📰 Navy steps up patrolling of Indian Ocean Region
Aims to check Chinese dominance in key corridors
•The Indian Navy is broadening its patrol areas in the Indian Ocean Region to cover all choke points in the face of increasing maritime threats, its chief Sunil Lanba told The Hindu.
•“Last year, we had a relook at our deployment pattern and we reached a consensus within the Navy to have a mission-based deployment so that our areas of interest can be kept under permanent surveillance. So the ingress and egress routes of the Indian Ocean Region are being kept under surveillance so that we have better awareness and know what is happening,” Admiral Lanba said on the sidelines of the first Goa Maritime Conclave (GMC), which saw the participation of 10 Indian Ocean littoral states.
•Under the mission-based deployment, 12 to 15 ships are now permanently deployed at the choke points and crucial sea lanes of communication.
Reference to China
•Addressing the GMC, Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman had expressed concern that “extra-regional nations maintain near permanent presence” in the region, in an oblique reference to China. The Chinese have been sending ships to the northern Indian Ocean in the name of anti-piracy operations and over the last two to three years on average about 8-10 ships have been deployed. This August, the number shot up to 14.
•Apart from getting access to several ports and facilities in the Indian Ocean, China recently opened its first overseas military base in Djibouti in the Horn of Africa, giving it the ability to monitor across the Gulf of Aden and the Persian Gulf. “Now”, former Navy Chief Admiral Arun Prakash told The Hindu, “it is imperative that our Navy should be more visible in our own waters.”
•“Visibility is an important part of peacetime signalising,” he explained.
•Vice Admiral Shekhar Sinha, former Western Naval Commander, said China, a huge importer of energy, has been trying to get past the Malacca dilemma, a critical choke point, from which most of its supplies pass through. He named three choke points for the Chinese — Gulf of Aden, Gulf of Hormuz and the Malacca straits — and added that they now have Djibouti at the Gulf of Aden and the Gwadar port and Chinese companies have acquired stakes in Kuantan port in Malaysia, close to the Malacca Straits. “Then all three choke points will be under the surveillance of the Chinese. That will slightly restrict the Indian Navy and the U.S. Navy,” he noted.
•Speaking on the conclave, Admiral Lanba said the key takeaways were the identification of common security threats across all countries and a broader agreement for greater coordination and information sharing. The threats, essentially non-traditional in nature, include maritime terrorism, unregulated fishing, illegal fishing in the global commons, pollution, sea piracy, drug and human trafficking.
•While India is looking at cooperative frameworks to deal with common threats, Adm. Lanba clarified that efforts like coordinated patrols and joint patrols will be done only with maritime neighbours. “We only do coordinated patrols and joint patrols with nations who are our maritime neighbours. We are not looking at joint patrols with the U.S. Navy at this moment,” he added.
•Over the last year, the Navy, to test the waters, stepped up its presence and maintained round the clock surveillance on India’s vital areas of interest across the length and breadth of the Indian Ocean Region (IOR). This allows India to position itself as a net security provider in the region. “Earlier, there were flag showing missions in terms of overseas deployments for exercises and visits. The need of the hour is to change the nature of deployments. All choke points (meaning straits which connect seas or narrow water channels where ships and submarines of adversaries can be choked off) and sea lanes are now under 24/7 surveillance. They are now institutionalised deployments,” a senior Navy officer said.
•The new mission-based deployment concept, which was unveiled in the Naval Commander’s Conference in May, has mission-ready ships and aircraft being deployed along critical sea lanes of communications and choke points from Malacca straits to the Persian Gulf. The biannual Naval Commander’s Conference, which recently reviewed its effectiveness, has formalised it.
•The cycle of 12-15 ships in effect means a turnaround of 36-45 ships, with one set deployed, one set in transit, and one set in maintenance.
•“These ships are deployed always ready to meet any eventuality across the spectrum of operations ranging from acts of maritime terrorism and piracy to humanitarian assistance and disaster relief (HADR) missions,” the officer stated.
•Adm. Arun Prakash said the new maritime strategy had listed “naval presence” as a mission. "This is, firstly, to reassure our friends that you are there, second to send a message to your adversaries and third, it is a measure of maritime domain awareness."
•In this backdrop, he said Bay of Bengal and Arabian Sea can be effectively monitored if India were to sit at the three choke points.
•Another aspect is that India is positioning itself as the net security provider in the region and the first responder in the case of natural disasters.
•For instance, in May, the Indian Navy was the first to respond to heavy rain and flooding in Sri Lanka as also to the requirements post Cyclone Mora in Bangladesh and Myanmar.
📰 Counting the tigers that roam a water world
Sundarbans proved a challengefor camera traps and GPS collars
•In the Sundarbans, tigers are everywhere and nowhere, says Amitava Ghosh in his book The Great Derangement, Climate Change and the Unthinkable .
