If the objective is to connect the whole world to the Internet, then Free Basics by Facebook (previously known as internet.org) is a controversial method to achieve it. The company wants to provide a subset of the Internet free of charge to consumers, with mobile telecom operators bearing the costs of the traffic. Facebook acts as the unpaid gatekeeper of the platform.

This kind of arrangement has come to be called “zero rating” and attracted criticism from Internet civil society groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation. It argues that the Free Basics scheme has “one unavoidable, inherent flaw: Facebook’s central role, which puts it in a privileged position to monitor its users’ traffic, and allows it to act as gatekeeper (or, depending on the situation, censor)... there is no technical restriction that prevents the company from monitoring and recording the traffic of Free Basics users. Unfortunately, this means there is no guarantee that the good faith promise Facebook has made today to protect Free Basics users’ privacy will be permanent.”

Monopolists vs free market

In India, Internet civil society activists are opposing Facebook’s scheme for additional reasons. While the attempt to introduce new users to the Internet is a good thing, they argue, the scheme risks breaking the network into many smaller ones and skewing the playing field in favour of apps and services that enjoy privileged pricing.

Zero rating in general and Free Basics by Facebook in particular has many defenders among advocates of free markets and capitalism. They argue that if the mobile operator wishes to lose money or cross-subsidise some users at the cost of others, then it should be allowed to do so. Government intervention in pricing usually has bad unintended consequences, and it should be no different in the case of Internet traffic.

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has re-engaged in a public consultation seeking submissions on which path it should take: the conservative path of insisting on net neutrality, a laissez-faire approach of non-intervention in the decisions of private firms, or other options in between these two.

What seems to be taken for granted but should really surprise us is that companies and policymakers accept that getting the developing world online requires methods that are different from how the developed countries got there. So, how did the hundreds of millions of people around the world become Internet subscribers? Not because of government schemes, but because they could afford it. They could afford it because market forces — competition — drove prices down to levels that made an Internet connection affordable. Unless government policies get in the way, there is no reason why the same forces will not reduce prices further to make the service affordable to ever more people, with lower disposable incomes.

There is empirical evidence for this: the 980 million mobile phone subscribers in India are able to make phone calls because they can afford the charges. Even after some price capping by TRAI, most mobile telecom operators are doing well. Despite persistent call drops and atrocious customer service, consumers enjoy reasonably good service and the industry as a whole is fairly healthy.

All this happened without a mobile phone operator providing free calls to a limited set of numbers in order to demonstrate the value of mobile phones and to encourage more people to take up subscriptions. Operators did, however, innovate in retailing, launching prepaid packages and recharging these connections. On the flip side, they also cut costs by skimping on customer service, overloading spectrum and sharing tower infrastructure.

Competition is the key

TRAI should reflect on its own success in transforming India from a low teledensity country to a moderately high teledensity one. This happened not due to “no-frills services for poor and developing country users” but by ensuring that market competition is allowed to take its course. There is no reason why mobile Internet services will not become as popular as mobile phone services as long as there is adequate competition.

Therefore, the debate on whether or not to permit zero rating is beside the point. What TRAI ought to be asking is whether there is sufficient competition in its current policy framework. Should it be licensing more telecom operators? Has the government made enough spectrum available so that mobile operators can lower prices and ensure adequate service quality? Are there bottlenecks in the hands of monopolists that raise the costs of service?

The path to achieving the dream of Digital India lies not in foreign companies deciding on what basic services India’s poor ought to access free of charge, but by encouraging ever greater competition and a level playing field. This calls for the regulator to have a hawkish approach towards anti-competitive behaviour by existing market players.

Now, let’s say that the government really wishes to make the Internet affordable to citizens whose incomes are too low to pay for it. There is a good case for this based on positive externalities: that some benefits of an individual’s connection to the Internet accrue to society as a whole. Much like primary education, an Internet connection allows a citizen to participate in the modern economy. Just as society as a whole benefits if all citizens are educated, it benefits if all citizens are connected. To be clear, this is not an argument for the government to run telecom businesses. Rather, it is to say that it is in the public interest for nearly everyone to be connected to the Internet.

