NASA launches Earth-observing satellite

It is on a mission to track the amount of water locked in soil, which may help residents in low-lying regions brace for floods or farmers get ready for drought conditions.

A Delta 2 rocket carrying Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) satellite was launched early Saturday from Vandenberg Air Force Base on California’s central coast.

The satellite is on a three-year mission to track the amount of water locked in soil, which may help residents in low-lying regions brace for floods or farmers get ready for drought conditions.

NASA launch manager Tim Dunn said there were zero launch problems with the rocket, calling the Delta 2 a “workhorse.”

Once the satellite reaches the desired orbit 430 miles or 692 kilometers high, engineers will spend two weeks checking out the two instruments, which will measure moisture in the soil every several days to produce high-resolution global maps.

Scientists hope data collected by the satellite, the latest to join NASA’s Earth—orbiting fleet, will improve flood forecasts and drought monitoring.

At a news conference broadcast online, SMAP mission project manager Kent Kellogg said the launch went off without a hitch.

“This data will benefit not only scientists seeking a better understanding of our planet, climate and environment ... it’s a boon for emergency planners and policy makers,” said Geoffery Yoder, NASA’s deputy associate administrator for programs.

Currently, drought maps and flash flood guidance issued by the federal government are based on computer modeling. SMAP will take real-time measurements that can be incorporated into forecasts, said Dara Entekhabi, mission science team leader from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Besides the satellite, the rocket also carried three research nanosatellites for JPL, Montana State University and California Polytechnic State University. More than 100 university students took part in designing and building the tiny satellites known as CubeSats.

New proposed particle may help detect dark matter

The particle, which is proposed to have 0.02 per cent of an electron’s mass, does not interact with light and may not penetrate the Earth’s atmosphere but will be detected through a space experiment.

Researchers have proposed a new fundamental particle which could explain why no one has managed to detect the elusive ‘dark matter’ that makes up 85 per cent of the universe’s mass.

Dark matter is conjectured to exist as a consequence of its gravitational effects on stars and galaxies, gravitational lensing (the bending of light rays) around these celestial objects, and through its imprint on the Cosmic Microwave Background (the afterglow of the Big Bang).

Despite compelling indirect evidence and considerable experimental effort, dark matter has never been detected directly.

Particle physics gives clues to what dark matter might be, and the standard view is that dark matter particles have, researchers say, a very large mass for fundamental particles — comparable to that of heavy atoms.

Lighter dark matter particles are considered less likely for astrophysical reasons, although exceptions are known, and this research highlights a previously unknown window where they could exist and, with very general arguments from particle physics, derives some surprising results, according to researchers from the University of Southampton.

They have proposed a new particle that has a mass only about 0.02 per cent that of an electron.

While it does not interact with light, as required for dark matter, it does interact surprisingly strongly with normal matter.

Indeed, in stark contrast to other candidates, it may not even penetrate Earth’s atmosphere, researchers said.

Earth-bound detection is therefore not likely, so the researchers plan to incorporate searches into a space experiment planned by the Macroscopic quantum resonators (MAQRO) consortium, with whom they are already involved.

A nanoparticle, suspended in space and exposed directly to the flow of dark matter, will be pushed downstream. Sensitive monitoring of this particle’s position will reveal information about the nature of this dark matter particle, if it exists, researchers said.

“Our candidate particle sounds crazy, but currently there seem to be no experiments or observations which could rule it out,” said Dr James Bateman, from Physics and Astronomy at the University of Southampton and co-author of the study.

“Dark matter is one of the most important unsolved problems in modern physics, and we hope that our suggestion will inspire others to develop detailed particle theory and even experimental tests,” he said.

“At the moment, experiments on dark matter do not point in a clear direction and, given also that the Large Hadron Collider at CERN has not found any signs of new physics yet, it may be time that we shift our paradigm towards alternative candidates for dark matter,” said Dr Alexander Merle, co-author from the Max Planck Institute in Munich, Germany.

The research is published in the journal Scientific Reports.

current affairs

Leander Peas and his Swiss teammate Martina Hingis have won 2015 Australian Open mixed doubles title.

In the final they defeated Canadian-French team of Daniel Nestor and Kristina Mladenovic, in straight sets, 6-4 and 6-3.

This is their first Grand Slam of the season. With this win Leander Paes clinched his 15th Grand Slam title.

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T Suvarna Raju has taken charge as chairman of state-run Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL).

He will be 17th chairman of HAL and will replace RK Tyagi’s following his retirement.

Earlier, in September 2014, Public Enterprises Selection Board had selected him from among five contenders to succeed Tyagi.

