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NoneWith the Department of Government Efficiency ( DOGE ) being announced as a sort-of empowered advisory agency adjunct to the incoming Trump administration, there is debate in India about replicating it. Some of the discussion has been pointed. Much of it has been circular and redundant. It merits deeper thought. ET Year-end Special Reads Corporate Kalesh: Top family disputes of India Inc in 2024 The world of business lost these eminent people in 2024 Fast, faster, fastest: How 2024 put more speed into your shopping Making government more efficient - indeed, making any institution more efficient - is a valid aspiration. Efficiency has many parameters. These include rightsizing - as opposed to merely downsizing - and making government more responsive by use of, for instance, technology. Streamlining government structures and regulations also plays a part. All of this operates under an overarching political philosophy, defined by the government. However, models, templates and ideas from one system cannot easily be transplanted. The Indian state needs efficiency, but does GoI need DOGE? Or, at least, DOGE as interpreted by DOGE's leadership? That is an extremely relevant question. It deserves more than loose thoughts expressed by social media ideologues. DOGE's primary focus is to reduce the size of the federal government by slicing off jobs created by executive order in recent years. The logic is that what was created by executive order can be undone by executive order. Cutting positions that will require Congressional approval can happen later. 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These could include certain types of 'soft diplomacy' positions in the State Department, or in education regulation. Done intelligently, this could be very popular with Republicans, and also melt obvious fat. Done with a sledgehammer, it could end up strengthening career civil servants, and removing a layer of political flexibility and subjectivity. Typically, there will be a bit of both, even if DOGE is ultimately judged a success. The situation in India is dissimilar. In core governance roles, relatively few positions have been created or filled by political discretion. True, there is a panoply of institutions and commissions. But these are often at the periphery of government. Further, an honest assessment of the Union government could well conclude that it requires not fewer employees but more, encompassing both technocrats and generalists. The Indian state needs to recede and give more space to entrepreneurship and civil society. But several ministries, departments and agencies are actually understaffed. These are both true, and mean very different things. Could some of this efficiency be injected by bringing in external talent? Again, it would be prudent not to jump to conclusions. Harmonisation of lateral entrants and career bureaucracy is a challenge in many systems. The selection of lateral entrants, too, is critical. India has a long history of such experiments. Some have worked, others have not. The best case studies involve individuals identified for specific positions and roles due to aptitude, skill set and alignment with chosen policy goals. Take India's semiconductor mission. It has made appreciable progress. But within the global semiconductor community, there is a genuine argument as to whether India can, and needs to, make such massive capital investments. Of course, GoI's policy direction is clear. Presume GoI wants to hire an outside specialist for the semiconductor mission. Should it choose the technically best-qualified candidate, who believes the semiconductor policy is flawed? Or the less but still appropriately qualified one, who believes the government is on the right path in committing resources to building a semiconductor ecosystem? A UPSC selection panel could go by objective criteria and nominate the first candidate. An enlightened political appreciation will pick the second. x selections of the second type are more likely to enhance efficiency than 2x selections of the first type. For that, you need not elaborate job application processes, but clear-headed ministers who know whom they want - and what they want to do. Does rewriting or removing laws and minor regulations - 'process reform', as this is referred to these days - enhance efficiency? The answer is a qualified one. While updating regulations and abolishing anachronistic laws have notable modernisation and aesthetic value, it's worth ascertaining which rules and laws are actual hindrances and which are simply around but are no longer being deployed. Many countries are burdened with obsolete laws and regulations not used in practice, and offer no real-world deadweight loss. Removing them is a good thing. But it does not automatically deliver economic outcomes or systemic efficiency. Activity, as Yes Minister cautioned us, is not always achievement. Finally, there are vestigial organisations. New Delhi is no stranger to agencies, councils and commissions that serve little purpose. Perhaps they answered a felt need at their founding. Perhaps they were sinecures for a political favourite. Either way, they have outlived utility and become self-serving cost centres. The Modi government has done much to dissolve, merge and zip such bodies. Yet, the striving never ends. Post facto clean-up is no substitute for institutionalised, built-in correctives. Rather than a one-time DOGE, a regular and systemic audit of government and quasi-government bodies to measure return on investment is better. Ideally, it should be intrinsic to an organisation's inaugural charter itself. It is not too late to start. Any such rigorous audit should look at not just bodies founded in the distant past but closely at institutions and agencies set up since 2014.

