Li-fi 100 times faster than wi-fi'

A new method of delivering data, which uses the visible spectrum rather than radio waves, has been tested in a working office.

Li-fi can deliver internet access 100 times faster than traditional wi-fi, offering speeds of up to 1Gbps (gigabit per second).

It requires a light source, such as a standard LED bulb, an internet connection and a photo detector.

It was tested this week by Estonian start-up Velmenni, in Tallinn.

Velmenni used a li-fi-enabled light bulb to transmit data at speeds of 1Gbps. Laboratory tests have shown theoretical speeds of up to 224Gbps.

It was tested in an office, to allow workers to access the internet and in an industrial space, where it provided a smart lighting solution.

Speaking to the International Business Times, chief executive Deepak Solanki said that the technology could reach consumers "within three to four years".

The term li-fi was first coined by Prof Harald Haas from Edinburgh University, who demonstrated the technology at a Ted (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference in 2011.

His talk, which has now been watched nearly two million times, showed an LED lamp streaming video.

Prof Haas described a future when billions of light bulbs could become wireless hotspots.

One of the big advantages of li-fi is the fact that, unlike wi-fi, it does not interfere with other radio signals, so could be utilised on aircraft and in other places where interference is an issue.

While the spectrum for radio waves is in short supply, the visible light spectrum is 10,000 times larger, meaning it is unlikely to run out any time soon.

But the technology also has its drawbacks - most notably the fact that it cannot be deployed outdoors in direct sunlight, because that would interfere with its signal.

Neither can the technology travel through walls so initial use is likely to be limited to places where it can be used to supplement wi-fi networks, such as in congested urban areas or places where wi-fi is not safe, such as hospitals.

Is the India vs Bharat trope passé? The divergence between the fortunes of India and Bharat has been a recurring theme not just in economics but in many a Bollywood movie

Is the India vs Bharat trope passé?

The divergence between the fortunes of India and Bharat has been a recurring theme not just in economics but in many a Bollywood movie

The urban-rural divide in India is a cliché. The divergence between the fortunes of India and Bharat has been a recurring theme not just in economics but in many a Bollywood movie. Could it be that we are moving away from this rather glib urban-rural dichotomy? It would appear so from a recent World Bank research paper, Cities, Catchment Areas and Prosperity in India, by Yue Li and Martin Rama.

Development is not necessarily a process where all urban centres grow faster than rural. Instead, the centres of growth are usually clusters and agglomerations where skills, knowledge, infrastructure, networks and money converge. These are the areas of highest productivity in the country.

Of course, it’s well-known that location is an important driver of labour productivity. Why else do people migrate from rural Bihar to work in Mumbai and Delhi? What is interesting about the paper is its finding that as far as labour productivity is concerned, “the performance of large rural areas and that of small urban areas resemble closely, challenging the conventional view of a rural-urban divide.”

The paper maps the spatial productivity patterns across the country by classifying centres into four types: top locations, their catchment areas, average places and bottom locations. The top locations are the 100 places with the biggest location effects. An example of a location effect is an average Indian household moving from a small rural area in the Malkangiri district of Odisha to Gurgaon, which, the paper says, would see its nominal household expenditure per capita increase 3.6 times. The seven large urban areas that qualify as top locations are, in descending order, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Faridabad, Thane, Kolkata, Surat and Delhi.

What’s remarkable, though, is that some small cities are among the top locations, while some large cities are not. The study also finds that top locations and their catchment areas include many high-performing rural places. Conversely, large urban areas such as Agra, Kanpur, Varanasi and Patna have location effects below the Indian average. A vast majority of the bottom locations are bunched together in the middle of India, crossing the states of Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Odisha. A number of bottom locations can also be found in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. Interestingly, most of them are not rural but small urban areas.

Taking the catchment areas into account, the study identifies 17 clusters in the country. These clusters are spread across several districts and even states. For example, the cluster of Mumbai, Surat and Thane encompasses nine districts in Gujarat and Maharashtra; the cluster of Ahmadabad covers seven districts in Gujarat; and the cluster of Bengaluru includes five districts in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu.

Within the 17 clusters, there are 12 large urban areas, 91 small urban areas, 45 large rural areas and 67 small rural areas. In other words, what matters for development is not so much whether the area is urban or rural, but whether it forms part of a cluster. Location, location, location, as they say in realty, is what counts for productivity as well.

The authors underline the point by mentioning that more than 10% of the rural population lives in one of India’s 17 clusters, compared with about 18% in its 218 bottom locations. Nevertheless, it’s a fact that top locations and catchment areas have both significantly lower employment shares in agriculture and significantly higher shares in manufacture. They also have higher educational attainment at both secondary and tertiary levels and better access to infrastructure and services. These are, rather obviously, factors that set apart India’s most productive areas from the rest of the country.

