Scientists claim discovery of drowned Pacific Ocean continent Zealandia

The 4.5-million square km land mass is 94% under water and only its highest points — New Zealand and New Caledonia — are visible.

A continent two-thirds the size of Australia has been found beneath the south-west Pacific Ocean, scientists reported in the journal of the Geological Society of America.
Known as Zealandia, the land mass of 4.5 million square kilometres (1.74 million square miles) is 94 per cent under water and only its highest points — New Zealand and New Caledonia — poke above the surface.
“It’s rather frustrating for us geologists with the oceans being there,” said Nick Mortimer, a geologist at GNS Science in Dunedin, New Zealand. “If we could pull the plug on the oceans, it would be clear to everyone we have mountain chains and a big high-standing continent above the ocean crust.”
Mr. Mortimer was the lead author of the paper titled Zealandia: Earth's hidden continent which says the new discoveries prove what had long been suspected.
Suspected since the 1920s
“Since about the 1920s, from time to time in geology papers, people used the word ‘continental’ to describe various parts of New Zealand and the Catham Islands and New Caledonia,” Mr. Mortimer said. “The difference now is that we feel we’ve gathered enough information to change ‘continental’ to the noun, ‘continent.’”
Mr. Mortimer said geologists early in the previous century had found granite from sub-Antarctic islands near New Zealand and metamorphic rocks on New Caledonia that were indicative of continental geology. If the recent discovery is accepted by the scientific community, cartographers will probably have to add an eighth continent to future maps and atlases.
“The paper we’ve written unashamedly sticks to empirical observations and descriptions,” Mr. Mortimer said. “The litmus test will really be if ‘Zealandia’ appears in maps and atlases in five or 10 years’ time.”

Split 80 million years ago?

Zealandia is believed to have broken away from Australia about 80 million years ago and sank beneath the sea as part of the break up of the super-continent known as Gondwanaland.

Project Loon can now predict weather systems

Researchers at Google have moved a step closer to rolling out a network of huge balloons to provide Internet connectivity to billions of people around the world, particularly those in difficult-to-reach rural areas.
The Project Loon team, part of the company’s X research lab, said it can now use machine learning to predict weather systems.
The advance means Google has much more control over where its balloons reach, making it possible to focus on a specific region, rather than circumnavigating the globe.
“We can now run an experiment and try to give service in a particular place in the world with ten, twenty or thirty balloons,” rather than the hundreds needed previously, the company said.
“Real users” will be able to make use of the system in the “coming months”, however, the company did not specify where the initial roll-out would take place.
The company has experimented with beaming down connectivity from a network of huge, tennis-court sized balloons rather than undertaking huge construction projects to replicate connectivity networks in the developed world.
The balloons float in the stratosphere around 18 kilometres high. By raising or lowering altitude, the balloons can be caught in different weather streams, changing direction.

By using machine-learning algorithms, Google thinks it has found a way to predict weather with enough accuracy to make it possible to hover balloons over a relatively small area for a long period of time.

The firm was last year able to keep a cluster of balloons over Peru for three months.

Upsetting a very fine balance

Three recent instances invite disturbing questions about the transformation of the Supreme Court

Sixty-seven years ago, the framers of our Constitution made a simple — yet radical — choice. They decided to trust the Indian people. The Indian Constitution, with its guarantee of universal adult suffrage, transformed colonial subjects into free and independent citizens, who were to use their own reason in governing themselves.

Our Constitution’s framers also made another important choice. Having fought so long against a repressive government, they were aware of how easily power is used to crush free thought, open discussion, and civil rights. While they trusted the Indian people, they did not trust their rulers. And so, in the Constitution, they guaranteed to all citizens fundamental rights, including the fundamental right to the freedom of speech and expression, subject only to specified restrictions.

