📰 ‘Declare polygamy in Islam illegal’
•A fresh plea was on Wednesday filed in the Supreme Court seeking to declare as “illegal” and “unconstitutional” the practices of polygamy and ‘nikah halala’ among the Muslim community.
•‘Nikah halala’ is a practice intended to curb the incidence of divorce, under which a man cannot remarry his former wife without her having to go through the process of marrying someone else, consummating it, getting divorced and observing a separation period called ‘iddat’ before coming back to him.
•The petition, filed by a Delhi-based woman, said that by virtue of Muslim Personal Law, Section 494 of the IPC (marrying again during the lifetime of husband or wife) was rendered inapplicable to Muslims and no married woman from the community had the avenue of filing a complaint against her husband for the offence of bigamy.
•“This is in blatant contravention of Articles 14 (equality before law), 15 (prohibition of discrimination on grounds of religion, race, caste, sex or place of birth) and 21 (right to life and personal liberty) of the Constitution,” the petition said.
📰 Far short of the potential
The India-Japan economic relationship remains underwhelming in relation to strategic ties
•In theory, it’s hard to find two nations that make a better economic fit than fast-growing, populous India and rich, demographically challenged Japan. India needs technical expertise and investments to develop its infrastructure, while Japan has capital to spare and know-how to share. They have a common strategic objective in countering Chinese hegemony in Asia, a goal that can be best met in collaboration. And they enjoy a rare historic amity, being geographically and culturally close, but not too close and, therefore, free of contentious issues such as border disputes.
Boosting ties
•Consequently, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Japanese counterpart Shinzo Abe have worked hard to upgrade ties. Regular high-profile bilateral visits have brought with them a smorgasbord of memoranda of understanding, some big-ticket projects, notably Japanese investment in India’s first bullet train, and political avowals to grow the economic relationship exponentially.
•There are now 1,369 Japanese companies and over 4,800 Japanese corporate offices active in India. Japanese investment in India totalled $4.7 billion in 2016-17, up from $2.6 billion the previous year. Japan currently ranks as the third largest investor in India.
•And yet, the India-Japan economic relationship remains underwhelming both in relation to its potential, and to the ties that each nation shares with China. According to Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO) data, China received about five times more Japanese investment between 1996-2015 ($116 billion) than India did ($24 billion). Japan-India two-way trade — $13.48 billion in 2016-17 — is also a fraction of the $350 billion China-Japan trade relationship or even India-China trade ($84.44 billion in 2017). In fact the share of India-Japan trade in Japan’s total trade basket is barely 1% and it is a little over 2% of India’s trade with the rest of the world.
•The gap cannot wholly be explained by the usual suspects that plague foreign investors in India such as inadequate infrastructure, complex tax regulations and land acquisition problems, although these remain substantial challenges.
•Tomofumi Nishizawa, manager of JETRO’s Overseas Research Department, spent five years at his organisation’s India office, till 2015. According to him it takes Japanese companies in India longer than their Korean or Chinese counterparts to learn how best to localise their products for the Indian market.
•He elaborated with the example of air conditioners. The Japanese tend to think that the most important element is the quality of the air conditioner so that it is able to last without the need for repairs. But in India it is cheap to have an air conditioner repaired and technicians are abundant. The consumer is therefore more focussed on cost than durability. Japanese manufacturer Daikin, which recently opened a second manufacturing facility in Rajasthan, is an example of a company that eventually cottoned on to this, switching from importing expensive parts from Japan to sourcing them locally.
India’s image
•But the greatest challenge according to Mr. Nishizawa is cultural: an outdated and negative image of India. He said that employees picked for jobs in India often act as though they have drawn the short straw. The larger corporations may realise India’s potential, but small and medium enterprises are the worst culprits of this attitude. “Maybe our attitude can be called racist,” he said. “It is very difficult to change it.”
•The difference in the cultural relationship to punctuality is another stumbling block. In Japan, being on time is akin to religion, whereas in India, time is fungible. Ultimately, Japanese corporations are strongly risk averse which makes it difficult for them to cope in the freewheeling, jugaad-proud environment of India, where flexibility and impromptu decision making are necessary skills in the business arsenal. Mr. Nishizawa says, “We (Japan) are not the global norm, but we act like we are. Unless we become more flexible and adapt better to other ways, we will not succeed.”
Some optimism
•But this pessimism can be overblown. A recent development that bodes well for the future is the collaboration between Japan’s Panasonic and India’s Tata Elxsi to develop smart solutions and products for Panasonic customers in India and the neighbouring region. “This is only possible in India because it has the capacity and skills for engineering design that can match Japanese requirements,” says Mr. Nishizawa. Roping in more Indian companies to develop and design Japanese products for the South Asian market could be one major way forward in deepening the bilateral engagement
•The other is the use of India as a manufacturing base for markets in Africa, a trend that is interesting to Japan’s business strategists. Existing examples include Hitachi Construction Machinery’s joint venture with Tata whose Kharagpur plant is a hub for exports to developing countries, as well as auto major Nissan, which exports the India-made Datsun ‘GO+’ to South Africa.
•And yet as Mr. Nishizawa concludes, “The G (government) to G relationship is far ahead of the B (business) to B.” Closing this distance remains a tough ask.
📰 Explaining 1971
India’s intervention achievedstrategic objectives while maintaining a humanitarian veneer
•India liberated Bangladesh in 1971. The Bangladesh freedom fighters were no match militarily for the Pakistan army and there was enough residual support for the idea of Pakistan in its eastern wing to preclude a clear-cut separation of the two wings. India’s intervention was altruistic only in small part. It was primarily based on realpolitik.
