📰 24 years on, OBC workforce in Centre still short of Mandal mark
As of January 2017, the number across cadres is far below the mandated 27%
•At a time when President Ram Nath Kovind has appointed a five-member commission to examine sub-categorisation of Other Backward Classes (OBCs) “to achieve greater social justice,” a reality check shows that representation of OBCs in the workforce in Central Government offices falls far short of achieving the 27% quota recommended by the Mandal Commission.
•Data furnished under the Right to Information (RTI) Act by 24 of the 35 Union Ministries, 25 of the 37 Central departments and various constitutional bodies reveal that 24 years since the implementation of the Mandal Commission recommendations, across various groups of employees, the OBCs have not optimally benefited from it.
•According to the Union Ministry for Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions, the reservation for OBCs is being implemented from September 8, 1993. Replies provided under the RTI Act by the Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT) show that as on January 1, 2017, only 17% of the Group A officers in the 24 Ministries belong to the OBCs. The representation among the Group B officers is even lower at 14%.
•Likewise, only 11% of the Group C employees are from the OBCs and in Group D, the figure is 10%.
•Incidentally, in July last year, Union Minister of State for Personnel Jitendra Singh informed the Lok Sabha that as on January 1, 2014, OBC representation in 71 Ministries/Departments was 19.28%. A reason, he cited, for the shortfall in meeting the Mandal Commission mandate was that OBC candidates appointed up to 1993 (when reservation kicked in) were not included for counting their representation. Besides, he said, there is generally a time gap between occurrence of vacancies and filling them as recruitment is a time-consuming process.
•Cut to the present: in the cumulative staffing position of the 24 Ministries, 25 departments (out of 37) and eight constitutional bodies (such as the PMO, the President’s Secretariat and the ECI), which provided information under the RTI Act — 14% of Group A officers are from the OBCs. The figures for Group B, C and D employees are 15%, 17% and 18% respectively. In some cases, the under representation of OBCs is glaring. For instance, in the Cabinet Secretariat, which has 64 Group A officers, not one is from the OBCs, whereas 60 belong to the Open Competition (OC) category and four are from the Scheduled Castes.
•In the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, only 25 of the 503 Group A officers belong to the OBCs.
•In 2015, the representation of Group A OBC officers was only 10.71% and Group B officers 7.18% across 12 ministries, 10 departments and five constitutional bodies which furnished information under the RTI Act then. In 2013, OBCs constituted 9.43% of the Group A officers in 55 Central Government agencies.
•“These figures don’t tell the entire story because among the 11 ministries which refused to provide employee data under the RTI Act this year are the Railways, Defence, Home and Finance, which are large recruiters. The bigger ministries account for 91.25% of the central government jobs. Whereas the data provided by the 24 ministries account for only 8.75% of the total jobs. If you go by the March 2011 Census of Central Government Employees, the Railways has 13,28,199 regular employees and we don’t have the community-based employee data for it,” points out Dr. E.Muralidharan, a Chennai-based activist, who filed the application under the RTI Act. In real terms, as against an estimated 31 lakh Central Government employees, the data pertains to only 2,71,375 employees, he added.
•In 2015 when he had sought details of OBC employees, as many as 40 ministries and 48 departments refused to part with the information. “An Office Memorandum (O.M. -No.43011/10./2002-Estt.Res) dated December 19, 2003 issued by the Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions makes it mandatory for each Ministry/Department to send a report regarding representation of SCs, STs and OBCs in services. But this is followed in breach,” rued the IIT Madras alumnus.
•Dr. Muralidharan recalled that in June 2013, the Ministry of Personnel had issued a detailed memorandum (No. 36038/1(i)/2013 Estt.Res), on measures to be taken to fill up backlog vacancies reserved for SCs/STs/OBCs “at the earliest” monitored at the “highest level”.
•The memorandum had identified certain reasons for non-filling up of reserved vacancies such as lack of finishing skills - English fluency or interview skills - and scarcity of qualified reserved category persons.
