THE HINDU – CURRENT NOTE 26 March
‘We back indigenisation, but Tejas didn’t fit the bill’
•Naval chief outlines his vision for the force based on timelines for projects and induction of personnel, especially women
•The Chief of the Naval Staff, Admiral Sunil Lanba, in a wide-ranging interview with The Hindu, clarifies that the Navy has only taken a purely technical decision in turning down the naval version of the light combat aircraft developed by the DRDO despite its strong commitment to indigenisation. He highlights the need to step up training facilities to meet personnel shortage and the Navy’s strong ‘Act East’ focus.
•All along, the Navy had placed thrust on indigenisation of assets, but is now facing flak for turning down the home-grown fighter LCA Navy, which is being read as a retreat from the earlier commitment.
•We are the pioneers of indigenisation, which we started in the 1960s and have worked shoulder-to-shoulder with the DRDO, whose naval labs also have naval personnel. As for the LCA (light combat aircraft Tejas) programme, the Navy was the first service to support the ADA (the Aeronautical Development Agency) in its development and the Air Force came on board at a later date. What the Navy wants is a deck-based fighter, but the LCA Navy Mk1 doesn’t meet that requirement. Its power-to-weight ratio, the thrust the engine generates [are insufficient] and it’s underpowered for the airframe. Unfortunately, even the Mk2 variant doesn’t qualify. That’s why we took this case up to the Defence Ministry.
•A good 25% of the financial support for the project comes from the Navy. As and when the ADA produces a fighter that can operate from the deck of an aircraft carrier, we will be more than willing to acquire it and fly it. The LCA Navy was supposed to be flying off from [the aircraft carrier] Vikramaditya. The second carrier, Vikrant, should be sailing in 2019. So we want a deck-based fighter today. The timelines that the ADA promised to generate one was over a decade ago. We are looking at a period of at least a decade for the ADA to produce a deck-based fighter. In the meantime, the Ministry has allowed us to go ahead and look for a fighter that meets our requirements following which we issued an RFI.
•Timelines have slipped for the under-construction, maiden indigenous carrier Vikrant thanks in part also to delay in delivery of aviation equipment from Russia. Also, what is the latest on the third carrier?
•There have been some delays in the delivery of equipment for the aviation complex from Russia. We are hopeful that Vikrant will start going to trials in 2019.
•As for the IAC-II [second indigenous aircraft carrier], we are taking up the case with the Ministry for which we will get an approval sooner than later. We are looking at a CATOBAR aircraft carrier above 65,000 tonnes and with EMALS and an advanced air strip.
•What will be the fate of the decommissioned carrier INS Viraat?
•The Navy will like the Viraat to be converted into a museum, but it is not the Navy’s job to do that. We made an offer through the Ministry to all the coastal States, but only Andhra Pradesh responded. The offer was that we will give the ship to you and you will convert it into a maritime museum at your cost, without any funding from the Ministry. The proposal that we got from Andhra Pradesh was for a 50:50 partnership. The Ministry is very clear that they are not going to do that. So, at the moment, we have no proposal to convert her into a museum. If we don’t have a concrete proposal, we propose that the ship be scrapped. Off the cuff, what I thought was we could take her out to sea and make her a maritime museum by sinking her in 30-40 metres of water not far from the coast, thereby turning her into a diving site. Interested people will dive to have a sight of the ship.
•We don’t want to go through the Vikrant experience in which we gifted the ship to the State of Maharashtra for ₹1 and got stuck with her for 17 years, occupying valuable berthing space. And, then there was this hullabaloo when she was to be scrapped. It’s a costly affair to convert a carrier into a floating maritime museum and given the cost of construction of a jetty, it costs you roughly about ₹1,000 crore.
•How do you plan to address shortage of personnel and also attain gender parity by inducting women officers in combat roles?
•There is a steady growth in the number of sailors and officers being integrated, and overall shortages as per percentage have come down. But we are constrained by our capacity to train. We have to get the right kind of people and have to compete with other avenues that are open to youngsters to get the kind of people we need. The shortages are gradually being bridged, with the Indian Naval Academy working in full capacity at 1,300 cadets. We induct about 800 officers each year, but 500 retire annually. So the net gain is 300. With increase in training capacity and the government sanctioning more numbers, we will be able to liquidate the shortage in five to six years.
