Weak official response to the pollution of Bengaluru’s wetlands threatens public health

Weak official response to the pollution of Bengaluru’s wetlands threatens public health

The extraordinary sight of a lake in Bengaluru on fire, with a massive plume of smoke that could be seen from afar, is a warning sign that urban environments are crashing under the weight of official indifference. If wetlands are the kidneys of the cities, as scientists like to describe them, Karnataka’s capital city has entered a phase of chronic failure. No longer the city of lakes and famed gardens, it has lost an estimated 79% of water bodies and 80% of its tree cover from the baseline year of 1973. Successive governments in the State have ignored the rampant encroachment of lake beds and catchment areas for commercial exploitation, and the pollution caused by sewage, industrial effluents and garbage, which contributed to the blaze on Bellandur lake. The neglect is deliberate, since some of the finest urban ecologists in the city have been warning that government inaction is turning Bengaluru into an unliveable mess. It is time the State government took note of the several expert recommendations that have been made, including those of the Centre for Ecological Sciences of the Indian Institute of Science. The priority, clearly, is to end pollution outfalls into the water bodies, which will help revive them to an acceptable state of health. Identifying all surviving wetlands and demarcating them using digital and physical mapping will help communities monitor encroachments, while removal of land-grabbers and restoration of interconnecting channels is crucial to avoid future flooding events.

Loss of natural wetlands is an ongoing catastrophe in India. A decade ago, when the Salim Ali Centre for Ornithology and Natural History released a conservation atlas for all States using space applications, it reported the tragic fact that 38% of wetlands had already been lost nationally; and shockingly, in some districts only 12% survived. The Centre has since issued rules for conservation and management, and chosen 115 water bodies in 24 States for protection support, but this is obviously too little. Moreover, research studies show that the concentration of heavy metals in such sites is leading to bioaccumulation, thus entering the plants and animals that ultimately form part of people’s food. It should worry not just Bengaluru’s residents, for instance, that soil scientists have found higher levels of cadmium in green vegetables grown using water from Bellandur. More broadly, the collapse of environmental management because of multiple, disjointed agencies achieving little collectively and legal protections remaining unimplemented pose a serious threat to public health. Every city needs a single lake protection authority. India’s worsening air quality is now well documented, and most of its wetlands are severely polluted. Citizens must assert themselves to stop this perilous course.

The historically low solar tariffs at Rewa

Solar energy has become the cheapest it has ever been in India, thanks to historically low tariffs achieved in the reverse auction bid for three units in the Rewa plant in Madhya Pradesh earlier this month. But what does this mean for the solar industry in India?

What exactly happened?

The two-day reverse auction bid for three 250 MW blocks in the Rewa solar plant in Madhya yielded a tariff of Rs 2.97 for each of the blocks and a levelised tariff of Rs 3.3 over the course of the 25-year power purchase agreement. The winners of each of the bids were Mahindra Renewables, ACME, and Solenberg Power. The Rewa plant is a joint venture of Solar Energy Corporation of India and Madhya Pradesh Urja Vikas Nigam (MPUVN).
A reverse auction in such a scenario is basically a situation where companies bid for a unit by offering the lowest tariffs at which they will sell the energy generated from the unit. The lowest tariff wins the bid.

How were such low rates achieved?

Companies bidding for the Rewa units were able to commit to such low tariffs because of various factors, some to do with the industry, and others to do with the specific bid.
The industry-related factors include the fact that solar energy producers in India have been able to greatly reduce their costs due to the import of cheap photovoltaic panels from China. In addition, in keeping with the government’s renewable energy push, especially its commitment to achieve 100 GW of solar energy by 2022, it has expedited the land acquisition process and has reduced excise duties on various components required to set up a solar plant.

Specific to the Rewa bid, the Madhya Pradesh government implemented a few favourable and unique structures in the project power purchase agreements. For example, it included a state government guarantee for the contracted capacity by the utility as well as a compensation for deemed generation in case of non-availability of grid. These factors allowed the bidders to commit to lower tariffs than they would otherwise have been able to.

What does this mean?

While this does mean that solar energy will be cheaper, several industry experts have warned that, at such low tariffs, margins are also very slim. This could mean that even a slight increase in input prices—such as pricier imports from China—could push many of these projects into unprofitability.

 

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