Awards &Prizes
 

Nobel Prize2014 (medicine)

•  U.S.-British scientist John O’Keefe and Norwegian married couple May—Britt Moser and Edvard Moser won the Nobel Prize in medicine for discovering the brain’s positioning system.

•  This “inner GPS” helps explain how the brain creates “a map of the space surrounding us and how we can navigate our way through a complex environment,” the Nobel Assembly said.

•  The Nobel awards in physics, chemistry, literature and peace will be announced later this week. The economics prize will be announced soon.

Nobel Prize2014 (physics)

•  Isamu Akasaki and Hiroshi Amano of Japan and U.S. scientist Shuji Nakamura won the Nobel Prize in physics for the invention of blue light-emitting diodes a new energy efficient and environment-friendly light source.

•  The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said the invention is just 20 years old, “but it has already contributed to create white light in an entirely new manner to the benefit of us all".

•  Prof. Akasaki, 85, is a professor at Meijo University and distinguished professor at Nagoya University. Prof. Amano, 54, is also a professor at Nagoya University, while the 60-year-old Prof. Nakamura is a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

•  The laureates triggered a transformation of lighting technology when they produced bright blue light from semiconductors in the 1990s, something scientist had struggled with for decades, the Nobel committee said.

•  Using the blue light, LED lamps emitting white light could be created in a new way.

•  Last year’s physics award went to Britain’s Peter Higgs and Belgian colleague Francois Englert for helping to explain how matter formed after the Big Bang.

Nobel Prize 2014 (chemistry)

• Two Americans and a German scientist won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for finding ways to make microscopes more powerful than previously thought possible, allowing scientists to see how diseases develop inside the tiniest cells.

• Working independently of each other, U.S. researchers Eric Betzig and William Moerner and Stefan Hell of Germany shattered previous limits on the resolution of optical microscopes by using glowing molecules to peer inside tiny components of life.

• Their breakthroughs, starting in the 1990s, have enabled scientists to study diseases such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s at a molecular level, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.

•  “Due to their achievements the optical microscope can now peer into the nanoworld,” the academy said, giving the 8 million-kronor ($1.1 million) award jointly to the three scientists.

Nobel Prize 2014(Literature)

•  Patrick Modiano of France, whose work focuses on the Nazi occupation and its effect on his country, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

•  The Swedish Academy gave the 8 million kronor ($1.1 million) prize to Modiano “for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation.”

•  Modiano, 69, whose novel “Missing Person” won the prestigious Prix Goncourt in 1978 was born in a west Paris suburb two months after World War II ended in Europe in July 1945.

•  Jewishness, the Nazi occupation and loss of identity are recurrent themes in his novels, which include 1968’s “La Place de l’Etoile” later hailed in Germany as a key Post—Holocaust work.

•  Modiano owes his first big break to a friend of his mother’s, French writer Raymond Queneau, who first introduced him to the Gallimard publishing house when he was in his early twenties.

•  Modiano, who lives in Paris, is known to shun media, and rarely accords interviews. In 2012, he won the Austrian State Prize for European Literature. Canadian writer Alice Munro won the literature prize last year.

Nobel Peace Prize 2014

•  KailashSatyarthi, 60-year-old child rights activist from Madhya Pradesh, and MalalaYousafzai, who has risked her life to wage a campaign for girls’ education in Pakistan, are the joint winners of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize.

•  “It is an important point for a Hindu and a Muslim, an Indian and a Pakistani, to join in a common struggle for education and extremism,” the Norwegian Nobel Committee said. They were chosen for the prize for “their struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to education.”

•  The Committee said Mr. Satyarthi, based in New Delhi, showed “great personal courage” and “maintaining Gandhi’s tradition, has headed various forms of protests and demonstrations, all peaceful, focusing on the grave exploitation of children for financial gain.”

• The peace prize winner has saved thousands of children from bonded labour in factories through the BachpanBachaoAndolan which he founded in 1980, and other organisations. On MalalaYousafzai, the Committee said, “Despite her youth, [she] has already fought for several years for the rights of girls to education, and has shown by example that children and young people, too, can contribute to improving their own situations.” Malala became a global symbol of the fight against extremism after she was shot by Taliban militants two years ago in Swat.

