SUNA! stands for the Slightly Useful Newsletter for Asia. The name is deliberate.

If an issue leaves you with one new question, one surprising number, one data gap, a few readings, or an idea worth carrying into your next conversation, event, or ASIA SenseMaker session — it has done its job.

This is not a newsletter about what ASIA has done this month. Plenty of publications already catalogue events, announce papers, and mark institutional milestones — useful work, but not this publication's job.

SUNA exists to slow down instead.

Every month, researchers across our centres spend hundreds of hours inside academic papers, government reports, think tanks publications, archives, legal judgments, and datasets. Along the way, they run into questions that won't let go, numbers that upend what they thought they knew, books that change how they think — ideas too early to be a research paper, but too interesting to stay in an internal conversation. This newsletter is where those ideas get their first outing. Our work spans six centres — security, health, governance, law and emerging tech, economic resilience, and history — and there's plenty we want to share.

This is our inaugural issue, and we intend to keep it a habit: SUNA will land in your inbox on the last day of every month.

This first issue reflects our ambition for what's to come. We ask whether digitising an archive can ever really decolonise it, in an age where AI increasingly learns history from whatever's already been scanned. We look at why standard-essential patents have quietly become instruments of technological sovereignty and industrial strategy. We examine India's fast-growing, largely unregulated market in unproven stem-cell therapies, and what it says about gaps in health governance. We ask why India's data centre boom has a water problem — and a political risk problem too. And we look at how the idea of "China" has been shaped and contested across history, examining questions of identity, nationalism, statehood, and China's evolving place in the world.

Some of this work will carry forward into future editions as it develops further; other pieces will be new each time. Where we're still building out an area, we'll say so plainly — and if there's an organisation already working on it, we'd welcome the conversation, whether that means collaboration, funding, or simply comparing notes.

None of these usually sit on the same page — yet each is a piece of the same larger question: how should Asia think about knowledge, technology, institutions, and power in a century being reshaped by both?

As SUNA grows, so will its range — original data, visual essays, maps, reading lists, opportunities for researchers, and contributions from scholars and practitioners across Asia and beyond.

Thank you for reading the first issue. Don't just read it — disagree with it, build on it, tell us what questions deserve more attention. Good research rarely starts with an answer. It starts with curiosity.

Welcome to SUNA. See you at the end of next month.

Team, SUNA

Open almost any major digital archive today, and you are looking at history through someone else's filing system.

Across the world, centuries-old collections are being scanned, catalogued, and uploaded at a pace that would have seemed impossible a generation ago. It looks like progress — and in many ways it is. But a harder question has been building quietly inside history departments, digital humanities labs, and archival institutions alike: does digitising an archive decolonise it, or does it just move the same old hierarchies onto a screen?

The scholars who have spent careers inside actual archives tend to answer with a version of "not automatically."

Ranajit Guha and the Subaltern Studies collective built an entire school of history around a similar suspicion: that colonial and elite records systematically pushed the experiences of ordinary people to the margins, and that conventional historical writing simply inherited that omission. Achille Mbembe went further still, describing the archive not as a neutral container of facts but as an institution of power in its own right — one that structurally decides what can be known at all. Ann Laura Stoler's advice to historians was to stop reading colonial archives only for their content and start reading them for their form: for the categories, the silences, and the assumptions baked into how information was organised in the first place.

None of that is a new argument against archives — it is an argument for reading them more carefully. What has changed is the stakes. Roopika Risam and Walter Mignolo have both pushed the debate into the digital era directly, arguing that digital knowledge infrastructure has to actively work against inherited colonial habits of classification, rather than simply carrying them forward at scale and calling it innovation.

For countries across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, this is not an abstract methodological dispute. Much of what survives of their documented past is still organised through the classification systems, institutions, and narrative conventions that colonial administrations built. A scanner does not undo that. Digitising a collection without a harder look at whose voice made it in in the first place risks doing something worse than simply preserving the old hierarchy — it can make that hierarchy more permanent, more searchable, and more authoritative-looking than it ever was on paper. Real decolonisation, in this reading, means actively going out and finding what colonial cataloguing left out: vernacular sources, oral traditions, indigenous knowledge systems, community-held material that was never considered "archive-worthy" to begin with.

Here is where the question stops being a history-department problem and becomes everyone's problem. The large language models now being trained on enormous troves of digitised text learn the past largely from whatever has already been digitised. If the archives feeding those systems over-represent one part of the world's history and under-represent another, the bias does not stay contained in a research paper — it gets built into the tools that will shape how billions of people access historical knowledge going forward.

