We have doubts on China’s OBOR project: Jaitley
Minister cites issues of ‘sovereignty’
•India has “serious reservations” about China’s One Belt, One Road (OBOR) plan given that there are issues of “sovereignty” at stake, Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said on Saturday.
•“The idea is always there for the future that the expansion of connectivity takes place between countries,” Mr. Jaitley said at a roundtable on the role of trade in Asia’s economic outlook, when asked for his views on the OBOR initiative.
•“But the particular suggestion that you have made, I have no hesitation in saying we have some serious reservations about it, because of sovereignty issues.”
China-hosted meeting
•China is set to host ‘The Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation’ in Beijing starting May 14 and has been trying to bring India on board. One section of OBOR passes through Pakistan-occupied Kashmir.
•Pakistan sees the plan as a welcome step to boost regional connectivity which is essential to promoting intra-regional trade, Finance Minister Mohammad Ishaq Dar said at the event, part of the Asian Development Bank’s 50th annual meeting here. “Connectivity is very important and the One Belt, One Road is a very good initiative...,” Mr. Dar said.
•Separately, the Finance Minister said trade as a lynchpin of economic growth was here to stay.
•Protectionist tendencies would also fail to deter the natural flow of goods and services across borders as the global economy, especially companies in different parts of the world, stood to lose too much from barriers to free trade, he observed. “Notwithstanding the fact that a particular trade deal may move forward or not, RCEP could move forward, probably will, but trade is going to move forward.”
Nirbhaya: Juvenile lives in anonymity
In 2015, DCW alleged that he had become ‘radicalised’ and his release would be a danger to society
•A petition filed by the Delhi Commission for Women (DCW) in the Supreme Court in 2015 claimed that the juvenile involved in the Nirbhaya gang-rape and murder case had become “radicalised” while in the correctional home and his release from the facility after three years of detention was a danger to society.
•The Commission referred to an Intelligence Bureau report on the juvenile in conflict about his three years of stay in the correctional facility.
•The women’s panel said there was no evidence that he was reformed.
‘Truly reformed’
•It asked the court to suspend his release till it was confirmed that he was truly reformed.
•A Bench of Justices A.K. Goel and U.U. Lalit had disagreed.
•The court said the juvenile could not be kept in confinement for an indefinite period like that.
•“What do you really want … The child’s reformation or the child’s detention,” the court had asked throwing out the DCW petition.
•The court had then orally observed that if the juvenile had turned out to be more of a threat after his stay at the correctional home, the facility had not lived up to the legislative intent that these institutions were supposed to be “places of safety” conducive for the juvenile’s reformation.
•The much-publicised last-ditch attempt by the DCW to prevent his release began on the eve of his release in December 2015 when Commission members had knocked on the doors of the Supreme Court, with journalists hot on the trail.
Undisclosed location
•The petition had made the overnight journey from the residence of then Chief Justice of India T.S. Thakur, who referred it to the vacation Bench of Justices Goel and Lalit.
•During this time, the Delhi Police, acting on the fact that the convict’s release was not stayed by the apex court, had already released him to a non-governmental organisation on December 20, 2015.
•He had been then moved to an undisclosed location, reportedly near his village in Uttar Pradesh.
•The Nirbhaya case had caused an outpouring of grief and outrage by the nature of brutality of the crime against a helpless woman.
New law
•At the time of the juvenile’s release, a new Juvenile law, which called for treating juveniles aged between 16 and 18 involved in heinous crimes, as adults was pending with the Rajya Sabha.
•Public furore increased when the juvenile convict, alleged to have been the most brutal among the accused, was cleared for release by the Delhi High Court.
•The victim’s family had been running from pillar to post seeking justice, demanding rigorous punishment and amendments in the Juvenile law, given the magnitude of the heinous crime of rape and murder committed on December 16, 2012.
U.S. keen to expand Malabar exercise
Decision will be based on consensus
•The U.S. is keen on expanding Malabar trilateral exercises but it will be a decision based on discussion and consensus with the partner countries, a senior U.S. Navy officer has said.