Two layers of safeguards

The framers were careful about the language they used: restrictions upon a fundamental right could be imposed only by law. Only an elected legislature, after careful deliberation, could decide to restrict some speech in the interests of an overwhelmingly important public goal. This could then be challenged before independent courts. Thus, the Constitution protected citizens’ rights through two layers of safeguards: the legislature had to make a law, and then the courts could be called upon to test its constitutionality.
In the years after Independence, the framers’ delicate balancing act — between State and citizen, between rights and public goals, between legislatures and courts — has sometimes come under immense strain, but has survived more or less intact. In recent months, however, that balance is once again under stress. Only this time, it is not because of an overbearing Executive or a pliant Parliament. It is because of the Supreme Court. In the course of its history, the Supreme Court has performed its role as the guardian of our fundamental rights with a debatable degree of success: upholding the law of sedition while striking down Section 66A of the Information Technology Act, upholding the law of obscenity while gradually liberalising it over the years, and so on. However, what is happening now is more serious: of late, the Court has begun to redefine its own role under the Constitution, transforming itself from the guardian of civil rights to a great, overarching moral and political censor. This is a role that the framers never envisaged. Given that there is nobody to guard the guardians, it is a role that vests great power — without any accompanying responsibility — in the Court. And it is a role that runs contrary to the very spirit of our Constitution, and specifically to its structuring principle of autonomous, thinking citizens.

Three instances

Three recent instances have accelerated this nascent trend. Recently, the High Court of Bombay found that certain scenes in the film Jolly LLB 2 “defame” the legal profession. Despite the fact that the film had been cleared by the Censor Board, the Court set up an entirely fresh committee to “review” the film, and ordered four “cuts” to be made. The producers moved the Supreme Court, arguing that while the High Court could, admittedly, review the decision of the Censor Board, it could not create an entirely new censoring mechanism. However, the Supreme Court refused to intervene or to hear the producers on the merits of their case until the High Court had passed its final orders. When the Bombay High Court finally mandated cuts, the producers — understandably — saw little point in going back to the Supreme Court. Facing huge commercial losses (the film was set to release in four days), they managed to bargain and reduce the number of cuts. The film was released. The precedent that it set, however, is disturbing.
While the Supreme Court saw nothing wrong with the Bombay High Court’s invention of a parallel censorship mechanism, it saw everything wrong with the fact that cinema halls were not playing the national anthem before every film. Acting upon a “public interest litigation”, and without any basis in existing law, in November 2016, the Court passed an “interim order” compelling all cinema halls to play the anthem. For a moment, forget about whether this is a good or a bad thing. Instead, consider the following: is it legal? It is constitutional? Is this kind of compelled performance of patriotism something India’s Supreme Court can impose upon India’s free and independent citizens? Somewhere, drowned underneath the drumbeats of patriotism, these crucial questions are going unanswered.
And lastly, only last week, the Supreme Court passed yet more interim orders, in a case involving sex-determination tests. Ostensibly, the Court was acting under the authority of the Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques Act of 1994, which prohibits advertisements regarding pre-natal sex determination.
However, fuelled by a sense of moral outrage, the Court had been passing a series of “interim orders” (eventually likely to become final) that were progressively increasing censorship; in the latest order, it directed search engines such as Google to constitute in-house committees to “block” access to such websites, and (in continuation of previous orders) to do so by blocking search “keywords”. In one stroke, the Supreme Court vested vast censorship powers in unaccountable private committees, something that Internet scholars and activists all over the world have repeatedly warned against. More worryingly, however, the Court’s orders amount to making entire swathes of the Internet off-limits for everyone, no matter what the purpose: research, investigation, or even simple curiosity. Or, to put it even more simply: because advertising for sex determination is illegal in India, the Court will make any attempt to look it up on the Internet also illegal. That is how totalitarian societies react to the Internet. It is not how the Supreme Court of India is expected to react.
The implications of these orders are frightening. Today, the Court wants Google to block access to search results involving the word “gender selection”. What will it be tomorrow? “Secession”? “Terrorism”? Or just about anything that the courts, in their wisdom, feel that Indian citizens cannot be trusted to read about?

Now, Supreme Censor?

