UN Declares APJ Abdul Kalam’s Birthday As ‘World Students Day’

UN Declares APJ Abdul Kalam’s Birthday As ‘World Students Day’

World Students Day: It was year 2010 when United Nations decided to mark the importance of India’s former President and great scientist APJ Abdul Kalam and declared his birthday as ‘World Students Day’.

October 15, which is Dr. Kalam’s birth anniversary, is celebrated as a day for students all around the world. Even Dr. Kalam always expressed his wish to be remembered as a teacher by the people.

दक्षिण कोरिया की लेखिका ‪#‎HanKang‬ ने द वेजेटेरियन के लिए जीता वर्ष 2016 का अंतरराष्ट्रीय ‪#‎ManBookerPrize‬

दक्षिण कोरिया की लेखिका ‪#‎HanKang‬ ने द वेजेटेरियन के लिए जीता वर्ष 2016 का अंतरराष्ट्रीय ‪#‎ManBookerPrize‬

South Korean author, Han Kang, has won the 2016 Man Booker International Prize for her novel 'The Vegetarian'.
It tells a story of a wife who decides to become a vegetarian. The decision provokes cruelty from her husband, and from her father, and obsession from her sister’s husband, as the woman, Yeong-hye, dreams obsessively about becoming a tree.
Han is the first South Korean to win the prize.
The Vegetarian" is the first of her books to be translated into English. It tells the story of Yeong-hye, a dutiful wife whose decision to forego meat uproots her whole existence.

South Korean author Han Kang won the Man Booker International Prize for fiction on Monday with “The Vegetarian,” an unsettling novel in which a woman’s decision to stop eating meat has devastating consequences.

Literary critic Boyd Tonkin, chair of the panel that chose the winner from 155 entries, said Han’s book combined “tenderness and terror” in a tale of “volcanic, visceral intensity.”

The award is the international counterpart to Britain’s prestigious Booker Prize and is open to books published in any language that have been translated into English.

The prize money will be split evenly between Ms. Han and her 28-year-old translator, Deborah Smith, who only began learning Korean less than seven years ago.

“The Vegetarian” is the first of her books to be translated into English. It tells the story of Yeong-hye, a dutiful wife whose decision to forego meat uproots her whole existence.

The author said she wanted to explore “human violence, and also (ask) a question about human dignity.”

The prize named after its sponsor, financial services firm Man Group PLC was previously a career honour, but changed this year to recognize a single work of fiction.

The change comes amid signs that English-speaking readers are slowly becoming more receptive to translated literature. Research firm Nielsen Book says the British market for translated fiction almost doubled between 2001 and 2015 but still accounts for just 1.5 percent of all fiction sales.

Man Booker is one of the few literary prizes to recognize translators alongside authors, and marks an extraordinary victory for Smith- “The Vegetarian” is not just the first Korean novel she had translated, but the first she had read.

“For a short novel, it felt like climbing a mountain,” she said.

The other contenders were Yan Lianke’s “The Four Books,” one of the few Chinese novels to tackle the Great Famine of the 1950s and ‘60s; Angolan revolution saga “A General Theory of Oblivion” by Jose Eduardo Agualusa; and the Alpine story “A Whole Life” by Austria’s Robert Seethaler.

ISRO’s Reusable Launch Vehicle to take off next week

ISRO’s Reusable Launch Vehicle to take off next week
The technology demonstrator will take place from Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota.

The first technology demonstrator (TD) launch of the Indian Space Research Organisation’s Reusable Launch Vehicle (RLV), or the spaceplane in popular parlance, will take place on May 23 at 9.30 a.m. from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre (SDSC), Sriharikota, according to ISRO officials.

Visually, the RLV-TD is a rocket-aircraft combination measuring about 17 m, whose first stage is a solid propellant booster rocket and the second stage is a 6.5 m long aircraft-like winged structure sitting atop the rocket.

