Since the 1960s, India’s groundwater irrigation has increased dramatically, playing an important role in its economy and people’s lives — supporting livelihoods of over 26 crore farmers and agricultural labourers who grow over a third of India’s foodgrains. These benefits, however, have come at the cost of increased pressure on groundwater reserves. 

India is the world’s largest user of groundwater and, since the 1980s, its groundwater levels have been dropping. The severity of the problem is particularly acute in the northwest, where levels have plunged from 8m below ground to 16m, so that water needs to be pumped from even greater depths. Worse yet, much of this is non-renewable since recharge rates are less than extraction rates and replenishing this resource can take thousands of years. 

This won’t last 

Using up such “fossil” groundwater is unsustainable. Moreover, the future of monsoon rainfall remains uncertain; while some climate models predict an increase, others forecast a weakening monsoon, although changes in monsoon variability are already underway and will continue into the future. Historical records show the number of dry spells and the intensity of wet spells have risen over the past 50 years. As climate change alters the monsoon, the large stresses on India’s groundwater resources may increase.

Please go to The Hindu Buisness Line to read the entire article.

Fellows will arrive at Stanford in July to begin the three-week academic training program taught by Stanford faculty, policymakers and thought-leaders in the technology sector.

Image

Stanford's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law is proud to announce the 2017 class of Draper Hills Summer Fellows, which is composed of 28 leaders – selected from among hundreds of applications – advancing democratic development in some of the most challenging corners of the world.

In Bahrain, Burma, Rwanda and Sudan our fellows are working on peace-building initiatives to create more tolerant and inclusive societies. Judges and lawyers are holding government and criminals accountable and reforming the rule of law in Argentina, Guatemala and the Philippines. Gender rights activists are creating new tools and programs to protect the safety and freedom of women and girls in India, Kuwait and Papua New Guinea.

In Egypt, Morocco, Pakistan, Serbia and Ukraine, our fellows are serving inside the government as members of Parliament and senior civil servants to advance reform and new policy agendas. Business leaders in Jordan and India launched initiatives to support more inclusive economic growth and social development.

CDDRL is excited to launch another powerful network of leaders determined to advance change in their communities. They will emerge with new tools, frameworks and connections to enhance their work and deepen their impact on democratic reform.

The 2017 class will mark the 13th cohort of the Draper Hills Summer Fellows Program and the fellows will join the Omidyar Network Leadership Forum, an alumni community of over 300 alumni in 75 countries worldwide.

China is encountering a religious resurgence. Its revival symbolizes tension between the past and the present, as people search for purpose in a country that’s been shaken by expansive reforms and modernization efforts over the past four decades.

That was the message shared by veteran journalist Ian Johnson, the 2016 winner of the Shorenstein Journalism Award, who gave a keynote speech followed by panel discussion titled “Religion after Mao,” part of the Award’s 15th anniversary ceremony at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center on Monday.

Johnson, who has spent 30 years as a journalist, has written extensively about Chinese history, religion and culture, and is also a teacher and published author, most recently releasing the book The Souls of China: The Return of Religion after Mao.

“Ian is maybe one of the most remarkable awardees we’ve had in recent years,” said Daniel Sneider, Shorenstein APARC associate director for research, who introduced the event by talking about Johnson’s distinguished career, which has included writing for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and New York Review of Books and led to a Pulitzer Prize win in 2001.

Xueguang Zhou, a Stanford professor of sociology and senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute, and Orville Schell, the director of the Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations and former dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at U.C. Berkeley, joined Johnson on the panel, while Sneider moderated the discussion.

In a wide-ranging conversation, the panelists discussed the varied history of religion in Chinese society during the 20th and 21st centuries, offering stories of their experiences living and working in China.

According to Johnson, religious persecution in China is often thought to be associated with the anti-religious campaigns of Mao Zedong following the Chinese Communist Party’s assumption of power in 1949, but in reality, it existed decades before and has lingered in national memory.

Into the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Chinese government remained superstitious of religion, trying to redefine religious groups as “culture” alone, under the assumption that religion could be desensitized enough to eventually disappear, Johnson said.

But that did not happen, he said, and instead an opposite trend did. Reaching a high point in the 2000s, China’s economic reforms – both sweeping and fast-paced – brought growing angst and anxiety and prompted people across every socioeconomic background to turn to religion as an outlet.

Johnson, who has spent weeks at a time living among religious groups, noted a shift from the time he was in China in the mid-1980s to the past decade, where now “the government sees that religious groups can provide some sort of moral framework for some people.”

Image

Chinese people today are searching for meaning, the panelists said, and are driven to join religious groups amid resource competition and mass migration that has usurped traditional family structures and disquieted many people who have moved from close-knit rural towns to alienating urban centers.

“Everybody is out there…trying to reify that part of life which isn’t filled by bread alone, by commerce alone,” said Schell, who has written about China since the 1970s as an author and journalist. “It’s a pretty chaotic quest and it’s very hard to know where it will all end.”

At the moment, religious groups in China remain heterogeneous and fragmented, Zhou said, but cohesion is growing in some regions and participation of local government leaders has drawn greater attention to the practice of faith.

“In grassroots China, religion, spiritual life and the Party, really go hand-in-hand – they’re intertwined,” said Zhou, whose research focuses on Chinese bureaucracy and economic development. “Local elites are involved both in the spiritual world and the Party world, and they shift back and forth simultaneously.”