•First, the Bengali uprising provided India with the “opportunity of the century”, to quote India’s leading strategic thinker, the late K. Subrahmanyam, to break up Pakistan and thus eliminate the threat of a two-front war in any future confrontation. Although the eastern front remained largely inactive in 1965, it tied down substantial military resources.
•Second, Indian decision-makers concluded that even if the new country in the east would not be an “eternal ally”, it could never pose the kind of threat that ‘East Pakistan’ posed to Indian security. At worst, it might turn out to be a thorn in India’s flesh.
•Third, New Delhi concluded that if Bangladesh became independent without Indian help, it would bear a serious grudge against the latter. India had strongly encouraged the Bengali movement for autonomy through its propaganda and clandestine financial support. To allow the Pakistani military to decimate the Bengali elite would have been viewed as a serious breach of trust by the Awami League leadership, potentially turning it into India’s bitter enemy.
•Fourth, New Delhi recognised that a drawn-out civil war would radicalise the Bengali population. This could lead to the side-lining of the pro-India Awami League and shift the leadership of the movement to left-wing pro-China parties such as the Bhashani-led National Awami Party and the Communist Party. Guerrilla warfare would then become a likely prospect. This was anathema to New Delhi especially in the context of the Naxalite movement which was raging in eastern India. A Maoist-inspired guerrilla movement in East Pakistan would have provided the Naxalites with aid and destabilised West Bengal and the surrounding region.
•The plight of the ten million refugees did have an impact on the Indian government. But, it was the economic and political rather than the humanitarian aspect of the refugee problem that was important to New Delhi.
•Moreover, by July-August 1971, 90% of the refugees were Hindus concentrated in the border districts of West Bengal with large Muslim populations. Consequently, there was danger of serious communal strife.
•The campaign of 1971 was brilliantly conceived and deftly executed. It achieved India’s strategic objectives while still maintaining a humanitarian veneer for both domestic and international consumption.
📰 Lok Sabha passes Finance Bill without discussion
Added 21 amendments including on LTCG and tax exemptions for start-ups
•The Lok Sabha on Wednesday passed the Finance Bill, 2018, with 21 amendments, some of which had to do with the controversial long-term capital gains tax on equity announced in the Budget speech by Finance Minister Arun Jaitley and tax exemptions for start-ups.
•The Bill was passed without discussion amid ruckus, following which both Houses of Parliament were adjourned for the day.
LTCG amendments
•Regarding the long-term capital gains (LTCG) tax, one of the major amendments made was that the grandfathering of gains till January 31, 2018 will now be incorporated in the computation of the gains itself, rather than for the purposes of computing tax at the rate of 10%.
•“This resolves the ambiguity contained in the language of the Finance Bill, 2018, on the need for a duplicated computation, viz. first for computing LTCG without grandfathering and then for applying 10% tax rate with grandfathering,” Rajiv Chugh, Tax Partner at EY India, said in a note.
•“The amended Finance Bill, 2018 clears the air on several ambiguities and anomalies on the new LTCG regime, cost base for depreciation allowance on stock in trade converted into capital asset, valuation of securities held as inventory by scheduled banks and public financial institutions, due date for CbCR (country by country reporting) compliance by Indian constituent entity of non-resident parent entity and turnover cap for eligible start-ups.”
•However, tax experts say that ambiguities on other proposals continue to exist, such as the deemed dividend taxation of accumulated profits of an amalgamating company, potential extension of SEP to physical transactions, applicability of prosecution for non-filing of returns of income to foreign companies whose incomes are fully covered by withholding tax, and restrictive relief from minimum alternate tax (MAT) for non-resident companies under presumptive basis of taxation.
No deferment
•“Markets were expecting some relief from the government like deferment of new capital gains tax or increase in the threshold limit from Rs. 1 lakh to Rs. 2 lakh for levy of capital gains tax at the rate of 10%,” Naveen Wadhwa, DGM at Taxmann.com, said. “However, the Finance Bill, 2018, as passed by the Lok Sabha, didn’t make any significant change in the original proposal.”
•“The only noteworthy change is that of allowing the indexation benefit to shares which were unlisted as on January 31, 2018 but are listed on the date of transfer which happens to be on or after April 1, 2018,” Mr. Wadhwa said.
•The amended Finance Act also made changes to the rules regarding how start-ups can avail of tax deductions on profits.
•Previously, start-ups were allowed 100% deduction of profits for any three out of seven years from the year of incorporation. To avail of this incentive, the start-ups were required to comply with a condition that stipulated that their turnover could not exceed Rs. 25 crore in those seven years.
•“This was considered restrictive, as exceeding the turnover threshold in later years could have jeopardised the claim for earlier years (even though the conditions were met in those years),” Jiger Saiya, Partner, Tax and Regulatory Services, at BDO India, said in a note.
•“In an amendment to the Finance Bill as passed by the Lok Sabha today [Wednesday], the condition is relaxed largely to the effect that turnover should not exceed the prescribed limit for the year for which 100% deduction is claimed by the start-up. The linking of turnover limit directly to year of claim is welcome.”
📰 In civic ranking, Pune is Maximum City
None of the 23 cities surveyed had a good platform for citizen engagement
•The Annual Survey of India’s City-Systems (ASICS) 2017, which uses 150 parameters to judge 23 cities, has placed Pune at the top and Bengaluru at the bottom of the rankings. While Pune scored 5.1 out of a maximum score of 10, Bengaluru got just 3. But Indian cities lagged behind global cities like New York and London, which scored 8.8.
