📰 Consent key factor in defining sexual assault, says Delhi HC
“Accused may have misread the ‘no’ of the woman as a ‘yes’”
•Is a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ from a woman to a sexual act really a ‘yes’ or ‘no’? The Delhi High Court asks.
•The High Court discusses the various “models” of sexual consent in the modern world. The debate is part of an 82-page judgment which acquits film-maker Mahmood Farooqui in a rape case giving him the benefit of the doubt that he might have misread the ‘no’ of the woman as a ‘yes’.
•In normal parlance, consent would mean voluntary agreement of a woman to engage in sexual activity without being abused or exploited by coercion or threats, Justice Ashutosh Kumar, who authored the verdict, observes.
‘Affirmative model’
•The consent can be revoked any moment. “Thus, sexual consent would be the key factor in defining sexual assault as any sexual activity without consent would be rape,” the judgment says.
•On the “various models of sexual consent”, the judge starts with the “traditional and the most accepted” one, which is the “affirmative model” where a “yes is yes and no is no.”
•But the judgment goes on to tackle a situation where a woman’s affirmative consent or positive denial is not asserted, but conveyed in an “underlying/dormant” fashion, leading to a “ confusion in the mind of the other.” The court says there are “differences between how men and women initiate and reciprocate sexual consent.”
Gender equality
•“The normal construct is that man is the initiator of sexual interaction. He performs the active part whereas a woman is, by and large, non-verbal. Thus, gender relations influence sexual consent,” Justice Kumar notes. But this may not be true in the case of modern society where gender equality is the “buzzword”, Justice Kumar adds.
📰 India, S. Korea to upgrade FTA at ‘earliest’
New Delhi wants its English, yoga teachers to get opportunities to offer services
•Even as the India-South Korea Free Trade Agreement (FTA) will be expanded soon to boost bilateral trade and investment, New Delhi has voiced concerns about the low utilisation of the FTA by India due to the ‘complicated’ provisions in the pact as well as South Korea’s regulations.
•According to official sources, the recent bilateral talks in Seoul saw India cite the difficulties being faced by its English teachers in getting permission to teach in South Korea. Though, going by the FTA, Indian English language teachers should be getting opportunities to teach in primary and secondary schools in South Korea, this is not being implemented effectively in practice. This is because the ‘English Program in Korea’ (EPIK) stipulates that those eligible to teach English in South Korea must “be a citizen of a country where English is the primary language.”
South Africa example
•The EPIK specifies that “EPIK teachers must be citizens of one of the following countries: Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, U.K, U.S., or South Africa.” India has now asked that it be included in the EPIK country-list by pointing out that South Africa was on the list though that country has 11 official languages including Afrikaans, and English was only one of them.
•India is also keen on sending its yoga teachers for short-term work while Seoul has stated their services may not be needed since many Koreans are now learning yoga in India and returning to teach it in South Korea.
•On the goods side, India is keen that norms are eased to upgrade the FTA in a way that Indian goods get greater market access.
•Since the implementation of the FTA in 2010, India’s trade deficit with South Korea has increased from about $5 billion to more than $8 billion.
•To ensure greater market access for Indian products, India is seeking a set of mutually accredited bodies for export inspection.
📰 PM launches ‘Saubhagya’ plan for household electrification
Says welfare of the poor is linked to the identity of the NDA government
•The welfare of the poor is linked to the identity of the NDA government, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said here on Monday.
•He was speaking at the launch of a Rs. 16,000 crore scheme, Saubhagya, under which households across the country that have no access to electricity, will be given power connections free of cost.
Free connections
•“Under the PM Sahaj Bijli Har Ghar Yojana (Saubhagya), every household in the country, whether it is in a village or a city or in a far-flung area, will be given an electricity connection. No price will be charged for the poor to get an electricity connection, and the government will go to their houses to give them the connection,” Mr Modi said on Monday evening.
•The government will bear the expected Rs. 16,000 crore cost of giving electricity connections to the four crore households in the country, which the Prime Minister regretted are yet to get any electricity and haven’t seen a light bulb. “It’s been over 125 years when the famous scientist Thomas Alva Edison invented the bulb and said: ‘We will make electricity so cheap that only the rich will burn candles’,” Mr. Modi stressed, highlighting that it was unfortunate many households were still lit only with candles or lanterns.