•The other issue is of inducting women to serve on board ships. We have about 570 women officers in branches such as education, logistics, ATC, as observers on maritime reconnaissance aircraft and the law, and not counting the doctors. We have identified ships on which [billeting] facilities are available for women officers and are working on the modalities of their induction on board ships. We need some minimum numbers [of women] on each ship. We are also going to do a survey and ask them if they want to serve on board ships. And then we will take a call and take this proposal forward.
•A string of accidents had dented the image of the Navy a couple of years ago. It seemed to be a thing of the past when the frigate INS Betwa collapsed on its side in the drydock late last year.
•To be honest, I cannot give an assurance that there will be zero accidents. But SOPs have been put in place and a culture of safety is being enforced. The number of accidents has come down drastically lately. Some of those past incidents have been blown out of proportion by the media.INS Betwa’s was an accident that shouldn’t have happened. A Board of Inquiry is looking into it. Basically, there was a mistake in calculating the stability [on the blocks].
•Of late, the Navy has been focussing strongly on the eastern side, strengthening the security apparatus along the island chains.
•In Andaman and Nicobar, newer and more capable assets are in place in the form of Kora-class ships [corvettes] and there is a long-term infrastructure plan where airfields in the northern group of islands are being strengthened and lengthened for heavier aircraft to operate. A similar project is taking place in the south. Infrastructure plans of making OTR (operational turnaround) facilities in the southern group of islands have started to move. The Boeing P8I [long range maritime reconnaissance aircraft] is being deployed from Port Blair.
•At the same time, our cooperation with our neighbours in the east has grown. We have resolved our maritime boundary issues with Bangladesh and there is much greater interaction with Myanmar, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia and Singapore. It’s no just ‘Look East’, we are also ‘Acting East’ in accordance with the government’s policy.
•We are assisting island nations in the IOR (Indian Ocean Region) and neighbours in the East in capability enhancement and are doing coordinated patrols with Myanmar, Thailand and Indonesia.
A leaner military is on the cards
•Jaitley approves most proposals of expert committee; ex-servicemen may take over running of NCC
•The government has approved a host of reforms in the military, with proposals to cut flab and improve financial management.
•If the proposal to reduce deployment of active-duty soldiers in avoidable postings were to be implemented, retired officers and jawans will replace serving personnel in the running of the National Cadet Corps (NCC).
•Arun Jaitley, who took additional charge as Defence Minister last week, has approved most of the proposals of a committee of experts, headed by Lt. Gen. D.B. Shekatkar (Retd), constituted by the Defence Ministry. The committee, set up in 2015 to recommend measures to enhance combat capability and rebalance defence expenditure of the armed forces, submitted its final report in December 2016. Sources said Mr. Jaitley had approved in principle 90 of the recommendations.
Huge savings
•The committee has said that if its recommendations are implemented over the next five years, the government can save up to ₹25,000 crore from the current expenditure. Most of the recommendations are measures to cut down flab in the Army to make it lean and agile and increase coordination among the three Services.
•The panel has recommended a roll-on defence budget to have enough capital expenditure available for modernisation as against the present practice of surrendering unspent capital budget at the end of each financial year.
Performance audit
•The committee has recommended a performance audit of the role of non-combat organisations under the Defence Ministry. The organisations include those dealing with defence estates and accounts, the Director- General of Quality Assurance, the Ordnance Factory Board, the Defence Research and Development Organisation and the NCC.
•The committee has suggested downsizing or rationalisation of manpower in these organisations, which can lead to significant savings. Another recommendation is the setting up of a joint services war college for training middle-level officers.
•Sources said comprehensive reforms in the running of NCC could be rolled out over the next few years. Progressively, the NCC could be run by re-employed or on-contract ex-service personnel. It is not clear if the NCC will be transferred out of the Defence Ministry to the HRD Ministry, as recommended by the committee.