•Among the recommendations given by the Ministry was that the Departments concerned may take a decision within six months on launching a special recruitment drive providing certain relaxations so that the vacancies may be filled up. It had further said that finishing training be imparted for reserved category candidates. Another recommendation was to constitute a committee with representations from the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, Tribal Affairs, major ministries like Railways and Home Affairs to find out specific reasons for backlog in filling up of vacancies and suggest measures to enhance the employability of reserved category candidates.
•“The memorandum of June 2013 directed all ministries / departments to take follow up action on the decision taken by the Government and sent quarterly progress reports on implementing the recommendations to the Ministry of Personnel,” the RTI Act applicant said.
•Subsequently, the Union Minister of State for Personnel Jitendra Singh informed Parliament that based on the recommendations of a committee headed by the Secretary, Ministry of Social Justice & Empowerment, time bound action plan for filling up backlog reserved vacancies was intimated to all Departments/Ministries on November 11, 2014 for filling up such vacancies by August 2016. This Action Plan included study of reasons for non-filling of backlog reserved vacancies, review of prescribed standards, if required; conducting Special Recruitment Drive and conducting pre-recruitment training programmes.
•“If the Action Plan was put into motion, we wouldn’t have had the kind of poor representation for OBCs (as of January 1, 2017), as the details furnished under the RTI Act show,” contended Dr. Muralidharan.
•S.K. Kharventhan, former member National Commission for Backward Classes, said among the reasons for under-representation of OBCs is non-filling of backlog vacancies and non-implementation of the communal roster system for filling vacancies. “As per Supreme Court judgment, they should follow only a post-based roster system. But in many departments only vacancy-based communal roster system is followed,” he alleged.
•K. Danasekar, secretary general, All India Confederation of OBC Employees’ Welfare Associations, said, “Some two-three years ago, of the 83 Deputy Secretary level officers in Central Government only three were from OBCs and five belonged to the SC/STs.” According to him, only OBC candidates who enter government service at the age of 23 or so eventually qualify to get promoted as Deputy Secretary or Under Secretary. “Many enter the service when they are 30 and therefore retire below the rank of Deputy Secretary. That is why the OBC representation will be higher in Group C and D category of employees and not in Group A or B,” he said.
•Mr. Danasekar added that in the Finance Ministry, the OBC representation in Group A is likely to be better. “Usually in the UPSC examination, many from the OBCs qualify for the Indian Revenue Service, which is lower in order of preference as opposed to the IFS, IAS and IPS,” he explained.
•Meanwhile, Dr Muralidharan is critical of the attempt to introduce sub-categorisation among OBCs. “Presently the OBCs constitute the largest group among in India. By constituting a committee to explore sub-categorisation, the government is trying to divide the OBCs,” he said.
📰 Crimes against women at alarming levels in Bengal
•The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data on crimes against women, including trafficking in West Bengal, have shown alarming highs.
What happened?
•The NCRB report for 2016, which was released on November 30, 2017, recorded 283 incidents and 307 victims under Section 326A (acid attack) and Section 326B (attempt to carry out an acid attack) in the country. Of these, West Bengalrecorded 76 incidents of such attacks and about 83 victims, accounting for 26% of all incidents and 27% of victims. Uttar Pradesh, the most populous state in the country with almost double the population of West Bengal, recorded 57 incidents and 61 victims.
Why can’t it be controlled?
•Despite guidelines from the Supreme Court on regulating the sale of acid, there is little monitoring on the ground in West Bengal. While the guidelines ban over-the-counter sale of acid without identity proof, no restrictions have been imposed in rural and semi-urban areas where most of the attacks take place. The easy availability of the corrosive substance has resulted in high incidence of acid attacks in the State, according to the police.
What about other crimes?
•Acid attacks are not the only crime directed at women in Bengal. One of the highest contributors of crime against women are cases registered under Section 498A of the IPC (cruelty by husband or his relatives). During 2016, 1,10,434 cases were registered across the country, of which West Bengal recorded 19,305 cases (over 17% of the total cases in the country).
