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30 July 2014

“Coastal Ocean Monitoring and Prediction System (COMAPS)”

The Integrated Coastal Marine Area Management centre of Earth System Science Organisation (ESSO-ICMAM) has been implementing a program called “Coastal Ocean Monitoring and Prediction System (COMAPS)” with the objectives (i) to monitor water quality parameters periodically in selected locations in the coastal waters of India (ii) to develop possible prediction of sea water quality in these selected locations to assess the state of marine environment. Under the COMAPS program, the data up to 25 parameters such as dissolved oxygen (DO), nutrients, pH, Biological Oxygen Demand (BOD), plankton, benthos and pathogenic bacteria, etc., are being monitored covering different seasons at 20 coastal locations viz., Vadinar, Veraval, Hazira, Thane (Mumbai), Worli, Ratnagiri, Malvan, Mandovi, Mangalore, Kochi, Kavaratti, Sandheads, Hooghly, Paradip, Visakhapatnam, Kakinada Ennore (Chennai), Pondicherry, Tuticorin, Port Blair.

Seawater quality data collected over period has indicated areas of low, moderate and high. The data further indicates that the concentration of the nutrients and population of pathogenic bacteria are confined to 0 – 1 km at these locations except in Mumbai. A large amount of data is generated under the program. The data are also hosted on the website of ESSO-Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services (INCOIS), Hyderabad for wider utility. The details of meta-data and salient findings are placed at Annexure-1.

These details of the findings are being provided to the State Pollution Control Boards, who make use of the information to take remedial measures, if any.

The program has been under successfully implementation successfully over a decade, with the participation of reputed national institutions.

The data collected under COMAPS programme over the years have been compiled and organized into a database. Databases for Sandheads, Hooghly estuary, Saptamukhi, Subarnarekha, Digha, Haldia Port, Diamond harbor, Port Blair, Andaman & Nicobar Islands were completed. GIS based database on marine pollution was completed for Kochi, Vishakhapatnam, Koodankulam and Veraval. These data are provided to the State Pollution Control Boards, who make use of the information to take remedial measures

Doppler Weather Radars

The Government proposes to install hi-tech Doppler weather radars in sensitive Himalayan region including Uttarakhand to get early alerts about cloudburst and heavy rain in higher reaches of the region.

Based on scientific assessment of the needs of observing system network, comprising Doppler Weather Radars, rain radars, Automatic Weather Stations (AWSs), Automatic Rain Gauges (ARGs), Snow Gauges etc. expansion has been formulated by Earth System Science Organization –India Meteorological Department (ESSO-IMD), under its project Integrated Himalayan Meteorology Programme for Western & Central Himalayas. It covers Jammu & Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand. The total budget proposed for the entire project is approximately 117 crores.
Weather radar, also called weather surveillance radar (WSR) and Doppler weather radar, is a type of radar used to locate precipitation, calculate its motion, and estimate its type (rain, snow, hail etc.). Modern weather radars are mostly pulse-Doppler radars, capable of detecting the motion of rain droplets in addition to the intensity of the precipitation. Both types of data can be analyzed to determine the structure of storms and their potential to cause severe weather.Weather radars send directional pulses of microwave radiation, on the order of a microsecond long, using acavity magnetron or klystron tube connected by a waveguide to a parabolic antenna. The wavelengths of 1 – 10 cm are approximately ten times the diameter of the droplets or ice particles of interest, because Rayleigh scattering occurs at these frequencies. This means that part of the energy of each pulse will bounce off these small particles, back in the direction of the radar station.

Shorter wavelengths are useful for smaller particles, but the signal is more quickly attenuated. Thus 10 cm (S-band) radar is preferred but is more expensive than a 5 cm C-band system. 3 cm X-band radar is used only for short-range units, and 1 cm Ka-band weather radar is used only for research on small-particle phenomena such as drizzle and fog.

Impact of Abnormal Weather Condition

Many parts of the country are affected by tsunami, heavy rain, drought and global warming due to abnormal weather conditions.

