THE HINDU – CURRENT NOTE 12 March
Indian researcher uses novel strategy to increase wheat yield
•Using a novel route, an Indian researcher has been able to increase wheat grain yield by 20% and also improve the resilience of wheat to environmental stress such as drought. By using a precursor that enhances the amount of a key sugar-signalling molecule (trehalose-6-phosphate (T6P)) produced in wheat plant, Dr. Ram Sagar Misra, from the Department of Chemistry, University of Oxford and currently with the Department of Chemistry, Shiv Nadar University, Greater Noida, has been able to increase the amount of starch produced and, therefore, the yield.
The technique
•The T6P molecule stimulates starch synthesis, which in turn, increases the yield. Since the pathway of T6P molecule is the same in other plants, the yield can potentially be increased by using suitable precursors. The results were published in the journal Nature. Dr. Misra is one of the authors of the paper.
•Dr. Misra and researchers from UK used four precursor compounds to increase the amount of T6P produced in the plant. While genetic methods can increase the T6P level two-three fold, the four precursor compounds were able to achieve 100-fold increase in the sugar-signalling molecule level compared with plants that did not receive the molecule. Dr. Misra and others tested the effect of four precursors by dissolving the molecule in water and feeding this to the roots of Arabidopsis thaliana plants. Compared with controls, the precursor-treated plants produced higher amount of T6P molecule and starch when exposed to sunlight.
•In field trials using wheat, a tiny amount of precursor given to the plant increased the yield significantly — the grains produced were bigger as the amount of starch content in the grains increased by 13-20% compared to controls that got only water. “A particular precursor molecule — ortho-nitrophenyl ethyl — showed the best results in both A. thaliana plants and wheat studies,” he says. “The uptake of this molecule by the plants was much more than the other three molecules and the precursor took less time to release T6P.”
•To study the resilience of wheat to drought-like conditions when treated with the precursor molecules, the researchers carried out two different studies.
Resilence to drought
•In the first case, four-week-old wheat plants already treated with the precursor molecules were not watered for nine days to simulate a drought-like condition. “The plants were almost dying. When we watered the plants after nine days, only those that were pre-treated with the precursors were able to regrow while the control plants did not survive,” says Dr. Misra.
•In another experiment, four-week-old wheat plants that were not watered for nine days were sprayed with the precursor molecules. “The regrowth of plants sprayed with the molecule was substantial when the plants were watered a day after treatment. We saw regrowth of new tissue and also survival and growth of existing tissue,” Dr. Misra says. “This also showed that the molecule could enter the plants directly when sprayed.”
•“These two studies showed that wheat plants were able to survive environmental stress if treated with the precursors. The molecule 2 (dimethoxy(ortho-nitro)benzyl) was better in battling stress,” he says. More trials on a larger scale are needed to confirm the role of the precursor molecules in increasing yield and withstanding drought-like conditions.
Chennai team taps AI to read Indus Script
•The Indus script has long challenged epigraphists because of the difficulty in reading and classifying text and symbols on the artefacts. Now, a Chennai-based team of scientists has built a programme which eases the process.
•Ronojoy Adhikari of The Institute of Mathematical Sciences and Satish Palaniappan, who is at Sri Sivasubramaniya Nadar College of Engineering, have developed a “deep-learning” algorithm that can read the Indus script from images of artefacts such as a seal or pottery that contain Indus writing.
•Scanning the image, the algorithm smartly “recognises” the region of the image that contains the script, breaks it up into individual graphemes (the term in linguistics for the smallest unit of the script) and finally identifies these using data from a standard corpus. In linguistics the term corpus is used to describe a large collection of texts which, among other things, are used to carry out statistical analyses of languages.
•The algorithms come under a class of artificial intelligence called “deep neural networks.” “These have been a major part of the game-changing technology behind self-driving cars and Go-playing bots that surpass human performance,” says Satish Palaniappan. The deep neural network mimics the working of the mammalian visual cortex, known as convolutional neural network (CNN), which breaks the field into overlapping regions. The features found in each region are hierarchically combined by the network to build a composite understanding of the whole picture.
