Mine over matter

By all accounts, the coal Ordinance that the Narendra Modi government promulgated last week has paved the way for an eventual opening up of commercial coal mining by the private sector. This decision is bold as well as ambitious and the government is being justifiably complimented for its reformist zeal and initiatives.

But has the coal Ordinance succeeded in resolving the primary problem that arose out of the Supreme Court order cancelling the allocation of over 200 coal mines? Not really. Indeed, with the gradual ebbing away of the initial euphoria over the lightning speed at which the government acted on the matter, experts and even some civil servants in infrastructure ministries are coming round to the view that the Ordinance may not be able to address all the problems that arose out of the cancellation of the mines.

The central problem that the Ordinance was expected to tackle was to eliminate or substantially minimise the loss of coal production estimated at over 50 million tonnes in the wake of the cancellation order. Nobody is faulting the process of e-auctioning the cancelled coal mines as mandated by the Ordinance. The problem, however, stems from the acquisition of land and other infrastructure around the mines to be e-auctioned. Will these be allowed to be acquired without the long delays that are usually associated with such a process? As coal miners point out, the problem in mining is not with the actual process of excavation, but with the acquisition of land necessary for evacuation of the mined coal.

Two, how costly will it be for the existing owners of the cancelled mines to secure them through thee-auction process? If a company has a mine linked to a power plant or a cement project, its need to acquire that mine is paramount. In an open e-auction process, this situation can be easily exploited by rivals to make non-serious bids in an attempt to jack up the cost of acquisition. Such instances are not entirely unknown in the auctions that have so far been held in other areas. There is no reason one will not see the repeat of such attempts.

Three, will the e-auction process lead to an optimum utilisation of the country's vast coal assets? This is, of course, a larger question and strikes at the root of the policy on end-use based captive mining of coal blocks. Given the many varieties of coal found in this country - ranging from those with a high calorific value to those with high ash content and a low calorific value - the idea of linking a coal block to a pre-determined project does not always lead to optimum use of coal. It is possible that a coal block, linked to a power project, produces high-quality coal that should ideally be used for a steel plant to achieve optimum results. But with end-use restrictions in place, such diversion would not be permissible. In other words, top-grade coal would be used in a project that does not need that level of fuel quality and could well have met its needs with lower grade coal. The e-auction process may improve transparency in awarding mining blocks, but it will fail to address the basic problem of sub-optimal use of a valuable natural resource like coal.

Could the government have done something better? Some officials point out that the government could have acquired the mines and then e-auctioned them to firms whose primary job would be to mine coal under the supervision of an effective regulator that also should be set up simultaneously. Land acquisition delays would have been obviated in the process because the government would have taken far less time in acquiring them. And then the coal produced by such firms could either be sold or made available through linkages to projects depending on the quality of coal produced there. Even Coal India now tries to ramp up production by using private contractors to do the actual mining. The same principle could have been applied by the government and instead of relying on Coal India, there would have been many private contracting firms mining coal until such time the government chose to allow through a notification private commercial mining of coal.

But then such ideas cannot get discussed when decisions are taken without following a more broad-based consultative process. Quick decisions are welcome, but some more consultation with experts and even think tanks within and outside the government can certainly help.

The Narendra Modi government's coal Ordinance is a bold move, but it may not be able to tackle the central problem of minimising the loss of coal production

Cancer cell fingerprints in blood may speed up diagnosis

Scientists have identified cancer cell fingerprints in the blood that could one day help doctors diagnose a range of children’s cancers faster and more accurately.

Researchers, from the University of Cambridge and Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge, have found unique molecular fingerprints for 11 types of children’s tumours, which could be used to develop blood tests to diagnose the cancers.

This may eventually lead to a quicker, more accurate way to diagnose tumours, and could also reduce the need for children to undergo surgery to get a diagnosis one day.

The researchers uncovered the fingerprints left by the tumours by analysing blood samples from children when they were diagnosed with cancer.

They were looking for molecules that turn genes on and off, called microRNAs, to find common changes linked to different tumours.

