ALBEDO OF EARTH (geo)

When sunlight reaches the Earth’s surface, some of it is absorbed and some is reflected. The relative amount (ratio) of light that a surface reflects compared to the total incoming sunlight is called albedo. Surfaces with high albedos include sand, snow and ice, and some urban surfaces, such as concrete or light-colored stone. Surfaces with low albedos include forests, the ocean, and some urban surfaces, such as asphalt.
Albedo is important to Earth scientists because it plays a significant role in our planet’s average surface temperature. When a surface reflects incoming sunlight, it sends the energy back to space, where it doesn’t affect temperature or climate. When a surface absorbs light, however, solar energy is turned into heat. If the surface is snow or ice, it may melt; otherwise, the surface’s temperature rises.
A surface’s albedo may change depending on the angle of the incoming sunlight and the satellite’s viewing angle. These maps show the albedo that would be observed at each location at noon local solar time—in other words, as if the Sun were directly overhead at every location.
In addition, the same surface may not have the same albedo for all wavelengths of light. Consider leaves: they look green because they are reflecting a lot of the green wavelengths of light falling on them. So, they have a high albedo in green wavelengths. But we know they are absorbing other wavelengths of visible light for photosynthesis, so in those wavelengths (mostly red and blue), leaves have a low albedo. 

A force for tech-savviness

example of good policing

Bangalore police is trying not to let its lack of numbers show.

It was a carefully crafted sting operation that could have been straight out of a movie. Early this month in Bangalore, some 700 undercover policemen, including 100 women, carried out an all-day operation on autorickshaw drivers. Posing by turn as Kannada, English and Hindi-speaking commuters, they tracked the responsiveness of drivers in a 15-hour long operation. The result: over 3,000 autorickshaw drivers were fined and 450 auto rickshaws seized for a variety of offences ranging from boorish behaviour and overcharging to refusal to ply to the commuter’s destination of choice. The scale, creativity and originality of the operation transformed what might have been a small-scale exploit into a full-fledged police feat.

Autorickshaws are a lifeline in Bangalore, whose public transport system consists of a crowded, inefficient bus service as well as a piecemeal metro rail system that is ineffectual because it only operates at two extreme ends of the city. So, the three-wheeled vehicle is often the only option for thousands of students and young workers, who use them to travel to their colleges or workplaces. By posing as Hindi- and English-speaking commuters, the Bangalore police exposed the travails of “outsiders” in dealing with auto drivers.

The raid gave the much-maligned Bangalore police force a reputation lift. Just weeks before, a young woman who refused to give in to the exorbitant fare demands of an autorickshaw driver had been soundly abused by him. Not to be cowed down, she had whipped out her smartphone and started filming the abusive driver, who then pushed and shoved her. The shaken woman’s Facebook entreaty went viral and inspired the police sting operation.

Following the auto raid, hundreds of residents took to social networks to stack praise on the police’s efforts to rein-in rogue auto drivers. “This operation made us non-Kannadigas feel that we belong in the city,” said one resident on a social networking site. “If this raid had happened earlier, I would not have bought a car,” said another. Commuters from cities like Gurgaon and Pune demanded that their police also embark on similar raids.

Bangalore Police rarely gets such a shower of eulogies. On the contrary it is flak, like when a member of the legislative assembly, Vijayanand Kashappanavar of the Congress, was caught on tape abusing and assaulting two policemen who — as is routine — started filming liquor being served to his party, without knowing his identity, at a ritzy downtown bar much past closing time.

Policing is an underappreciated job in Bangalore, where an inadequate force manages an ever-expanding city steadily swelling with an influx of immigrant workers, students and professionals. Its population is over 10 million but the city has a police force of 16,000, with some 3,000 vacancies at last count. Surprisingly, while the city has exploded both in population and size, the police force has shrunk. The city and its people are changing, policing is also changing and has become very challenging, said Raghavendra Auradkar, the city’s police commissionerin a recent speech. Solving crime and maintaining law and order is part of it, and the Bangalore police is also required to smoothen the city’s nightmarish traffic during peak hours. It is a mammoth task in an urban sprawl with over 5 million registered vehicles — one vehicle for every two residents. Hundreds of policemen position themselves at crowded intersections in neighbourhoods trying to untangle traffic snarls. It is backbreaking, 7-days-a-week work.