There are a few unifying features about these three cases. All of them were brought to the Court as “public interest litigation”. There is a tragic irony here: public interest litigation began as a movement to democratise access to courts. It discarded traditional rules of evidence, and vested vast powers in courts to “do justice”. In 2017, the very dilution of rules and the existence of vast powers have become weapons in the hands of courts to cut down rights. More importantly, however, in all these cases, the Court’s censorial actions bear a tenuous connection — if any — to “law”. In the Jolly LLB 2 and National Anthem cases, the courts do not even attempt to demonstrate that what they are doing is within the legal framework. In the Sex Determination case, vague references are made to the IT Act, but that law simply does not contemplate judicial orders that make the Internet off limits. In short, the Court’s actions have upended the careful balance that the framers sought to achieve in the Constitution: instead of our elected representatives making laws, which the Court then tests for constitutionality, the Court has now begun to make its own laws limiting, restricting, and suffocating speech. And this is only the tip of the iceberg: the Supreme Court is currently hearing petitions seeking to ban pornography, order a keyword-block for rape videos, and ban racy pictures on condom packets. The Court’s jurisprudence also has an impact downwards: last year, the Madras High Court ordered that the teaching of the Tamil epic Thirukkural be made compulsory in all schools — again, in the absence of any law whatsoever.

In 2017, the Supreme Court has reduced us to passive subjects instead of active, thinking citizens. The Supreme Court tells us what we can watch and what we can’t watch. The Supreme Court tells us what we can search on the Internet, and what we can’t search. The Supreme Court tells us that we must be patriotic, and how, where, and when, we must be patriotic.

To the framers of our Constitution, who fought for political independence from colonial rule on the Enlightenment principle of “have courage to use your reason”, and who trusted the Indian people to make that most important of all decisions — the decision to choose their own rulers — we can only say that the transformation of the Supreme Court into the Supreme Censor would have come as an unpleasant shock

The economics of immigration reform

The question of how the country should approach immigration remains one that is often discussed and never resolved

My grandmother disembarked at Ellis Island in 1922, just as the doors to the US closed on Soviet immigrants. Clearly, my family is relieved that policy did not change before she got her visa, but does that mean all of her dozens of descendants support continued immigration? Of course not: We can’t even agree on a proper brisket-making technique. As a nation, we have been discussing the benefits and disadvantages of bringing new blood in for centuries, and the issue has yet to be settled.

This week the IGM Economic Experts Panel showed us that even the world’s leading economists can’t agree on this issue, judging by the mixed poll results for two questions about low-skilled immigrants.
The first question considered whether the average US citizen would be better off if a larger number of low-skilled foreign workers were legally allowed to enter the US each year. Slightly more than half of the experts agreed with this statement. “This would drive down the cost of a variety of services,” said Aaron Edlin of Berkeley. Still, 28% were uncertain.
One reason for the high number of uncertain responses seems to be semantics: “‘Average US citizen’, what does that mean?” asked Barry Eichengreen of the University of California at Berkeley. Others simply did not have an answer, citing a lack of information.
“I am sure that I am uncertain,” said Caroline Hoxby of Stanford. “A certain answer would require a knowledge of EQM effects on which we’ve only a partial grasp.”
Several panellists noted that there were both pros and cons to admitting more low-skilled foreign workers. Joseph Altonji of Yale pointed out that “real income of the average American would rise, but social strains and inequality would also increase”. Oliver Hart of Harvard commented that average citizens would be better off, but welfare payments to unemployed immigrants would be a countervailing effect.
As for the second question, half of the panel agreed that low-skilled American workers would be substantially worse off if a larger number of low-skilled foreign workers were legally allowed to enter the US each year. “A higher number of workers of the same type seeking jobs would lower their average wages or employment rate,” said Darrell Duffie of Stanford. His faculty mate, Kenneth Judd, concurred. “It is hard to see how (low-skilled American workers) would benefit, and they would lose from the competition in the labour market,” said Judd.
As in the previous question, nearly a third of the respondents were uncertain, and again some of the indecision came down to semantics: several experts questioned the meaning of the word “substantial”. Others questioned the available evidence, including Robert Shimer of the University of Chicago: “Evidence that immigration pushes down low-skill wages is mixed.”
The question of how the country should approach immigration remains one that is often discussed and never resolved. Still, it is comforting to know that even some of the best minds out there can’t agree on something the rest of us are arguing over at the dinner table.

