Water by Chopper; Informal Sector Smashed

Water by Chopper

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At seven on Saturday morning, the helicopter was thrumming in the hazy sky, towing its red ‘belly bucket’* to the Binsar forest. The sorties had begun two days ago, the chopper scooping up water from Bhimtal, 45 kilometers to the south, and dumping it on the raging fire in the Binsar sanctuary. 

Water is scarce on the Binsar ridge, but even if that were not so, once a forest fire goes out of control, vast tracts of terrain cannot be approached by land. Three forest guards died while trying to negotiate the forest, and their colleague is fighting for his life in hospital.

This morning, the skies are silent, so presumably the Binsar fire has been put out, but the Kumaon skies are heavy with smoke, the slopes hot and dry, and the hillsides busy with the transport of water. At a roadside hand pump, a knot of villagers looked up at the helicopter and speculated about the amount of water it was carrying. 

“Ten thousand liters”, one uncle said quite confidently.

“Ten thousand liters”, an army man on home leave echoed that afternoon, when I was having a flat tire fixed. 

“That’s a lot of water to carry”, I ventured. 

“It’s a huge helicopter, the Mi-17”, he replied.

It is, but even so, the Mi-17 can’t carry more than four thousand kilograms of load, Wikipedia informed me. Allowing for the weight of the pilot and crew, the maximum amount of water it could carry would be about three thousand kilograms, which is also three thousand liters. Burning aviation fuel at the rate of four liters a kilometer, chugging a hundred kilometers for every round trip from Bhimtal to Binsar and back, a helicopter is about the most expensive way to ferry water. 

Not that cost should be a major consideration when fighting a raging forest fire. But in the daily life of a hillside, water economics must be upfront. Cycling down to the stream at the bottom of our valley last week, I reckoned that one in every two vehicles I crossed was ferrying water. One was a dedicated tanker being plied by the local government; the others pick-up trucks with plastic tanks spilling water as they groaned up the steep, winding road.  Most settlements now boast a hand pump, but where homes are more isolated, women and children trudge to the nearest strot, or water source, battered plastic cans in hand.

The poor pay for their water with time and effort; the rich, in their second homes, and in the burgeoning concrete cluster of hotels on the ridge, with the price of diesel burnt to bring the water up the hill. There is an irony of physics here: rain water runs down the hill in the monsoons, some of it getting stored in underground aquifers, but most of it surging down to the plains in the muddy eddies of seasonal streams. But we fail to store it when it falls, even though rainwater harvesting is not exactly rocket science. And when the rains are slow to arrive, as they have been this year, we scurry down the hill, to find the remnants of last year’s rainfall in the stagnant pools of the tiny Suyal river, as if it never rained where we lived, as if water originated in the river below, rather than in the skies above.

As a footnote, I know that some people might respond by saying that I am not taking drought into account, the possibility that we receive less rain that we did in better times. Well, I checked that, thanks to the daily rainfall data that David Hopkins has recorded since 1987, at Kausani, on a ridge to the north of us, but very much in the same meteorological zone. The graph below shows annual rainfall since then, along with a five year moving average, ‘5YMA’. Annual rainfall was flat, averaging about 1150 mm a year for about two decades till 2005, then perked up to almost 1500 mm., and is now running at 1350 mm. a year.

If we are running short of water on our hillside, the fault is not in our clouds, but in ourselves, that we can invest in marble bathrooms and velvet bedspreads, but not in water storage.

1. Belly bucket: https://pilotteacher.com/helicopters-how-are-they-used-to-fight-wildfires/

We Shrunk the Informal Sector

The informal sector of India’s economy has got hammered in the years 2016 to 2023. Now that the government has - finally - released the data from the ASUSE* survey, we know how badly:

Employment in the sector has dropped between 2016 and 2023, from 111.3 to 109.6 million workers. For a nation with deep unemployment and a growing population, this is an economic policy disaster. Pronab Sen, chairperson, Standing Committee on Statistics, told the Business Standard* that the structural shifts in the economy in the last decade have resulted in about 25 million fewer jobs than we would have seen if the sector had performed to trend.

The Gross Value Added (GVA) of the sector shrunk in real terms, by roughly 2% per annum between 2016 and 2023. In rupee terms, GVA grew by 33.8% over the 7 years, at a rate of 4.2% per annum. If you adjust this for inflation, at 6% per year, the sector has actually shrunk by 1.8 % per year. This, as I have repeatedly asserted, is the obverse - and perverse - side of the coin that has been much celebrated, the ‘formalisation’ of the Indian economy.

The trend of these numbers is what I expected, but the extent of the hit is even worse than I thought. India’s GDP numbers will have to be radically re-worked to reflect the reality of the hit to the informal sector; for the last seven years, GDP calculations have assumed that the informal sector has grown as fast as the formal, even while knowing this not to be the case. Given the political sensitivity of the topic, I don’t expect any official agency will be in a hurry to adjust GDP figures to correct for this fallacy.

Meanwhile, I did my own rough and ready calculations for how much impact the degrowth of the informal sector will have on GDP readings for the period 2016 to 2023:

• Annual GDP growth rate will be marked down from 4.97% to 2.35%

• We will need to adjust the size of the economy - downward -  by 16%

I know these are not small adjustments. I know that the official purveyors of GDP statistics will wriggle and squirm before accepting this reality. On my part, with the data at hand, I have been as scrupulous as possible with my calculations.

As they say in commerce, E&O.E., or Errors and Omissions Excepted - but, whichever way you slice it, informal enterprises, which account for the bulk of non-farm jobs in India, have been shoved to the margins of our economic policy.

1. ASUSE: Annual Survey of Unincorporated Sector Enterprises

2. https://www.business-standard.com/economy/news/employment-in-informal-sector-remains-below-prepandemic-level-nso-data-124061401110_1.html

Pronab Sen quote:

“Usually, the number of unincorporated enterprises grows by close to 2 million annually. Had the sector not faced these economic and natural shocks, the total number of such enterprises would have been close to 75 million. In effect, close to 10 million enterprises were lost. Given that an establishment provides employment to around 2.5-3 persons, close to 25-30 million jobs were lost in the process. Also, the number of people employed by them is still lower,” he added.