‘Dreams of the poor’
•“Forget about conveniences; the women of the house have to cook in the dark, which is why most of them are under pressure to try and finish the cooking before the sun sets,” Mr. Modi said after inaugurating Deen Dayal Urja Bhavan, a green building built by the ONGC.
•Arguing that few would have imagined a government that would give bank accounts to 30 crore poor people, insure 15 crore people at a cost of 90 paise per day and reduce the price of stents and knee replacements, the Prime Minister said the dreams of the poor were the dreams of his government.
📰 India’s refining capacity expansions lags growth in fuel demand
Growth in demand for oil products rising faster than refining capacity added
•India may export fewer fuels in the next four years as growth in the demand for oil products is rising faster than new refining to produce them is being added, an Essar Oil company executive said on Monday.
•“Over the next three to four years, other than a few brownfield (refinery expansions), we really don’t see any major expansions coming in,” B. Anand, chief executive officer of Essar Oil told S&P Global Platts APPEC conference in Singapore.
Refined fuels demand
•India’s rising disposable income has helped boost its demand for refined fuels, including gasoline, jet fuel and liquid propane gas (LPG), but its capacity to keep up with this demand may be strained in the coming years.
•With only about 3.50 lakh barrels per day (bpd) of refining capacity being added through new greenfield projects over the next four years, India’s dependence on LPG imports may rise while limiting its exports of oil products such as gasoline and diesel so it can cope with its domestic demand, Mr. Anand said.
•Essar runs an oil refinery in Vadinar, the western Indian state of Gujarat, that can process four lakh bpd of crude oil.
•“The possibility is always there but its still early days,” said Mr. Anand when asked if the company was considering expanding its refining capacity to help meet the increase in India’s fuel demand.
Business consolidation
•With Essar Oil’s recent ownership change, Mr. Anand told Reuters the company was currently focused on consolidating its businesses.
•In August, Russian oil major Rosneft and its partners — global trader Trafigura and Russian fund UCP — purchased a 98.26% stake in Essar Oil in a deal announced in October.
•India is a net importer of LPG, a fuel used in coking and heating, and a net exporter of other products such as gasoline, jet fuel and diesel.
📰 Database soon of savings schemes linked with Aadhaar
Cabinet Secretariat has directed that all GPF, EPF, PPF account data be seeded
•The Cabinet Secretariat is keen on a central database of government and private sector employees who have subscribed to the general provident fund (GPF), public provident fund (PPF) and employees’ provident fund (EPF) with Aadhaar as the primary identifier.
•It has directed the various departments monitoring such savings schemes to ensure that 100% Aadhaar seeding of all salaried accounts takes place by December 31, according to the minutes of the meeting seen by The Hindu .
•The proposal came up in a meeting chaired by the Cabinet Secretariat with the Ministry of Finance, Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG), Ministry of Communications and Information Technology and the Ministry of Labour and Employment on August 25 to discuss the “interoperability of savings schemes” and linking them to Aadhaar.
•“The objective of meeting is to deliberate on Aadhaar linking of GPF, PPF and EPF accounts of employees, examine the possibility of a centralised repository of employees’ fund details with Aadhaar as the primary identifier and establishing portability of fund accounts across organisations,” Peeyush Kumar, Joint Secretary [Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) Mission], Cabinet Secretariat, said in the meeting.
•The Department of Economic Affairs informed that small savings schemes, including PPF, were operated by post offices, public sector and private banks. The Cabinet Secretariat asked the Ministry of Finance to examine whether a centralised platform of all savings schemes was being worked out as all banks had their own systems in place.
Employees’ information
•For government employees, the Ministry of Finance said that it is developing Employees’ Information System, an online salary application system, which may also be used to maintain information related to GPF.
•While EPF is the savings scheme for private sector employees, the GPF is meant for government employees and PPF can be subscribed to by all workers.
•The Department of Posts informed the Cabinet Secretariat that 4.7 crore out of 56 crore PPF accounts in post offices were linked with Aadhaar. “All stakeholder departments to ensure 100% Aadhaar seeding of GPF, PPF and EPF accounts by December 31, 2017” the Cabinet Secretariat directed.