•When it comes to human trafficking, West Bengal is not only the highest contributor to the crime but it alone accounts for 44% of all cases nationally. Of the 8,132 cases of human trafficking reported in 2016, West Bengal accounted for 3,579 cases. In terms of missing children, which is related to human trafficking, the State recorded 8,335 cases of children gone missing in 2016. As the State shares a border with Bangladesh, Nepal and Bhutan, it has become a transit route in human trafficking. The distress-ridden tea gardens of north Bengal, the remote islands of Sunderbans and the districts of Malda and Murshidabad with poor human development indicators and high density of population serve as ideal source point for traffickers luring young girls on the pretext of jobs or marriage to other States. Some experts say that the number of cases of human trafficking are high as the police are proactive in registering cases of human trafficking and missing children. One of the aims of the Kanyashree Prakalpa launched by the West Bengal government was to curb trafficking by providing conditional cash transfer to school-going girls but the numbers clarify that a lot more needs to be done.
Who is to blame?
•West Bengal has been recording a high crime rate against women over the past several years. In 2016, West Bengal ranked second with 32,513 cases of crime against women, contributing 9.6% to all such crimes in the country. Uttar Pradesh with over 17% of the female population of the country — Bengal has 7.5% — accounted for 14.5% of all crimes against women. But despite the high levels of crimes against women, it has failed to garner adequate attention from the authorities. The State government has not taken note of the numbers, and the Opposition too has not raised the issue.
•Statutory bodies such as the West Bengal Women’s Commission and the West Bengal Commission for Protection of Child Rights have failed to put any system in place by which crimes against women and child trafficking can be arrested. According to non-governmental organisations working in the field, the commissions need to improve victims’ access to legal services and put in place concrete steps that can act as a safety net for women and children. The overall conviction rate for crime against women in India stands at 18.9 %. For West Bengal, the conviction rate is the lowest in the country at 3.3 %.
📰 Collective honour and individual dignity
As we can neither live without communities nor live entrapped within them, notions of collective honour that are consistent with individual dignity are likely to flourish
•In several parts of our country, inter-caste marriages are frowned upon and inter-religious marriages are virtually taboo. Young couples in our villages sometimes pay a heavy price for such transgressions, with some even being killed because their act is seen to dishonour their community. The furore around the film Padmavati based on Sufi poet Malik Muhammad Jayasi’s legendary allegorical tale Padmavat betrays this same anxiety about a community’s honour — the film is believed to have insulted a martial caste and violated the honour of the Hindu nation.
•What sense are we to make of such community-related honour? Honour is a form of respect. To have honour is to be entitled to high respect, to be judged positively by a standard which many others fail to meet. To have collective honour is to be entitled to positive regard by others by virtue of belonging to a particular community. Indeed, the real recipient of such honour is the entire community. Honouring a community means judging it to be better than others. This concept of honour can be interpreted to yield an achievement-oriented conception of individual and collective honour, as when a person is awarded the Gyanpeeth Award or a Nobel Prize, or the Indian team is elevated to the first rank in test cricket. But it can also lead to another conception of honour which is tied to rigid, inegalitarian practices and is at play in resentment against inter-caste and inter-religious marriages.
Honour and hierarchy
•In this conception, individuals are defined almost wholly by their membership in hierarchically related communities, groups viewed as naturally superior and intrinsically inferior (e.g. men and women; upper and lower castes; high-ranked and low-ranked religious communities). Honour here is not earned but grounded, at best, in real or imagined past achievements. All performative acts (practices) are then meant only to reiterate this hierarchy, to continually demonstrate that one group is better, higher than the other and deserving of more respect. Honour is encoded in social norms and becomes the direct expression of status within a hierachical set-up. Each group is expected to behave by the honour code between superiors and inferiors. One honours a superior community by not marrying any of its members. If the superiority of a community is inscribed in the bodies of its women, how can inferiors touch them? If a member from an inferior caste marries someone from a higher caste, he treats his superiors as equals, thereby violating the social code, and dishonouring the entire community. And because the identity of one person in a community is deeply intertwined with that of the other, any member can claim to be offended by the marriage and act on behalf of the entire community to avenge ‘wrongdoing’, and thereby repair the damaged code of honour.
•This troubling notion of collective honour appears to dominate all the headlines these days. But mercifully it coexists with, and is challenged by, another form of respect which also has little to do with achievement, appears to exist independent of community, and challenges hierarchy by pointing to certain qualities shared by all humans.
