📰 U.S. trio wins physics Nobel for gravitational waves
Phenomenon was predicted by Einstein a century ago as part of his theory
•U.S. astrophysicists Rainer Weiss, Barry Barish and Kip Thorne and were awarded the Nobel Physics Prize on Tuesday for the discovery of gravitational waves — a phenomenon that opens a door on the extreme Universe.
•Predicted by Albert Einstein a century ago as part of his theory of general relativity, but only detected in 2015, gravitational waves are “ripples” in space-time, as the theoretical fabric of the cosmos is called.
•They are caused by ultra-violent processes, such as colliding black holes or the collapse of stellar cores.
•“Their discovery shook the world,” said Goran K. Hansson, the head of the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences, which selects the Nobel recipients.
•They made their discovery in September 2015 and announced it in February 2016, a historic achievement that culminated from decades of scientific research. And since then, they have clinched all the major astrophysics prizes to be had.
•Mr. Thorne and Mr. Weiss co-created the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) at the prestigious California Institute of Technology, which has taken home 18 Nobels since the prizes were first awarded in 1901. Mr. Barish then brought the project to completion.
1.3 bn light years away
•The first-ever direct observation of gravitational waves was the result of an event some 1.3 billion light years away. “Although the signal was weak when it reached Earth, it is already promising a revolution in astrophysics. Gravitational waves are an entirely new way of following the most violent events in space and testing the limits of our knowledge,” the Academy said.
•Since 2015, the enigmatic ripples have been detected three more times: twice more by LIGO and once by the Virgo detector located at the European Gravitational Observatory in Cascina, Italy.
📰 3-fold rise in extreme rainfall events in Central India
Sudden surges of monsoon winds bring in plenty of moisture, causing brief heavy spells of shower in the region: report
•There has been an average 10% decline in summer monsoon (June to September) rainfall over central India between 1950 and 2015 as a result of weakening of the summer monsoon winds.
•However, the frequency and intensity of extreme rainfall (more than 150 mm per day for two-three days covering an area of 250 by 250 km) events during the same period over central India (from Gujarat in the west to Odisha and Assam in the east) has been on the rise.
•There has been a three-fold increase in widespread extreme events over central India during 1950-2015. In the 1950s, there were two extreme rainfall events per year, while in recent years the number of events has increased to six per year.
•Models suggest further increase in extreme events over most parts of the Indian subcontinent by the end of the century.
•“The weakening of the monsoon winds has resulted in less supply of moisture to the Indian subcontinent. The warm ocean temperatures in the northern Arabian Sea result in large fluctuations in the monsoon winds leading to occasional surges of increased moisture transport. These sudden surges of the monsoon winds bring in plenty of moisture and that is what is causing extreme rainfall events across the central Indian belt,” says Dr. Roxy Mathew Koll from the Centre for Climate Change Research at Pune’s Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM).
Temperature difference
•While the central Indian Ocean has warmed up, the Indian peninsular region has not warmed up compared to other regions in the tropics leading to reduced land-sea temperature difference. “Probably the cooling caused by aerosol and the reduced land-sea temperature difference in recent years is what is causing the weakening of the monsoon winds and decline in monsoon rainfall,” Dr. Koll says.
•At the same time, the northern Arabian Sea is becoming increasingly warm leading to more moist air over the Arabian Sea. In addition, the northern Arabian Sea gets warmer (1-2 degrees C) 2-3 weeks prior to extreme events. As a result, there is 20-40% more evaporation and increased moisture levels over the Arabian Sea before an extreme event. This gets transported over central India resulting in extreme rainfall events. The results were published in the journal Nature Communications.
•“The Arabian Sea supplies more moisture to the extreme rainfall events than the Bay of Bengal and the central Indian Ocean combined,” says Prof. Subimal Ghosh from the Department of Civil Engineering, IIT Bombay and one of the authors of the paper. The study found that the Arabian Sea contributes 36% of the total moisture to central India, while the Bay of Bengal’s is 26% and the Indian Ocean’s is 9%. “Interestingly, land evotranspiration contributes 29% moisture, which is much more than even the Bay of Bengal. Moisture from land evotranspiration is often neglected in monsoon studies,” says Prof. Ghosh.