📰 ‘Intervention, rethinking needed to stir demand’
Centre, States should step up capital spending in this fiscal
•Economic growth in India has weathered the global tail winds over the last few years and the economy is well equipped to move to a higher growth trajectory in the near future.
•However, subdued growth in the last few months, coupled with the slowdown in exports perhaps calls for some intervention and rethinking to push investments and demand in the economy. One of the critical contributions made by the government to economic growth comes from its capital spending on areas such as roads, railways, irrigation projects, affordable housing and building other productive assets.
•These tend to have a multiplier effect on economic growth as higher spending on projects creates jobs which further creates greater demand for goods and services in the economy. In many cases, we find that the finances are not a problem. Implementation bottlenecks need to be addressed. For example, the National Infrastructure Investment Fund (NIIF) has sufficient funds to take over sound assets that are stranded due to paucity of funds.
Special infra bonds
•The other option that the government could explore is to issue special bonds for large infrastructure spends in railways and other projects in roads and highways, bridges to name a few.
•The recent PPP option announced for low cost housing is innovative as it targets issues in risk allocation. Similar models can be offered to other infrastructure sectors where private investments can come in.
•Clauses on renegotiation and grievance redressal need to be included in such policies as absence of these have stranded several projects in the past.
•In the current year, capital expenditure of not only the central government but also the state governments should be stepped up. Even if this leads to some breach in the fiscal consolidation target, this may be relaxed for a year, as suggested by the FRBM Act for exceptional circumstances.
Trimming bank holdings
•One area of concern that needs immediate attention is to do with bank recapitalisation. This has become even more imminent given the stress caused by the NPAs. The government can look at raising this capital without putting pressure on the balance sheet by trimming its large holdings in these banks.
•This will enable the banks to restore their financial health and provide an opportunity to the retail capital market.
•The government has also been concerned about a slowdown in job creation.
•While growth revival through public spending will itself create jobs especially in the construction sector, it is also necessary to focus on the labour-intensive sectors. It is time to recast labour laws and allow fixed term employment contracts ensuring more flexibility.
•The government’s recent initiative on setting minimum wages is a move in the opposite direction and should be reconsidered.
•To quickly restore confidence among businesses, the government needs to resolve issues related to GST especially for the small and medium sector.
•A clear and simple framework needs to be defined and instituted for claiming input tax credit. Problems faced by exporters such as withdrawal of duty drawback benefit need to be addressed immediately. In the near to medium term, reducing the number of rates under GST and expanding its coverage to include electricity, oil and gas, alcohol and real estate at the earliest should be a priority.
•The country has been fortunate to have two successive years of normal monsoon and good agricultural production.
•There is need to catalyse FDI in organized food retail which can create a supply chain transformation and strengthen the linkages between farmers and markets.
RBI’s supporting role
•The RBI also needs to play a role in providing support to the economy. For one, it needs to place some priority on growth while deciding on monetary policy.
•Having switched to an inflation-targeting regime, the monetary policy committee seems to be ignoring the weak growth trends while setting interest rates.
•The policy repo rate of 6% does seem excessively high for an economy that is facing recessionary pressure.
•The RBI could outline a plan of cutting interest rates over a period of time.
•Further, the exporters should have access to easily available credit.
•This can be done by expanding interest rate subvention from the current rate to 4% and allowing commercial banks to lend more to SME exporters or tweaking working capital norms.
📰 Diary of a very long year
A year after the surgical strikes across the Line of Control, India must recover its role as a regional stabiliser
•“The surgical strike was a point we wanted to drive home, that the Line of Control is not a line that cannot be breached. When we want to, we will be able to breach it, go across and strike when we need. This was the message we wanted to convey and we did,” Lt. Gen. Devraj Anbu, the Northern Army Commander, stated in a recent press conference at his headquarters in Udhampur.
The big picture
•It has been one year since the special forces of the Indian Army carried out surgical strikes to destroy terror launchpads in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir on September 29, 2016. It is important to take stock at this point on how India-Pakistan bilateral relations and the regional security situation have evolved over the past year since the strikes. Showing no appetite for a bilateral rapprochement, the two acrimonious neighbours have limited their interactions to firing across the borders in Jammu and Kashmir and calling each other names in global forums. At the United Nations General Assembly a few days ago, for instance, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj termed Pakistan a “pre-eminent exporter of terror” — to which Pakistan’s Permanent Representative to the UN, Maleeha Lodhi, responded: “India is the mother of terrorism” in South Asia.