Women in an unorthodox democracy

Voting percentage for women have increased in ongoing assembly polls but their participation as candidates and the possibilities of their victory are shamefully low

Ever heard of Najima Bibi? If you haven’t, let me do an introduction for you. She is trying to script history in a little-known part of India. The consequences could be dangerous for her as the extremists have threatened her.

Najima Bibi’s difficulties began when she made up her mind to participate in the assembly polls in Manipur. If she had joined hands with a so-called ‘established’ party, things wouldn’t have been so tough. But she chose the People’s Resurgence And Justice Alliance, founded by her equally strident comrade, Irom Sharmila. Irom is living proof of the perversities of Indian society. You may be aware of how she went on a hunger strike for 16 years, demanding the repeal of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA). She spent those golden years, when young women fall in love, get married and start a family, fighting the establishment. Till the time she was on hunger strike, her family and the people she consider ‘her own’ kept praising her. It helped boost their prestige. People said Irom came from ‘this’ family and stayed in ‘that’ neighbourhood. In the process, they became victims of the ‘VIP syndrome.’
But their attitude changed when she fell in love with an outsider and decided to take her battle to a new paradigm. Subsequently, Irom decided to break her fast and join politics. This was the juncture when her family and her closest supporters turned against her. As her illusions were shattered, in this poignant moment, she must have realized that the people for whom she gave away everything she possessed, only wanted to deify her as the goddess of sacrifice. They never intended to stand by her.
Irom and Najima’s struggle is also extraordinary because they’ve both decided to follow their own beliefs. Which money-bag businessman would finance their endeavours? In the absence of funds, they are campaigning for elections on bicycles. Will their voices go unheard? Whether they win or lose, the example that they have set with their dignified struggle will keep inspiring young people for a long time.
If we look at the 2017 assembly elections closely, we will discover that Indian politics may boast of a few names, decisions and events, but it disregards the needs of close to half our population. Statistics from the 2017 assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand reveal that the voting percentage for women might have increased but their participation as candidates and the possibilities of their victory are shamefully low. According to data collected by www.indiaspend.com, the number of women candidates went up in 2012 but 85% of them lost their deposit. In reserved seats, this number was relatively less disappointing, but it was still abysmal because just 79.8% women could hold on to their deposit. Just 7.1% women won from reserved seats and in non-reserved seats, just 4.7% women emerged victorious.
Will the assembly elections in 2017 play a part in increasing the representation of women in Indian politics? I am not very optimistic.
Just pick up the list of candidates and you will realize what I am saying. Most of the ‘winnable’ women candidates come from political families. They are being fielded so that another seat comes into the family fold. Over three-and-a-half decades of political reporting I have always felt that many women who are made to file nominations from certain constituencies cannot even retain their deposits. Their name is used to split the votes going to political opponents of their family members. If women from political families are considered ‘winnable’, how does one perceive women who are forced to be scapegoats of other’s ambitions, owing to their humble background?
In many villages of Uttar Pradesh, where women are village panchayat chiefs, their husbands introduce themselves as ‘pradhan pati’ (husband of the panchayat chief). These are men who could not contest on their own owing to women’s reservation, but fielded their wives instead. They still want to confine women to the four walls of their homes. Can there be a bigger betrayal of democracy than this?
This is the situation in Uttar Pradesh that prided itself as a role model for women’s emancipation many decades ago.
The country’s first woman chief minister was Sucheta Kriplani in UP. She presided over the largest state in the country from 1963 to 1967. She was married to Acharya J.B. Kriplani. Kriplani was an opponent of the Congress and his wife was the chief minister from the same party. What can be a better example of democracy within a family? The same state also gave us Indira Gandhi, the only woman prime minister of the country so far. This is the state from where Congress national president Sonia Gandhi has been elected to Parliament. Mayawati, one of the leading contenders in these assembly elections, has many records to her name. Not only was she the first Dalit chief minister, she has also set a record by becoming chief minister four times.
For how long will the first democracy in the history of the world to bestow equal voting rights upon women keep preening about its glorious past? We have to get into the habit of setting new records