📰 Can India protect Rohingya, SC asks govt.
Bench rejects Centre’s stance that decision to deport the community is outside the domain of the Supreme Court
•Can India protect a large section of humanity comprising Rohingya women, children, the sick and the old who are “really suffering”?
•This is the question the Supreme Court wants the government to answer.
•The government, meanwhile, said the crisis over its move to deport 40,000 Rohingya was not “justiciable”, that is, the issue outside the Supreme Court’s domain.
•But the court rejected this stand outright.
•“I, for one, believe, from my past experience of 40 years, that when a petition like this comes to us under Article 32 of the Constitution, the court should be very slow in abdicating its jurisdiction,” Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra, who leads the three-judge Bench comprising Justices A.M. Khanwilkar and D.Y. Chandrachud, responded to the government.
•The Centre, represented by Additional Solicitor-General Tushar Mehta, submitted that its August 8, 2017 communication to all the States to identify Rohingya and aid in their deportation was based on certain “executive parameters” such as diplomatic concerns, on whether the country can sustain such an influx of refugees and geographically whether there would be tensions and threat to national security. It denied saying all Rohingya were terrorists, but only “some of them”.
•Faced with stiff resistance from the Bench, the government climbed down to explain that whether an issue was justiciable or not ought to be decided on a case to case basis.
‘Out of sync’
•Senior advocate Fali Nariman, appearing for the Rohingya community, said the government “has gone out of sync” with its August 8 directive for deportation of Rohingya. He submitted that the government’s affidavit claiming the question of deportation of Rohingya was exclusively “within its subjective domain and not justiciable” makes “big inroads into what we thought our Constitution was.”
•He rubbished the government’s claims that the Rohingya refugees will eat into the resources meant for citizens. “Our Constitution is not made up of group rights but individual rights,” Mr. Nariman submitted. Mr. Nariman, who introduced himself as a refugee from British Burma, submitted that the fundamental right to life enshrined in Article 21 protects all “persons,” including refugees who fled persecution in their native countries.
Universal obligation
•He said the obligation to grant asylum was universal. “The Government of India has constantly made efforts to substantiate, enhance the rights of refugees. The August 8 communication is totally contradictory to Article 14. It sticks out like a sore thumb in our nation’s policy towards protection of refugees,” he submitted.
•Mr. Nariman referred to the December 29, 2011 directive which laid out the standard operating procedure and internal guidelines for the Foreigner Regional Registration Offices (FRRO), and if necessary take steps to provide the foreign national with a long-term visa. This had to be done irrespective of religion, gender, etc.
•He said India had been “supportive of burden-sharing, of providing humanitarian assistance,” citing the Nepal earthquake as an instance. The court asked the government to address Mr. Nariman’s submissions that humanitarian concerns of children, women, the sick and the old outweigh justiciability and cannot be viewed in the same light as “everyone”. The next date of hearing is October 13.
•The Rohingya had offered that anyone among them found to be a militant can be proceeded against as per the law. They were replying to the Centre’s claims that the Rohingya community was a threat to national security, easy prey for radicalisation. Their affidavit had referred to India’s strong track record of hosting refugees .
•The Rohingya community, represented by main petitioner Mohammad Salimullah, said the government could not make a “blanket claim that all Rohingya refugees have terror links.”
📰 India set to ink $4.5-bn credit deal with Bangladesh
Arun Jaitley arrives in Dhaka ahead of the signing
•Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley arrived here on Tuesday ahead of India and Bangladesh signing the third line of credit (LoC) agreement involving $4.5 billion to be spent on infrastructure and social sector development.
•“His visit will be marked by the signing of the deal... that was announced during Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s New Delhi visit,” a Bangladesh finance ministry spokesman told reporters.