Growth as a force multiplier

While it is tempting to provide free or subsidised services — like we do in India for many such things — the best method to achieve this outcome is to raise people’s incomes. If the Indian economy grows at 8 per cent over several years, the income effect will make Internet connections more affordable even if prices do not fall.

In other words, the best scheme to bring the Internet to all involves boosting competition to bring down prices and pursuing economic growth to raise people’s incomes. This is the formula that has worked elsewhere in the world, has worked in India and will continue to work. Schemes like Free Basics by Facebook and Airtel Zero are unnecessary from the perspective of connecting the unconnected.

Now, Facebook is not a charity. So, it probably must have a good explanation to its shareholders why it is spending so much of its time and resources in promoting a good cause. That explanation is likely to go: “more Internet users in the world means more users for Facebook, which we monetise in our usual ways”. It might also hint that being the gatekeeper, however open, of Internet content for hundreds of millions of people will give it a lot more market power. This is important, for as Chamath Palihapitiya, venture capitalist and an early Facebook executive says, the company worries that it will lose out if it does not capture most of the world’s Internet content on its own platform.

TRAI must take a call on whether such business strategies are anti-competitive. But in dealing with the question, the regulator must not allow itself to be persuaded that such schemes are necessary for bringing the Internet to the masses.

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We need to provide full Internet at prices people can afford, not privilege private platforms. This is where India’s regulatory system has to step in

The airwaves, the newspapers and even the online space are now saturated with a Rs. 100 crore campaign proclaiming that Internet connectivity for the Indian poor is a gift from Facebook which a few churlish net neutrality fundamentalists are opposing. In its campaign, Facebook is also using the generic phrase “free, basic Internet” interchangeably with “Free Basics”, the name it has given its private, proprietary platform. This is in blatant violation of Indian rules on advertising, which forbid generic words being used for brands and products. This is from a company which, in spite of having 125 million Indian subscribers, refuses to be sued in India, claiming to be an American company and therefore outside the purview of Indian law. Nor does it pay any tax in India.

The Free Basics platform is a mildly tweaked rehash of the controversial internet.org that Facebook had floated earlier. Facebook and Reliance, the sixth-largest mobile service provider in the country, have joined hands to offer it as a platform for free data services restricted to a few websites. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has stopped this service for now, pending its public consultation on the subject. Facebook’s campaign is essentially to influence the outcome of such a consultation.

Data as commodity

Evgeny Morozov, one of the most insightful commentators on technology, has written extensively on how Silicon Valley seeks to subvert the state, promising to give the people connectivity, transport and other facilities, if we only hand over our data to them. Instead of people demanding that the state provide access to various services — from drinking water to transport and communications — people are being led to believe that a few capitalists from Silicon Valley will provide all these services. We will have Internet connectivity instead of education, and Uber will provide private taxis, instead of public transport. To paraphrase Marie Antoinette, let the people have cake instead of bread. This is the Internet monopolies’ agenda of hidden and mass-scale privatisation of public services.

By accepting the Silicon Valley model of private services, we pay the Internet monopolies with our data, which can then be monetised. Personal data is the currency of the Internet economy. Data as commodity is the oil of the 21st century. Facebook and Google’s revenue model is based on monetising our personal data and selling it to advertisers. Facebook generates an estimated revenue of nearly $1 billion from its Indian subscribers, on which it pays no tax.

Free Basics is not free, basic Internet as its name appears to imply. It has a version of Facebook, and only a few other websites and services that are willing to partner Facebook’s proprietary platform.

Today, there are nearly 1 billion websites. If we consider that there are 3.5 billion users of the Internet, 1 out of 3.5 such users also offers content or services. The reason that the Internet has become such a powerful force for change in such a short time is precisely because anybody, anywhere, can connect to anybody else, not only to receive, but also to provide content. All that is required is that both sides have access to the Internet.

All this would stop if the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) or telecom companies (telcos) are given the right to act as gatekeepers. This is what net neutrality is all about — no ISP or telco can decide what part of the Internet or which websites we can access. Tim Wu, the father of net neutrality, has written that keeping the two sides of the Internet free of gatekeepers is what has given a huge incentive for generating innovation and creating content. This is what has made the Internet, as a platform, so different from other mass communications platforms such as radio and television. Essentially, it has unleashed the creativity of the masses; and it is this creativity we see in the hundreds of millions of active websites.

