Environment and Progress Can Go Hand in Hand, Says Javadekar at the Convocation for Indian Forest Service Probationers in Dehradun

Environment and progress can supplement each other and they are not contrary to each other as is general perception. This was the observation of the Union Minister of State (Independent Charge) for Environment, Forest and Climate Change and Information and Broadcasting at the annual convocation of 2012-14 course of the Indian Forest Service Officer trainees of Indira Gandhi National Forest Academy in Dehradun today. The Minister exhorted the young forest officers to perform their duty to the society with passion, compassion and integrity. He said the forest cover of India has to be increased from present level of 24 per cent to 33 percent and to achieve it the forest officers will have to be innovative in policy, process and outreach. He said instead of more infrastructure, we need more faculty and the forest officers should come forward andwork as faculty to teach the young officers. The Minister gave away diploma and awards to 78 officer trainees of the 2012-14 batch, including 22 lady officers and 2 officer trainees from Bhutan. This batch consisted of 4 PhDs, 48 Post Graduates and 26 Graduates in different science subjects. The convocation function was presided over by Dr. S.S.Garbyal, Director General and Special Secretary in the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change. The Minister later also laid foundation stone of UNESCO centre for ‘Natural World Heritage Management and Training for Asia and Pacific Region’ at Wildlife Institute of India in Dehradun. On this occasion Shri Javadekar said the demands of nature and the demands of development should not be seen in conflict with each other. He urged the Wildlife Institute of India to help schools and colleges by creating environment related syllabus in easy-to-understand language. He said that on one hand India needs 10 per cent economic growth but on the other, it also needs one percent forest cover growth for development.  Earlier the Union Environment and Forest Minister had deliberations with Shri Harish Rawat, the Chief Minister of Uttarakhand and the senior officers of the state. The environment Minister agreed to empower the nodal officer of his Ministry in Dehradun for forest clearance upto 5 hectare forest land in 13 types of projects like road, water, electricity etc. The Union Minister also assured to consider releasing 1200 crore rupees under Compensatory Afforestation Fund Management and Planning Authority (CAMPA). He also assured to soften and redefine the parameters to allow quarrying in the rivers.

Disease and ecology

LOOKING at the many vector-borne diseases, particularly viral, one finds that there exists a complex host-parasite relationship among various animals, their arthropod vectors and infective organisms. The results of human entrance into the infectious chain are deleterious, since man becomes an integral part of the host-parasite relation which changes his environment. Therefore, before thinking of controlling the diseases, efforts must be made to understand vector-transmitted infections in man in relationship to his environment.

Parasitic diseases of humans and animals are obviously a part of the broad evolutionary development. The application of the theory of insect-carriers led to a better understanding of diseases such as sleeping sickness, malaria, yellow fever, bubonic plague and typhus. While the role of animals, vectors and man in the natural cycle of disease transmission was established about two centuries ago, not much importance has been given to understanding the role of the environment and the necessity of an ecological approach to study this. The lack of accurate knowledge concerning the ecology of wild reservoir hosts, vectors and the human victims in nature has been responsible for a poor understanding of the epidemiology of many diseases, particularly arthropod-borne viral diseases.

The Russian parasitologist and geographer Eugene N. Pavlovsky’s extensive researches in the middle of the last century gave us a greater understanding of the evolution of natural adaptations of infectious diseases. The concept means that wild enzootic foci of many diseases exist in nature independently of man and domestic animals. These foci present well-defined ecological peculiarities wherein pathogens and natural hosts are associated, often through an intermediate vector.

The environmental factors determining these associations are climate, soil, vegetation and topographical features (landscape epidemiology). These serve as reliable indicators of the existence of certain diseases. Areas at the edge of deserts, with burrowing rodents, may harbour Cutaneous leishmaniasis (a skin infection, as in Rajasthan); areas at the junction of mountains, forests and agricultural fields or grasslands (interfaces) may harbour many vector-borne diseases. These natural foci, which may be called “silent zones of diseases”, may remain undetected until susceptible human beings come into contact with them directly or indirectly and become infected. With accurate ecological knowledge, similar foci in other areas may be detected before human disease can be predicted.

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http://www.frontline.in/science-and-technology/disease-and-ecology/article6189534.ece#test

Brain-controlled flight

IN work carried out as part of a European Union-funded project called “Brainflight”, scientists of the Technische Universitat Munchen (TUM) and the Technische Universitat Berlin (TUB) demonstrated the feasibility of flying with amazing precision using brain control alone (and no hands). Pilots of the future may be able to control their aircraft by merely thinking commands.

A long-term vision of the project, according to Tim Fricke, who heads the project at the TUM, is to make flying accessible to more people. “With brain control, flying, in itself, could become easier. This would reduce the workload of pilots and thereby increase safety. In addition, pilots would have more freedom of movement to manage other manual tasks in the cockpit.”