•The survey, carried out by the NGO Janaagraha Centre for Citizenship and Democracy, was released on Wednesday. It broadly looks at urban planning and design, capacity and resources of Urban Local Bodies, the degree of empowerment of the civic body, and processes for transparency and citizen participation. Cities such as Surat and Ahmedabad moved up the rankings by 12 and seven positions respectively from 2016. Bhubaneshwar moved up by six spots, while Chennai dropped by 11 places. Bengaluru was down seven places.
•“Surat, Ahmedabad and Pune have gone in for reforms under the Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation or Smart City programmes to shore up revenues and implement better auditing,” said Anil Nair, Deputy Head, Advocacy and Reform at Janaagraha. “But, Bengaluru and Chennai have done little over the year.”
•While financial management has improved in some cities, there has been little progress in devolution of powers to civic bodies. Just three out of the 23 cities enacted town planning legislations since economic liberalisation in 1991, while the rest rely on laws enacted nearly six decades ago. Consequently, notes the report, local bodies suffer from fragmented governance. On average, Indian cities score 4.9 on this parameter. Their municipal commissioners had an average tenure of only 10 months. On the other hand, London, where the mayor is elected for five years and has far-reaching powers, scores 9.8.
•Only in Mumbai and Pune does the elected local body determine urban planning. In the remaining cities, it is ‘parastatal’ bodies which are not directly accountable to the electorate that call the shots, stated the report.
•Not only are citizens kept out of governance, they do not even get access to important data concerning their civic life.
•“India’s cities have virtually no platforms where citizens can participate in civic matters in their neighbourhoods. This impacts the quality of democracy itself,” the report said.
📰 ‘No bank regulator can catch all frauds’
Not possible to be in every nook and cranny of banking activity, says RBI Governor Urjit Patel
•Amid criticism from several quarters, including the government, for failing to prevent banking frauds in the light of the recent Punjab National Bank scam, Reserve Bank of India Governor Urjit Patel said on Wednesday that no banking regulator can catch or prevent all banking frauds. “There has been a tendency in the pronouncements post revelation of the fraud that RBI supervision team should have caught it,” Dr. Patel said in a speech at the Gujarat National Law University, Gandhinagar.
•He said it was simply not feasible for a banking regulator to be in every nook and corner of banking activity to rule out frauds by “being there.”
•He said the RBI too was deeply pained by the banking frauds and termed these incidents ‘loot’. “I have chosen to speak today to convey that we at the Reserve Bank of India also feel the anger, hurt and pain at the banking sector frauds and irregularities. In plain simple English, these practices amount to a looting of our country’s future by some in the business community, in cahoots with some lenders,” Dr. Patel said.
•Mr. Patel said that banking regulatory powers in India were not ownership neutral. He pointed out that the RBI did not have the power to supersede public sector bank boards as they were not registered under the Companies Act like private sector banks. He said the RBI can neither remove any directors of public sector banks nor liquidate a government-owned bank.
•“The BR Act exemptions for PSBs mean that the one agency – the regulatory – that can respond relatively quickly against banking frauds or irregularities cannot take effective action. Hence, for example, MDs at PSBs find it comfortable to tell media that business will be as usual for them under RBI’s Prompt Corrective Action framework, as even if they do not meet the stipulated restrictions of the framework, the ultimate authority over their tenure is with the government and not with the RBI,” Dr. Patel said.
‘Credit culture’
•He said RBI had undertaken cleaning up the credit culture of the country, and referred to the recent stringent circular on NPA as the churning rod in the ‘Amrit Manthan’ or the ‘Samudra Manthan’ of the modern day Indian economy. He called for making banking regulatory powers neutral to bank ownership and creating a level-playing field between public and private sector banks. Dr. Patel said it was an open issue on whether centralised government control alone can be effective enough at implementing governance of the banking franchise comprising more than two thirds of the sector’s deposits and assets.
📰 ‘LoU ban to hit importers as costs rise’
CII, Assocham say RBI’s move to hurt export competitiveness, especially for SMEs
•The Reserve Bank of India’s directive barring banks from issuing Letters of Undertaking (LoUs) has brought the $85 billion buyers’ credit market — a key source of low-cost trade finance for the country’s importers — to an abrupt standstill.
•The RBI’s move on Tuesday, coming in the wake of the $2 billion LoU fraud at state-owned Punjab National Bank, evoked sharp reactions from trade and industry organisations, which argued that the abrupt move would push up financing costs for the country’s importers and exporters. Many exporters used the LoUs to help fund their imports of raw materials and the central bank’s decision would hurt their competitiveness, the lobby groups said.
‘Disruptive impact’
•“The decision would have a disruptive impact on the buyers’ credit market, in the immediate term,” Shobana Kamineni, president of the Confederation of Indian Industry, said in a statement. “The traders who have been conducting business through these instruments will now have to necessarily shift their transactions to Letters of Credit and Bank Guarantees. The result would be that cost of credit may go up, especially for the SMEs.”
•Industry bodies said the gems and jewellery sector was likely to be the worst affected by the LoU ban.
•“A lot of people, especially genuine businessmen, will be impacted and the ban is not exactly the proper thing to do,” said Rajesh Mehta, Chairman, Rajesh Exports Ltd., one of India’s largest bullion exporters.
•Mr. Mehta said costs for the trade would rise as the LoU was a simple method to avail international trade finance.