•The process consists of three phases: In the first phase, the input images are broken into sub-images that contain graphemes only, by trimming out the areas that do not have graphemes. The grapheme-containing areas are further trimmed into single-grapheme pieces. Lastly, each of these single graphemes is classified to match one of the 417 symbols discovered so far in the Indus script.
Indus script
•The Indus valley script is much older than the Prakrit and Tamil-Brahmi scripts. However, unlike the latter two, it has not yet been deciphered because a bilingual text has not yet been found.
•A bilingual text has in many other cases aided archaeologists in understanding ancient scripts, for example, the Rosetta stone. This stone which was found in the eighteenth century carries inscriptions of a decree, issued in 196 BCE, in three parts, the first two in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic and the Demotic scripts, while the bottom is in Ancient Greek. Since the decree was the same, the Rosetta stone provided the key to deciphering Hieroglyphs. For the lack of such a “Rosetta stone,” the Indus script remains undeciphered today.
•It is a major effort to even build a standard corpus of the language and decode the writing on existing artefacts and map them to this standard corpus. The most widely accepted corpora of Indus scripts was brought together by the efforts of Iravatham Mahadevan, noted Indian epigraphist, from the 3,700 texts and 417 unique signs collected so far.
•When asked about the relevance of this work, Dr Mahadevan says, “It [the algorithm] represents a significant advance in the computerised study of the Indus Script. I wish I had this software 40 years ago when I compiled the Indus concordance.”
The lowdown on the Bill to regulate surrogacy
•The Surrogacy (Regulation) Bill was introduced in Parliament in November 2016. With Karan Johar announcing recently that he has had twins through a surrogate mother, the spotlight is back on the Surrogacy Bill that is yet to become an Act, allowing for it to be implemented in the country.
•The Bill seeks to regulate the surrogacy part of a rather flourishing infertility industry in the country.
•Defining ‘surrogacy’ as a practice in which a woman undertakes to give birth to a child for another couple and agrees to hand over the child to them after birth, the Bill allows ‘altruistic surrogacy’ — wherein only the medical expenses and insurance coverage is provided by the couple to the surrogate mother during pregnancy. No other monetary consideration will be allowed.
•India has emerged a hub for infertility treatment, attracting people from the world over with its state-of-the-art technology and competitive prices initially to treat infertility. Soon after, with the prevailing socio-economic inequities, underprivileged women found an option to ‘rent their wombs’ and thereby make money to take care of their expenses — often to facilitate a marriage, enable children to get education, or provide for hospitalisation or surgery for someone in the family.
•Once information of the availability of such wombs got out, the demand also picked up. Unscrupulous middle men inveigled themselves into the scene, and the exploitation of women began. Several instances began to emerge after women, in desperate straits, began to file police complaints when they did not receive the promised sum.
•Other issues also began to crop up. For instance, in 2008, a Japanese couple began the process with a surrogate mother in Gujarat, but before the child was born they split and there were no takers for the child.
•In 2012, an Australian couple commissioned a surrogate mother, and arbitrarily chose one of the twins that was born. The time was ripe for regulation, or a revolt.
•Any couple that has ‘proven infertility’ are candidates. The ‘intending couple,’ as the Bill calls them, will be eligible if they have a ‘certificate of essentiality’ and a ‘certificate of eligibility’ issued by the appropriate authority. The former will be issued if the couple fulfils three conditions: one, a certificate of infertility of one or both from a district medical board; two, an order of parentage and custody of the surrogate child passed by a magistrate’s court; thirdly, insurance cover for the surrogate mother.
•An eligibility certificate mandates that the couple fulfil the following conditions: they should be Indian citizens who have been married for at least five years; the female must be between 23 and 50 years and the male 26 and 55 years; and they cannot have any surviving child (biological, adopted or surrogate). However, this would not include a ‘child who is mentally or physically challenged or suffers from life threatening disorder or fatal illness.’
