📰 ‘Fish-lizard’ fossil from Kutch is a Jurassic first
The 5.5 metre ichthyosaur, believed to be at least 90 million years old, points to India’s evolutionary links
•A near-complete Jurassic-era fossil of an intriguing animal that looks like a mashup of a dolphin and lizard, and lived during the twilight of the dinosaurs, has been unearthed in Kutch, Gujarat.
•Ichthyosaurs, or ‘fish- lizards’ in Greek, were large reptiles that lived at the same time as dinosaurs. While many ichthyosaur fossils have been found in North America and Europe, the fossil record in the Southern Hemisphere has mostly been limited to South America and Australia.
•Guntupalli Prasad, a geologist at the University of Delhi, said when a fossil bone from the animal’s skeleton was first found by an Indo-German research team in Kutch in 2016, they suspected it to be a dinosaur. “But the bone was too long and later the whole skeleton was unearthed. It’s the first Jurassic ichthyosaur found in India,” he told The Hindu.
•The 5.5 metre-long skeleton is thought to belong to the Ophthalmosauridae family, which likely lived between 165 and 90 million years ago, when the arid Kutch was a sea. The remains were found among fossils of ammonites and squid-like belemnites, and the way the creature’s teeth were worn out suggest it ate animals with thick, bony coverings, the team of scientists report in the October 25 edition of PLOS ONE.
•Dr. Prasad, one of the authors of the report, notes: “This also throws light on the evolution and diversity of ichthyosaurs in the Indo-Madagascan region of the former Gondwanaland and India’s biological connectivity with other continents in the Jurassic.”
Sparse evidence
•Earlier too, researchers have discovered evidence of ichthyosaurs in prehistoric India. Remnants were reported from Ariyalur, Tamil Nadu in 2016 but these were only fossils of teeth and part of the vertebra. In Kutch, the team reported the finding of vertebral column, ribs, neural spines and a part of the snout.
📰 Legal steps to guard digital payments
Centre to amend law as frauds rise post-demonetisation
•The Home Ministry has asked banks and e-wallet firms to furnish details of the extent of financial fraud reported in the past one year as digital transactions picked up after the Union government implemented demonetisation from November 8, 2016 and scrapped old Rs. 500 and Rs. 1,000 notes.
•The use of mobile wallets and online transactions has spiked since then.
•A high-level committee of the Ministry convened a meeting with officials of banks, e-wallet firms and the Reserve Bank of India on Tuesday to understand the extent of technological misuse and financial frauds committed through digital means.
•A senior government official said the Centre was planning to bring changes to the law to check frauds in the financial sector.
•Representational data available with the RBI show that the value of prepaid payment instruments increased from Rs. 1,320 crore in November 2016 to Rs. 2,760 crore in September 2017.
•By an estimate of security agencies, nearly 10,000 fraud transactions are being reported every month through e-wallet platforms. Pre-demonetisation, the figure stood at 4,000.
•On September 19, Home Minister Rajnath Singh reviewed the preparedness of agencies to check financial cybercrimes, and asked security agencies to strengthen surveillance and legal frameworks to check the menace.
Going unnoticed
•“We do not know the extent of fraud yet as many people do not report it as in some cases it is a small amount. We have asked the banks and e-wallet firms to furnish the data of the way it was being done,” said a senior government official.
•As many as 1,44,496 cybersecurity attacks were observed in the past three years. Information reported to, and tracked by, the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) shows 44,679 cybersecurity incidents in 2014, 49,455 in 2015 and 50,362 in 2016.
📰 Judges cannot decide on troop deployment: Centre
‘That is the exclusive domain of the Central government’
•Judges cannot decide on deployment of troops. It is the fundamental job of the government of the day, and not the judiciary, to decide on the placement of police and armed forces to secure the nation’s borders and maintain law and order internally, the Centre told the Supreme Court on Wednesday.
•The government’s sharp attack was directed at a recent Calcutta High Court order directing the Centre to retain all 15 companies of the Central Armed Police Forces, deployed in the restive districts of Darjeeling and Kalimpong in West Bengal, till October 27 or until further orders. The High Court had countermanded the Centre's directive to withdraw certain companies from the two districts.