LIBOR-based pricing
•LoUs were the cheapest source of funding as the credit provided against them were typically priced 20-30 basis points above the three-month or six-month LIBOR. The total cost was about 2.3%, which is much lower than the average of 10% or more for any rupee loan product. Since the LoU route is no longer available, importers have to provide bank guarantees or letters of credit, which are more expensive.
•Assocham secretary general D.S. Rawat said following the ban, importers — essentially in the gems and jewellery trade — were unable to raise money to secure their shipments.
‘Few black sheep’
•“The costs have gone up since raising money through the LoU was the cheapest source of raising finance. We had a product which was an important instrument of trade finance, particularly for import-based exporters; so, if a few black sheep have taken advantage of the situation, the fault does not lie with the LoU,” Assocham’s Mr. Rawat said.
📰 ‘RBI’s ban on LoUs may push up the cost of imports’
Export competitiveness would also be impacted: SBI chief
•The Reserve Bank of India’s decision to ban Letters of Undertaking (LoUs) will raise costs for importers and will hurt export competitiveness, says SBI chairman Rajnish Kumar , in an exclusive interview. Edited excerpts:
What will be the impact of RBI’s ban on Letters of Undertaking (LoU)?
•The cost of imports will go up. What was happening was importers, through the route of LoU they were availing dollar funding which was cheaper than rupee funding. So now, the importer will have an option of either opening a letter of credit, but for that they will need suppliers’ agreement - the supplier should be willing to extend the credit. Or otherwise, they have to fund it through rupee borrowing. So, that will increase the cost. And if they are exporting, then it will impact your export competitiveness also. So, the impact overall will be that the dollar borrowing of many of the importers will get either replaced by the letter of credit.
PNB had said it will pay the bonafide dues to the banks. When are you expecting payments from PNB?
•We have given our claim and all the supporting documents. Hopefully some repayment will happen this month.
What has been the response from the banking regulator for improving checks and balance after the PNB scam?
•RBI has asked all the banks to integrate SWIFT with the core banking solution.
•All banks are now linking SWIFT with CBS.
•RBI has given a circular to do it by April 30. We will do it by that time.
What are the steps SBI has taken?
•We thoroughly reviewed our LoU portfolio. Risk management in the bank is a continuous process and not a one-day process. Period review, see to it that checks and balances are working, you have to on a continuous basis.
RBI came out with a circular tightening NPA norms. What is your view?
•There are two ways to look at it. One is there are definitely bring more discipline on the borrowing. Borrowers will be more careful on how they manage their cash flow and the intent will be to repay bank dues in time. However, on certain things probably some relief is required. The Indian Banks’ Association has represented to RBI on these issues. So let RBI examine it and see what comes out.
What are the issues?
•One of the things that the circular says is that before an account is upgraded, 20% has to be paid. I think that is a bit tough requirement. Similarly, if the account is under restructuring and even if there is a delay of one day and then the account has to be referred to NCLT within 15 days.
Bond yields have further increased in Q4. How difficult is Q4 going to be?
•It is going to be difficult for banks on account of both these reasons. But thereafter, things will start returning to normal. By April-May, all the NCLT cases of the first RBI list will have resolution. The impact will be that banks’ gross and net NPAs will start coming down. And certain portion of these assets will get a new management, so that will start become performing. You normally see a negative credit growth in first quarter, but I have a feeling that credit growth will be positive in first quarter. For SBI, our pipeline of stressed assets looks very normal. Our fresh slippages in the next financial year will not exceed 2%.
So, do you see credit demand to pick up in the next financial year?
•There are certain sectors which are doing well. Like if infrastructure grows, then naturally cement will do well. In steel sector we have seen revival. I am told, housing sector demand is much better starting from January. Automobile sector is doing well. There are many sectors where activity is happening, but what is probably missing is large size projects by the private sector which is because of the over capacity that has been created. Going ahead, we see revival in credit growth. Also, now NCLT resolution will start happening. In many cases, we are at advanced stages of resolution. If that starts happening, then there will be working capital, investment requirements will revive demand.
📰 Urea subsidy extended till 2020
•The Cabinet on Wednesday approved the proposal by the Department of Fertilizers to continue the ongoing Urea Subsidy Scheme from 2017 to 2020.
•The estimated cost of this would be Rs. 1,64,935 crore, the government said. “The continuation of the urea subsidy scheme will ensure that adequate quantity of urea is made available to the farmers at statutory controlled price,” the government said in a release.
•The DBT mechanism would entail 100% of the payment going to fertiliser companies on the sale of fertilisers to farmers at subsidised rates.
📰 Curb misuse of social media, says Rajnath
‘It poses a serious challenge to policing’
•Social media posed a serious challenge to law enforcement agencies and the areas of concern included terrorism, financial frauds and victimisation of women and children, Home Minister Rajnath Singh said on Wednesday.
•The Minister said that during the 2013 riots in Muzaffarnagar, Uttar Pradesh, the government had said that social media was used extensively by anti-social elements to spread hatred and misinformation among communities, Mr. Singh said.
•Inaugurating a two-day Asia-Pacific regional conference of the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) here, Mr. Singh said that serious crime developed because the police and citizens did not work together to prevent decay of social norms and social disorder.
•“The social media had also posed serious challenge to policing. The three main issues are (i) law and order, (ii) cyber crimes, like fake and imitating accounts, financial frauds [Nigerian 419 frauds], malware delivery, drug and other illegal article sales, victimisation of women and children and (iii) terrorism,” he said.