•The future direction of the foremost regional forum, the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), remains unclear after India dropped out of the 2016 Islamabad summit in the wake of the Uri terror attack. (The summit was eventually postponed.) The regional security situation remains embattled, thanks to confused American policies in South Asia, continuing turmoil in Afghanistan, heightening India-China rivalry, and the India-Pakistan hostility.
Regional stability
•From a regional stability point of view, the surgical strikes do not seem to have had much of an adverse impact. The fact that Pakistan neither acknowledged the attacks nor responded in kind shows that the general deterrence between the South Asian nuclear rivals remains intact. It is easy to talk about nuclear use and threaten nuclear retaliation, as Pakistan has been doing for long. It is, however, not easy to translate such talk into action. In that sense, the surgical strikes have called Pakistan’s nuclear bluff. And that certainly is good news for regional stability.
•But such higher-level stability seems to have come with heightened lower-level instability — and that is the bad news. There are two sets of challenges that are more apparent today, one year after the surgical strikes. One, the India-Pakistan escalation ladder has become far more precarious today it has ever been in the past one and a half decades, i.e. since the ceasefire was agreed to in 2003. The recurrent, and almost daily, occurrence of border battles between the two militaries in Jammu and Kashmir today have a worrying potential for escalation to higher levels. The border stand-offs often lead to, as is evident from the data from the past 15 years, military, political and diplomatic escalation as well as contribute to escalating an ongoing crisis.
•While this was common even prior to the surgical strikes, the September 2016 operation has made ceasefire violations more worrisome in at least two ways: first, Pakistan has been retaliating ever since the surgical strikes by increasing the pressure on the frontlines; and second, surgical strikes have reduced the critical distance between ceasefire violations and conventional escalation. While stealthy surgical strikes may not, strictly speaking, qualify as conventional escalation, they certainly reduce the psychological distance between sub-conventional violence and conventional escalation in the classical sense. That sure is bad news for regional stability.
•The second challenge is more practical than theoretical. Conventional escalation as discussed in the academic/policy literature tends to put too much emphasis on pre-conceived and war-gamed escalation scenarios. However, surgical strikes could easily offset the logic behind such familiar and analytically elegant scenarios. The perils of preventive strikes, in other words, are unpredictable. Preventive strikes are pregnant with immense potential to lead up to a ‘competition in risk-taking’, a tendency already prevalent on the frontlines of the India-Pakistan border in J&K. Put differently, preventive strikes in hyper-nationalist bilateral settings could defy our expectations and go out of control, with disastrous implications.
Deteriorating environment
•Have the surgical strikes helped the country’s overall national security environment? The Central government argues that surgical strikes have been a spectacular success. Notwithstanding the more conceptual challenges I have explained above, let’s try and break down this claim to see if indeed surgical strikes have improved our national security in plain practical terms. The first obvious question to ask is whether the strategy of punishment has worked vis-à-vis Pakistan.
•There are two reasons why the strategy of punishment may not have worked. For one, a strategy of punishment requires consistency and commitment. The momentum achieved by the surgical strikes was not followed up (despite several attacks thereafter), nor was the government committed to its declared determination to respond firmly to terror strikes, thereby lacking in both consistency and commitment. Second, and more importantly, Pakistan’s responses thereafter of supporting insurgency in Kashmir, aiding infiltration across the border, and allegedly supporting attacks on the Indian army convoys and bases continued without much reaction from New Delhi. This has led to a visible lack of credibility on New Delhi’s part which makes one wonder whether, bereft of domestic political uses, there was any strategic planning behind the September operation.
•By all accounts, India’s national security environment is fraught today. Terror attacks in Kashmir continue to break the calm. Consider Gen. Anbu remarks: “Large number of terrorist camps and launch pads exist across south and north of Pir Panjal, they have not decreased... Launch pads and terrorist camps have increased since last year.”