T Suvarna Raju

• He hails from a village in West Godavari district in coastal Andhra Pradesh.
• He had joined HAL in June 1980 as management trainee after graduating from IIT in Chennai.

Senior IPS officer Krishna Chaudhary appointed as new ITBP DG

Senior IPS officer Krishna Chaudhary has been appointed the new Director General (DG) of the Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP).

His name was announced by the Appointments Committee of Cabinet (ACC) headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and will be in office till June 2017.

Krishna Chaudhary is 1979-batch Bihar cadre officer. Before this appointment he was working as the Director General of the Railway Protection Force.

Background

• The post of ITBP DG has been vacant since 1 January 2015 after the retirement of Subhas Goswami on 31 December 2014.
• Till the vacant time, CRPF DG Prakash Mishra was holding the additional charge of the ITBP chief.

Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP)

• It is one of the eight statutory Central Armed Police Forces of India and was established on 24 October 1962, under the CRPF Act, in the wake of India- China War of 1962.
• Later Parliament enacted the Indo-Tibetan Border Police Force Act, 1992 to provide full autonomy to ITBP.
• At present ITBP has about 50,000 personnel strong force, to secure the 3,488 km border with China along Tibet Autonomous Region and operates under Ministry of Home Affairs.
• ITBP force also render in a variety of internal security tasks in the country  including civil Medical Camp, disaster management, nuclear, biological and chemical disasters and UN peacekeeping missions around the world.

Maharashtra government has given nod to confined genetically modified (GM) food trails in state.

In this regard, state government has granted no-objection certificates (NOC) for open field trials of 5 genetically modified (GM) crops. They are rice, chana (chickpeas), maize, brinjal and cotton.

NOC was granted by state government after state-level Committee, headed by Anil Kakodkar had given clearance for field test of these five GM crops.

Based upon the results of these trials, government take further steps.

With this decision, Maharashtra has become the fourth state after Punjab, Delhi and Andhra Pradesh to approve open field trials in GM crops.

Confined trials: It is typically carried out in small plots of one hectare or less. It is primarily meant to collect data on the potential bio-safety impact of the GM crop lines.

Why state governments NOC are required for GM food trails?

• Earlier, Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee (GEAC) under the previous UPA Environment Ministry had permitted field trials of GM food in India.
• But GEAC had inserted mandatory condition of separate NOCs from states for such trials.
• So, states like Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan have banned such research activities.

Food insecurity acts

The Shanta Kumar Committee’s recommendations to unbundle the Food Corporation of India are in tune with U.S.-led demands raised in the World Trade Organization

The Shanta Kumar Committee report, released last week, on a range of issues relating to procurement, storage and distribution of food grains is not only deeply flawed in its reading of the situation on food security, but also short on facts. It was prepared under the guidance of the Prime Minister’s Office.

For example, the report asserts that only six per cent of all farmers have benefited from Minimum Support Price (MSP) through sale of food grains to an official procurement agency, according to data of the National Sample Survey Organisation’s 70th round. But analysts have found discrepancies between the survey’s estimates of the food grains sold to official procurement agencies and the actual amount of grains procured by official agencies for that year.

For kharif, the NSSO survey estimates that 13 million tonnes were sold to a procurement agency while the actual procurement that year by government agencies was 34 million tonnes. For rabi, the gap is even larger: 10 million tonnes estimated in the survey while the actual amount procured by an official agency was 38 million tonnes.

Selling at distress prices

Why did the Shanta Kumar Committee overlook these possible underestimates? Was it just to arrive at the sensational figure of six per cent and then argue that since only six per cent of farmers get the benefit of MSP and procurement, why have the Food Corporation of India (FCI) at all?

But there is another way of looking at it. It is true that large numbers of farmers are deprived of the benefits of MSP. It is not because they do not want to sell to the procurement agencies but because they do not have access to official procurement centre, which are set up only in selective States and regions. The majority of farmers sell at distress prices which push them deeper into debt. For this large section of rural India, reforming the system would mean a substantial increase in the number of procurement centres and easier access, so as to enable it to benefit from MSP.

As soon as the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) assumed office, the first thing it did was to bring down the rate of increase of MSP to just about three per cent over the previous year — this when the prices of farm inputs have increased phenomenally.

Some States under pressure from Kisan movements decided to give a bonus over and above the MSP to help farmers. The Modi government stepped in to “punish” such States. It decreed that it would not procure any food grains over and above the requirement for the Public Distribution System (PDS) from such States which gave the farmers a bonus.