The dignity of individuals
•Whatever the current mood in the country, one outstanding feature of our age is that each and every one of us can legitimately aspire to radical improvement in the material conditions of life. Underlying this yearning and its necessary public expression is a silent transformation in our self-understanding — to some degree, we have all begun to see ourselves also as individuals. This is not to say that we have ceased to define ourselves in terms of some or the other community, or that seeing ourselves as institutional role players, as fathers or mothers, or as Hindus or Sikhs, is no longer important. But the social and communitarian dimension of our lives is now lived alongside, and sometimes in tension with, our lives as individuals. We believe that the life of each person matters because of our common capacity to create and lead a life of significance. We each have a point of view of ourselves, our life and the world. In a very important sense, our life is first and foremost our own and has also to be lived individually. This fact alone entitles us to a basic respect which has little to do with community. In the English language, there is word for this: dignity. Each one of us has dignity merely by virtue of our humanity. This is a kind of deep personal honour we are born with, and one that must be recognised as such. This notion has deep roots in the great renunciatory traditions of this land but was given fresh impetus in the last two centuries by equality — centred social reform movements, the anti-colonial struggle, struggles for gender equality, but above all, by a movement against caste hierarchies led by the greatest Dalit leader of our times, Babasaheb Ambedkar.
•India is living through a deeply interesting but troublesome transition where older ideas of collective honour are vying with new articulations of individual dignity. In this clash between two forms of respect, inegalitarian forms of collective honour are more likely to be pushed out of our society as social and political democracy deepens. But since humans can neither live without communities nor live entrapped within them, both collective honour and individual dignity will be needed in future. And would it not be good to see flourish in our society a form of collective honour consistent with individual dignity?
📰 Novel anode for next-generation batteries in electric vehicles
This has double the capacity of graphite anode-containing lithium ion batteries
•One of the factors that determine the success of electric vehicles is the availability of batteries that can be charged quickly and retain enough charge to make long distance travel possible per charge. Researchers at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) Pune have synthesised a new type of anode material to make such a battery possible.
•Unlike graphite anode-containing lithium ion batteries that have capacity of just 372mAh/gram, the anode synthesised by IISER researchers has double the capacity of about 720mAh/gram. The capacity remained the same even after 1,000 charge-discharge cycles.
•The high capacity was seen when the rate of charging/discharging was 100mA/gram. But when the battery was charged quickly (1A/gram), the capacity reduced by about 20% (about 580mAh/gram).
•“So even when the battery is charged quickly, it can still store about 80% charge,” says Prof. Ramanathan Vaidhyanathan from the Department of Chemistry at IISER Pune.
•“And even when the battery was charged rapidly (2A/gram), the capacity was still around 500mAh/gram, which is much higher than the graphite-containing battery.” He is one of the corresponding authors of a paper published in the journal Advanced Energy Materials.
•“The performance of the anode material is good in terms of capacity and stability,” says Dr. Satishchandra Ogale from the Department of Physics at IISER Pune and the other corresponding author. “Graphite is cheaper and lithium ions can easily be inserted into graphite. But unlike the novel anode material, graphite can’t be tuned.”
Testing the anode
•The researchers tested the capacity by replacing the graphite anode with the novel material (covalent organic framework) and used lithium metal as the cathode and not lithium cobaltate (LiCoO2), which is normally used as the cathode.
•“We had tested the anode using a half-cell configuration. To realise the full potential of the novel material it has to be tested in a full-cell configuration,” he says.
•When tested in a full-cell configuration, the charge will be lower than what has been observed by the researchers. This is because the kinetics of lithium diffusion will be different depending on the cathode material used and the configuration of the battery.
•“The capacity of a graphite anode in a full-cell configuration will be only about 150mAh/gram if the battery is charged quickly (rate of charge is 1A/gram). So with our anode material, even if the capacity drops by 50% in a full-cell configuration, the capacity will be about 360mAh/gram, which is much higher than graphite. This can be confirmed only when we carry out an experiment using full-cell configuration,” says Prof. Vaidhyanathan.
•The anode made of a few-layer thick (6-8 layers) nanosheets has pores lined by functional groups capable of interacting with lithium ions. The pores provide an easy path for diffusion of lithium ions and helps access the functional groups, which are sites of lithium ion interaction.