However, the future of the relationship between religion and the government remains to be seen, according to the panelists.

Religious groups could fracture, or the government could continue to favor “native” religious groups, which if exacerbated over time, could lead to quasi-state religions, Johnson said. (Today, China recognizes five religions: Buddhism, Catholicism, Daoism, Islam and Protestantism).

While religious groups increasingly provide a service to some people, the Chinese government continues to be wary of them as an alternative source of knowledge and values, Johnson said, which hold the potential to coalesce into a nascent civil society.

“Every dynasty in China knows that one way dynasties usually ended was with some millenarian movement,” Schell added of the government’s apprehension. “They are afraid of religious movements because they do bespeak of higher values, higher loyalties and different organizational structures that don’t owe fealty to the Party.”

A video of the keynote speech is posted at this link.

Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) Director Gi-Wook Shin spoke with Yonhap News about the situation on the Korean Peninsula, following a visit to U.S. Pacific Command with a delegation of scholars from the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

While there, U.S. officials conveyed that the United States has the capability to strike North Korea should the president make that call.

U.S. officials said that North Korea had already moved into the “red zone,” and that the Trump administration has the view that it cannot miss a window of opportunity to stop the nuclear and missile program before it advances further.

Shin also said he believed that the Trump administration holds a view that the policy of “strategic patience” failed under the Obama administration, and that growing tensions on the Peninsula have compelled the Trump administration to consider – with greater plausibility – the option of a preemptive military strike.

Regional tensions have risen in the midst of impending political shifts in South Korea, where a new president will assume office following a snap election this May, and in China, where the Party Congress will meet to appoint new senior leadership of the Chinese Communist Party this fall.

Whoever becomes president in South Korea should place relations with North Korea at the top of the agenda and consider sending an envoy early on to meet its leader Kim Jong-un in-person, Shin said.

The Yonhap interview can be viewed in Korean, and a shorter version, in English. A related analysis piece is also available on MK News (in Korean).

The U.S.-Asia Security Initiative at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center has selected two Stanford students for its inaugural summer internships in partnership with The Asia Foundation and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. The two students, Kar Mun Nicole Wong and Vivan Malkani, will intern at The Asia Foundation offices in Jakarta, Indonesia, or Washington, D.C., and pursue separate projects focused on international policy.

In Jakarta, Wong will help document a case study focused on Indonesia’s marginalized communities, and in the District of Columbia, Malkani will research topics such as the role of civil society in development and U.S. policy on countering violent extremism.

Brief bios of the selected students are listed below:

Interning at the Jakarta office

Image

Kar Mun Nicole Wong is a junior at Stanford from Singapore, majoring in international relations with a minor in art history. Her departmental specializations are international history and culture, and East and South Asia. She is currently writing an honors thesis on the relationship between China and the Middle East and its effects on China’s Muslim populations.

Much of Wong’s Stanford career has been dedicated to pursuing her interests in social organization and increasing inclusion of marginalized communities. As a freshman, Wong served as a research assistant for the Rural Education Action Program, a research organization dedicated to discovering the causes of, and solutions to, poverty in rural China. In 2016, Wong was also selected to serve as the Stanford delegate to the Vienna International Christian-Islamic Summer University, a program dedicated to religious inclusion through discourse between Christian and Muslim perspectives of students and academics from all over the world.

Through her internship with The Asia Foundation in Jakarta, Wong hopes to not only gain a better understanding of Indonesia and Southeast Asia as a whole, but also to continue her passion for social inclusion through her work with the Peduli program.

Image

Vivan Malkani is an undergraduate student at Stanford from the class of 2019. He is currently a sophomore, majoring in political science with a focus on political philosophy and data science. His other academic interests include earth systems, computer science and Mandarin Chinese.

Born and raised in Mumbai, India, Malkani attended the Cathedral and John Connon School for his high school education. He came to Stanford in 2015, undertaking the Structured Liberal Education program, a yearlong course of study that examines the evolution of Western philosophy, religion and political structures. This experience prompted him to pursue coursework in history and political science, including Chinese history and politics by learning Mandarin Chinese.

In the summer of 2016, Malkani was a research assistant at the Stanford Political Science Summer Research College, working for Professor Lisa Blaydes on her project on Middle Eastern state development. The project examined the role of different economic institutions in the political development of 13th-15th century Mamluk Egypt, examining cadastral records and building geospatial visualizations of the data.

Outside of the classroom, Malkani is an active member of Stanford in Government. He is also a writer for the Stanford Political Journal and member of the Ethics Bowl Society.

Uncertainty about U.S. intentions in Northeast Asia has increased fear that events could spin out of control in the region due to American disengagement. That engagement cannot be taken for granted, Shorenstein Fellow Thomas Fingar writes on the Stanford University Press blog, and it remains to be seen just how well regional political leaders adjust to the Trump administration’s evolving foreign policy.

The blog post highlights themes from his book Uneasy Partnerships: China’s Engagement with Japan, the Koreas, and Russia in the Era of Reform (Stanford, April 2017).

South Korean culture has long held ethnic homogeneity as an integral part of national identity, but attitudes toward multiculturalism are slowly beginning to change amid the country’s shifting demographics, Gi-Wook Shin, professor of sociology and director of the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, said in an interview with Al Jazeera English. Read the article.