The paper also highlights that road density increases from bottom locations to top locations and top locations register significantly higher road density than any other tier. In other words, the lesson is: build the roads and the firms will follow. Indeed, that is precisely what is happening. High costs in cities have led to firms converting their land into lucrative real estate while shifting their factories into those parts of the hinterland that are well-connected. In recent years, manufacturing has been moving into rural areas.

It follows from all this that the current government’s single-minded emphasis on road building, therefore, is the right one, as is the work being done on the North-South and East-West freight corridors. As a paper by Urmila Chatterjee, Rinku Murgai, and Martín Rama in theEconomic & Political Weekly pointed out earlier this year, in an economy that is transforming rapidly both economically and spatially, the rural-urban divide is becoming blurred. Perhaps a more fruitful way to look at the Indian economy is in terms of growth clusters and how to extend them.

The numbers behind climate change

Climate change has a long history. Scientists have been warning about rising temperatures and carbon dioxide levels since the 1960s. However, it took a couple of decades before governments started moving. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988, and two years later, further international cooperation materialized at the Rio Earth Summit, when the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change(UNFCCC) was established to stabilize greenhouse gases. Here’s a look at the numbers that explain the politics of climate change and what countries have promised so far.

Why the Ambedkar legacy really matters

Why the Ambedkar legacy really matters
More important than tactically quoting him is to understand the Ambedkarite project

One of the welcome features of the parliamentary debates on the Constitution last week was the centrality given to the ideas of B.R. Ambedkar. We also saw the sorry spectacle of various political parties trying hard to claim him as one of their own. Such attempts to forcefully fit Ambedkar into a straitjacket does injustice to a complex thinker, undoubtedly the most scholarly political leader India has ever had.

Ambedkar wrote on various issues for over four decades, with utter intellectual honesty. A quick look at his oeuvre reveals an astonishing range. He wrote on why India needed to adopt the gold standard, on the exchange rate of the Indian rupee with the British pound, the evolution of provincial finance, the origins of the pernicious caste system, economic modernization as the ultimate solution to farmer distress, what needs to be done to annihilate caste, how to protect the rights of the oppressed, searing critiques of M.K. Gandhi, attacks on the Hindu orthodoxy, why the creation of Pakistan would be good for India, the nature of the Constitution, the need for linguistic states and the humane message of the Buddha. His range included economics, political philosophy, anthropology, history, religion and law.

The current fashion is to selectively quote from Ambedkar to make limited sparring points, as a result of which he is being claimed by the Hindutva camp, the Congress, the free market crowd, the Lohiaites and the Communist Left. His grammar of anarchy speech, made on the day the constituent assembly met on 26 November 1949 to adopt the draft Constitution, is a favourite these days. Far more important than tactically quoting Ambedkar is to understand the bigger Ambedkarite project, which has unfortunately not kept pace with his growing posthumous popularity.

Ambedkar himself often spoke about his intellectual debt to the philosopher John Dewey, who was his mentor at Columbia University. Many of the constant themes in Ambedkar’s varied writings spring from the school of pragmatic philosophy that Dewey was a distinguished member of. The pragmatists championed the cause of individual liberty, they welcomed modernity, they had a disdain for metaphysics, their politics was moderate, and they argued that truth is not an objective category, so any idea must be judged by whether it works or not when put into practice.

But perhaps the most significant idea or at least the most relevant for our times, from Dewey that one can find in Ambedkar is democracy as a way of sharing a common life with other human beings. Democracy is thus not just about periodic elections but a way of living. One core idea is that human beings are not only shaped by social institutions but also shape them in return, but the latter is possible only if there is an aware citizenry that has had the benefit of good education and equal rights. Ambedkar brilliantly adapted these insights from the pragmatic philosophers to develop his critiques of the caste system, his ideas about the Indian nation and his views on the requisites of a robust democracy.

It is easy to selectively quote Ambedkar. He wrote like a libertarian economist in defence of the gold standard in his early career. He led labour unions for the time when he flirted with what he described as state socialism. He attacked Hindu society but had hard truths to share about the reality of Muslim politics in undivided India. He was the moving spirit of the Constitution but once threatened to burn it in a fit of anger. He wanted India to have a strong centre though he warned about the threat of dominance by the Hindi states.

Picking and choosing quotes while ignoring the larger Ambedkarite project is an easy sport that too many indulge in these days. That Ambedkarite project is about individual liberty, the end of the caste system, social democracy, a democratic public culture, the embrace of modernity, pragmatism, constitutional methods and education for an enlightened citizenry.

Can any political party claim Ambedkar as its own?

The cost of redistributing wealth

The cost of redistributing wealth
Should we just redistribute all the wealth until everyone has an equal amount?