Selected Editorials of Importance

Issues of surrogacy

• With a range of alternative medical solutions to childlessness becoming available, surrogacy has emerged as one route for many couples. While some countries have banned the practice, commercial gestational surrogacy, in which a woman is paid to have a baby to whom she has no genetic link, has caught on in countries such as Mexico and India. After the first surrogate delivery in India in June 1994, India has steadily emerged as an international destination. Relatively inexpensive medical facilities, know-how in reproductive technology, and the availability of women, largely from poor socio-economic situations and who are willing to take up the task, have aided the growth.
   

• Today there are thousands of clinics in India that offer such services. From what was generally confined to close relatives or friends in altruistic mode, the network has become extended, with payment of money to surrogate mothers becoming the norm. Services are even being advertised. Such commercialisation of motherhood has raised ethical, philosophical, and social questions and raised fears of the exploitation of women as baby-producers, and the possibility of selective breeding. In several instances, complications have arisen regarding the interests and rights of the surrogate mother, child, and intending parents. Yet, there are no clear legal provisions in place yet. The Indian Council of Medical Research in 2005 issued guidelines for the accreditation, supervision and regulation of surrogacy clinics, but those remain on paper. An expert committee drafted the Assisted Reproductive Technologies (Regulation) Bill, 2010.
   

• The Union government is now set to table in Parliament the Assisted Reproductive Technologies (Regulation) Bill 2013. Letting single parents and foreign nationals to have children through surrogates in India is one issue in focus. The question relating to the citizenship of children born through an Indian surrogate and claimed by a foreign couple is one outstanding issue. Unscrupulous or mismanaged agencies could wreak havoc with lives. Many surrogacy agencies claim they are offering a legitimate service but in truth they operate in a grey area. The absence of appropriate legal provisions to ensure that surrogate mothers, who often enter into loosely drafted agreements with commissioning parents, do not become vulnerable is a serious issue. Right now, the surrogate mother could find herself with a child she did not plan for, should the clients change their mind. On the other hand, the big worry of the intending parents would be that the baby may not be handed over to them. A comprehensive regulatory framework and binding legal provisions could bring order to the field, but the larger moral question whether human reproduction should be commercialised would still remain.

(Courtesy: The Hindu)
MGNREGA much exploited, will go ahead with tweak: Govt

• Amidst opposition in several quarters to its plan to tweak the rural job scheme, NDA government asserted that it would go ahead with MGNREGA reforms as it charged that the flagship programme of the previous UPA regime “was allowed to be exploited for purely partisan purposes”.
   

• “The tendencies of acquiring easy money and using government funds for political party promotion could be curbed only when a spirited team of genuine and unbiased individuals is asked to look into the question of reforming MNREGA,” the government said.
  Citing various studies and excerpts of CAG reports on MGNREGA, it added, “What is urgently required is a thorough review of the scheme by independent organisations and individuals, essentially those who so far have never been involved with MoRD (Ministry of Rural Development) schemes.'
   

• A note prepared by the NitinGadkari-led MoRD said, “Unless an extremely likely network of interests is not broken, the real picture will not emerge.
   

• “Excerpts of CAG reports and critical studies, including those done during the UPA regime and presented at a conference called by the government, are an eye opener. These reports rarely find mention in MoRD documents.
   

• “These reports are testimony to the fact that the scheme was allowed to be exploited for purely partisan purposes in states like Andhra Pradesh,” it said.
   

• The government’s reiteration of its stand comes two days after several leading economists urged Prime Minister NarendraModi to not dilute the provisions of the rural employment guarantee programme, which provides economic security to millions of poor.
   

• However, the ministry said it was necessary for the scheme to be converted into “a popular movement aimed at zero-unemployment in villages”.
   

• “‘HamaraGaon-HamaraRojgar!–HamaraVikas!’, or similar slogans may inspire villagers to use the scheme to evolve a collective vision for their village and, in the process, eradicate unemployment completely. Unless this spirit is successfully inculcated, the schemewill continue to be yet another government programme where money is doled out. Since anyway it is easy money, all participating agencies and individuals consider nothing wrong in seeking personal benefits out of the same,” the ministry said.
   