Confronted with the Central government’s policy, the Chhattisgarh government, for example, which had given such a bonus, issued a circular that it would procure only 10 quintals of paddy per acre from individual farmers. Andhra Pradesh has also limited its procurement. Thus, open-ended procurement which ensured India’s food security and farmer security is now in the process of being whittled down while the rate of increase of MSP is delinked from the increases in the cost of production and adequate profit margins. This is in contrast to the Swaminathan Commission’s recommendation for MSP to be calculated at the cost of production plus 50 per cent profit, to keep agriculture viable.

The immediate impact in Chhattisgarh has been distress sales by farmers to private traders who can dictate prices, buoyed by the assurance from the government that it would not procure more grains.

The Shanta Kumar Committee report takes these dangerous steps further by advocating limited procurement as the officially declared policy.

This is directly linked to its recommendation to scrap the existing Food Security Act (FSA). The Committee wants to reduce the coverage from 67 per cent to 40 per cent of the population. It also wants to double the prices that these food grains are to be sold at under the present Act by linking the price to the MSP. This means resurrecting the fraudulent and discredited Above Poverty Line and Below Poverty Line estimations and depriving equally poor people of subsidised grains. In fact, as the Left has consistently argued and fought for, it is only a universalised PDS that can meet the requirement to make India hunger-free. The Shanta Kumar Committee wants to eliminate even the inadequate provisions under the existing FSA and push the country back to the worst days of food insecurity.

Ironically, such a recommendation comes at a time when the United Nations agencies monitoring country-wise performances towards meeting the Millennium goals have praised India for its reduction of malnutrition, giving credit for this to food security systems like the “ICDS [Integrated Child Development Services] as well as the public distribution system.” In spite of the reduction, which brings India from the “most alarming category” to the “seriously affected” category, the country is still home to the largest malnourished population in the world; its rank in the Global Hunger Index at 55 out of 76 emerging economies is only slightly ahead of Pakistan and Bangladesh but worse than Sri Lanka and Nepal.

As in the case of procurement, the Modi government has started to subvert the FSA in the case of implementation too. The FSA became law in September 2013. More than a year later, it is being implemented in only 11 States. The Central government has excluded 25 States and Union Territories from the ambit of the Act. According to a release on November 28, 2014, these States and Union Territories “have not completed the preparatory measures required for the implementation of the Act.” It was further stated that “the Central Government extended the deadline for the implementation of the Act by another six months, namely till April 2014.”

The Government of India has no right to make the implementation of the Act conditional to “preparedness” on the basis of parameters it has decided arbitrarily. There is no such legal provision in the Act, nor is there any legal deadline. But the official release reflects clearly the present government’s hostility towards taking any responsibility for food security. This is also reflected in the allocation of food grains. If the FSA is to be implemented, then according to the calculations of the Food Ministry, the allocations will go up to 550 lakh tonnes of food grains compared to the pre-FSA allocations in 2012-2013 of 504 lakh tonnes.

Shift to direct cash transfers

According to the Ministry’s food grains bulletin till December 2014, allocations to the States were just 388 lakh tonnes of food grains. This is roughly the same as it was the previous year, before the Act was passed. In other words, the Modi government has already stayed the implementation of the FSA. It is preparing to shift to direct cash transfers for a more restricted number of families.

The Shanta Kumar Committee’s recommendations to unbundle the FCI, allowing the free play of market forces in procurement and storage of food grains, and restricting the FSA are in tune with the demands raised by the western world led by the U.S. in the World Trade Organisation against India’s systems of procurement, storage and distribution. The India-U.S. agreement to end the stalemate in the WTO process is clearly premised on the changes being suggested by the Committee.

The government can be expected to try and bulldoze the required amendments to the FSA through Parliament using its majority. But undoubtedly it will face the resistance of the people.

Gold award for the Income Tax Department under National Award on E-Governance 2014-15

The Income Tax Department has been awarded GOLD by the Government of India under category “Cat-I-Excellence in Government Process Re-engineering” for National Award on e-governance 2014-15. The award has been conferred for “TDS Reconciliation Analysis & Correction Enabling System (TRACES)” project launched by the Department. The Project marks a major step in ensuring TDS compliance through the processing of TDS returns and comprehensive data processing of TDS statements using technology driven end-to-end processes. At present 15 Lakh deductors and 2.5 crore tax payers are using various e-enabled online services through the CPC (TDS). The award was presented today during the 18th National Conference on e-governance held at Mahatma Mandir, Gandhinagar, Gujarat. This third award on e-governance to the Income Tax Department in the last 5 years speaks volumes about the commitment of the Department to e-governance and to move towards a non-adversarial and tax-payer friendly regime.