📰 Back and forth renaming of temple kicks up a row
Devaswom Board’s decisions on Sabarimala invite rap
•The controversial renaming of the famous Sabarimala temple twice in the past 15 months has kicked up a controversy with many prominent citizens representing key stakeholders at Sabarimala taking strong exception to it.
•“The two mutually inverted decisions, taken within a short span of 15 months by the Travancore Devaswom Board (TDB), first to change the official name of the Sabarimala temple from ‘Sree Dharma Sastha Temple’ to ‘Sree Ayyappa Temple’ and then vice versa, under the presidency of the Congress nominee Prayar Gopalakrishnan and the CPI-M (Communist Party of India-Marxist) nominee A. Padmakumar, respectively, prima facie recalls the proverbially historic ‘Tughlaq culture’,” said P. Rama Varma Raja, chairman of the Pandalam Palace Managing Committee.
•Talking to The Hindu , the PPMC chairman said both the moves could be seen only as part of continued overstepping by the TDB of the mandate it enjoyed in managing temples.
Not devotee-centric
•“It is another matter that the Sastha temples and Ayyappa temples often use the names interchangeably, based on the close links between the Sastha legends and Ayyappa history. But, the two renaming processes have only added to controversies already bedevilling the forest shrine at Sabarimala. These are neither devotee-centric nor would they strengthen or weaken the litigation pending before the Supreme Court of India [on the entry of women to the shrine],” Mr. Raja said.
•Mr. Raja said the TDB and the government should give due priority to the opinions and the right of the Pandalam Palace in matters related to Sabarimala.
•The Nair Service Society has also taken serious exception to the TDB’s move to rename the temple. The NSS’s general secretary G. Sukumaran Nair has cautioned that the temple authority should not venture into such misadventures at Sabarimala, sidelining the unique tradition, rites and religious practices there, as it could only make the sacred grove of Lord Ayyappa a centre of avoidable controversy.
•The Akhila Bharatha Ayyappa Seva Sanghom (ABASS) national vice-president D. Vijayakumar said that Ayyappa devotees were deeply hurt over the TDB’s irresponsible move in executing the political agenda of government nominees in the temple’s administrative body. Former TDB president Prayar Gopalakrishnan, said the presiding deity at Sabarimala is Sree Ayyappa and the temple rituals have been arranged taking the deity as Ayyappa, a perpetual celibate (‘Naishtika Brahmachari’).
•“Political ideology and religious beliefs should not be permitted to mix up, at least in the case of temple administration,” he said.
📰 Medaram’s Jatara to get national tag
The event in Telangana is said to be the biggest tribal festival in Asia
•Central government is likely to declare Medaram’s Sammakka-Sarakka/Saralamma Jatara a national festival this year. Union Ministry of Tribal Affairs released Rs. 2 crore as Centre’s contribution towards conducting the massive event which is held bi-annually in Jayashankar Bhupalpally district to honour the twin goddesses Sammakka and her daughter Sarakka.
•Union government had in 2015 declared Vanaj, a tribal dance and music festival, as national festival. Union Minister of Tribal Affairs Jual Oram is expected to announce the Centre’s decision on Jatara’s national status on January 31 when he visits Medaram, senior officials of Telangana’s Tribal Welfare Development department told The Hindu .
Biggest festival
•Sammakka-Sarakka Jatara held by forest dwelling Koya tribe of Telangana and surrounding States, is the biggest Tribal festival in Asia which is attended by one crore people on an average. This year, the four-day Jatara, scheduled to begin on January 31, is expected to have a footfall of 1.20 crore persons.
•The State government has already released Rs. 80.5 crore for the Jatara this year. Once declared a national festival, Jatara can be considered for ‘intangible cultural heritage of humanity’ tag of United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO). UNESCO had given the tag to Kumbh Mela, which is world’s biggest festival which sees participation by up to 10 crore persons.
•Out of the huge congregation which comes to Medaram, 50 % are non-adivasi making the Jatara the most popular Tribal festival in India. People from Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Andhra Pradesh come for the festival. “Tribal Welfare Department has been requesting the Centre to recognise Jatara since the past eight years. But this year State government also requested the Centre because of which we expect a positive outcome,” Director Tribal Cultural Research and Training Institute Sarveswar Reddy told The Hindu.
Mythical narrative
•The ball started rolling in favour of the Jatara when in September 2016 Telangana government made a formal request to the Central government to declare it a national fest. On January 2, a delegation of Telangana ministers had also met Mr. Oram to press the demand. Apart from Telangana Rashtra Samithi legislators, Bharatiya Janata Party leaders of Telangana have also been supporting the festival’s national status.
•Several communities in Telangana society support Jatara as it is also a mythical narrative of two tribal women leaders who fought against the Kakatiya rulers who tried to annex their land and forests.
•According to the myth it was Sammakka’s curse which caused gradual decline and death of Kakatiya rule. The Jatara gets 12 % Non-Resident Indian footfall.
📰 10% gender gap in Jan Dhan accounts: study
Difference is 21% in Madhya Pradesh
•A World Bank paper has noted a 10% gender gap in opening accounts under the country’s flagship financial inclusion programme — Jan Dhan Yojana — with 73 % men applying for accounts against 63 % women. Madhya Pradesh recorded the largest gender gap of 21%. The World Bank’s policy research working paper ‘Making It Easier to Apply for a Bank Account: A Study of the Indian Market’ (2017) by Asli Demirguc-Kunt, Leora Klapper, Saniya Ansar and Aditya Jagati also noted an income gap — 64% being poorer adults and 71 % richer adults — in applying for an account.