• The government said in spite of clear evidence of rampant corruption at various places, the scheme continues to be presented as a successful scheme.
   

• “This perhaps is due to a solid network of vested interests involving political party functionaries, government officials, NGOs, research institutes and experts desirous of milking the scheme to their advantage,” it said.
   

• Stating that the scheme has earned “quite a bad name”, the note said that under it there was “lack of genuinely demand-driven implementation mechanism (and) non-transparent functional structure”.
   

• Also, it noted, there was “absolute lack of collectively thought-out development projects leading to complete delink between requirements of the village and the activities carried out under the scheme”.
   

• The ministry said that being part of a “right-based framework”, the scheme could also be effectively linked with skill development.

(Courtesy: The Indian express)
Respite on inflation

• The fall in consumer price index inflation to 6.46 per cent in September is significant for more reasons than one. First, it is the lowest inflation number since the start of the new CPI series from January 2012. Second, this is the fourth successive month when CPI inflation has ruled below 8 per cent, which is the Reserve Bank of India’s target for January 2015. The latest drop, from 7.73 per cent in August, is indeed rather sharp and takes the inflation rate closer to the RBI’s 6 per cent target for January 2016. Third, the decline has taken place notwithstanding a somewhat deficient south-west monsoon and poorly distributed rainfall, both spatially as well as temporally. This probably suggests that the fall we are seeing is real. The fact that inflation based on the wholesale price index has dipped to 2.38 per cent in September — a 59-month low — is only further confirmation of what appears a clear trend.

• It is another matter, however, whether the RBI believes that inflationary pressures have receded enough to justify interest rate cuts. The central bank may well take the position that the current decline is not structural, but flows out of the ‘base effect’ of higher inflation during this time last year. But there is one thing the RBI must take into account: global crude prices, which have touched about $85 a barrel (Indian basket) from the over $105 levels three months back. This, along with a stable rupee, has enabled oil marketing companies to reduce retail petrol prices and possibly repeat the same for diesel in the coming days. The impact of this in tempering the public’s inflationary expectations is not small. The RBI also cannot be oblivious to a developing global bear market in most agri-commodities, which again provides reasonable insulation from renewed inflationary pressures back home.

• It is an opportune time for the Centre and the RBI to engage in a dialogue on a monetary policy framework that balances inflation control with growth promotion objectives. Ideally, it is the Centre that should specify an inflation target for the RBI; at the same time, the latter should have the full freedom to set interest rates or employ other monetary measures to achieve the same. Now, it is the RBI that decides on both the inflation target as well as policy rates without really factoring in growth concerns. We have clearly reached a point where industrial growth at 0.4 per cent should worry our policymakers more than retail inflation at below 6.5 per cent, and possibly heading lower. The Centre must use the opportunity from falling world crude prices to rationalise fuel subsidies and show its seriousness about fiscal consolidation. This, by itself, should give the RBI sufficient reason to show greater monetary accommodation.
  (Courtesy: Business line)

Challenge to mainstream parties

• Maybe not much should be made of a first-time entry to the Westminster Parliament by a party that was until recently seen as being on the political fringe. Even so, the by-election win last week by the U.K. Independence Party (Ukip) of Nigel Farage says something about the surge in support for the far-right anti-European Union (EU) parties beyond the May 2014 elections to the European Parliament. Equally, it marks an important moment in the steady undermining of the political centre in Britain by the mainstream parties — a space that is increasingly occupied by anti-immigrant and anti-EU forces. As with Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Front in France and the Danish People’s Party in Denmark, Ukip emerged on top in Britain, capturing 24 seats in the Strasbourg legislature and 27.5 per cent of the vote. Other radical right-wing parties also managed to pull their weight, ranking third in Finland, Austria, The Netherlands and Greece. Germany’s anti-euro party, launched in 2013, won seats in the EU Parliament; it also has a presence in three German states. Now, the former Conservative Member of Parliament, Douglas Carswell, clinched the Clacton-on-Sea win for Ukip, and the party came a menacingly close second in a Greater Manchester seat against the Labour party. A third by-election may be called soon, following another defection by a Conservative. The outcome is a pointer to the political uncertainties ahead of the country’s next general elections some 200 days away.
   