JEDDAH, Saudi Arabia (AP) — “My Driver and I” was supposed to be made in 2016, but was scuttled amid Saudi Arabia's decades-long cinema ban. Eight years later, the landscape for film in the kingdom looks much different — and the star of “My Driver and I” now has an award. Roula Dakheelallah was named the winner of the Chopard Emerging Saudi Talent award at the Red Sea International Film Festival on Thursday. The award — and the glitzy festival itself — is a sign of Saudi Arabia's commitment to shaping a new film industry. “My heart is attached to cinema and art; I have always dreamed of a moment like this,” Dakheelallah, who still works a 9-5 job, told The Associated Press before the awards ceremony. “I used to work in voluntary films and help my friends in the field, but this is my first big role in a film.” The reopening of cinemas in 2018 marked a cultural turning point for Saudi Arabia, an absolute monarchy that had instituted the ban 35 years before, under the influence of ultraconservative religious authorities. It has since invested heavily in a native film industry by building theaters and launching programs to support local filmmakers through grants and training. The Red Sea International Film Festival was launched just a year later, part of an attempt to expand Saudi influence into films, gaming, sports and other cultural fields. Activists have decried the investments as whitewashing the kingdom’s human rights record as it tightly controls speech and remains one of the world’s top executioners. With FIFA awarding the 2034 World Cup to Saudi Arabia this week, Lina al-Hathloul, a Saudi activist with the London-based rights group ALQST, said Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman “has really managed to create this bubble where people only see entertainment and they don’t see the reality on the ground.” These efforts are part of Vision 2030, an ambitious reform plan unveiled in 2016 to ease the economy's dependence on oil. As part of it, Saudi Arabia plans to construct 350 cinemas with over 2,500 movie screens — by this past April, across 22 cities, it already had 66 cinemas showing movies from the local film industry, as well as Hollywood and Bollywood. (The Red Sea International Film Festival attracts a host of talent from the latter industries, with Viola Davis and Priyanka Chopra Jonas also picking up awards Thursday.) The country's General Entertainment Authority last month opened Al Hisn Studios on the outskirts of Riyadh. As one of the largest such production hubs in the Middle East, it not only includes several film studios but also a production village with workshops for carpentry, blacksmithing and fashion tailoring. “These facilities, when they exist, will stimulate filmmakers,” said Saudi actor Mohammed Elshehri. “Today, no writer or director has an excuse to imagine and say, ‘I cannot implement my imagination.’” The facilities are one part of the equation — the content itself is another. One of the major players in transforming Saudi filmmaking has been Telfaz11, a media company founded in 2011 that began as a YouTube channel and quickly became a trailblazer. Producing high-quality digital content such as short films, comedy sketches and series, Telfaz11 offered fresh perspectives on Saudi and regional issues. In 2020, Telfaz11 signed a partnership with Netflix to produce original content for the streaming giant. The result has been movies that demonstrate an evolution on the storytelling level, tackling topics that were once off-limits and sensitive to the public like secret nightlife in “Mandoob” (“Night Courier”) and changing social norms in “Naga.” “I think we tell our stories in a very simple way, and that’s what reaches the world,” Elshehri says of the changing shift. “When you tell your story in a natural way without any affectation, it will reach every person.” But the films were not without their critics, drawing mixed reaction. Social media discoursed ranged from pleasure that Saudi film were tackling such topics to anger over how the films reflected conservative society. As Hana Al-Omair, a Saudi writer and director, points out, there are still many stories left untold. “We certainly have a long time ahead of us before we can tell the Saudi narrative as it should be,” she said, acknowledging that there are still barriers and rampant censorship. “The Goat Life,” a Malayalam-language movie about an Indian man forced to work without pay in Saudi Arabia, is not available on Netflix's platform in the country. Movies that explore political topics or LGBTQ+ stories are essentially out of the question. Even “My Driver and I,” featured at the Red Sea festival alongside 11 other Saudi feature-length films, was initially too controversial. It