•“Optimal interactions allow lithium ions to go in and come out of the nanosheets with ease allowing the anode to discharge easily,” says Sattwick Haldar from the Department of Chemistry, IISER Pune and first author of the paper.
Charging and capacity
•The ease with which lithium ions go in and come out of the nanosheet anode changes when the time taken to charge the battery changes. When it is charged quickly, the efficiency of lithium ions diffusion drops and capacity of the battery reduces. “In our case, whether the battery charging time is short or long (50mA/gram or 2A/gram), the capacity does not change much,” says Prof. Vaidhyanathan.
•The anode was tested in a coin cell and not a bigger battery that would typically be used in electric automobiles. The researchers are trying to scale-up the battery so that it can potentially be used for applications that need higher battery output. “But it has to retain its capacity in full-cell configuration and the cost of make the monomers should also be considered,” he says.
📰 IISc: Etched aluminium keeps surfaces bacteria-free
Bacteria such as E. coli are responsible for up to 70% of infections in ICU alone
•Now, hospital-acquired infections can be reduced by using etched aluminium surfaces in ICUs, operation theatres and other places as well as by using them on regularly used objects such as taps, bedside tables, hand rails to name a few where transmission of bacterial infections is high.
•Like shark skin and wings of cicada and dragonfly that are free of any pathogens, a team of researchers led by Kaushik Chatterjee from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru used etched aluminium to kill both drug-sensitive and drug-resistant bacteria and also prevent bacteria from attaching and growing on the surfaces.
•The aluminium surfaces have very minute textures produced through chemical etching which kills the bacteria and is responsible for antifouling.
•In the case of drug-resistant bacteria isolated from a hospital, the etched surface that had both nano and microscale features killed 82% of E. coli (control 10%), 25% of K. pneumoniae (control was just 1%) and 86% of P. aeruginosa(control 10%). The etched surface also showed effective antifouling property against all the three drug-resistant strains.
•While surfaces with both nano and microscale features killed 94% of E. coli and resisted bacterial adhesion and growth, surfaces those that had only microfeatures killed only 18% of E. coli and prevented the bacteria from adhering to it. Gram-negative bacteria such as E. coli are responsible for up to 70% of infections in ICU alone.
•Though the precise mechanism by which the bacteria gets killed is not known, like the wings of cicada and dragonfly, the nanoscale features appear to mechanically rupture the bacterial cell membrane due to physical interaction of the cells with the surface topography. The microstructures limit the ability of the bacteria to adhere to the surface.
•Bacterial isolates of E. coli and S. aureus were used for the antibacterial studies. Though only fewer spherical-shaped S. aureus were killed by surface topography, there was significant reduction of the bacteria on the surface. There was one-third reduction in S. aureus adhering on the surface that had only micro-features, and one-tenth reduction on surfaces had both nano and micro-features.
•“Unlike the rod-shaped E. coli, the spherical shape of S. aureus results in fewer contact points with the surface and less likelihood of getting killed,” says Jafar Hasan from the Department of Materials Engineering at IISc and first author of the paper published in the journal Materials & Design.
•Using sodium hydroxide and potassium hydroxide of different concentrations to etch the aluminium alloy for different time periods (10 to 60 minutes), the researchers were able to keep the surfaces nearly free of Gram-negative bacteria. “Etching aluminium surface is not only a simple, single-step process but can also be scaled-up easily,” says Dr. Hasan.
•“We are engaging with people who are responsible for infection-control in hospitals to know the specific locations where the material can be used. They might either want aluminium foil with these surface properties can be regularly replaced or permanent fixtures,” says Prof. Chatterjee. “We have not studied the long-term durability of the surface features and their effectiveness. The durability will depend on how often such surfaces are handled by people.”
•“A combination of five surface roughness parameters resulted in maximum (over 80%) bactericidal efficiency,” says Dr. Hasan. “The study proposes topography-based design rules of surfaces that can kill bacteria. The design can be efficiently transferred to other materials for bacteria killing property.”
•The experiments with drug-resistant bacteria at the hospital were carried in collaboration with Dr. Vasan Sambandamurthy and his team from Mazumdar Shaw Centre for Translational Research, Narayana Hospital, Bengaluru.
