📰 Promoting torture in India
After all, talented professionals have sharpened their skills of custodial torture
•The global movement for gender equity in torture won a tremendous victory last week, thanks to feminist icon and tireless advocate of women’s rights, U.S. President Donald Trump. I know you’ve been gorging on fake news like everyone else. But if you think he’s a bad guy, I feel sorry for you. Yes, I do.
•Trust me, only dumb people read the failing New York Times . And only the dumbest believe everything it puts out on Trump. Let me tell you something, and this is a fact. You can Google it if you like, because I just did: it wasn’t Kennedy or Clinton or that loser Obama who had the guts to nominate a woman to head the biggest, richest, most powerful and most outstanding intelligence agency in the world. It was Trump who did it when he nominated torture expert Gina Haspel to be the director of the CIA.
•As expected, human rights groups have begun their usual mischief. Instead of hailing her as an example of women’s empowerment, they are saying she is a bad person because, in the words of Senator Rand Paul, she showed “joyful glee” in torturing people. Let me tell you something else: they know nothing. And they know it even less than Jon Snow.
Supervising torture
•Haspel broke much more than the glass ceiling when she was picked to run a secret prison in Thailand where a single man was waterboarded 83 times in one month. As a woman, she had to be twice as good to rise to the top of the male-dominated CIA hierarchy, which means she had to be twice as good at supervising a variety of torture management projects involving a range of advanced skills that included, but were not limited to, waterboarding, sleep deprivation, mock executions, rectal feeding and hydration, ice water baths, and confining a prisoner in a coffin-size box.
•As we all know, extensive use of these torture methods has foiled numerous terror attacks between one terror attack and another. Trump got it right when he said of Haspel, “She is an outstanding person.” Well, a woman has no choice but to be outstanding in order to succeed in a man’s world, and sadly, the torture industry continues to be one. A woman has to lean in to pull out those fingernails with a steady hand and a calm head. Many men can’t do it. I know I can’t.
•In fact, the last time I tortured a living being was back in university when I poured cow urine on a suspicious gathering of cockroaches. I mention this only because it technically qualifies as waterboarding, since the intruders, going by their reaction, seemed to believe they were going to drown. But all six of them escaped without telling me who they really were, what they were doing in my room, and who had sent them. I knew right then I had no future as a torturer, though I often get reader feedback that informs me of the contrary.
•Frankly, I can’t stand the sight of blood, or people screaming in pain, or pictures of bodies mutilated by torture. But like most normal people, I totally endorse the use of extreme torture on innocent people who may or may not be terrorists. After all, that is the best way to generate actionable intelligence for a safer planet.
Time for India to cash in
•But moving beyond the gender aspect, I can’t help but wonder why India hasn’t cashed in on the growing market for outsourced torture. We have a fantastic equation with the U.S. So if the Americans can set up a torture facility in Thailand, why not in Gurgaon? After all, India’s law enforcement agencies offer a rich pool of talented professionals who have sharpened their skills over several years of custodial torture. Despite pressure from rabid human rights groups, India has wisely avoided ratifying the UN Convention against Torture, which means we can torture away merrily.
•The entire world knows we’re great at signing MoUs. Recently even U.P. signed a clutch of MoUs, just for fun. So what stops us from signing MoUs with every country that’s squeamish about doing torture on its own soil? It could bring in foreign investment and create millions of jobs as we build a nationwide interrogation infrastructure, including Special Torture Zones where torture services are exempt from GST.
•Also, in view of the dwindling job opportunities in India (except in the pakoda sector), the government should revive the Skill India Programme with a special focus on torture skills. It is regrettable that India could not become the sweatshop capital of the world despite the brilliant Make in India PR campaign. But a Torture in India programme, generously funded through a 20% torture cess on taxable income, will go a long way in making India the world’s top torture destination. Once we achieve that distinction, will any terrorist — be it from IS or al-Qaeda or LeT or whatever — dare to come and work in India?
📰 Breaking the silence
•The film Padman has definitely drawn national attention to a long-neglected issue in India, and Union Minister of Women and Child Development Maneka Gandhi’s announcement recently of #YesIBleed, the national campaign on menstrual hygiene, might just be a critical entry point for the country to talk about India’s “period poverty”.
•However, for a long time, menstrual hygiene management (MHM) was not a priority area in the public health agenda and national programmes did not do enough to make this a focus area. Young girls in many parts of India are still growing up with limited knowledge about managing their menstrual cycle, largely the result of a lack of education and awareness about personal hygiene as well as resources.