•Camouflaged in the mangrove forest and living in a unique water-dominated habitat with a minimal prey base, the Sundarbans tiger remains one of the most mysterious animals.
•One of the questions that forest officials and scientists have been grappling with for decades is this: how can tigers be counted in the Sundarbans? Until a few years ago, it was impossible to get an estimate with existing techniques. While individual estimation of tigers was out of the question, tides twice a day in the region (high tide and low tide at an interval of 12 hours) made identification by pugmarks and fecal DNA extremely difficult.
•In 2006-07, attempts to set up camera traps were unsuccessful as saline water entered the camera, destroying the equipment. The traps were placed at knee height.
•It is only after 2014 that camera traps began to give positive results, and the latest results have been encouraging. With years of experience and trial and error methods, forest officials and experts found strategic locations to put camera traps in the Sundarbans, in the higher areas of the forests not inundated during high tide. The camera traps are set about 40 cm to 50 cm above the ground here.
•The photographs reveal 87 ‘adult individuals’ in the Sundarbans, a significant increase from the earlier camera trap exercises. Earlier, camera traps yielded photographs of about 62-63 adult tigers.
•“In 2015, we got photographs of 63 adult tigers. Six of them could not be located this year. Fifty-seven of the remaining tigers were located once again using the camera traps. We also got photographs of 30 new adult tigers, taking the number to 87,” Ravi Kant Sinha, Principal Chief Conservator of Forests and Chief Wildlife Warden, West Bengal, told The Hindu .
•Mr. Sinha said with a minimum of 87 adult tigers (cubs were not included), the ecosystem with a potential tiger area of 3,200 sq km can host more than a hundred tigers.
•‘The Status of Tigers in India 2014’, published in 2015, stated, “Sundarbans has now been camera trapped with 62 unique individual tigers photo-captured.” According to the report, “Tiger population in the Sundarbans has remained stable and is estimated to be about 76 (62 to 96) tigers.”
•Officials, including Mr. Sinha, say tiger estimation in the unique habitat is still a work in progress and only over the next few years — with more results of camera traps — could a more precise number be ascertained.
Software analyses photos
•These camera trap images are fed into software which uses statistical extrapolation based on the number of days and the images to come up with a tiger number. Since each tiger has a unique pattern of stripes, the images help count adult tigers. In every assessment, some new tigers are found and some are recaptured. Some tigers which were photographed earlier may not appear again.
•The results of the camera trap exercise pointed to the presence of 24 tigers in South 24 Parganas forest division, which is outside the Sundarbans Tiger Reserve Area. In this region, which is closest to human habitation, 10 new adult individuals were photographed in the latest estimate. Images of 16 adult tigers were captured in the National Park East Range, 19 in the West Range and 15 each in the Basirhat Range and the Sajnekhali Wildlife Sanctuary. In each of the tiger zones, there was a minimal increase of at least five adult tigers.
•The camera traps also revealed that two tigers captured in the Basirhat range were recaptured in the Sajnekhali Wildlife Sanctuary.
•Yet, experts admit that estimations by camera traps have limitations in the Sundarbans, particularly because of tidal variation leading to inundation in large parts of the tiger ecosystem and difficulty of access to remote areas of the forest to set up camera traps.
•Experts and forest officials said the number of tigers which the ecosystem can accommodate may also be estimated using the prey base.
Wild pig main prey
•The Sundarban tiger’s main prey is the wild pig, said Biswajit Roychowdhury, Secretary, Nature Environment & Wildlife Society (NEWS). A number of tiger scats were examined and found to contain pig hair. They also eat swamp deer, rhesus monkey, monitor lizards, and even crabs and fish. The region is the only forest in India where no cattle or other easy prey is available to tigers, which forces them to swim across water channels.
•Mr. Sinha said that to get an estimate of the prey base, even the fish in the region would have to be taken into account. According to Mr. Roychowdhury, if tigers here regularly feed on fish, it would place the tiger atop both the terrestrial and aquatic food chain.
•In July 2009, the remains of two cobras, a king cobra and a monocled cobra were found in the stomach of a 12-year-old dead tigress, an anomalous occurrence as the big cats are not known to eat venomous snakes. There were no external injuries on the body of the tigress and its lungs, liver and spleen were found to be infected. But forest officials could not confirm that it was snake venom that resulted in its death.
Tiger behaviour
•The elusive nature of the tiger here has led to many questions on its behaviour.
•A paper titled Ranging, Activity and Habitat Use by Tigers in the Mangrove Forests of the Sundarbans , published in April 2016 in PLoS One , a peer-reviewed journal by researchers Dipanjan Naha, Yadvendradev V. Jhala, Qamar Qureshi, Manjari Roy, Kalyansundaram Sankar and Rajesh Gopal sheds some light.