• The latest results have triggered intense speculation on whether it is the Tories or Labour that would be hurt the most by a further consolidation of Ukip at the hustings. Mr. Farage is already trumpeting the outcome as a sign that his party is the real alternative the voters crave for. Having abandoned their traditional right-wing position for a hardline anti-immigrant and anti-EU stance over the years, the Conservatives are faced with Ukip wooing the same constituency. The loudest voices right through their current term with the Liberal Democrats has been those of the Tory back-benchers. They have pushed Prime Minister David Cameron to the point of promising an in or out referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union. Earlier in 2009, he led the British Conservatives out of the centre-right bloc — the European People’s Party — in the European Parliament. It is quite a contrast to the view spelt out by the Conservative Prime Minister Winston Churchill, when he invoked the idea of a united states of Europe in his famous 1946 University of Zurich speech. The general drift of things is not in a direction Britain’s businesses would be happy with. Labour in election mode is not likely to engage the forces hostile to integration.

(Courtesy: The Indian express)
Pakistan, 1971

• Every year, December 16 is observed in Pakistan as a moment of morose stocktaking, in which India is held responsible for the break-up of Pakistan in 1971. However,over the years,the Pakistani media has taken to mixing the message. It now balances the short-term culpability of India with the long-term culpability of Pakistan.
   

• This year,the familiar pattern was disturbed by the hanging of a Jamaat-e-Islami (Bangladesh) leader,AbdulQuaderMollah,for “war crimes” including the rape and slaughter of women, while he opposed the “war of liberation” for the new state of Bangladesh.
  As the NGOs protest at the way Mollah was punished, the world has accepted the hanging. The Islamabad foreign office pointed to the violation of human rights in the “war crimes” tribunal, but called it an internal matter for Bangladesh. The Pakistani parliament, though, decided to condemn the hanging through a non-unanimous but bitterly-worded resolution that has not been taken kindly by Dhaka.
   

• The Jamaat-e-Islami Pakistan — having recently won back Taliban and al-Qaeda protection — flexed its street muscle by protesting against the hanging of a man it feels affiliated to. It rightly expected the parliament to bend in deference to this new “empowerment”. But the media in Pakistan has mixed the message more than usual this time. The “secret” HamoodurRehman Commission report on the atrocities committed by the Pakistan army in East Pakistan in 1971 has been taken out of the state’s closet of collective conscience and quoted to great effect.
   

• Unread books by honest military officers are now being quoted to the embarrassment of the Jamaat, which had thought the battle for its new leg-up had been won after the Mollah hanging. What Pakistan is still forgetting is the fundamental critique of its conduct towards East Pakistan contained in a book by senior bureaucrat, HasanZaheer — The Separation of East Pakistan (1994). In this,linguistic nationalism was more properly understood as the element which alienated the Bengali Muslim from the West Pakistani Muslim.
   

• The idea of imposing Urdu on East Pakistan was born in the mind of a non-Bengali education secretary of East Pakistan,F.A. Karim, who was able to convince a dimwit Bengali central education minister in Karachi,FazlurRehman, to adopt it. It also caught the imagination of the governor of East Pakistan,MalikFeroz Khan Noon, not the brightest son of Punjab. He started the scheme of writing Bengali in the Arabic script. By 1952,there were 21 centres doing this in East Pakistan, funded by the central education ministry. The East Pakistan chief minister didn’t even know that this was happening outside the primary school stream.
   

• Zaheer writes: “Such was the insensitivity of the ruling party to popular issues that the East Pakistan Muslim League Council also recommended Arabic as the state language. This was not acceptable even to the West Pakistan intelligentsia.” What happened to the Muslim League in East Pakistan in the years that followed is history.