The Government is monitoring the variability of the weather phenomena and development of abnormal weather pattern like drought, flood, flash flood, cyclone, rain induced landslides, heat and cold waves, etc. on a continuous basis. Records of past weather events show that extreme values in respect of heavy rainfall, maximum and minimum temperatures, seasonal rainfall etc. remained unsurpassed in many cases. Areas influenced by the abnormal weather pattern change as per the interannual and intra-seasonal weather and climate variability.

Heavy rain events (>10cm/day) over central India are increasing at about 1%/year while weak and moderate events are decreasing at about the same rate over the past 50 years. The extreme rain events which are becoming more intense in recent years are localized and could be part of the natural variability of the monsoon system. No such pattern is discerned in respect of other weather phenomena.

Earth System Science Organization –India Meteorological Department (ESSO-IMD) has enhanced its observational network under the modernization plan by installing a network of Doppler Weather Radars (DWR), Automatic Weather Stations (AWS), Automatic Rain Gauge Stations (ARGS), etc. for monitoring abnormal weather patterns and upgraded its forecasting capabilities, so that advance warning can be provided to National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA), Ministry of Home Affairs, and Ministry of Agriculture to tackle the impacts of the adverse and extreme weather phenomena.

29 July 2014

motivation

Flipkart raises $1 bn funding; drops plans to go public

India’s largest e-Commerce firm Flipkart on Tuesday said it has raised USD 1 billion (over Rs 6,000 crore) in fresh funding from a group of investors, the largest so far in the fiercely competitive online shopping segment in the country. The company did not disclose its new holding pattern.

The sources said, however, that with this round of fund raising, Flipkart is valued at about USD 7 billion (around Rs 42,000 crore). Co-led by existing investors Tiger Global Management and Naspers, Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund, GIC, Accel Partners, DST Global, ICONIQ Capital, Morgan Stanley Investment Management and Sofina also participated in this latest financing round.

The Bangalore-based firm will utilise funds on expanding its online and mobile services, focusing on areas like R&D, enhancing customer experience and sellerbase. Flush with cash, Flipkart is also scouting for acquisitions, which can help it expand into newer technologies like wearables and robotics, a move that it believes will impact mobile commerce in the days to come.

“The funds will be used to make long-term strategic investments in India, especially in mobile technology,” Flipkart co-founder and CEO Sachin Bansal told reporters here. The focus at Flipkart is to continue to make shopping online simpler and more accessible through the use of technology, he added.

“This funding will enable us to step up our investments for innovations in products and technologies, setting us up to become the mobile e-commerce company of the future. This funding will help us further accelerate momentum and build our presence to become a technology powerhouse,” he said. On the company’s IPO plans, Bansal said: “IPO is not in consideration at all, we are not thinking about it. We have not settled on a business model that we can take public.”

In May, Flipkart had raised USD 210 million funding, bringing private equity firm DST Global on board as an investor. It is estimated that the firm has, so far, raised over USD 1.7 billion from investors, including the current transaction. The Bangalore-based firm, founded by Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal, counts Accel Partners, Dragoneer Investment Group, Morgan Stanley Investment Management, Sofina and Vulcan Capital among its other investors.

The home-grown e-retailer had acquired online fashion retailer Myntra in May in what is estimated to be a Rs 2,000-crore deal. It had also announced an investment of USD 100 million (around Rs 600 crore) in its fashion business over the next 12-18 months.

Flipkart, currently 14,000 people strong, has 22 million registered users clocking over 4 million daily visits. It delivers 5 million shipments per month, which the company claims is growing rapidly. Flipkart’s moves are being seen as efforts to protect its turf in the USD 3 billion Indiane-commerce market that is witnessing aggressive competition from global giant Amazon and peers like Snapdeal.

Led by increasing Internet penetration and youngsters shopping online, India’s e-commerce market has seen huge growth in the past few years. As more people log on to the Internet to shop, it is estimated to expand over seven-fold to USD 22 billion by 2018.

