ISRO scientist travels to the ‘edge of space’

Becomes the first Indian to have the once-in-a-lifetime experience

T.N. Suresh Kumar, a senior scientist working with the ISRO’s Master Control Facility in Hassan, has become the first Indian to visit the stratosphere – the second layer of the Earth’s atmosphere.

He made it to an altitude of 17,100 metres on August 15 in a MIG-29 from Sokol Airbase near Nizhny Novgorod in Russia paying a hefty fee of around Rs. 15 lakh from his savings.

“It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience and one that I have been dreaming of for two decades. I am happy I did it,” Mr. Kumar told The Hindu on Tuesday.

The flight reached a maximum speed of 1,850 km per hour, reaching the stratosphere in 48 minutes. With this, Mr. Kumar becomes the 259th person and the first Indian to take the flight ever since the Country of Tourism Ltd., an agency conducting space travel in Russia, started the journey called ‘Edge of Space’ six years ago.

“Money alone will not buy oneself this opportunity. They look for physical fitness, communication skills and a basic knowledge of science before selecting people for this journey,” he said.

In fact the selection process began six months ago, after which Mr. Kumar had to take clearances from different agencies, including his workplace and embassies.

Mr. Kumar nurtured space travel dreams since 1985 when he was one among the four selected by ISRO to travel to space. But he missed the chance when the flight was called off following the explosion of space shuttle ‘Challenger’ in February 1986. “It was highly disappointing. Later, my wife and I decided to save a major part of our earnings for travel,” he said.

Mr. Kumar has visited 110 countries across seven continents over the last 15 years. His wife Geetha, also a senior scientist at MCF in Hassan, has accompanied him to 87 countries. Altogether the family has spent over Rs. 50 lakh on travel. “I am a budget traveller and plan the trips well in advance to avoid extra expenditure on airfare. I carry ready-to-eat food and spend little on lodging,” he said

IISc develops molecular "sniffer dog" to detect explosives

they have come up with a highly sensitive fluorescent polymer that scouts out a class of commonly-used explosives

The sniffer dog might finally have its day. Scientists at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc.) have created a highly sensitive fluorescent polymer that scouts out a class of commonly used explosives.

TNT and other nitroaromatic compounds, which are used in a cocktail of chemicals in landmines and plastic explosive devices, release vapours that ‘quench’ the polymers, reducing their glow, according to a team from IISc.’s Department of Inorganic and Physical Chemistry.

“The team has developed two types of fluorescent polymers — supramolecular polymers and porous metallic-organic polymer — that are electron-rich and pick up vapour from TNT and other nitroaromatic explosives much like a molecular ‘sniffer dog’,” says P.S. Mukherjee, associate professor at the department and co-author of a paper on the experiment published in the latest edition of Chemistry: A European Journal.

“While the drop in fluorescence is not visible to the naked eye, it is visually sensed and interpreted by a high resolution spectrometer,” Dr. Mukherjee explained.

Nitroaromatic compounds are replacing conventional metal-based weapons in the explosives industry, the research paper says, adding that the compounds are available commercially. Besides their explosive nature, the chemicals contaminate groundwater after military operations and an efficient method to detect them at low concentrations is now needed. “The next step for the teamnow is to develop similar systems to detect other forms of explosives such as RDX and ammonium nitrate.

NASA to map earth forests in 3D

The US space agency, NASA, is developing the Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) Lidar device to map forests on Earth in 3D and increase understanding of their role in the carbon cycle.

The instrument will be the first to systematically probe the depths of the forests from space.

“GEDI Lidar will have a tremendous impact on our ability to monitor forest degradation, adding to the critical data needed to mitigate the effects of climate change,” said Patrick O’Shea, chief research officer at the University of Maryland.

It is a laser-based system that can measure the distance from the space-based instrument to Earth’s surface with enough accuracy to detect subtle variations, including the tops of trees, the ground, and the vertical distribution of above ground bio-mass in forests.

The instrument will be built at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre in Greenbelt, Maryland, a NASA release said.

“GEDI will be a tremendous new resource for studying Earth’s vegetation,” said Piers Sellers, deputy director of Goddard’s Sciences and Exploration Directorate.

In particular, the GEDI data will provide global-scale insights into how much carbon is being stored in the forest bio-mass.