In particular they found a very specific fingerprint which identifies different types of neuroblastoma, a form of childhood cancer which develops from a type of nerve cell.

Lead researchers Dr Matthew Murray and Professor Nicholas Coleman, both from the University of Cambridge and Addenbrooke’s Hospital said the research suggested that different types of tumour could be identified using a blood test which recognises the unique fingerprints produced by tumours.

“We hope that this early research could eventually lead to the development of non-invasive tests which are faster, more accurate and gentler, transforming the way we make a cancer diagnosis in the future,” said Murray.

“Using a blood test instead of surgery to remove a tumour sample could improve diagnosis - such that results take a matter of hours rather than days or weeks.

“However, before such a test can be incorporated into clinical practice, it will now be important for these findings to be validated in other, larger independent studies,” Murray said

Indian researcher develops new device to track status of heart

An Indian researcher here has developed a wearable device that he claims can help one track the status of heart, both in medical and emotional terms.

“The Inner You (INYU) is a wearable device that helps the user to track and manage his or her physical as well as emotional health,” Srinivasan Murali, co-founder and CEO of the Switzerland-based SmartCardia told PTI.

The SmartCardia technology is based on several years of research from the Embedded Systems Laboratory at the Ecole Polytechnique Frale de Lausanne (EPFL), he said.

“I hope the device will be highly beneficial for India. It can be used to track Electrocardiogram (ECG), breathing and key vital signs of users, so that they can get timely feedback from the doctor,” he said.

“The user can see the signals immediately on his or her mobile phone. It can also be used for managing a healthy lifestyle, as it tracks the emotional and physical health aspects, such as the stress level, body fat and physical activity,” Mr. Murali said.

The developer of the device intends to price it around Rs 9,000, so that tracking one’s complete health becomes affordable.

Explaining the working of the device, he said INYU obtains key physiological signals from the body like ECG, breathing, skin conductance and physical activity by a simple touch that give a complete picture of the body-mind health.

The combination of the biological signals is used to infer the overall physical and emotional state of the user.

“For example, the variation in time intervals between heartbeats is related to the stress level. The conductivity of the skin, reflecting the amount of sweat-induced moisture on the skin — is determined by the emotional intensity, while breathing is a good indicator of the activity of the autonomic nervous system,” Mr. Murali said.

By combining these indicators, he said the stress level, concentration level and mood are inferred by advanced machine learning algorithms on the device.

“This allows managing stress and quantifying yoga and meditation techniques. New breathing games can be implemented as well,” he said.

He said the INYU sends the signals in real-time to smartphone and other smart objects through Bluetooth 4.0.

“Mobile and computer games can become immersive. Imagine a user having to hold his breath when jumping into the water on the screen. Games can also be personalised for the user,” he said.

The INYU signals can also control smart lights, music and other smart objects. The breathing or emotion state can be used control the colour or intensity of lights or the music can change according to physical activity or mood, he said.

North elects more women MLAs

Bihar, Haryana and Rajasthan have the highest proportion

When the results to the Maharashtra and Haryana Assembly elections came out two weeks ago, the northern State had produced twice the proportion of women legislators as its western counterpart.

This isn’t an exception; States with poor records on gender equality are consistently producing more female MLAs.

Using Election Commission of India data, The Hindu found that as of today, Bihar, Haryana and Rajasthan have the highest proportion of women MLAs in the country (14 per cent) while Nagaland, Mizoram and Karnakata bring up the bottom (2 per cent and below). Using 50 years of State elections data until 2012, economists Mudit Kapoor and Shamika Ravi of the Indian School of Business found that women were far more likely to contest elections from constituencies with a sex ratio skewed against women, most of which were in the northern States. While fewer women contested elections in the southern and western States, however, they were more likely to win, they found.

Professors Kapoor and Ravi hypothesise that the greater propensity of women to contest from the northern States is a result of the skewed sex ratio: “[I]n places where the gender ratio is in favour of women, they do not have to incur the high cost of contesting an election to achieve their preferred policy outcomes. They achieve this through the simple act of voting…[I]n constituencies, where the gender ratio is unfavourable to women, woman candidates incur the costly strategy of contesting elections, not always with the objective of winning but to prevent those candidates whose policy preferences are farthest from their interest,” they wrote.

