THE HINDU – CURRENT NOTE 24 February
India, Israel to develop missile for Army
•Ahead of the likely visit of Prime Minister Naendra Modi to Israel in June, India has approved a deal to jointly develop a medium range surface-to-air missile (MR-SAM) system for the Army in a ₹17,000-crore deal.
•This is the latest in a series of other variants of SAM systems for the Navy and the Air Force being jointly developed with Israeli help under deals estimated at billions of dollars.
•The Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS), headed by Mr. Modi, at a meeting on on Wednesday, gave the go-ahead for the deal to be executed by the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) and Israel Aircraft Industries (IAI).
•A source said Mr. Modi is likely to visit Israel in June, and preparations were on in both countries.
•The deal is for 200 missiles for five regiments, each getting 40 units. The missile has a range of 50-70 km.
•“The system will be based on the older Barak system of Israel, which is in use in India. It is being changed as per requirements,” a defence source said on Thursday.
•The systems will be manufactured in India and would have an 80% indigenous content.
•The DRDO would play a crucial role in developing the target homing system. Deliveries would begin in 2023, a source said.
•The two countries are also in an advanced stage of negotiations for the purchase of two more long-range Phalcon Airborne Warning And Control System (AWACS). The CCS had approved the deal for additional AWACS last year that is expected to cost ₹7,500 crore.
Russian partnership
•India now operates three Phalcon AWACS with Israeli radars mounted on Russian IL-76 transport aircraft, under a $1-billion tripartite deal with Russia, signed in 2003.
•Russian officials said at the recent Aero India that India had ordered two IL-76 aircraft to be converted to AWACS.
•Officials said they were hopeful of a deal during Mr. Modi’s visit, and added that discussions were on for additional long-range drones.
•India and Israel have stepped up their defence relations since Mr. Modi came to power.
‘Legally vetted’ pact on services tabled at WTO
•India on Thursday said it has submitted to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) a legally vetted proposal on a global services pact, that among other things, aims to ease norms for movement of skilled workers across borders for short-term work.
•The proposal for a Trade Facilitation in Services (TFS) Agreement will be taken up by an expert committee at the WTO headquarters in Geneva during March 14-17, following which it will be put up for discussion among all the WTO members, commerce minister Nirmala Sitharaman said.
•Ms. Sitharaman said: “We have submitted the legally vetted paper (on TFS) in Geneva. Till March 17, only the Council for Trade in Services members will be privy to it. After that we will take it up for discussion with all the WTO member countries to build awareness.”
•According to official sources, the proposed pact also aims to ensure portability of social security contributions, a single window mechanism for foreign investment approvals and cross-border insurance coverage to boost medical tourism. In October 2016, India had tabled a concept note on the proposed TFS at the WTO and followed it up with a paper on its possible elements in November 2016, Ms. Sitharaman said. The TFS proposal is on the lines of the Trade Facilitation Agreement (TFA) in Goods. According to India, the proposed TFS pact is also about ‘facilitation’ – that is “making market access ‘effective’ and commercially meaningful and not about ‘new’ (or greater) market access.”
•Meanwhile, the TFA in Goods — adopted by the WTO Members in 2014 — entered into force on Wednesday.
•According to the WTO Director General Roberto Azevêdo, the TFA in Goods aims to streamline, simplify and standardise customs procedures. By doing so, it will help to cut trade costs around the world, he said in a statement.
TFA in goods
•“By 2030 the (TFA in Goods) Agreement could add 2.7% points per year to world trade growth and more than half a percentage point per year to world GDP growth. This impact would be greater than the elimination of all existing tariffs around the world,” he said. India has already ratified the TFA in Goods.
•Ms. Sitharaman said: “It will lead to effective functioning of ports and reduce transaction costs. Logistics will improve, goods will move faster. Besides, since all the ports will be connected electronically, we will have export and import data on a real time basis.”
•Turning to other issues, Ms. Sitharaman said there was no need to be alarmed about the recent reports on layoffs in the e-commerce industry.
Life elsewhere
The quest to find life outside the solar system got a big boost with thediscovery of seven Earth-size extra-solar planets, or exoplanets, orbiting a dwarf star about 40 light years away. Unlike earlier discoveries of exoplanets, all seven planets could possibly have liquid water — a key to life as we know it on Earth — with three planets having the greatest chance. This is by far the largest collection of Earth-like planets in the habitable ‘Goldilocks’ zone of a star — neither too close nor too far from a star, which raises the possibility of liquid water being present on the surface. Only Earth has liquid water in the solar system. Less than a year after scientists announced the discovery of three planets orbiting the dwarf star, the team found four more through intense searches using several ground-based telescopes, including a 20-day continuous monitoring using the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Spitzer Space Telescope. Since the dwarf star is much cooler than the Sun, the dimming of light each time a planet passes or transits before the star could be easily recorded from Earth unlike in cases when planets transit a Sun-like bright star. Since the initial discovery of three planets was made using the Chile-based Transiting Planets and Planetesimals Small Telescope, the exoplanet system is called TRAPPIST-1. Unlike in the case of our solar system, the planets have apparently formed far away from the star and gradually migrated towards it; they share a similar formation history with the Galilean moons, which migrated towards Jupiter after formation. Another major difference in comparison with the solar system is the tight packing of the seven planets around the star. The closest planet in the TRAPPIST-1 system takes just 1.5 days to complete an orbit and the farthest one takes 20 days; the orbital period of the planets is also similar to the Galilean moons.