centers on a Sudanese man in Jeddah, living away from his own daughter, who feels responsible for the girl he drives as her parents are absent. It was initially blocked from being made because of the relationship between the girl and the driver, filmmaker Ahd Kamel has said, even though it's not a romantic relationship. Now in 2024, the film is a success story — a symbol of the Saudi film industry's evolution as well as the growing role of women like Kamel behind the camera and Dakheelallah in front of it. “I see the change in Saudi cinema, a very beautiful change and it is moving at a wonderful speed. In my opinion, we do not need to rush,” Dakheelallah said. “We need to guide the truth of the artistic movement that is happening in Saudi Arabia.” Baraa Anwer, The Associated PressFACT FOCUS: Inspector general’s Jan. 6 report misrepresented as proof of FBI setupNone

Infrastructure projects in Tibet have often drawn controversy for failing to balance development, human rights, and environmental protection. As CDT has covered this year, state-sponsored hydropower projects have forcibly displaced local communities and led to violent reprisals against protesters. A series of recent reports expand on this topic to highlight the social and environmental perils of these projects. Last week, the International Campaign for Tibet (ICT) published a report titled, “ Chinese Hydropower: Damning Tibet’s Culture, Community, and Environment .” The report includes an interactive map showing the location of 193 hydropower dams constructed or proposed in Tibet since 2000, along with their areas of impact and proximity to locations of cultural importance, protected areas, and land cover. The report reveals that these dam projects are causing “irreparable damage” to Tibetan communities, downstream countries, and the environment : If completed, 1.2 million residents living nearby dam projects could be dislocated from their homes, communities, and livelihoods. Religious and sacred sites serving communities will also be destroyed. Almost 80 per cent of dams studied are large or mega dams (\>100MW), which carry the most significant risk to the Tibetan civilization, environmental sustainability, and the climate. However, over half the dams (60%) are either in proposal or preparation stage, presenting opportunities to change course. A truly sustainable pathway for the energy plan must account for the climate, social, environment, and geopolitical costs of hydropower and change course. No plan is sustainable without the consent, participation and co-management of local communities. Tibetans, who remain among the most politically marginalized in China, should not bear the highest cost to power China’s industrial centers. Any long-term solution must involve a political solution where Tibetan people enjoy the right to freely decide how their natural resources are used. This begins with the PRC entering into a meaningful dialogue with representatives of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. [ Source ] Speaking to French newspaper Libération about the report, ICT researcher and advocacy officer Tenzin Palmo stated, “We wanted to show what was happening in this inaccessible border area in the west of the country, but also to reveal the projects of the Chinese authorities who are trying by all means to hide information, to harass civil society, all while engaging in a greenwashing operation around these dams .” Other groups have provided related evidence. Last month, Turquoise Roof and Tibet Watch published a report titled, “ The risks of China’s dangerous dam-building in Tibet: the impacts of China’s move upstream on the Machu/Yellow River ,” which highlighted the threat of geological disasters and environmental problems: For the first time, China’s construction of hydropower dams is reaching upstream to the sources of Asia’s great wild rivers in Tibet, with at least three major new dams on the upper Machu (Chinese: Huang He) river. Chinese scientists have warned of the risks of heavy infrastructure construction in a seismically unstable region where river systems are increasingly unpredictable due to climate change. [...] While China can point to its solar and hydro projects in Tibet to signal a green transition, the smart grid is currently orientated to fossil fuels, which may reveal a slower, less substantial shift than these projects imply. Although hydroelectric power is technically renewable, the large-scale hydropower projects underway in Tibet have complex environmental and social impacts, including ecosystem disruption and displacement of communities. The first major dam to be built upriver on the Machu, the Yangkhil (Yangqu) hydropower station, has devastated an entire community. Accounts and