Another explanation sometimes put forward is that women politicians often tend to be “proxies” of male politicians who might be their relatives, and that this trend is likely to be stronger in the north.

Between Maharashtra and Haryana, however, the western State had a higher proportion of women MLAs who come from political families (55 per cent) than the northern State (38 per cent), The Hindufound.

In general, women politicians are more likely to come from political families. In its analysis of newly elected members of the 16th Lok Sabha, The Hindu found that women MPs were twice as likely to come from a political family as male MPs. Moreover, those female MPs who are “placeholders” – those who get ticket because of the inability of their husband or other male relative to contest that particular election – have worse parliamentary participation than other female MPs, Suraj Jacob, a political economist at the Azim Premji University, found.

Swachh Bharat: a scheme or a pipe dream?

If Prime Minister Modi is serious about Swachh Bharat, he must provide leadership in converting the slogan into a viable multi-faceted programme

Who does not want, or hasn’t wanted, a clean India the public places of which are today probably the dirtiest and the most polluted in the world?

The question one must ask is: why it has been so, and what has not been done to change the situation for the better? Otherwise, Swachh Bharat will only remain a slogan, like Indira Gandhi’s ‘Garibi Hatao.’ She was very upset when I once asked her in all humility what exactly she wanted to hatao (eradicate), what she wanted to replace it with, and how.

It is strange that while much has been said about Swachh Bharat, no one appears to have pointed out that Indians are traditionally and culturally clean people. If the country looks dirty to a visitor — as it truly is — the biggest culprit is the government which is unclean in ways more than one!

Just drive from the old airport in my city, Hyderabad, to the new airport via Tarnaka (a distance of 50 km). Sidewalks, if they are there, are broken, encroached, or otherwise dysfunctional. There are mounds of mud and garbage on the side of the road which have been there for years. The buildings acquired to widen the road have not been demolished and have remained abandoned for years.

There is leftover construction material such as broken stones that line the pavements of roads. Whenever there is construction, one often finds unnecessary encroachment. In many places, road dividers are non-functional. The poor condition of roads can lead to numerous health issues for users. Even elite residential localities do not seem to be free of these problems.

Non-functional municipality

The fact is that there is no professional expertise in the Municipal Corporation to keep the city clean. Combined with total apathy, it creates an irremediable situation.

This deplorable situation is compounded by corruption. There is virtually no supervision when a civil work contract is given by the Municipal Corporation or Municipality, for example, for road repair. It is the responsibility of the contractor to remove all the construction material or waste, but it is just pushed to the side of the road to save money that would be otherwise spent on its transportation and disposal — and no one cares. Not surprisingly the only places that are clean are the military and the defence areas. Common garbage bins, where they are provided by the government, are overflowing, besides being an eyesore. The fact is that once you leave areas which come within the purview of civil administration, India is substantially clean. We are thus a country where ‘private’ places are clean but ‘public’ places are dirty.

It is not that the citizens in our cities and towns do not contribute to public filth. They do and there are two reasons for that. Firstly, there are no waste bins in public places where people can dispose their waste, so they simply throw it on the road or the sidewalk if it exists.

Secondly, it is about human psychology. If the place is clean and maintained clean, the tendency of a visitor or a user is not to make it dirty. On the other hand, if the place is already dirty, the tendency is not to worry about making it dirtier. In this connection, let me share an experience. In Hyderabad, we have a scientific research laboratory called the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB). It has been around for more than 25 years and has had an unbroken tradition of clinical cleanliness.

Once a year, it has an open day when more than 10,000 visitors come to the laboratory. At the end of the day, when all the visitors have gone, the place is just as clean as it was to begin with. The visitors simply use the waste bins which are always within sight no matter where the visitors are in the campus. Deep in their mind, they do not want to dirty a place which looks spotlessly clean. Kolkata metro would be another example.