•“The discussions on granting observer status will continue, there is a process for all the exercises we go through … The first step is an observer status and then potentially as participants. Ultimately, this is a bilateral dialogue between India and the U.S… There is a desire to increase the participants but must be done step by step and in a collaborative way,” Admiral Scott Swift, U.S. Pacific Fleet Commander, said on Friday.
Planning on
•The next edition of Malabar is scheduled to be held in July in the areas “surrounding India in Bay of Bengal” for which the planning conferences are under way.
•As reported by The Hindu , Australia has requested India for observer status at this year’s Malabar exercises and is awaiting a final decision.
•However, India has been reluctant to let expand the exercises further from the trilateral format which included Japan due to sensitivities from China.
•Malabar, which began in 1992 as a bilateral naval exercise between India and the U.S., has since grown in scope and complexity acquiring considerable heft in recent times.
•In 2015, it was expanded into a trilateral format with the inclusion of Japan. Japan and the U.S. are keen on expanding the games to include Australia which was expressed by officials from both countries on various occasions.
Anti-submarine ops
•This year’s exercises are expected to focus on anti-submarine warfare (ASW) with increasing Chinese submarine presence in the Indian Ocean.
•Admiral Swift said that with both Indian and U.S. Navies operating the P-8 long-range patrol aircraft, they are keen to expand the ASW component in the coming exercises.
RBI looks to Army for ‘Operation shredded notes’
Central bank wants to eliminate billions of demonetised notes quickly, but lacks the manpower
•Holding a pile of billions of demonetised notes, the Reserve Bank of India has a problem — it is unable to destroy them quickly. At the current pace, the process could take nearly two years.
•Keen on completing the task on a war footing, the RBI’s central office in Mumbai is seeking the Army’s help for the job.
•It has asked its regional offices to requisition the services of Army personnel, wherever necessary, through the central office. The help of soldiers is being sought due to the ‘sensitivity and secrecy’ required. “We could not have hired just any agency for this task,” a senior officer said.
•As of March 31 last year, there were 15.7 billion Rs. 500 notes and 6.3 billion Rs. 1,000 currency notes in circulation, before demonetisation. According to a Bloomberg report, if one stacked up all the defunct notes, they’d form a column 30 times the height of Everest.
•When the deadline for depositing the scrapped notes expired, 16.4 billion were with banks and the Reserve Bank of India.
•These masses of notes, now lying in 19 RBI offices, are being sorted, counted, verified and then sent to the shredder.
Destroyed in shifts
•An RBI official said each of its offices has three or four shredders running at least two shifts a day, with five people assigned to each. The central bank has also hired shredders from private banks.
•Two senior officials do random checks and the exercise is monitored using CCTV cameras. Not all RBI offices have enough manpower, the official said, explaining the quest for more hands. An initial count of the notes has been completed, which is being followed up with recounts, since the presence of fake currencies was strongly suspected. Another reason is to ascertain the exact number of demonetised notes that came back, a figure that the RBI has not yet confirmed.
•Shredding is undertaken only after verification.
•Most demonetised notes were deposited; the RBI’s annual report for 2015-16 says fake notes are but a small fraction of the total.
Namami Gange set for rebranding push
Ganga Jyoti Yatra from Kolkata to Varanasi; roping in Ambassadors on the list for campaign
•In the third year of the Narendra Modi government, one of its flagship programmes, the ambitious Namami Gange, is set for a rebranding exercise, and pitches from top advertising agencies invited to giving a public relations push over the next few months.
•The move, powered by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, aims at a more participatory approach to the Namami Gange (National Mission for a Clean Ganga-NMCG) programme.
•“Given past efforts to clean the river [such as Ganga Action Plans] there is also a certain level of scepticism over whether this latest attempt will be successful. There is thus a need to generate public confidence in the proposed programme,” said a note circulated by the NMCG to those wishing to pitch for the project.