(Courtesy: Business line)
Not so Nobel record

• KailashSatyarthi has done the country proud by bagging a Nobel Prize for his untiring crusade against child labour. But that still leaves a nagging question: Why does India, with its army of engineers and doctors, bag so few science Nobels? Unlike the Nobel awards for literature and peace, excellence in science (and economics, for that matter) is linked to a country’s quality of education. VenkataramanRamakrishnan, who bagged the Chemistry Nobel in 2009, was only the fourth scientist of Indian origin after CV Raman, HargobindKhurana and S Chandrashekhar to be awarded the Prize in about 80 years. That tells a story. We have killed the basic sciences in our pursuit of applied science courses, only to be left with many mediocre engineers who would prefer being marketing managers. The only hope for science education lies in reversing this bias against basic science. The opening of five Institutes of Science Education and Research (IISER) since 2006 is welcome, but more are needed. Besides, the entrance exam for the IISERs is the same as that for the IITs (the IIT-JEE), reinforcing the prevailing bias in favour of ‘technology’ courses. After the top few make it to the IITs, the rest qualify for the IISERs. These institutes, however, confront a major problem: the wall between science teaching and research, even as each needs the other to survive.
   

• Unwilling to take on cussed university bureaucracies, the government created separate research institutes such as the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, National Physical Laboratory and National Chemical Laboratory while leaving teaching to the universities. Today, both university science departments and research establishments are in bad shape. It is worth considering whether some of these research bodies have outlived their utility. They have created a science bureaucracy that frustrates talent. Foreign and domestic private players should be permitted to set up IISER-like institutes. The same holds true for opening pure science colleges as part of universities. Science teaching should be thrown open to foreign faculty. This will challenge the lethargy and power of vested interests in academia, creating an enabling atmosphere for researchers and teachers, who may otherwise explore options in the US and Europe.
   

• Institutions such as IISER should be located in a university ambience, which offers courses in social sciences and the humanities. That our universities are unable to offer a flexible combination of subjects, as in the US, suggests that they need to be exposed to competition. Creativity and insight flows from a holistic and dynamic approach to learning. But for these changes to occur, a change in social attitudes is called for. The government should popularise careers in science teaching and research, blunting the craze for engineering courses. We need better teachers to produce top scientists – like Ramakrishnan’s professors at Baroda University. Also, universities that offer both physical infrastructure and a creative ambience that can make for that ‘Eureka’ moment.

Fuelling reform

• It was a long-awaited reform measure but when the Narendra Modi government eventually deregulated diesel pricing on Saturday, the timing, in the backdrop of falling global oil prices, was just perfect. With oil companies wiping off the under-recoveries on diesel and going into surplus, the government could sweet-coat what is essentially a bitter pill with a cut in retail price of the transportation fuel. While consumers may rejoice over the benefit now, they need to be conscious of the fact that when the wheel of global oil prices turns into an up-cycle once again, the domestic retail price of diesel will go up. That is also when the government’s commitment to the reform measure will be tested. In a deregulated regime, oil companies will adjust diesel prices at periodic intervals to reflect the prevailing international price of oil, just as they do now in the case of petrol. This is as it should be. Subsidies, including on diesel, have been exerting tremendous pressure on government finances, leading to a widening fiscal deficit. The 2014-15 Budget had projected a subsidy burden of Rs.2,46,000 crore, of which petroleum subsidy accounted for Rs.63,500 crore. Thanks to falling oil prices in the last few months and deregulation of diesel now, the petroleum subsidy is expected to be substantially lower than the budgeted level, thus easing the burden on the fisc.
   

• The Modi government has also done well in deciding to deposit the subsidy on cooking gas directly into the bank accounts of consumers. The government should do the same for kerosene subsidy as well given that leakages are the highest there, but only after ensuring that no deserving recipient is left out. The new Jan Dhan accounts could be used for this purpose. With petroleum subsidies now being addressed, the focus should shift to reducing fertilizer subsidy, which is about the same quantum as that on petroleum. Meanwhile, in the other major announcement on Saturday, the government finally addressed the contentious issue of domestic gas pricing which has been hanging in the balance since the start of this year. The formula has been tweaked to curtail the increase envisaged under the Rangarajan formula by over two-thirds thus containing the final base price to $5.61 per million metric British thermal unit. The government has done well in granting a premium to gas produced in ultra-deep water, deep-water and technologically challenging areas as production costs will be high but the fine print that provides details on premium calculation has to be read closely before a final assessment is made. The point, ultimately, is to balance the interests of consumers who desire the cheapest price, and of producers who would want their costs covered fully and topped by a decent margin.