•In 2012, the exodus of North East people from south took place allegedly due to a misinformation campaign through Internet and social media. Mr. Singh had in the past said social media had been increasingly used in the country to instigate communal riots.
📰 A political choice
What sparks an India-Pakistan crisis?
•The “surgical operation” earlier this month killing the mastermind of the Sunjuwan Army camp attack (Jammu) was lauded as a major victory for Indian security forces, but for some observers, it is surprising that such a seemingly provocative episode closed with such a measured response.
•Details of the February 10 Sunjuwan attack fit a familiar pattern. Indian authorities were quick to attribute to Pakistan a terrorist attack facilitated by security lapses that killed five soldiers and one family civilian as well as injured six women and children. Commenters noted the attack was the deadliest since Uri in September 2016 and closely mirrored the Kaluchak attack in May 2002.
•The comparison was worrisome. Uri sparked Indian retaliation that could have easily escalated and Kaluchak triggered the second “peak” of the 2001-02 crisis that brought India and Pakistan to the brink of all-out war. Whenever such an audacious attack occurs, analysts hold their breath anticipating a major military confrontation between two nuclear powers, something the world has not witnessed in almost 20 years.
•So this begs the question, why didn’t Sunjuwan spark the same crisis atmosphere and foreboding over escalation risks? The simple answer is that crisis onset is largely a political choice, and New Delhi opted not to select into a crisis this time.
The crisis onset
•While every war or near-war began as a crisis, and each crisis involves a provocation, not all provocations precipitate crises. The question of crisis onset is generally overlooked. Casual explanations that account for crisis onset default to large numbers of civilian fatalities, the symbolism or importance of the target, or vitriolic public demands for retribution. However, these explanations fall short in explaining why some cross-border provocations spin up into crises while others remain inert.
•Sunjuwan is not the first episode of a dormant crisis. Before Uri, the relatively similar Pathankot attack received a qualitatively different treatment. And before the November 2008 Mumbai attack, the July 2006 Mumbai attack on commuter trains that claimed nearly 200 lives did not provoke an interstate crises. In our book Investigating Crises: South Asia’s Lessons, Evolving Dynamics, and Trajectories , we test implicit explanations of crisis onset on a dataset of provocations occurring from 1998 to 2016. Of 51 provocations — mostly involving alleged, cross-border militant attacks on Indian targets — only 12 were treated as crises, prompting India’s national security principals to convene an unplanned Cabinet Committee on Security meeting within a week of the event. This suggests that India and Pakistan exercise a degree of agency in selecting into a crisis after a provocation.
•How and when do leaders treat a provocation as the beginning of an interstate crisis? By studying provocations that did not escalate — crises that didn’t happen — alongside those that prompted episodes of India-Pakistan crises, we sought to isolate elements of provocations most closely correlated with escalation to crisis.
•A crisis involves three properties — acute threat, significant abnormality, and temporal pressure — and factors that shape perceptions of these can increase or decrease the risk of crisis onset. In our analysis, we found that features of a provocation typically assumed to precipitate escalation — high fatalities, civilian or iconic targets, critical geography, or government leaderships — do not appear to be correlated with the onset of crisis. Instead, provocations correlated with crises exhibit intensified abnormality, like attacks involving complex assaults over an extended duration. Furthermore, high-volume media coverage and cumulative, successive attacks intensify perceived time constraint pressures on leaders’ decision making, increasing the risk of a crisis. However, meaningful ongoing bilateral dialogue may reduce those pressures by offering an alternative venue for compellence strategies.
Returning to the Sunjuwan non-crisis
•Sunjuwan involved an extended duration complex attack to draw attention and provoke Indian overreaction. Nevertheless, the attack was missing some important correlates of a crisis. It did not follow after cumulating cross-border attacks and occurred amidst the backdrop of National Security Adviser dialogue. More telling, the media coverage — a key indicator of crisis atmosphere — in the week following Sunjuwan was relatively subdued. Part of this may owe to a deliberate government decision to keep the focus on Assembly polls in Tripura, Meghalaya and Nagaland. Escalated tensions with Pakistan make good politics in the Hindi belt, but not the Northeast.
•While not foolproof, these probabilistic indicators suggest that even under pressure, the government exercises some agency in “selecting into” a crisis. In this case, the government chose not to.
📰 The man who traced the history of time dies
Stephen Hawking roamed the cosmos in a wheelchair
•Stephen W. Hawking, the Cambridge University physicist and best-selling author who roamed the cosmos from a wheelchair, pondering the nature of gravity and the origin of the universe and becoming an emblem of human determination and curiosity, has died at his home in Cambridge, England. He was 76.
•His death was confirmed by a spokesman for Cambridge University. “Not since Albert Einstein has a scientist so captured the public imagination and endeared himself to tens of millions of people around the world,” Michio Kaku, a professor of theoretical physics at the City University of New York, said.
•Hawking did that largely through his book A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes , published in 1988. It has sold over 10 million copies.
•The 2014 film about his life, The Theory of Everything , was nominated for several Academy Awards, and Eddie Redmayne, who played Hawking, won the best-actor Oscar.
•Scientifically, Hawking will be best remembered for a discovery so strange that it might be expressed in the form of a Zen koan: When is a black hole not black? When it explodes. What is equally amazing is that he had a career at all. As a graduate student in 1963, he learned he had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a neuromuscular wasting disease also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. He was given only a few years to live.