•The share of wage earners (72%) was higher than the share of adults who are out of the workforce and applied for an account (64%). Among adults with primary school education, 62% applied as compared with 70% of adults who had completed secondary school education (and 84 % of adults with a graduate degree).
•The survey was carried out between January and March of 2016 in 12 States — Andhra Pradesh (including Telangana), Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Odisha, Punjab, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh — which make up about 70% of the country’s population.
•The paper explored the costs of opening an account, the efficiency of the account application process, and demographic differences between those who choose to apply and those who do not.
•The research said despite initial successes, people who wished to apply for an account continued to incur a range of costs, including the cost of travelling to bank branches, the cost of collecting documentation and various other monetary costs. The confluence of these factors makes account opening a tedious task, researchers said.
•Some adults declined to get an account as they were unable to afford the fees for maintaining and using an account, or think the fees are not worth it. Yet 40 % of adults cited lack of trust in financial institutions as reason for not opening an account.
📰 Why is Maharashtra on the boil?
What happened?
•On January 1, members of the Dalit community on their way to Bhima-Koregaon, a village near Pune, were attacked, allegedly by Hindutva forces. In the violence, a young man was killed. Protests erupted, and by January 2, they spread throughout Maharashtra. Prakash Ambedkar, head of the Bharipa Bahujan Mahasangh party and a grandson of Babasaheb Ambedkar, called a State-wide bandh on January 3.
Why is Koregaon-Bhima important?
•The Koregaon Ranstambh (victory pillar) is a memorial for British East India Company soldiers killed in a battle on January 1, 1818, in which a small group of infantrymen — about 500 of them Mahars (a Scheduled Caste community) — held off a numerically superior force from the army of Peshwa Bajirao II. The Mahars fought alongside the British, some accounts say, because the Peshwa had scorned their offer to join his army.
•That battle has not found a place in public memories of that time. Dalit activists put this down to a Brahmanic hold on the telling of Indian history. After Dr. Ambedkar visited the site on January 1, 1927, it became a place of pilgrimage for Dalits, an assertion of pride. In recent years, attendance has been in the lakhs, with Dalits coming from all over India. This year, the bicentenary, saw an especially large influx.
What triggered the violence?
•Sambhaji, Shivaji’s son and successor, was captured by the Mughals; according to legend, he was tortured and his mutilated corpse thrown into the Bhima river. Govind Mahar, a Dalit, gathered the dismembered parts of his body and performed the last rites; later, Mahars of the village erected a memorial to Sambhaji. Govind Mahar’s tomb stands near Sambhaji’s in Vadhu-Budruk village, near Bhima-Koregaon.
•On December 29, a board came up in Vadhu-Budruk hailing Govind Mahar, which, locals say, irked the Marathas in the village, who believe that their ancestors performed Sambhaji’s last rites. Mahar’s tomb was vandalised. On January 1, a mob of 1,500 gathered and, armed with stones, bottles and sticks, attacked buses on their way to Bhima-Koregaon; they threw stones and torched more than 10 vehicles. The violence continued for over four hours. The police remained spectators, and the administration seemed unprepared for the unrest, though it knew of the assembly of a large number of youths at Vadhu-Budruk.
Who instigated the violence?
•News reports say Manohar (a.k.a. Sambhaji) Bhide of Shiv Pratisthan and Milind Ekbote of Hindu Ekta Aghadi instigated the violence. Mr. Bhide, whose stronghold is Sangli district, has close ties with the RSS. He claims to travel across the State, lecturing the youth on Shivaji and his work. He has had cases filed against him for inciting protests against the film Jodha-Akbar, and is believed to have been involved in the Sangli-Miraj riots. Mr. Ekbote is a former BJP municipal corporator in Pune. After the party denied him nomination, he formed his own outfit, Hindu Ekta Aghadi. He, too, has been charged in the past with fanning communal tensions. Cases have been filed against both under the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe (Prevention of Atrocities) Act.
What happened during the bandh?
•On January 2, Dalit organisations took to the streets in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region, Nagpur, Pune and many other districts, blocking roads and trains and allegedly forcing closure of commercial establishments.
•On January 3, in Mumbai, local trains and Mumbai Metro suspended a number of services; vehicular traffic, too, came to a halt, and many schools, colleges and offices remained shut. Similar protests brought life to a stop in every district. Violence erupted in Mumbai, Aurangabad, and Kolhapur, among other places. The bandh was arguably the biggest since 1997, when Dalit organisations protested against police firing at Ramabai Ambedkar Nagar, Ghatkopar. This bandh served as a potent reminder of Dalit strength and brought Mr. Ambedkar back into the reckoning as a political force and voice of Dalit aspirations.
📰 Who is Vijay Gokhale, the China expert in the hot seat
•Vijay Gokhale, the man who will helm India’s diplomacy as Foreign Secretary for the next two years, is known for working “below the radar.” Thus, by the time his appointment was announced on January 1, he had already been at work, quietly, in South Block.
What is he working on?
•As Secretary (Economic Relations) since October, Mr. Gokhale was at several important meetings and dealing with upcoming visits, like those of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in mid-January, ASEAN leaders at the end of January, and King Abdullah II of Jordan thereafter. When India expressed its anger at the Palestinian envoy to Pakistan’s appearance at a public rally with Hafiz Saeed, it was Mr. Gokhale, whose portfolio includes West Asia and North Africa, who summoned the Palestinian Ambassador in New Delhi. Mr. Gokhale is understood to have conveyed the tough message in his characteristically understated, but effective, manner: within hours, the Palestinian Foreign Ministry announced that they had withdrawn their man in Islamabad and regretted his actions.