Strong soul connect
•“While there is no questioning the reverence in which the river is held, the emotional connect with the Ganges, for most Indians tends to be restricted to personal ritualistic moments and becomes passive once it is over. Invoking this reverence [ aastha ] towards the river — without however giving it religious overtones — could be an entry-point towards mass awareness and action towards river clean-up.”
•“The proposed campaign therefore needs to evoke a strong soul connect with the Ganga and leverage associated emotion to drive active participation to keep the river clean and healthy,” the notice further stated.
•Ideas like a Ganga Jyoti Yatra (like an Olympic torch run) starting from Kolkata and ending in Varanasi, and roping in brand ambassadors like former Indian cricketer Sachin Tendulkar are some of the things being discussed.
•U.P. Singh, director of NMCG confirmed to The Hindu that a long campaign was on the anvil.
•“We have invited concepts from the several advertising agencies and are hearing them out,” he said.
•He added that, “the message that cleaning the river Ganga requires participation from everyone hasn’t effectively reached out.”
Slow progress
•In spite of being a marquee project of the government, the Namami Gange is yet to show visible progress.
•Out of a Rs. 20,000-crore clean-up programme, only Rs. 2,000 crore has been sanctioned to the NMCG, the executive authority tasked with commissioning treatment plants, cleaning and beautifying the ghats and setting up improved crematoria.
•To treat the 12,000 million litres per day (MLD) of sewage emptying into the river, that meanders through 11 States from Uttarakhand to West Bengal, only capacity worth 4,000 MLD exists and of them, only plants with 1,000 MLD capacity are working.
India’s coming urban mega crisis
Too many cities, too little planning. And too much complacence
•How many metro cities are there in India? If you said four, you are more than a decade out of date. The four ‘traditional’ metros – Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata – were actually categorised as metro cities back in 1965 by the expenditure department of the Finance Ministry for the purpose of calculating house rent allowance for government employees. This is actually the only ‘legal’ definition of a metro as far as the government is concerned.
•Over time, various Pay Commissions have expanded the list to more cities: Bengaluru and Hyderabad in 2007, and Ahmedabad and Pune in 2014, taking the official tally of metros to eight. But India is one of the most rapidly urbanising economies in the world. By the time the government actually gets around to formally recognising a city as being worthy of classification as a metro, the reality is that several more have joined the fray.
Clues from the Census
•The Census gave us the first inkling about the pace of change. India’s urban population rose from 27.82% to 31.14% between 2001 and 2011. And it was not just because existing cities and towns grew — new towns, cities and megacities were being created. The number of ‘statutory towns’ — towns with a municipal body or cantonment board – grew by over 6.1% during this period.
•But the real pace of urbanisation was revealed by the exponential rise in the number of ‘census’ towns — defined as habitations with a minimum population of 5,000 with at least 75% of the working population engaged in non-agricultural pursuits; and a density of population of at least 400 persons per sq. km. The number of ‘census’ towns rose by over 185% between 2001 and 2011, compared to an increase of just 0.36% in the number of villages.
•With such a breakneck pace of urbanisation, it is inevitable that the number of metros and soon-to-be metros is substantially higher than the official tally. According to a new study by consultancy EY ( India’s growth paradigm, March 2017 ), India already has two more metros — Jaipur and Surat — as well as 10 ‘high potential’ cities which will soon grow to metro-hood: Bhopal, Chandigarh, Indore, Jabalpur, Kanpur, Lucknow, Nagpur, Patna, Vadodara and Visakhapatnam. That’s not all – EY has identified as many as 30 more ‘new wave’ cities, based on population growth and cumulative household income. During the course of this ongoing decade, EY believes these 42 cities will actually outpace the eight defined metros in both population and income growth.
•EY sees this as a good thing. The report actually highlights the untapped potential of these aspiring metros. By 2020, they estimate that India’s urban population will be close to half a billion, accounting for more than 70% of India’s GDP and with GDP growth rates over double that in rural areas. This is not unlikely, as India’s 50 largest cities housed 123 million people and had a combined income of Rs. 26.4 lakh crore as of end 2015 itself.
