National Conference of Micro Missions

National Conference of Micro Missions of National Police Mission being organised by the BPR&D Conduct survey of States and Districts on Policing index: 

Shri Amitabh Kant, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of NITI Aayog (National Institution for Transforming India), has advocated conducting a survey on the status of Policing in various States. Inaugurating the 1st National Conference of Micro Missions of National Police Mission (NPM) here today, Shri Kant said the Bureau of Police Research & Development (BPR&D) should come out with the survey of State Police, including at district-level, based on various parameters including outcomes, to bring about change in policing. Stating that economic development and internal security have a symbiotic relationship, he said the police will also have to act as an instrument of social change.

Laying out a survey of districts based on four development indices, - Health, Eductaion, Poverty & Roads, Shri Kant pointed out it is apparent that the districts lowest in the combined index are concentrated in the Northern and Eastern parts of the country. These very 100 districts lowest on the development index pose the gravest challenges to security and law and order, he added.

Shri Kant said as India aims to accelerate the growth rate from the present 7.6% annually to 9-10% for the next three decades or more, it will be marked by a demographic profile consisting of a majority 72% youth population and witness a huge amount of urbanization. For the economy to pick pace India will also have to take the share of womens contribution to GDP from the present 17% to 40% share in the developed world economies, he added.

Shri Kant also deliberated on Out of Box Ideas to reform the current policing framework in the country. He gave various examples to state the heightened competitiveness being demonstrated by various State Governments in terms of Ease of doing business. He further laid stress on adoption of similar competitive spree amongst different Departments of the Government including the Police.

He also emphasized on areas which could revolutionize the current police functioning across India. These included:

Improve Citizen-police interface

Improve the condition of Police Stations

Improve judicial system

Improve rate of conviction

Provide healing touch to victims

Ensure extensive & pragmatic use of technology

Shri Kant gave references of international police departments to exemplify emphatic use of technology in crime investigation and prevention. Prudent use of Social Media & Data Analytics can help in gathering information, tracing suspects and identifying crime trends, he added. Shri Kant also unveiled the National Police Missions Compendium on Projects, which shares insights on various Micro Mission Projects being carried out under the aegis of NPM.

Speaking on the occasion, Dr. M. C. Borwankar, DG, BPR&D, said the eight Micro Missions under the NPM have been redesigned to include at least 25% young Officers of the level of Superintendents of Police. Shri Parvez Hayat, ADG, BPR&D also graced the occasion. Dr. Nirmal Kumar Azad, IG, Director, NPM is the Conference Secretary.

The two-day Conference is being organised by the Bureau of Police Research & Development (BPR&D), under the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA). The Conference aims to review, share learnings and trace the journey of NPM ever since its inception in 2008. It witnesses participation of representations of all eight Micro Missions. Nobel Laureate Shri Kailash Satyarthi will grace the Valedictory function tomorrow. 

Biodiversity. But what is it?

Biodiversity is one of the less well-described aspects of environmental change when it comes to metrics for guiding, enforcing and refining efforts to sustain it

International Biological Diversity Day fell on 22 May in the UN calendar of commemorative days. This decade—until 2020—is the Decade on Biodiversity by the same measure.

Biodiversity is a good thing to call attention to. It helps regulate climate, air, soil, hydrology and other parts of our context that we’d like to keep within habitable ranges. It provides food, fuel, and shelter and maintains the ongoing supply of such material goods. The diversity within the genetic “portfolio” of the plants and animals around us is an important source of insurance against the stress of accelerating environmental change. Biodiversity contributes to inspiration, mental health and stress reduction. Pretty much all of the good things in life trace back to biodiversity “ecosystem services” one way or another.

But we need to do more than admire and commemorate it. We need to start measuring biodiversity and its evolution more effectively: comprehensively enough to inform local politics, decision-making, and trade-offs; and comparably enough for enforcing international treaties and targets.

Biodiversity conservation is a cause that people can get behind. Changes in the composition and range of animal, plant and other species are some of the most widely recognized aspects of environmental disruption.

Studies from the Himalayas to the Peruvian altiplano find that alterations in plant and animal patterns are one of the first forms of environmental change that people in rural areas notice. For those of us in the more insulated urban world, the general threat to biodiversity is visible in mainstream media. The perils of letting bees go extinct, for example, have shown up on blogs with titles like “Why Bee Extinction Would Mean The End Of Humanity”. TV shows, school curricula, magazines, and best-selling non-fiction have helped convey findings about species loss from academic science to a wide audience.

