Old debate on lead rekindled

Despite its known toxicity, lead continues to bring in profits for manufacturers. And it continues to be used, to the great detriment of human and environmental health.

Noodles laced with lead have made the news. But humans have been imbibing lead with their food and drink for over 2,000 years. Lead is an abundant, easily accessible metal that has been in use for millennia. The Romans used lead extensively in cooking vessels, water pipes, and as an alloy in their silver coins. Annual production in the Roman Empire amounted to 80,000 tonnes. Grape juice boiled in lead vessels was added to wine and other dishes, all of which meant that Romans guzzled lead in substantial quantities throughout their lives. This happened despite the fact that Greco-Roman physicians knew that lead was highly toxic; they had vividly described the symptoms of lead poisoning. Some historians speculate that the collapse of the Roman Empire was brought on by lead poisoning.

The wordwide annual production of lead today amounts to 50 lakh tonnes; it is used in solder, paint and even food colouring. By now, lead has accumulated in significant quantities in human bodies and the environment. But the major culprit in the spread of lead is the anti-knock additive to the automobile fuel, tetraethyl lead (TEL). The history of how TEL was unnecessarily thrust on humanity and the biosphere makes a riveting story.

Push for TEL and opposition

TEL was first synthesised in Germany in the mid-19th century, but never put to use, being highly toxic. It was resurrected by the American automobile, oil and chemical industry as an anti-knock agent in the early 1920s. By then it had been widely acknowledged that mixing alcohol with petroleum could effectively serve the same purpose, with Scientific American reporting on April 13, 1918: “It is now definitely established that alcohol can be blended with gasoline to produce a suitable motor fuel.” By 1920, a U.S. Naval Committee had concluded that alcohol-gasoline blends “withstand high compression without producing knock.” But alcohol cannot be patented and cannot bring large profits to companies. So, all discussion of its potential was deliberately suppressed, and TEL pushed with vigour.

This push met with much opposition because there were many deaths and serious injuries in plants manufacturing TEL. As a result, several U.S. states banned its use. Many distinguished medical scientists opposed it. In response, the U.S. Surgeon-General convened a meeting in 1925 that, in turn, appointed a committee. This committee reported that there was no existing evidence of the ill-effects of long-term exposure to lead in the atmosphere on human health, but also pointed out that this was because there had been no research on the topic, and such research needed to be initiated urgently. Industry happily funded a pliant medical scientist, Robert Kehoe. For the next 40 years, the Surgeon-General and Kehoe undertook forceful advocacy of TEL. Many noted scientists remained unconvinced, but Kehoe challenged them to show clear evidence of the ill-effects of TEL. An important element of Kehoe’s claim of the absence of ill-effects of TEL was that the natural levels of lead in human blood were as high as 0.2-0.4 ppm. Notably, toxic effects of lead appear at just slightly higher blood levels of 0.5-0.8 ppm. Since Kehoe monopolised the research, it was impossible for the many doubters to produce counter-evidence.

The logjam was broken in the 1960s when a brilliant young geochemist, Clair Patterson, entered the scene. Patterson was working on iron meteorites to determine the age of our earth, for which it was essential to determine the levels of lead in the meteorites accurately. But this proved incredibly difficult, for Patterson discovered that the whole environment was so polluted by lead that it was well-nigh impossible to set up a lead-free laboratory. Finally, Patterson succeeded, and in 1956 determined the earth’s age to be 4.56 billion years, an estimate that continues to be accepted to this date. Patterson was then stimulated to look into the issue of lead in natural and human-impacted environments. Surprised by the closeness of the ranges of presumed natural and toxic lead levels in human blood, he began to examine the levels of a series of elements in the non-living environment and the biosphere. Patterson showed that living organisms preferentially take up useful elements such as calcium and actively exclude toxic ones such as barium from the same group.