•Let’s also look at some figures from J&K. Credible media reports show that 110 militants, and 38 army personnel were killed between January and September 2016 (i.e. prior to the surgical strikes). However, since the surgical strikes, at least 178 militants and 69 Army personnel have been killed. Forty-four army personnel were killed between January and September this year, compared to 38 last year between January and September (including those killed in the Uri Army base attack). One might argue that the terrorist casualties have also gone up. While that is true, more militants killed can be a barometer of the level of militancy too.
•Surgical strikes, then, may have been a tactical victory for New Delhi, but its strategic value is far from settled.
The big picture
•With two hostile neighbours on either side, terror attacks against India on the rise, and the South Asian neighbourhood unsure of India’s leadership any more, New Delhi has a lot to be concerned about the continuation of its pivotal position in the region and the nature of its future engagement with it. The events since September last year have further contributed to South Asia’s regional ‘insecurity complex’. For a country that has traditionally been the regional stabiliser, New Delhi seems to be quickly embracing the virtues of geopolitical revisionism. The costs of aggression, self-imposed regional exclusion and an absence of strategic altruism are bound to become starker sooner or later.
📰 Waiting for a signal
The Railway Minister must put a safety upgrade above plans for punctuality and new trains
•Every time there is a change of guard in the Railway Ministry, expectations are raised that the new minister will cut the Gordian knot by focussing on issues that will enable the Indian Railways to recoup from past excesses. This also holds true for the new Railway Minister, Piyush Goyal. It is not as if the problems cannot be addressed, but those who have to address them tend to focus on issues that may be important in themselves but are not necessarily the ones that will enhance the performance of the Railways. Is this out of ignorance? Or are these issues ‘insignificant’? Or are they a political hot potato? It is anybody’s guess.
•For decades the lack of consistent political direction has affected the Railways. The country lacks civilian expertise on railway matters and only a few politicians are interested in the railways. Railway officers are professional and have the expertise. However, results are determined by the Ministry-Railway Board relationship and how much the Minister is willing to follow professional advice, especially when it does not gel with the political compulsions of pandering to constituencies. The results are a haphazard introduction of trains, subsidising passenger fares by overcharging freight, investment in unwanted new facilities, and modernisation and induction of new technologies without a plan. The fallout of all this is a balkanisation of the organisation on departmental lines, with each following its own narrow interests. Decision-making revolves around pursuing immediate goals that can show the department in a good light.
Safety concerns
•That this state of affairs has led to a breakdown of systems is exemplified in the case of the Puri-Haridwar Utkal Express derailment in Uttar Pradesh in August, where over 20 passengers lost their lives and scores were injured. Safety is not something that can be separated from the normal functioning of the Railways and is a window that reveals the underlying health of the system. The accident shows that the numbers of trains have now reached a level where field staff are unable to carry out maintenance without cutting corners. In this case, track maintenance staff had decided to replace a defective glued joint even though the section control staff had refused to block trains from entering the section that was to be repaired. Repair work involved cutting out the defective joint and welding in a new one. Trying to carry this out without stopping trains was an invitation for disaster. If this was an isolated case, then the case could have been closed by punishing the guilty. But it appears that the practice of repairing tracks without blocking trains is quite widespread, which is cause for concern.
•The situation is the outcome of pursuing three inconsistent goals at the organisational level. These are: moving more people by continuously adding trains even when sections are saturated; focussing on increasing speed and punctuality; and diverting freight earnings to subsidise passenger fares. These are incompatible with the declared objective of safety, especially when there is a shortage of capacity to run existing services. Unless the numbers of trains can be brought down to what the system can handle without cutting corners in track, signalling and rolling stock maintenance, there is really no way to make the system both safe and punctual. The problem is further exacerbated by a lack of money to replace old assets or purchase spares. The Utkal train accident is a distressing example of how incompatible organisational goals connect to unsafe behaviour at the field level.