The economically damaging and uncomfortable effects of biodiversity loss are visible on political and corporate time-scales. These are not invisible emissions or ephemeral changes in temperature here and there. Biodiversity is more like air quality—there is potential for constructive politics.

We also have an international infrastructure for maintaining biodiversity. The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), a legally binding treaty to conserve biodiversity has been in force since 1993. Nearly all countries have ratified it (notably, the US has signed but not ratified).

But we need to be more precise about biodiversity in order to make the most of these institutions. Biodiversity is one of the less well-described aspects of environmental change when it comes to metrics for guiding, enforcing, and refining regional and global efforts to sustain biodiversity. “National biodiversity monitoring programmes differ widely, most data sets are inconsistent, and few data are shared openly,” write A. Skidmore and colleagues in a 2015 comment paper in Nature. National submissions to the CBD are often incomplete: containing information on animals and plants but missing fungi, for example. There are no doubt many reasons that we missed the 2010 CBD targets for halting biodiversity and seem poised to miss the 2020 targets but R. Hill and co-authors identify “delayed feedback and insufficient information flows” as significant factors in a 2015 Global Environmental Change article.

Biodiversity has various dimensions: the number of species represented, the heterogeneity of the species, and the “evenness” with which different species are represented (more concentrated populations with many members of one species and few of another are less “diverse” than ones with less concentration, even if the overall species counts match).

The first, the crudest, is the most commonly available metric. The second and third dimensions, however, are probably the most important for understanding the sustainability of the non-human communities around us. L. Santini and colleagues point out another challenge in their 2016 paper in Biological Conservation: commonly used summary indices for biodiversity offer incommensurate and sometimes inconsistent messages about changes in biodiversity over time. We are flying blind and cross-eyed.

Traditionally structured international efforts to measure biodiversity are moving slowly. The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the UN has long recognized the value of biodiversity for food security, but the first report on The State Of The World’s Biodiversity For Food And Agriculture, will only be coming out later this year. The Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services , established in 2012 in the hopes of producing a biodiversity equivalent of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change series, had to cut its 2018 budget by a third and postpone three reports after donations from the 126-member nations failed to keep pace with the work programme. Scientific publications on new species have increased since the Global Taxonomy Initiative was initiated in 1998 as part of the CBD, but M. Costello and co-authors in a 2013 Nature article estimate that just 1.5 million of the 5+/- 3 million species on the planet have been named.

New forms of international scientific collaboration, information technology-fuelled citizen science, advances in remote sensing as well as free dissemination of some publicly funded datasets, and a rise in private philanthropic interest are picking up some of the slack. But will these be too little, too late?

3rd interview transcript of ukpcs 2012 exam (interview question of ukpcs) by samveg ias

NASA names new space bacteria after APJ Abdul Kalam

NASA researchers discovered a new bacteria on the filters of the International Space Station and named it Solibacillus kalamii to honour the late president

In a great news for India, scientists at National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) have named a new organism discovered by them after the much-loved A.P.J. Abdul Kalam.

Till date, the new organism—a form of a bacteria—has been found only on the International Space Station (ISS) and has not been found on earth!

Researchers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the foremost lab of NASA for work on inter-planetary travel, discovered the new bacteria on the filters of the International Space Station (ISS) and named it Solibacillus kalamii to honour the late president, who was a renowned aerospace scientist.

Kalam had his early training at NASA in 1963 before he set up India’s first rocket-launching facility in the fishing village of Thumba in Kerala. “The name of the bacterium is Solibacillus kalamii, the species name is after Dr Abdul Kalam and genus name is Solibacillus which is a spore forming bacteria,” said Dr Kasthuri Venkateswaran, senior research scientist, Biotechnology and Planetary Protection Group at JPL.

The filter on which the new bug was found remained on board the ISS for 40 months. Called a high-efficiency particulate arrestance filter or HEPA filter, this part is the routine housekeeping and cleaning system on board the international space station.

This filter was later analysed at JPL and only this year did Venkateswaran publish his discovery in the International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology. According to Venkateswaran, even as it orbits the earth some 400 kilometres above, the ISS is home to many types of bacteria and fungi which co-inhabit the station with the astronauts who live and work on the station.

Venkateswaran said even though Solibacillus kalamii has never been found on earth till date, it is really not an extra-terrestrial life form or ET. “I am reasonably sure it has hitch hiked to the space station on board some cargo and then survived the hostile conditions of space,” explained Venkateswaran.

