📰 Scientists make fuel from oxygen in air
May help in cutting carbon emissions
•Scientists have found a way to produce methanol — an important chemical often used as fuel in vehicles — using oxygen in the air, an advance that may lead to cleaner, greener industrial processes worldwide.
•Methanol is currently produced by breaking down natural gas at high temperatures into hydrogen gas and carbon monoxide before reassembling them — expensive and energy-intensive processes known as ‘steam reforming’ and ‘methanol synthesis.’
Simple catalysis
•However, researchers from Cardiff University in the U.K. have discovered they can produce methanol from methane through simple catalysis that allows methanol production at low temperatures using oxygen and hydrogen peroxide.
•The findings, published in the journal Science , have major implications for cleaner, greener industrial processes worldwide.
•“The quest to find a more efficient way of producing methanol is a hundred years old. Our process uses oxygen — effectively a ‘free’ product in the air around us — and combines it with hydrogen peroxide at mild temperatures which require less energy,” said Graham Hutchings, from the Cardiff Catalysis Institute.
Commercialisation later
•“Commercialisation will take time, but our science has major implications for the preservation of natural gas reserves as fossil fuel stocks dwindle across the world,” he said.
•“At present global natural gas production is about 2.4 billion tonnes per annum and 4% of this is flared into the atmosphere — roughly 100 million tonnes,” he said.
•“Our approach of using natural gas could use this “waste” gas saving, saving carbon dioxide emissions,” he added.
📰 Sun and sea water powers vegetable farms in Jordan
Three hectares of desert used to grow organic crops in EU-funded project
•Jordan, a water-poor country that is 90% desert, has launched a project to turn its sand dunes into farming land to produce food using sun and sea water.
•King Abdullah II and Norway’s Crown Prince Haakon recently attended a ceremony to mark the official opening of the “Sahara Forest Project” near the southern port city of Aqaba.
130 tonnes of food
•In the first stage, the project aims to produce up to 130 tonnes of organic vegetables per year from an area the size of four football pitches.
•It will use solar panels to provide power and include outdoor planting space, two saltwater-cooled greenhouses, a water desalination unit and salt ponds for salt production.
•The project, whose funders include Norway and the European Union, is to be expanded from three hectares to around 200 hectares of desert.
•“This is a project that has a great promise for the future,” said Prince Haakon.
•“It is impressive to see how technology can be used in such a sustainable way to produce agricultural goods in a quite tough climate like here.”
•The project’s director, Joakim Hauge, said the scheme simply tapped into Jordan’s existing resources.
•“Jordan has a lot of sunlight, it has a lot of desert, it has sea water, it has carbon dioxide. That is what we need to produce food, water and renewable energy.”
📰 Bali action puts India on other side of debate
Other neighbours call for restraint on Rohingya issue
•India’s decision to reject a joint statement by the World Parliamentary Forum in Indonesia, that included references to human rights in Myanmar in its ‘Bali declaration’, was a major show of support for the Suu Kyi government just hours after Prime Minister Narendra Modi ended his bilateral visit there. The move, however, has put India on the other side of the Rohingya refugee debate from Myanmar’s other neighbours and countries in the region.
•Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Sri Lanka were all among countries that joined the Bali declaration at Nusa Dua on Thursday, that India disassociated from, according to Indonesian officials.
•In their explanation, the Indian delegation headed by Lok Sabha Speaker Sumitra Mahajan had said the reference to Myanmar had been “proposed at the eleventh hour” and was unjustified as the Parliamentary forum was meant to focus on Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and not a particular country.
•“At the drafting committee India raised its objections, especially after Turkey inserted clauses specific to one country (Myanmar), which Bangladesh supported. But the host country went ahead and adopted the declaration despite our objections,” an MEA official told The Hindu on the telephone from Indonesia.