Is there a Doklam link?
•Mr. Gokhale’s reputation for conducting negotiations in Beijing, in tandem with National Security Adviser Ajit Doval and Foreign Secretary S. Jaishankar during the Doklam crisis last year, is also well known, and both Indian and Chinese leaders appreciated his role. Many of Mr. Gokhale’s predecessors have also been China experts: most notably Mr. Jaishankar, Shivshankar Menon and Shyam Saran, but a few have the unifocal breadth and depth of his skills and experience in handling Beijing. He has had two “desk postings” in New Delhi, as Director (China and East Asia) in the Ministry of External Affairs, and then Joint Secretary (East Asia). The vast majority of his postings abroad have taken him to the east.
What are the challenges?
•The experience will stand him in good stead, say most analysts, as at a time when relations with the other big powers, the U.S., Russia, Japan and the EU, are on a strong wicket, it is China that will remain the most unpredictable variable in the Foreign Secretary’s worksheet. The other big challenge will come from the subcontinent, where ties with India’s smaller neighbours have been under strain for various reasons. What is in common for them, however, is that China is now a factor in each of those countries, whether it is with Pakistan, Afghanistan, Maldives, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh or even Bhutan. With elections expected in most of the neighbourhood this year, Mr. Gokhale has his task cut out as India battles the perception that it is losing to China not just in terms of economic muscle, but also in political influence in the region. This may be a tougher task given that Mr. Gokhale lacks in experience in SAARC postings, once considered essential for the job.
•The appointment of Mr. Gokhale, a 1981 batch officer, will not ruffle many feathers as he is the senior-most among his peers. He was in the same batch with India’s High Commissioner to the U.K. Y.K Sinha, and India’s Ambassador to Japan Sujan Chinoy. An interesting fact is that not only is he fluent in Mandarin Chinese, but when he was director of the Indian cultural centre in Taipei, Mr. Gokhale taught himself Sanskrit.
•Mr. Gokhale is called a “traditionalist” by most colleagues, an officer who plays “by the rules” which would ensure a more “tried and tested” foreign policy rather than one that “thinks out of the box.” Those phrases, used for him by retired and serving foreign service officers indicate a closer personal alignment to India’s older positions as well, and it may not be entirely coincidental that India voted more firmly with the Palestinian cause at the UN General Assembly on the Jerusalem issue last month, than it has in previous votes since 2015. An officer who is known to shun the limelight, Mr. Gokhale could also restrict the more “personalised” policy projection that has marked Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s travels abroad in the last few years, say diplomats who have worked with him. Much will depend on how free a hand the Foreign Secretary is given, and how much of the Prime Minister’s ear he receives.
📰 ‘Raising Iran unrest at UN a blunder’
Foreign Minister says majority agreed that U.S. should refrain from interfering in its internal affairs
•Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif ridiculed U.S. President Donald Trump on Saturday over what he called the foreign policy "blunder" of trying to raise its recent protests at the UN Security Council.
•The Security Council "rebuffed the U.S.' naked attempt to hijack its mandate", Mr. Zarif wrote on Twitter.
•"Majority emphasised the need to fully implement the JCPOA [nuclear deal] and to refrain from interfering in internal affairs of others. Another FP [foreign policy] blunder for the Trump administration."
•The United States had pushed for the UN meeting on Friday to discuss the five days of protests that hit Iran last week, leading to the deaths of 21 people and hundreds of arrests.
•U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley argued the unrest could escalate into full-blown conflict and drew a comparison with Syria.
U.S. protests brought up
•"The Iranian regime is now on notice: the world will be watching what you do," Ms. Haley warned.
•But Russia's envoy shot back that if the U.S. view holds, the Council should have also discussed the 2014 unrest in the US suburb of Ferguson, Missouri over the police shooting of a black teenager or the U.S. crackdown on the Occupy Wall Street movement.
•Britain and France reiterated that Iran must respect the rights of protesters, but French Ambassador Francois Delattre said the "events of the past days do not constitute a threat to peace and international security".
•China also described the meeting as meddling in Iran's affairs. Iran's Ambassador Gholamali Khoshroo slammed the meeting as a "farce" and a "waste of time" and said the Council should instead focus on addressing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or the war in Yemen.
Easing sanctions
•Iran signed a nuclear deal with the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China in 2015, easing sanctions in exchange for curbs to the country's nuclear programme.
•U.S. President Donald Trump has fiercely opposed the deal, but the other signatories remain firmly behind it.
•Mr. Trump must decide every few months whether to continue waiving nuclear sanctions, with the next deadline due on Friday. Analysts say there is a chance he may use the latest unrest as a pretext to reimpose sanctions.
📰 Palestinians willing to give the ‘one-state’ idea another chance
However, they demand proportionate political power and equal civil rights, including right to vote, in national and regional elections
•As momentum ebbs for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, both sides are taking another look at the one-state idea. But that solution has long been problematic for both sides.
•For the Israelis, absorbing three million West Bank Palestinians means either giving up on democracy or accepting the end of the Jewish state. The Palestinians, unwilling to live under apartheid-like conditions or military occupation, have also seen two states as their best hope.
•Now, for the first time since it declared its support for a Palestinian state side-by-side with Israel in 1988, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) is seriously debating whether to embrace fallback options, including the pursuit of a single state.
•“It’s dominating the discussion,” said Mustafa Barghouti, a physician who sits on the PLO’s central council, which is to take up possible changes to the national movement’s strategy later this month.