Many barriers
•According to UN data, 66% of Indian girls are unaware of menstruation before their first period. For 23% to 28% of girls in rural India, periods, together with a lack of private spaces and facilities are a major reason for their being out of school. Cultural beliefs, hygiene practices, and social attitudes have also been limiting girls from using washroom facilities, more so during menstruation. National Family Health Survey 4 data state that a staggering 62% of young women in India are still using cloth which leaves them vulnerable to health issues such as urinary and reproductive tract infections. Also, till recently, girls in rural areas did not have access to affordable menstrual management products. There are still not enough suitable and safe spaces for women to manage their menstruation in a hygienic manner. There are also widespread reports of restrictions and isolation of girls during menstruation.
•These factors put together adversely affect the health and personal development of girls, and, in the long run, lower their workforce participation and opportunities of growth.
•On government interventions, since the Reproductive and Child Health Programme (RCH) in 1997 was not target-driven, menstrual health got space but was not completely addressed. While the government has from time to time initiated several national level efforts, nothing has been done as yet to change social norms. Menstrual health is a comprehensive, multifaceted issue and evidence has shown the need to address it on war footing. It is not only a public health issue but also a human right, for, every menstruating girl and woman must have access to a safe, clean and private space.
•It is vital to adopt a sustained approach to tackle menstrual management. We need to build on the existing momentum through public-private partnership, which will require working with other civil society organisations within the districts of operation, identifying and involving community-based organisations, and ensuring that they move toward a viable model. A multi-sectoral response involving water, sanitation, urban planning, education, health, and the social sector can ensure that appropriate, evidence-based, and cost-effective interventions and policy are developed and implemented for the benefit of girls and women.
•One such example could be the special emphasis on the Swacch Bharat Mission, which along with Menstrual Hygiene Management – national guidelines (2015) clearly lays down recommendations for State governments, district administrations, technical experts in line departments and schoolteachers to support girls and women with MHM choices, addressing their needs of sanitation, hygiene, privacy and safety.
•An initiative to address menstrual health through a national campaign such as #YesIBleed will raise awareness and ensure that every girl and woman gains the requisite knowledge on menstrual management and has greater access to hygiene products at affordable prices to comfortably manage her periods with dignity.
📰 Pak. withholds envoy’s return
India issues another note verbale; Islamabad will skip Delhi WTO meet
•India issued another note verbale to Pakistan on the continued harassment of Indian High Commission officials, including two incidents on Saturday. According to the note — India’s second formal protest in two days — Indian diplomats had been subjected to ‘aggressive surveillance and harassment’, as the month-old diplomatic spat intensified.
•Pakistan said it would skip a World Trade Organisation (WTO) ministerial meeting in Delhi. Sources also said Islamabad would not send High Commissioner Sohail Mahmood back to Delhi until the diplomatic row was resolved. Pakistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Mohammad Faisal said Islamabad had not confirmed the participation of its minister for the WTO meeting on March 19-21.
•“Once the problems began, we decided to wait and watch,” Dr. Faisal told The Hindu , referring to incidents of alleged harassment and surveillance of its diplomats in Delhi. Pakistani diplomatic sources said on Saturday that there would be no representation from the Delhi mission either.
•India’s note of protest, the 12th this year, said its officials had been subject to “intimidation and harassment,” with incidents on March 15 and 17 highlighted, when officials were followed aggressively by men on a motorbike, and when officials were abused publicly in a shopping area. “We have asked the Pakistan government to investigate these incidents,” sources said.
•Sources in Islamabad told The Hindu that Mr. Mahmood, who was recalled to Pakistan for consultations on Friday, would be there for an “indefinite period”. An Indian official said the Pakistani decision was ‘posturing’, especially given that it was Pakistan, not India, that was the “aggressor in the recent incident.”
•According to Dr. Faisal, Mr. Mahmood and the Foreign office will begin discussions on Sunday on the next step. When asked about the possibility of recalling more diplomats, or declaring New Delhi as a “non-family” station as India has declared Islamabad, Dr. Faisal said, “All options are on the table, but we hope that we can restore the situation to [that] before the trouble started.”
•When asked if India was considering a similar recall of its High Commissioner Ajay Bisaria for consultations in Delhi, diplomatic sources said no such action was contemplated yet, and attempts were on to “settle the situation calmly.”