Naming the new microbe after Kalam was natural to Venkateswaran and his team. “Being a fellow Tamilian, I am aware of the huge contributions by Dr. Kalam,” he said. New bacteria are usually named after famous scientists.

Venkateswaran is part of a team which is asking that eternal question “are we alone in the universe?” Towards that, his responsibilities include monitoring the bug levels on the ISS and he also has to ensure that all spacecraft that fly to other planets are free of terrestrial bugs.

One of his big jobs was to ensure that NASA’s Mars Curiosity rover—the massive car-sized almost 1000 kg buggy—was totally sterile when it left earth. By international law, this extreme hygiene is required else other planets could get contaminated by bugs that reach the Martian or other planets hidden on human satellites.

Today the ISS is the size of a football field and its construction started with a launch in 1998 and as of now it is the largest human-made object orbiting the earth. Weighing about 419 tonnes, it can house a maximum of six astronauts and has costs roughly $150 billion.

Till date, 227 astronauts have flown to the space station. This makes the space station actually a very dirty place and maintaining hygiene is critical so that humans can live on it with ease. On the space station all the air and water is recycled, being a completely closed environment there is a rapid build- up of moulds and bacteria on the station. These not only have to be cleaned but monitored to ensure that they do not corrode the walls of the space station and do not turn hazardous to the astronauts.

Venkateswaran’s main job is to monitor the environment of the space station so that harmful bugs do not proliferate. He heads the ‘Microbial Observatory’ on the ISS projects to measure microorganisms associated with compartments owned by the US.

According to NASA, he also directs several research and development tasks for the JPL—Mars Program Office, which enables the cleaning, sterilisation, and validation of spacecraft components. He directs several NASA competitive awards on the microbial monitoring of spacecraft and associated environments for the Exploration System Mission Directorate, closed habitats like ISS or its earth analogues for the Human Exploration and Operation Mission Directorate. But is the new bug of some use.

“These spore formers tend to withstand high radiation and also produce some useful compounds protein wise which will be helpful for biotechnology applications,” Venkateswaran said. His team has not characterised the bacteria fully but he hints that the new bug could be a key source for chemicals that can help protect against radiation damage.

Missing the coastal growth opportunity

Coastal Regulation Zone norms are an example of a top-down, heavy-handed, legislative diktat from Delhi that ignores local dynamics

India has a significantly large coastline measuring close to 7,517km, covering large swathes of territory across nine states and four union territories. The total population of all the coastal districts in India is around 171 million, which makes up 14.2% of India’s population. Contrasting this with China, where the coastal population stood at 590 million in 2010, roughly half the population of the country, India’s coastal regions have witnessed tepid growth in terms of size and economy.

Burdensome laws, accompanied by the onerous rules and regulations they impose, restrict economic activity in the entire country. The coastal regions suffer from the additional liability of having to comply with far-fetched coast protection norms originating under the Environment (Protection) Act (EPA). Passed under the powers conferred on the Central government by Section 3 of the EPA, the Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) rules were first notified in 1991 and were further amended in 2011.

As per the norms created by the Central government, a CRZ is the land area from the high-tide line to 500m inland. There is a long list of proscribed activities within this zone, such as the setting up of new industries, expansion of existing industries, establishment of fish processing units, warehouses, land reclamation, etc. Although the norms carve out exceptions within these prohibited activities for certain undertakings, such as building ports or reconstructing dwelling units for local communities, it interestingly carves out a singular exception for the development of a greenfield airport proposed at Navi Mumbai. The regulation is replete with such curious exceptions to some specific cases, which raise questions pertaining to the criteria that was followed to determine permissible and non-permissible activities.

The peculiarity of the CRZ directives is further evidenced from the universal allowance granted to areas adjoining bays, estuaries, backwaters, lagoons and other tidal-influenced water bodies. For areas falling under this category, the regulated zone extends only 100m inland from the high-tide line. As a result, many developers, entrepreneurs and builders have been asking the coastal zone management authorities to declare the water around the coastal land area within their project plans as bays or tidal-influenced water bodies. Some have approached several high courts for such declaration to avail the benefits of a smaller regulated zone.

Going even further with the regulatory tangle created by these CRZ guidelines, the norms demarcate the zones into different numbered categories—CRZ I, CRZ II, CRZ III and CRZ IV. This demarcation, it seems, is based primarily on the level of previous construction or developmental activity that’s been conducted in a region now within the regulated zone of either 500m or 100m. Another set of permissible and impermissible activities are also listed under these defined demarcated zones. Supplementary arbitrary exceptions have also been carved out for the city of Mumbai, and the states of Kerala and Goa, based on the above- mentioned demarcated zones, unusually leaving out other coastal states and districts.