Flipkart had a 4.9 per cent market share in 2013, while Amazon and eBay had 1.6 per cent and 1.2 per cent share respectively. Flipkart, which started in 2007 as an online bookstore, sells products across categories, including fashion and electronics. It also sells white goods and furniture.

While apparel and electronics are bestsellers for most e-commerce firms, categories such as home decor and household items are also popular. “We believe the Internet will improve the quality of life for millions of Indians, and e-commerce is going to play a huge role in this change,” Bansal said.

The company also plans to hire 1,000 engineers with an eye on expanding its R&D capabilities and is also looking at roping in mobile and technology experts from Silicon Valley.

“By 2020, India will have more than half a billion mobile Internet users. Our intense focus on mobile and technology puts us in a unique position to take advantage of this massive opportunity,” Bansal said.

Harvest of controversy,GM CROPS

Decisions on genetically modified crops cannot be left to experts; technicalities need to be supplemented by answers to people’s anxieties

A quirky anthropologist once exclaimed: “Biotechnology is sheer drama.” He explained his cryptic headline by saying all great contemporary philosophical and ethical debates intersect around it. He added that the city might be the basis for the 21st century imagination but it is the fate of Indian agriculture that would trigger some of the great dilemmas of the century. The sociologist added that it was time to see science as political, and claimed that our scientists like Madhav Gadgil, M.S. Swaminathan or Pushpa Bhargava were as critical to political theory as Ashis Nandy or Rajni Kothari. Each has mediated the relation between science and democracy, and each of them knows that nothing is more central to the fate of democracy than the debates around biotechnology and genetic engineering. This essay will try to outline the nature of this debate and link it up to the GEAC (Genetic Engineering Approval Committee) decision to field test a range of genetically modified crops.

Entry of Bt cotton

The public debates on GM began with the unannounced entry of Bt cotton in Gujarat, where the farmers had grown 21,000 acres of Bt cotton. It was an ironic beginning where an act of smuggling inaugurated the transfer of technology. Monsanto had no idea of this development and was as stunned as the government of India. The Bt cotton debate began as a downloaded debate where Indian journalists and movements discovered the implications of such an introduction. The first concern was whether Bt would enter the food chain and the second centred around empowerment. For centuries, farmers had been custodians of seeds but now they had to obtain seeds from multinationals. Expertise which was once located in the farmer was more focused in laboratories, many of which belonged to private firms.

Two other issues entered the first phase of the debate. One was a memorable battle between two champions of agriculture. Vandana Shiva attacked biotechnology and genetic manipulation claiming that it stunted diversity, disempowered the farmer and skewed intellectual property rights in favour of the multinational. Ms Shiva’s argument centred around alternative forms of farming while Gail Omvedt argued that in this age of liberalisation the farmer needed choice, the freedom to choose the kind of farming he wished to pursue and the seeds he wanted to pick.

The second phase of the debate arose over the introduction of Bt Brinjal. By the second phase, civil society and farmers’ movements had entered the fray in a more systematic manner and were demanding wider debates. The groups argued that the question was not a mere debate about technology. It was a debate about the nature of decision-making especially when experts’ decisions affected livelihoods, ways of life and the very notion of agency in citizenship. One had to answer whether citizenship was to remain a passive act of consuming science or whether the citizen as scientist was to have a say in technologies modifying life and livelihood. The groups argued that if science was public knowledge devoted to creating public goods, it should be subject to a public debate. This required that transparency and responsibility be built into every stage. NGOs showed that there was an arrogance to Indian science pointing out that science itself had changed, moving from certainty to risk. In the age of risk sciences like genetic engineering, one could not always predict whether a technology was safe. Safety had become a “bracketed” term where consequences were not fully predictable. Such new technologies required prudential rather than promethean behaviour, not the Pollyanna-like attitude of our scientists. The movements had a bit of governmental luck in the presence of Jairam Ramesh, Minister of Environment and Forests.