📰 The runaway locomotive of EVMs
Electronic voting systems need far greater scrutiny than those who are singing the siren songs of ‘progress and digitalisation’ want us to realise
•It happened in December 1841 near Reading, England. A Great Western Railway luggage train travelling from London Paddington to Bristol Temple Meads station had just entered Sonning Cutting. Rain had loosened the soil next to the track, which had caused mud to spill on to the track and cover it. This forced the broad gauge locomotive, containing three third-class passenger carriages and some heavy goods wagons, to derail. Eight passengers died on the spot and many were seriously injured. One passenger died later in hospital.
•The tragedy set in process a largely unremarked legal change: it led to the abolishment of ‘deodands’. Deodands were penalties imposed on ‘moving objects that caused deaths’. After the Sonning Cutting accident, a deodand of £1,000 (about £100,000 today) was imposed on the train engine. This was, however, never paid (how could it be?), and five years later deodands were abolished.
•From our perspective, this marks a significant change: from objects associated and controlled by humans to objects with much more leverage of their own. From a dropped box or a mismanaged horse carriage to a derailed engine. In 1841, deodands existed in a world that had changed. Trains marked not just the increase of pace while travelling, they also enabled a kind of tragedy which was difficult to imagine in an age of horses: now dozens, soon hundreds, of bodies could be mangled in a single accident. Blame for a derailed engine was a different matter than blame for a brick dropped from a window or an overturned carriage.
An opportunity and a danger
•I start with this example to highlight the obvious fact that all technological developments come with some advantages and dangers. A society that ignores the former for the latter stays stuck in time, but a society that ignores the latter for the former might well plunge down a precipice.
•Electronic voting machines represent such an opportunity — and danger. But because too much capital is invested in selling and replicating these systems, the opportunities and advantages are currently drummed up more than the dangers. Electronic voting machines have been accused of advertent or inadvertent ‘flaws’ in many countries, including India. But governments argue that some malfunctioning is inevitable when we use voting systems in vast lands with great educational disparity.
•But let us talk about Denmark. Denmark is an egalitarian country of only six million people, all of whom receive basically the same kind of education until high school, and can choose to go to university free of charge. It has a high literacy rate and its politicians are at least theoretically more accountable than those of India or the U.S. It also has a high voting percentage.
•And yet, recently, a small controversy erupted in Denmark. The fact that it is only a small controversy is frightening — because it has to do with the very nature of democracy, and Danes are a proudly democratic people. The largely neo-liberal government of Denmark decided to put the partly electronic voting system of Denmark up for a bid between rival companies. Three companies applied, including the public-owned company that has provided these services in the past. Then the government lowered the maximum bid amount. This forced two of the companies — including the public-owned one — to withdraw. The single company that stayed in the fray could submit a cheaper offer because it already runs similar voting systems in a number of countries — where the system has been accused of malfunction or vulnerability to tinkering.
•As this was a private corporation, questions were asked in the Danish Parliament about its ownership. The Parliament was wrongly assured by a minister that it was a Danish company. When the major Danish daily, Politiken , traced the company’s head office to a tax-haven island off South America, the government promised more information.
Who are the owners?
•But in the process, a vital factor seems to have been overlooked — not just by members of the Danish government, which is not surprising, but also by many of its critics. It is this: the island on which the company is registered permits companies not to disclose their ownership. In other words, the Danish voting system might be produced by a company whose real owners are invisible. Surely, there is something seriously wrong about the increasing vulnerability of democracies to the digitalised chicanery of invisible or half-visible corporate owners? Surely it is legitimate for citizens to demand to know the real owners of such companies? For instance, would a company controlled by the Russian mafia or the Koch brothers of the U.S., with their history of lobbied interference in democratic matters, be a neutral player and a reliable service provider?
•As trains came into being, not only were ineffective laws, like that of deodands, remade or abandoned, new laws were put in place to ensure safety and accountability. Today, with the locomotive of digitalisation rushing at us, we largely lack a concerted effort to protect democracy against its dangers. Electronic voting systems need far greater scrutiny that those who are singing the siren songs of ‘progress and digitalisation’ want us to realise. It is time to plug our ears, and ask some hard questions — in every country of the world.