•In two separate paragraphs, the Bali Declaration that was eventually made by 49 countries, expressed concern about the recent violence in Myanmar’s Rakhine state, where the UN says at least 1,000 Rohingya Muslims have been killed, and 2,70,000 have fled, mainly to Bangladesh, in the past two weeks.
•The statement “called on all parties to contribute to the restoration of stability and security, exercise maximum self-restraint from using violent means, respect the human rights of all people in Rakhine State regardless of their faith and ethnicity,” as “there can be no sustainable development without peace”.
•India’s statement followed PM Modi’s visit to Naypyitaw where he expressed his support for the NLD government’s crackdown on terror groups in the Rakhine.
📰 ‘Income inequality in India at its highest level since 1922’
Top 1% of earners captured less than 21% of total income in the 1930s, which dropped to 6% in the ’80s and has risen to 22% now, says economist
•According to a research paper by renowned economistsThomas Piketty and Lucas Chancel, income inequality in India is at its highest level since 1922, the year the Income Tax Act was passed. In December, they will release the first ‘World Inequality Report’ where they will compare India’s inequality trajectory with other emerging, industrialised and low-income countries and suggest ways to tackle global and national inequality.
•In an e-mail interview,Lucas Chanceldiscusses the findings of the paper titled ‘Indian income inequality, 1922-2014: From British Raj to Billionaire Raj?’ Excerpts:
Can you summarise key findings of the paper?
•According to our benchmark estimates, the share of national income accruing to the top 1% income earners is now at its highest level since the creation of the Indian Income Tax [Act] in 1922. The top 1% of earners captured less than 21% of total income in the late 1930s, before dropping to 6% in the early 1980s and rising to 22% today. Over the 1951-1980 period, the bottom 50% group captured 28% of total growth and incomes of this group grew faster than the average, while the top 0.1% incomes decreased. Over the 1980-2014 period, the situation was reversed; the top 0.1% of earners captured a higher share of total growth than the bottom 50% (12% versus 11%), while the top 1% received a higher share of total growth than the middle 40% (29% vs. 23%). These findings suggest that much can be done to promote more inclusive growth in India.
You have said the income inequality has been at the highest level?
•Since the 1980s, India did not only open-up and liberalise its economy, it did it in a way that was very favourable to top income earners and capital owners.
•Top tax rates which were very high in the 1970s (up to 98%) decreased to 30% in the 1980s. Wages set by governments in government enterprises were liberalised after privatisations and the dispersion increased.
•It is also likely that privatisations principally benefited richest income groups, those who already had capital, rather than the majority of the population which didn’t access equity.
•On the other hand, growth at the bottom of the distribution was notably lower than average growth rates since the 1980s.
Is this finding unique for India?
•To better understand the rise in Indian inequality, let’s look at other emerging countries. China also liberalised and opened up after 1978, and in doing so, experienced a sharp income growth as well as a sharp rise in inequality.
•This rise, however, stopped in the 2000s so that inequality is currently at lower level there than [in] India (top 1% income share at 14% versus 22% in India, according to our estimates). In Russia, the move from a communist to a market economy was extremely brutal and today has a similar level of inequality as in India. This shows that there are different strategies to transit from a highly regulated economy to a liberalised one. In the arrays of possible pathways, India pursued a very unequal way but could probably have chosen another path. All this data is available on an open-access website, WID.world.
There have been counter arguments to your thesis?
•Some commentators argue that without extreme growth at the very top of the distribution, there wouldn’t have been high growth in India. There is, in fact, little evidence supporting this claim. The top 0.1% captured more total income growth as the bottom 50% since 1980. Would all income growth have disappeared if the situation had been reversed? We can also doubt this. The highest growth period in Western Europe, after the second world war, was also a period of equitable redistribution of the fruits of growth. Europe grew as a market economy but it was not a market society. It had institutions, rules, norms limiting the power of capital accumulation and of income concentration.
What do these findings mean for India?