Oldest fossils hold clue to origin of life
•The find shows early diversification of organisms
•Life on Earth may have originated earlier than thought and could have done so in hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor. A new study in Nature finds the origin of life at at least 3,770 million and possibly 4,290 million years ago in ferruginous sedimentary rocks, interpreted as seafloor-hydrothermal vent-related precipitates from the Nuvvuagittuq supracrustal belt of Eastern Canada. Scientists led by Dr. Dominic Papineau of University College London made the discovery.
•Epifluorescence imaging of modern vent samples has shown that cylindrical casts composed of iron oxyhydroxide are formed by bacterial cells and are undeniably of biological origin (biogenic). Hence, morphologically similar tubes and filaments in ancient jaspers may be taken as evidence that the jaspers held organisms that can survive elevated temperatures.
•“The fact that we found microfossils in these rocks shows that within only a few hundred million years of the accretion of the Earth, life had not only originated, but had also already diversified into specialised microorganisms living in hydrothermal vent environments where biologists have been suggesting for years that that was the site for the origin of life on Earth,” noted Dr. Papineau in an email to this Correspondent.
•The scientists found that NSB rocks contain graphite with ratios of the 13C/12C isotopes (the two naturally occurring stable isotopes of carbon – 13C having one more neutron than 12C) indicative of biological metabolism. The mineral graphite is composed of carbon and can form during the metamorphism of biological organic matter. It is the same for carbonate, but these minerals represent oxidised organic matter.
Rosette remnants
•Microscopic spheroidally-concentric mineral structures called rosettes were found in the NSB rocks and are composed of apatite (the phosphate mineral in our teeth and bones), carbonate, and graphite. Also found were granules which are similar to rosettes, but slightly larger, up to 2 mm in diameter. The granules contain different iron minerals that indicate the former presence of chemical reactions. The scientists believe that both rosettes and granules are the mineralised products of putrefaction.
•On the basis of chemical and morphological lines of evidence, the tubes, filaments and granules are best explained as remains of iron-metabolising (consuming iron) filamentous bacteria, and therefore represent the oldest life forms recognized on Earth.
•“Some bacteria can literally eat iron, which is what we think these ones were doing more than 3.77 billion years ago. All these lines of evidence have also been documented in younger jasper that formed when we know life existed, as well as in modern ferruginous-siliceous (iron–silica containing) precipitates in the vicinity of hydrothermal vents. Hence, we conclude that we have found the oldest fossils known,” Dr. Papineau says.
Have foreign fund flows been volatile?
Why were FIIs being bearish?
•If the period between the last quarter of 2016 and early 2017 was anything to go by, FIIs were quite bearish, both in debt and equity. Between October 2016 and end-January 2017, FIIs were net sellers in the debt and equity segments at ₹48,406 crore and ₹31,903 crore, as per data from the National Securities Depository (NSDL).
•The equity segment saw selling by FIIs on expectations that the new government in the U.S. under President Donald Trump would take fiscal steps to boost growth even as interest rates trended higher, thereby making the other markets relatively less attractive. Incidentally, the U.S. Federal Reserve raised rates by 0.25% on March 15, only the third such increase in a decade.
•There was some amount of profit booking in the equity segment on account of demonetisation as well, which is expected to dent corporate earnings over the next few quarters.
•Portfolio management firm Sanctum Wealth attributes the outflows in the debt segment to the infusion of fresh deposits in the banking system that is likely to bolster demand for government bonds at banks, which augurs well for bond prices but makes debt less attractive for yield investors. The narrowing of the rate differential is likely to keep foreign investors on the sidelines, it said.
What makes FIIs so important?
•FIIs have been the prime drivers of every bull run in the Indian equity market. They have been attracted by the handsome returns and the robust regulatory and trading mechanisms of the country for long. Data on foreign flows in the Indian equity and debt segments are available from 1992-93, and since then, they have invested ₹8.51 lakh crore in equities and ₹2.82 lakh crore in debt. Interestingly, between 1992-93 and 2015-16, there have been only three financial years (1998-99, 2008-09, 2015-16) when FIIs ended the fiscal period as net sellers of equity. In the debt segment, they were net sellers on five occasions.