A misnomer

However, the popular perception of the technology as a marriage between rocket and aircraft is a misnomer.

In RLV-TD that is awaiting launch at SHAR, the first stage, weighing about 9 tonnes, is merely the Satellite Launch Vehicle (SLV-3) flown in the 1980s.

The vehicle will take off like a rocket and the RLV will be taken to a height of 70 km and where the booster will release the vehicle to carry out its manoeuvres.

Hypersonic Experiment 1

According to Dr. K. Sivan, director of the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC), Thiruvanathapuram, where the RLV was designed, assembled and where it underwent basic electrical, hydraulic and “sign check” tests, the objective is to achieve hypersonic speeds to basically test the hypersonic aero-thermodynamic characterisation of the winged body’s re-entry, its control and guidance systems, autonomous mission management to land at a specific location at sea and testing of “hot structures” that make up the structure of the RLV.

The test is, therefore, termed as Hypersonic Experiment 1 (HEX-1).

Complex technology

A conventional launch vehicle (LV), says Dr. Sivan, spends the lowest time of its flight in the atmosphere, whereas the RLV system spends all the time in the atmosphere. Also, while an aircraft experiences limited flight regime of say Mach 0 to Mach 2 or so, the RLV experiences a much wider range of flight regimes.

Hence the technology of an RLV is much more complex basically arising from the design of the control and guidance systems, he pointed out.

In HEX1, the winged RLV is otherwise a dummy with no powered flight of its own. In this test, the RLV will attain a flight regime of Mach 5 with the help of the booster alone, Dr. Sivan said. At the end of the HEX1 mission, the aircraft will land in sea. The total flight duration of the RLV-TD from launch till splash down will be about 10 mins.

However, the ultimate objective of the RLV programme of ISRO is to enable the vehicle traverse a very wide range of flight regimes from Mach 0 to Mach 25 based on air-breathing propulsion for achieving two-stage-to-orbit (TSTO) launch capability.

The integrated test system (booster plus the RLV-TD) is already at the SDSC (SDSC), Sriharikota. Prior to being moved to Sriharikota, the RLV subsystem underwent acoustic tests at the National Aerospace Laboratories of the CSIR (CSIR-NAL) and the booster went as a separate subsystem directly from VSSC. At SDSC the two were mated together.

Dr. A.S. Kiran Kumar, ISRO Chairman, called the first test launch HEX1 “a very preliminary step” and stressed that “we have to go a long way” before it could be called a re-usable launch system. “But these are very essential steps we have to take,” he said.

Lower cost

Asked whether the Indian reusable launch system was aimed at bringing down the launch cost, the ISRO Chairman said, “It will bring down the cost. Towards that, we will have to work and go through these initial steps,” the Chairman said.

Flying test bed

The present design is basically “a flying test bed to evaluate various technologies, namely hypersonic flight, autonomous landing, powered cruise flight and hypersonic flight using air-breathing propulsion using a scramjet engine”, according to ISRO website.

The HEX series of experiments will be followed by the landing experiment (LEX), return flight experiment and scramjet propulsion experiment (SPEX).

The basic design of a scramjet has already been evolved.

A test launch of the engine aboard a sounding rocket, which will achieve a flight regime of up to Mach 8, will take place some place in June at SHAR, Dr. Sivan said.

Government constitutes a five Member Committee to comprehensively review and give recommendations on the FRBM roadmap for the future

Government constitutes a five Member Committee to comprehensively review and give recommendations on the FRBM roadmap for the future

In pursuance of the Budget Announcement 2016-17, the Government has constituted a five Member Committee to comprehensively review and give recommendations on the FRBM roadmap for the future.