The growing importance of trade for India

Trade enriches countries because it extends the scope for efficient division of labour

It is now time to dump a tired old assumption about India—that it has an economy closed to trade both within its territory as well as with the rest of the world. The reality is refreshingly different.

The new Economic Survey written by the team of finance ministry economists headed by Arvind Subramanian has used a unique data set of invoices from the goods and services tax network to estimate the level of trade between states (tangentially, we welcome the innovative use of Big Data in the Economic Survey. Railway passenger data has also been used to estimate internal migration patterns. The Indian government needs to embrace such use of Big Data).

The estimates in the Economic Survey show that interstate trade flows, which include the movement of goods between firms and within firms, are around 54% of gross domestic product (GDP). The usual assumption in economic geography, that large countries with substantial domestic markets have robust internal trade, can explain why interstate trade is so active in India, and is perhaps an antidote to the usual belief that the outdated barriers to trade across states reduce the movement of goods and services across borders.

What is unclear is how much of this internal trade is natural and how much a result of a perverse indirect tax system.

It is much the same story with international trade. The old shibboleths need to be discarded. India once suffered under a system of autarky. Much has changed since then. The ratio of trade to GDP has shot up after the economic reforms of 1991 but especially in the first decade of the current century.

Few seem to notice that India has since 2011 traded more with the rest of the world than China does. The trade intensity of both these economies has come down sharply since world trade started contracting a few years ago, but India continues to maintain its lead over China on this front.

What are the implications of these two facts? Trade enriches countries because it extends the scope for efficient division of labour. It thus raises productivity. And trade barriers are an invitation to poverty. So the new evidence that India actually has a robust trading culture should be welcomed.

The task of the Narendra Modi government is to push ahead with more openness on both fronts. The Prime Minister said in November that he wants India to become the most open economy in the world. The data in the Economic Survey shows that we are no laggards—but the challenge now is to keep dismantling barriers to internal and external trade.

The global task is an important one given the rise of protectionist sentiment in many developed countries. Free trade has helped hundreds of millions of Indians and Chinese emerge from the shackles of poverty. There is immense strategic value for India to combine with countries such as China and Japan to keep the flag of free trade flying in the age of Donald Trump. India should not see international trade as a zero-sum game.

The case for even more internal trade is also a solid one. The makers of our Constitution were perhaps still worried about the risks of separatism in the aftermath of Partition when they put in clauses such as Article 302 that gave Parliament the power to impose restrictions on trade between states, even though there could not be discriminatory policies that were specifically targeted at any one state.

Companies have been forced to build suboptimal supply chains because of a fragmented internal market. The agricultural produce market committee laws restrict the ability of farmers to sell across state borders. Such restrictions are past their due date, and the new goods and services tax will hopefully iron out some of these problems.

India is now a middle-income country that has seen the benefits of trade over the past 25 years. Internal economic integration as well as fewer barriers to international trade should be key policy concerns in the years ahead.

India needs to reclaim its place as one of the great trading cultures of the world. A lot has already been done since 1991. The task now needs to be completed.

What should the government do to open up the Indian economy to benefit more from trade?

Mapping the crime-politics nexus in India

As elections get under way in Uttar Pradesh, there is apparently reason to cheer already. The Association for Democratic Reforms has reported a drop in the number of candidates with criminal records or cases filed against them. As against 2012, when 32% of candidates had criminal cases against them, this time around the figure is 20%—168 out of 836 aspirants to political office.