Facebook’s ads and Mark Zuckerberg’s advertorials talk about education, health and other services being provided by Free Basics, without telling us how on earth we are going to access doctors and medicines through the Internet; or education. It forgets that while English is spoken by only about 12 per cent of the world’s population, 53 per cent of the Internet’s content is English. If Indians need to access education or health services, they need to access it in their languages, and not in English. And no education can succeed without teachers. The Internet is not a substitute for schools and colleges but only a complement, that too if material exists in the languages that the students understand. Similarly, health demands clinics, hospitals and doctors, not a few websites on a private Facebook platform.

Regulate price of data

While the Free Basics platform has connected only 15 million people in different parts of the world, in India, we have had 60 million people join the Internet using mobiles in the last 12 months alone. And this is in spite of the high cost of mobile data charges. There are 300 million mobile broadband users in the country, an increase fuelled by the falling price of smartphones.

In spite of this increase in connectivity, we have another 600 million mobile subscribers who need to be connected to the Internet. Instead of providing Facebook and its few partner websites and calling it “basic” Internet, we need to provide full Internet at prices that people can afford. This is where the regulatory system of the country has to step in. The main barrier to Internet connectivity is the high cost of data services in the country. If we use purchasing power parity as a basis, India has expensive data services compared to most countries. That is the main barrier to Internet penetration. Till now, TRAI has not regulated data tariffs. It is time it addresses the high price of data in the country and not let such prices lead to a completely truncated Internet for the poor.

There are various ways of providing free Internet, or cost-effective Internet, to the low-end subscribers. They could be provided some free data with their data connection, or get some free time slots when the traffic on the network is low. 2G data prices can and should be brought down drastically, as the telcos have already made their investments and recovered costs from the subscribers.

The danger of privileging a private platform such as Free Basics over a public Internet is that it introduces a new kind of digital divide among the people. A large fraction of those who will join such platforms may come to believe that Facebook is indeed the Internet. As Morozov writes, the digital divide today is “about those who can afford not to be stuck in the data clutches of Silicon Valley — counting on public money or their own capital to pay for connectivity — and those who are too poor to resist the tempting offers of Google and Facebook” (“Silicon Valley exploits time and space to extend the frontiers of capitalism”, The Guardian, Nov. 29, 2015). As he points out, the basic delusion Silicon Valley is nurturing is that the power divide will be bridged through Internet connectivity, no matter who provides it or in what form. This is not likely to happen through their platforms.

The British Empire was based on the control of the seas. Today, whoever controls the data oceans controls the global economy. Silicon Valley’s data grab is the new form of colonialism we are witnessing now.

Net neutrality is not an esoteric matter, the concern of only a few netizens. It is fundamental to the world, in which the Internet is a source of knowledge, a means of communication, an artery of commerce. Whoever controls access to the Internet will control our future. This is what the current battle over Facebook’s Free Basics is all about.

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Net neutrality requires Internet be maintained as an open platform on which network providers treat all content, applications and services equally.

Bengaluru, the information technology capital of India, is vehemently opposing social network Facebook’s controversial Internet service as it fears a ‘digital colonisation by the West.’

The people opposing Facebook Internet service, called Free Basics, include startup entrepreneurs, students, activists and tech employees. Most of them are based in Bengaluru, which is home to approximately 3,100 to 4,900 active tech startups and is ranked 15th-best startup ecosystem in the world.

They said India has just woken up to the advantages of mobile Internet and any such splitting will create a ‘have versus have not’s list' in the country.

“At the start of startup India revolution, we cannot have some Indian developers and entrepreneurs blocked by large corporates to access consumer,” said Vijay Shekhar Sharma, founder of mobile Internet company One97 and mobile payments firm Paytm. “If telecom operators are allowed to split Internet, it will be a near death experience for Indian startup eco system.”

Mr. Sharma is among many tech entrepreneurs and employees, who are venting off their resentment on platforms like Twitter and Medium, a blog-publishing platform.

SaveTheInternet.in, an Indian web petition portal to support the principle of net neutrality in India, is also very actively opposing Free Basics.

Free Basics allows customers to access selected social networks, and services like healthcare, education and job listings from their phones without a data plan. However startup entrepreneurs are opposing the service. They said that it violates net neutrality, a concept that all Internet traffic should be treated equally.