That reframes the original question. It is no longer just "can digitisation decolonise the archive" — it is "whose history is quietly becoming the default training data for machine intelligence, and who decided that." Historians, technologists, museums, libraries, and governments are all, whether they have realised it yet or not, co-authors of that answer. DHL's own work on the Indian Archives of Ideas and Material sits inside exactly this problem: an attempt to build a digital archive documenting India's civilisational, constitutional, and political history without simply reproducing the colonial-era filing cabinet in higher resolution.

India's lead chromate crisis is a single-supply-chain problem that its institutions have fragmented into regulatory invisibility. Lead chromate (PbCrO₄), the synthetic inorganic pigment first developed in the early 1800s and marketed as "Chrome Yellow," "Chrome Orange," and "Chrome Green," is manufactured by a concentrated cluster of firms in Gujarat (Vadodara/Ankleshwar belt) and Maharashtra (greater Mumbai/Thane), with smaller producers in Haryana and Telangana.

A 2025 Center for Global Development analysis of 8,397 confirmed Bills of Lading shipments (January 2022–June 2024) found that companies registered in India accounted for 76% of all supplier-identified lead chromate shipments globally, and 81% of all shipments were physically exported from India. The pigment enters the domestic market through two documented diversion pathways: the unorganised paint sector, where a 2023 Toxics Link/IPEN study of 51 paint cans from 40 brands across 10 cities found 90% exceeded the 90 ppm legal limit and 76% contained concentrations above 10,000 ppm; and turmeric adulteration, where a 2024 Forsyth et al. study of 356 samples across South Asia found 14% had detectable lead above 2 µg/g, with lead-to-chromium molar ratios near 1:1 consistent with lead chromate as the source, and Patna samples exceeding 1,000 µg/g—more than 100 times India's FSSAI limit of 10 µg/g. The compound delivers both lead, a cumulative neurotoxin with no safe exposure threshold, and hexavalent chromium (Cr(VI)), classified by IARC as a Group 1 human carcinogen. Yet no Indian ministry regulates the substance itself: FSSAI caps lead in food but concentrates enforcement on packaged brands, leaving loose turmeric from wholesale mandis largely untested; CPCB's 2016 paint rules exclude industrial paints entirely; BIS standards remain largely voluntary; and DGFT tracks imports under HS codes 2841 50 and 3206 20 with no specific restriction on lead chromate.

Bangladesh's 2019–2021 campaign, which reduced detectable lead in market turmeric from 47% to 0% in two years at under $1 per DALY averted, demonstrated that the chokepoint is upstream pigment control, not downstream retail policing. India has not replicated this because its federal architecture fragments accountability: FSSAI sets standards but state commissioners enforce; CPCB notifies rules but state pollution control boards inspect; and no agency is mandated to map the pigment supply chain itself. The debate is whether India's institutional complexity is an insurmountable barrier—or whether a single first-mover state, apex directive, and upstream licensing model can replicate Bangladesh's unitary success at twenty times the scale.

Every time a smartphone connects to a 5G network, a smart meter communicates with the electricity grid, or an electric vehicle exchanges data with charging infrastructure, it relies on technical standards that enable devices developed by different manufacturers to work together. Behind many of these standards are Standard-Essential Patents (SEPs), patents that must be used to comply with an industry standard.

While SEPs are often discussed as an intellectual property issue, they increasingly sit at the intersection of trade, industrial policy, and technological sovereignty. Countries seeking to build domestic manufacturing capacity in sectors such as telecommunications, automotive electronics, digital public infrastructure, and the Internet of Things must also navigate complex global licensing ecosystems. Royalty payments, cross-border technology transfers, and standard-setting institutions now influence industrial competitiveness as much as tariffs or trade agreements.

For India, this debate has become especially significant. Government initiatives promoting semiconductor manufacturing, electronics production, smart infrastructure, and Digital Public Infrastructure depend upon technologies embedded in international standards. Yet Indian firms remain relatively underrepresented among global SEP holders, creating questions about technology dependence, licensing costs, innovation incentives, and long-term industrial strategy.

At CLET, we believe SEPs should no longer be viewed merely as private licensing disputes. They are becoming instruments of economic policy that influence supply chains, market access, geopolitical competition, and national innovation capacity. Understanding how standards, patents, and trade interact will be essential for designing regulatory frameworks that promote both technological diffusion and domestic innovation. As governments worldwide rethink industrial policy, SEPs deserve a central place in conversations about the future of technology governance.