To compensate for low manpower, the force is taking to technology in a big way, making it the country’s most tech-savvy. The public can send complaints through multiple modes — text messages, emails or even a post on its official website. Its social networking pages have turned into handy tools to disseminate news of crime and warn the public about the modus operandi of criminals. Recently, a Facebook upload of an offender’s photo gave the police a direct lead to the accused, who stole luxury cars by posing as a buyer and pretending to take the cars on a test drive. Automated cameras at street junctions send feeds that are monitored at a central location, yielding video evidence to book hundreds of traffic offenders.

Later, the police reprised their role as stealth agents by duplicating the sting operation on the city’s cab drivers. Constables dressed in plain clothes pretending to be commuters booked no less than 8,000 cab drivers on a single day for offences including speeding and using mobile phones while driving. The operation earned the police a cool Rs 8.65 lakh in fines. The police strategy has sorted out, at least temporarily, the problem of errant auto and cab drivers. What the police force lacked in numbers, it seems to have made up with original thinking.

Governed by whim,removal of governors

The office of the governor has always been a subject of political controversy. Of course, a governor’s removal from office evokes greater controversy than her appointment. Traditionally, politicians who have become non-performing assets and bureaucrats who retired from top positions in government and who were particularly helpful to the ruling dispensation have been appointed governors.

In our constitutional scheme, the governor plays a very important role. But strangely enough, the Constitution does not lay down any criteria for the appointment of a governor except that she should be an Indian citizen and should have completed 35 years of age.  The debates in the Constituent Assembly indicate that the general thinking of the members was in favour of appointing persons of eminence in the field of education or other fields of life, as well as individuals who would “represent before the public something above politics”. Though no criteria have been laid down for selecting a governor, the governments that held office after the Constitution came into force should have respected the views of the Constituent Assembly and set a tradition of appointing persons of eminence and not politicians who were defeated in elections, or retired bureaucrats who were useful. Raj Bhavans have become convenient parking places for them.

It has now become a convention for a new government led by a different party to get rid of the governors appointed by the previous one. In 2004, the UPA removed NDA-appointed governors, although the Vajpayee government had not resorted to this measure in 1999. Now the new government in Delhi has instructed the home secretary to informally ask governors to quit. Some have resigned (mainly ex-bureaucrats), but some — mostly politicians — are resisting the Centre’s pressure. Till 2010, it was believed that governors could be sacked through a presidential order. After all, the Constitution says governors hold office during the pleasure of the president or in other words, the pleasure of the government of the day.

But in 2010, the Supreme Court handed down a judgment that placed certain restrictions on the withdrawal of the pleasure of the president. It said that the president can sack a governor only on the basis of valid and compelling reasons.

The presidential act should not be malafide, capricious or whimsical. The judgment categorically said that a change of government is no ground for the changing of governors. The court made it clear that if the reasons for the removal of a governor are arbitrary, whimsical, etc, such executive actions will be subject to judicial review.

In light of this judgment, what are the options available to the president? The court said that it would not intervene in the removal of a governormerely on the ground that a different view is possible or that the material or reasons for the decision are insufficient. The judgment, in essence, highlights that there should be reasons for such a removal, which are relevant and not arbitrary or whimsical.

It is not very difficult for the government to find valid and relevant reasons for the removal of a governor. The Union home ministry would have sufficient information about the activities of a governor. If she indulges in political activities covertly, it would be a valid ground for withdrawing the pleasure of the president. Similarly, if the governor is closely associated with some activity that is being investigated by agencies, the continuance of such a person in the Raj Bhavan would become untenable and it can be presumed that there is a valid reason for removing her. If a person who was involved in a criminal activity has been made a governor, the next government has a valid and compelling reason to remove her. All that the Supreme Court has suggested is that the proximate cause of removal should not be a change of government or that the governor is not in sync with the politics and ideology of the new government.

