About 5.5 million babies (around 3 million neonates + 2.6 million stil-births) die every year globally. Every day, about 8,000 neonates die and about 7, 000 are stillbirths. Stillbirths occur at about 28 weeks of gestation and also during labor. Nearly half of all stillbirths are those who die during labour- just 5 minutes before birth.

Five countries account for half of all the newborn mortality across the world. These are:

1. India (highest): 7,79,000 deaths
2. Nigeria: 2,76,000
3. Pakistan: 2,02,400
4. China: 1,57,000
5. Democratic Republic of Congo: 1,18,000

While significant achievement has been made in reducing the number of deaths in children aged under-five by half, the progress in bringing down the number of newborn deaths has been slower.

The progress is even worse in the case of stillbirths. Stillbirths are not counted in the Millennium Development Goals.

What is shocking is that most of the 2.6 million stillbirths every year across the globe go unrecorded as in most countries stillbirths do not get birth or death certificates, which makes these births and deaths “invisible”.

How will climate change affect livelihoods in South Asia?

How does a warming environment affect rainfall, cropping patterns, livelihoods? What could be the alternatives that people whose livelihoods are hit by the effects of climate change do to cope? An initiative by Britain and Canada seeks to study and tackle the effects of climate change in South Asia, in tandem with TERI and Jadavpur University in India and similar institutes in neighbouring Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Canada's International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and the UK's Department for International Development (DFID) have launched a research programme to "take a fresh approach to understanding climate change and find ways to adapt" in some of the hot spots.

The programme, named Collaborative Adaptation Research Initiative in Africa and Asia (CARIAA), a seven-year Canadian dollar 70 million research initiative, seeks to study the effects of climate change in three hot spots — semi-arid regions, river deltas and Himalayan river basins.

K S Murali, senior programme officer with IDRC, told IANS: "We try to understand what are the different scenarios that can happen with one degree rise in temperature, with a two-degree rise in temperature."

In semi-arid regions, for example in Madhya Pradesh, where there is relatively high temperature and the rainfall hovers between 300-700 mm a year, rise in temperature can badly hit cropping patterns, said the researcher.

Semi-arid areas are dominated generally by dry land and agriculture is rain fed, or dependent on rainfall. "If the rain becomes erratic, or the area receives less rain, or it is not distributed equally, the cropping pattern is affected badly and cultivation is hit. Not just the summer temperature, the winter temperature too gets affected, and there is high rate of evaporation," he said.

The effects of climate change on river deltas, where the river meets the sea, and coastal estuaries are also to be studied. This includes the Sundarbans mangrove forest shared between India and Bangladesh.

Estuaries have very high productivity in the form of marine life and support the ecosystem.

"There is fear that climate change will lead to rise in sea temperature and in sea levels, which could lead to submergence of small islands over time. This could affect the Sundarbans too," he added.

Climate change would also affect another hot spot - the Himalayan river basins.

The Ganga and Brahmaputra rivers would be affected by snow melting. High temperatures will make the glacier snow melt faster. This will lead to more water flowing down the river, leading to flooding. The faster disappearance of glaciers is also of concern," he added.

"We try to understand how a degree rise in temperature can affect the hydrology of mountain rivers, the flow of the Ganga and the Brahmaputra. This will help predict river flow, how it will affect cropping and productivity and what alternatives can be offered to the locals," he said.

According to Murali, IDRC and DFID along with the partner organizations in the area try to address the climate change issues in tandem with the local people, the local communities, NGOs and policy makers. "Our aim is to benefit the people in solving the situation."

The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) of India is involved in the study of climate change in Himalayan river basins. The Jadavpur University is involved in the study of deltas, while the Indian Institute for Human Settlements is working in the field of semi-arid areas. These institutes are working in partnership with institutes in Bangladesh and Pakistan to address the issues of climate change.

Does corruption influence voter choice?