’d like to explain how most modern economists think about wealth redistribution. If you discuss welfare, taxes or inequality with an economist, you are bound to run into a concept called the equity-efficiency tradeoff. It’s the idea that there’s a fundamental tradeoff between the size of the economic pie and the equal distribution of said pie.

Suppose you’re a really rich person. You have $50 billion in wealth, though it fluctuates day to day depending on the financial markets. But even if the markets take a tumble, you will still have enough to buy almost anything you want.

Now suppose some hacker comes and steals $10,000 out of one of your brokerage accounts. The difference it would make in your purchasing power would be negligible. Now suppose that hacker, in the tradition of Robin Hood, decided to give the stolen $10,000 to a poor man in a slum in Baltimore. That $10,000 is probably as much as the poor guy earns in a year. Suddenly, his yearly salary is doubled and his risk of having to sleep in a homeless shelter is dramatically reduced.

This difference in the marginal value of wealth—the value of each additional dollar—is a key part of modern economics. It underlies our theory of risk and our theories of labour and leisure. But it also has implications for what we think of as human welfare—the total well-being of the species, or the nation. A given number of dollars creates more well-being in the hands of the poor than in the hands of the rich.

So, should we just redistribute all the wealth until everyone has an equal amount? Even if you think that doing so would be morally acceptable, you would have good reason for caution. Although rich people might not notice one or two random thefts from their bank accounts, they will most definitely notice the systematic appropriation of their wealth by the government. That systematic appropriation, of course, is called taxation.

When you tax people, you usually cause them to reduce the amount that they do the thing that is subject to the tax. That’s not always true—if you tax people’s labour, they may work less because of the decreased value of an hour of work, or they may work more because they are poorer than they were before. But in general, taxation reduces economic activity. Taxing investment reduces investment, and taxing consumption reduces consumption.

Anyway, the basic message is that the more the government tries to shift income around, the less total income there is to distribute.

This is sometimes known colloquially as “Okun’s bucket”, after economist Arthur Okun, who once likened redistribution to moving wealth from one person to another with a leaky bucket.

Modern empirical techniques have allowed economists to get a better idea of how big the leaks are in the bucket. For example, a recent paper by Nathaniel Hendren looks at the earned income tax credit, food stamps and housing vouchers. He finds that for every dollar redistributed from rich to poor with those programmes, anywhere from 34 cents to 56 cents leaks out and is lost.

This is how economists think when they consider redistribution programmes like the ones mentioned above. They don’t normally consider moral questions, like whether it’s ethical for the government to confiscate one person’s income in order to give it to another. When they do attempt to wade into the moral side of things, the result is often ham-handed and awkward.

Thus, economists typically leave questions of justice to the philosophers and politicians. Mostly, they focus on trying to quantify the tradeoff between equality and efficiency. That may seem a bit heartless, but to many economists, it feels like the most objective way to approach questions of redistribution. Bloomberg

india introduces injectable polio vaccine in routine immunization

india introduces injectable polio vaccine in routine immunization
Babies getting their third dose of oral polio vaccine (OPV) will now also be administered an injection with inactivated polio vaccine (IPV), as part of India’s efforts to boost its polio immunization programme. IPV and OPV together can provide additional protection to a child.

India was certified polio-free on 27 March 2014, but the immunization programme continues in the country since two of its neighbours remain polio-endemic and due to the threat of vaccine-derived polio.

In the first phase, the injection will be introduced in six states: Assam, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Punjab.

“The last polio case was reported in India in 2011. But the risk is still there with the virus being active in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Hence, we are introducing IPV for double protection against polio,” said Union minister for health and family welfare J.P. Nadda, at an event to launch the vaccine. “By 2016 April, we will switch from trivalent to bivalent vaccine. We have to ensure that core and support systems work, along with a robust cold chain system and improved routine immunization,” added Nadda.

Trivalent vaccines protect against three strains of the polio virus while the bivalent variety protects against two. Immunization programmes the world over are switching to the bivalent vaccine since the third strain has been eradicated, and the trivalent vaccine could theoretically re-introduce it.

There are challenges that come with the introduction of the vaccine. IPV is an expensive vaccine and each dose costs around Rs.120 and unlike OPV, the IPV which is an injectable vaccine can only be given by trained health workers at vaccination sites. There are also issues of vaccine availability which the health ministry is trying to resolve.

“IPV is a key step towards global endgame strategy. It is a tough task to convince a population to continue with OPV after a country is declared polio-free and even harder to introduce IPV on top of that,” said Louis George Arsenault, country representative India, Unicef. “A lot of people doubted India could get polio-free, but it happened. We now look forward to a transition from OPV to IPV. If India can do it, so can the world,” he added.