The composition of the FRBM Review Committee is as follows:

(i)Shri N.K. Singh, Former Revenue Secretary & Expenditure Secretary &Former Member of Parliament(Rajya Sabha) : Chairman

(ii)Shri Sumit Bose, Former Finance & Revenue Secretary: Member

(iii)Dr. Arvind Subramanian, Chief Economic Advised (CEA) : Member

(iv) Shri Urijit Patel,Deputy Governor,RBI: Member

(v) Shri Rathin Roy, Director, NIPFP: Member

The Terms of Reference (ToR) of the Committee are as under:

(i) To review the working of the FRBM Act over last 12 years and to suggest the way forward, keeping in view the broad objective of fiscal consolidation and prudence and the changes required in the context of the uncertainty and volatility in the global economy;
(ii) To look into various aspects, factors, considerations going into determining the FRBM targets
(iii) To examine the need and feasibility of having a ‘fiscal deficit range’ as the target in place of the existing fixed numbers(percentage of GDP) as fiscal deficit target; if so, the specific recommendations of the Committee thereon; and
(iv) To examine the need and feasibility of aligning the fiscal expansion or contraction with credit contraction or expansion respectively in the economy.

The Committee will make its assessment and provide its views on the expected impact of its recommendations on the General Government deficit and other FRBM parameters. The Committee will also examine and give recommendations on any other aspect considered relevant in relation to the determination and implementation of the FRBM roadmap. The Committee may be entrusted with additional ToR, if considered necessary. In this context, the Committee may consult Departments/Agencies of Government, experts and institutions, as considered necessary, and determine its own procedures.

The Budget Division of Department of Economic Affairs, Ministry of Finance will provide necessary secretarial and logistics support to the Committee.

The Committee shall submit its Report to Government by the 31st October, 2016.

Narendra Modi’s Iran visit to focus on boosting energy, trade ties

Narendra Modi’s Iran visit to focus on boosting energy, trade ties
Narendra Modi to make the 22-23 May trip at the invitation of Iranian president Hassan Rouhani

Prime Minister Narendra Modi will be visiting Iran over the weekend on a two-day trip that is expected to boost bilateral energy and trade ties besides giving a fillip to India’s connectivity plans in its extended neighbourhood.

India’s external affairs ministry announced the visit in a press statement on Tuesday in which it said that Modi was making the 22-23 May trip at the invitation of Iranian president Hassan Rouhani.

Modi and Rouhani have met earlier at Ufa in Russia, on the sidelines of a Shanghai Cooperation Organization meeting.

Modi’s visit to Iran comes after his visits to the UAE and Saudi Arabia and ahead of trips to Qatar and Israel. It comes at a time of flux in the Middle East with the rise of the radical Sunni Islamic State militant group and an Iran freed of sanctions, which has made countries like Saudi Arabia and Israel wary of the rise of the Shia majority country.

“During the visit, the prime minister will call on the supreme leader of Iran (Ali Khamenei) and will hold talks on a wide range of subjects of mutual interest with President Rouhani.

“India and Iran share longstanding civilizational ties. Iran is situated in India’s extended neighbourhood and the two countries have significant overlap in their economic and security space.

“The visit of the prime minister to Iran will seek to build on these commonalities by focussing on specific cooperation in regional connectivity and infrastructure, developing energy partnership, boosting bilateral trade, facilitating people-to-people interaction in various spheres and promoting peace and stability in the region,” the statement said.

Modi’s visit will provide “a timely thrust to the ongoing efforts of the two countries and their business entities to expand bilateral cooperation and mutually benefit from new opportunities in the wake of lifting of secondary sanctions against Iran earlier this year,” it added.

Iran has been a major source of energy for Asia’s third largest economy even during the period when the US imposed crippling sanctions on financial institutions dealing with Iran, making it impossible for countries buying crude oil from the Shia country to pay their bills. The sanctions—aimed at curbing Iran’s allegedly clandestine nuclear programme—were lifted last year after Iran struck a deal with Russia, the US and its other Western allies to allow international monitors to inspect its nuclear facilities.

Earlier this month, India’s ambassador to Iran Saurabh Kumar was cited by media reports as saying that India was accelerating a plan to pay nearly $6.5 billion it owes Teheran for crude oil imports.