•There are many options and we do not claim to put an end to debates. Regarding rising inequality at the very top of the distribution, we show that after 1980, in India, top Income Tax rates were brought from extreme levels to much lower ones. Land concentration is also an issue in India. where agriculture remains a key sector. Indeed, access to free and quality education and health is crucial to raise bottom 50% incomes.
📰 India could embrace CO2 capture technology
Meet in Alabama offers possibilities
•India will explore the possibility of introducing technologies for capturing carbon dioxide emitted while burning coal and other fossil fuels, the country’s Coal Secretary Susheel Kumar has said. Mr. Kumar is leading an Indian delegation at an international conference on Carbon Capture Utilisation and Storage (CCUS) in Alabama.
•“Attending the conference has been very informative for my colleagues and me, we now have some food for thought to carefully contemplate the feasibility of CCUS with relevance to India,” he said.
Commercial uses
•A lot of advanced research in the area, of late, has been focussing on capturing carbon dioxide emissions from sources like coal-fired power plants, to either reuse or store it so it will not enter the atmosphere. CO2 has commercial and industrial uses, particularly for Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) in depleting oil fields. Carbon dioxide has the ability to change the properties of oil and make it easier to extract.
•The International Energy Agency’s Green House Gas Research and Development initiative organises the annual Post Combustion Carbon Conference, which is currently in session in Birmingham, in the State of Alabama.
•Dr. Prabhat Ranjan, Executive Director of Technology Information Forecast and Assessment Council (TIFAC) of Department of Science and Technology; S.K. Acahrya, Chairman and Managing Director of Neyveli Lignite Corporation; and other officials are part of the Indian delegation at the conference.
📰 Indicators that matter
Governments must be judged on the quality and extent of the public health care they provide
•The deaths of more than 70 children in one hospital in Gorakhpur and 49 in Farrukhabad, both in Uttar Pradesh recently, reflect the appalling state of public health in India. However, it needs to be remembered that India’s public health-care sector has been ailing for decades. According to the latest Global Burden of Disease Study, India has the 154th rank, much below China, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.
Scant consideration
•Though ‘health’ is a State subject, States have been reducing their health-care spending efforts in relation to total government spending. In 2013-14, the per capita public expenditure on health in U.P. was Rs. 452. The number of primary health centres, went down from 3,808 in 2002 to 3,497 in 2015. The gravity of the situation is understood better when we juxtapose this with the 25-30% increase in the State’s population during the same period. These statistics show that health has never been a political priority in the State. The patterns of public expenditure on health show that the provisioning of curative care through hospitals received disproportionate policy significance, ignoring overwhelming evidence that it is preventive health care and public health actions that have brought down periodic episodes of infectious disease outbreaks or epidemics. Scientific discoveries, technological improvements and government efforts to improve sanitation and hygiene have successfully controlled infectious diseases globally. The government’s lack of understanding of the importance of public health has played the most important part in U.P.’s health predicament.
Global instances
•While the under-provisioning of health care including public health services continues in some States that were directly under the control of the British Raj, those that were once princely states such as Kerala and had outstanding health achievements have not been providing enough resources to health since the late 1980s. It is no wonder then that the situation has deteriorated. Health care continues to be treated like any other private good in this country, although it has certain features that make it on a par with a public good. That is why instead of leaving it to the ‘invisible hand’ of the market, governments around the world became deeply involved in health care. After World War II, most governments in Europe became extensively involved in health care. A notable example is the National Health Service, a publicly funded health-care system in the U.K., set up in 1948. Government health spending now accounts for 80-90% of total health expenditure in most countries of the European Union; public expenditure contributes to less than 30% of the total health expenditure in India.
•As public health-care provisioning becomes more limited and the quality of services deteriorates, people are left with no option but to seek services from private providers, knowing well that the end result could be financially ruinous. Every year, around 60 million people become impoverished through paying health-care bills in India. Worse, more than a fifth of people do not seek health care, despite being unwell, because of their inability to pay for it.