There is overwhelming consensus that the Congress-led UPA has performed poorly in this election owing to charges of massive corruption at the highest level, besides lack of leadership and the government’s inability to control price rise. Political commentators and the BJP-led NDA made repeated references during election campaigns to the coal scam, the 2G spectrum allocation scam, the commonwealth games (CWG) scam and the Adarsh Housing scam among others. But the BJP too faced its own share of trouble — among other accusations, Narendra Modi’s government in Gujarat was alleged to be favouring the Adani business group and Nitin Gadkari was alleged to be involved with the Purti group. Notwithstanding the campaign rhetoric, however, the issue of corruption does not matter in the way commentators and political parties think it does.

Knowledge of scams
This is not to say that voters in India do not care about corruption. There is a crucial difference in how voters think about corruption and how political parties and leaders represent this issue in their campaigns. Voters care more about the corruption they encounter on an everyday basis, whereas parties make the issue a spectacle.

In our view, big-ticket corruption does not determine electoral outcomes in India for two important reasons. First, a large proportion of the electorate has never heard of the corruption scams that occupy newspaper headlines and prime-time television space. In July 2013 (tracker I poll), Lokniti-CSDS contacted more than 18,000 citizens and found that awareness among the general public on scams such as 2G and coalgate was quite low. Only half of the sampled respondents said that they had heard of the coal scam; 40 per cent knew of the 2G scam. For all other scams, less than a third of the citizens reported that they had heard of them. Not surprisingly, the awareness of all of these scams is much lower among women, the poor and respondents residing in rural areas.

Second, did knowledge of a scam influence which party a citizen preferred? The 2013 tracker poll had asked respondents whom they would vote for in the elections. We estimated a statistical model that would asses whether a respondent’s knowledge of the scams would influence which party he/she preferred, after controlling his/her demographic characteristics (age, gender, caste, religion, economic class and locality of the respondent, and his/her exposure to the media.) We found that there was no statistically significant influence of the knowledge of scams on the respondent’s preference for the the two main parties — the Congress and the BJP.

The table shows that the likelihood of a voter preferring the Congress remained almost the same whether or not he/she had heard of the party’s involvement in scams. Those who had heard of the scams were a little more likely to vote for the BJP but the difference in the probability of a voter voting for the BJP after hearing about the scams is no more than 10 per cent (and that too only for the CWG scam) and does not pass the threshold of statistical significance. In layman’s terms, the difference in the probability of a voter voting for the BJP after hearing of a scam and one opting for the BJP without having any knowledge of a scam is zero.

Local-level corruption
Why do these scams have no bearing on vote choice? In our view, this is because it is the corruption of local-level institutions which matters more to voters. In the State of the Nation survey conducted in January 2009, respondents were asked if it was possible to get work done in a government office if the work was legitimate and if one had all the documents. Only one in every five respondents said yes. The others said that despite having all the documents, even for legitimate work one needed to either know someone important, pay a bribe, or both. Similarly, data from the State of the Nation survey (2011) show that people are much more concerned with the everyday corruption they face while interacting with local-level state institutions — the police, Block Development Officers etc. It is extremely difficult for a voter to use this local-level corruption as the basis for casting his/her vote. Since most local-level corruption cases are directly linked to state officials and are not directly linked to any particular party, corruption is not an issue on which voters discriminate while exercising their franchise.

Scientists have created a new material- ‘Triazine-based Graphitic Carbon Nitride‘ (TGCN) similar to Graphene, which has the potential to improve transistors used in electronic devices. Though TGCN was predicted theoretically in 1996, but this is the first time that it has been created.

Graphene is one atom thick, strong and conducts heat and electricity highly efficiently. The new TGCN material is also two-dimensional, but it has an electronic band gap, making it potentially suitable for use in transistors.

Normally, Transistors are made of costly silicon that produces heat when used in electronic devices. There has been a search for a material that is carbon-based and that has the electronic band gap needed for use as a semiconductor.

Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) began drilling its first-ever well in the Palar basin at Chinnapuliyur village near Gummidipoondi, about 55 km from Chennai, on Sunday.

The exploratory well is to be drilled to a depth of 2,000 metres in four months.