•Within the Asia ex-Japan pack, India traditionally features among the highest recipients of foreign money.
When will foreign flows stabilise?
•Going by the data for the past two months, it seems the outflows have stabilised for now. Data show that foreign investors have been net buyers of Indian debt at ₹17,630 crore in February and March. In equities, they have been all the more bullish, putting in a cumulative amount of ₹30,863 crore in this period. But a section of market analysts feels that it is too early to conclude that the trends have changed as the past two months have seen a reversal in flows across all emerging markets, not just India. For instance, while India has seen inflows of $4.6 billion in the current calendar year, as per Bloomberg data, South Korea and Taiwan have also seen inflows in excess of $4 billion. Further, Indonesia and Malaysia have seen inflows of $455 million and $961 million respectively.
•There is a view that the flows started reversing by January-end on increasing expectations that growth in the U.S. would accelerate, which would have a ripple effect on the emerging markets too. Historically, a strong growth acceleration in the developed markets has led to emerging markets being significant beneficiaries. This time though, analysts are taking a cautious view as the Trump administration has talked about trade restrictions and punitive import duties while calling domestic companies to manufacture more in the U.S. Much would depend on the valuations as the recent surge has made Indian markets expensive in both the relative and absolute sense. Based on parameters like price earnings and price to book returns, India looks about 40-50% higher than the regional average.
•Finally, corporate earnings would also be an important factor to decide the course of foreign flows. Currently, there is hardly a bullish view on earnings growth as many are expecting a hit from demonetisation and global economic momentum is yet to decisively strengthen. Incidentally, the recent surge has entirely been due to liquidity as investors have been betting on equity on the back of a strong mandate for the ruling political party. So, from an economic point of view, a combination of slightly cheaper valuations and consensus growth in earnings are the key to continued foreign flows.
My battle with TB
•India is the tuberculosis (TB) capital of the world, with more than 2.8 million cases. Thousands of Indians are being pushed into depression, poverty, suffering and debt every day due to this disease. Clearly, we seem to be losing the battle against this foe, seemingly deadlier than terrorism.
•TB is curable, but why is it such a challenge to control? This disease is caused by one of the most mutative bacteria that can respond differently to medication. We have only a handful of drugs to treat TB, and there are chances that the bacteria might turn resistant to some. Depending on the condition, we have drug-resistant tuberculosis (DR-TB), multi-drug-resistant TB (MDR-TB), extensively-drug resistant TB (XDR-TB), and totally drug-resistant TB (TDR-TB). India has over 100,000 such cases. XDR-TB needs stringent and accurate treatment, and few drugs work in such cases. Chances of survival are often minimal. More than 30 years of research has yielded two new drugs — Bedaquiline and Delamanid. Considered miracle drugs, they can be used apart from traditional TB medicines.
•Recently, a young girl, barely 18, and who is battling XDR-TB, was denied Bedaquiline. The reason given by the government was that she didn’t have the appropriate domicile. The drug is available in select cities and requires stringent monitoring.
My fight
•It reminded me of my own struggle, two years ago, when I was diagnosed as a borderline XDR-TB case. There was barely any medication that could work on me. My doctor applied for me to receive Bedaquiline on compassionate grounds. Unfortunately, I could not qualify for the drug for technical reasons. My heart rate and calcium levels were higher than the range required, which posed a serious risk.
•I could not believe the denial. All hope seemed to slip away. I was barely 21, 50 kg and had my entire life ahead of me. However, my doctor did not give up and put me on a combination of highly potent drugs, used in severe, drug-resistant conditions. Though a risk, it worked. But with the beneficial impact of treatment, came the sideeffects. Due to these medicines, there was concurrent monitoring along with special care.
Think of the patient
•This girl’s father went to court. It worked and she will be started on Bedaquiline shortly. What if he had failed? The government needs to realise that not having access to a life-saving drug is devastating. Patients lose hope and the motivation to fight. While it is essential to keep such drugs in safe hands to ensure no further resistance, you cannot deny patients potentially life-saving drugs. Why can’t we develop a system that allows access to such drugs under strong monitoring? We need to ensure that patients everywhere, irrespective of where they seek care, have access to it.