Mr. Ramesh summoned the various scientific academies to prepare a report, and simultaneously asked the Centre for Environment Education to arrange for a major colloquium on biotechnology inviting all the major stakeholders. The open hearings were a major breakthrough in the relation of science and democracy. A cross between a carnival and a protest meeting, the debates led to a moratorium on Bt Brinjal. A whole Pandora’s box of questions remain to be answered. There were questions of method. How objective is an evaluation, how safe is safe? Does the control of seeds by multinationals create a marked asymmetry in knowledge and power between the scientific multinational and the farmer? Can private science work for public benefit, and who decides? The questions of food chains, seed prices, contamination, certainty, and intellectual property created a new thesaurus of questions around biotechnology.

On July 18, the Genetic Engineering and Evaluation Committee gave a green signal for field trials of a whole range of genetically modified crops. This assembly line of crops included rice, mustard, cotton, chickpeas and brinjal. Two questions were immediately raised. Was such a range of testing required? Second, how objective was GEAC as an institution?

Pushpa Bhargava, former director of CCMB (Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology), questioned the permission given to import GM-based soya bean oil and then went on to question the bona fides of GEAC as an independent evaluation committee of experts.

The nature of decisions in such “expert evaluation” committees needs to be discussed. One has to ask how stakeholder sensitive they are in terms of representation. Secondly, one needed an independent agency to evaluate data, especially private. Rituals of evaluation are part of the integrity of expertise. Thirdly, one has to ask about the method of evaluation itself. Can a small group of bureaucrats decide for the future? How do they explain the framework of that analysis? Can a small group like GEAC explain the ethical and political burden of such a decision? One thing is clear: the GEAC carry claim like the father of atom bomb Robert Oppenheimer did, that the bomb was a “technical answer to a technical question.” Bt crops grow beyond technical issues. They cannot be treated as technical fixes to social problems.

In fact, we should treat the protest by the Bhartiya Kisan Union (BKU) as a collective questionnaire of anxieties and expectations. The BKU raised the following doubts. First, any democracy, any nation-state, has to raise issues of not merely territoriality but also seed sovereignty. Once Monsanto patents the seed, in its search for profit, who decides on ownership? Secondly, what is the new ethics they follow? As transgenic seeds can contaminate a food chain, what is the notion of corporate liability? There are laws for Intellectual Property but there seem to be no laws for corporate violations of nature. The idea of corporate social responsibility is too weak to address these questions. Already in nuclear energy, the nuclear liability clause caps corporate liability. The question is: can we afford such an equivalent system or do we need new ideas of law and ethics?

The need of the hour is a new social contract where nature and technology are reworked constitutionally

Food security & sustainability

Even technical questions do not sound strictly technical. How do we determine safety? Does safety include livelihood security of farmers or even the question of eco-system damage? Given the current nature of complexity, a responsibility as a simple cause and effect diagram may be difficult to fix. We need concepts which combine food security and food sustainability.

There is also the question of problem solving. C.S. Holling and other ecologists have advocated the idea of Panarchy. Panarchy like hierarchy is sensitive to levels but while a reductive hierarchic solution goes right down, panarchy argues that different levels of a problem require different solutions. Ecological science seems to suggest that genetic modification can no longer be touted as a single solution to agricultural problems.

All these questions demand or suggest the necessity of a different framework of debate. Firstly we need a nested series of hearings, debates, academic seminars where data is analysed independently. Secondly, the voice of dissenting scientists needs to be listened to and responded. Thirdly, decisions cannot be expert decisions — technicalities need to be supplemented by answering citizen anxieties.

Finally, the BJP government, instead of rushing into decisions, must set up a framework of debate. Delays while debates and tests are analysed need not be embarrassing. The need for speed is not obvious. In fact what is necessary is a new social contract where nature and technology are reworked constitutionally. As a democracy, we have to adjudicate between different ideas of farming, evaluate different kinds of responsibility, ethics and accountability. Bowdlerising GM crops is the worst thing any government can do. In its urge to satisfy the corporation, it cannot ignore the needs of farmers, the future and the ideals of our civilisation.