•Which all sounds terrific on paper, but it is only when you actually visit these ‘cities’ that you can see the real problems: traffic is hellish, public transport is rudimentary, public infrastructure is ramshackle, there doesn’t appear to be any civic planning to speak of, roads peter off into dirt tracks in new ‘colonies’, there are mounds of garbage everywhere, power and water shortages are acute, and law and order machinery is stretched.
•Other infrastructure is even more attenuated. Like education, for instance — in most of the ‘new wave’ markets identified in the EY report, for instance, anywhere from a quarter to half the schools have only opened shop after 2001. EY’s analysts see this as untapped potential for education investors, but you could also see this as the gap left by the public system.
•What is even more worrisome is the lack of any sort of plan to deal with this surge in urbanisation. Where will the millions in these cities get water from? Or power? Or fresh vegetables, or milk, or meat for that matter, if other States carry out U.P.-like crackdown on abattoirs? Who will build the schools? Provide the health care? Dispose of the garbage? Can Uber and Ola take the place of civic public transport? Vehicle ownership will more than double in these emerging markets in the next three years — any guesses on how many kilometres of new roads are being built in these places?
•There are, of course, plenty of schemes on paper. Visit the Ministry of Urban Development’s website and you are hit with a veritable alphabet soup of acronyms — AMRUT, HRIDAY, SBM, PFDF… but what is the scale of execution?
•And what about money? Do our civic bodies have the money to fund solutions, even if they have ideas? It looks unlikely. The numbers provided by the Ministry of Urban Development only come up till 2007-08. In that financial year, municipal bodies spent an average of Rs. 2,461.92 per head per year on all civic services put together.
•That’s simply not enough. We have a mega crisis looming in our mega cities. And nobody seems to be particularly worried about it.
Reversing drug resistance made possible
Drug-resistantE. colibecome sensitive to antibiotics when H2S synthesis is inhibited
•Indian researchers have unravelled the mechanism by which hydrogen sulphide (H2S) gas produced by bacteria protects them from antibiotics and plays a key role in helping bacteria develop drug resistance. And by blocking/disabling the enzyme that triggers the biosynthesis of hydrogen sulphide in bacteria, the researchers from Bengaluru’s Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) Pune, have been able to reverse antibiotic resistance in E. coli bacteria; E. colibacteria were isolated from patients suffering from urinary tract infection. The results were published in the journal Chemical Science.
•Antibiotics kill by increasing the levels of reactive oxygen species (oxidative stress) inside bacterial cells. So any mechanism that detoxifies or counters reactive oxygen species generated by antibiotics will reduce the efficacy of antibiotics. “Hydrogen sulphide does this to nullify the effect of antibiotics,” says Dr. Amit Singh from the Department of Microbiology and Cell Biology at IISc and one of the corresponding authors of the paper. “When bacteria face reactive oxygen species a protective mechanism in the bacteria kicks in and more hydrogen sulphide is produced.” Hydrogen sulphide successfully counters reactive oxygen species and reduces the efficacy of antibiotics.
•The researchers carried out simple experiments to establish this. They first ascertained that regardless of the mode of action of antibiotics, the drugs uniformly induce reactive oxygen species formation inside E. coli bacteria. Then to test if increased levels of hydrogen sulphide gas inside bacteria counter reactive oxygen species produced upon treatment with antibiotics, a small molecule that produces hydrogen sulphide in a controlled manner inside the bacteria was used. “Hydrogen sulphide released by the molecule was able to counter reactive oxygen species and reduce the ability of antibiotics to kill bacteria,” says Dr. Singh.
•The small molecule was synthesised by a team led by Prof. Harinath Chakrapani from the Department of Chemistry, IISER, Pune; he is one of the corresponding authors of the paper. “We designed the small molecule keeping in mind that synthesis should be easy, efficiency in producing hydrogen sulphide should be high and the molecule should release hydrogen sulphide only inside bacteria and not mammalian cells,” says Vinayak S. Khodade from the Department of Chemistry, IISER, Pune and one of the authors of the paper who contributed equally like the first author. The researchers were able to selectively increase hydrogen sulphide levels inside a wide variety of bacteria.