So, it seems correct, as many have asserted, that the Supreme Court has barred a new government from dismissing governors appointed by the previous regime. The court’s intervention will take place only if an aggrieved governor could prove beyond doubt that his removal was malafide, whimsical and arbitrary. The court wants there to be a valid reason for the removal, which may not even be sufficient. But it will not look beyond such reasons. In sum, the government can throw the ball out of its court with ease of conscience.

Drawing lines in the water,indo-bangla relation,ias mains

An international tribunal’s award last week on the maritime territorial dispute between India and Bangladesh and its acceptance by Delhi and Dhaka should set the stage for substantive regional maritime cooperation in the Bay of Bengal. India and Bangladesh, in partnership with Myanmar, are now in a position to take the destiny of Bay of Bengal into their own hands at a time when the strategic significance of its waters is drawing the attention of great powers.

The judgement of the Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Hague brings to a close one of the subcontinent’s long festering territorial disputes. The partition of the subcontinent and China’s entry into Tibet in the middle of the last century left India with multiple territorial disputes on its land frontiers. Nearly seven decades later, India’s land borders with Pakistan, China, Bangladesh and Nepal remain to be settled.

India’s record on the maritime front has been a little better. Over the years, India has delimited its maritime boundaries with Maldives, Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand and Indonesia. The Hague verdict now settles the maritime boundary with Bangladesh. That leaves the maritime boundary with Pakistan the only one to be sorted out.

It is tempting for many in both Delhi and Dhaka to define the verdict in terms of what each side has “won” and “lost”. The subcontinent has the tragic tradition of ignoring the opportunity costs of letting boundary disputes simmer and refusing to find reasonable settlements and move on.

The inability of India and Bangladesh to settle the dispute all these years bilaterally has prevented the fisherfolk of both countries from effectively exploiting the large but disputed waters of the Bay of Bengal. National companies and their international partners could not drill for oil in the bay that has seen the discovery of many new fields in the last few years.

Given the complexity of the issues involved in such cases, there was never going to be a  “winner takes all” outcome. As in any arbitration, each side won some, but not all, of their arguments at the Hague. Delhi and Dhaka rightly welcomed the verdict of the tribunal as beneficial for the people of both countries. This break from the “lose-lose” politics of the past reflects the new spirit of friendship between the two countries.

The long overdue settlement of the boundary dispute at the Hague underlines the enduring value of international arbitration in settling bilateral disputes, especially those that do not raise existential national security questions. India has accepted such international involvement in the drafting of the Indus Waters Treaty in 1960 and in resolving some of issues arising from its implementation since then. India also agreed to settle the dispute over the Rann of Kutch with Pakistan through arbitration.

The resolution of the maritime dispute between Delhi and Dhaka in accordance with international law

follows a similar settlement between Bangladesh and Myanmar two years ago. This stands in contrast to the escalating maritime territorial disputes in the South China Sea adjoining the Bay of Bengal. China has refused to abide by the principles of international law and has begun to use force to assert its expansive claims over the South China Sea.

The resolution of Dhaka’s maritime territorial disputes with Myanmar and India now opens the door for substantive regional cooperation in the Bay of Bengal littoral. This cooperation is no longer a luxury but a vital strategic necessity. For the Bay of Bengal is no longer a backwater of the Indian Ocean.

The rise of China and its growing maritime interests in the Indian Ocean have made the Bay of Bengal a theatre of critical interest for Beijing. China’s vital sea lines of communication pass through the Bay of Bengal. It is also the closest body of water for many of China’s landlocked south western provinces. China, therefore, is building transport corridors, energy pipelines and new ports in the Bay of Bengal.

To cap it all, China is now promoting the idea of a maritime Silk Road in the Bay of Bengal that connects the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Only the very bold will claim that all these developments pose no long term challenges for India. While Beijing’s initiatives do create the possibilities for economic cooperation, Delhi can’t afford to ignore the strategic consequences of China’s rise for the Bay of Bengal.

A century ago, at the beginning of the First World War, a rising Germany shocked the government of India by having its warship, ‘Emden’, sneak up to Madras and bombard the city. Three decades later, in the Second World War, Delhi was surprised again by the swift Japanese occupation of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.