Addressing the ONGC employees at the site, Narendra K. Verma, Director (Exploration) said the ONGC had already “opened” (explored for hydrocarbons) six out of seven sedimentary basins in India. The Palar basin was the seventh.

The basin, covering an area of 1,800 sq.km., was sandwiched between the two petroleum-bearing Krishna-Godavari and Cauvery basins. There was no reason, therefore, why the Palar basin should be devoid of hydrocarbons, he said. “The seismic surveys have given us a new hope that there will be significant columns of hydrocarbons in the Palar basin.”

In Mr. Verma’s assessment, the ONGC was passing through an “exciting phase” but it faced a lot of challenges. Its production stood at 52 million tonnes of oil and gas a year “but it is not good enough.” Its production should double by 2030. So “hilly areas and frontier areas” would be tackled in the company’s quest to find oil and gas, he added.

B.S. Josyulu, Executive Director and Basin Manager, Cauvery, ONGC, said his team would complete drilling the Chinnapuliyur well and another well (seven km away) in six months. There were limitations on the seismic data because of “logistics” and a lot of industries were situated in the block. Dr. Josyulu was, however, confident that “we will reap a rich harvest from this exploratory well.”

The block called PR-ONN-2005/1, where Chinnapuliyur is located, was a joint venture with the ONGC and Tata Petrodyne Limited (TPL). Twenty per cent stake in the block belonged to the TPL, he said.

Sushma Swaraj on Tuesday became the first woman External Affairs Minister, in yet another first for the 62-year-old BJP leader.

Apart from having the distinction of becoming the youngest cabinet minister in Haryana government at the age of 25, Ms. Swaraj has also many other firsts such as being the first woman Chief Minister of Delhi and woman spokesperson for any political party in the country.

Ms. Swaraj has also been given the charge of Overseas Indian Affairs.

Ms. Swaraj is assuming the charge of the Foreign Ministry, one of the senior-most offices in the Union Cabinet, at a time when India’s growing international influence gives it a prominent voice in global affairs even as issues in the region keep the largest democracy busy.

Ties with Pakistan and China are some of the perennial challenges for Indian foreign policy practitioners.

Incidentally, the MEA also has a woman Foreign Secretary Sujatha Singh.

In 1977, at 25 years of age, Ms. Swaraj became the youngest-ever cabinet minister. She held the education portfolio in Haryana.

In 1979, she became the state president of the BJP in Haryana. She was also the first woman spokesperson for any political party in India and won the Outstanding Parliamentarian Award.

Ms. Swaraj, a law graduate who practised in the Supreme Court, has been elected seven times as a Member of Parliament and three times as a Member of the Legislative Assembly.

She began her political career with RSS student wing ABVP in the 1970s. Member of the Haryana Assembly from 1977 to 1982 from Ambala Cantonment, she was sworn in as a Cabinet Minister in the Devi Lal government.

She was Cabinet Minister for Information and Broadcasting during the 13-day Atal Bihari Vajpayee Government in 1996.

She resigned from the Cabinet in the next Vajpayee regime to take over as the first woman Chief Minister of Delhi in October 1998.

The WHO’s Emergency Committee for MERS-CoV has raised concerns about the sharp surge in the number of ‘Middle East Respiratory Syndrome CoronaVirus’(MERS-CoV) cases since March 2014. The sharp increase has been seen particularly in Saudi Arabia and in the United Arabian Emirates. The Emergency Committee has advised a number of measures to be urgently taken, including better national policies for infection prevention and control in healthcare facilities.

Since the virus was first detected in humans 2 years back, a total of 152 people have now died and 495 have been confirmed to have contracted the virus in Saudi Arabia. Recently, cases have also been reported from Egypt, Greece, Malaysia, Philippines, and the U.S. in which infected individuals had travelled there from the Middle East.

Although it is known that the virus is widespread in camels in the Middle East and north-east Africa, it is yet to be ascertained how transmission from animals to humans takes place. As MERS-CoV causes mostly respiratory disease in humans, the common thinking is that such transmission takes place via a respiratory route.