-globalise in an effort to buffer themselves from supply shocks, we are likely to see an upward pressure on prices. 

Central bankers around the world are trying to combat inflation by raising interest rates from the ultra-low for ultra-long regime we have seen for most of this century. This phase shift came rather late, in my opinion. Europe is experiencing 8% inflation, and German bonds still yield less than 1% - meaning you lose 7% buying power per annum if you lend money to the government. Negative real interest rates introduce massive distortions into economic behaviour, inducing consumers to buy rather than invest; and investors to “hunt for yield”, or buy risky financial assets rather than succumb to the sure erosion of value in bonds and other fixed assets.

Last week, when the Chairman of the US Federal Reserve announced a second consecutive rate hike of 0.75%, he tempered the impact by suggesting that subsequent hikes might be more moderate. Equity markets were ecstatic, and vaulted. I think that is premature. 

First, because that asset price action suggests there is still a vast pool of liquidity sloshing around, which needs to be curbed.

Second, because those supply chains are still far from fixed. Till global manufacturing and logistics find a new balance, inflation will remain a threat, which central bankers will have to combat with higher interest rates. 

How will we know that supply chains have been fixed? I will let you know when I get my gravel bike.