•It can be done
•The task before Mr. Goyal may be politically challenging but is doable technically. He has to make difficult political decisions such as cutting back on trains on saturated sections and putting punctuality on the back burner, at least until the system can recoup its capacities. He has to accept that time has to be allotted for maintenance systems to stabilise even at the cost of delaying trains. His aim must be to restore the strong culture that underpinned every decision in the field — that no unsafe condition would be allowed to exist and be addressed even at the cost of delaying or slowing down trains. For this, the judgment of the supervisory staff must be respected. There is also a need to restore the well-established practice of field inspections at all levels to grasp what is happening in the field. The energies of field officers should not be sapped by meaningless drives and responding to social media as it diverts their attention from their main job of oversight and correction of divergences from standard procedures. He needs to ensure money for maintenance and replacement of aged assets. This should be done by freeing freight from subsidising passenger fares through a subvention from the general Budget. Which path will Mr. Goyal choose? Will he give the Railways the space to recoup or will he follow the beaten path of pushing goals that are incompatible with enhancing safety?
📰 Worrying downgrade
Removing the snow leopard from the Red List must not affect conservation efforts
•The elusive and charismatic snow leopard has lost its endangered status in the Red List of the International Union for Conservation of Nature, causing genuine worry among wildlife biologists, who believe this sends out the wrong signal to those working to protect it. If the argument for a downgrade to vulnerable status from endangered is that conservation actions have reduced the threat to the cat, there is an equally persuasive response on how little scientists know about its population health, given its remote habitat in the alpine zones of the Himalayas and trans-Himalayas. As a major range country, India has worked to protect these animals, and even launched a programme on the lines of Project Tiger for its conservation, covering 128,757 sq. km of habitat in Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh. There is also an upcoming international collaborative effort, the Global Snow Leopard and Ecosystem Protection Program, involving the countries that make up the range of this graceful animal. It is vital that this momentum should not be lost merely on account of the technicality that the estimated numbers have crossed the threshold for an ‘endangered’ classification, which is 2,500. If anything, studies on its vulnerability have to be intensified, and the task of monitoring its entire habitat of high mountains speeded up.
•It would be a disservice to conservation if governments shift their focus away from the big challenges to the snow leopard’s future: trafficking in live animals in Central Asia, and hostility from communities because of its attacks on livestock. India handled the problem of the cat preying on goats, sheep, donkeys and other animals by roping in communities in conservation, and compensating them for any losses. An insurance programme in which residents of a part of Spiti Valley in Himachal Pradesh participated also worked well. New research indicates that even when wild prey is available, the attacks on livestock by snow leopards have cumulatively been on the rise. The response to this finding must be to insulate the owners from losses and encourage them to move away from traditional pastoral grazing. A more fundamental worry is over the likely loss of habitat owing to changing climate patterns. Fortunately, research models indicate that there are considerable stretches of steppes in High Asia that could withstand climate-related changes in the greater Himalayan region, creating refuge lands for snow leopards. Today, the factors that pose a threat to the species remain unchanged, and the IUCN down-listing, which changes the classification since 1986, should not be misread by policymakers. If conservation has protected the cat, it must be strengthened by enlarging protected areas in all the range countries, and keeping out incompatible activities such as mining and human interference.
📰 Solving food challenges with more research
Linking agricultural and nutritional outcomes is crucial
•The world’s population is booming. According to estimates, the global population is likely to exceed 9 billion by 2050, with 5 billion people in Asia alone. The capacity to produce enough quality food is falling behind human numbers. Food production in the region must keep pace, even as environment sustainability and economic development are ensured. The answer to these challenges lies in research for sustainable development. As the second goal of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals says: “End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition, and promote sustainable agriculture.”
Investing in research
•India’s fivefold increase in grain production over the past 50 years is largely the result of strong scientific research that has focussed on high-yielding crop varieties, better agronomic practices, and pro-farmer policies. However, India continues to face challenges such as food insecurity and malnutrition, particularly in rural areas.
•Providing the world’s growing urban population with safe and healthy food requires both a rural and a peri-urban agricultural movement — a huge challenge, but also an opportunity for ingenuity. Integrating agricultural production, nutrition, and health is emerging as a key focal point throughout Asia, with policymakers shifting their attention to the role of biodiversity and the power of local farming systems to improve nutritional status.