Separation of powers
•“The [Calcutta High Court’s] direction ignores and virtually obliterates the very concept of separation of powers. The maintenance of order and the security of the country, which includes the deployment of police and armed forces, is a fundamental facet of the governance of the country, and is a core governmental function of the executive wing of the State. These matters cannot be the subject matter of judicial review, or adjudication by a court,” the petition, filed by advocate S. Wasim A. Qadri and settled by Attorney General K.K. Venugopal, contended.
•The Centre mentioned the petition for urgent hearing before a Bench led by Justice J. Chelameswar, who agreed to refer it for listing before an appropriate Bench of the Supreme Court.
•The petition said the demands on the Central Police Forces were tremendous. “India has a long border and, in order to effectively prevent cross border infiltration of terrorists, the Central Police Forces are also deployed. Obviously, being a high priority consideration, the thinning of border deployment has serious national security implications,” the Centre explained.
•Noting that 61 officers of various Central police forces were martyred this year alone, the government pointed to the various high alert theatres like the Valley, the North East and the Red Corridor States affected by naxal extremism which require heightened presence of forces. Even natural disasters and the holding of elections would require the deployment of these forces.
Pressing situations
•“It would be the exclusive domain of the Central government to decide on the most efficacious deployment of the limited police personnel and resources, to quell pressing situations, varying in gravity, that simultaneously arise in different parts of the country... There is no yardstick by which the Court could assess the need for deployment of Central Police Forces in different States,” the petition said.
•Following unrest in the two districts in West Bengal, the Centre had deployed a total of 15 companies of Central Police Forces in June-July 2017. It said the State’s own police force has 73403 personnel, followed by 20781 personnel in the State Armed Force, 15612 in Home Guards and two I.R. Battalions, besides the Rapid Action Force, Counter Insurgency Force, Eastern Frontier Rifles (EFR) and ‘STRACO’.
•The Centre submitted that its decision was taken after assessing the ground situation. The State government had also concurred.
📰 Tillerson did not pull any punches with Pakistan
U.S. Secretary of State told Islamabad to stop support to terror and pushed for the capture of Haqqani, Al-Qaeda and Afghan Taliban leaders
•In contrast to previous visits by top-ranking U.S. officials, Pakistan has been clearly told this time to shut down support to terror groups, Indian officials told The Hindu on the visit of U.S Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.
•During his interaction with the press after meeting External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj, Mr. Tillerson said the U.S. had called for a special mechanism with Pakistan to share “not just information but action taken” against terror groups.
•“We have extended to Pakistan certain conditions and expectations we have … in particular with regard to these organisations, and the leaders of these organisations,” Mr. Tillerson said.
•The officials said Mr. Tillerson was even more candid during his meetings in Delhi, and they were optimistic that the Pakistani government had got a stern message.
•“There were no half-messages, as in the past. [The Trump administration] is behaving differently from other U.S. administrations, and we must recognise that,” said a senior official present at the meetings between Mr. Tillerson and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Ms. Swaraj and National Security Adviser Ajit Doval here on Wednesday.
Unambiguous message
•“The message given was that either Pakistan must take action against these groups, or the U.S. troops [in Afghanistan] will,” the official added.
•Sources said Mr. Doval, who met Mr. Tillerson on Wednesday morning, began the meeting by asking Mr. Tillerson for his “assessment” of Pakistan’s readiness to take action on terror groups. Mr. Tillerson gave Mr. Doval a full description of his meetings in Islamabad with Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi and Pakistan Army Chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa, who he met together on Tuesday.
•Asked if the U.S. had mentioned the groups such as the Jaish-e-Mohammad and Lashkar-e-Taiba that threaten India the most, a South Block source said, “No specific groups were mentioned [by Mr. Tillerson].”
•It is understood that in Islamabad, Mr. Tillerson pushed for the capture of the Haqqani network chief, Sirajuddin Haqqani, and Al- Qaeda and Afghan Taliban leaders.