•He said two agreements for the implementation of the third LoC and the ‘Joint Interpretative Notes on the Agreement between India and Bangladesh for the Promotion and Protection of Investments’ would also be signed in the presence of Mr. Jaitley and his Bangladesh counterpart A.M.A. Muhith.
•“The two countries are also expected to enter into another deal on investment promotion and protection during the visit,” the spokesman said.
•A special aircraft carrying Mr. Jaitley landed at the Bangladesh Air Force base on Tuesday afternoon. Mr. Muhith received his counterpart, who was accompanied by a group of business leaders and senior officials on the three-day visit.
New visa scheme
•The two countries signed the first LoC in August 2010. The second one was inked in March, 2016.
•According to the tour schedule, Mr. Jaitley would call on the Bangladesh premier and inaugurate, along with his counterpart, a new scheme for cashless transactions in visa services run by the State Bank of India on behalf of the Indian High Commission here.
📰 ‘Recovery in energy demand not abiding’
Stressed thermal assets sizeable: ICRA
•A sustained energy demand recovery is still absent and the stressed thermal assets are sizeable at about 60 GW, credit rating firm ICRA said on Tuesday.
Capacity utilisation
•The recent up-trend in electricity demand growth has led to a marginal improvement in the all India thermal PLF (plant load factor or capacity utilisation) to 59.9% for the first five months of 2017-18 as against 59% in the April-August period of last fiscal, ICRA said.
•The government recently introduced the Saubhagya Scheme with a thrust on rural electrification, which will improve an energy demand in the near to medium term in ICRA’s view, if the scheme is implemented in a timely manner.
•In a statement, ICRA said that a sustained demand recovery, however, was still absent and thus energy demand growth from the relatively high tariff paying industrial and commercial segments remained critical for both State distribution utilities and IPPs.
•Also, the stressed thermal capacity (in private IPP (independent power producers) segment remains sizeable at about 60 GW, despite the various policy level initiatives undertaken by the government, the credit rating firm added.
📰 ‘India’s main challenge will be finding jobs amid automation’
Information, communications technology driving unequal world: Adair Turner
•While the global economy is in a “much better position” than it was before last year, India’s major challenge will be to find jobs for its working-age population which is forecast to increase from about 740 million to 1.3 billion by 2050, Lord Adair Turner, chairman of U.K.-based Institute for New Economic Thinking said in an interview.
•Information and communications technology is driving an increasingly unequal world, Mr. Turner said. “For emerging economies such as Africa, a very rapidly growing working population is a major challenge. India is in an intermediate position.”
•Job creation is not expected to pick up in 2017 and 2018 and unemployment in India is projected to increase from 17.7 million in 2016 to 17.8 million in 2017 and 18 million next year, according to a UN Labour report released earlier this year. In percentage terms, unemployment rate will remain at 3.4% in 2017-18, according to the report.
2008 crisis
•The former Chairman of the U.K.’s Financial Services Authority said that at least five decades before the financial crisis of 2008, there had been a surge in private debt. It went from 50% of global gross domestic product in 1950 to 170% in 2007, with most of that debt falling in the category of real estate — mortgage or commercial real estate, he said.
•“That build-up of debt created a situation where more debt was created in real estate, which went up in value. This saw people borrow more money and banks said they can lend money as real estate is going up in value, so it is safe. It goes in this very powerful upward spiral and then it cracks.”
•“It is very important to take a global view of the debt overhang in the economy,” said Mr. Turner, who was in Bengaluru to deliver the Azim Premji University’s ‘Resurrecting the Public’ lecture series.
•“The challenge we now have in this global economy is that the total amount of debt has not gone down. The total debt as a percentage of global GDP has gone up. You are sort of stuck.”
•The existing debt levels are only sustainable if interest rates are very low, he said. “But very low interest rates encourage people to create more debt which may create more problems in the future. We will see the U.S. Federal Reserve now increasing interest rates and maybe the Bank of England a bit. I think, as we get into 2020, we will see interest rates in Japan are exactly where they are today. Zero.”