Net neutrality requires that the Internet be maintained as an open platform, on which network providers treat all content, applications and services equally, without discrimination. This is emphasised by over 60 groups and experts across the world on www.thisisnetneutrality.org.

“The practice of zero rating (toll-free data or sponsored data) is not compatible with this (net neutrality), since it allows companies to act as 'stronger gatekeepers' and discriminate against the open Internet,” said Raman Jit Singh Chima, global policy director at Access Now, an international non-profit, human rights, public policy, and advocacy group dedicated to an open and free Internet.

Free Basics developers can’t innovate on technology without the permission of Facebook, experts said. Telecom operators and Facebook also need to approve services. Entrepreneurs say there is a need for unbiased, equal Internet that treats all developers same.

“No developer should need to take a license or apply to someone to bring new idea to Indians or any one in the world,” said Mr. Sharma of Paytm. He said any segregation of the Internet into fast and slow, free or paid, app or web will undermine Prime Minister Narendra Modi's digital India program.

VoIP

A key aspect of the Internet is that a user can choose to visit any website and access any service. In Free Basics, Facebook has decided voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) and video are not good for users, so they will not have them.

Since Google hasn’t signed up as a partner with Facebook, users cannot access it. This also includes any of the billions of websites that haven't partnered with Facebook.

“In sociology, this locus of decision-making ability is called ‘agency’,” said Kiran Jonnalagadda, founder of Bengaluru-based tech community HasGeek and one of the key members of the SaveTheInternet.in campaign.

He said Free Basics shifts ‘agency’ (who has decision making rights) from the end user to Facebook. But India’s constitution guarantees ‘agency’ to each citizen, which is why they have fundamental rights and universal franchise. “Free Basics wants to take it away,” said Mr. Jonnalagadda.

Experts say even more worrying is the fact that Facebook wants this right to take away agency enshrined in law. This is why they’re lobbying Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) so heavily. While Facebook may claim to be benign, once it is legally approved, others will abuse it for private gain, according to the experts.

“This is why we’re calling it ‘Digital Colonialism, the exploitation of resources while denying rights,” said Mr. Jonnalagadda.

He is also of view that Free Basics, like all forms of zero rating, comes from the same school of thought that considers a 'benevolent dictatorship' better than democracy for progress.

“In India we’ve seen this taken to the extreme once with the emergency. We don’t want any further evidence of the harm possible,” said Mr. Jonnalagadda.

Sharad Sharma, co-founder of Bengaluru-based software product think tank iSPIRT said that it is fine for companies to sponsor free access to their Internet in general. “But, consumers should have choice of using any telco provider and still get the benefit,” said Mr. Sharma.

Facebook had earlier collaborated with telecommunications company Reliance Communications to provide its proposed ‘Free Basics’ plan. However, TRAI has told Reliance Communications to delay the launch of Free Basics.

Special deal

Mr. Sharma of iSPIRT said telecos should not have special deal like the partnership between Reliance Communications and Facebook to provide free Internet. “This violates the fundamental net neutrality principle,” he said.

He said companies should pay money, data time or anything else to the consumer directly by using tools like Gigato, a data-sponsoring app. These tools reimburse users for data without violating the net neutrality.

Meanwhile, India also witnessed street-level protests in Gachibowli, a major IT suburb of Hyderabad. The protestors were sitting under a tent and were trying to discredit Facebook’s Free Basics initiative.

The Free Software Movement of India (FSMI) organised protests in several towns across Telangana and Andhra Pradesh with a demand to scrap it.

The members are trying to convince people about their stand through various social media initiatives. They said people who have signed up to support the online campaign of ‘Free Basics’ can reverse their decision by visiting their website 'saynotofreebasics.fsmi.in'

This week, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg made renewed pitch for its Free Basics Internet service saying it protects net neutrality. Mr.Zuckerberg whose Facebook is spending billions of dollars on projects to deliver Internet to under-served areas using satellites, drones and lasers, appeared on a video to personally promote Free Basics. He also wrote a personal appeal in one of the newspapers.

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First shipment of premium hatchback to Europe is expected to commence in January

Maruti Suzuki India, the country’s largest carmaker, is set to commence exports of its Baleno model to the European Union, in its second attempt to revive its presence in the region, according to a company official.