IPV is not a new vaccine and was first used in 1955. Thirty countries have already introduced IPV in their national immunization schedule, while 126 countries including India will introduce IPV soon.

A vaccine boost to India’s polio fight

The launch of the inactivated polio vaccine injection marks a shift in addressing vaccine derived poliovirus cases.

After nearly five polio-free years, and with the launch of the inactivated polio vaccine (IPV) injection in the national immunisation programme tomorrow (November 30), India will be pushing for “endgame polio”.

The injectable vaccine, which uses killed polio viruses, will be used alongside the oral polio vaccine (OPV).

For now, immunisation using IPV will be restricted to Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal. In the first quarter of 2016, it will be expanded to the other Northern and Northeastern States and in the second quarter, will encompass the four southern States and Maharashtra. “Immunisation using IPV injection is in a reverse order, with the well performing States getting it last,” said virologist Dr. Jacob John, formerly with the Christian Medical College, Vellore.

R. Prasad

Though cheap and easy to administer, OPV HAS an inherent safety issue —in rare cases, live viruses used in a weakened form can turn virulent, spread within communities and cause polio in unprotected children. In 2011, such a scenario caused seven vaccine-derived poliovirus (VDPV) cases in India.

IPV aims to prevent vaccine caused polio cases, where viruses used in OPV cause flaccid paralysis. Till date, India, like many other countries, has been relying on an OPV campaign-style programme several times a year to keep the naturally-occurring wild polioviruses at bay.

All three strains of the poliovirus (type 1, type 2 and type 3) are used in OPV. Of these, type 2 is responsible for more than 95 per cent of VDPV cases. Ironically, type 2 wild poliovirus had been eradicated since 1999. Since then, all type 2 cases have been caused solely by vaccine polioviruses.

The move also marks a shift in addressing vaccine-derived poliovirus cases, with the Global Polio Eradication Initiative removing the type 2 strain globally from OPVs.

To begin with, one dose of IPV will be administered along with the third dose of OPV and DPT to children who are 14 weeks old. Even after being immunised with IPV, it is essential that all children are immunised with OPV every time it is offered. IPV when used in combination with OPV can quickly boost immunity against poliovirus and offer double protection.

“One dose of IPV will prime the immune system and the immune response will be quicker whenever OPV or IPV is given subsequently”, said Dr. Pankaj Bhatnagar, Technical Officer of the WHO India National Polio Surveillance Project, New Delhi.

There is a scientific reason for choosing 14 weeks for IPV immunisation. “When IPV is given to children at 14 weeks and later, nearly 70 per cent of them will develop antibodies against polio viruses. It will be around 30 per cent if given to children younger than 14 weeks”, he said.

The switch from OPV with all three strains to only two strains (type 1 and type 3) will happen towards the end of April 2016. “India will make a switch from a trivalent [containing all three virus strains] to a bivalent [containing only two strains] on April 24,” Dr. John said.

“There are a risk when this switch is made,” he warned. “Vaccine-derived type 2 will spread silently and cannot be stopped and children will continue to shed type 2 strain for 4-6 weeks after the last OPV dose. [A] new crop of children who do not get the trivalent oral polio vaccine can get exposed to [the] type 2 strain shed by vaccinated children,” he said.

It is to minimise this that the Global Polio Eradication Initiative requires all countries using the three-strain to introduce at least one dose of the injectable vaccine before making the switch.

“We will be building the immunity of the community against type 2 through IPV and OPV immunisation so that at the time of switching from trivalent to bivalent OPV there will be no risk,” said Dr. Pradeep Haldar, Deputy Commissioner – Immunisation, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Government of India.

Since the injectable vaccine contains all three strains in a killed form, it cannot cause vaccine-derived poliovirus. Superior safety apart, IPV has other advantages. Nearly 60 per cent who receive IPV will develop immunity when compared with/to the 10 to 30 per cent when OPV is used.

The higher the injectable polio vaccine coverage, the lower the risk. Hence, routine immunisation coverage in States like Uttar Pradesh and Bihar must be stepped up for IPV to become effective.

“In the beginning of this year only 64 per cent of children were fully immunised. It will reach 82 per cent by the March 2016. Of the 9 million children who were not fully immunised, 40 per cent have already been covered and another 10 per cent will be covered by March 2016,” said Prof. Ramanan Laxminarayan, Vice President — Research and Policy at the Delhi-based Public Health Foundation of India. He established the Immunization Technical Support Unit that supports the immunisation programme of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare.

India imports inactivated polio vaccine injections at a cost of $2 per dose. Since wild polioviruses are the raw material for IPV, no Indian manufacturer is allowed to make IPV in India. Companies now using biosafety level 3 facilities for IPV manufacturing will move to biosafety level 4 once wild polio is eradicated globally. After that all, OPV will be discontinued and IPV will remain the mainstay.