📰 Situating plurality in an egalitarian frame
The melodrama of how our Constitution contests hierarchical systems of old practices and new illusions is still playing out
•A German proverb proclaims that a man is what he eats. It could equally have insisted that he is also what he does not eat. Indeed, a man is also what he wears, speaks, believes, worships, smells, the music he listens to, how he dances, the colours that entice him. This list can multiply, and multiply differently for different people. Human diversity is rich and immense.
•India’s own diversity is among the richest: countless culinary habits, dress, customs and musical traditions; more than 200 different dialects and languages; religious and doctrinal diversity, the ritual-oriented Vedic practices, the teachings of Buddha, Mahavira, Zarathustra, the Torah, and Guru Nanak, the religiosity in the Puranas, Islam, Syriac-Christianity, the great varieties of animism and atheism.
•In the past, this deep diversity existed within a framework of inequality. This was not unusual, but true of virtually every agrarian, pre-industrial society endowed not only with a highly complex division of labour but also with an intricate network of social distinctions. Indeed, cultural differences often marked and strengthened a stable, rarely questioned hierarchy of roles and ranks. Differences in speech, dress, manner, food or appearance were deeply intertwined manifestations of minutely arranged, culturally nuanced social hierarchies — visible indicators of differential rights and duties in a highly unequal society. They performed another important function: by diminishing ambiguity and friction, they helped place everything and everybody in their proper place. They reduced conflict and maintained existing relations of power. Not everyone could speak, dress and eat as they pleased. Socio-cultural boundaries were not easy to cross. Our past is a system of hierarchical plurality.
Challenging the system
•A succession of egalitarian waves has challenged this system. The most obvious pointer here is the opposition to caste and gender hierarchies. Rights and duties do not vary today from one caste to another or between men and women. The right to equality enshrined in the Constitution of India is not merely a negative right against discrimination but also a positive right to be treated as an equal. Every individual is entitled to equal respect and concern simply as a human being. It is not legally possible today to have one set of laws for men and another for women. Article 15 sounds the death knell of the old order: “The State shall not discriminate against any citizen on grounds only of religion, race, caste, sex, place of birth or any of them”. It adds that none of these will be the basis for subjecting any citizen “to any disability, liability, restriction or condition with regard to (a) access to shops, public restaurants, hotels and palaces of public entertainment; or (b) the use of wells, tanks, bathing ghats, roads and places dedicated to the use of the general public”.
•Not only has the degrading practice of untouchability been banned but temples have long been thrown open to everyone regardless of caste. Caste is no longer a barrier to any job, even to the highest offices of the land. This legal installation of equality could not but begin undoing the inseparable, culturally nuanced distinctions that accompanied differential status and power relations. Indeed, when it speedily dismantled some of them, an illusion was created that we might be able do away with all cultural distinctions and give rise to a new system where either cultural differences are insignificant or people can live by one culture alone.
Contesting homogeneity
•This expectation that egalitarian social, economic and political movements will make cultural differentiation irrelevant or totally flatten our cultural landscape has proved to be mistaken. A complete system of universalised, abstract equality has not come into existence. The expectation that we would have a culturally homogenous society is belied too. We do not have a monocultural social system in India. Although infinitesimally small cultural differences that mark social hierarchies have disappeared or are on their way out, new, larger cultural configurations have replaced them. We have relatively more homogenised but distinct languages (among them, Bengali, Oriya, Assamese, Gujarati, Marathi, Hindi, Sindhi, Urdu, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kashmiri and Kannada), religions (not only Islam, Christianity, Zoroastrianism, but also Sikhism, Buddhism, Jainism and of course, the hugely internally plural Hinduism), regional cuisines and literatures, even large caste associations vying for equal recognition, each refusing subordination to the other. These cultures are unlikely to disappear. One way or another, cultural differences are here to stay.
•Besides, can one publicly claim today that one language, say, Bengali or Hindi, is superior to Tamil or Punjabi? Can one one claim that Christianity is superior to Hinduism or Islam? Indeed, by granting community-specific cultural and religious rights, our Constitution is among the first to endorse an egalitarian multi-lingual, religiously plural, multicultural system — a system where no religion, culture or language-based group can say that it is superior to others.
•India being India, nothing here is firmly entrenched. Hierarchical plurality still colonises large swathes of our land. Hopes of a complete system of abstract equality might now be entertained only by a handful of cosmopolitan intellectuals, but dreams of a culturally unified society, with or without social equality, are found aplenty in our public discourse and streets. The melodrama of how our Constitution — that (wisely) only partially endorses both abstract, culture-neutral citizenship rights (individual rights to education, belief, public employment, voting, etc) and some multicultural rights (Articles 26-30) — contests these systems of old practices and new illusions is still being played out in our country. Alas, it is hard to tell how, when and even whether it will end.