The first shipment of premium hatchback to Europe is expected to commence in January. The company is targeting several markets such Italy, France, Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark and Spain, among others to sell India-built Baleno, according to a company spokesperson who doesn’t want to be named.

Maruti Suzuki started exports to EU as early as in 1987-88 with about 500 units. But, exports lasted only till 2006-07. It started looking at non-EU markets, which offered huge potential then. The company resumed exports to EU in 2008-09. But, European exports have not been growing since 2010-11. With the new Baleno, the company is hopeful of reviving and growing its exports to EU.

“Since some export markets like Africa and Latin America are facing demand slowdown due to slump in oil and commodity prices, Europe focus for exports will help the company maintain stability in exports,” according to an industry analyst.

The EU export plan is part of Suzuki’s global export strategy.

Suzuki, Maruti’s foreign parent, has also decided to sell made-in-India Baleno in Japan, signalling growing importance of Indian operations in Suzuki’s global growth strategy. Presently, Maruti is the only manufacturer of Baleno for Suzuki.

With strong response to its cars in markets such as Asia, Africa, Latin America & Middle East, Maruti’s overall passenger vehicle exports have been growing. Over 95 per cent of the export volumes are generated from non-EU markets now.

Company officials said that new markets were being identified for growing its exports further and Maruti added many new models such as Ertiga, Swift, DZire, Ciaz, Celerio to the export portfolio. “Markets like Mexico have responded positively to our mid-size sedan Ciaz,” a company spokesperson said.

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Scientific evidence suggests that the parts of the brain responsible for impulse control, decision-making, judgment and emotions, and crucial when fixing culpability in case of juvenile delinquency, keep developing into the twenties.

Earlier this week, the Rajya Sabha cleared the Juvenile Justice (Amendment) Bill that allows juveniles between ages 16 and 18 years who are charged with heinous offences to be tried as adults.

Neuroscience was conspicuously absent from this debate. Globally, juvenile justice policies are increasingly informed by developments in brain science that probe questions of culpability and “blameworthiness” of adolescent offenders. “Capacities relevant to criminal responsibility are still developing when you’re 16 or 17 years old,” psychologist Laurence Steinberg of the American Psychological Association had said while supporting Christopher Simmons, who, as an adolescent, had been convicted of murder — a case that became a landmark judgment in forensic psychiatry, and relied on neuroscience while convicting the juvenile offender.

Much like the juvenile involved in the December 16, 2012 gang rape in New Delhi, Simmons was 17 years old in 1993 when he robbed a woman, tied her up with electrical cable and duct tape, and tossed her over a bridge. When the case went to trial, he was convicted and sentenced to death by a Missouri court in 1994. By 2004, the Simmons case had worked its way up to the U.S. Supreme Court and a year later, in a landmark decision, the court said that it was unconstitutional to impose capital punishment for crimes committed under the age of 18. The decision relied on neurobiology, developments in brain research to define the “age of understanding”. So, what does science have to say about the Indian government’s decision to allow 16-18 year olds to be tried and sentenced as adults? To put it simply — science does not back the decision.

Age of understanding

As per India’s Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act of 2000, the age of understanding is fixed at 18 years. And so, legally, any individual beyond that age could be held fully responsible for his actions. However, neuro-scientific developments in the past decade prove that brain development continues till the person is well into his twenties.

In 2007, a study conducted at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), U.S., scanned the brains of nearly 1,000 healthy children between ages 3 and 18. Child and adolescent psychiatrist Jay Giedd, who conducted the Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scans and followed the actual physical changes in the adolescent brain, believes that brain maturation peaks around the age of 25. In a 2005 paper on “Adolescence, Brain Development and Legal Culpability”, Dr. Giedd was quoted as saying, “Part of the brain that is helping organisation, planning and strategising is not done being built yet… It’s sort of unfair to expect [adolescents] to have adult levels of organisational skills or decision-making before their brain is finished being built.”

According to available neuro-scientific data, the frontal lobe, especially the prefrontal cortex, is among the last parts of the brain to fully mature. The frontal lobes are responsible for impulse control, in charge of decision-making, judgment and emotions — and therefore crucial when fixing “culpability” in the case of juvenile delinquency. Further, we now know conclusively that teenagers tend to be impulsive and prone to mood swings because the limbic system — which processes emotions — is still developing.