•The experience from other nations that have done relatively well in health suggests that political commitment to health is a prerequisite for improving the health scenario of any country. Thailand, Cuba or Costa Rica have achieved universal health care, although they have taken different routes. Thailand has made quality health care a constitutionally guaranteed right, having undertaken structural reforms in the health sector to achieve goals stated in the Health Act. Even before it started reforms to attain universal health coverage, it began massive investments to build public health facilities in rural areas.
The Cuba story
•Cuba did the same thing many decades ago. Health care is a right there and the government assumes the fiscal and administrative responsibility of ensuring access to free health care.
•The health indicators of Cuba are similar to that of developed countries. With an infant mortality rate of 4.2 per thousand births, this socialist country is among the top three performers in the world. But this was not the scenario five decades ago. In 1959, the infant mortality rate in rural areas was 100 per thousand live births and half of Cuba’s doctors and hospital beds were in Havana. The rural areas had all the problems that U.P. and other underdeveloped States in India still have. However, Cuba’s health-care system has become a model for other countries. This was made possible as the country’s leadership recognised the importance of public health and developing a health-care system based on preventive medicine and not curative care.
•If we want the people of this country to enjoy a health status that is commensurate with that of their counterparts from other middle-income countries and in the region, not only should there be more resources available for health, but also the government’s approach towards health needs to be radically changed.
📰 All that data that Aadhaar captures
The very foundation of Aadhaar must be reconsidered in the light of the privacy judgment
•Predictably enough, the recent Supreme Court order affirming that privacy is a fundamental right sent Aadhaar’s public-relations machine into damage control mode. After denying the right to privacy for years, the government promptly changed gear and welcomed the judgment. Ajay Bhushan Pandey, CEO of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), suddenly asserted, “The Aadhaar Act is based on the premise that privacy is a fundamental right.” He also clarified that the judgment would not affect Aadhaar as the required safeguards were already in place.
Types of information
•The fact of the matter is that Aadhaar, in its current form, is a major threat to the fundamental right to privacy. The nature of this threat, however, is poorly understood.
•There is a common perception that the main privacy concern with Aadhaar is the confidentiality of the Central Identities Data Repository (CIDR). This is misleading for two reasons. One is that the CIDR is not supposed to be inaccessible. On the contrary, the Aadhaar Act 2016 puts in place a framework for sharing most of the CIDR information. The second reason is that the biggest danger, in any case, lies elsewhere.
•To understand this, it helps to distinguish between three different types of private information: biometric information, identity information and personal information. The first two are formally defined in the Aadhaar Act, and protected to some extent. Aadhaar’s biggest threat to privacy, however, relates to the third type of information.
•In the Aadhaar Act, biometric information essentially refers to photograph, fingerprints and iris scan, though it may also extend to “other biological attributes of an individual” specified by the UIDAI. The term “core biometric information” basically means biometric information minus photograph, but it can be modified once again at the discretion of the UIDAI.
•Identity information has a wider scope. It includes biometric information but also a person’s Aadhaar number as well as the demographic characteristics that are collected at the time of Aadhaar enrolment, such as name, address, date of birth, phone number, and so on.
•The term “personal information” (not used in the Act) can be understood in a broader sense, which includes not only identity information but also other information about a person, for instance where she travels, whom she talks to on the phone, how much she earns, what she buys, her Internet browsing history, and so on.
•Coming back to privacy, one obvious concern is the confidentiality of whatever personal information an individual may not wish to be public or accessible to others. The Aadhaar Act puts in place some safeguards in this respect, but they are restricted to biometric and identity information.
Sharing identity details
•The strongest safeguards in the Act relate to core biometric information. That part of the CIDR, where identity information is stored, is supposed to be inaccessible except for the purpose of biometric authentication. There is a view that, in practice, the biometric database is likely to be hacked sooner or later. Be that as it may, the UIDAI can at least be credited with trying to keep it safe, as it is bound to do under the Act.