India is actively promoting the establishment of data centres as part of its digital infrastructure strategy to support cloud computing, artificial intelligence and data localisation. Although the draft National Data Centre Policy has yet to be formally notified, both the Union Government and several states, including Telangana, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra and Gujarat, have introduced policy measures and incentives such as land support, reliable power infrastructure, fiscal concessions and streamlined approvals to attract investment. Government data indicates that India's installed data centre capacity increased from approximately 375 MW in 2020 to around 1,500 MW by 2025, reflecting the country's ambition to become a global hub for digital infrastructure.

Despite this policy push, the rapid expansion of data centres presents significant environmental and regulatory challenges. A primary concern is their intensive consumption of electricity and water, particularly for cooling high-performance computing systems. In water-stressed regions, the substantial water requirements of data centres may place additional pressure on local freshwater resources, potentially creating trade-offs with agricultural, industrial and domestic water use. 

As India continues to position itself as a global data-centre hub, future incentives could be linked to measurable sustainability outcomes, including greater reliance on renewable energy, adoption of water-efficient cooling technologies such as direct-to-chip liquid cooling and immersion cooling, and the use of treated wastewater and rainwater harvesting systems wherever feasible. Environmental clearances should also place greater emphasis on local water availability, particularly in water-stressed regions, while encouraging periodic disclosure of energy and water consumption. Such an approach would help ensure that India's digital infrastructure ambitions are pursued alongside responsible resource management, balancing the growing demands of AI and cloud computing with long-term environmental sustainability.

What if the biggest political risks don't begin with war or crisis—but with small exceptions that quietly become the new normal?

This short explainer introduces by ASIA is currently a part of an ongoing research paper on political risk, global governance, and the changing rules of the international order. Stay tuned for more insights as the research progresses.

China employs approximately 16,000 patent examiners; India has only 860 patent examiners and controllers.

The contrast highlights one of the most significant institutional constraints facing India's innovation ecosystem. As patent applications continue to grow, examination capacity becomes critical for reducing pendency, improving patent quality, and ensuring that intellectual property supports, rather than delays, technological development.

In July, Decypher, the flagship publication of ASIA's Research in Security, Crisis and Strategy (RISCS), continued to unpack the strategic shifts shaping Asia. This month's editions explored Chinese media narratives surrounding the India–Japan summit, Beijing's changing approach to scientific publishing, and South Korea's housing and demographic challenges. Together, these analyses demonstrate Decypher's commitment to connecting contemporary events with their broader geopolitical, economic, and strategic implications.

This month on ASIA SenseMaker, ASIA was pleased to host Professor Xu Guoqi, David H. Y. Chang Professor of Chinese History at the University of Hong Kong, for a thought-provoking conversation on his acclaimed book, The Idea of China: A Contested History.

In conversation with Professor Amogh Rai, Research Director at ASIA, Professor Xu explored how the idea of "China" has been shaped and contested across history, examining questions of identity, nationalism, statehood, and China's evolving place in the world. The central argument was that the idea of China is historically contested, continually evolving, and shaped by interactions with the wider world rather than being a fixed or timeless concept.  Key themes from the conversation included: 

Watch the full conversation on YouTube:

ASIA operates under a governing framework called the "3I Framework" — Inquire (beginning every project with a genuine question rather than a predetermined conclusion), Interpret (connecting regional events to global patterns and situating policy in context), and Illuminate (conveying genuine complexity to audiences who need to act on it, rather than simply publishing research that sits unread).

Despite being only three years old, ASIA has already placed research in major outlets like The Hindu, Financial Express, Economic Times, and Der Spiegel; convened conferences including national and international and secured formal recognition as a partner in the WHO/UNEP-led Global Alliance to Eliminate Lead Paint. The Institute is governed by a board chaired by Najeeb H Jung, with Dr Indu Bhushan as Vice Chairperson, and members including Dr Rajat M. Nag, Sandhya Vasudevan, and Distinguished Fellow Manpreet Singh Badal; Prof. Amogh Dev Rai serves as Research Director and Ex-Officio Board Member.

What It Does

ASIA's work is organized across six research centres, each committed to a defined five-year research question rather than broad thematic coverage:

Beyond research, ASIA produces publications (journals, policy briefs, monographs, working papers), hosts podcasts and webinars (including the SenseMaker series), and convenes conferences and dialogues.