Arvind's Newsletter

1.Indigo vs Air India for supremacy over Indian skies
The year 2023 is already an eventful year for India's aviation industry as two of the country's airlines ordered the world's largest and second-largest order of passenger aircraft within a span of a few months. It was in the month of February that the Tata-owned Air India placed an order for 470 aircraft which was broken by another Indian carrier IndiGo which places a massive order for 500 passenger aircrafts with Airbus.

IndiGo, India’s largest airline by market share, has placed a firm order for 500 A320 Family aircraft, setting the record for the biggest single purchase agreement in the history of commercial aviation.

2.Sri Lanka has a whale of a problem. A clutch of international maritime organisations want the island nation to reroute ships to protect the endangered blue whale’s feeding grounds in the Indian Ocean south of its coast.

Sri Lankan experts say it’s an attempt to undercut the country’s growing importance on the world’s busiest east-west trade route. Lankan ports lost business when some ships that voluntarily veered away from the feeding grounds did not dock in the country. A mandatory rerouting could wean away business to Dubai, Singapore or India. Currently around 3 million TEUs of Indian container cargo gets trans-shipped in Sri Lankan ports.

Differing views: Marine biologists say southern Sri Lankan waters are crucial feeding and nursing grounds for blue whales. But high trade traffic means the risk of collision with whales is also high. Some shipping executives have questioned the scientific conclusions, while others say slowing ships down in the area instead of rerouting would protect the giant marine mammals.

3.Nudging motorists :Owners of the most polluting cars to pay double for parking across England

Owners of the most polluting cars may soon have to pay more to park as councils across England are expected to roll out new charges based on a vehicle’s CO2 emissions.

Lambeth is the latest council in London to introduce emissions-based parking fees, with similar charges now expected elsewhere in England. Owners of the most polluting cars can expect to pay more than twice as much as cleaner cars.

Lambeth has implemented the changes despite opposition, stating that air quality is a major public health issue and a wide range of interventions is required.

Emissions-based charges were shown to change motorists’ behaviour. People make fewer journeys or they choose a cleaner vehicle

4.Why the Evidence Suggests Russia Blew Up the Kakhovka Dam
The Kakhovka dam in Ukraine was designed to withstand almost any attack imaginable from the outside. Evidence reviewed by The New York Times clearly suggests that Russia blew it from within.

The dam, which is controlled by Russia, was built during Soviet times, which meant that Moscow had the structure’s engineering drawings and knew about its Achilles’ heel: a small passage underneath the dam reachable from the machine room. This passageway, the evidence suggests, is where an explosive charge detonated and destroyed the dam.

Seismic sensors in Ukraine and Romania detected the telltale signs of large explosions on the day of the collapse, and U.S. intelligence satellites captured infrared heat signals that also indicated an explosion. Additionally, as water levels fell, the section that collapsed was no longer visible above the water line — strong evidence that the foundation had suffered structural damage, engineers said

5. Simon Saris, writing in the Palladium, makes a powerful case for rethinking schools- Why school is not enough. Some excerpts:

   “Much of this fault lies with the nature of school, the largest dictator of early life-scripts. Modern schooling began as a track to be left as soon as you had something worthwhile to do with your life. But it has since morphed into an attempt at systematising as many years of a child’s life as possible, extending well into their adulthood. At the same time, school can never gratify the smartest pupils as much as either party would like, because they are charged with the education of everyone. The result is that many precocious children will spend prime years of their life quite literally waiting for other students to finish.”

   “Mass schooling attempts a systematisation of skill and knowledge transfer. The results are predictably mediocre—systems at scale must function with and cater to the lowest common denominator, and the process of standardisation loses all sensitivity to context. Since everyone must do the same things, it is difficult for any student to do exceptional things. This is alarming on its own for wasting people’s youth. But even worse, in having so many years of life monopolised, people come to inadvertently believe that skill and knowledge transfer are primarily the domain of school rather than a normal consequence of meaningful work.”

   “The institutions of higher and lower education have a purpose, but they are not your friend. They have no sensitivity to context. Their incentives are not the same as your incentives, and they have no interest in any individual going off-script. They ask nothing of you but time and eventually money, but these are not trivial things. And they will take as many of your prime years as you are willing to give them. School should be leveraged only so long as meaningful work is unavailable.”