THE HINDU – CURRENT NOTE 20 February
Rail Bhavan, North Block spar after Budget merger
Finance Ministry demand for dividends from PSUs leaves Railways fuming
•Less than a fortnight after the historic merger of the Railway Budget with the Union Budget, the Railways and Finance Ministries are not seeing eye-to-eye on some critical issues, including finances.
•The Finance Ministry, which has taken charge of presenting the annual accounts for the railways, has asked the Railway Ministry to hereafter remit the annual dividends it receives from the 14 central public sector units (CPSUs) under its purview.
•Rail Bhavan mandarins are not amused as saving on dividend payments to the Ministry of Finance was one of the biggest arguments made in favour of scrapping the Railway Budget. The Railway Ministry has shot back, arguing that giving away the dividends from the CPSUs – estimated at about ₹850 crore for 2017-18 – would hit its earnings.
•In a communication in January, the Finance Ministry told the Railway Ministry that since the ‘capital-at-charge’ of the railways – on which annual dividend was paid by the railways – would be wiped-off post the budget merger, the investment made in the railways-related PSUs would be treated as having come from the Central government’s accounts. ‘Capital-at-charge’ is the Centre’s investment in the railways — treated as loan in perpetuity.
•“In view of this, the Ministry of Railways is requested to remit the dividends received from its CPSUs to General Revenues,” the Finance Ministry said in the letter of January 9.
Why Earth’s inner core doesn’t melt
•An energy distribution cycle keeps the core solid despite it being hotter than the surface of the Sun
•Scientists have discovered why the crystallised iron core of the Earth remains solid, despite being hotter than the surface of the Sun.
•Researchers at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden found that on the edge of the inner core, pieces of crystals’ structure continuously melt and diffuse only to be reinserted due to high pressure like “shuffling deck of cards.”
•This energy distribution cycle keeps the crystal stable and the core solid.
•Spinning within Earth’s molten core is a crystal ball — actually a mass formation of almost pure crystallised iron — nearly the size of the moon.
•Understanding this strange, unobservable feature of our planet depends on knowing the atomic structure of these crystals — something scientists have been trying to do for years.
•As with all metals, the atomic-scale crystal structures of iron change depending on the temperature and pressure the metal is exposed to.
•Atoms are packed into variations of cubic, as well as hexagonal formations. At room temperatures and normal atmospheric pressure, iron is in what is known as a body-centred cubic (BCC) phase, which is a crystal architecture with eight corner points and a centre point.
•However at extremely high pressure, the crystalline structures transform into 12-point hexagonal forms, or a close packed (HCP) phase.
•At Earth’s core, where pressure is 3.5 million times higher than surface pressure — and temperatures are some 6,000 degrees higher — scientists have proposed that the atomic architecture of iron must be hexagonal.
•Anatoly Belonoshko from KTH said data showed that pure iron likely accounts for 96% of the inner core’s composition, along with nickel and possibly light elements.
Temperature impact
•At low temperature, BCC is unstable and crystalline planes slide out of the ideal BCC structure. But at high temperatures, the stabilisation of these structures begins much like a card game — with the shuffling of a “deck.”
•Mr. Belonoshko said in the extreme heat of the core, atoms no longer belonged to planes because of the high amplitude of atomic motion.
•“The sliding of these planes is a bit like shuffling a deck of cards. Even though the cards are put in different positions, the deck is still a deck. Likewise, the BCC iron retains its cubic structure,” he said.
•Such a shuffling leads to an enormous increase in the distribution of molecules and energy — which leads to increasing entropy, or the distribution of energy states.
•That, in turn, makes the BCC stable, he said.
3D-printed bio-bots with ‘life’ created
•Scientists have 3D-printed small, soft bio-bots with living tissues that can not only walk and swim, but also have the ability to age as well as heal if there is an injury.
•Researchers at University of Illinois made a soft 3D-printed scaffold measuring a centimetre or two in length and seeded it with muscle cells. The cells then self-organised to form functional tissues that make the bio-bots move.