Seven subjects took part in the flight simulator tests. They had varying levels of flight experience, including one person without any practical cockpit experience whatsoever. The accuracy with which the test subjects stayed on course by merely thinking commands would have sufficed, in part, to fulfil the requirements of a flying licence test. Several of the subjects also managed the landing approach under poor visibility. One test pilot even landed within only few metres of the centre line.

Normally, pilots feel resistance in steering and must exert significant force when the loads induced on the aircraft become large. This feedback is missing when using brain control. TUM scientists are now focussing on the question of how the requirements of changing flight dynamics can be incorporated in the new control method, which basically converts electrical potentials into control commands. Brain waves of the pilots are measured using electroencephalography (EEG) electrodes connected to a cap. An algorithm developed by scientists from the TUB allows a program to decipher electrical potentials and convert them into appropriate commands. The brain-computer interface only recognises the very clearly defined electrical brain impulses required for control. “This is pure signal processing,” Fricke emphasised.

India, Japan sign MoU to develop Varanasi into 'smart city'

Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to Japan today began on a significant note with a pact being signed under which his constituency Varanasi will be developed as a 'smart city', with cooperation and experience of Kyoto, the Japanese 'smart city' which is a confluence of heritage and modernity.

The signing of the Partner City Affiliation MoU, which marks the launch of smart heritage city programme, between the two countries, was overseen by Modi and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe who made a special gesture of flying here from Tokyo to meet his Indian counterpart.

The pact was signed by Indian Ambassador to Japan Deepa Wadhwa and Mayor of Kyoto Daisaku Kadokawa soon after Modi's arrival here for his two-day first leg of his visit. Abe received Modi at the Kyoto Guest House before the signing ceremony.

The MoU provides for cooperation in heritage conservation, city modernisation and cooperation in the fields of art, culture and academics, External Affairs Ministry spokesman Syed Akbaruddin told reporters

This marks the launch of Smart heritage city programme between the two countries, he added. The pact is in line with Modi's vision of building 100 smart cities across India.

Under the MoU, a detailed roadmap of cooperation will be prepared which will form the base for further understanding.

Both cities shall endeavor to strengthen exchanges and cooperation in the agreed fields based on principles of equality and mutual respect and benefit and continuously exchange information and opinion in the agreed areas and cooperate in important fields.

After the signing of the pact, Abe hosted a dinner for Modi who has embarked on the visit with "great expectations" and hope that a "new chapter" would be written in the bilateral ties while taking the Strategic and Global Partnership to a higher level.

Before the dinner, Modi and Abe participated in a special ceremony called 'Feeding the Fish', a ritual in Japan because of the belief that it gives strength and perseverance to the fish.

Modi arrived at the Osaka International Airport earlier in the day to begin the first leg of his five-day visit to Japan, his first bilateral visit outside the subcontinent as the Prime Minister.

Modi and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will have substantive summit meeting in Tokyo on September 1 during which the two sides will look at ways to take the Strategic and Global Partnership forward.

Modi has a substantive agenda duringthe trip which he hopes will "write a new chapter" in bilateral ties and take the Strategic and Global Partnership to a higher level.