“This information will be particularly powerful when combined with the historical record of changes captured by the US’s long standing programme of Earth-orbiting satellites, such as Landsat and MODIS,” Sellers added.

By revealing the 3-D architecture of forests in unprecedented detail, GEDI will also provide crucial information about the impact that trees have on the amount of carbon in the atmosphere.

Although it is well-established that trees absorb carbon and store it long-term, scientists have not quantified exactly how much carbon forests contain.

As a result, it’s not possible to determine how much carbon would be released if a forest were destroyed, nor how well emissions could be countered by planting new trees.

The system is one of two instrument proposals recently selected for NASA’s Earth Venture Instrument programme and is being led by the University of Maryland, College Park.

NASA said GEDI is scheduled to be ready in 2018.

A clean-up under scrutiny

It is not surprising that the Supreme Court has taken a dim view of the Central government’s long-running plan to clean the Ganga. More than 28 years after the government launched the Ganga Action Plan (GAP) in 1985, nothing seems to have worked. In 2013, estimates by the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) said that from Gangotri to Diamond Harbour faecal coliform levels were above acceptable levels on all stretches of the river, except for the upper reaches. Uttar Pradesh, which has a 1,000-km stretch of the river, has over 600 highly polluting industrial units. Of these, 442 are tanneries with toxic discharge, most of them violating pollution norms. An interim report of the Ganga River Basin Management Plan prepared by a consortium of seven Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) said attempts to keep the river clean through conventional pollution control methods have proved ineffective. Now, the new BJP-led government is planning to restore the “wholesomeness” of the Ganga, which was declared India’s national river in 2008. The National Ganga River Basin Authority has gone into mission mode to identify critical focus areas, and ensuring the continuous flow of the river is the main aim. Dams and barrages have snapped its longitudinal connectivity and crippled it, the IIT report said. The report pointed out that human activity including industrialisation, urbanisation and deforestation, and a complete lack of provision along the river for waste water disposal, have reduced the Ganga to its current condition. The quality of water in the river, once famed for its purity, is abysmal now. And one of the key areas which need attention is ecological restoration.

The National Mission for Clean Ganga envisions that by 2020, no untreated municipal sewage or industrial effluent will flow into the Ganga. Hundreds of crores of rupees from foreign funding agencies and the government has been pledged to clean the river, but as the Supreme Court has observed, the bureaucratic approach has failed to work. In addition, dams are proliferating on the river and its tributaries in an unplanned manner. A report prepared by the National Environmental Engineering Research Institute observed that the Tehri dam had, by blocking the sediments behind it, diminished the unique self-purifying ability of the Ganga. Extensive deforestation in the State of Uttarakhand, a part of the Ganga basin, and dams proposed on major rivers in this State after every 20 to 25 km, could leave large fragments of these rivers with minimal flow, according to a report prepared by a Supreme Court-appointed expert body in 2014. There seems to be no dearth of reports or expert advice on cleaning the Ganga; only the political will and decisive action on the ground are lacking. Perhaps the Supreme Court’s admonition, along with the government’s new resolve, could act as a catalyst for change.

The illiteracy of innovation

The formal economy and the scientific sector deal with advanced technology, while the informal, the world of biomass, craft societies, are treated as lesser worlds with a separate logic. It is a dualism of thought which is quietly destroying huge parts of our culture

Key words in policy frameworks have erratic careers. Some survive with a long shelf life, others sputter out after an initial promise. One thinks of the contrasting fate of two sibling words, planning and governance. Planning is now treated as nostalgia, an outmoded way of coping with federalism, while the concept of governance glows in mint condition, inviting people to make their careers out of it.

There is another word which is older, even more pervasive, which reincarnates itself frequently and haunts the progressive mind. It is all-pervasive, invidious and dominates the technological horizon. It is the word innovation. The power of the word is such that it creates its own folklore, its own coterie of in-words like science-induced innovation, the Schumpeterian innovator, the Kondratieff cycle, the baroquisation of technology. Innovation and ideas of innovation almost dictate the state of literacy of a regime, summoning us to a Darwinian world where only the fittest survive. So powerful is this need for the new, that C.S. Lewis, a classics scholar, better known for his The Chronicles of Narnia, once introduced himself, during one of his inaugural lectures at a university by claiming, “Gentleman, I offer you myself, the dinosaur.”