•India has consistently objected to any discrimination between terror groups operating in Pakistan. Last week, the U.S. failed to react to Pakistan’s decision to drop terror charges under the Anti-Terrorism Act against LeT chief Hafiz Saeed, the 26/11 mastermind and a terrorist designated by the UN Security Council.
•The statements made by Indian and U.S. officials on Wednesday also contained no references to “cross-border” terrorism that India faces from Pakistan.
Clarity on challenges
•Even so, Indian officials said that after the briefing by Mr. Tillerson, there was some satisfaction about the U.S.’s clarity on the challenges.
•“The U.S. understands that safe havens in Pakistan are the real problem. It may convey that message in different ways, but unlike past governments, U.S. officials are no longer mincing their words,” a senior External Affairs Ministry official said.
•Mr. Tillerson’s tough words in Delhi echoed his remarks in Kabul where he told Pakistan that America’s relations would be “conditional” on Pakistani action against groups including the Taliban. However in Islamabad itself, the U.S. government’s public utterances were more diplomatic.
•After his meeting with Mr. Modi, the External Affairs Ministry said the two leaders had exchanged views on Mr. Tillerson’s travels to Afghanistan and Pakistan this week.
•“PM [Modi] noted the commonality in the objectives of eradicating terrorism, terrorist infrastructure, safe havens and support, while bringing peace and stability to Afghanistan.”
📰 U.S. makes H-1B visa renewals tougher
New rules require a petitioner to re-substantiate his application
•Fresh changes in rules notified by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services for renewal of non-immigrant visas will severely impact H-1B visa holders. Petitions for renewal of H-1B visas, particularly when the underlying facts that supported the original petition have not changed, are currently considered with a presumption of approval, but that will no longer be the case, USISC said in a statement issued late on Monday. Consequently, the burden of proof will be on the petitioner to substantiate his application even when nothing has changed since the previous petition.
•The new rules are in line with the Donald Trump administration’s Buy American, Hire American policy, USCIS said. The new changes were announced even as a comprehensive review of the H-1B programme is under way.
•Primarily, an H-1B worker goes to the USCIS for three types of changes to his status — amendment, transfer and renewal. Amendments are sought when an H-1B employee changes the location within the same company; transfer is sought when he moves from one company to another; and a renewal is sought at the expiry of the visa, which is usually issued for three years at the beginning.
📰 No dilution of India, EU trade pact: official
‘Goal is to have comprehensive FTA’
•Even as India and the European Union are yet to finalise a date for re-launching their Free Trade Agreement negotiations stalled since 2013, both sides are not considering a scaled-down version of the pact with a view to somehow expedite the conclusion of the talks by lowering ambition, an EU official said.
•The negotiations on the Broad-based Trade and Investment Agreement, had begun in 2007 in order to ensure greater access to “each other’s markets for goods, services and to public procurement contracts”, and establish “the framework for investment, including investment protection”.
•At a round table organised by The Hindu BusinessLine and Germany’s Bertelsmann Stiftung, Marika Jakas, Counsellor and Head of Trade and Economic Affairs, Delegation of the EU to India, said, “Our goal is to have a broad...comprehensive FTA. An early harvest scheme [to identify a limited number of areas pending the conclusion of FTA talks] is not... being considered.”
📰 Should robots be nationalised?
What robotisation can offer to the future of work in India
•As we ask ourselves how employment is threatened by technology, we should look at how labour has changed in recent decades. Before we get so attached to the current job market, and feel we must defend it from an eventual robot takeover, we should examine how unfair the labour system has become and how robotics could contribute to change that.
•If properly managed, the robotic revolution could be a chance to free millions of people from a system of exploitation of labour which is unprecedentedly inhumane. Or not.
•In ancient Rome, a slave worked a maximum of six hours a day. A third of the year was spent in festivities. European workers in the Middle Ages had a six-hour work day and spent 150 days in religious celebrations — almost half the entire year off!
•Nothing close to the 13 to 14 hours put in by the average, always-on entrepreneur of our times. Or the 10 hours a regular employee often clocks in, which explains why overwork is causing so many deaths across Asia.
•The Industrial Revolution and the continuous automation of work have morphed us into becoming increasingly less human workers. This is the central premise before looking into what robotisation can offer to the future of work in India.