•To reconfirm hydrogen sulphide’s role in countering reactive oxygen species, the team took multidrug-resistant, pathogenic strains of E. coli from patients suffering from urinary tract infection and measured the hydrogen sulphide levels in these strains. “We found the drug-resistant strains were naturally producing more hydrogen sulphide compared with drug-sensitive E. coli, ” says Prashant Shukla from the Department of Microbiology and Cell Biology at IISc and the first author of the paper. So the team used a chemical compound that inhibits an enzyme responsible for hydrogen sulphide production. “There was nearly 50% reduction in drug-resistance when hydrogen sulphide production was blocked,” Dr. Singh says.
•“Bacteria that are genetically resistant to antibiotics actually become sensitive to antibiotics when hydrogen sulphide synthesis is inhibited,” says Prof. Chakrapani. The multidrug-resistant E. coli regained its ability to survive antibiotics when hydrogen sulphide was once again supplied by introducing the small molecule synthesised by Prof. Chakrapani.
•“As a result of our study, we have a found new mechanism to develop a new class of drug candidates that specifically target multidrug-resistant bacteria,” says Prof. Chakrapani. The researchers already have a few inhibitors that seem capable of blocking hydrogen sulphide production. But efforts are on to develop a library of inhibitors to increase the chances of success.
How H2S acts
•The researchers identified that E. coli has two modes of respiration involving two different enzymes. The hydrogen sulphide gas produced shuts down E. coli’s aerobic respiration by targeting the main enzyme (cytochrome bo oxidase (CyoA)) responsible for it. E. coli then switches over to an alternative mode of respiration by relying on a different enzyme — cytochrome bd oxidase (Cydb). Besides enabling respiration, the Cydb enzyme detoxifies the reactive oxygen species produced by antibiotics and blunts the action of antibiotics.
•“So we found that hydrogen sulphide activates the Cydb enzyme, which, in turn, is responsible for increasing resistance towards antibiotics,” says Dr. Singh. “If we have a drug-like molecule(s) that blocks hydrogen sulphide production and inhibits Cydb enzyme activity then the combination will be highly lethal against multidrug-resistant bacteria.”
•This combination can also be used along with antibiotics to effectively treat difficult-to-cure bacterial infections.
•The link between hydrogen sulphide and Cydb enzyme in the emergence of drug resistance is another key finding of the study.
NASA missions on solar system
A new mission to Saturn’s moons Titan or Enceladus to find signs of life beyond Earth cannot be ruled out as NASA says it is reviewing 12 proposals for future unmanned solar system mission to be launched in the mid-2020s.
•The proposed missions of discovery — submitted under NASA’s New Frontiers programme —will undergo scientific and technical review over the next seven months, the US space agency said in a statement on Friday. Selection of one or more concepts for Phase A study will be announced in November. At the conclusion of Phase A concept studies, it is planned that one New Frontiers investigation will be selected to continue into subsequent mission phases.
•Investigations for this announcement of opportunity were limited to six mission themes — comet surface sample return; lunar South Pole-Aitken basin sample return; ocean worlds (Titan and/or Enceladus); Saturn probe; Trojan tour and rendezvous; and Venus in situ explorer
•“New Frontiers is about answering the biggest questions in our solar system today, building on previous missions to continue to push the frontiers of exploration,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, Associate Administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington.
•“We’re looking forward to reviewing these exciting investigations and moving forward with our next bold mission of discovery,” Zurbuchen said.
•The New Frontiers Programme conducts principal investigator (PI)-led space science investigations under a development cost cap of approximately $1 billion.
•This would be the fourth mission in the New Frontiers portfolio. Its predecessors are the New Horizons mission to Pluto, the Juno mission to Jupiter, and OSIRIS-Rex.