📰 Hawking, 1942-2018
This great man took physics to the people,and changed the way we think about disability
•Few scientists manage to break down the walls of the so-called ivory tower of academia and touch and inspire people who may not otherwise be interested in science. Stephen Hawking was one of these few. Judging by the odds he faced as a young graduate student of physics at Cambridge University, nothing could have been a more remote possibility. When he was about 20 years old, he got the shattering news that he could not work with the great Fred Hoyle for his PhD, as he had aspired to. Around this time he was diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, an incurable motor neurone disease, and given two years to live. Not many would have survived this, let alone excelled in the manner he did. Luckily, the type of ALS he had progressed slowly, and over time he made many discoveries that marked him among the great physicists of his time. His first breakthrough was in the work he did for his PhD thesis. The expanding universe and the unstoppable collapse of a black hole under its own gravity present two extreme spectacles for the physicist to grapple with. Inspired by Roger Penrose’s ideas on the latter, Hawking came up with a singularity theorem for the universe. This work and its extensions, known as the Hawking-Penrose singularity theorems, brought him international acclaim. Later, along with others he formulated the laws of black hole mechanics, which resemble the laws of thermodynamics. Thinking along these lines led him to a contradiction — that this theory predicted that black holes would exude radiation, whereas in a purely classical picture nothing could escape the black hole, not even light. He resolved this contradiction by invoking quantum mechanics. The radiation of the black hole was named Hawking radiation.
•There is no doubt that with Hawking’s death the world has lost an outstanding scientist. But he was not only a pathbreaker in the world of science. He came to be known to millions with the publication of A Brief History of Time , his best-selling book describing in non-technical terms the structure, development and fate of the universe. He ranks with Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein as that rare physicist who fired the popular imagination. However, while Newton and Einstein worked on broad canvases, Hawking was focussed on cosmology and gravitation. His was a life that carried to the public not only the secrets of the cosmos but also the promise of hope and human endeavour; he showed that disability need not hold a person back in the pursuit of his dreams. He leaves behind a wealth of knowledge, and also the conviction that the will to survive can overcome all odds.
📰 Cosmology’s worst gambler
Stephen Hawking lost most of his bets, but beat all the odds to take physics forward and to the people
•Stephen Hawking had a rich history with bets; particularly losing them. The best known was the one with Caltech (California Institute of Technology) cosmologist Kip Thorne, about the existence of black holes, which was in many ways at the heart of Hawking’s scientific success. Cygnus X1 was a mysterious galactic source of X-rays and appeared to be a black hole. It was the first time that physical evidence for one seemed to be on the horizon. Hawking said this was unlikely and Thorne — later on scientific consultant to Interstellar — was certain it was. Fifteen years down, in 1990, Hawking conceded defeat and gifted Thorne the wager, a year’s worth of Penthouse magazines.
•He later on bet Gordon Kane of Michigan University that the Large Hadron Collider wouldn’t be able to detect the Higgs boson, the ‘God particle’ that is one of the foundational bricks on which the standard model of particle physics rests. Hawking had to pay up $100 for that.
•Then — this time with Kip Thorne as an ally — he went up against John Preskill, another Caltech physicist, and bet that ‘information’ couldn’t leak out of a black hole. This was unusual for someone who made a career by proving that black holes were not dead ends but gave off radiation. In 2004, he admitted defeat and gave away a baseball encyclopaedia — as agreed in the wager — to Preskill.
•In 2014, an Irish bookmaker had him devise an equation on the odds that England would win that year’s football World Cup. According to a report in The Guardian , his formula suggested that England was best poised to win if the team wore red, played a 4-3-3 formation, kicked off in the afternoon and “avoided referees from South America to best succeed in Brazil.” The eminent physicist, science writer and amateur footballer, Jim Al-Khalili, went on record to describe the equations as “meaningless.” That year, for the first time since 1958, England failed to qualify beyond the group stages.
•How does one reconcile this image of one of the greatest scientific minds of this century with his record of perpetually losing his wagers? It’s unlikely that he was regularly blindsided by his calculations. Moreover, the marked quirkiness of the objects being wagered shows that Hawking wasn’t a person who played by the odds.
The will to pull along
•The chances, in 1963, that his 21-year-old self would survive a motor neurone disease much more than two years were next to zero. Yet through an extraordinarily-consistent force of will that he would live, think and strive to accomplish as much as he could, he carved out a dream-reality and permeated popular culture far more deeply than any other scientist — Albert Einstein and Richard Feynman included — and without even winning a Nobel, a pre-requisite for immortality.
•Carl Sagan, Jayant Narlikar, Stephen Weinberg were all excellent scientists who also took communicating popular science very seriously and did it marvellously. Hawking however did something more: he proposed some of the most original ideas in cosmology; wrote, arguably, the most popular science book ever, A Brief History of Time ; and proved that esoteric scientific ideas like black holes could become part of the popular imagination.
•It helped of course that he was brilliant, that he was brought up in a background of intellectual achievement — both his parents studied at Oxford University — and he had access to the likes of Roger Penrose and got to work on black holes even as experimental evidence was piling in cosmology that the universe didn’t just exist forever but was probably born out of a Big Bang. He was lucky that there existed the technology to translate the movements of his cheek into English.
•Anyway you look at it these are incredibly long odds that have combined together, much like how physicists describe our universe as a ‘Goldilocks’ universe, or one where a confluence of physical constants have come together to bring about the conditions that ultimately led to a habitable Earth. A slight change in the gravitational constant, for instance, and this world would be impossible.