Friends for the future,indo-japan relation

When they catch up this weekend in Kyoto, the ancient capital of Japan, Prime Ministers Narendra Modi and Shinzo Abe will celebrate the deep civilisational links between the two nations before they unveil the contours of a more purposeful strategic partnership in Tokyo on Monday.
That Modi and Abe have developed a personal rapport over the years is well known. Although he could not make Japan his first foreign destination as PM, Modi has kept the essence of his promise that he would attach special significance to ties with Tokyo. His trip to Japan is his first bilateral diplomatic engagement outside the subcontinent.
If Tokyo was disappointed with Modi’s cancellation of his trip to Japan at the last moment a few weeks ago, Abe is making a special gesture now by showing up at Kyoto to host a private dinner for the Indian prime minister. As they push for an ambitious agenda of bilateral cooperation, Modi and Abe are both privileging the past to address the challenges of the present.
For Modi and Abe, widely hailed and rebuked for their unabashed nationalism, the past is not really past. They are actively mobilising the past in pursuit of their current goals. If Modi is leveraging nationalism to reconfigure India’s domestic politics and its external orientation, Abe is determined to end Japan’s post-war antipathy towards nationalism and remake it as a normal state.
As they seek a larger role for their nations in Asia and the world, Modi and Abe know they need each other more than ever before. They are acutely conscious that India and Japan form unique partners for each other amid the current economic and geopolitical flux in Asia.
They have one common problem, though. Both are burdened with national security bureaucracies that are stuck with mantras of the past and slowing down the prospects for civil nuclear and defence cooperation. Modi and Abe need to press their bureaucracies to quickly wrap up the nuclear negotiations and lay the foundations for a strong defence partnership.
On the economic front, the challenges are more on the Indian side, where Modi must get his domestic act together to take full advantage of the possibilities that have opened up for Japan’s participation in accelerating India’s economic development. On a whole range of issues identified as priorities by Modi — from boosting India’s manufacturing sector to the modernisation of infrastructure, from building high-speed railways to constructing smart cities, from cleaning the Ganga to the development of green technologies — Japan is well placed to become a productive partner.
Modi’s decision to arrive in Kyoto a day ahead of schedule and Abe’s move to meet him there are part of an effort to showcase the historic Buddhist bonds betweenIndia and Japan, so visible in Kyoto and Nara, and create a broader public support in both countries for a meaningful strategic partnership. Over the weekend, Modi and Abe are likely to announce a sister city partnership between Varanasi and Kyoto. For preserving the heritage of Varanasi and making it a modern city, Kyoto is a fine place to learn from.
Past and present will also come together in the political engagement between the two leaders in Tokyo. Since he surprised the world by his return to power at the end of 2012, Abe has sought to pull Japan out of extended economic stagnation and re-establish it as a front-ranking power in Asia and the world.
For more than five decades, Japan has been content to rely on the military alliance with the US to ensure its security. It also normalised relations with China when Washington warmed up to Beijing to counter Moscow. But the context has rapidly evolved with the rise of China, its emergence as a great military power, and its intensifying territorial dispute with Japan in the East China Sea. As it worries about Beijing’s new clout, Tokyo is also concerned about America’s ambivalence in the new dynamic between China and Japan.
While the alliance with the US will remain Japan’s security anchor for the foreseeable future, Abe is taking some additional insurance. He is strengthening Japan’s military capabilities and preparing it for a more active security role in Asia and the Indian Ocean. He also wants to build stronger security partnerships with many countries in the region, including US allies like Australia and the Philippines as well as non-aligned nations like India, Vietnam and Indonesia. Abe’s vigorous policies have drawn flak from China. Beijing has charged him with militarism and accused him of trying to overturn the post-war order in Asia. It is into this East Asian minefield that Modi n’s re-emergence as a responsible power in Asia. In the seven decades that have elapsed since the end of World War II, Japan has proved to be a good international citizen, having contributed significantly to regional economic growth, including in China, and promoted political and institutional cooperation in Asia.
Endorsing Japan’s normalisation does not mean Modi will be taking sides between Tokyo and Beijing. Here again, the past offers a sensible guidance for the present. India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, argued against treating Japan as a defeated power in the wake of WW II. Nehru also opposed Western attempts to isolate China after the communists won the civil war there in 1949.
Unless both China and Japan are given their legitimate due, Nehru was convinced, Asia will be neither secure nor prosperous. Modi, then, has a strong precedent to pursue good relations with both Japan and China. The PM should strengthen partnerships with Tokyo and Beijing, each on its own merit, and in the process, build up India’s comprehensive national power and make Delhi an indispensable actor in shaping Asia’s future.

Let’s talk transfer of technology

India must insist on co-development and co-production of defence systems that it plans to buy from the U.S.

It is good that Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Defence Minister Arun Jaitley have made it clear to the U.S. Defence Minister, Chuck Hagel, who was in India earlier this month, that the pure sale of defence hardware by the U.S. to India is far from enough.

The way we should go with the Americans has to be on the lines of the co-development and co-production of the state-of-the-art Fifth Generation Fighter Aircraft (FGFA) with the Russians.

However, India, which agreed to buy 39 AH-64D Apache helicopters for the Army in addition to the 22 now under negotiation, is in talks again for purchase by the Indian Air Force (IAF) from the U.S. manufacturer, Boeing. This is being done without transfer of technology (TOT) to Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) for the local manufacture of all these 61 helicopters, which is bad for the country. Such a number of helicopters, senior managers and engineers of HAL’s Helicopter Division argue forcefully, is large enough for substantial local content-based production. Neither the IAF nor the Army contracts with Boeing has gone so far as to make TOT result in techno-commercially viable production here feasible and viable. The Ministry of Defence should act immediately to tie-up such TOT-based production by HAL instead of proceeding with mere import of the finished product.

Defence supplies by the U.S.

Will the U.S. government agree? If we use the multi-billion U.S. dollar value of the two contracts as leverage and exert pressure, they will have to. This would mean new jobs for HAL and its sub-contractors. It would also mean we would have a nationally controlled spares production base in the country, which would be orders of magnitude cheaper than supply of spares from the U.S. The bread and butter for the supplier come from hugely priced spares; not from the main equipment.

 “Having a production base in the country would mean national control over spare parts, so as to not remain at the mercy of the supplier”

If one were to analyse defence supplies by U.S. companies under the U.S. government’s direction and control even to their “closest allies” such as the U.K., one would find that it is the policy of the U.S. government to severely restrict not only TOT in general, but transfer of technology relating to critical sub-assemblies, modules and components too, making us eternally dependent on them.