Equal rights and power
•Palestinian supporters envision one state with equal rights for Palestinians and Jews. Palestinians would have proportionate political power and, given demographic trends, would before long be a majority, spelling the end of the Zionist project.
•That outcome is unacceptable to the Israeli right-wing, which is pressing to annex the land on the occupied West Bank where Jewish settlers have built communities while consigning Palestinians to the areas where they live now.
•Israeli proponents of these ideas freely acknowledge that the Palestinian areas would be considerably less than a state, at least to start: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has even called it a “state-minus”. Eventually, they say, the Palestinians could achieve statehood in a confederation with Jordan or Egypt, as part of Israel, or perhaps even independently — but not soon.
•Both sides have long officially supported the idea of a two-state solution to the conflict while accusing the other of harbouring designs on the whole territory. But U.S. President Donald Trump’s Jerusalem declaration last month changed the calculus.
•Saeb Erekat, the veteran Palestinian negotiator, said that Mr. Trump’s declaration was the death knell for the two-state solution and that Palestinians should shift their focus to “one state with equal rights”.
•His position has since gained traction among the Palestinian leadership. Under that idea, the Palestinian movement would shift to a struggle for equal civil rights, including the freedoms of movement, assembly and speech, and the right to vote in national elections. “Which could mean a Palestinian could be the Prime Minister,” Mr. Barghouti said.
•To its Palestinian supporters, the one-state idea is bitter consolation after decades of striving for statehood under the Oslo peace accords, which many believe has achieved little aside from providing cover, and buying time, for Israel to expand settlements.
Media campaign
•Several efforts are under way. A decade-old group called the Popular Movement for One Democratic State, led by Radi Jarai, a former Fatah leader, is planning a media campaign to explain the idea to West Bank residents.
•“They think it means Palestinians will take the Israeli ID and live under an apartheid regime,” he said. “But our idea is to have one democratic state, with no privilege for the Jews or for any other ethnic or religious group.”
•To the Israeli Right, abandoning the two-state goal is a good thing, a long-term threat averted. But the it has not fully explained how its single state overcomes the demographic conundrum.
•“I would never give citizenship to the masses of the Arab population in Judea and Samaria,” said Yoav Kisch, a Member of Parliament from Mr. Netanyahu’s party.
•What these two sharply different one-state visions share is a conviction that a two-state solution is out of reach.
•To be sure, the PLO is not giving up entirely on a two-state solution. It is still pursuing other diplomatic avenues. On Friday, for example, Mr. Erekat called on Arab League member states to act on past commitments to cut ties with any country that recognises Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.NY Times
📰 U.S.-Korea trade negotiations pit pickup trucks against nuclear threat
The goods trade deficit with South Korea has doubled since the 2012 signing of a free trade agreement; almost 90% of the 2016 shortfall of $27.6 billion came from the auto sector
•The United States and South Korea on Friday completed the first round of review talks on a bilateral trade deal with Washington saying there was “much work to do” to reach a new pact.
•Since taking office, President Donald Trump has pulled the U.S. out of talks on a 14-nation Asia-Pacific trade pact, started negotiations on a new deal for the North American Free Trade Agreement between the U.S., Mexico and Canada and initiated a review of the 2012 Korea deal.
•Washington has taken a hard line in the NAFTA talks, which appear stalled with just two rounds of negotiations left, saying that concessions are the only way for Canada and Mexico to keep the deal.
Strike a balance
•The Korea trade talks will have to strike a balance between Mr. Trump’s domestic agenda and the need to contain a nuclear-armed North Korea. A swift agreement would have aided that, officials from both sides told Reuters.
•The U.S. goods trade deficit with South Korea has doubled since the 2012 signing of the U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement (KORUS). Almost 90% of the 2016 shortfall of $27.6 billion came from the auto sector, an issue the U.S. is expected to press hard in the Washington talks.
•A quick Korea deal could give Mr. Trump his first trade victory at a time when NAFTA negotiations are dragging on and pressure on China to change trade practices has yielded little progress.
•The talks, led by Assistant U.S. Trade Representative Michael Beeman and Yoo Myung-hee, director general for FTA negotiations at South Korea’s trade ministry, begin at a time of heightened tension with Pyongyang.
•The U.S. had primarily raised the issue of the automobile sector, Ms. Yoo told reporters after the first round of talks, Yonhap News Agency said.
•A top priority for the Americans is maintaining a tariff of 25% on imports of Korean pickup trucks, which the existing deal envisaged to be phased out from 2019, according to a U.S. official and a South Korean car industry source. South Korea has two major automakers, Hyundai Motor and Kia Motors, that rely heavily on exports because of the small size of the domestic market. Critics say South Korea discriminates against imports with a range of non-tariff barriers.
•South Korean auto companies believe Washington will also seek to increase the 25,000-vehicle per U.S. automaker threshold for U.S. car shipments to South Korea that can enter the country without meeting domestic industry regulations. The official at a South Korea auto company, who was not authorized to speak to the media, also said the U.S. was interested in easing Seoul’s vehicle emissions targets. These are viewed as discriminating against U.S. autos.
•Since Kim Jong Un took power in North Korea, Pyongyang has run a series of increasingly powerful nuclear tests and ballistic missile launches, drawing ever tighter sanctions and a freeze on contacts between the two Koreas. This month, however, Seoul agreed to high-level talks with the North in response to a speech in which the North Korean leader offered an opening to diplomacy.
•Pyongyang has a long history of seeking to play off Seoul and Washington as well as Beijing and Moscow in its diplomacy.