•Only a close relative of the couple, who is able to provide a medical fitness certificate, can be a surrogate mother. She should have been married, with a child of her own, and must be between 25 and 35 years, but can be a surrogate mother only once.
•While there was a general murmur of appreciation and some strident approval from infertility experts, there was some apprehension about the regulations being too restrictive. For instance, it does not allow single women or men, as in the case of Johar, or gay couples to go in for surrogacy. Representations from these groups emerged even as Health Minister J.P. Nadda introduced the Bill in the House.
•Others, primarily those involved in organ transplantation, pointed out how despite a similar stringent law, the Transplantation of Human Organs Act, organ commerce continues to thrive. Clearly, the issue will have to be handled firmly, even as the sensitivities of people are factored in.
•The Bill will have to be passed by both Houses of Parliament to become an Act. The States would have to draw up their rules and regulations for the implementation.
IT’s new, improved skills problem
•Open any newspaper on any weekend, and chances are that you will have a plethora of real estate ads staring you in the face. Most of them, if you look into them a little deeper, have something or the other to do with the IT (information technology) sector. Either they are hawking office spaces aimed at the IT sector, or residences which are pitched as being ideally located and designed to serve the needs of India’s vast — and by relative standards, exceptionally well paid — techie army.
Consumption-driven
•It’s not surprising, because this segment forms the core consuming audience for a number of other industries, particularly in the major metros and mini metros. Whether is Delhi or Mumbai, Bengaluru or Chennai, Hyderabad or Pune or even upcoming cities like Kochi or Bhubaneswar, the ‘techie crowd’ forms the core audience for not just builders, but everyone from carmakers to lifestyle holiday merchants to gourmet restaurants. It’s not that there is no money with the rest or that there are no other well-paid jobs. It is just that given their numbers, these high disposable income and lifestyle consumption oriented techies give the critical volumes necessary to sustain such businesses. This is also why such businesses are concentrated in the cities which are home to the largest concentration of IT and IT-related businesses.
•All that, however, may soon be a thing of the past. Over the past few weeks, there have been increasingly pessimistic noises made by the IT sector about the key challenge faced by the sector in sustaining the growth momentum of the past — and no, it’s not Donald Trump, though the choleric U.S. head of state is an enormous ‘X factor’ in the equation. The real challenge, they say, is the skill level of their staff — or more precisely, the lack thereof.
•Advisory firm McKinsey, which is not usually given to doomsday predictions, said in a report released last month that almost half the IT industry’s four million-strong workforce of technology and software professionals will be “irrelevant” in the next three to four years. French BPO giant (it prefers to call itself a consulting and solutions company) CapGemini went even further — its India CEO said as much as 65 per cent of the IT workforce will not be relevant to the changed needs of the workplace, and will lose their jobs over the coming few years unless they are able to re-skill themselves. Worse, from an economy point of view, these jobs will be lost in the well-paid middle and senior levels – by people in their late thirties to early forties, people who should, in theory, have decades of productive employment left. These people, the CapGemini head says, will become redundant not only because they lack the skills needed by their digitally transforming customers, but because they are unable or unwilling to acquire the needed new skills.
•This is the double whammy which our IT industry, our policy makers and the by now largely privatised education and skilling sector have to face. And this challenge is fundamentally different from the one faced 20 years ago, when India’s IT sector hit its exponential growth phase. At that time, given its low-cost employee pool and the currency advantage it enjoyed, the IT sector was able to invest in skilling and training on its own, taking in essentially non-relevantly skilled employees and bashing out the rough edges in vast internal training centres, now called, fairly justifiably, as ‘universities’. Infosys, Wipro, TCS, they all have them.
•This was fine for a while, but the trouble with the knowledge industry is the changing definition of knowledge. While customer industries were transforming at light speed, India’s IT Inc itself was relatively slow to change. Worse, over the past decade or so, as they grew into vast, publicly listed and traded enterprises, their focus turned more and more into satisfying their investors’ insatiable appetite for returns, which meant that they progressively invested less and less in skill development as a proportion of their total business. The government, too, dropped the ball, sanguinely assuming that the private education sector would fill the gap.