This led to his second major contribution to science in the form of the concept of biopurification. According to this principle, natural concentrations of harmful elements in human body should be far lower than levels that are toxic, and that Kehoe’s claim of natural levels of lead in human blood being as high as 0.2-0.4 ppm was very much suspect.

Rising levels of lead

Patterson then systematically investigated levels of lead in rocks, rivers and sea water, ocean sediments, the atmosphere and the biosphere. He demonstrated that over the last few centuries, the levels of lead in the remains of marine organisms incorporated in sediments had gone up a hundredfold. He took ice cores from the Arctic and Antarctic and demonstrated a similar increase. The obvious conclusion was that the prevailing levels of lead in the human body were a result of pollution, and were not natural levels at all, as Kehoe had been claiming so far. Patterson provided clinching evidence of this when human teeth and bones from ancient burials turned out to have just one-thousandth the amount of lead as teeth and bones of modern-day humans.

Summarising his work, Patterson published a ground-breaking paper in 1965 that destroyed all of Kehoe’s unsustainable claims. The scientific, especially the medical research, community that had been mutely witnessing the unacknowledged ill-effects of lead pollution was immediately convinced. After sidelining his work and oil companies cutting off his funding, the U.S. government was finally forced to ban TEL a full 20 years after the publication of his paper.

But this chemical, thrust upon the world only because it is patentable, continues to bring in profits to its manufacturers from across the world, including India’s neighbours, Afghanistan and Myanmar, who still use it as an automobile fuel additive. Indeed, as Larry Summers, then a vice-president of the World Bank, and later Secretary of Treasury under Bill Clinton, had written in his notorious memo of 1991: “The measurements of the costs of health impairing pollution depends on the foregone earnings from increased morbidity and mortality. From this point of view, a given amount of health impairing pollution should be done in the country with the lowest cost, which will be the country with the lowest wages. I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.” Perhaps India, too, is acting today on this “impeccable” logic, to the evident detriment of its environment and the quality of life of its people.

Indian Ocean Dipole

Indian Ocean Dipole

The Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) also known as the Indian Niño is an irregular oscillation of sea-surface temperatures in which the western Indian Ocean becomes alternately warmer and then colder than the eastern part of the ocean

The IOD involves an aperiodic oscillation of sea-surface temperatures, between "positive", "neutral" and "negative" phases. A positive phase sees greater-than-average sea-surface temperatures and greater precipitation in the western Indian Ocean region, with a corresponding cooling of waters in the eastern Indian Ocean—which tends to cause droughts in adjacent land areas of Indonesia and Australia. The negative phase of the IOD brings about the opposite conditions, with warmer water and greater precipitation in the eastern Indian Ocean, and cooler and drier conditions in the west.

The IOD also affects the strength of monsoons over the Indian subcontinent. A significant positive IOD occurred in 1997–8, with another in 2006. The IOD is one aspect of the general cycle of global climate, interacting with similar phenomena like the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) in the Pacific Ocean.

The IOD phenomenon was first identified by climate researchers in 1999.[1][2] Yet evidence from fossil coral reefs demonstrates that the IOD has functioned since at least the middle of the Holocene period, 6500 years ago.

Gujarat farmer paves way for a new, climate-smart cash crop - sunshine

 using the excess energy to pump more groundwater to irrigate wheat and banana crops, Ramanbhai Parmar from Gujarat sold the extra energy he generated over four months back to the power grid.
He received Rs7,500 ($120) for 1,500 kilowatt hours kWh of electricity which, if used to run his water pump, would have extracted extra 8 million litres of groundwater.
“’Solar crops’ are a very exciting example of a triple-win,” Tushaar Shah, IWMI senior fellow, said in a statement.
“Farmers, the state, and precious water reserves all benefit from a single intervention.”
When solar-powered water pumps were introduced in Gujarat, it quickly transpired that farmers took advantage of what they saw as free energy to extract more water than they needed and groundwater reserves were depleted.
“We know that India’s farmers are extremely responsive to incentives that improve productivity and incomes,” said Shah.
“By offering them the chance to sell the electricity generated by their solar-powered water pumps, we could make agriculture in India cleaner and greener.”
Gujarat gets up to 3,000 hours of sunlight per year, but at the same time suffers from extended dry spells. Giving farmers an opportunity to sell excess energy could encourage them to pump only the water they need, said IWMI.
IWMI estimates that around 11 million farmers across India are currently connected to the electricity grid could install solar-powered water pumps and sell the extra energy produced.
According to the 2011 census, about 33% of India’s households lacked access to electricity. Scaling up the initiative could help relieve pressure on the state’s overwhelmed electricity board,