•“It appears that tigers moved most during dawn and the early morning hours. Sunrise in the Sundarbans region was between 4.45 a.m. and 6 a.m. and tiger activity coincided with this period,” the paper states.
•Tigers are nocturnal and try to avoid confrontations with humans, and the paper suggested that if human activity were reduced in the early morning hours, attacks by tigers could potentially be reduced.
•An estimate provided by the Forest Department claims that tigers, between 1985 and 2010, attacked 410 people, leaving only 95 survivors.
•Post-2010, the number of tigers straying and attacks on human decreased. The latest figure of deaths from attacks by Sundarban tigers in 2014-15 is 10. Even in July 2017, a tiger from the forest jumped on a boat carrying a fisherman and took away 62-year-old Sushil Majhi into the deep forests. In another instance this year, a tiger which had strayed near human habitation, was released in South 24 Parganas Forest on October 26.
•The problem of straying has come down by laying nylon net along the vulnerable areas of interface of forest and human habitation. Between 2007 and 2010, seven tigers were radio collared.
•In some cases, radio collars slipped off the neck, indicating that tigers in the islands were smaller and weigh less than those in north and central India and have a higher level of adaptation. The satellite-based radio collaring, some of which have GPS attached, gave the locations of the tigers.
•This exercise was carried out to ascertain whether the tigers in the Sundarbans are territorial.
•Interestingly, a tiger captured in May 2010, which was released near Katuajuri camp near the Bangladesh border, crossed the mighty Raimangal river and remained on Talpatti Island of Bangladesh for a long time, as its activities were studied by researchers.
A trans-border habitat
•This phenomenon highlights the Sundarbans as a habitat requiring a Trans Border Protected Area involving India and Bangladesh.
•The Sundarbans is the only mangrove forest in the world to be home to tigers, but the sea level rise is posing a threat to their survival. Pranav Chanchani, national noordinator for tiger conservation, WWF-India, said, “Certain studies have predicted that a 28 cm rise in the sea level (which is possible in the next 50-90 years) could result in more than 90% loss of mangrove habitats in this landscape, and catastrophic declines in the area’s tiger populations.”
📰 The lowdown on the stimulus to banks
What is it?How did it come aboutWhy does it matter?What next?
•The government has announced a capital infusion in public sector banks amounting to Rs. 2.11 lakh crore over financial years 2017-18 and 2018-19 through the issue of recapitalisation bonds, enabling the banks to tap the market, and through budgetary support. Of this sum, Rs. 1.35 lakh crore will come through recap bonds, Rs. 18,000 crore from the budget and Rs. 58,000 crore that banks can raise from the market. However, the government is yet to decide on the modalities of the recap bonds.
•The government has issued recapitalisation bonds in the past, between 1986 and 2001, worth over Rs. 20,000 crore. The process typically is that the government issues the bonds to banks in lieu of capital. After lenders subscribe to these bonds, the money raised by the government is used to infuse fresh equity into the banks. Except the interest that has to be paid, there will not be an additional burden on the government. It is likely to have a marginal impact on fiscal deficit.
•Reacting to the move, RBI Governor Urjit Patel said the capital infusion would be “liquidity neutral for the government,” except the interest expense that will contribute to the annual fiscal deficit. He pointed out that a well-capitalised banking system was a pre-requisite for stable economic growth. Similar bonds have been used by many countries, including Chile, the Philippines, Finland, Hungary, and Argentina.
•Reeling under the pressure of bad loans for the last three years, capital has eroded significantly in public sector banks. These banks are overly dependent on the government for funds due to their limited ability to tap the capital market because of the subdued valuation of their share price. Most of the public sector banks’ shares are trading at a discount to their book value. However, the government is also constrained to make a significant capital allotment from its budget, since it wants to stick to the path of fiscal discipline. The Finance Minister has pegged the fiscal deficit target at 3.2% of the GDP. So, recap bonds were an option which fulfilled both objectives: supporting banks with their capital needs but without disturbing the fiscal math.
•According to a report by State Bank of India, from 1986 to 2001, the interest paid by the government to the nationalised banks on recap bonds worked out to 0.07% of GDP per annum on average. But during the period, the banks paid dividends to the government amounting to 0.06% of the GDP on an average. So, the net impact on fiscal deficit was only 0.03% of the GDP.
•The move will strengthen the capital adequacy of public sector banks, which is required for provisioning for bad loans and adhering to the Basel-III framework. Following a sharp increase in bad loans, which is almost 10% of the banks’ advances, the capital position of the public sector banks has weakened. In the past two years, NPAs have increased to Rs. 4.55 lakh crore. The banking system is saddled with bad loans and stressed assets close to Rs. 10 lakh crore. As the banks were wary of lending, credit growth slipped to a 60-year low of 5% in April. Analysts and rating agencies claim the capital infusion will be sufficient for public sector banks. Pointing out that the funds infusion would be credit positive, rating agency Moody’s said external capital requirements over the next two years would be around Rs. 70,000 crore-Rs. 95,000 crore for 11 banks rated by the agency.