•That does not apply, however, to identity information as a whole. Far from protecting your identity information, the Aadhaar Act puts in place a framework to share it with “requesting entities”. The core of this framework lies in Section 8 of the Act, which deals with authentication. Section 8 underwent a radical change when the draft of the Act was revised. In the initial scheme of things, authentication involved nothing more than a Yes/No response to a query as to whether a person’s Aadhaar number matches her fingerprints (or possibly, other biometric or demographic attributes). In the final version of the Act, however, authentication also involves a possible sharing of identity information with the requesting entity. For instance, when you go through Aadhaar-based biometric authentication to buy a SIM card from a telecom company, the company typically gains access to your demographic characteristics from the CIDR. Even biometric information other than core biometric information (which means, as of now, photographs) can be shared with a requesting entity.
•Quite likely, this little-noticed change in Section 8 has something to do with a growing realisation of the business opportunities associated with Aadhaar-enabled data harvesting. “Data is the new oil”, the latest motto among the champions of Aadhaar, was not part of the early discourse on unique identity — at least not the public discourse.
•Section 8, of course, includes some safeguards against possible misuse of identity information. A requesting entity is supposed to use identity information only with your consent, and only for the purpose mentioned in the consent statement. But who reads the fine print of the terms and conditions before ticking or clicking a consent box?
•There is another important loophole: the Aadhaar Act includes a blanket exemption from the safeguards applicable to biometric and identity information on “national security” grounds. Considering the elastic nature of the term, this effectively makes identity information accessible to the government without major restrictions.
Mining personal information
•Having said this, the proliferation and possible misuse of identity information is only one of the privacy concerns associated with Aadhaar, and possibly not the main concern. A bigger danger is that Aadhaar is a tool of unprecedented power for mining and collating personal information. Further, there are few safeguards in the Aadhaar Act against this potential invasion of privacy.
•An example may help. Suppose that producing your Aadhaar number (with or without biometric authentication) becomes mandatory for buying a railway ticket — not a far-fetched assumption. With computerised railway counters, this means that the government will have all the details of your railway journeys, from birth onwards. The government can do exactly what it likes with this personal information — the Aadhaar Act gives you no protection, since this is not “identity information”.
•Further, this is just the tail of the beast. By the same reasoning, if Aadhaar is made mandatory for SIM cards, the government will have access to your lifetime call records, and it will also be able to link your call records with your travel records. The chain, of course, can be extended to other “Aadhaar-enabled” databases accessible to the government — school records, income-tax records, pension records, and so on. Aadhaar enables the government to collect and collate all this personal information with virtually no restrictions.
•Thus, Aadhaar is a tool of unprecedented power for the purpose of mining personal information. Nothing in the Aadhaar Act prevents the government from using Aadhaar to link different databases, or from extracting personal information from these databases. Indeed, many State governments (aside from the Central government) are already on the job, under the State Resident Data Hub (SRDH) project, which “integrates all the departmental databases and links them with Aadhaar number”, according to the SRDH websites. The Madhya Pradesh website goes further, and projects SRDH as “the single source of truth for the entire state” — nothing less. The door to state surveillance is wide open.
•What about private agencies? Their access to multiple databases is more restricted, but some of them do have access to a fair amount of personal information from their own databases. To illustrate, Reliance Jio is in possession of identity information for more than 100 million Indians, harvested from the CIDR when they authenticate themselves to buy a Jio SIM card. This database, combined with the records of Jio applications (phone calls, messaging, entertainment, online purchases, and more) is a potential gold mine — a dream for “big data” analysts. It is not entirely clear what restrictions the Aadhaar Act imposes, in practice, on the use of this database.
•In short, far from being “based on the premise that privacy is a fundamental right”, Aadhaar is the anti-thesis of the right to privacy. Perhaps further safeguards can be put in place, but Aadhaar’s fundamental power as a tool for mining personal information is bound to be hard to restrain. The very foundation of Aadhaar needs to be reconsidered in the light of the Supreme Court judgment.