•“In the eurozone, they are pretty much where they are, which is zero. I think in the U.K. they maybe more than 1% at the most and in the U.S. they may be at 2.5%. So in historical terms, they will still be very low. I don’t think it will go higher than that without pushing the economy back into a recession and so there are some unanswered questions on how we deal with the situation.”
U.S., China
•After 2008, the U.S. and some European countries saw a significant number of households and corporates having to deal with the situation and public debt in the U.S. and in China shot up, Mr. Turner said.
•“Banks will lend to the real estate more so in the future as the information and communications technology don’t need much to invest. Look at how much Facebook had to invest to be worth about $400 billion and compare to how much Henry Ford had to invest in machinery, and people had to invest in steel mills to produce the machinery.
•“This is a world of huge wealth creation without much investment. In this scenario, it is not surprising that a large portion is towards real estate or consumer lending. I do not think we need to stop that. We need to recognise the dangers that come with that and manage the debt.”
•If India has a large concentration of bad debt then “you end up with a festering problem which the free market is not capable of solving.”
•“The free market has a group of people both from the borrower and the lending side who have personal incentives to let the problem roll over for a month or a year. Indian banking system could be as bad or good as any other system which means it will create a real estate boom or bust. I don’t think India is uniquely good at avoiding that.”
‘Industrial class’
•“In India, the problem has been lending for large industrial class. That is different from what we advanced economics face. It is incredibly important too.”
•Mr. Turner said: “The global economy is moderately in a good position for the next two years. But a lot of fundamentals are not addressed. Debt overhang is fundamentally not addressed. Alongside that we are likely to see an increasing effect of information and communications technology on the automation of jobs.
•“I think that is probably what lies behind the extraordinarily low level of wage inflation in developed economies...You don’t see any wage pressure. I think it has something to do with the capacity [building] towards maintaining information technology.”
•“We have to think of universal basic income and what public sector has to do with health, education, infrastructure and cities which are liveable for people of all income levels,” he said.
📰 Awaiting police reforms
Only strong public opinion can move the political class to implement the 2006 Supreme Court directives
•The Indian Police Foundation was inaugurated in 2015 to mount pressure on State governments to implement the directions of the Supreme Court on police reforms (Prakash Singh v. Union of India). The court in 2006 had issued seven binding directions to implement those reforms. It took the court a little over 10 years to give its verdict on the writ petition filed by Prakash Singh and me in 1996. We were happy when the orders came because almost all the submissions made by us and several others such as the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, the Human Rights Commission, and the Ribeiro Committee were accepted. Eleven years have passed, but States have taken only some grudging steps to implement the reforms. September 22 is is observed every year by the Police Foundation as Police Reform Day to create awareness for the much-needed reforms.
Stronghold over the police
•The fact is that political authorities still have a stronghold over the police. When a new government is elected, the first thing it does (as it happened recently in Uttar Pradesh) is to replace the Director General of Police (DGP) of the State. In some cases, this is also happening with the Chief Secretaries. There are a few exceptions, no doubt — the Chief Minister of Bihar changed neither the DGP nor the Chief Secretary, both of whom he inherited from his predecessor under rather acrimonious circumstances.
•The result is that the police even today is not trusted by the people. They perceive the force as being partisan, politicised, and generally not very competent. Nothing confirms this more than the frequent demand for probes by the CBI into crimes which can be handled by Criminal Investigation Departments. Even in the recent murder case of journalist-activist Gauri Lankesh, there was a demand for a CBI probe.
•And what about the CBI? Only a few years back, the Supreme Court had called it a “caged parrot”. If at all, the lock of that cage has become tighter. And very often now, the demand for a CBI probe is accompanied by a Supreme Court-monitored probe.
Implementing Lokpal
•Much of the problem would not have been if the 2013 Lokpal legislation was put in place. The Lokpal would have the powers to oversee the CBI’s work and would ease the burden of the court. However, even the Opposition is not enthusiastic about the Lokpal as parties across the political spectrum have a vested interest in continuing with the present police system.