•“In addition to the fact that Moody’s estimates of capital requirement is for only the 11 rated banks, while the government factors in the entire PSU bank universe, the government’s estimate of capital requirement could also be factoring in a much higher loan growth than was seen in the last three years,” the agency said.
•While capital infusion is welcome, it must be ensured that the government is not throwing good money after bad money. Improving credit discipline and risk management systems are the need of the hour for public sector banks. The governance issues of the banks and their over-enthusiastic lending in the past, for instance, need to be addressed.
•The government should initiate long-pending reforms, especially those recommended by the P.J. Nayak Committee that said, among other things, that it should cede control of nationalised banks and cut its stake below 51%.
📰 Time to rethink public housing?
The private sector cannot solve India’s housing problem
•India’s real estate sector is in the doldrums. Of course, you already knew that if you were trying to sell property. ‘Quoted rates’ are just that — for conversation purposes — while real rates have already fallen by a fifth, with buyers still not showing up.
•According to a recent report in The Hindu Business Line , new project launches in urban India — or at least in the major markets of the National Capital Region, Mumbai, Pune, Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Chennai, Kolkata and Hyderabad — have fallen to a seven-year low, with just one lakh units being started this year compared to the average of over five lakh units between 2010 and 2013.
Unsold houses everywhere
•The reason is not difficult to see. There is a huge pile-up of unsold inventory. The outer stretches of almost every major Indian city are littered with the skeletons of completed and partially completed projects. According to real estate consultancy Knight Frank, in the first six months of the current financial year, barely 17,000-odd sales of residential units were recorded across the country — in a country of over 1.2 billion people!
•Unsold inventory levels are staggering. While the industry itself admits to unsold inventory levels of around 48 months across India, that is based on average sales during the golden years. If you extrapolate on current levels, the unsold inventory of built (or nearly ready) housing units across the eight top markets, estimated at 5.96 lakh units by Knight Frank, translates into a decade and a half’s worth.
•Further, the introduction of the Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act, 2016 (RERDA) — albeit by just a handful of States so far — promises to make the situation worse. Most of the under-construction projects in RERDA States are stuck because the developers cannot meet the new, stricter provisions of the Act, and cannot sell them without RERDA approval.
•This, in a country where there is still a staggering shortage of housing, particularly in urban areas. According to the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, housing shortage across urban India was estimated at 18.78 million units during the 12th Plan period (which ended, along with the era of planned development, on March 31 this year). But that may be a serious underestimate. According to a white paper ‘Indian Housing Industry’ by research and consultancy firm RNCOS, the housing shortage is expected to rise to 34.8 million units by 2022.
The developers we need
•Of course, the private sector has woken up to the so-called ‘affordable housing’ segment and has been pushing it. The problem is, its definition of affordable is limited to price. But just because the price is lower doesn’t mean those needing houses buy them, because most of these houses are unliveable from a practical point of view — too far away from economic or employment hubs, poorly connected, and lacking social and soft infrastructure like education and entertainment.
•So the private sector’s solution isn’t really working. The only other option is the state as developer. Here, the track record is very poor. Most of the State Housing Boards have built very little. The Gujarat Housing Board has built around 1.76 lakh units so far in over half a century. The Odisha State Housing Board, set up in 1968, has built around 28,500 houses. The Madhya Pradesh Housing Board manages around 6,000 houses a year.
•This is way too little. And increasingly, of late, these housing boards have also gone the way of the private sector, jacking up prices. So much so that earlier this year, the Delhi Development Authority, which has a monopoly in Delhi, attracted only around 8,000 applications for 11,000 flats in the economically weaker section category, because of its high prices and shoddy construction in past projects.
Purpose of building
•Housing, despite all the noise the government makes about it, does not get either policy bandwidth or adequate funding, particularly when it comes to mass housing in urban areas for the not-poor (they’re not rich either) middle class. This needs to change. Governments – both at the Central and State levels – need to lead the way as developers of affordable and liveable housing stock in cities. And they need to look seriously at not only building to sell, which is what they have been doing, but building to let. In other words, publicly owned housing which is available for use by private individuals.
•Since the government is also the largest land owner in the country, it can manage this and control prices, both in the sale and rental markets, if it abjures from riding on the coat-tails of the private sector and avoids profiteering. This will also dampen inflation in the private sector.
•Of course, for this to become a policy imperative, the political class needs to see the urban lower middle and middle classes as viable vote banks. Which, so far, only the Aam Aadmi Party has done, and we all know how far it actually got poor Arvind Kejriwal.