A forgotten society

A classics scholar or a language professor might state with comfort his ease with tradition, but modern governments are obsessive about innovation or the lack of it. This creates its own politics of anxiety. Innovators are seen as positive, while those who oppose it are dismissed as Luddites.

 “The laboratory is no longer the centre of the universe. The slum and the city also become innovative sites” 

The world view of innovation chains has no place for the defeated, the obsolescent, the outdated. There is no ethics of the defeated other. We have an ethics for the cyborg, an ethics of the robot, but no ethics of alternative worlds, ecological niches. A.K. Coomaraswamy cites the case of a housewife who refuses a washing machine, asking “what will happen to my washer man?”

Innovation is a form of forgetting, of erasure in the name of improvement. To the West, what justifies innovation or revolution is museumisation, a process of embalming cultures which are dead or dying. The cultures which could not survive or adapt are subject to the objectifying gaze of science. Innovation as progress has its charms, but as erasure, obsolescence, waste and ecocide raises a whole gamut of questions about the violence of science and technology. India, unlike the West, cannot eliminate defeated cultures. They do not belong to the reservations. The handloom weaving community includes 13 million people. Shifting cultivation as a practice caters to a few million. But vulnerable communities are not just marginal groups, but include even the middle class, many of whom are dumped for being outdated. In the global regimes of today, an obsolescent society is a forgotten society. Worse, it is a dispensable society.

Living traditions

The illiteracy of an innovation chain stems from the impoverishment of time, the indifference of history to defeated cultures. From an Indian viewpoint, tribes and crafts are not defeated cultures but living traditions. The question is this: how is technology looking at such livelihoods? How does policy respond to an Ikkat weaver? I remember Syeda Hameed of the now defunct Planning Commission asking this: “do we go in for Chinese stuff, or ask whether the Chinese can weave an ikkat like this, where every weave of cloth is like the flow of a river?” Or do we, as George Fernandes once did, declare the use of clay khullars compulsory in railway stations, banning thermocool and plastic? Of course, today, we might have to face the fact that the soil from which the clay comes might be contaminated. Do we ask, as my friends in Dastkar do, how can we sustain the breathtaking Indigo blue of a Yellappa, working with primitive vats where he uses his sensorium as a substitute for instruments? What do we think of a scientist who celebrates Bakelite but has nothing to say about the wondrous world of Lac that it destroyed? Or think again. Are people who defend traditional seeds backward or are they trustees of seed as memory and a collective commons in the age of genetically modified seeds? Do we save the Varanasi weaver or prefer the Surat power loom?

Dualism of thought

Our current discourse deals with these questions in a fragmented, absent-minded way. The formal economy and the scientific sector deal with advanced technology, while the informal, the world of biomass, craft societies, are treated as lesser worlds with a separate logic. It is as if the third world in us is treated as the third class, or third rate, that the poor have to be content with a third rate science. It is a dualism of thought which is quietly destroying huge parts of our culture.

The task before policy, the state, in fact all democratic societies, is how we mediate between different technological traditions which are also different cultural traditions. As the late chemist, C.V. Seshadri, said, these are not just ethical questions but constitutional ones. Our science laboratories and governance groups have to answer these: do we prioritise nanotechnology and biotechnology or are we as a society plural enough to arbitrate between different worlds? These are practical questions. Do Irula tribals who are knowledgeable about snakes have a place in our biodiversity policy as trustees and custodians or do they have to be treated as poachers, intrusions into the scientific world? Similarly, are scavengers, kabbadiwallas, who are geniuses of waste, a part of the dream of policy or do we make their classificatory genius alien to the Linnaean cosmos? How do we create a frame to adjudicate conceptually between such worlds?