•The case of this young girl is a mirror to thousands of patients who do not have access to a potentially life-saving drug. For some, it could shorten the treatment or provide a better quality of life, for others it could simply save them. The government needs to create a strategic partnership with the private sector to develop an easier protocol needed to make such drugs accessible. Also, there is a need to estimate the need of this drug — we still don’t know how much drug resistance we have. Finally, we need to ensure that we have cost-effective, free, high-quality testing for drug resistance available early to all patients. Patients who need this drug should be provided the free tests that are required to get this drug.
•An appropriate mechanism is a filtering process set up by an expert panel which has private sector representatives too. This group can take vital decisions for dispensing Bedaquiline and other such new drugs.
•Building further on this, there has to be priority catalytic funding provided to research organisations for development of revised regimes, drugs and techniques. There has to be adequate training of medical and paramedical staff handling the drug and sensitisation for those being given this drug.
•Unless the public health system takes an integrated approach to this problem, we will face countless compromised lives despite a potential solution within our reach. Nothing gets more disturbing than knowing this fact.
•Saurabh Rane, an MDR-TB survivor, is part of ‘Survivors Against TB’, a community of TB survivors working to strengthen India’s fight against TB
TB time bomb: the price of policy inertia
•India’s TB burden is exacerbated by the government’s refusal to augment resources and enable access to newer drugs
•A crumbling health system, slashed budgets and an overcrowded country — these factors make India the perfect playground for one of the world’s oldest diseases, tuberculosis.
•In the past year, the global public health community, led by World Health Organization (WHO), has been looking at India with trepidation. In 2015 alone, 4.8 lakh Indians died of the airborne disease. In fact, India’s leading chest physician Dr. Zarir Udwadia called it “Ebola with wings” earlier this week during a TED Talk to mark World Tuberculosis Day, which fell on Friday, March 24.
Thousands without access
•Two new TB drugs, Bedaquiline and Delamanid, being used in Europe and the United States for several years, are yet to be made available in India’s national health-care system. In January, an 18-year-old Patna girl took the government to court after she was refused Bedaquiline on the grounds that she was not a resident of Delhi. The drug is available only in six sites across the country and, according to Health Ministry’s annual TB report released on Friday, only 207 patients have access to the drug needed by at least 79,000 patients. Herein lies the crux of the matter, making India’s bureaucratic inertia the world’s problem: TB does not respect geographical boundaries and these patients continue to transmit drug-resistant forms of the disease due to the poor access to medicines. Not only does India shoulder the highest TB burden in the world with over 2 million of the 10 million cases reported here, it also accounts for the most drug-resistant patients — nearly 1.3 lakh people who do not respond to first-line drugs. “Transmission of drug-resistant TB will continue unabated unless patients get early diagnosis and the right treatment. India has to invest extensively and urgently if it has to expand the testing facilities and get the drugs to the patients. Currently, there is a mismatch between the urgency with which the government is talking and the resources we are committing,” says Chapal Mehra, a public health specialist on TB.
•In a major embarrassment for the government, WHO had to revise global TB estimates last year after India informed that it had been under-reporting TB cases from 2000 to 2015. The global estimates were revised upwards to 10.4 million people infected with TB — a jump of 5,00,000 from 2014. In its annual TB report, the Health Ministry explained that “this apparent increase in the disease burden reflects the incorporation of more accurate data. With backward calculations, both tuberculosis incidence and mortality rates are decreasing from 2000 to 2015”.
The intent-action deficit
•While the global spotlight for urgent action has sent the government back to the drawing board, experts maintain that it is not putting its money where its mouth is. The budget estimates in the annual TB report are in fact lower than that of 2014-15. As against Rs. 1,358 crore requested, the government approved Rs. 710 crore in 2014-15. In 2016, however, in the face of trenchant criticism, the budget requested actually went down to Rs. 1,000 crore and the approved budget was a measly Rs. 640 crore. “By no means is this enough to expand the programme. For the strategic plan to show impact, we must allocate enough resources,” says Mr. Mehra.