(Courtesy: The Hindu)
Slow arm of the law

• The Securities and Exchange Board of India’s decision to bar real estate giant DLF and its top management from transacting in stocks and raising funds from the stock market is significant for who it took on. When the regulator takes on heavyweights, it helps reinforce the trust of small investors in the market’s supervisory mechanism. That said, it must be noted that the order has come seven years after a complaint was filed in 2007, which was before the company’s initial public offer that raised ₹9,187 crore. Thanks to a cumbersome process that involved a sequence of appeals, stays and rulings, we have been left with an order that a company was guilty of suppressing material information during its IPO, well after the event is over. Had such an order been issued even a year after the public offer, it might have enabled investors to sell the stock at more than double the price at which it is trading now. The legal process took longer in the even more recent case of the employee of Tata Finance who was found guilty of executing illegal transactions in various stocks. It was 12 years before SEBI could close the case.
   

• Is the punishment meted out to DLF and its owners inadequate considering the magnitude of the offence? While preventing fundraising for three years will hurt any company severely, particularly one that has accumulated a mountain of debt, the question is whether it is enough to deter others from similar misdoings. Around
   

• 4,600 crore of public money is currently locked in the shares of DLF. By allegedly suppressing vital information, the company is regarded as having led those who invested in the company astray. It is to be noted that the Tata Finance employee — whose offence was of a much smaller magnitude — was slapped with a similar ban.
   

• Although SEBI has been silent about the role of the investment bankers in the DLF issue, the order underlines the importance of vetting public issues with the utmost diligence; after all, it is the responsibility of the lead manager to ensure that all material facts are disclosed in the prospectus. While hauling up a number of companies in 2010 for IPO-related offences, SEBI had banned investment bankers involved with the issues from capital market-related activities. The investor community has only the information disclosed in the prospectus to base its decisions upon. It would be a start to demand that companies write at least a section of the prospectus in a manner that the lay investor can understand — in prose that is direct, comprehensible and stripped of legalese.

(Courtesy: Business line)

Nuclear disaster: Control rooms with no bosses, hotline turned cold

• They know it’s the last thing of beauty they might ever see: long beds of ramphool flowers scattered across the countryside, their long stalks bending in the wind. For years now, 1,149 first-responders stationed amidst the flowers, at the National Disaster Relief Force base at Sudumbare near Pune, have trained each day for the most horrific kind of industrial accident imaginable: a disaster at the Tarapur Atomic Power Station, Maharashtra.
   

• After years of learning about events from Chernobyl to Fukushima, the men know this: although the odds of a disaster are very, very low, the unimaginable extracts unimaginable costs.
   

• Two basic principles will be key to saving thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of lives: timely detection of the radioactive leak and swift evacuation of people from wind-borne radioactive cloud which will follow.
   

• Led by Alok Avasthy, the NDRF’s 5 Battalion has trained for a decade to deal with CBRN events — short for chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear. “If you place us at the spot at the right time, we are confident that we are going to fix the situation,” Avasthy says. The “if” is a carefully considered one.

Dysfunctional system

• THE 5 Battalion has been called to help in all kinds of disasters over the years — landslides, floods, building collapses, etc. It has always had to get there by road. In spite of extensive correspondence with NDRF headquarters, and subsequent communication between the NDRF and the Ministry of Home Affairs, there’s no hotline that would allow the Battalion to immediately call in air support. The NDRF’s director, as first reported by The Indian Express earlier in this series, has no power to requisition helicopters or aircraft.
   

• In 2011, fatigued and frustrated by the distance between cities and their base, and in an effort to multiply force, the battalion with specialised skills and equipment began picking men from the State Response Police Force for training. Those men, though, have been committed back to law and order duties, dispersed across various units.
   

• “The idea was to strengthen our CBRN response in mega cities,” says Avasthy. “Around 1,100 police personnel were trained in the best of grounds and with the best equipment and mock situations. I do not know where they have vanished today.”