📰 JNCASR: Super-packed organic transistors for flexible devices
Each transistor is 500 times thinner than a human hair and half a micron in height
•A nano-array with one billion transistors in 1 sq. cm area has been developed by researchers from Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR), Bengaluru. Though tiny, these transistors provide higher output current in comparison with conventional organic field transistors used in organic light emitting diodes.
•As the new device is not rigid and uses organic semiconductor inks, it can also be used in flexible displays and sensor technology.
•They developed the new vertical organic transistors called Organic Nano-Triode Array. “At 100 nm, each transistor in the circuit measures 500 times thinner than the human hair and it is half a micron in height. We made it in the lab using a simple templating technique,” explains K. Swathi from the Department of Molecular Electronics at JNCASR and first author of the paper published in Nano Letters. “In the regular organic field effect transistor, there will be 5-10 transistors in 1 sq. cm area. But in our case, about one billion transistors can be packed in the same area.”
•The cost per transistor is drastically scaled down with this procedure. “Curved, flexible and foldable device technology is increasing every day and these new electronic products require smarter, slimmer circuits which can provide high throughput at low cost. Transistor technology is now shifting to 3D circuits which can pack more components in a smaller area. With this in mind, we developed the new nano-array which can house higher density of transistors,” says K.S. Narayan from the Department of Molecular Electronics, JNCASR.
•The researchers carried out two types of measurements to study the capacity of the nano-array. The first one is the typical transistor measurement of the entire array. The second set of measurements involved studying each pore of the array and demonstrating its transistor action. They concluded that the new transistor can be turned-ON to the high conducting state with a low voltage of less than 3 V.
•The molecular electronics laboratory at JNCASR is building a portfolio of different devices in the area of organic electronics. Further design and development is needed to fully address these vertical transistors as functional blocks to build circuits.
📰 Workings of solar wind flows deciphered by PRL team
They studied 43 geomagnetic storms during 2006-2010
•A group of researchers from Physical Research Laboratory (PRL), Ahmedabad, have, for the first time, figured out the conditions under which certain types of solar storms can flow towards the earth and affect its atmosphere. This is important because such storms contain charged particles travelling at very high speeds and these can affect the electronics present on satellites in orbit around the earth. The research was published in Geophysical Research Letters.
•Solar storms are violent events on the sun which can temporarily distort the earth’s magnetosphere – the region around the earth which is influenced by its magnetic field. These temporary disturbances, called geomagnetic storms, can generate shock waves in the interplanetary medium that can accelerate charged particles to very high energies and which, in turn, can harm the satellites placed by humans in space. Such solar storms have two causes: Coronal Mass Ejections (CME) and Corotating Interaction Regions (CIR).
CME and CIR
•CMEs are huge explosions of charged particles extending beyond the sun’s corona or outer layer and can be visibly observed. CIRs are much more complicated and difficult to observe. “CMEs can be detected by a coronagraph when they are ejected from the Sun… CIRs are generated in the interplanetary medium and there are no visual signatures for CIRs. Hence, in order to detect [them], solar wind parameters need to be characterised critically,” says Diptiranjan Rout, the first author of the paper and a post-doctoral fellow at PRL.
•Charged particles are being spewed continually out of the sun’s corona, forming the solar wind. Some parts of these winds move faster than others. Since they contain charged particles in a plasma state, these different regions physically interact with each other to form wavelike disturbances called CIRs that emanate from the sun and spiral outwards.
•They are called “corotating” interaction regions as they rotate along with the sun, attached to it at one end.
•The sun goes through cyclic variations with a period of eleven years during which sunspot activity increases to a maximum and then decreases. The researchers studied 43 geomagnetic storms linked to CIRs during the years 2006-2010 which corresponded to the minimum of solar activity in that particular solar cycle.
•“It took rigorous data analyses for almost a year to identify the final pattern,” says Mr. Rout.