•Ultimately, it is only strong public opinion that can move the political class to implement the 2006 directives. But the police has to set examples to win public trust. Reform must start at home. Since the political class has a vested interest in the present system, no amount of pressure will work. We will have to fall back on the judiciary, which wants an impartial and professional police force because it knows that the criminal justice system cannot function without a healthy police and investigative agency.
📰 In need of a psycho-economic boost
All drivers of economic growth are sputtering — a fiscal and monetary stimulus would boost ‘animal spirits’
•When a person decides to buy a flat, it reflects his or her optimism about the future. There is confidence that one will have enough income flowing in, to pay for the monthly instalments. This optimism is not because of job security, but because of the belief that one will get a new job, even if one becomes unemployed. The same is true for an entrepreneur setting up a new factory or new business. It’s called risk taking, but that is not to imply reckless gambling. It reflects the investor’s confidence about the future returns on the investment. If that confidence starts to wane, then potential home buyers refrain or postpone their decisions. Investors adopt a wait-and-watch attitude. If everyone in the economy starts becoming extra-cautious, the decline in confidence and economic activity becomes self-fulfilling. As the economy slows down, people say, “See I told you so! It was wise to not invest and take unnecessary risk now.”
•This decline can happen even if the economy is fundamentally sound. What causes investor or home buyer confidence to wane? It could be anecdotes, actual economic evidence, broken trust in government or socio-political developments. Not to overstate this, but there is an element of psychology that keeps the economy chugging. The government’s role is as much to provide the right policy environment, as to provide a psychological atmosphere that is conducive to risk taking about the future, and inspire confidence in the people.
The Keynesian solution
•John Maynard Keynes called these the “animal spirits” which guide buyer and investor behaviour. When those spirits are in a downward spiral, the end result could be recession, if not outright depression. His remedy was to suggest countercyclical policy, which has become the hallmark of Keynesianism. This includes an injection of both fiscal and monetary stimulus. This involves increasing government spending or cutting taxes, or both, and decreasing interest rates. Despite many attempts at discrediting the efficacy of Keynesian remedies, to this day policy-makers continue to repose faith in them. Sure, the effects could last only for a short term, but if that helps the economy into a higher gear, or break out of the “pessimism spiral”, it would have served its purpose.
•We are not quite in a recession, nor are we anywhere remotely near a depression. But the fact is that we are in danger of the self-fulfilling prophecy nature of investment and consumer behaviour. The data need to be restated to understand the seriousness of the situation. GDP growth declining continuously for six quarters in a row, down from 9.2% to 5.7%. Investment share of GDP, which creates new factories and businesses for tomorrow, falling for almost five years. The latest data from the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy show that even the project pipeline is drying up. Newly announced projects at Rs. 84,500 crore are at a four-year low. Even the stalled projects which have been revived are only 6% during this fiscal year, as against 25% last year. The value of stalled projects is at a record high of Rs. 13.2 lakh crore. During the last years of the previous government, projects were stalled due to delays in approvals and clearances, legal disputes and charges of corruption. But these issues were tackled, and yet new projects are not picking up. In fact, in terms of the number of new private sector projects announced in the latest quarter, it is at a 13-year low.
•The short point is that investor enthusiasm is lacking, especially from the private sector. Added to their lack of demand is the reluctance of supply of investible funds.
Cautious banks
•Banks, despite being flush with deposits (partly thanks to demonetisation), are in no mood to extend new credit. This is because of the increasing burden of bad loans (called non-performing assets, or NPAs). The ratio of NPAs has been continuously going up for five years. Either you have to write-off the loans and book losses, or ask shareholders to bring more equity capital. The new bankruptcy code and procedure is promising, but is as yet untested for timeliness and effectiveness. There is also a suggestion to collect all the bad loans (that is, toxic waste) from the various banks and move them to a freshly capitalised bank, the so-called “bad bank”. The bad bank would focus solely on liquidating the collateral, bringing in fresh owners and managers to run distressed companies. Once freed from NPAs, the existing banks can resume lending to the healthy sectors. This is a promising idea as well and worth pursuing. The government cannot shy away from funding the rescue of India’s banking. It has to provide capital to the new “bad bank” or to recapitalise the beleaguered public sector banks, where most of the NPAs reside.