Courtesy: (The Indian express)
Melting glaciers, changing climate

• At dawn, MohdSoheb begins an arduous trek to the high camp at ChhotaShigri glacier in the PirPanjal range in Spiti valley, Himachal Pradesh. From the PWD guesthouse at ChotaDara, he walks down to the Chandra river where he travels across in a small iron crate using an ingenious system of pulleys to the base camp at about 3,850 metres set up by the Jawaharlal Nehru University’s (JNU) School of Environmental Sciences.
   

• From the camp, the snout of the glacier located at about 4,050 metres, looks deceptively close but actually requires a two hour climb over moraine. Covered by a sheet of dirty ice, it is almost blocked by stones but has a clear stream flowing from it which meets the river downstream at ChotaDara. Soheb will go ahead to 4,800 metres, to the high camp from where he will be carrying out studies. Steam drills are carried all the way up to dig into the snow and ice to place bamboo stakes up to 10 metres deep for measuring melting at intervals after the snout of the glacier.
   

•  About 100 km from Manali, the glacier is relatively accessible, but for students like Soheb doing his M.Phil in glacier studies, the hardest part is getting there. The five-hour drive from Manali over non-existent roads is bone crushing and then the climbing over moraine filled with giant boulders. What is more challenging is measuring the winter snow accumulation, also called winter balance, just when the snow starts melting in late May, Soheb says. Last year he, along with other researchers, walked 30 km to reach the glacier since the area was snowed under and the roads were not open.
   

• Glaciology, therefore, is not for the faint-hearted. JNU solved the issue of trained human resources by launching a programme from 2013 under a Department of Science and Technology (DST)- Indo-Swiss capacity building programme for budding glaciologists, training nearly 30 persons for advanced research in Himalayan glaciology. ChhotaShigri is one of the earliest glaciers in the country to be studied since 1986 as part of the Himalayan Glaciology Research Programme by DST. This was discontinued in 1989.

Mass balance study

• Dr. Pottakkal George Jose, scientist at JNU and now part of the DST’s renewed project on ChhotaShigri glacier, says the idea of starting mass balance studies, which is the most accurate way of measuring glacier melt, was mooted in 2002. He explains that it is a benchmark glacier and is among the very few in the country that are being studied on a long-term basis with data on mass balance. Mass balance is the difference between the amount of ice gained by a glacier in winter and the amount lost in summer. A glacier which is gaining mass has a positive mass balance: more ice is added in the winter than is lost in the summer. A negative mass balance indicates that the glacier is losing mass. ChhotaShigri glacier met most of the benchmark requirements for the study.
   

• A Status Report on the ChhotaShigri glacier in 2011 says that, “Apart from helping us to unravel the past climate, understanding the dynamics of Himalayan glaciers has their applicability in the environmental appraisal and mitigation of hazards like avalanches, lake outbursts, etc. in high altitude regions of the Himalayas.” Glacier snout position is the simplest indicator of glacier advance or retreat over a period of time which generally happens due to climatic fluctuations. Studies on Machoi, Sonapani, Bara Shigri and ChhotaShigri have been carried out by the Geological Survey of India (GSI), the Report says and the snout of the ChhotaShigri glacier has been found retreating in recent times.

(Courtesy: The Indian Express)
MGNREGA is unwell

• India’s 2005 Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) creates a justiciable “right to work” by promising up to 100 days of wage employment per year to all rural households whose adult members volunteer to do unskilled manual work. Employment is provided in public works projects at a stipulated wage.
   

• The Central government proposes to allow a greater share of the cost of projects under the scheme to go to skilled labour and materials. The mandatory share for unskilled wages will fall from 60 per cent to 51 per cent. It is also proposed that the MGNREGA be focused on backward areas only.
   

• These changes will not solve the main problems with the scheme, which relate to effective implementation on the ground, most importantly in India’s poorest areas.

• In a book published recently, Right to Work?, my coauthors and I studied how the scheme was working across India, but chose to focus especially on one state, Bihar, which is simultaneously one of the poorest states and has the lowest participation in the scheme.
   

• Under the idealised conditions that the MGNREGA’s founders had in mind, we find that the scheme would have a large impact on rural poverty in Bihar, bringing the poverty rate in 2010 down by at least 14 percentage points.
   

• However, reality falls far short of this ideal. We estimate that the actual impact on the poverty rate was around 1 percentage point. A specially-designed survey of 3,000 households across all of rural Bihar was used to make this calculation and to understand this disappointing performance. Along with extensive discussions in the field, we learnt a lot about how the scheme might work better.
   