Turkey’s Halkbank has been identified to facilitate the payment and the money will be paid in euros, Kumar said.

Modi’s visit is also expected to see progress on New Delhi’s proposal for allowing ONGC Videsh Ltd (OVL) to develop the Farzad B gas field in Iran.

OVL, along with Oil India Ltd and Indian Oil Corporation Ltd, had earlier invested about $100 million in the Farzad B gas field, but production could not be started as Indian companies found it difficult to stay engaged in the hydrocarbon sector due to sanctions imposed by the US and the European Union.

New Delhi conveyed to Tehran its interest to return to the project after sanctions were eased last year.

India is also keen on developing Iran’s Chabahar port which could ease India’s connectivity problems vis-a-vis landlocked Afghanistan. India is to equip and operate two berths in Chabahar Port Phase-I with capital investment of $85.21 million and annual revenue expenditure of $22.95 million on a 10-year lease. India, Afghanistan and Iran have finalised a trilateral transport and transit deal, which will allow Indian exporters to utilise the Chabahar Port, besides gaining access to markets in Afghanistan through Zahedan in the West Asian country.

The judiciary is shifting the balance of power

The judiciary is shifting the balance of power
It is increasingly becoming the first port of call for solving all problems

Usually known to be measured with his words, finance minister Arun Jaitley cut loose with scathing criticism of the Indian judiciary on the floor of the Rajya Sabha last Thursday. He blamed the judiciary for actively encroaching on the powers of legislative and executive authorities. He claimed that “step by step, brick by brick, the edifice of India’s legislature is being destroyed” by the judiciary. Through a number of judgements, including the one Jaitley referred to in his Rajya Sabha intervention—ordering the creation of a National Disaster Mitigation Fund while national and state disaster response funds already exist—the judiciary has appropriated for itself a role far beyond its primary duties of dispensing justice and interpreting laws.

This encroachment is clearly a matter of huge concern. And to that extent, Jaitley is right. As far as his choice of words is concerned, it is also an indicator of how repeatedly used camouflaged phrases like “judicial overreach” have been incapable of instigating any self-correction by the honourable judges.

The judiciary in India is often called the most powerful among its tribe globally. While the creative interpretations of the text of law had started earlier, the post-Emergency phase marked a distinct turnaround in the Indian judiciary’s activism. After the ignominious failure to protect the fundamental rights of the citizens in ADM Jabalpur vs Shivakant Shukla (1976), the court believed a constitutional correction would be insufficient. So, the pursuance of constitutional legitimacy was replaced—in the words of Lavanya Rajamani and Arghya Sengupta—“by a quest for popular legitimacy”. A series of judgements, most notably S.P. Gupta vs President of India and others (1981), gave rise to a new legal instrument called public interest litigation. This instrument allowed “public-spirited individuals seeking judicial redress” on a variety of matters beyond what would be permitted by the traditional rule of locus standi, which specifically addressed the concerns of aggrieved citizens.

Through several judgements thereafter, the judiciary has unhesitatingly shuffled into the roles of both the legislature and the executive. It assumed wide powers in matters of protection of the environment. This process was, however, aided by the executive which dithered in taking politically difficult decisions that might have invited wrath from their constituencies. The overzealousness of the judiciary and the neglect by the executive helped along a gradual obliteration of the separation of powers between the judiciary, the legislature and the executive.

Jaitley is not the only one to speak out. When quizzed about the Supreme Court decision to move Indian Premier League matches out of Maharashtra given the drought in Latur and other parts of the state by an interviewer on NDTV, transport and shipping minister Nitin Gadkari said: “If judges want to do our job, they can resign and contest elections.” Not just the drought, the courts have also evidenced their concerns about the problem of pollution in the National Capital Region. Among a spate of orders, the apex court has doubled the entry tax on trucks entering Delhi. The intention is indeed laudable. But here is a question that should be considered by anyone making such a decision. Who will bear this tax—the truck owners or the citizens of Delhi? Well, it depends on the demand elasticity of goods in Delhi, an overwhelmingly consuming state. This example is ample proof of why the courts which are ill-equipped to weigh the economic, environmental and political costs involved should keep away from such issues.