L1 point
•There is an imaginary point on the line joining the sun and earth known as the L1 point or the Lagrange 1 point. A special feature of this point is that a particle placed there will feel no gravitational pull due to either the sun or the earth as the two forces cancel each other. “[Only those] CIRs that come at an angle of 6 degrees or less at the first Lagrangian point of the Sun-Earth system (L1 point) affect the earth’s outer plasma environment,” says D. Chakrabarty, Associate Professor at PRL and Mr Rout’s thesis advisor. Those CIRs that are incident at angles more than 6 degrees at the L1 point will not reach the earth.
•This is the first time that such an understanding has been arrived at.
•The group plans to further focus on the causes for the events when solar wind flow angle deviates from 6 degree for a considerable duration of time.
📰 Only 31% Indians have separate health policies
Vehicle, life insurance on top: survey
•Indians are more likely to have a vehicle or life insurance than health insurance, according to a survey by private research firm, Chrome Data Analytics and Media (CDAM). Only 31% of Indians had medical policies independent of those provided by their employers in spite of nearly half the survey respondents admitting to having faced a “financial emergency” due to medical needs.
•This was because the bulk of Indians weren’t correctly estimating the potential pitfall — of exorbitant bills — from not having insurance and only saw it from the lens of tax benefits. “Even among those who did have health insurance,most had covers below 2 lakh which in many cases doesn’t cover a serious ailment like a heart transplant,” said Pankaj Krishna, Founder, CDAM. While a vehicle insurance was mandatory, a life cover too was popular because of tax benefits and not due to having a succession plan in place, he added.
•The survey polled about 4,000 people — 51% of them women — from Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Pune and Bengaluru. While some had multiple policies, it emerged that 41% of those interviewed had a life insurance policy and 37%, one for their vehicle. Only 36% had a health cover. Moreover, 87% of those considering health insurance were only doing so to save tax, the survey reported.
•The number of lives covered under health insurance policies during 2015-16 was 36 crore which is approximately 30% of India's total population, according to the Indian Brand Equity Foundation.
•Indians are also known to spend a significant fraction of their health expense out of their own pockets. 89% of health expenditure by India, in 2014, was out-of-pocket as compared to a global average of 18%. Also, government contributed no more than 30% of individual health expenditure in India according to a 2014 — the latest — assessment by the World Health Organisation.
•The Chrome study also found that of all the government-sponsored schemes on offer, the Pradhan Mantri Suraksha Bima Yojana elicited the most recall. Another scheme, the Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana (RSBY) offers medical insurance up to ₹30,000 for a family of five living below the poverty line (BPL) — defined as the ability to spend ₹33 per day in urban India and ₹27 per day in rural. It is, however, limited to inpatient treatment or hospitalisation. This scheme elicited the 3rd-largest recall among respondents.
📰 Why are there disparities between States on diseases?
What is the report?
•The India State-Level Disease Burden report, a first-of-its-kind assessment of causes for diseases in each State from 1990 to 2016, was released recently. A team of scientists evaluated the diseases causing the most premature deaths and ill-health in each State. It found out, for instance, that life expectancy at birth in the country has improved significantly.
What is worrying?
•However, the report indicated many health inequalities among States, noting that while there was a fall in the under-five mortality in every State there was also a four-fold difference in the rate of improvement among them. “The per person burden from many of the leading infectious and non-communicable diseases varied 5-10 times between States,” the report pointed out with researchers attributing this to differences in the development status, environment, lifestyle patterns, preventive health measures and curative health services between the States.
•“In the most developed States this transition took place about 30 years ago, but in the poorest States this transition has taken place only over the past few years,” the report said.
Who suffers most?
•It explained that infectious and childhood diseases continue to be significant problems in the poor Empowered Action Group States of north India (Bihar, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Odisha, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand and Assam), which still contributes 37-43% of the total disease burden. These diseases are responsible for the inordinately high burden of premature deaths and morbidity suffered by children under five years of age in these States.
•The results show that non-communicable disease and injuries have together overtaken infectious and childhood diseases in terms of disease burden in every State, but the magnitude of this transition varies markedly between the poor States and the more developed States, according to the report which is now being used as an important tool for health planners in India to improve health of the people more effectively.
What led to the report?