All about skills
•The trouble is, that the private education sector was equally returns focussed. This meant that while quantity was delivered, quality was another issue altogether. At last month’s Nasscom event, CapGemini’s Srinivas Kandula, whose firm employs one lakh IT engineers in India alone, admitted that the intake quality was so bad that most of the candidates could not even say what subjects they were taught in the final semester of college!
•This is a frightening situation. The water, as the saying goes, is well and truly above our heads. If we do not put in place a coherent policy response, coordinating effort and investments between the government, industry and the education sector, we are likely to see a cataclysmic de-growth, more spectacular than the boom of this century’s first decade. The IT industry, just as much as our banking sector, is simply too big to fail. The time to act is now.
On track, but more needed
•Despite institutional delivery being as high as nearly 79% nationally, the number of children in India breastfed within one hour of birth is less than 42% — near 43% in urban areas and 41% in rural India, according to the National Family Health Survey 4 (NFHS-4) data released a few days ago. The Janani Suraksha Yojana — cash incentives to pregnant women to attend antenatal clinics and opt for institutional deliveries — has led to a sharp increase in institutional delivery (from 39% in 2005-06 to 79% in 2015-16) and near doubling of children breastfed within one hour of birth in the last 10 years.
•Breastfeeding babies soon after birth can prevent a significant number of neonatal deaths — about 20% newborn deaths and 13% under-five deaths, according to C.K. Mishra, Secretary, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare.
Improvements all around
•At 99.9% in both urban and rural areas, Kerala has the highest institutional births in the country. Tamil Nadu is a close second with 99.2% institutional births in urban areas and 98.7% in rural areas. Yet, Kerala and Tamil Nadu do not fare greatly when it comes to initiating breastfeeding within one hour of birth. At 64%, Kerala is well below Goa’s average of 73%. Similarly, Maharashtra with 90% institutional deliveries has 57.5% for early initiation of breastfeeding compared to Tamil Nadu’s nearly 55%.
•Bihar has shown the most improvement in initiating breastfeeding within one hour of birth — from 4% in 2005-06 to 35% in 2015-16. Though Uttar Pradesh has improved its performance, it is still about half of the national average — 7.2% in 2005-06 to 25% in 2015-16. Other States that have shown good improvement on this front are Haryana, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Punjab and Rajasthan.
•Similarly, all States have registered an improvement in the case of exclusive breastfeeding of children under age six months. While Goa has shown a dramatic increase from 17.7% in 2005-06 to nearly 61% in 2015-16, Chhattisgarh has witnessed a drop from 82% to 77%.
Barriers to breastfeeding
•“You need dedicated people who can counsel mothers on the need to breastfeed within one hour of delivery. There are socio-cultural barriers too,” says Dr. Ajay Khera, Deputy Commissioner and Head of Child Health, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. “It is to overcome these that the government launched the MAA — Mother’s Absolute Affection — programme in August last year. Under the programme, there are special efforts to create community awareness and promotion of breastfeeding, capacity building and skilling of healthcare providers at all delivery points in the country.”
•According to Dr. Sutapa B. Negi from the Indian Institute of Public Health, Delhi, early initiation of breastfeeding becomes difficult in the case of babies delivered through caesarean section, babies born preterm and low-birth-weight (less than 2.5 kg) babies. “Caesarean deliveries account for 10-15% and nearly 20% babies have low birth weight while 15% are born preterm,” says Dr. Khera.
•According to NFHS-4 data, the national average for babies delivered by caesarean section is 28%, which is more than three times the 2005-06 figure of 8.5%.
•While percentages may varying from one State to another, there is not much difference in the rate of breastfeeding within one hour of birth among rural and urban population. Except for a few States like Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Gujarat and Tamil Nadu, rural areas have slightly higher percentage of babies being breastfed within one born of birth than their urban counterparts. “This implies that the need for support regarding breastfeeding is universal,” Mr. Mishra said last year during the inauguration of the MAA programme.