With a fair possibility of liquid water being present on at least three planets, the focus is now on deciphering the climate and chemical composition of their atmosphere. As a first measure, scientists are keen to know if the planets are Earth-like, by ruling out the presence of hydrogen gas enveloping them. Mass estimates already suggest that the inner six planets might have a rocky composition, while the one with a low density may have a volatile composition due to the presence of an ice layer or atmosphere. The composition of the atmosphere can be identified by measuring the wavelength characteristics of light. Since the TRAPPIST-1 system is close by and the star is cool enough, it would be easier to decipher the various critical features of the planets. If there is life on these planets, we would know this in about 10 years. The search for extraterrestrial life has just become more focussed.
Basic income and mental health gains
•A National Mental Health Survey conducted by the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS), Bengaluru, estimated that approximately 150 million people in India experience one or the other mental health condition. Typically, care access points are limited to clinics, psychiatrists or therapists, all serving essential and distinct purposes. However, concerted attacks on inequality through innovative social interventions that build social capital and decrease the experience of relative poverty and discrimination could influence trajectories of well-being and mental ill health, especially among families living in poverty (India is home to 30% of all poor children globally). These in conjunction with effective health systems, marked by early identification and appropriate care paradigms, could yield ideal results.
A challenging nexus
•The gender-poverty-caste nexus opens up a Pandora’s box in an unquiet ecosystem that underestimates the impact of structural barriers on mental ill health. Poverty is feminised in an uninterrupted, ceaseless cycle; characterised by malnourished women and girl children who drop out of school to care for their male siblings or because they are unable to manage their menstruation in schools without toilets or water. The last to access health care when unwell and the first to play caregiver, girls are married off before the legal age even today, often subject to brutality perpetrated by a patriarchal society, ills of dowry and intimate partner violence. We fare poorly (130/150) on the gender inequality index, measured by indicators including workforce participation, access to secondary education and control over reproductive rights.
•In this context, it is no surprise that depression and anxiety are twice as prevalent among women than men, and inordinately high among the poor. This cannot be viewed exclusively in medically hegemonic frameworks of a depressive illness. Sociological and philosophical attributes reflective of one’s disempowered status and impoverished internal locus of control are just as relevant.
Poor budgetary allocations
•Yet, in the 2017 Union Budget, growth in health and disability budgets remains marginal. Particularly disappointing is the negligible focus on mental health, especially considering India’s suicide rates rank among the highest globally. Unimaginative allocations primarily assigned towards upgradation of premium institutes leave scarce resources to address challenges in mental hospitals, leave alone grappling with issues around long-term care in inclusive community spaces or constructing a robust social care component within the District Mental Health Programme.
•Taking into cognisance health and non-health pathways to achieve mental health gains, what if we applied unorthodox and creative options, such as unconditional cash transfers (UCTs), as a stress-reducing, equity-promoting intervention for those among the 150 million in need of financial recourse? Evidence from a rigorous randomised control trial conducted in Kenya by social scientists Johannes Haushofer and Jeremy Shapiro from Princeton University indicates that UCTs resulted in an increase in earnings and other assets, greater nutritional spend, decrease in domestic violence and increase in mental health gains, qualified by an increase in levels of happiness and life satisfaction, and reduction in stress and depression. There was no adverse impact on alcohol or tobacco spend, crime or inflation. Economist Esther Duflo in another study observed that the gains were not unitary — i.e. the person who received the transfer also seemed to influence outcomes, so if the woman received the transfer, better outcomes
for girl children seemed possible. Closer home, a survey of the Banyan’s service users’ disability allowance of ₹3,600 per annum for over 11 years again indicated enhanced social mobility and sustained engagement with the mental health system.
•It is time to discern whether our fiscal climate would allow this. Professor Pranab Bardhan from the University of California, Berkeley seems to think it could, especially since direct bank transfers would eliminate middlemen, corruption, subsidy leakages and related administrative costs. However, UCTs cannot operate independent of, or as a substitute for public goods, namely health and education.
•The bi-directional influence between mental ill health and poverty is clear as is the need to make meaningful investments and pursue inclusive development. Experience of autonomy, one’s agency and choice — the allied, yet pivotal benefits of UCTs — are imperative to social change.
Choke on it
•A report from The Lancet, published on Sunday, estimated that two lives in India are lost every minute due to ambient air pollution. The first response from the Environment Minister, Anil Madhav Dave, was that the government would come out with its own study to understand the effects of air pollution on human health. “A proud country,” Mr. Dave said, “always trusts its own data and takes action on that.”
•It is difficult to discern which is worse: the fact that the authorities are not interested in taking any immediate measures to tackle the problem of the killer air, as described in the report, or that they have not even initiated a study to understand its impact. The Minister, as well as anyone who has visited Delhi in the last couple of months, would be able to vouch for the fact that the evidence of the impact of the smoggy air on the health of the city’s population has, to use a terrible cliché, been literally blowing in the wind.
Valuing cars over lungs
•Acute respiratory infections (ARIs), which have a direct link to pollution, have been rising significantly. The National Health Profile 2015 reported a 30% increase in ARIs since 2010. According to private doctors and paediatricians, the rise in the number of respiratory ailments, skin and eye infections — all of which can directly be linked to air pollution — in the last three months is well over 50%. The elderly and children are especially vulnerable to this. Yet, much like the government, people too have decided to err on the side of denial.