•Washington is wary of separate approaches and there are concerns that disagreements over KORUS could fuel a rift between South Korea and the U.S.
📰 India’s second FTII to be set up in Arunachal
•Arunachal Pradesh would get its first Film and Television Institute, being set up by the Union Government as part of tapping the potential of the Northeastern region, Union Minister Jitendra Singh said on Saturday.
•This would be the second such one in the country. The first Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) was set up in Pune, an autonomous institute operating under the Information and Broadcasting Ministry.
•“We are coming out with the first ever film and television institute in Arunachal Pradesh after Pune,” Dr.Singh, also Minister of State for Prime Minister’s Office and Development of the Northeastern region, said.
•Dr. Singh said he learnt that only two film shootings had taken place in Arunachal Pradesh in the last few decades as the requisite infrastructure for film shootings and storing the equipment was not there in that State.
•He said the south Indian film industry could take the lead in giving a fillip to the FTII there by shooting films in that State.
•Dr. Singh was speaking at a conference ‘Indian Entertainment Industry: Global Leader in Making’ organised by Bharat Niti and South India Film Chamber of Commerce.
📰 Now, Citizenship Bill hangs fire
BJP’s Assam leadership feels it goes against the spirit of NRC updating exercise
•Even as the National Register of Citizens (NRC) is being updated in Assam, the Citizenship Bill, 2016 has been in limbo.
•The Bill, which seeks to amend the existing Citizenship Act, 1955, aims to grant citizenship to religious minorities, barring Muslims, from neighbouring countries. It was referred to a Joint Select Committee of Parliament in August 2016.
•This needs to be seen in the context of the recent debate on the updating of the NRC with West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee calling it an exercise to drive Bengalis out of Assam. Sources said the BJP’s Assam leadership was uncomfortable with the Citizenship Bill as they felt it was against the spirit of the NRC updating exercise.
•In the past 17 months, the joint select committee has held eight sittings but is far from finalising its report. The last meeting of the committee was held last Wednesday after a gap of over six months. “It [the meeting] was merely to welcome the new chairperson of the committee, Rajendra Agarwal, who replaced Satyapal Singh. Mr. Singh was elevated as a Minister in September. Regardless of the change, the government has lost interest in the Bill,” said an MP who attended the meeting.
•The Bill was sent to select a committee after vehement protests from members in the Opposition, who alleged the Narendra Modi government is trying to convert India into a Hindu nation. The Bill amends the Citizenship Act, 1955, to make undocumented Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi and Christian migrants from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan eligible for citizenship.
•The Opposition also said the Bill violated Article 14 of the Constitution which guarantees the right to equality.
•“The government promised something during the elections which was entirely unconstitutional. Later their own people, especially in Assam have opposed it. So now they have put it on the backburner occasionally,” said CPI (M) MP Mohammed Salim, a committee member.
📰 Centre awaiting Siang report: Kiren Rijiju
Says it is too early to blame any activity by China for the darkening of the river in Arunachal Pradesh
•Union Minister of State for Home Kiren Rijiju has said that the Union government will wait for the final report of the Central Water Commission on the unusual darkening of the Siang river in Arunachal Pradesh before blaming any man-made activity by China.
•The Siang enters India from Tibet, where it flows for about 1,500 km as the Tsangpo and becomes the Brahmaputra after it flows into Assam. Reports have blamed tunnel construction by China in Tibet for the unusual darkening of the river and a surge in silt downstream.
China stand
•Mr. Rijiju told The Hindu that China had clarified that a 6.4 magnitude earthquake in Tibet was responsible for the darkening of the river. “The study is being carried out by the CWC and other experts are looking into it. As per the current information, China has reported that darkening was caused by some natural phenomenon like an earthquake. The final report hasn’t come, let us wait for the final study,” he said.
•Mr. Rijiju represents Arunachal Pradesh in the Lok Sabha.
•On December 19, Ripun Bora of the Congress told the Rajya Sabha that the Assam Chief Minister had twice written to the Prime Minister to take up the matter with China at the bilateral level, but no action had been taken. “There is an abnormal change in the Brahmaputra during the past one month and poisonous, muddy, turbid water is flowing in the river. As a result, a lot of wild animals and aquatic life have died. This has also resulted in loss of livelihood for many people. This catastrophe has jeopardised the Brahmaputra valley civilisation. The main reason for this is China is constructing 1,000-km tunnel, connecting South Tibet and Desert Taklimakan in Jhingjiyang Province. This is the longest tunnel in the world. And, China has constructed a 200-metre-wide, 13-km-high big dam at Yarlung Tsangpo to divert the Brahmaputra,” Mr. Bora said.
Excess silt
•As reported earlier, official reports of the colour of water in the Siang, in Tuting, changing emerged from the Arunachal Pradesh office of the CWC on November 10 and it attributed it to excess silt. What caused the deluge of silt, however, wasn’t specified. But the water at Tuting was still potable, according to the CWC. Earlier, Masood Hussain, Chairman, CWC, had said that the agency’s preliminary reports did not find traces of cement or high alkalinity in the river — or signs of construction.
📰 The lowdown on Assam’s NRC drive
What is it?
•On December 31, at the stroke of midnight, the Assamgovernment published the first draft of an updated version of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) with the names of 1.9 crore people. In all, 3.3 crore people from 68.7 lakh families have submitted over 6 crore documents to back their claim of being a citizen of India.