📰 Ahead of 2019, Congress fixes focus on farmers
Promises panel on farm labour welfare, guarantee social security for elderlyTo re-examine GST rate on agricultural equipment to bring down input costsLauds Karnataka for setting up agricultural prices commissionPromises to revamp methodology tofix MSP, include more crops
•Days after the massive farmers’ protest in Mumbai, the Congress on Saturday promised to come out with a farm loan waiver scheme for small and marginal farmers, similar to the one undertaken by the UPA government before the 2009 elections.
•The Congress said if the party came to power after the Lok Sabha elections next year, it would set up a permanent commission for farm labour welfare with constitutional status to guarantee social security for the elderly.
Fuelling agrarian crisis
•Adopting a resolution titled “Agriculture, employment and poverty alleviation” at its 84th plenary session, the party called the Modi government’s agriculture policies “flawed” and “anti-farmer” that had caused an agrarian crisis in the country.
•The Congress said the UPA’s loan waiver in 2009 had benefited 3.2 crore farmers.
•The resolution on agriculture and jobs — moved by Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh — expressed concern over the “failure” of the Union government to deliver on its “lofty” promises, and accused it of “duping farmers by making empty noises of doubling farm incomes by 2022”.
•The Congress said the crop insurance scheme of the Modi government had benefited private insurance companies more than the farmers, and alleged that money was taken away from farmers’ bank accounts without their consent.
MSP process revamp
•“The party notes with satisfaction that the party’s government in Karnataka has set up a State-level Agricultural Prices Commission to ensure remunerative prices to the farmers of the State, keeping in view local factors and to compensate the farmers’ loss due to low minimum support price (MSP) fixed by the Centre. The State provided Rs. 2000 crore benefiting five lakh farmers. The Congress shall advise its government in [other] States to emulate Karnataka,” the resolution said.
•The party said it would also provide interest-free loans to cover input costs to tenant farmers, sharecroppers and farmers owning and cultivating up to two hectares of land as was done by Congress governments in Haryana and Rajasthan in the past.
•The party also said if voted to power, it would re-examine the issue of GST on agricultural equipment to lower input costs for farmers.
•Promising to review the methodology used by the Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices to determine the minimum support price (MSP), factoring all relevant input costs including warehousing and transportation, the party said it would expand the price regime to other crops and forest produce of tribal community and expand the procurement process to ensure that the farmer gets benefits of the MSP.
📰 Notice to Bengal over GI tag for ‘Rosogolla’
Plea for rectification filed by Odisha man
•The Geographical Indication (GI) Registry has issued a notice to the West Bengal State Food Processing and Horticulture Development Corporation, asking why the GI recognition given to ‘Banglar Rosogolla’ not be withdrawn.
•Reacting to an application for rectification or removal filed by Ramesh Chandra Sahoo, chairperson of the Bhubaneswar-based Regional Development Trust, the GI Registry office in Chennai served this notice to West Bengal.
Questions documents
•Through this petition, Mr. Sahoo had objected to the GI status procured by West Bengal for ‘Banglar Rosogolla’ four months ago. He had also questioned the dataprovided by West Bengal for getting the GI tag.
•He also said that Odisha was not given a chance to explain its stance when West Bengal applied for the GI status.
•Odisha Small Industries Corporation applied for the GI tag for ‘Odisha’s Rasagola’ on January 23 this year. The application includes historical evidence seeking to prove that the famous sweet was part of the offering in Sri Jagannath Temple of Puri at least five centuries ago.
•“With the emergence of more and more historical evidences, it is proven that the rasagola had originated in Odisha as a special offering at the Sri Jagannath Temple of Puri. Later, its preparation technique had reached West Bengal and other parts of the country,” said cultural researcher Asit Mohanty, who helped in collecting evidences for the ‘Odisha’s Rasagola’ GI tag application.
📰 ‘Ease of doing business improves in West Bengal’
Land acquisition a concern: survey
•West Bengal was now more conducive to doing business, offering satisfactory environment even as concerns remained over the acquisition of land for large projects, according to a survey.