•“These machines are now viewed as partially living, with the ability to form, the ability to age and the ability to heal if there is an injury,” said Taher Saif from Illinois. “We are beginning to look back and try to understand how the cells organise themselves and what language they use to communicate. This is the developmental biology of living machines,” he said.
•“As engineers, we usually build with materials like wood, steel or silicon. Our focus here is to forward-engineer biological or cell-based systems,” said Rashid Bashir, head of the bioengineering department at the University of Illinois.
•“The design is inspired by the muscle-tendon-bone complex found in nature. There is a skeleton or backbone, but made out of soft polymers similar to the ones used in contact lenses, so it can bend instead of needing joints like the body does,” he said.
Speak in our own voice
•Why India must keep charge of its bilateral engagement with its largest neighbour
•In mid-January, a week before he resigned as U.S. Ambassador to India, Richard Verma held an unusual dinner at his residence, inviting the Minister of State for Home Kiren Rijiju as well as the Sikyong, or Leader of the Tibetan ‘Government in Exile’. It was a small sit-down event, and was clearly no ‘accidental meeting’. The Ambassador could hardly have been working without the approval of the government, and if he had, the Ministry of External Affairs has chosen not to comment in the weeks that followed. What’s more, the dinner follows a series of interventions by American officials on India-China issues in the past few months.
•Mr. Verma made waves by becoming the first U.S. envoy to visit Tawang in Arunachal Pradesh in October 2016, a visit that drew a sharp response from the Chinese Foreign Ministry about “third parties” interfering.
•His visit followed comments by U.S. Consul General Craig Hall, during a visit to Arunachal, in April referring to the State as an “integral part of India”. The comment was accurate, and a boost for New Delhi’s claim, but diplomatically speaking, unusually forthright. Also in April, the government let in the U.S. federal government’s religious freedom body (USCIRF) commissioner Katrina Lantos Swett to attend a conference in Dharamsala for Chinese dissidents, including Tibetans, Uighurs and Falun Gong activists. And in June, Thomas Shannon , then U.S. Undersecretary of State, visited New Delhi, warning that China’s actions in the South China Sea were “madness” and its next “target” was the Indian Ocean.
•In the absence of a pushback from New Delhi, the impression created is that it is allowing, possibly even encouraging, the U.S. to be its voice on what are essentially bilateral issues between India and China. At a time when India and China have had major differences over a series of issues, allowing an external voice into this bilateral equation can only drown out India’s own.
•Unfortunately the U.S. is not the only country making itself heard in this equation. Australian and Japanese experts as well as Indian think tanks are increasingly articulating the need for their trilateral with India to go further, calling for a strategic “middle power coalition”. First, India is not, nor is it likely to be a treaty ally of the U.S., as Australia and Japan are. Second, such a coalition would necessarily be considered a front to counter Chinese maritime hegemony. While Indian naval presence would boost efforts to police the South China Sea, the other members of this coalition would hardly be able to help India on its most prominent frontier with China, the unresolved Line of Actual Control. In short, to allow these so-called middle powers to speak for India is a mistake equal to that of allowing any big power to do the same.
Three-and-a-half fronts
•Today, India and China square off or have conflicts on what can be called three-and-a-half fronts. The land front, where they have fought one war in 1962; the maritime front,
•where the U.S. and its allies want India to take part in joint patrols to confront China’s naval ambitions; India’s neighbourhood, particularly Pakistan, where Chinese investment is altering bilateral equations; and the Tibetan front, which could be considered a half-front.
•Fortunately, despite the lows of the past year, including the impasse where India singled out China as the “one country” inhibiting its progress into the Nuclear Suppliers Group, New Delhi and Beijing have kept their bilateral engagement steady. As Foreign Secretary S. Jaishankar heads to Beijing this week for the newly created Strategic Dialogue, it would be hoped that relations will be brought to an even more steady bilateral keel, especially as India charts its course in the foreign policy-scape rocked by the uncertainties of the new U.S. Presidency. It would do well by following the Gandhian principle that “true power speaks softly, and has no reason to shout.” Nor does it need to employ the voice of others, or use frivolous pinpricks when serious issues are at hand.