Six steps to a successful sanitation campaign

Inadequate sanitation costs India $54 billion a year. To that, add the challenge of juggling our nationalistic aspirations of superpowerdom with the ignominy of housing the largest share of human population that defecates in the open.

Amid many reports that the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (SBA) is failing, we need a dose of optimism. While SBA might be failing, it certainly isn’t the first, nor will it be the last state-led sanitation programme to fail in India. Our large schemes to tackle this challenge have, more often than not, ended up as models of just what one should avoid doing if they are serious about bringing about total sanitation.

It is now widely acknowledged that conventional approaches are not working: those that set up a false dichotomy between construction and behaviour change; those that are content with pit latrines as opposed to functional toilets; those that use reductionist conceptions such as communities being open defecation free rather than focusing on personal and environmental sanitation and hygiene as a whole; and those that settle for incremental coverage instead of full coverage from the start.

However, it’s not that there are no success stories within India or in our immediate neighbourhood. For one, the experiences of locally-embedded NGOs that have taken their interventions to scale can be highly instructive. There have also been state-led successes in Maharashtra and Himachal Pradesh that can offer valuable lessons. So what could some key design elements in a sanitation programme be?

First, do not approach communities with a single message (build and use toilets), but with a comprehensive health and hygiene intervention. Gram Vikas, an Odisha-based NGO, approaches communities with a package of interventions: a toilet and bathing room, and a community-level overhead tank to provide piped water supply to all houses through three taps (one each in the toilet, bathing room and kitchen). The community engagement should start with the promotion of individual level, household level and environmental sanitation. This will automatically place an emphasis on the participation of every household in the community. Also, talk about menstrual hygiene. Doing this makes the programme one that talks to communities about their lifestyles, health, livelihoods and dignity, rather than just about toilets.

Second, instead of being subsidy-averse, be ready to experiment until you get the design right. Recent research in Bangladesh shows that a subsidy helps overcome barriers to sanitation that cannot be overcome by information campaigns alone. Specifically, they find that joint investment commitments from a community accompanied with subsidies targeted at the poorest families helps increase take-up. The same is the experience in Maharashtra under a state-led sanitation programme. The popular failings of subsidies in India have been due to a combination of mis-targeting, poor community buy-in and shoddy construction. However, an optimal level of financial assistance and delivery should continue to be part of the policy design and implementation strategy.

Third, play on local power relations. Messages targeted at young women encouraging them to demand that toilets be available in households they marry into seem to have worked in many places. On the other hand, it is important to ensure that messages targeting women and girls are not misinterpreted in patriarchal societies that usually make up the audience. Supporting the poorest households (who are also likely to lower caste groups) can also translate into social pressure on the rich (and upper caste) households to catch up in terms of adopting safe sanitation practices.

Fourth, allow communities to evolve their own norms around individual and collective rights and responsibilities. As the water and sanitation infrastructure is being built up, gram sabhas should deliberate about shared codes of conduct and keeping the campaign to promote toilet usage running. While one may not be in favour of local norms that border on coercion, it is best to allow time for shared norms to evolve.

Fifth, do not hurry into scaling up: Yes, big numbers are important in a vast country like India. However, all too often, organisations in a rush to scale up end up compromising on key design elements that made their pilots a success. This is a typical problem with sanitation programmes. When communities become aware of the ‘target-pressures’ on the field staff, it gives them undue bargaining capacity. In an attempt to hasten their work, staff also focus more on the ‘hardware’, ignoring the critical ‘software’.