One of the concepts proposed which developed out of the battle of social movements was cognitive justice. This referred to a world where the right of different knowledges to coexist was recognised. The world of innovation chains was no longer science-centred but included the innovative world of citizen inventors, where ordinary people solving problems in innovative ways was recognised. The honeybee initiative captures thousands of such innovations. Once we see democracy itself as problem-solving, we have to work for the democratisation of knowledge systems. The laboratory is no longer the centre of the universe. The slum and the city also become innovative sites. In such a world, the informal economy and its innovative styles are treated as epistemologies, theories of knowledge. The scavenger, the hawker are seen as experts in survival, inventing their way through the problem sets of the city. Such an opening of the innovation chain beyond the control of scientific experts, opens up innovation to ideas beyond the professional, to ideas which stem from all forms of practice. The Silicon Valleys of the mind emerge in the slums and villages where new forms of city-making, garbage clearance and recycling are being worked out. Innovation sounds more open-ended and inclusive now. I am not denying the power of a Monsanto and a Microsoft; I am only testifying to the existence of the other worlds. Hindustan Lever is huge but the entire network of the Khadi and Village Industries Commission (KVIC) or the garbage industry is not modest either. All three provide value for money in different ways.

Rethinking innovation

Our nation is at a stage where we are rethinking the very nature of institutions and institutional building. We are rethinking the very process of planning. At this stage, we need to rethink the categories of innovation. If we were to imagine a national innovation council, one cannot think of a Xerox Park and a Silicon Valley alone. One has to locate them within a culture, juxtapose scientific innovation to linguistic and musical innovation and learn how other traditions also innovate with rigor, yet have ethics of memory. An innovation council which represents dyes, bamboo, weaving as well as biotechnology and IT would be more representative. One has to realise that an authority on crafts like Laila Tyebji or Uzramma is as crucial to innovation as a TCS or an Infosys. A friend added that he is a new form of scavenger. “Innovation theory,” he said, “needs both the iconography of technology and the iconoclast as innovator but without this balance, the disruptiveness of innovations can be disastrous.” He claimed that he cleaned up after the consequences of the innovations providing solace, alternatives, employment and possibilities for survival. I cannot see the current regime adapt this way but maybe society can accept this challenge.

Neel Mukherjee’s book makes the cut for Man Booker Prize

Kolkata-born British author Neel Mukherjee’s latest novel The Lives of Others, set in troubled Bengal of the 1960s and centred around a dysfunctional family, has been shortlisted for the prestigious Booker Prize 2014, in its debut as a global literary award.

Mr. Mukherjee, who studied at Oxford and Cambridge, was also the only Indian-origin author to be longlisted earlier this year, the first time the prestigious literary award opened up for anyone writing in English regardless of nationality.

“We are delighted to announce our international shortlist. As the Man Booker Prize expands its borders, these six exceptional books take the reader on journeys around the world, between the U.K., New York, Thailand, Italy, Calcutta and times past, present and future,” said A.C. Grayling, chair of the 2014 judging panel.

“We had a lengthy and intensive debate to whittle the list down to these six. It is a strong, thought-provoking shortlist which we believe demonstrates the wonderful depth and range of contemporary fiction in English,” he added.

Mr. Mukherjee, now a British citizen, reviews fiction for the Times and the Sunday Telegraph and his first novel, A Life Apart was a joint winner of the Vodafone-Crossword Award in India.

A break from the past

Previously, the prize was open only to authors from the U.K. and Commonwealth, Republic of Ireland and Zimbabwe. For the first time in its 46-year history, the £50,000-prize has been opened up to writers of any nationality, writing originally in English and published in the U.K.

It’s time to clean up

Many felt that the Supreme Court judgment of August 27, which advised that persons chargesheeted in criminal cases should not be appointed as ministers, lobbed the ball back into the prime minister’s court. Now that it has brought the “criminalisation” of politics back to centrestage, the response of the prime minister and chief ministers will be watched with great interest.

Was the SC’s advice judicial overreach? According to some, the court has no business giving advice to the political executive. For others, the SC actually exercised judicial restraint by not prohibiting such appointments outright and stayed clear of possible overreach, while drawing attention to the constitutional concern for probity in public institutions. It referred to several SC judgments that had emphasised democracy as a cornerstone of the Constitution and drew the attention of the prime minister and chief ministers to constitutional expectations. There is also a view that the SC should not have “shirked” its responsibility and adjudicated on this critical issue, instead of merely advising.
Protecting the parliamentary system from criminalisation has been the intention of the law from the beginning. The election law (Section 8 of the Representation of the People Act, 1951) disqualifies a person convicted with a sentence of two years or more from contesting elections. But those under trial continue to be eligible to contest elections. The situation would have been acceptable if the trial were completed and the verdict given within a reasonable period of time.