As Beijing eyes a vigorous strategic presence in the Bay of Bengal littoral, the Americans can’t be far behind and are seeking active maritime collaboration with Bangladesh and Myanmar. India has two choices as its quiescent maritime frontiers to the east come alive. Delhi could keep quibbling with its neighbours on minor territorial issues and allow outside powers to play a larger role in the Bay of Bengal and its vast hinterland. Alternatively, it could quickly implement the boundary settlement with Dhaka, boost trilateral
maritime cooperation with Bangladesh and Myanmar, and improve the region’s leverage with the external powers.

In the southern Indian Ocean, Delhi has already embarked on trilateral maritime cooperation with Maldives and Sri Lanka. It is likely to be expanded to include Mauritius and Seychelles. A similar framework for security engagement with Bangladesh and Myanmar should be at the top of Delhi’s agenda in the Bay of Bengal.

Beyond that, there are unlimited possibilities for strengthening maritime cooperation with Bangladesh and Myanmar — ranging from joint scientific research to environmental monitoring and from major trans-border projects to trilateral naval exercises. If Delhi decides to play for small stakes in the Bay of Bengal, it will deal itself out of the emerginggreat game in the east.

Giving new direction to planning commission

An independent evaluation of the Planning Commission done by Ajay Chibber has recommended that the Planning Commission be scrapped altogether and a new think tank be appointed instead. The commission was set up in the 1950s by Jawaharlal Nehru to give direction to the developmental activities. The commission was to ensure that policies implemented by different ministries should not work at cross purposes. The power ministry, for example, wants to cut the forests for generation of electricity while the environment and forests ministry does not want to cut them for conservation of biodiversity. The Planning Commission was expected to synchronise such policies.

The commission has generally been successful in doing this as seen by the strides the country has made since Independence. Indeed, the commission may have exceeded the scope of its authority by exercising undue influence on the allocation of funds to the state governments. But it should not be read as its failure; rather it may be a product of overreach fostered by personal equations that the likes of Montek Singh Ahluwalia enjoyed with Manmohan Singh. The commission has got progressively cut off from the people and deeply connected with the PMO. The world, however, is moving in the opposite direction.

In the neighbouring China, at the annual central economic conference in 2012, Xi Jinping, then general secretary of the CPC Central Committee, demanded establishment of decision-making consulting mechanisms and developing think tanks that are capable of assisting decision-makers. Just one month after he was elected president, Xi expressed his approval to a proposal of building think tanks with Chinese characteristics. The Third Plenary Session of the 18th CPC Central Committee in November 2013 decided to establish a complete consulting system for decision-makers.

Looking back, this demand for increased consultation is a new stage in development of governance. In 1750 only England and the Netherlands had placed limits on the powers of the king. All the other rulers of Europe, the Muslim empires, and China had absolute power. The situation changed dramatically with the oncoming of the industrial revolution. The economic changes lifted the standard of living and education of the masses. People began to question the assumptions of absolute governments.

The new idea was that people can figure things out, and they can come up with better decisions. In the 1600s John Locke wrote that a ruler’s authority is based on the will of the people. He also spoke of a social contract that gave subjects the right to overthrow the ruler if he ruled badly. The worldwide spread of democracy was the direct result of the technological changes that came with the industrial revolution.Today we are moving onto the next plane due to the development of information and communication technologies. People can now download and read government policy documents and they have the mind and the energy to respond to it. They want to be heard and their concerns and ideas to be taken on board. It is here that our Planning Commission has miserably failed.

Sham discussion

In India, the commercial interests of hydropower companies are very powerful. I along with Swami Gyan Swarup Sanand had filed a case in the National Green Tribunal challenging the findings of a studies done by IIT Roorkee and Wildlife Institute of India regarding impact of hydropower projects on environment. The tribunal directed the government to give a hearing to us. Member, Planning Commission, B K Chaturvedi called us for discussion. But that was a sham. Not one point made during the discussion was accepted or even rebutted in the report. The Commission had totally delinked with the people.