Sixth, and perhaps most important, be conscientious about quality. The poor do not deserve poor solutions to be thrust upon them. When designing a communications campaign, do not insult the intelligence of the communities you are working with. When constructing toilets, pay utmost attention to technical specifications.

One may be tempted to say that these are impossible conditions for a large-scale state-led programme to pull off. In each of these six components outlined above, it is important to integrate a dose of experiential learning and evidence-informed decision-making. It is critical that implementers are responsive to the dynamic context. The successful sanitation practitioners bring with them years of experience of engagement with informal institutions, local governance structures and local institutions such as schools, clinics and anganwadi centres.

A clear message from years of failure is that technocratic and reductionist approaches will struggle on the ground. Transformative change requires a willingness to work with local politics, allowing for interventions to take root and mature, and an evidence-informed learning approach that eschews pre-conceived biases. A fully decentralised system of implementation is non-negotiable. Only then will we start making progress towards the goal of ‘Swachh Bharat’.

'GROSS VALUE ADDED - GVA' .

A productivity metric that measures the difference between output and intermediate consumption. Gross value added provides a dollar value for the amount of goods and services that have been produced, less the cost of all inputs and raw materials that are directly attributable to that production

 In a major overhaul of the way India’s gross domestic product (GDP) is calculated, the Central Statistics Office will start measuring the country’s economic growth by gross value-added (GVA) at basic prices, replacing the practice of measuring it by GDP at factor cost.

The new measurement under the new base year of 2011-12, replacing 2004-05, will be released on 30 January for three years to 2013-14.

This is the most comprehensive review of the GDP measurement, including the sources of data, ever undertaken, said Pronab Sen, chairman of the National Statistical Commission.

The new method was recommended by the United Nations System of National Accounts in 2008 and will make India’s GDP growth numbers comparable with that of developed nations.

GVA at basic prices will add the net of production taxes and subsidies to GDP at factor cost. While the change in base year is likely to lead to a higher GDP, the impact of the measurement change is unclear.

Stamp duties and property taxes are part of production taxes in India, while subsidies to labour, capital and investment such as apprentice subsidies and interest subsidies constitute production subsidies.

The Indian economy grew at 6.7%, 4.5% and 4.7% during 2011-12, 2012-13 and 2013-14 fiscal years, respectively. Sen said that along with GVA at basic prices for these three years, revised measurements for GDP at factor cost will also be provided in the appendix for historical comparison. Providing GVA growth rates at basic prices historically for earlier years may take longer, he said.

The statistics department will release the advance estimates of the economy for 2014-15 along with the fiscal third quarter data on 9 February.

The change in base year is being done in accordance with the recommendation of the National Statistical Commission, which had advised to revise the base year of all economic indices every five years. The new base year has been selected in line with the latest quinquennial round of employment-unemployment survey.

The new 2011-12 series will incorporate results of the recent national sample surveys such as enterprise survey (2010-11), employment-unemployment survey (2011-12), all India debt and investment survey, situation assessment survey of farmers and survey on land and livestock holdings (2013). It will also take into account the population census (2011), agriculture census (2010-11) and livestock census (2012).

The statistics department will also release Consumer Price Index (CPI) for January with a new base of 2012 next month. The GDP data revision will also incorporate the new CPI instead of the current practice of using CPI for various groups such as agricultural labourers and industrial workers. The new series of Index of Industrial Production and Wholesale Price Index are likely to be released by March 2016.

The change in base year of national accounts statistics will result in an increase in the size of the economy in 2013-14 to Rs.111.7 trillion as against the earlier estimate of Rs.105.4 trillion, said Devendra Kumar Pant, chief economist and senior director (public finance) at India Ratings.

“The 2013-14 fiscal deficit and current account deficit are likely to decline to 4.3% of GDP (4.6% earlier) and 1.6% of GDP (1.7% earlier), respectively,” he said.