•The government will soon be launching a new strategy, and Union Health Minister J.P. Nadda has announced that his Ministry will aim to “eliminate TB” by 2025. “Ensuring affordable and quality health care to the population is a priority for the government and we are committed to achieving zero TB deaths and therefore we need to re-strategise, think afresh and have to be aggressive in our approach to end TB by 2025,” he said on World Tuberculosis Day.
•During the TED Talk, Dr. Udwadia, one of the first doctors to make Bedaquiline available in India, called tuberculosis patients “therapeutic destitutes”, adding, “Drug-resistant TB represents a collective indictment of all of us as a society. Of the tests too slow. The drugs too toxic. Of the government programme that’s underfunded and inefficient. Of the private practitioners who’ll dole out the drugs but not compassion. Of the public policy failure.”
Indians find a new bacterial target for drug development
•In an innovative approach, the researchers focused on the biofilms that normally shield the bacteria from antibiotics
•Indian researchers have found a new target that can potentially be used for developing new antibiotics that will be effective against many bacteria. The new target is made of two proteins, which form a complex that is responsible for the formation of biofilm, that perform very important functions and are critical for bacterial ability to successfully infect humans. The results were published in the journal Biofilms and Microbiomes.
Biofilm as a biological shield
•Bacteria form biofilms, a kind of matrix, during infection in plants and animals. The biofilm shields the bacteria from antibiotics and helps bacteria survive harsh conditions such as extreme temperature or stress. Now a study by Indian researchers has found the molecular signalling events that play a crucial role in biofilm formation in Bacillus anthracis, the causative agent of anthrax.
•Till now, all attention has been on developing antibiotics that target disease-causing bacteria and not the biofilm itself.
•One of the basic questions that scientists have been trying to answer is how and when bacteria decide to form biofilms. “One possibility is that bacteria has sensors on the surface which senses some signal and helps in biofilm formation,” says Andaleeb Sajid from the Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (IGIB), Delhi and one of the authors of the paper.
•“It was serendipity. Our lab was working on signalling in bacteria and we were studying PrkC and similar proteins. When PrkC protein is deleted, Bacillusbacteria are unable to form biofilm. So we started studying the mechanism by which PrkC protein controls biofilm formation,” she says.
•“Our hypothesis is that PrkC senses some signal and transmits it from outside to inside the cell. This signal goes to other proteins like GroEL. PrkC adds phosphate group (phosphorylate) to different proteins. The mystery to biofilm formation lies with one chaperone protein called GroEL. The addition of phosphate to this tiny machine initiates a course of events within bacterial cells leading to complex biofilm formation,” Dr. Sajid says.
GroEL protein’s role
•The team found several proteins receive signals from PrkC protein. Using cutting edge genetics, molecular biology and proteomics techniques, they confirmed that GroEL was regulated by PrkC.
•“From other unrelated bacteria, we already had a clue that GroEL has a role in biofilm formation. We looked at the molecular level and found six amino acid residues where phosphate was getting added to the GroEL protein. Through a series of steps, we ascertained how important phosphorylation was for proper functioning of GroEL,” says Gunjan Arora from IGIB and the first author of the paper.
•“We wanted to know if the bacteria has any other compensation mechanism to form biofilm in the absence of PrkC. So we made PrkC mutant bacteria to produce more of GroEL. The bacteria were able to form biofilm even in the absence of PrkC. This experiment helped us understand that PrkC is the influencer and GroEL is key to biofilm formation,” Dr. Arora says.
•Both PrkC and GroEL perform very important functions and are critical for bacterial ability to successfully infect humans. “We think GroEL-PrkC complex could be a target for developing new antibiotic that will be effective against many bacterial pathogens such as the ones that cause MRSA, TB and pneumonia. One strategy to tackle drug resistant bacteria will be to develop multi-drug regimen that combines traditional antibiotics with candidate drugs that can block bacterial signalling and prevent biofilm formation,” Dr. Arora says.