To be fair, the judiciary has its own complaints of the executive. Speaking at the chief ministers and chief justices conference, chief justice of India T.S. Thakur grew emotional talking about the long backlog of pending cases. He blamed the centre for moving slow on the appointment of judges and increasing the number of courts and judges. Thakur may indeed be right, but he could have also looked at the propensity of the judiciary to continually expand its sphere of operations and the consequent effect on the backlog.

A bench headed by Thakur himself has been, in recent times, trying to fix the air connectivity to Shimla. And over the past few days, Olympic medallist Sushil Kumar had moved the Delhi high court to help him make the cut for Rio Olympics 2016. Even as the court has refused to interfere, this is another example, if any was needed, to show that the courts have become the first port of call for all problems—from air-connectivity of Shimla to securing nomination in the Olympics.

Has the Indian judiciary taken too much upon its shoulders?

Government opens special channel to speed up patent grant process

Government opens special channel to speed up patent grant process
The government, in a first, aims to process patent applications within 6 to 12 months as against the normal route which takes 5 to 7 years
The government, in a first, has opened a special window to process patent applications within 6 to 12 months as against the normal route which takes 5 to 7 years. The easy route will be open only to start-ups and firms willing to file patents for new innovations first in India, thereby recognising the Indian patent office as a competent International Searching Authority (ISA) or International Preliminary Examining Authority (IPEA).

The Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP) notified on Monday the amended patent rules which included the provision among others. But the Controller General of Patents Designs and Trademarks will only take up a limited number of applications under the fast-track route in one year. There are 18 patent offices classified as ISA or IPEA in the world.

“India is the 17th ISA. We have kept this condition to popularize Indian ISA for patent filings. We expect start-ups and Indian companies to use this route,” a DIPP official said on condition of anonymity.

Now when an applicant files a “request for examination” which is a completed application form, it takes the Indian patent office 5-7 years to do the first examination. Then, based on the questions or contests by other parties, the patent office gives 12 months to respond to the original applicant after which it either grants or rejects the patent. The final award of patent depends on how soon the applicant responds to the queries. The centre is trying to bring down the first examination period to 18 months by March 2018 for applications filed through the normal route.

The time to be taken to complete the first examination has not been specified in the amended rules and it will be separately notified through an executive order, the official said.

The fast-track facility will be available for start-ups set up anywhere in the world if they satisfy the definition of a start-up by DIPP. “Under the World Trade Organisation rules, we have to give national treatment and cannot discriminate against a company from another country,” the official said.

India has defined a start-up as one that has been set up in less than five years and whose turnover is less than Rs.25 crore. This definition will also be applicable to foreign start-ups.

DIPP has also recognised start-ups as individuals rather than companies and has cut their application fees. For example, initial application fee for a start-up is Rs.1,600, equivalent for an individual person and the fee for request for examination is Rs.4,000. If the start-up wants to expedite its patent application, it has to pay double the fee. The application fees for small and medium enterprises and large companies go up by 2.5 times and 3 times, respectively.

Through the amended rules, DIPP has also for the first time introduced cases under which firms can ask for a refund of patent application fee if one withdraws the application.

“There are a lot of applications pending with us unnecessarily when the party is not even interested in pursuing it. They filed an application earlier thinking that they had a grand idea. After working on it for a year, they realized that it was of no use or could not be commercialized or it’s not viable. Now, they can just file an application to withdraw and we will return the fee. If the patent application has reached the stage of ‘request for examination’, still the applicant can withdraw it and we will refund 90% of the application fee,” the official said.

In countries such as Japan, 10-15% of the applications get withdrawn. In India, the number of pending patent applications are around 240,000.