•Participants in the survey on ease of doing business, conducted jointly by CII and PwC, also listed labour and trade union issues and lack of skilled manpower as areas of concern for the State even as they said that West Bengal offered cost competitiveness in terms of raw material and machinery.
Need for stringent laws
•The participants felt that the State needs to put in place stringent and progressive laws for trade unions and streamline the process of acquisition and conversion of land for industry.
•The ease of doing business survey was released on March 17 at a CII event.
•Size of the market was one of the main drivers of business along with low operational costs, the survey showed.
•As per the 2011 census, West Bengal had a population of about 9.1 crore of which 6.2 crore are in rural areas.
•The State offered natural resources and minerals, is a major agriculture base and hosts industries like petrochemicals, chemicals, coal iron and steel, heavy and light industries, dairy, leather, tea and jute industries.
•A majority of the respondents felt that there was scope for improvement in registration process, incubation systems and legal processes. Although more than 60% of the participants said telecom and power availability was good, some felt that the power tariff structure was not competitive.
•The survey showed that it mostly took a year to get the approvals to start a business and an equal amount of time to get the regulatory clearances. Land acquisition took longer — upto three years.
•Even as many units were looking to expand their business in the State, some said that they were as keen to expand their network and manufacturing facilities across multiple regions.
•Commenting on the survey, CII eastern region’s immediate past chairman Smita Pandit Chakraborty said that CII West Bengal Committee formed a separate committee on ease of doing Business. The survey was conducted within the State and outside to understand industry perception on West Bengal as an investment destination.
📰 A knowledge hub for medicinal plants
Open source record of plants with “druggable” chemicals will help validate traditional systems
•The use of Indian medicinal plants for drug discovery and therapeutics just received a boost.
•A database of such plants has been built by a Chennai-based team led by Areejit Samal of the Institute of Mathematical Sciences.
•By documenting 1,742 Indian medicinal plants and 9,596 chemicals that plants use to thrive and ward off threats (phytochemicals), this database has the distinction of being the largest so far. This is a first step towards validating and developing traditional systems of medicine that use plant extracts.
Tribal medicine
•For the repository, the scientists sourced information from several texts including those that documented tribal medicine.
•With supporting studies in the form of well-planned lab tests, this work has the potential to improve health care and enhance drug discovery.
•Plants secrete various special chemicals to ward off predators, fight pathogens and survive in difficult situations. Some of these so-called phytochemicals have been used to prepare traditional medicines and also poisons. While there are extensive databases of phytochemicals of Chinese herbs, there has no similar work in India.
•The new database, named IMPPAT (Indian Medicinal Plants, Phytochemistry And Therapeutics) brings together not just the Indian medicinal plants and their associated phytochemicals, but also the latter’s 2D and 3D chemical structures, the therapeutic use of the plants and the medicinal formulations.
•Among the many challenges in building IMPPAT was in removing redundancy and standardising names and spellings that varied across the several books and documents they have referred to.
•From previous work we know that natural products are made of highly complex molecules, which therefore are more likely to bind to very specific proteins unlike commercial (or synthesised) drug molecules.
•“We show that phytochemicals in IMPPAT also have high stereochemical and shape complexity similar to natural product library of Clemons et al, and thus, IMPPAT phytochemicals are also expected to be specific protein binders,” says Areejit Samal.
•Drug molecules which are specific protein binders are likely to have fewer side-effects as they will bind specifically to their target protein.
Quest for druggability
•The team analysed the features of the phytochemical structures using established “druggability” criteria.
•This identified 960 potentially druggable phytochemicals of which only a small percentage showed similarities to existing FDA-approved drugs.
•“This offers immense potential for drug discovery,” says Dr. Samal.
•Of the 960 phytochemicals, 14 have the highest druggability score, and one of these is Skullcapflavone I – This is produced by two plants, one of which isAndrographis paniculata , commonly known as Nilavembu or Siriyanangai.
•Another interesting topper is Kumatakenin, which is made by three plants including Artemisia capillaris .
•This plant is a close relative of Artemisia annua from which Nobel laureate Youyou Tu extracted the drug artemisinin which has saved the lives of many malaria patients.
•“We hope to expand the links between phytochemicals of Indian medicinal plants and their target proteins, enabling application of systems biology... Our resource will help future efforts render Indian medicine evidence-based rather than experience-based,” says Dr. Samal.