•Another draft is expected by early March after the documents of the residents are verified. If any resident is left out, he or she can approach the authorities with the requisite documents for their name to be included in www.nrcassam.nic.in (http://be%20included.in%20www.nrcassam.nic.in% 20this/). This is called the claims and objection process to rectify any error. Once the verification is over, a final updated NRC will be published with the names of citizens. Those excluded will be considered foreigners.
How did it come about?
•The first draft was published as per the directives of the Supreme Court. However, the issue has its roots in the anti-foreigner movement or ‘Axom Andolan’ that was launched in June 1979 by the All-Assam Students’ Union (AASU). It started after the death of Mangaldoi Lok Sabha member Hiralal Patwari in 1978 that necessitated a byelection. When the electoral rolls were being prepared, the number of voters increased dramatically. It was suspected that the increase was largely because illegal immigrants from neighbouring Bangladesh had settled down in the State. After years of mass protests that at times resulted in violence, including the Nellie massacre of 1983, the Assam Peace Accord was signed between the Rajiv Gandhi government, the AASU and the Asom Gana Sangram Parishad in 1985.
•Anyone who entered the State after the midnight of March 24, 1971, was considered a foreigner. The State government was to “detect and deport” illegal Bangladeshi immigrants. However, successive governments in the State have failed to make progress in detecting and deporting foreigners as laid down in the Accord.
•In 2005, another agreement was signed among the Centre, the Tarun Gogoi government and the AASU. It mandated an update of the NRC.
•Though the Gogoi government started the update as a pilot project in some districts, the exercise was stopped after violence broke out in some parts of the State. Assam Public Works, a non-governmental organisation, petitioned the Supreme Court for identification of Bangladeshi foreigners and deletion of their names from the electoral rolls. The court directed the State to complete the NRC update first.
Why does it matter?
•The NRC — first published after the 1951 Census in the post-partition India when parts of Assam went to the erstwhile East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) — is being updated to determine foreigners who entered Assam after the cut-off date. Once the exercise is over, it is expected to tell the authorities how many migrants might have illegally settled down in the State. It will also provide dignity to all those Bengali-speaking settlers who continue to live under the shadow of being called “illegal Bangladeshis.”
•In pre-independent India, migration of farmers from Mymensingh district of the erstwhile East Bengal was common as they were brought in as experts in wet paddy cultivation. Many of them had come in when Sir Syed Muhammed Saadullah was heading the government of Assam Province and launched the Grow More Food campaign to aid British war efforts in the early 1940s.
What next?
•The next stage is undoubtedly the most difficult part of the exercise. The State and the Centre are expected to take a call on what to do with those identified as foreigners. Bangladesh does not recognise them as their nationals and even the cut-off date of March 1971 is 46 years old. There are apprehensions of it becoming a law and order issue. Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal has talked about dealing with the issue humanely.
📰 Frequent data breaches dent Aadhaar’s role as a unique identifier: petitioners tell SC
“Aadhaar numbers are being issued to ‘Lord Hanuman,’ ‘Rani Jhansi,’ chairs, dogs, etc.,” the affidavit said.
•Multiple data breaches from government portals, resulting in unfettered, unauthorised access to Aadhaar details, have affected 135 million Indians, and exponentially increased the danger of perpetuating Aadhaar as a “universal, unique identifier”, petitioners said in the Supreme Court, responding to the Centre’s submissions listing the benefits of Aadhaar.
•Coupled with this is the studied opacity shown by Aadhaar’s nodal agency, UIDAI, in revealing to the public the number of data breach incidents on its servers, they said.
•A five-judge Constitution Bench is scheduled to hear over 20 petitions, challenging the Aadhaar scheme and its linking with 139 government subsidies, SIMs, bank accounts and various other essential financial and everyday services.
Few penalties
•An RTI query on the suspension / blacklisting of enrolment operators till October 31, 2016 revealed that despite having received almost 1,400 complaints related to bribery, duplicate enrolments etc., the UIDAI initiated police complaints in only three cases.
•“There is no obligation on the UIDAI to provide any reasons for taking or failing to take any action,” the petitioners submitted in the court.
•The government’s insistence on seeding Aadhaar furthers the risk of identity theft as mere possession of the Aadhaar number can enable an identity thief access a host of other information stored in different databases, the petitioners — represented by senior advocate Shyam Divan and advocate Vipin Nair — submitted in a detailed additional affidavit.
•They argued that data breaches are in flagrant violation of Section 29 of the Aadhaar Act read with Regulations 6 and 7 of the Aadhaar (Sharing of Information) Regulations 2016. The government-appointed Justice B.N. Sri Krishna Committee has not given a deadline for submitting its recommendations on a new data protection regime. Besides, the government is not bound by such recommendations. This leaves the Supreme Court to decide the validity of Aadhaar without any further delay, the petitioners said.
•They said, the government has provided in the Rajya Sabha a list of 210 websites of the Central government, State government departments and some educational institutes which have displayed the list of beneficiaries along with their name, address, other details and Aadhaar numbers.
•By the UIDAI’s own admission, 49,000 Aadhaar enrolment operators were blacklisted for violations. These operators were entrusted by the UIDAI to capture sensitive biometric information of over 1.3 billion Indians. “Aadhaar numbers are being issued to ‘Lord Hanuman,’ ‘Rani Jhansi,’ chairs, dogs, etc.,” the affidavit said.
•The affidavit said biometric failures and botched authentication attempts due to electricity or internet related failures or the inability of machines to scan biometrics correctly have resulted in untold sufferings to the common man. As per the Economic Survey 2016-17, these authentication failures are as high as 49% in some States.