Scrapping the commission and establishing a fresh think tank will not serve any purpose as long as it remains isolated from the people. The Energy Research Institute (TERI) is one of the Indian think tanks that is mentioned in the top 100 non-US think tanks worldwide. Yet I find it is happy to misstate facts when project money is involved. TERI assessed that people were willing to pay about Rs 7 per unit of electricity. Later the National Hydro Power Corporation gave a contract to TERI to evaluate the costs and benefits of two hydropower projects. TERI now concluded that the benefits of electricity were Rs 100 per unit. The benefits were increased from Rs 7 to Rs 100 when prompted by a hydropower company. This is the sad state of our globally-ranked ‘independent’ think tanks.

It does not matter whether the Planning Commission is retained as a fund allocator, limited to its role as a planner or scrapped and a new think tank established. The fundamental problem is that the government is being run by a combine of business and bureaucratic interests. They have no interest or concern for the people. The need it to change the mindset of the bureaucrats. A robust system of public participation in all facets of the government has to be put in place.

I have two suggestions. One, a department of social audit must be established. This department would appoint a committee consisting of elected representatives, independent professionals, NGOs, and public representatives to make a social audit of all government departments. The promotions of the concerned official and fund allocations for ensuing years would be made contingent on this audit report. Indeed, many of these Committees will be co-opted to sign on the dotted line. But there will be others that will resist and give a correct picture.

My second suggestion is that the government should enact a ‘right to reply Act’ along the lines of Right to Information Act. It should be made obligatory for government officials to give a reasoned response to suggestions given by the public. It should be obligatory for the executive engineer, for example, to give reasons for rejecting a suggestion like increasing the capacity of a 

The three ‘Ms’ of change,GOOD FOR IAS MAINS

States are being upended by the market, Mother Nature and Moore’s law.

In the 1960s, there was a popular sitcom — “Get Smart” — about a hapless secret agent named Maxwell Smart, played by Don Adams. Smart went by the code name “Agent 86.” “Get Smart” famously introduced the shoe phone to American audiences, but the show also introduced something else: its own version of the bipolar world. Do you remember the name of the intelligence agency Maxwell Smart worked for? It was called “Control.” And do you remember the name of Control’s global opponent? It was called “Kaos” — “an international organisation of evil.”

The creators of “Get Smart” were ahead of their time. Because it increasingly appears that the post-post-Cold War world is cleaving into the world of “order” and the world of “disorder” — or into the world of “Control” and the world of “Kaos.”

How so? First, we said goodbye to imperialism and colonialism and all their methods of controlling territory. Then we said goodbye to the Cold War alliance system, which propped up many weak and newly independent states with money to build infrastructure and to buy weapons to control their borders and people — because the stability of every square in the global chessboard mattered to Washington and Moscow.

And, lately, we’ve been saying goodbye to top-down, iron-fisted monarchies and autocracies, which have been challenged by massively urbanised, technologically empowered citizens.

So, today, you have three basic systems: order provided by democratic, inclusive governments; order imposed by autocratic exclusivist governments; and ungoverned, or chaotically governed, spaces, where rickety failed states, militias, tribes, pirates and gangs contest one another for control, but there is no single power center to answer the phone — or, if they do, it falls off the wall.

Look around: Boko Haram in Nigeria kidnaps 250 schoolgirls and then disappears into a dark corner of that country. The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, a ragtag jihadist militia, carves out a caliphate inside Syria and Iraq and boasts on Twitter of beheading opponents. NATO decapitates Libya’s regime and sets loose a tribal-militia war of all against all, which, when combined with the crackup of Chad, spills arms and refugees across African borders, threatening Tunisia and Morocco. Israel has been flooded with more than 50,000 Eritreans and Sudanese refugees, who crossed the Sinai Desert by foot, bus or car looking for work and security in Israel’s “island of order.”

And, just since October, the US has been flooded with more than 50,000 unaccompanied children from Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras. “They’re fleeing from threats andviolence in their home countries,” noted Vox.com, “where things have gotten so bad that many families believe that they have no choice but to send their children on the long, dangerous journey north.”