The multiplicity of definitions, exceptions, permissible and impermissible activities not only lead to high regulatory and legal expenditure in obtaining project clearances, there is all-round confusion in implementation as well. The execution of the CRZ rules falls within the domain of several coastal zone management authorities created by the state governments for this purpose. The authorities have to prepare coastal zone management plans based on the complicated regulation which also lists the guidelines that the authorities must follow in preparation of the plans. Most authorities are themselves unaware of the implementation scheme and a significant number of cases concerning clearances and bay designation are sent to the Central government for clarification. This not only creates uncertainty, it also increases the time taken for permissions, burdening the firms with high compliance outlays.

The CRZ norms are another example of a top-down, heavy-handed, legislative diktat from Delhi that ignores local dynamics and the diverse needs and realities of states. Regulations like CRZ create significant entry barriers for firms unable to negotiate the myriad, complex guidelines or lobby for rent-seeking special concessions from the government. Restrictive market entry adversely affects economic development and consumer welfare, increases prices owing to high costs and constrains technological improvement.

Even though the CRZ rules stand amended as on 6 January 2011, the new rules have done little to ease the regulatory burden imposed on a wide array of economic and development activities that may be pursued in coastal regions. The Central government must assert its political will and rescind these regulations, leaving the task of administering coastal zones to the already created state coastal zone management authorities. State governments in coastal regions will be better suited to devise laws concerning coast development, given their substantial political interest in the matter and superior knowledge of state goals as well as needs. The Central government must restrict its role to advising state governments on the prospective benefits and costs of any regulation that the states propose.

Planting trees no substitute to cutting carbon dioxide emissions: study

A new study warns that growing trees cannot replace cutting emissions from fossil fuel burning

Growing trees and then storing the carbon dioxide (CO2) they have taken up from the atmosphere cannot replace cutting emissions from fossil fuel burning, a new study warns.

“Reducing fossil fuel use is a precondition for stabilising the climate, but we also need to make use of a range of options from reforestation on degraded land to low- till agriculture and from efficient irrigation systems to limiting food waste,” said Tim Lenton of the University of Exeter in the UK.

“If we continue burning coal and oil the way we do today and regret our inaction later, the amounts of greenhouse gas we would need to take out of the atmosphere in order to stabilise the climate would be too huge to manage,” said Lena Boysen from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) in Germany.

Plants suck CO2 out of the atmosphere to build their woody roots, stems and leaves. This is low-tech terrestrial carbon dioxide removal that could be combined with high-tech carbon storage mechanisms, for example underground, the researchers said.

They calculated that a hypothetically required plantation would in fact replace natural ecosystems around the world almost completely. If CO2 emissions reductions are moderately reduced in line with current national pledges under the Paris Climate Agreement, biomass plantations implemented by mid-century to extract remaining excess CO2 from the air still would have to be enormous, the researchers further added.

In this scenario, they would replace natural ecosystems on fertile land the size of more than one third of all forests we have today on our planet, they said. Alternatively, more than a quarter of land used for agriculture at present would have to be converted into biomass plantations — putting global food security at risk.

Only ambitious emissions reductions and advancements in land management techniques between 2005-2100 could possibly avoid fierce competition for land. However, even in this scenario of aggressive climate stabilisation policy, only high inputs of water, fertilisers and a globally applied high-tech carbon-storage-machinery that captures more than 75% of extracted CO2 could likely limit warming to around 2 degree Celsius by 2100.

To this end, technologies minimising carbon emissions from cultivation, harvest, transport and conversion of biomass and, especially, long-term Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) would need to improve worldwide, researchers said.

“What happens in the worst case, a widespread disruption and failure of mitigation policies? Would plants allow us to still stabilise climate in emergency mode? The answer is: no. There is no alternative for successful mitigation,” Wolfgang Lucht from PIK said.

“In such a scenario, plants can potentially play a limited, but important role, if managed well,” Lucht further added.

Researchers investigated the feasibility of biomass plantations and CO2 removal from a biosphere point of view. So far, biomass plantations as a means for CO2 removal have often been considered as a comparatively safe, affordable and effective approach.

“Our work shows that carbon removal via the biosphere cannot be used as a late-regret option to tackle climate change. Instead we have to act now using all possible measures instead of waiting for first-best solutions,” Lenton from the University of Exeter in the UK, added.