•This is where the Keynesian wisdom of stimulus is worth recalling. All four drivers of economic growth are sputtering. While reviving exports may need boosts like a weaker rupee or more export-linked incentives, consumption and investment sentiment can certainly be boosted by conventional Keynesian tools. Corporate income tax can be reduced to 25% as promised two years ago. Excise taxes on petrol and diesel need to be reduced. These are indirect taxes, hurt the poor more, are regressive and feed into general inflation through logistics and energy costs.
Four steps
•On the spending side, the government can focus on the following four areas. First, provide fresh capital either to existing banks or the new “bad bank”. Second, provide some version of a wage subsidy as an incentive to labour intensive sectors. A version of this was offered to the textile and garment sectors last year, but can be improvised and extended. The successful model of Odisha in the garment sector can be replicated. Third, give a big boost to affordable housing, by funding land acquisition for the builder, and interest rate subvention for the home owner. The States of Kerala and Maharashtra have interesting and replicable models. Fourth, keep a big focus on exporters, especially in labour intensive sectors, including agriculture. This includes a weaker exchange rate, quicker refund of GST credit and expanding the scope of the Merchandise Export from India Scheme and Service Exports from India Scheme.
•All of these are short-term economic stimuli, but can also provide a psychological boost to the animal spirits. Of course, consumer and investor confidence can return and sustain only when the Keynesian boost is buttressed by credibility of implementing longer-term reforms.
📰 The cold facts
It’s vital that India scales up surveillanceto track various influenza viruses
•Ever since the influenza virus known as H1N1 landed on Indian shores during the 2009 pandemic, outbreaks have been an annual occurrence. The worst was in 2015, when 2,990 people succumbed to it. This year the virus has been particularly active; mortality, at 1,873 by the last week of September, is quickly catching up with the 2015 toll. In comparison, official figures show 2016 to be a relatively benign year, with an H1N1 death toll of 265. The problem with these official figures, however, is that they only capture H1N1 numbers, a practice that has been adopted in response to the severity of the 2009 pandemic. But influenza was present in India even before 2009 in the form of H3N2 and Influenza B virus types. Out of these, H3N2 is capable of causing outbreaks as big as H1N1, and yet India does not track H3N2 cases as extensively as it does H1N1. This means that seemingly benign years such as 2016 may probably not be benign at all. Data from outside government surveillance systems are making this fact apparent. For example, a surveillance project for acute febrile illnesses, anchored at the Manipal Centre for Virus Research in Karnataka, has found that influenza accounts for nearly 20% of fevers across rural areas in 10 Indian States — fevers that are often undiagnosed and classified as “mystery fevers”. During the years when the H1N1 burden is low in these regions, H3N2 and Influenza B circulation tends to spike.
•All this indicates that India’s surveillance systems are still poor and underestimate the influenza burden substantially. If numbers are unsatisfactorily tracked, so are changes in the viral genome. As a 2015 commentary by a pair of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology pointed out, India submits a woefully small number of H1N1 genetic sequences to global open-access databases for a country of its size and population. Sequencing is important because it can detect mutations in genetic material that help the virus evade human immune systems, making it more deadly. Because India does not sequence a large enough sample of viral genomes, it would be missing mutations that could explain changes in the lethality of the virus. Put together, the numbers data and sequence data will enable sensible vaccination decisions. Vaccination is the best weapon that India has against this menace, because Oseltamivir, the antiviral commonly deployed against flu, is of doubtful efficacy unless administered early enough. Yet, India has thus far stayed away from vaccinating even high-risk groups such as pregnant women and diabetics, because influenza is thought to be a more manageable public health challenge compared to mammoths such as tuberculosis. Better surveillance of influenza will possibly change this perception by revealing the true scale of this public health issue.