Why is this happening now? Well, just as I’ve argued that “average is over” for workers, now “average is over for states,” too. Without the Cold War system to prop them up, it is not so easy anymore for weak states to provide the minimums of security, jobs, health and welfare. And thanks to rapid advances in the market (globalisation), Mother Nature (climate change plus ecological destruction) and Moore’s Law (computing power), some states are just blowing up under the pressure.

Yes, we blew up Iraq, but you can’t understand the uprising in Syria unless you understand how a horrendous four-year drought there, coupled with a demographic explosion, undermined its economy.

You can’t understand Egypt’s uprising without linking it to the 2010 global wheat crisis and soaring bread prices, which inspired the anti-Hosni Mubarak chant: “Bread, Freedom, Dignity.” You also can’t understand Egypt’s stress without understanding the challenge that China’s huge labour pool poses in a globalised world to every other low-wage country. Go into a souvenir shop in Cairo, buy a Pyramids ashtray and turn it over. I’ll bet it says, “Made in China.” Today’s globalisation system rewards countries that make their workers and markets efficient enough to take part in global supply chains of goods and services faster than ever — and punishes those who don’t more harshly than ever.

You can’t understand the spread of ISIS or the Arab Spring without the relentless advance in computing and telecom — Moore’s Law — creating so many cheap command-and-control Internet tools that superempower small groups to recruit adherents, challenge existing states and erase borders. In a flat world, people can see faster than ever how far behind they are and organise faster than ever to protest. When technology penetrates more quickly than wealth and opportunity, watch out.

The combined pressures of the market, Mother Nature and Moore’s Law are creating the geopolitical equivalent of climate change, argues Michael Mandelbaum, author of “The Road to Global Prosperity,” and “some familiar species of government can’t survive the stress.”

So, please spare me the “it’s all Obama’s fault.” There are plenty of reasons to criticise Obama, but everything is not about what we do. There are huge forces acting on these countries, and it will take extraordinary collaboration by the whole world of order to contain them

First Indigenously Built Research Ship “Sindhu Sadhana” to Nation

In a historic ceremony held at the Marmugao Harbour of Goa today, Dr.Jitendra Singh, Minister of State in the Prime Minister’s Office, Department of Personnel and Training, Science and Technology (Independent Charge), Atomic Energy, Space and Earth Sciences, dedicated to the nation the first ever indigenously built Research Vessel (Ship) " Sindhu Sadhana " acquired recently by the CSIR-National Institute of Oceanography. Sindhu Sadhana is a multi-disciplinary research vessel equipped with a number of laboratories for data collection, echo sounders, acoustic doppler, profiler, autonomous weather station, air quality monitors and a host of other world-class latest equipments in the field of ocean technology and ocean research. Speaking on the occasion, Dr Jitendra Singh said that after the successful launch of PSLV-23 satellite in space from Sriharikota on June 30, today's launch of Sindhu Sadhana into the ocean is the second major initiative in the field of science and technology within seven weeks of taking over of the Narendra Modi Government. This only indicates the high priority attached by the present Government to the development of science and technology in the country,he observed and added that just as PSLV-23 enabled India to become part a of world's exclusive space satellite club, Sindhu Sadhana has brought India to the world map of ocean technology. Dwelling on the salient features of the new research ship, Sindhu Sadhana, Dr. Jitendra Singh said, it will greatly enhance the capabilities of Indian oceanographers to make multi-disciplinary observations with a capability to predict the future changes in oceanographic processes, thus generating enormous inputs, which will benefit not only India but also the number of other nations and seas around India. As India marches ahead to become a world power in the next one decade,Dr Jitendra Singh said, initiatives like Sindhu Sadhana will also help an economic breakthrough in the area of shipping, fishing, exploration for oil and natural gas, submarine pipeline etc. Accompanied by the Captain of the ship and crew members, Dr.P.S.Ahuja, DG CSIR, Dr. S.W.A. Naqvi, Director CSIR-NIO, scientists and sailors, Dr.Jitendra Singh went around each and every room, cabins and chambers of the ship and personally met each of the staffers on duck.