Preeti Jacob, assistant professor, Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neuroscience, Bengaluru, says there is no valid, magic age which can work as a marker to define individuals as juveniles or adults. “Neuroscience has shown that the brain continues to develop well into the third decade of life. The 18 years cut-off is in itself an arbitrary number. Lowering this age further does not have its basis in current science,” she says.

According to experts, adolescents get involved in risk-seeking behaviour without thinking of long-term consequences, which leads them to actually overstate rewards without fully evaluating the risks. This is because the level of dopamine production changes during adolescence. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter — a chemical produced by the brain that helps link actions to rewards and/or punishments.

In defence of leniency

Sumantra Chattarji is a professor of neurobiology at National Centre for Biological Sciences and head of the Centre for Brain Development and Repair at The Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine, in Bengaluru. His work has established that under conditions of chronic and severe stress in rats, the prefrontal cortex can shrink by up to 40 per cent resulting in brain cells in this area losing their capacity to process information properly. The hippocampus, which is crucial for forming memories of daily facts and events, is also damaged in a similar fashion.

Thus, the parts of the brain that are crucial for processing information about specific events, and making careful decisions based on them — such as applying the brakes on high-risk behaviour — are severely compromised. On the other hand, the same stress pushes the amygdala, the emotional hub of the brain that is involved in fear, anxiety and aggression, in the opposite direction by making its neurons grow bigger and stronger. Strikingly, MRI imaging shows that similar changes take place in the brains of individuals suffering from stress disorders.

“What this means is that a stressed and damaged brain may lose its ability to control impulsive and risk-seeking behaviour because of a lack of balance between the prefrontal cortex and brain areas it is supposed to control. The ability to remember and reason is also curtailed,” says Dr. Chattarji.

This may be relevant in light of reports that a significant proportion of juveniles committing crimes in India come from economically and socially deprived backgrounds.

In the Indian context, Dr. Rajat Mitra, clinical psychologist and director of Swanchetan — a non-governmental organistaion based in New Delhi providing support to juvenile delinquents among others — says that “complete rehabilitation is very rare”. “It is almost next to nil. Rehabilitation is a well-defined scientific process. The idea is to help the convict gain back his original psychological, physical and social capacity which is impaired as a result of the crime committed,” he says.

Juveniles in conflict with the law are more capable of change given the fact that their brains are still learning. Honest efforts made towards rehabilitation — including visits by a mental health professional three-four times a month — will have a significant positive impact on them. Unfortunately, there is no psychiatric screening in Indian prisons. No mental health professional has met the juvenile convicted in the gang-rape case yet; neither when he was in a reform home for three years nor after release. He was given a one-time financial grant of Rs.10,000 and a sewing machine because the rehabilitation manual says that. “That’s no way to look at rehabilitation,” says Dr. Mitra.

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Incomplete wells are one of the reasons why oil price recovery is nowhere in sight

The price of oil keeps dropping. But that didn’t stop a work crew from drilling a well recently on what was once a cornfield, carefully guiding the last sections of 13,000 feet of pipe spiralling into the hard Niobrara shale with a diamond-tipped bit.

Their well, one of hundreds drilled by Anadarko Petroleum in eastern Colorado’s Wattenberg field this year, could someday gush as many as 800 barrels of crude oil a day. But Anadarko is not planning to produce a drop of crude from the well for at least another year because the price of oil is now so low.

The well here is just one of more than 4,000 drilled oil and natural gas wells across the country producing nothing, but ready to be tapped quickly.

Many constitute a new form of underground storage, a new well inventory strategy for an industry in distress, one that has been forced to lay off tens of thousands of workers, decommission most of its rigs and write down assets. For individual companies such as Anadarko, the deferred completions — known in the oil business as DUCs (an acronym for drilled but uncompleted) — are a bet on higher oil prices than the current level of about $38 a barrel, which is about 60 per cent lower than in the summer of 2014. They are viewed by oil executives as a way to hoard cash as service costs plummet and are a flexible lever to rapidly increase production whenever oil rises again.

“We are adapting to market conditions,” Moe Felman, the Anadarko Rockies drilling operations manager, said as he watched workers pump drilling fluids and screw pipes together within sight of the snowcapped Rocky Mountains. “We are focused on what we can do to be ready to accelerate when the market returns.”