•Is there also a continuing percolation, in India, from the agricultural sector, through urbanisation and its consequences, into the service and manufacturing sectors? Certainly.
•Could this happen in a more humane way, as easily automated jobs are slowly stolen by robots? Is farming also destined to be substituted by Artificial Intelligence (AI)? Could we then envision a future of a widely urbanised class with more leisure time thanks to robots? Utopia.
•But there may be a way to go in that direction, if we think about the advantages of robotisation being equally distributed among those who will lose their jobs.
•A socially sensitive policy should consider this a chance for the government to gather advantages from higher robotisation and distribute them to the work force by creating job alternatives. Or by providing subsidies and employment systems with less working hours — such as part-time and work from home. Finally, robotised work should distribute earnings to those who will permanently lose their jobs. And this could be done in very specific ways.
A kind of exploitation
•First, we should consider how to capitalise from the current market. The premise for doing so requires a radical change of perspective.
•When we read that in a town in Andhra Pradesh, an AI company hires women and youth and spends some of its profit on education and drinking water for the community, we should not be humbly thankful. We should be worried.
•But what is passed for bringing employment to underdeveloped areas is neo-colonial exploitation at its best. Workers are paid peanuts to build the very same AI that will render them obsolete. This is not explained to them. So they are thankful for an extra little water and infrastructure, in exchange.
•This trick is fooling Western underprivileged people as well. To refine conversation skills, a digital AI assistant needs to be told over and over when it has failed. There are plenty of American college students spending 10 to 30 hours a week, for $10 an hour, on phones or computers as AI supervisors, evaluating search results and chats through sites such as Clickworker. If they understood the ramifications of their work, they might demand to be paid much more.
•This is policy recommendation number one: enforce a high international minimum wage for all data-entry and data-supervision workers. Help people who are “feeding the machine” be better paid for contributing to coding reality into its virtual version.
•There is a more serious issue in the Indian job market. In 1810, the agricultural sector was 90% of the U.S. economy. In 1910, it was down to 30%. In 2010, it was 2%.
•Is this what’s in store for India, where agriculture is still occupying half of the work force? Will it happen faster here? How do we retrain farmers? And where are they to relocate?
•What will happen to “the rejected” as Pope Francis called them, “the forgotten,” as U.S. President Donald Trump labelled them during his campaign?
A new era
•More interestingly, will we move into a “humanistic intelligence” era in which we transform our workers, first with wearable computers (smartwatches and Google glasses are a beginning, the new smartphones operating according to moods, gaze and gestures are the next step), and then with deeper integration, like the Swedish company Biohax, implanting chips under the skin of their employees’ wrists?
•It is called “shortening the chain of command”— from the smart screen era, to the cyborg era.
•At first, technology might not immediately take all our jobs, it will take over our bodies. Of course, it’s already doing that. For example, I wear a hearing aid. Would I wear a bionic eye for sensory and visual augmentation, or for, say, drone operation? Maybe.
•Is this how humans will compete with robots in an intermediary phase? What does it mean for society and its sense of identity, our relationship to our bodies?
•There might be a lot of jobs for our new cyborg selves out there, in what is called the aug-mediated reality. Humans, some argue, are not to be defended, but expanded. So, will we be become transhumanistic, pimped-up cyborgs, with mechanical elements expanding our physical limitations? Isn’t this already happening? Is this the Nietzschean Übermensch we are supposed to become? Shouldn’t policy regulate that as well?
•The focal question here is: as labour is being transformed at its roots, should economic forces be the only thing that matters? Aren’t we in front of an ethical and political, rather than an economic, question? And what if the answer is simply that everyone must benefit from the capital generated by robotisation?
•Shouldn’t we begin to think of an alternative form of ownership of the robots? Shouldn’t they be public property, since they are objects that occupy and operate on public grounds, impacting public economy and nation-wide employment?
•Shouldn’t they be owned by everyone? Should India consider nationalising robots? As ludicrous and anachronistic as it may sound in the post-neoliberal zeitgeist, it is something at least worth opening up for reflection.
•Or could robots owned by private companies be allowed to operate only by purchasing a costly state licence, benefitting society at large or, specifically, displaced workers, thus funding unemployment?