•It was the result of a collaboration between the Indian Council of Medical Research, the Public Health Foundation of India, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, and senior experts and stakeholders from about 100 institutions across India. The India State-Level Disease Burden Initiative was led by Dr. Lalit Dandona, who serves as the director of this initiative, and was guided by Dr. Soumya Swaminathan, Deputy Director- General, World Health Organisation.
•The technical paper was published the same day on this data in the journal The Lancet, and an online open-access interactive visualisation tool was released that allows easy understanding of the disease burden details in every State and their trends over a quarter century. The report is the result of two years of intense scientific work and collaborative effort. The Global Burden of Disease methodology was used for this analysis, which is the most widely used disease burden estimation approach globally.
How will it help?
•The India State-Level Disease Burden Initiative will update estimates annually for each State based on new data that become available. It will also provide more detailed findings: for example, next year it plans to report the rural-urban differences in disease burden for each State. Detailed topic-specific reports and publications will be produced for major diseases and risk factors for deeper insights to plan their control. The policy applications of these findings include planning of State health budgets, prioritisation of interventions relevant to each State, informing the government’s Health Assurance Mission in each State, monitoring of health-related Sustainable Development Goals targets, and assessing the impact of large-scale interventions based on time trends of disease burden. In addition, the data gaps identified in this estimation process will inform which areas of the health information system of India need to be strengthened.
•Another important aspect of this major collaborative effort is that scientific capacity is being enhanced in India to generate and analyse large-scale health data, as well as to utilise it to improve our health.
📰 Following the silk route
IIT researchers create a bioartificial liver model using silk
•Researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Guwahati have taken the first step towards creating a bioengineered liver model that might help patients with liver problems. This development follows the success of a team led by Prof. Biman Mandal at the institute’s Department of Biosciences and Bioengineering in successfully creating a bioartificial pancreas model grown within a 3-D silk scaffold
•The silk scaffold is capable of supporting growth, distribution as well as sustaining the functionality of liver cells.
Enhanced functions
•In studies carried out in petri dishes in a laboratory, the researchers found that the scaffold made from mixing mulberry and non-mulberry silk fibroins showed enhanced liver-specific functions. A fibroin is a protein which is the chief constituent of silk.
•“The blended scaffold showed enhanced liver-specific functions such as increased albumin production and urea synthesis, and enhanced detoxification,” says Janani Guru from the department, and the first author of a paper published in the peer-reviewed international journal, Acta Biomaterialia . “The extracellular matrix (ECM) production was higher; the higher the ECM production the faster is the liver regeneration,” she says.
•Besides being metabolically active, gene expression studies and functionality tests demonstrated that optimal-sized liver clusters formed on the scaffold maintained liver-specific functions for 21 days compared to scaffolds made of mulberry and non-mulberry silk fibroins.
Vast potential
•Tests carried out for four weeks on animal models showed that the scaffolds were biocompatible.
•Once successful in animal models and humans, the scaffolds can potentially be used for generating a bioartificial liver for human transplantation. The 3-D platforms may also come in handy for high-throughput drug testing by pharmaceutical companies. Currently, animals are used for carrying out such tests. A non-animal model made of human liver cells will have distinct advantages and also reduce the number of animals sacrificed. They can also be used for creating cirrhosis disease models for drug development.
•The researchers tested scaffolds made of mulberry and non-mulberry silk fibroins and a blend of the two silk varieties in petri dishes in the lab and in animal models. The silk-blend mixed in equal proportions was found to be superior on several counts to the other two varieties used individually. It also showed a better ability to retain stable primary liver clusters that exhibited optimal size, showed higher proliferation leading to high cell density, and prolonged cell survival and better functionality. This paves the way for its use in liver tissue engineering at a later stage.
•Unlike mulberry silk, non-mulberry silk has cell binding sites (RGD) that help in better cell attachment and proliferation. Also, the water-loving (hydrophilic) nature of non-mulberry silk allows for better cell attachment. The two silk varieties performed equally well in most other parameters.
•“People were using synthetic RGD to mulberry silk to improve cell attachment and growth. We used the non-mulberry silk instead, which naturally has the cell binding site property, to produce the blend,” says Prof. Mandal. “We are now validating it with primary human liver cells and also human stem-cell derived liver cells on the blended scaffold to make it clinically more viable.”