What is the way out? There are three possible options. One, political parties should refuse tickets to the tainted. Two, the act should be amended to debar such persons from contesting elections. Three, fast-track courts should decide the cases of tainted legislators quickly.

The SC has repeatedly expressed concern about the purity of the legislatures. In 2002, it made it obligatory for all candidates to file an affidavit before the returning officer disclosing criminal cases pending against them. Civil society organisations like the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) analyse and publish such information. The concern of the apex court has been increasingly clear from a series of judgments. The famous order to introduce NOTA was intended to make political parties think before giving tickets to the tainted. The Lily Thomas case (2013) ended the unfair advantage that legislators enjoyed even after conviction.

According to the ADR, 187 MPs in the current Lok Sabha face criminal charges (that is, 34.4 per cent). Of them, 113 face serious criminal charges. The number has gone up from 162 (76 serious) charges in 2009 and 128 (58 serious) in 2004. This obviously shows the political class and legislature in a poor light.

In a rare instance of unanimity, all political parties have come together to oppose the proposal to debar perpetrators of even heinous offences during pendency of thetrial, on the grounds that false criminal cases may be filed by opponents. This concern is valid. However, the proposal itself has three safeguards. First, all criminal cases would not invite the ban, only heinous offences like murder, dacoity, rape, kidnapping or moral turpitude. Second, the case should have been registered at least a year before the elections. Third, the court should have framed the charges. The opponents of the proposal also argue that the jurisprudence followed in the country holds that a person is innocent until proven guilty. But the presumption of innocence until conviction is legally ignored in the case of those under trial. About two-thirds of the nearly 4 lakh persons lodged in jails are undertrials and are therefore “innocent”. Yet they are locked up, denied their fundamental rights of liberty, freedom of movement, freedom of occupation and dignity. Does this not violate the fundamental right of equality? If the rights of an undertrial can be suspended within the ambit of the law, what is the fuss about temporarily suspending the right to contest an election, which, incidentally, is only a statutory right? The debate over the issue raises several questions. Does the framing of charges involve the application of judicial mind? Though legal opinion is divided, many jurists, including senior high court judges, say several cases are thrown out at the stage when charges are framed. This shows application of mind even at that stage. The Law Commission, in its report in March 2014, accepted this contention after consulting constitutional experts. Does debarring the chargesheeted before conviction go against the Constitution? The conditions for disqualifying a person from contesting an election to the Lok Sabha or a vidhan sabha are laid down in the Constitution (Articles 102 and 191). But it also provides for disqualification “under any law made by Parliament”. The Election Commission, the Law Commission and citizens have been demanding a law debarring tainted candidates from contesting polls. What if the minister is found innocent after a long trial? He would have been denied a position that he was legitimately entitled to. But then, how many young persons found innocent of terror charges have got their lives/ jobs back? And what if a legislator is found guilty of rape after a decade? Another argument is that there can be no discrimination against anyone on the grounds of pendency of a case. If so, why was the CVC, P.J. Thomas, removed by the SC just because there was a case pending against him? The principle enunciated by the court was maintaining “institutional integrity”. But then, isn’t the institutional integrity of the legislature, a more important, constitutional body than the CVC, which is just a statutory body, even more vital? Do fast-track courts discriminate against the lakhs of other cases awaiting a decision for years, and are they therefore illegal? No. Fast tracking has been the accepted norm. The RP Act requires the high court to decide on election petitions within six months. The fact that courts have been taking years to decide -on election petitions makes it an issue of dereliction, not legal infirmity. Special CBI courts, consumer courts, special courts for economic offences and, more recently, fast-track courts for rape cases do create special categories for adjudication, and nobody has dubbed them discriminatory. In any case, the issue of fast tracking has now been clinched by the landmark judgment of March 2014, by which the SC accepted the urgent need for cleansing politics of criminalisation and directed all subordinate courts to decide on cases involving legislators within a year, or give reasons for not doing so to the chief justice of the high court. That should put an end to the endless impasse. With a positive judicial disposition and a strong political mandate for an avowedly corruption-free India, the situation is ripe for resolution. Let’s not miss the bus. -