Designing cybersecurity for the financial sector

There is no dearth of regulatory intervention at present to secure India’s financial ecosystem, and more of the same need not necessarily lead to better outcomes

The most recent ransomware attacks, currently estimated to have locked up more than 100,000 computers across 100 countries, yet again highlights the very real peril of cyber-threats in the virtual world. The Mirai botnet’s distributed denial of service attacks last year, soon followed by BrickerBot’s permanent incapacitation of several devices forming part of the Internet of Things, exposed the vulnerabilities of a world where everything from room heaters to wearable fitness trackers is connected. Attacks of this kind have proved themselves capable of even imperilling national security, economic stability and public health.

The critical information infrastructure rules framed in 2013 under the Information Technology Act, 2000, identified banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) as one among five critical sectors. Yet, the past years have seen an increasing number of large-scale cyber-attacks in this sector. About 3.2 million debit cards were compromised last year through a hack on Hitachi’s ATM switch server. Phishers assumed the Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI’s) identity to hoodwink a gullible staffer in the Union Bank of India and inject malware into the bank’s servers. The $171 million, transferred through unlawful access to the bank’s SWIFT codes for cross-border transactions, was fortunately rolled back due to early detection. At a lesser level of sophistication, software vulnerabilities in the Bank of Maharashtra’s Unified Payment Interface app were recently exploited to complete digital transactions even when there was insufficient balance in the sender’s account.

These attacks, coupled with the exponential growth of fintech platforms and solutions partly fuelled by the demonetisation exercise, underscore the need for strong cybersecurity initiatives. In this regard, Union finance minister Arun Jaitley’s budget speech this year, which announced the formation of a sectoral Computer Emergency Response Team for Finance (Cert-Fin), merits closer scrutiny. The design and approach of this newly proposed body is central to its success. There is no dearth of regulatory intervention at present to secure India’s financial ecosystem, and more of the same need not necessarily lead to positive outcomes.

To quickly take stock, RBI circulars have identified the key features of an optimal cybersecurity framework for banks, including network management, user access, customer authentication, and incident response and management. Similarly, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) and the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India (Irdai) have issued guidelines for strengthening the cybersecurity framework in capital markets and insurance, respectively. The Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (Icert) continues performing its statutory mandate—information sharing and management, cybersecurity alerts, emergency responses, etc.—on a non-sectoral basis. Even assuming Cert-Fin entirely replaces Icert as the cyber-warrior for the BFSI sector, can it add real value over and beyond what sectoral regulators such as RBI, Sebi and Irdai are already addressing? Or would it just be an additional layer of compliance and friction for innovators in the fast-changing fintech landscape?

We believe there are gaps in the cybersecurity framework that an appropriately designed Cert-Fin can still address better than the existing framework. Broadly these are in the areas of research, talent-building and industry-academia coordination; digital literacy; and better information flows between various actors in the security ecosystem.

Without undermining Icert’s vigilance thus far in issuing timely advisories, it is clear that the body has been unable to take leadership in knowledge creation. The white papers and other research material it has managed to put out are mostly outdated and fail to keep pace with current security trends.

A body built on the foundational principle of shared responsibility with a larger body of stakeholders, including banks, fintech start-ups, cybersecurity companies, and academic institutions, is better placed to effectively fund advanced research and even incubate cybersecurity solutions on a co-creation basis. The Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council serves as a good precedent.

Cert-Fin should also have a valued say in the revamping of engineering course curriculum to mitigate the existing skills and supply gap for cybersecurity professionals. The financial sector, with its growth potential highly dependent on the presence of security and trust, is a prime candidate for both skilling and hiring new talent.

Another key intervention, without which any security measure at the service provider end remains likely to fall short, is digital literacy and cybersecurity awareness for customers. Apart from taking the lead, Cert-Fin should also be vested with powers to mandate and evaluate on-the-ground initiatives by private players towards educating end users on safe and responsible access practices. Many a hack has been caused by poor password security.

Finally, Cert-Fin must serve the function of a data escrow, taking important decisions on real-time data sharing and ideally veering towards more information flows than less. A common trend today is the denial of responsibility by all actors in the security chain as soon as news of a hack breaks out. Only a well-designed Cert-Fin can prevent this attitude from regressing into a collective action problem. Suitable exceptions to the law of evidence must also be fashioned to encourage maximum information disclosure to the Cert-Fin.

If these normative goals are sought to be achieved by building them into the very design of Cert-Fin, it could hopefully serve as a healthy template for other jurisdictions too, in addition to facilitating the transition to a digital India for financial transactions.