India Ratings expects the economy to reach $3 trillion by 2019-20 with the change in base to 2011-12, it said in a statement. On the 2004-05 base, it would have happened a year later in 2020-21.

“Of the last three base year changes, while the size of economy changed significantly in two cases, it did not change much in one case. The growth impact of a base year change both in India and recently in UK has been minimal,” the rating agency said. “The reason for the increase in size of the economy is the usage of more up-to-date information for these estimations

GVA is linked as a measurement to gross domestic product (GDP), as both are measures of output. The relationship is defined as:

GVA + taxes on products - subsidies on products = GDP

As the total aggregates of taxes on products and subsidies on products are only available at whole economy level,^[3] Gross value added is used for measuring gross regional domestic product and other measures of the output of entities smaller than a whole economy. Restated,

GVA = GDP + subsidies - (direct, sales) taxes

Over-simplistically, GVA is the grand total of all revenues, from final sales and (net) subsidies, which are incomes into businesses. Those incomes are then used to cover expenses (wages & salaries, dividends), savings (profits, depreciation), and (indirect) taxes.

RBI's inflation indicator

RBI's inflation indicator
The basket of goods whose prices are measured by CPI inflation is constant. Hence, the CPI reflects the prices of goods and services consumed by domestic households. It is the best indicator

The chief economic advisor, Dr Arvind Subramanian, has recently suggested that it may worthwhile revisiting the issue of which inflation indicator the RBI should use in conducting monetary policy. His basic argument rests on comparing the somewhat contrasting recent trajectories of inflation as measured by the consumer price index (CPI), the wholesale price index (WPI) and the GDP deflator. While the CPI is currently still around five per cent, the WPI inflation and the GDP deflator numbers are close to zero. Consequently, if one measures the stance of monetary policy by the repo rate minus the inflation rate, CPI inflation suggests that monetary policy is very accommodative while the other two suggest that it is very tight. Which of these measures is most informative for policy?

The choice of indicator rests crucially on the requirement that the chosen indicator reflect current inflationary pressures in the economy as accurately and as quickly as possible, since monetary policy needs to respond in a timely fashion to unfolding developments. One of Subramanian's proposed candidates is the WPI. This measure is wholly unrepresentative of the economy since it doesn't include the service sector which comprises over 60 per cent of output and around 40 per cent of employment in India. Any measure that fails to include the service sector will fail to provide a reliable indicator of the true state of the economy.

Another of his candidates is GDP deflator inflation. This measure has at least two problems. First, the GDP deflator includes prices of the country's exports, which can often have very little to do with the prices being paid by consumers domestically as also the types of goods being consumed locally. Consequently, it is an incomplete indicator of domestic inflation, which makes it of relatively limited usefulness.

Second, the GDP deflator is subject to large uncertainty due to its dependence on GDP estimates from the national income accounts. As is well known, GDP numbers are subject to large and significant revisions over time. The first estimates of quarterly GDP that are put out by the CSO are necessarily based on quick estimates which subsequently get revised as more data for the previous quarter come in. These revisions often continue for over a year. India is no exception in this. In the USA, the revision of quarterly GDP growth numbers have averaged nearly 1.5 percentage points since 1965, a period when average US GDP growth has been 2.7 per cent. Clearly, inflation based on the GDP deflator is a rather poor reflector of the true contemporary state of the economy.

In view of these limitations of other measures of inflation, central banks the world over mostly tend to target either headline or core CPI inflation (core inflation excludes some items like food and fuel). The CPI is not prone to large revisions. Moreover, the basket of goods whose prices it measures is constant. Hence, the CPI reflects the prices of goods and services consumed by domestic households. It is presumably for these reasons that the RBI has chosen to target headline CPI inflation. It is the best option amongst the available alternatives.