•Is it conceivable to create “job permits for robots” so that 30% of the revenue they raise with their work goes directly to finance the pension funds of the workers made redundant by robotisation?
•This may not be the specific solution, but discussion should begin on these topics, as one of the ways to avoid famine and death possibly brought on by massive unemployment in a relatively short time.
•Carlo Pizzati is an author and professor of communication theory. This text is part of his contribution to the “Technology Foresight Group on the Future of Work in India,” a collaboration between Tandem Research and the International Labour Organisation
📰 Going back to the basics
It is unconscionable that so many children are still out of school
•On page 115 of the World Development Report 2018, the World Bank’s new report which focuses for the first time on education, are two powerful images. They are MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) images taken in Dhaka, Bangladesh, of the brains of two infants aged two-three months. The growth of one infant was stunted while the other was not. The images show the stark difference in brain development between the stunted child and the one who is not stunted. The fibre tracts in the brain of the child who is not stunted are denser, and the connections more elaborate, than those in the brain of the stunted child. This is an example of how intense deprivation can hinder the brain development of young children.
Impact of malnutrition
•The report, titled “Learning to Realize Education’s Promise”, focusses on education. It is the first of the Bank’s annual reports in four decades to do so. There are six main points to note about the report. First, it is good to see that it makes a moral case for education, with a rights-based approach, and sub-sections titled ‘Education as freedom’; ‘Education improves individual freedoms’; ‘Education benefits all of society’.
•Second, one of the most important sections is not about education but about early childhood development. And rightly so, for the report discusses the far-reaching impact of poverty and chronic malnutrition on the physical and mental development of children.
•Poverty undermines a child’s learning. “Severe deprivations—whether in terms of nutrition, unhealthy environments, or lack of nurture by caregivers—have long-lasting effects because they impair infants’ brain development.” The effects of stunting in the early years on physical, cognitive and socio-emotional development prevent children from learning well in later years. “So even in a good school, deprived children learn less.”
Childhood stunting
•The report points out that in low-income countries, stunting rates among children under-five are almost three times higher in the poorest quintile than in the richest. The effects of childhood stunting remain into adulthood. If early childhood development programmes are to compensate for poor children’s disadvantages, they need to be scaled up and resourced for nutritional inputs, along with a focus on antenatal and postnatal care, sanitation, and counselling of parents for effective early child stimulation. Reduction of child stunting should be one of the major moral imperatives before nations today.
•Third, it is good to see that technology is not regarded as a panacea in itself but as something that has the potential to enhance learning — and that the teacher-learner relationship is at the centre of learning. “Technological interventions increase learning — but only if they enhance the teacher-learner relationship.”
•Fourth, the report acknowledges firmly that on the issue of public vs private schools, the results are still mixed: “There is no consistent evidence that private schools deliver better learning outcomes than public schools, or the opposite…In some contexts, private schools may deliver comparable learning levels at lower cost than public systems, often by paying lower teacher salaries. Even so, lower teacher salaries may reduce the supply of qualified teachers over time.”
•Fifth, while the focus on learning is welcome, a wider and more nuanced exploration of the reasons for the learning crisis would have been useful. While school enrolments have increased significantly, massive teacher shortages persist. Further, beyond reading and arithmetic, any meaningful assessment of learning should also consider aspects such as comprehension, problem solving, critical thinking, and innovation. Beyond merely increasing assessment (“Just weighing the pig doesn’t make it fatter,” as the report itself remarks), it is equally important to fund the sector better; improve teacher training; support the continuing professional development of teachers; and help teachers to help the poorest children to learn.
The way forward
•One would have liked to see greater focus on the continuing problems of access and equity, which are still the biggest problems in education. If there is one aspect of education which needs to be quantified and measured in order to make our education systems function better for all children, it is equity. How fair and equitable are education systems? Where are the greatest gaps? Which kids suffer the most from inequitable systems? These questions should be asked as part of an ongoing process of assessment for equity.
