Foundations for an Indian JETP; Delays in government contracting -- Calcutta vs. Delhi metro; Symposium on Julia/Statistics
Foundations for an Indian JETP
The energy transition involves a problem of `investability’, and once this is solved, the problem of investment. One channel of climate financing has been in place for some time: there is near-infinite capital available overseas through ESG investment. The bottleneck in India has been the investability: the difficulties of electricity policy that have hampered sound business plans from coming together.
The second channel of climate financing, `Just Economic Transition Partnership’ (JETP) is at a nascent stage. Done right, it can help finance the transition costs of electricity sector reforms, and carry one state of India (at a time) to the platform of investability. In the Business Standard today, Akshay Jaitly and I have a column, Foundations for an Indian JETP, where we help think about the place of JETP in the overall problem of Indian climate mitigation.
Delays in government contracting: Calcutta vs. Delhi metro
The Calcutta metro was a pioneer in India. But the work ran for 24 years, from 1971 to 1995. The Delhi metro only got started in 1995, but it has moved faster. Most of us have a rough notion about the improvements in resourcing and broad project management capabilities in India, from 1971 to 1995, which help explain the differences in delay between the two projects.
Anirudh Burman and Pavithra Manivannan have a new article on The Leap Blog on 23 December, Delays in government contracting: A tale of two metros, where they think about the factors that shaped the faster implementation of the Delhi metro. These are the elements that fed into the enhancement of state capacity from 1971 to 1995: the institutional design of the procuring entity, financing and revenue models, and human capacity and technical knowledge.
Symposium on Julia/Statistics
Julia is a clean and simple modern computer programming language, that is nice for humans to write and read code, and pushes to the limits of computer performance. In recent years, we have been helping to build the foundations of statistics for Julia.
We have a symposium on Julia/Statistics in Bombay, coming up on 3 January. Please tell me if you’d like to attend.