• A fundamental problem is that poor families are not getting the work they want on the scheme, and they are often not getting the full wages due to them. Their participation is far from costless — many have to give up some other income-earning activity when they take up work. But the unmet demand for work is the single most important factor in accounting for the gap between actual performance and the scheme’s potential impact on poverty.
   

• Our study also found very low public awareness about what needs to be done to obtain work. We used a randomised control trial of a specially-designed fictional (and entertaining) movie to show how knowledge of rights and processes can be enhanced. The movie was effective in raising awareness. But it had little discernible effect on actions such as seeking employment when needed. The reason is supply-side constraints on the ground, at the local level.
   

(Courtesy: Business line)
The myth of coal availability

Failures are the pillars of success, we were taught in school. However, one doubts whether the NarendraModi government has taken any lessons from the failures of the former UPA government with regard to pushing up the country’s coal production. Last month, coal and power minister PiyushGoyal unveiled a grand plan to mitigate India’s fuel crisis, a legacy of the Manmohan Singh government. Goyal wants the national miner, Coal India Ltd (CIL), to add 500 million tonnes capacity in the next four years so as to ensure round-the-clock electricity supply for all. Arguably, the target set by the minister is stiffer than the Prime Minister’s expectation of a 10 per cent compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) in coal production during the period. Goyal is not the first one to have held out such tall hopes.

Hyping up output

The UPA predicted 9 per cent CAGR in fuel production during the Eleventh Plan (2007-12) to ensure “power for all”. Coal India was mandated to produce 520 million tonnes of fuel in 2012. Captive production was expected to reach 111 million tonnes. What actually happened is history.

CIL’s output is expected touch 500 million tonnes this year. Captive miners (almost all of whom were de-allocated by the Supreme Court in September) are barely producing 40 million tonnes of coal — 64 per cent short of the 2012 target. Industry has blamed regulatory and administrative hurdles for the wide gap between targeted and actual output. The UPA blamed the inefficiencies of CIL as the prime reason for the fuel crisis. Goyal is sticking to this line. An efficient CIL — he regrets — can add 100 million tonnes of production a year. Goyal is not entirely wrong. The utilisation ratio of dumpers and shovels used in CIL opencast mines, the mainstay of coal production in India, is around half the optimal levels — a clear reminder that the miner is not producing to its potential.

CIL’s unionisedlabour force, earning between ₹25,000 to ₹65,000 a month, is not as productive as it should be. Its managers are expected to follow elaborate procedures, causing delays in decision making. Last but not the least, all-pervasive corruption, driven by insatiable demand for ‘favours’ from politicians, is taking a toll on performance. Ideally, private miners could tackle this part better. But they too failed to leave a mark. Captive production grew by merely 5 million tonnes in the last four years, implying there are other reasons behind the fuel crisis.

Land factor

The discussion on structural reasons that have affected public and private sector miners in equal measure, usually veers towards regulatory issues, especially ‘green hurdles’. The fact is that green norms has been rightly tightened in the last decade (and should be tightened further). But the inordinate delay in green clearances needs to be reduced. Increasing use of digital technology will reduce the scope of some corrupt forest officials to take subjective decisions. But that does not mean one can develop mines as quickly as in Australia or Africa. Because, India is populous. And, the conciliatory framework (as in Forest Rights Act) is now stronger than ever.

Unfortunately, there is no solution in sight in addressing the crucial issue of land availability. Unlike other industries where land requirement is fixed; a miner needs expansion almost on a daily basis, to maintain production. A small 4 million tonnes per annum (mtpa) open-cast mine, with a mine-face (width) of one km, moves ahead by 50 metres a year, in Odisha.

The land requirement may be three to six times more in Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra, respectively, for producing the same amount of fuel, due to the lower thickness of coal seam and a lopsided stripping ratio (ratio of overburden to coal). Assuming a hypothetical 1:2 stripping ratio, a back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests CIL needs 2,200 hectares of land (five times the size of the relocated Singur Nano facility) every year, to maintain the current opencast production of 426 million tonnes

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