Smoke on the water
Weak official response to the pollution of Bengaluru’s wetlands threatens public health
•The extraordinary sight of a lake in Bengaluru on fire, with a massive plume of smoke that could be seen from afar, is a warning sign that urban environments are crashing under the weight of official indifference. If wetlands are the kidneys of the cities, as scientists like to describe them, Karnataka’s capital city has entered a phase of chronic failure. No longer the city of lakes and famed gardens, it has lost an estimated 79% of water bodies and 80% of its tree cover from the baseline year of 1973. Successive governments in the State have ignored the rampant encroachment of lake beds and catchment areas for commercial exploitation, and the pollution caused by sewage, industrial effluents and garbage, which contributed to the blaze on Bellandur lake. The neglect is deliberate, since some of the finest urban ecologists in the city have been warning that government inaction is turning Bengaluru into an unliveable mess. It is time the State government took note of the several expert recommendations that have been made, including those of the Centre for Ecological Sciences of the Indian Institute of Science. The priority, clearly, is to end pollution outfalls into the water bodies, which will help revive them to an acceptable state of health. Identifying all surviving wetlands and demarcating them using digital and physical mapping will help communities monitor encroachments, while removal of land-grabbers and restoration of interconnecting channels is crucial to avoid future flooding events.
•Loss of natural wetlands is an ongoing catastrophe in India. A decade ago, when the Salim Ali Centre for Ornithology and Natural History released a conservation atlas for all States using space applications, it reported the tragic fact that 38% of wetlands had already been lost nationally; and shockingly, in some districts only 12% survived. The Centre has since issued rules for conservation and management, and chosen 115 water bodies in 24 States for protection support, but this is obviously too little. Moreover, research studies show that the concentration of heavy metals in such sites is leading to bioaccumulation, thus entering the plants and animals that ultimately form part of people’s food. It should worry not just Bengaluru’s residents, for instance, that soil scientists have found higher levels of cadmium in green vegetables grown using water from Bellandur. More broadly, the collapse of environmental management because of multiple, disjointed agencies achieving little collectively and legal protections remaining unimplemented pose a serious threat to public health. Every city needs a single lake protection authority. India’s worsening air quality is now well documented, and most of its wetlands are severely polluted. Citizens must assert themselves to stop this perilous course.
Currency in India: from more to less
Keynes’s 1913 book explains how paper currency was introduced and its use encouraged
•The powers that be in India have done a full flip. From trying to encourage people to use more currency notes, they are now trying to incentivise them to use less. Now that the dust has settled on demonetisation, it’s a good time to go back in history. Paper currency may be intrinsic to our lives now, but it was once an alien concept in India.
•According to John Maynard Keynes, the idea of paper currency took many forms before we settled on the system we have today. The official issue of paper currency came into effect in 1861 through the Paper Currency Act, and currency was restricted, he wrote in Indian Currency and Finance (1913). “For the first forty years of their existence, the Government notes, though always of growing importance, took a very minor place in the currency system of the country. This was partly due to an arrangement, now in gradual course of abolition, by which for the purposes of paper currency India has been divided up in effect into several separate countries,” Keynes said.
•What he meant was that the authority to print the paper currency was divided among seven areas, and the validity of each and every note only extended to that area where it was printed. For example, notes printed in Calcutta were valid currency only in Bengal, Eastern Bengal and Assam, those printed in Madras were valid only in Madras Presidency and Coorg, and so on.
•This, he said, was done so that the government would not have to bear the additional cost of transporting coins all over the country. If they were redeemable at fewer places, the cost of transport would be correspondingly lower. However, the objections to such a system were also clear. The geographic restriction of notes in such a manner significantly hurt their popularity and adoption.
•In 1903, ₹5 notes were universalised everywhere in India except Burma. This restriction was removed in 1909. In 1910, ₹10 and ₹50 notes were universalised, and in 1911, ₹100 notes. And thus were born the Indian currency notes that we know today.
•Other notable books such as B.R. Ambedkar’s The Problem of the Rupee: its Origin and its Solution and Bhanoo Bhushon Das Gupta’s Paper Currency in India provide a more detailed narrative on India’s currency issues.
•Shelf Help, a weekly column to appear every Monday, provides a guide to books on a particular subject