images from eyewitnesses in this report documents how Tibetans have been compelled to dismantle their own homes and an important monastery has been emptied and destroyed. China removed the monastery from a protected heritage list before beginning demolition to make way for a dam that Chinese engineers boast is constructed by AI-driven robots. [ Source ] In the Made in China Journal last month, James Leibold wrote about the Tibet-Aid Project, which he describes as a CCP initiative that pairs Tibet’s administrative units with inland government actors in order to extend Beijing’s settler-colonial enterprise and fortify Han dominance in the region. Among the Tibet-Aid cadres championed in CCP propaganda are Han engineers committed to transforming Tibet’s physical landscape through “civilizing” infrastructure projects. Leibold argued, “By unleashing a new legion of Han officials and settlers on to the Tibetan Plateau, Xi seeks to complete the discursive, demographic, and cultural integration of Tibet into a new Han empire.” In this excerpt, he describes how Han migration and infrastructure-building erode local Tibetan sovereignty : Most of the Han people living and working in Tibet today are descendants of former Tibet-Aid cadres. In a recent survey of 300-plus Han retirees who had worked in Tibet, 49 per cent had a parent who had previously worked in Tibet, with one-quarter of those born in Tibet (Zhou and Du 2023: 83). They are called ‘second’ or ‘third-generation Tibetans’ (藏二代 or 藏三代) in Chinese and now make up the backbone of the party-state’s governing and economic apparatuses in the region. According to officials, they are the ‘strongest source of strength’ for forging what Xi Jinping has called the ‘collective consciousness’ (共同体意识) of the Han-centric nation/race (Thondup and Tsring 2023). By claiming Tibetan identity, albeit an altered one, Han migrants are engaging in a common settler-colonial strategy—what Lorenzo Veracini (2010: 46) calls the discursive erasure of ‘indigenous specific alterity’. Han colonists live a highly fluid existence in the TAR and their roots are impermanent. Due to health concerns, they split their time between apartments in lower-elevation cities, chiefly in Sichuan, and their posts on the plateau. China’s mega-infrastructure building in the TAR—roads, airports, railways, power and telecommunication lines, etcetera—serves as conduits for Han mobility, allowing colonial subjects to move more comfortably and smoothly through ‘harsh’ Tibetan spaces while imprinting the landscape with Han norms that ultimately efface Tibetan sovereignty. The 1,629-kilometre Chengdu-to-Lhasa high-speed railway is of ‘immense strategic value’, a 2018 blog post asserts, as it will not only facilitate military logistics, but also allow the vibrant economy and Han-dominated population of the Sichuan Basin to ‘more easily spread and radiate into the Tibet region’ when it is completed in 2030 (Sohu 2018). [ Source ] Similar dynamics are playing out in other borderland regions, such as Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia. In an article for Atmos, Nithin Coca and Patrick Wack described how state-affiliated energy companies have built massive solar plants in Xinjiang that greenwash rights abuses against local Uyghur communities . Uyghur activists argue that these projects are part of longstanding efforts to Sinicize the region and exploit its resources while further colonizing their homeland through Han migration. This also plays out in the realm of Tibetan language politics, as the Chinese government has imposed Sinicization policies to force Tibetans to use Mandarin instead of their local languages. For more on this topic, see CDT’s recent interview with Gerald Roche about the erasure of Tibet’s minority languages, which face unique challenges in the face of both Mandarin and Standard Tibetan. Other interviews can be found in CDT’s series on Tibet . Categories : Environment , Human Rights , Level 2 Article , Society Tags : colonialism , dam , dams , dams resettlement , environmental degradation , environmental destruction , human rights violations in Tibet , migration , Tibet , Tibet culture , Tibet development , Tibet environment , Tibet plateau , tibet policy , Tibet protests , Tibet railroad , Tibetan culture , Tibetan language , Tibetan plateau , tibetan politics , Tibetan protests Related Posts Interview: Gerald Roche on the Erasure of Tibet’s Minority Languages Jimmy Lai Did Not Ask the U.S. to Nuke China China’s Global Fishing Fleet Intrudes on Distant Waters French Museums Waver Between “Tibet” and “Xizang” Amid Uproar Over Chinese Influence Essays on Colonialism and Indigeneity in and Beyond the P.R.C. 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