•As for access, over 260 million children across the world – equal to a third of the population of Europe – are not even enrolled in primary or secondary school. “In 2016, 61 million children of primary school age —10% of all children in low-and lower- middle-income countries—were not in school, along with 202 million children of secondary school age.”
•And in a world fraught with conflict, schooling suffers. “Children in fragile and conflict-affected countries accounted for just over a third of these, a disproportionate share.”
•It is unconscionable that in the twenty-first century, so many children are still out of school.
📰 Echoes at Doklam
The contours of future boundary talks with Chinaare far from clear
•In his address to the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC), Chinese President Xi Jinping unveiled his vision to make China a great power so that it “leads the world in terms of the composite national strength and international influence.”
•The days to the run-up of the much awaited, once-in-a-five-year event saw some symbolic posturing along the India-China border, especially at Doklam. After a lull following the disengagement, the continued presence of Chinese troops in the vicinity of the stand-off site came to light and a wait and watch game ensued. Recently, the Indian Air Force chief, Air Chief Marshal B.S. Dhanoa, expressed hope that Chinese troops who were in the Chumbi valley for their annual summer exercises would move back at the onset of winter. The Army believes that there could be increased transgressions by China at other vulnerable points along the over 4,000km long Line of Actual Control (LAC). This is possible, if Mr. Xi’s address is any indication.
•While Mr. Xi stressed that China did not “pose a threat to any other country”, he reiterated the centrality of China’s territorial integrity and called on the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to go hi-tech, saying that technology is at the core of combat strength.
Military reforms and tensions
•How this transition unfolds domestically could have a fallout on the border given the tussle between the PLA and Mr. Xi. In the last couple of years, the PLA has been systematically stripped of its power by Mr. Xi, first through the formation of the theatre commands and later in a series of changes in the top leadership. In 2015, Mr. Xi announced reorganisation of the seven military regions into five theatre commands with all three services effectively integrated, which reduced the clout of the PLA generals by bringing the military under stronger grip of the Central Military Commission chaired by him. He has also managed to project the end to the Doklam stand-off to the domestic audience as his victory. As Mr. Xi looks toward consolidating his grip on the Party and the crucial Politburo Standing Committee, it is in his interest to project himself as being firm and decisive in preserving core Chinese national interests.
•However, based on past instances, Beijing has used local disputes to establish a permanent presence, it can be argued that the PLA may stay put in the Chumbi valley using Doklam as a ruse. The 2012 stand-off with the Philippines over the Scarborough Shoal is an example. Therefore, will there be a repeat of the SCS sort of situation on Indian borders? In fact this is exactly what India has attempted to prevent.
•The Indian Army’s unusual assertiveness in stopping PLA personnel from extending a road from their side into the Dokalam tri-junction was as much out of necessity as other considerations. India had no option but to prevent the change of status quo by preventing the PLA from drastically altering the balance at the strategic location.
•As events in the SCS show, the cost of non-intervention is extremely high. With China’s rapid land reclamation and subsequent militarisation, there are now new facts on the ground for Beijing to enforce its claims. In fact, in his Beijing speech, Mr. Xi took credit for the reclamations by saying that “construction on islands and reefs in the South China Sea has seen steady progress” and added a note of caution that while China did not seek global hegemony, “no one should expect China to swallow anything that undermines its interests”. Through a process of normalisation, it is only a matter of time before it is accepted as a fact.
•In that context, even given the bilateral tensions that came with the Doklam stand-off, not responding was never an option. Standing its ground was, in fact, the least escalatory move that New Delhi could have made, given that the cost of intervention at a later stage is disproportionately higher and the risk of confrontation even so.
Other irritants
•Adding to this are other issues of disagreement such as India’s refusal to be a part of Beijing’s grand plans with the Belt and Road Initiative, citing sovereignty issues apart from deepening engagement with the U.S., and a jostling for space in the Indian Ocean Region. The stalemate has been generally viewed as a victory for India and China would not want to be perceived to be weak by other countries in the region.
•So, it is highly likely that China will test India in other areas. But one thing is certain. The ground status along the LAC has changed forever. How this will affect the contours of future boundary talks is still not clear. As Mr. Xi rolls out his grand vision, the ramifications could be much wider and far beyond the borders.