One concern with the CPI is that it may not accurately reflect prices faced by producers since it measures prices paid by consumers. The difference between producer prices and consumer prices is typically the distribution cost of getting the good from producers to households. It is conceivable that CPI inflation might be higher than inflation in the producer price index (PPI) due to increases in distribution costs. Unfortunately, the PPI does not yet exist in India though the recently constituted Goldar committee is currently working on it. Once it becomes available, the RBI could consider enhancing the information set on which it takes decisions to include the PPI. But this has to be clearly announced to the public.

The last point about clear announcement brings me to a much more fundamental problem with Subramanian's suggestion of revisiting the CPI as the inflation indicator. A key component of inflation is the private sector's expectation regarding inflation. Thus, firms set prices and labour negotiates wages based on their expectations of future inflation. Clarity regarding the inflation indicator that the RBI is using as well as the target level of inflation are both key for private agents to anchor their inflation expectations. This is precisely what the recent agreement between the RBI and the government on a four per cent long-run target for CPI inflation was meant to achieve. For the CEA to the government to now suggest that this may be worth revisiting is unfortunate, since it risks undercutting the precise goal of the agreement that the government itself signed.

The sub-text underlying Subramanian's suggestion is of course the government's desire that the RBI lower interest rates more aggressively. Subramanian justifies this by implying that high interest rates are stretching firm balance sheets and thereby causing further problems for banks that have lent to these corporates. This is disingenuous at best, since it conveniently omits to mention that the deterioration in firm and bank balance sheets occurred over the past few years when real interest rates were hovering close to zero by all measures of inflation. The causes of this balance sheet fragility are clearly elsewhere.

It is perhaps best for the government to focus on dealing with the structural issues facing the economy instead of trying to undercut some of the better articulated operating procedures like CPI inflation targeting for some purely short-run expediency.These statements are more likely to just confuse markets

India’s first visually challenged diplomat

IFS gets “hidden treasure” in Beno Zephine; 10 things to know about India’s first visually challenged diplomat

Beno Zephine being felicitated in DoPT

DURING the last few days senior ministers in the corridors felicitated a 25-year-old girl from Tamil Nadu. She is Beno Zephine. Literally, Beno means daughter of God and Zephine means hidden treasure. Yes, Indian Foreign Service gets a “hidden treasure” when Beno Zephine became the first 100 per cent visually challenged person to be inducted into the country's elite foreign service. Here are 10 things you may like to know about Beno Zephine.

1. Daughter of Indian railway employee Luke Anthony Charles and Mary Padmaja, a homemaker, Beno secured the 343rd rank in the 2013-14 civil service examination.
2. But, she had to wait as the government had to change the rules to accommodate her in IFS. After all, the existing government rules did not allow anyone with 100% blindness to be an IFS.
3. Beno’s first choice in UPSC was the Indian Foreign Service. So, when she got a call on June 12, 2015, from an under secretary-ranked official in the ministry of external affairs informing her that she was selected, she was overjoyed.
4. She is a post-graduation in English literature from Loyola College, Chennai.
5. After she completed her MA in 2013, she was selected as a probationary officer with the State Bank of India (SBI).
6. "With my first salary, I bought a gold chain for my father and earrings for my mother”, she said in an interview with rediff.com recently.
7. Her mother read out many books for her. Also, she regularly listened to the 9 o'clock news of All India Radio from her childhood, something which helped her cracking the UPSC examinations.
8. After her joining in SBI and passing the civil service examination, he gave motivational speeches in schools and colleges across the state of Tamil Nadu. She loves tell the students: “Understand your strengths and weaknesses, only then will you be able to strengthen your strength and weaken your weakness.”
9. Beno’s enthusiasm and zeal to work had earned her the title of "Collector" among the residents of the colony in Chennai from where she hailed, according to a Government of India statement about her felicitation.
10. When personnel minister and MoS in the PMO Jitendra Singh felicitated her recently, additional secretary and EO Rajiv Kumar, additional secretary T Jacob and other senior officials of DoPT made it a point to join the felicitation programme and encouraged h