Of these, 143 have serious criminal cases: murder and attempt to murder, rape and kidnapping. The Bharatiya Janata Party, which is apparently leading a national crusade against corruption, tops the tally.
Not far behind is the Bahujan Samaj Party, whose leader is supposedly running on her prior record of ensuring law and order but who has no problem inducting a notorious figure like Mukhtar Ansari into the party. The Samajwadi Party and Congress have an equally illustrious record on this count.
The spectacle of such figures strutting about in the world’s largest democracy is a matter for periodic despair and hand-wringing. Yet there have been few attempts at explaining this flagrant nexus between politics and crime in India. Milan Vaishnav’s new book, When Crime Pays: Money And Muscle In Indian Politics, fills this void with admirable rigour, clarity and elegance. Drawing on an extraordinary database of affidavits of almost all candidates that contested elections between 2003 and 2009 as well as field research, Vaishnav argues that there is something akin to a marketplace for criminals in Indian politics.

On the supply side, there is a growing willingness of political parties to field candidates with criminal records. The costs of elections have burgeoned in recent years. Parties are on the lookout not only for self-financing candidates but those who can also fill the parties’ coffers to help other candidates. But why do criminals want to contest elections in the first place?

Vaishnav suggests that this should be seen as a form of vertical integration. Previously, criminals and thugs did the bidding of parties in order to secure political protection. Over the years, especially as elections got more competitive from 1967 onwards, they have worked out that it was better for them to contest directly and ensure the requisite political cover.

Then again, why do people elect criminals to office? In analysing this demand side, Vaishnav demolishes claims about the ignorance of voters. On the contrary, he argues, people vote for candidates with criminal reputations precisely because of this reputation.
A combination of factors is at work. For one thing, the weakness of the Indian state in upholding the rule of law and in delivering public services compels constituents to turn to local tough-men for ameliorating their problems. For another, where divisions of caste, ethnicity or religion are strong, criminal politicians acquire greater salience owing to the dynamics of voter identification.

It is important to ask when criminalization of politics takes off and why. Vaishnav points to the 1967 election as the point of inflection. This seems plausible, though his reasoning is less persuasive. Drawing on the work of Samuel Huntington, he argues that by the late 1960s there was a combination of institutional decay, primarily within the Congress party, and a spurt in popular participation and consequent demands on the state. It was in this context that criminals came to acquire salience in politics.

There are at least three problems with this explanation. First, the framework of institutional decay and socio-economic change is too broad and vague to be usefully operationalized. An earlier generation of political scientists invoked it to explain everything from the declining fortunes of the Congress in the late 1960s to the imposition of the Emergency.

Second, all these arguments turn on an idealized picture of the Congress party in the period between 1950 and 1965. The notion that the Congress was a well-oiled, internally democratic, decentralized and responsive political machine is a mirage—created by the white heat of Indira Gandhi’s abrasive politics. And it is an image that cannot survive closer historical treatment.

Finally, there is a problem in identifying the role of criminals in the early period only by looking at instances of electoral or other form of overt violence. The best exercise of any power, including muscle-power, may actually occur when it is latent and not overtly observable.

Such embedded muscle-power was arguably central to the Congress’ preponderance in Indian politics for the first 15 years—especially through traditional forms of caste dominance in rural India. The political economy of power in such local networks is critical to understanding what went on before the mid-1960s.

Vaishnav’s analysis of the background to the rise of Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy, former chief minister of Andhra Pradesh, shows that he is not unmindful of this dynamic. But it needs more attention.

The book is spot on, however, in identifying Indira Gandhi’s 1969 ban on corporate donations to parties as a critical turning point. This enabled her at once to block funding to opposition parties and to tighten her own grip on the Congress. By the time Rajiv Gandhi amended the Companies Act again in 1985 to legalize corporate funding, the damage had already been done. Giving and receiving in “black” had become far more convenient to all concerned.

Tackling this problem is fundamental to addressing the crime-politics nexus as well as corruption, more broadly speaking. And Vaishnav’s book is the best map we have in navigating this tricky terrain.