A specific case will illustrate the reality. The case pertains to the Sea Harrier, which is aircraft carrier-borne and uses vertical take off and landing (VTOL). The U.K. was the inventor of VTOL technology. India had bought two squadrons (around 30 aircraft) of the Sea Harrier from the British Aircraft Corporation (BAC) way back in the 1970s for its aircraft carriers. When the Atal Bihari Vajpayee-led National Democratic Alliance government was in power (1999-2004), we sent our Sea Harriers to the BAC for a thorough upgrade. At that time, the Ministry of Defence, the Navy and the BAC knew that such an upgrade would call for the BAC importing some critical sub-systems, modules and components (hereafter collectively referred to as “modules”) from the U.S. This was because those modules had been imported by the BAC even for the Sea Harriers it had produced in the U.K. and supplied to the British Navy.

That the U.S. government would prove “difficult” in clearing the supply of those modules for our Sea Harriers was recognised by both the BAC and the Defence Ministry. So they sounded out the U.S. government agencies concerned. The U.S. response was non-committal. Nevertheless, the Ministry went ahead. Why? Because we did not have an option. Over 25 years, the Indian Navy operated those aircraft, but no effort was made to successfully indigenise those modules. We just merrily went along with importing those modules from the BAC, which in turn kept importing them from the U.S. companies concerned at huge increases in prices from time to time.

It was not surprising, therefore, that the U.S. government refused the supplies to the BAC for fitment on our Sea Harriers. The BAC and the British Navy then told India that the U.S. government had done likewise, even in regard to the Harriers of the British Navy despite the U.K. being the country’s “closest ally.”

The U.S. government finally agreed to the export of the modules concerned, but only after former British Prime Minister Tony Blair flew to Washington D.C. to specifically persuade the U.S. President to release them. As far as our requirements of the modules were concerned, Mr. Vajpayee had done something similar.

This case shows how even British and European defence equipment manufacturers have to constantly face and deal with the U.S. government’s export controls on them on a wide array of modules, despite the fact that all of them are supposedly equal members of NATO.

Being circumspect in dealings

This kind of policy and practice by the U.S. government also came up with regard to the “upgraded” F-16 Falcon and the F-18 Hornet fighter-bombers which Lockheed Martin and Boeing respectively had offered India against the global tender put out by the Ministry of Defence/IAF for 126 Medium Multi-Role Combat Aircraft (MMRCA) four years ago. Of all the six bidders, the TOT and terminal local content were the smallest in the case of both the U.S. planes. Therefore we have to be extremely circumspect in dealing with the U.S. government in all high technology defence systems from the transfer of technology and local production content points of view.

Constitutional duty underlined

The Supreme Court of India has a reputation for activism and has sometimes even been accused of judicial overreach. However, it needs to be said in defence of the Court that as a repository of public trust it has been wont to step in only in conditions of administrative apathy and legislative stasis to protect basic rights and constitutional values. It has in recent times delivered some significant verdicts to save the purity of the election process. It directed that the ‘none-of-the-above’ option be incorporated in the voting machine, and struck down a clause that saved sitting legislators from immediate disqualification upon conviction. When the question whether a person with a criminal background can be allowed to become a Minister was referred to a Constitution Bench, there could have been the expectation that the Court would expand the existing law to bar the appointment of those against whom serious charges have been framed. However, showing wise restraint, the Constitution Bench has declined to prescribe any fresh ground for disqualification for the appointment of Ministers. Instead, it has advised the Prime Minister, as well as the Chief Ministers, to live up to the trust that the Constitution reposes in them by refraining from advising the President, or the Governors, when it comes to appointing as Ministers those with the taint of criminality.

Even though doctrines such as implied prohibition and constitutional silence were put forward in support of a radical finding that the Prime Minister was impliedly barred from including in the Council of Ministers a person with a criminal record, the Court stopped short of doing so, correctly. Rather, it chose to invoke the principle of constitutional trust, constitutional expectation and the sanctity of the oath taken by the Prime Minister (or Chief Ministers), to counsel them against “choosing a person with criminal antecedents against whom charges have been framed for heinous or serious criminal offences or charges of corruption” as a Minister. In the ultimate analysis, the judgment may be no more than a learned dissertation on the subject. However, at a time when statistics of pending cases and charges against legislators are cited to assess the extent of criminality in politics, it is a timely reminder to the Prime Minister and Chief Ministers of their constitutional responsibility to preserve purity in public life. The Election Commission has already mooted some reforms to curb the criminalisation of politics, notably an amendment to make framing of charges in serious cases the basis for disqualification, instead of conviction, as it stands now. The message from the latest verdict is that these issues ought to be addressed through legislation rather than the judicial process.