•By aggregating personal data and biometrics in one centralised database, the government is ignoring precedent like that in the United Kingdom which scrapped a similar “identity card” project in 2010 following popular opposition. A report by the London School of Economics found that “no database’s security can be guaranteed.”
•The affidavit pointed to the Equifax breach, which resulted in the leak of several million Americans’ Social Security Numbers, has led to renewed debate in the U.S. to scrap the Social Security Number entirely.
•Noting that the issue of Aadhaar transcends mere data protection but involves the fundamental right to privacy, the petitioners said sophisticated data breaches affecting large populations indicates the inherent dangers of aggregating valuable personal information of Indian residents in one centralised database.
📰 A blueprint for India’s ‘Smart Villages’
•Sometime in early 2015, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Cabinet put forth a plan for upgrading a cluster of 300 villages to ‘Smart Villages’. Christened as the Shyama Prasad Mukherji Rurban Mission, after the founder of the Jan Sangh, the project aimed to develop the first phase by 2019. A sound plan, considering that at least 833 million, about 68%, of Indians are living in rural areas. And one that can be easily realised in a developing setting such as India’s, according to Yousef Khalili, head of Smart City Digital Transformation Consulting Unit at NXN Group.
•For Mr. Khalili, one of the architects of the Smart Dubai projects, Smart Villages is an idea that’s close to his heart. “The baseline for smart communities is always constant, whether it is a city or a village. It’s how you use technology to better the lives of people,” he explains in an interview.
•For India, Mr. Khalili recommends starting with the challenges that are presented for such a project. “The stress points of a city are very different from that of a village; and the quality of their life is perhaps the most prominent challenge in rural areas. Here, we are talking about demands of basic decent life conditions — education, health care, environment and employment among others,” he elaborates.
•Mr. Khalili says one should not look for the typical solutions that governments often resort to which have had little success over decades. “If a government aspires to focus on education, instead of budgeting for an expensive school infrastructure, they could create units for smart learning in digital classrooms.”
•When pointed to the obvious drawback that most villages lack the kind of Internet connectivity required, Mr. Khalili strikes back with complementary solutions. “I feel it is much more scalable as a solution to offer remote education within villages if the governments were to collaborate with private investors.” In India, he believes, the private sector is not assured of return on investments. “The government here needs to step up [its part], and implement a national programme whereby they take their infrastructure to the villages in exchange for subsidised markets and revenue shares,” he recommends.
•“[The] same framework would apply for health care,” he says, adding that access to technologies in health care needn’t affect the budget set aside for emergencies. “The government can offer tele-medicine and mobile clinics in the village.” Since India is an agrarian economy, Mr. Khalili recommends services aimed at farmers. “Apart from the consultation and support services, an exchange or an online platform could be set up at village centres that allows the farmers to sell their crops at the best prices,” he suggests. “It will bring transparency.”
Business model
•However, even with pragmatic, yet lofty ideas, Mr. Khalili is aware that realising them would require more than just good intentions. At his previous position with Cisco as well, Mr. Khalili had worked extensively on a project focussing on India as a landscape to launch Smart Villages. “After six months of study, I realised why such a project was unable to take off in the real world,” he explains. “I believe that despite all the wishful thinking and good intentions, the business model or the lack of one was not cracked.” The government alone cannot bear the financial costs of the project, and the private sector doesn’t see the revenues for them, he says.
📰 Fatal crossings: tigers in 26 reserves under threat
Cats die in accidents on highways without safe passages
•On New Year’s eve, a fast-moving vehicle on Maharashtra’s National Highway 6 killed Bajirao, one of Bor Tiger Reserve’s charismatic, dominant male tigers.
•The same day, a team of scientists published the findings from their latest research: roads with high traffic are sounding the death knell for the tiger in this part of the country. Unplanned expansion of national highways without mitigation measures (such as underpasses created for wildlife) could greatly increase the probability of tiger extinction in Central India’s protected areas, home to one of the largest tiger populations. But new and expanded roads continue to slice through most of India’s protected areas.
Second largest
•According to the National Highways Authority of India, the country’s road network, at approximately 33 lakh km, is the second largest in the world. Many of these roads — including national and State highways — cut through at least 26 tiger reserves, says a draft guidance document of the Wildlife Institute of India (WII), framed to reduce the impact of roads and railway lines on wildlife.
•Leopards, snakes, deer, desert fox, golden jackals, civets and critically endangered amphibians are among the wildlife that perish on roads in States as far flung as Assam, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Tamil Nadu.
•For tigers, like many other species, traversing large areas to move across habitats involves crossing of roads.
•This is the only way they can ensure genetic diversity, which is vital for species survival. When scientists from the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS) and other organisations extracted genetic material from the scat of 116 tigers to study genetic diversity across 11 protected areas, they found that human settlements and traffic intensity — which restrict tiger movement between populations — decreased genetic exchange the most.
•The areas they looked at included Bor, where Bajirao, or BTR T-2 as he was known to researchers, sired cubs. The study also covered three territorial forests across Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Chhattisgarh.
•The team found that if unplanned development continued, it could result in a 56% higher average extinction probability for tigers within protected areas, due to lack of genetic connectivity.
•“If the same rate of landscape change as we have seen for the past 12 years continues, small tiger populations like the ones in Bor and Tipeshwar Wildlife Sanctuary are unlikely to survive into the next century,” says author Prachi Thatte from NCBS. “Isolated populations – like the one in Panna – are also likely to go extinct.”
•But new roads in protected areas affect and road widening, attract more traffic. In 2001, scientists studying a 9-km stretch of NH 7 which passes through Pench Tiger Reserve in Madhya Pradesh recorded 490 snakes killed in just two years.