But the incomplete wells are also another reason many analysts say a recovery in the oil price is nowhere in sight. Together the well backlog could produce as many as 500,000 barrels of oil a day, about the same amount of oil that Iran is expected to add to the glutted global market after it complies with the recent nuclear deal by the end of next year. Some analysts say oil companies such as Anadarko, EOG Resources and Continental Resources may collectively risk suffocating the very price revival they anticipate by releasing abundant new supplies once prices inch up. Others say the eventual impact would be small and short-lived, but since the industry has never used this strategy before, no one can be sure.

“If prices start to creep up in the U.S., a lot of production could come on line in a quick manner that could put pressure on the supply-demand balance in the market,” said Christopher Kopczynski, a senior oil analyst at Wood Mackenzie, a consultant firm.

The new strategy is made possible by the shale revolution in Texas, North Dakota and Colorado, which nearly doubled national oil production in six years before the price of oil plunged and production began to wane.

Today, there are 1,300 horizontal wells — typically the most productive drilled in shale fields that will offer the biggest output their first year — that were drilled at least six months ago that remain incomplete in the nation’s major shale oil fields. That is more than three times last year’s average, according to Rystad Energy, a Norwegian consultant firm that tracks world oil fields.

Anadarko, EOG Resources and several other major producers began intentionally warehousing wells and effectively storing oil underground after the price of oil collapsed in late 2014 and early this year in the hope of a quick rebound.

“The reason we have deferred the completions is to really substantially increase the rate of return,” Bill Thomas, EOG’s Chairman and Chief Executive, acknowledged in an investment conference call. “We want to make sure that we allow prices to firm up.”

The price did not rebound, but the economics of drilling and completing wells have changed. As the oil price dropped and drilling crews were let go, the cost of drilling wells fell as much as 30 per cent.

At the same time, those companies that cancelled rig contracts were forced to pay costly severance costs.

On the completion side, fracking crews are easier to come by and their contracts tend to be more fluid. Now those completion costs have also come down — meaning that the uncompleted wells will eventually be brought on line at a lower cost, executives say.

Even if oil prices do not rise substantially, some companies say they will work through much of their warehoused wells in 2016 because with the drilling costs already paid, it will be at least 40 per cent cheaper to complete old wells than drill new ones. That should enable them to keep their production flat or rising even as they further cut their capital expenditures.

But Anadarko remains cautious for 2016.

“Should the commodity price change, we can ramp up,” Darrell E. Hollek, Anadarko’s executive vice president for onshore exploration and production, said in an interview.

“We may find that we complete a lot of these intentionally drilled and uncompleted wells but we may find we only want to do half of them. But from a capital standpoint, it truly is a lever for us.”

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Economic slowdown in Brazil, Russia and China may boost India’s economy

Kaushik Basu, the Chief Economist of the World Bank, indicated that India’s growth forecast may witness ‘some changes’ in the bank’s January review. The Central Statistics Office (CSO) has released data indicating growth in the “vicinity of 7.5 per cent” for 2015-16, which is less than what was projected in the last Economic Survey. In this year’s Economic Survey, the Finance Ministry had projected GDP growth of 8.1-8.5 per cent. As of October, the World Bank’s forecast for India was retained at 7.5 per cent for the current financial year.

Prof. Basu, who also was the Chief Economic Adviser to the Government of India till 2012, said the government’s failure to get the Goods and Services Tax (GST) Bill passed may have an ‘impact’ on the GDP growth projection of the World Bank. “The detailed decision-making (by the government) can have an impact on the growth rate and that a couple of important decisions did not go through could have an impact.” Prof. Basu said. He, however, also said that economic slowdown in Brazil, Russia and China may boost India’s economy in the coming year.

“This is the first time India is leading major global economies in terms of growth forecast. India is dominating for a couple of reasons. China is growing below 7 per cent, Brazil and Russia are in recession. The general mood is positive for India which is helping the investment climate,” he added. A fall in crude oil prices is also ‘helping’ the economy, he said.

Prof. Basu was in the city to attend a two-day seminar on “Growth in West Bengal” at the Kolkata-based Indian Statistical Institute.

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