•There’s a famous remark by Albert Einstein that God did not play dice with the universe. Hawking had an alternative take on it: “Einstein was wrong when he said, ‘God does not play dice’. [A] consideration of black holes suggests, not only that God does play dice, but that he sometimes confuses us by throwing them where they can’t be seen.”
•Hawking celebrated the role of chance and made it an integral part of the way he approached cosmology. He left open the possibility of a traditional ‘God’ in A Brief History… but over the years settled upon a theory grounded in physics, or ‘M-theory,’ as one that didn’t leave any place for the existence of God. Nothing, in this sense, was worth dismissing and every idea was a star in its own right provided it was backed by mathematics and evidence.
•That a monotonic, electronic voice is now an endearing, eternal element of pop-culture — existing in avatars as varied as a voice-over in a Pink Floyd song, or episodes in The Simpsons and The Big Bang Theory — only underlines how significantly he has altered the stereotype of the ivory tower cosmologist.
Changing Jantar Mantar
•When he visited India, wooden ramps installed at Jantar Mantar to enable access and — to an extent — this has facilitated setting up such spaces in several other monuments. Much of science revolves around proposing competing theories and using statistical tests that weigh the odds of one scenario being more likely than the other. For a person, who lived every day since he was 21, by defying the medical odds surrounding Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), there was certainly a different calculus at work. In most of the wagers that Hawking lost, science was pushed forward. The nature of black holes was better understood and exotic particles — that existed only in equations — detected for real.
•And then, what are the odds that exactly 300 years after Galileo was born a cosmologist, in the same month as Isaac Newton, and died on the 14th of March, precisely on Albert Einstein’s birthday?
📰 How much plastic is there in your packaged water?
A worldwide study by a U.S.-based journalistic organisation suggests that the level of microscopic plastic particles could have implications for human health
•Bottled water is usually marketed as the very essence of purity. It’s the fastest-growing beverage market in the world, valued at $147 billion a year.
•But new research by Orb Media, a non-profit journalism organisation based in Washington, D.C., shows that a single bottle can hold dozens, or possibly even thousands, of microscopic plastic particles.
•Tests on more than 250 bottles from 11 brands reveal contamination with plastic, including polypropylene, nylon, and polyethylene terephthalate (PET).
•When contacted by reporters, two leading brands confirmed their products contained microplastic, but they said Orb’s study significantly overstates the amount.
•For plastic particles in the 100-micron, or 0.1-mm size range, tests conducted for Orb at the State University of New York revealed a global average of 10.4 plastic particles a litre. These particles were confirmed as plastic using an industry-standard infrared microscope.
•The tests also showed a much greater number of even smaller particles that researchers said are also likely plastic. The global average for these particles was 314.6 per litre.
•Samples came from 19 locations in nine countries on five continents. Some bottles had effectively zero plastic. One contained more than 10,000 particles a litre. We found plastic in 93% of the samples.
•“This is shocking,” said Erik Solheim, executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme. “Please name one human being on the entire planet who wants plastic in his or her bottle.”
•Peggy Apter certainly doesn’t. “It’s disheartening,” said Apter, a real estate investor in Carmel, Indiana, U.S., who drinks only bottled water. “What’s the world come to? Why can’t we have just clean, pure water?”
•Packaged water can be a lifeline for many of the 2.1 billion people worldwide with unsafe drinking water. Some 4,000 children die every day from water-borne diseases, according to the United Nations.
•Yet many who do have safe tap water still choose bottled because they think it’s cleaner, find it more convenient or prefer the taste. Bottled water output will soon hit 300 billion litres a year.
•Scientists and governments are increasingly concerned about microplastic pollution. Recent studies have found microplastic — particles smaller than 5 mm — in the oceans, soil, air, lakes, and rivers. But plastic’s final frontier may be the human body.
•Last year, Orb Media revealed microscopic plastic in global tap water samples.
•Today’s study is “a very illuminative example of how intimate our contact with plastic is,” said Martin Wagner, a toxicologist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.
•What this means for human health is unknown.
•“Based on current knowledge, which is very fragmentary and incomplete, there is little health concern,” Mr. Wagner said. “The human body is well-adapted to dealing with non-digestible particles.”
•As much as 90% of microplastic that is consumed might be excreted, a 2016 European Union report on plastic in seafood said.
•Of the other 10%, some plastic under 150 microns (0.15 mm) could enter the gut’s lymphatic system, or pass from the bloodstream to the kidneys or liver, according the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation. Today’s bottled water study found plastic within that range.
•But assumptions about how plastic behaves in the gut come from scientific models, not laboratory studies, Jane Muncke, managing director at the Food Packaging Forum, a Swiss research organisation, said.
•“We don’t even know all the chemicals in plastics,” Ms. Muncke said. “There’s so many unknowns here.”
•Bottled water manufacturers emphasised their products met all government requirements.
•Gerolsteiner, a German bottler, said its tests “have come up with a significantly lower quantity of microparticles per litre”, than found in Orb’s study.
•Nestle tested six bottles from three locations after an inquiry from Orb Media. Those tests, said Nestle Head of Quality Frederic de Bruyne, showed between zero and five plastic particles a litre. None of the other bottlers agreed to make public results of their tests for plastic contamination.
•“We stand by the safety of our bottled water products,” the American Beverage Association said in a statement.
•Anca Paduraru, a food safety spokeswoman for the European Commission, said that while microplastic is not directly regulated in bottled water, “legislation makes clear there must be no contaminants”. The U.S. doesn’t have rules for microplastic in food and beverages.