•There is considerable potential in targeting underused crops such as millets, pulses, and vegetables as a sustainable means of increasing agricultural production and improving nutrition and health in high-need areas. In one project, researchers tested the sustainable use of traditional crops, vegetables, and fruit trees, as well as greater livestock diversity, to increase income and improve food and nutrition security in rural India. This project demonstrated that in three Indian “agro-biodiversity hotspots”, home gardens could provide households with up to 135 kg of legumes, vegetables, tubers, leafy greens, and gourds per year — more than double the amount of vegetables they were buying in local markets. These crops add value to existing farming systems by providing an additional source of income and/or more nutritious food for the family. The Food Security Act of 2013 was welcome, as was the inclusion of millets in the Public Distribution System as millets are superior to common grains in many ways and are also climate-resilient. Bio-fortification is also important in overcoming hidden hunger caused by micronutrient deficiencies such as iron, iodine, zinc, vitamin A, and vitamin B12.
Empowering women
•Studies show that women make up nearly half of agricultural labourers, yet they carry out approximately 70% of all farm work. Women are among the most disadvantaged because they are typically employed as marginal workers, occupying low-skilled jobs such as sowing and weeding. Our research shows that empowering women is one of the best ways to improve nutrition. Research needs to continue focussing on the needs of women farmers to ensure that they are the direct recipients of development impacts, such as access to markets and income, to improve theirs and their children’s access to adequate and diversified diets.
•Most importantly, it is crucial to continue to identify issues and seek evidence-based solutions through research. Building on the momentum of recent efforts by the government to improve understanding of India’s nutritional situation, there is considerable potential in building partnerships to extend the reach of research for development and to improve the connections between agricultural and nutritional research with extension services and policy. Taking a multisectoral approach that links agricultural and nutritional outcomes will help India sustainably grow, feed its people, and maintain the agricultural sector over the coming decades.
•India’s research community is poised to be a leader in meeting new food challenges by increasing food quantity and quality to improve food security and nutrition. The world needs to tap into India’s research excellence to experiment, innovate, share knowledge, and scale up effective solutions.
📰 Removing toxic metals from tannery waste
Researchers find that a fungal biomass does the job
•Removing hexavalent chromium from industrial effluents, particularly untreated tannery waste, will become easier and more efficient thanks to the work by a team of researchers from the Indian Institute of Chemical Biology (CSIR-IICB), Kolkata. Importantly, the heat-dried fungal biomass converts Cr(VI) — which is neurotoxic, genotoxic and a carcinogen — to a non-toxic trivalent form of chromium, thus eliminating the problems of disposing Cr(VI)-containing waste. Cr(VI) is found in very high concentration in tannery waste. The results were published in the journal, Scientific Reports.
•A team led by Sucheta Tripathy from the Structural Biology and Bio-Informatics Division at IICB isolated a fungus, Arthrinium malaysianum , and used the fungus biomass to remove Cr(VI). In experiments carried out in the lab using potassium dichromate solution, the adsorption capacity of the biomass was found to be as high as over 100 mg per gram of dry weight. In the case of untreated tannery waste, the fungal biomass was able to remove over 70% of Cr(VI). It can also remove other toxic metals such as lead and arsenic, which are normally found in tannery waste.
•The positively charged functional groups found on the surface of the fungus binds to Cr(VI) ions. These groups were found intact even after heat drying. The functional groups have more ability to adsorb the negatively charged Cr(VI) through strong electrostatic attraction in acidic conditions. “Though the tannery waste is slightly alkaline, the fungus was still able to adsorb heavy metals,” says Rajib Majumder from the Structural Biology and Bio-Informatics Division at IICB and the first author of the paper. Once Cr(VI) gets adsorbed, the reducing functional groups found on the fungus converts it to Cr(III), which is not toxic. “The efficiency of conversion of Cr(VI) to Cr(III) was unaffected even when the concentration of Cr(VI) was increased 10 times,” he adds.
•Besides adsorbing and converting the toxic form of chromium to a non-toxic form, the fungus biomass can also be reused by removing the adsorbed material. “We were able to reuse the biomass three times efficiently, beyond which it became unusable,” says Mr. Majumder.
•Having tested the ability of the heat-dried fungus biomass in removing chromium and other heavy metals, the team is working to immobilise the biomass on a glass or ceramic substrate. “We are trying to produce a biomaterial to increase the surface area for real-time applications,” Mr. Tripathy explains.
