India is killing it right now
What Could Go Right? is a free weekly newsletter from?The Progress Network?written by our executive director, Emma Varvaloucas. In addition to this newsletter, which collects substantive progress news from around the world, The Progress Network publishes an?anti-apocalypse conversational podcast also called What Could Go Right?.
Welcome to What Could Go Right?, where we’ve decided to stay out of the Great Student Loan Debate of 2022, but can weigh in if you would like us to. In the meantime, Biden,?say more.?
All about India
Perhaps American activists can take a page out of rural women in India’s playbook. When you want action but aren’t seeing any,?lock your local leader in his house?until you do. No, that is not a serious suggestion, but yes, that really did happen, in the northern Indian state of Rajasthan, according to?Reuters. These women were demanding clean, piped water in their homes, so they could stop walking for hours per day to collect it from a main water source like a well or hand pump. By 2020, they had it.
The success is part of an initiative started by Indian President Narendra Modi in 2019 for all rural households to have piped water by 2024. Earlier this month, Modi?announced a progress report: 52% of them, or 100 million homes, now do. The scale and pace of the project is stunning. “Nearly 30,000 engineers and officials, and thousands of contractors and laborers,” reports?Hindustan Times, “are engaged in a mission that will involve, in all, [the] laying of nearly 4 million kilometers of pipelines.”?
We’re looking forward to seeing the project’s effect on public health. Already, the?Hindustan Times?article says, cases of waterborne diseases “have come down 66% . . . between 2019 and 2021 in areas provided with clean drinking water.”
It has been a week of impressive India news. In addition to clean water, they are also racing to?add solar capacity across the country. After a building blitz in the first six months of 2022, the country now has a cumulative solar capacity of 57 GW. (For comparison, the?United States has 97.2 GW.) The state of Delhi is also?spending big to electrify its buses.
Some cultural changes are afoot, too. On Tuesday, India’s Supreme Court ruled in favor of a pregnant woman who brought a case against her employer when they denied her maternity leave “because she had already taken leave to care for her husband’s children from a previous marriage.” The decision, although not legislatively enforceable,?updated the concept of family?to one inclusive of same-sex couples, blended families such as those with stepchildren, and other family formations considered "atypical" by the court to have protection under the law as well as eligibility for social welfare benefits.
And, after decades of elective abortions to terminate pregnancies of girls, landing India among the top six?of countries worldwide with a “skewed sex ratio,” the ratio has?started to normalize.
Some slim silver linings six months into the invasion of Ukraine
August 24 marked six months since Russia invaded Ukraine.?Many are wondering?whether Ukraine’s?counteroffensive to retake its territory?might shift the balance toward them.?
After an agreement was inked in July, Russia has finally let Ukraine restart shipping wheat and other exports from three of the seaports it has been blocking in the Black Sea since February. “The first”—and much-needed—“shipment of Ukrainian grain to Africa since Russia’s invasion?arrived in Djibouti on Tuesday,”?Voice of America?reports. It will go to Ethiopia, where drought and armed conflict have placed millions in need of humanitarian aid.
These drones?are helping Ukraine to avoid the fate of somewhere like Cambodia, where decades after armed conflict ended, the country is still dealing with mines and other explosive weapons buried in the earth that are?triggered accidentally, killing and maiming people. Drones or no drones, mines are going to be a problem in Ukraine, but the more it is dealt with in real-time, the better. The drones cannot remove mines, but spot them safely, so teams are able to?go in and de-mine an area.
This UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) from Canadian drone-maker Draganfly is equipped with sensors to map areas with suspected mines.?| Credit: Draganfly
And for The Progress Network, journalist Stephanie Stacey covered the?surge in interest to learn Ukrainian?since the war began—in the first month of the invasion, she writes, “the number of users studying Ukrainian on popular language-learning app Duolingo increased by 577%.”?Speaking and learning Ukrainian is a profound cultural weapon in a country that has seen the use of the language undermined by both Imperial Russia and the USSR, and now again by Russian President Vladimir Putin to justify Russia’s invasion.
The linguistic resistance is both within and outside of Ukraine, Stacey explains. While in England people are signing up for classes specifically designed for those hosting refugees, “in the western city of Lviv, displaced Ukrainians from the predominantly Russian-speaking East have signed up en masse for Ukrainian classes.”
Before we go
Togo is doing the most. It is the first country in the world to eliminate four neglected tropical diseases: Guinea worm, lymphatic filariasis, sleeping sickness, and trachoma.
File this under “things that make absolutely no sense in the United States.” You need screenings and a prescription to get a hearing aid.?Many insurance companies qualify hearing aids as elective, though, meaning that once you get a prescription, they aren’t covered, anyway. (Since when did “being able to hear” become nonessential . . .) In the fall, though, you’ll be able to?buy a hearing aid over the counter, no prescription necessary, and at lower prices.
This headline speaks for itself. The USDA is sprinkling fish-flavored vaccines from the sky to fight rabies.?What?
Below in the links section,?plant-enriching bison, genetically modified chestnut trees, regenerative livers, and more.
—Emma Varvaloucas
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From The Progress Network
Fighting with the Ukrainian Language
Six months into Russia's invasion, interest in the Ukrainian language is still soaring. Speaking and learning it is everything from a show of resistance within Ukraine to a way of welcoming refugees outside of it.?|?Read more
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1 年Timely - you may want to consider changing the title of the article.
Founder, CEO Diversity Economics AI | Creator of ‘ReN’ AI | Winner of UK Government R&D Grant | Podcaster | Public speaker | Ex Gartner, Fujitsu
2 年Zachary a nicely written article on India ???? ??. A small correction - Modi is the PM of India, the President is in fact a women - Droupadi Murmu.
Founder, CEO Diversity Economics AI | Creator of ‘ReN’ AI | Winner of UK Government R&D Grant | Podcaster | Public speaker | Ex Gartner, Fujitsu
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