•Some consumers were shocked by Orb’s discovery. Others were confident plastic wouldn’t harm them.
•The study was supervised by Professor Sherri Mason, a leading microplastic researcher at the State University of New York in Fredonia. Mason also managed Orb’s 2017 tap water study.
•To test bottled water, Ms. Mason’s team first infused each bottle with a dye called Nile Red, an emerging method used by scientists for the rapid detection of microplastic. The water was then filtered to 1.5 microns, or 0.0015 mm — smaller than a human red blood cell.
•Under a microscope, in the blue glare of a crime-scene investigation light, and viewed through orange goggles, the dyed plastic particles on each filter glow like tiny embers.
•Ms. Mason analysed bigger particles, about 100 microns (0.1 mm), by Fourier-Transform Infrared spectroscopy, which beams infrared light into an object to read its molecular signature.
•Polypropylene, used in bottle caps, made up 54% of those larger particles. Nylon was 16%. PET, used in bottles, was 6%. The majority of samples came in plastic bottles. Water in glass bottles also held microplastic.
•Fluorescing particles that were too small to be analysed by FTIR should be called “probable microplastic”, said Andrew Mayes, senior lecturer in chemistry at the University of East Anglia, because “some of it might be another, unknown, substance to which Nile Red stain is adhering.” Mr. Mayes developed the Nile Red method for identifying microplastic.
•Mr. De Bruyne, of Nestle, noted that Mason’s tests did not include a step in which biological substances are removed from the sample. Therefore, he said, some of the fluorescing particles could be false positives — natural material that the Nile Red had also stained. He didn’t specify what that material would be.
•Ms. Mason said the so-called “digestion step” is used on debris-filled samples from the ocean or the seashore, and wasn’t needed for bottled water. “Certainly they are not suggesting that pure, filtered, pristine water is likely to have wood, algae, or chitin [prawn shells] in it?” she said.
•To count the particles, we used an app that recorded the number of fluorescing objects in photographs of lab filters.
•“This is pretty substantial,” Mr. Mayes said. “I’ve looked in some detail at the finer points of the way the work was done, and I’m satisfied that it has been applied carefully and appropriately, in a way that I would have done it in my lab.”
•A recent paper in the journal Water Research reported finding microplastic in German mineral water. “I’m sure that this [plastic] is from the bottle itself,” lead author Darena Schymanski said.
•Orb’s studies of tap water and bottled water used different methods. But there is room to compare them.
•For microplastic around 100 microns, about the width of a hair, bottled water samples had nearly twice the particles per litre (10.4) as tap water (4.45).
What’s best?
•So what’s best, bottled or tap?
•“If your tap water is of high quality, that’s always better,” said Scott Belcher, Professor of toxicology at North Carolina State University. “If you have contaminated and unsafe drinking water, bottled water may be your only alternative.”
•Echoing other consumers we interviewed, Ms. Apter said, “It’s the government’s responsibility to educate people to know what they’re drinking and eating.”
📰 Warming may ‘threaten’ half of species in 33 key regions
Many species in Amazon and Madagascar at risk of extinction in decades: report
•Global warming could place 25 to 50% of species in the Amazon, Madagascar and other biodiverse areas at risk of localised extinction within decades, a report said on Wednesday.
•The lower projection is based on a mercury rise of two degrees Celsius over pre-Industrial Revolution levels — the warming ceiling the world’s nations agreed on in 2015.
•The highest is for out-of-control warming of 4.5 Celsius. “Global biodiversity will suffer terribly over the next century unless we do everything we can,” said conservation group WWF, which commissioned the analysis published in science journal Climatic Change .
•“We must keep average global temperatures down to the absolute minimum.” The report focused on 33 so-called “Priority Places” which host some of the world’s richest and most unusual terrestrial species, including iconic, endangered, or endemic plants and animals.
•They include southern Chile, the eastern Himalayas, South Africa’s unique Fynbos ecoregion, Borneo, Sumatra, the Namibian desert, West Africa, southwest Australia, coastal east Africa, and southern Africa’s Miombo Woodlands, home to African wild dogs.
•The team looked at the impact of climate change on nearly 80,000 terrestrial plant, mammal, bird, amphibian, and reptile species.
•At warming of 4.5 Celsius, based on a “business-as-usual” scenario of no emissions cuts, the Amazon could risk the local extinction of 69% of its plant species.
•The Miombo Woodlands risks losing 90% of its amphibians, 86% of birds, and 80% of mammals, according to the report.
•Under the 2015 Paris Agreement, countries made voluntary pledges to curb planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions from burning coal, oil and natural gas.
•But even if those pledges are met, scientists predict warming over 3 Celsius, a recipe for disastrous climate change-triggered sea level rises, superstorms, floods, and droughts.
‘New normal’
•Warming of 3.2 Celsius would place about 37% of species in Priority Places at risk of local extinction, said a WWF statement. “Even with the emissions cuts pledged under the Paris Agreement, temperatures that were extreme in the past are set to be the new normal in all Priority Places,” it added — in some as early as 2030.
•Limiting warming to 2 Celsius would enable many species to continue inhabiting the areas they currently occupy, it said. And if animals can move freely, not constrained by roads, fences, or human settlements, the proportion of species at risk at warming of 2 Celsius drops from 25 to 20%.
•The report comes ahead of a major meeting of the IPBES inter-governmental panel in Medellin, Colombia, where scientists and governments will release five assessments of the state of biodiversity.