How then can we talk of Swachh Bharat when the majority in the country has no access to clean toilets, and the environment is so badly polluted? As far as I know, there is much talk but no detailed workable solution to provide clean toilet facility to every family — either in villages or in cities. Every politician wants to do it but nobody really does it or even has an idea of how to go about doing it. Operationally, it is not easy.

As an example of the government’s apathy toward clean toilets, let me cite the case of the erstwhile Paryavaran Bhawan in the CGO Complex at Lodi Road, New Delhi. I used to visit the sixth floor of this building to attend a meeting of the Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee (GEAC), generally once a month. The only common western-style toilet on this floor had no seat for as long as I could remember. If I needed to use one, I had to request for permission of the Additional Secretary of the Department of Environment and Forests who was the Chairman of GEAC, to allow me to use his private toilet. And to expect toilet paper in a western-style toilet in a government building is to ask for the Moon.

Needed, a holistic definition

Then, there is the question of environment. Can we really have Swachh Bharat when our environment is so polluted?

Finally, we have to consider the state of our villages where 70 per cent of India lives. Can we talk of Swachh Bharat, ignoring what happens in our villages where poverty is the greatest polluter? Can any scheme of cleaning up our villages be viable if, for example, we do not provide village children access to high-quality schools? Doesn’t education, including vocational education, provide the greatest resource for alleviating poverty? Thus, to think of Swachh Bharat as an achievable objective would be a folly unless equal emphasis is laid on several other objectives such as high-quality universal education.

If Prime Minister Narendra Modi is serious about Swachh Bharat, he must provide leadership in converting what is a slogan into a viable multi-faceted programme, no matter how difficult or challenging it is going to be.

Act now on climate change, says new IPCC report

India has to internalise climate considerations into development planning

Chairperson of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) R.K. Pachauri on Sunday said the window of action on tackling climate change was closing rapidly and warned that the path of inaction would be more costly than the path of action.

Speaking at the launch of the IPCC’s Synthesis Report in Copenhagen, he said the scientific community had done its job and was in a sense passing on the baton to politicians and decision-makers. The Synthesis Report points to the human influence on climate but also points out that there were means to limit climate change and build a sustainable future. He said the global community must look at the numbers in this report and bring about change. “There is no Plan B because there is no planet B,” he said to questions.

“The Report tells us that we need to tackle climate change with a combination of adaptation and mitigation,” he added.

Navroz K, Dubash, one of it lead authors, said for India, keeping the pressure on for global mitigation was also key.

UN Climate Change panel calls for phasing out fossil fuels

Emissions may need to drop to zero by the end of this century for the world to have a decent chance of keeping the temperature rise below a level that many consider dangerous.

Chairperson of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) R. K. Pachauri on Sunday launching the Panel’s Synthesis Report in Copenhagen, said, “There is no room for complacency.” He suggested that India’s National action plan on climate change needs to be revisited in the light of this report. If the rise in global temperatures has to be kept under 2 degrees Celsius, fossil fuels would have to be phased out by the end of this century, he added.

“The Report tells us that we need to tackle climate change with a combination of adaptation and mitigation,” he said.

Navroz K Dubash, one of the lead authors of the Synthesis Report, said, “The IPCC Synthesis Report suggests a way of thinking about climate change that is deeply relevant to India. There is a complex two way relationship between sustainable development and climate change: climate policies should support, not undermine sustainable development; but limiting the effects of climate change is necessary to achieve sustainable development. This suggests India has to increasingly internalize climate considerations into development planning.”

Dr Purnamita Dasgupta, coordinating lead author of the IPCC’s working group report two, said that there are observed impacts of climate change, for example in India there is decline in agricultural productivity. There is scientific consensus that warming is unprecedented and it will have irreversible impacts on lives across the globe.

Michel Jarraud, Secretary-General of the World Meteorological Organization, which co-sponsors the IPCC along with the UN Environment Programme said in a statement, “Urgent action is needed to cut global greenhouse gas emissions. The longer we wait, the more expensive and difficult it will be to adapt – to the point where some impacts will be irreversible and impossible to cope with,” he added.