•In the south, wildlife biologist Sanjay Gubbi and his colleagues studied the impact of vehicular traffic on the use of road edges by large mammals along the Mysore - Mananthavadi highway, which passes through Nagarahole Tiger Reserve seven years ago. Camera traps kept on two consecutive sections of the same highway – one closed to vehicular traffic and the other open to vehicles only during the day – the team found that spotted deer, Indian gaur and elephants frequented the segment with higher vehicular traffic density far less, suggesting that they avoid busy highways.
Rituals and roadkills
•Scientists found some years ago that religious tourism, which is concentrated across a few months of the year, also killed 56 species on roads passing through the Kalakkad Mundanthurai Tiger Reserve; they recorded a 299% increase in roadkills and a 648% increase in deaths of nocturnal species during this period over the baseline. Conservationists also write about how poachers in south India confessed to illegally hunting deer – including tiger prey like spotted deer – in Bandipur, Bhadra and Biligirirangaswamy Tiger Reserves by driving on roads at night.
•In 2008, night traffic was stopped on a 27-km stretch of the Mysore-Mananthavady Highway within Nagarhole National Park; in a first for India, authorities also re-aligned the highway out of the protected area, and invested in repairing the alternative route in 2012. Now, Tamil Nadu’s Mudumalai Tiger Reserve and Gujarat’s Gir National Park and Velavadar Wildlife Sanctuary have also either diverted roads or implemented night closure.
•“Closing roads at night will certainly ensure lower casualties,” says Mr. Gubbi. However, options for emergency commuters have to be provided, he adds. “Some compromises are necessary, along with science, outreach and logic.”
•Roads and widening projects in wild habitats exacerbate what scientists call ‘edge effects’: this alters plant communities (such as aiding the spread of invasive exotic species like Lantana camara) due to the disturbance along road edges. It can also change animal behaviour.
•Wherever possible, it is crucial to ensure alternative roads outside ecologically important areas, says Gubbi, who continues to study the impacts of roads on wildlife in Karnataka. “If there is no other option, impact has to be to minimised. Mitigation measures are very region - and species - specific and these should be taken into account.”
•In Tamil Nadu’s Valparai, the endangered Lion-tailed macaque was a frequent victim of roadkills on the narrow hill roads weaving through coffee and tea states, till 2011. Today, they cross the roads overhead, using seven canopy bridges installed by the Nature Conservation Foundation and the Forest Department in the Puduthotham and Varattuparai estates. Speed breakers also slow down speeding vehicles.
•States like Maharashtra, where Bajirao was killed, need other remedial measures: NH-6 and NH-7 intersect at least six tiger corridors in the Vidarbha region alone. In 2016, WII charted out guidelines for mitigation — such as creating underpasses and planting vegetation — to be followed while implementing new road projects. The National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) has already prescribed the implementation of some of these on NH-6 and NH-7 to the NHAI, says Debabrata Swain, Director, NTCA.
•“On NH-7, flyovers for traffic to facilitate underpasses for wildlife are already under construction and will be ready soon,” he says. “Measures on NH-6 are is also being implemented.”
•However, these will not be offer relief on existing roads; they can be added only to new roads or those that are widened, says Maharashtra Forest Department’s Chief Wildlife Warden A.K. Mishra.
📰 Expanding the donor pool
Indian scientists develop a mechanism to rejuvenate aged stem cells
•In cases such as bone marrow transplantation, which involves the transplantation of hematopoietic stem cells, namely stem cells that give rise to other types of blood cells, a younger donor age results in a better outcome. A group of Indian scientists have now developed a mechanism that can rejuvenate stem cells from older donors, making them useful for transplantation.
•The mechanism developed by researchers at the National Centre for Cell Science (NCCS), Pune, involves rejuvenating aged hematopoietic stem cells in a short-term culture using micro-vesicles secreted by young stromal cells.
•This approach, they hope, will expand donor cohort.
•The finding has relevance in clinical bone-marrow transplantation, wherein aged donors are usually not preferred as their stem cells could have compromised engraftment ability due to ageing. With the new mechanism, it might be possible to rejuvenate aged stem cells and thereby expand the donor pool.
•“Stromal cells are support cells present in the micro-environment of stem cells. We have shown that these cells display activated AkT signalling as they age. This leads to a loss of autophagy-inducing mRNAs in their micro-vesicles. If this signalling is blocked by using chemical inhibitors in aged stromal cells in culture, they become ‘young-like’ and secrete good quality micro-vesicles containing autophagy-inducing mRNA that can rejuvenate aged stem cells,” explains Dr. Vaijayanti P. Kale, who led the research team. The findings have been published in the scientific journal, Stem Cells .
Study using mice
•For the study, researchers used 6-8 week (young) and 18-24 month (aged) old mice because age-associated changes in human hematopoietic stem cells are similar to those observed in mice, suggesting that hematopoietic ageing is an evolutionarily-conserved process. Their bone marrow derived lineage-negative cells were treated with extra-cellular vesicles, micro-vesicles or exosomes isolated from a conditioned medium of mesenchymal stromal cells for 36 hours. The output cells were subjected to phenotypic, functional and molecular characterisations. They observed that young mesenchymal stromal cells rejuvenate aged hematopoietic stem cells.
•“Our data indicates that such rejuvenation may also be possible for other tissue-specific stem cells. We propose to extend our research towards stem cells from other tissues,” says Dr. Kale. She also adds that this research has the potential to improve the outcome of regenerative medicine therapies using this approach. — India Science Wire