📰 New understanding of mental health
Researchers find molecular signatures of mental illnesses in study
•Mental health issues could show up in the physiology of the brain, according to a study published recently in Science . Examining the brain cortex of a large number of deceased patients, the researchers found, for the first time, molecular signatures of mental illnesses. They studied five major problems — autism, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression and alcoholism — and discovered that these conditions go in parallel with specific gene activity and manifest in the genes’ expression in the cerebral cortex, or the outermost layer of the brain. The study throws up overlaps in some of conditions and surprisingly counter-intuitive results in other cases.
Five conditions
•In a scenario where diagnosis of psychiatric disorders is largely based on symptoms and signs, and treatment of these is primarily by targeting symptoms, this study has come as a milestone. It took up five common, major, disabling and chronic psychiatric conditions and looked for genetic expressions in the brain cortex. “This is a step toward an objective method of diagnosis as well as developing treatment methods that are disease modifying,” said Dr. M. Suresh Kumar, consultant psychiatrist, Psymed Hospital, Chennai.
•An international team of researchers, led by Dr. Daniel H. Geschwind, neurologist and neuroscientist at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), U.S., analysed 700 cerebral cortex samples from the brains of deceased individuals with one of the five disorders mentioned earlier.
•The team also studied 293 controls and 197 samples from patients who had inflammatory bowel disease for comparison with a non-neural disease. “The novel aspect of this study was using the gene expression patterns as a basis for directly comparing these different psychiatric conditions together across a large number of samples. Based on the different causes and behaviours present in each disorder, it was quite surprising that they ended up showing many of the same gene expression changes,” Dr. Geschwind said in an email to The Hindu.
•Analysis revealed an overlap between bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. This was surprising because the former is usually viewed as a mood disorder and hence closer to depression. Also, despite the prevailing tendency to associate alcoholism with depression or bipolar disorder, the study showed no correlation between alcoholism and the four other disorders.
•“It is interesting that the study finds a close overlap in genetic and molecular level brain changes between bipolar disorder and schizophrenia,” said Dr. Suresh Kumar. Bipolar disorder and schizophrenia are completely distinct for the clinician. While the former is treated with mood stabilisers, the latter is treated with antipsychotic drugs. Perhaps the two may be similar in several ways as the study has shown. “Clinicians change the diagnosis from one to another over the course of time. In addition, currently second generation antipsychotic drugs are used as first-line drugs in both schizophrenia and acute stages of bipolar disorder,” he added.
Unique disease signatures
•The study showed that while some genes were active in both schizophrenia and autism, they were much more active in the latter. There were also signs that brain cell communication was affected in three diseases, autism, depression and bipolar disorder. “We also identified unique disease signatures, such as an activation of microglial cells [a set of brain immune cells that protect the brain from inflammation] in autism, not seen in the others, and some changes in hormone regulation in major depression,” Dr. Geschwind said.
•While the study cannot immediately translate into therapeutics, as it was performed on the brains of deceased persons only, it could certainly pave the way for further research that would enable precision medicine approaches.
•Based on the findings, Dr. Michael Gandal of UCLA is running a clinical trial using a drug predicted to reduce neuroinflammation in autistic individuals. “We are now planning to look at patterns across many different brain regions to see how widespread the results are. Finally, we also intend to look at these disorders with single cell resolution using new sequencing technology,” Dr. Geschwind said.
•The National Mental Health Survey of India 2015-2016 estimated that nearly 150 million people in India were in need of mental health interventions and care. Given this pointer, it becomes important to get a better grip on both diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders. This study should change the way psychiatric medicine works.
📰 IIT Kanpur researchers find why babies need to move in the womb
The study suggests a possibility to intervene early to prevent osteoarthritis progression
•Formation of joints in the developing embryo and their maintenance after birth is sensitive to mechanical movement. Now, researchers at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur have deciphered the molecular mechanism underlying this phenomenon. They have demonstrated how permanent cartilage is formed in an embryo due to mechanical movement. They also found out how permanent cartilage is lost and temporary or transient cartilage is formed in its place in the absence of movement.
•While permanent cartilage lines the joint, the transient cartilage is a bone-forming one. Earlier this group demonstrated that during embryonic development, a bipotential cartilage population gives rise to both permanent and transient cartilage. BMP and Wnt are two major signals regulating this process. While BMP promotes transient cartilage formation, Wnt promotes permanent cartilage formation.
•In patients with osteoarthritis, the permanent cartilage acquires all the characteristics of a temporary cartilage, which affects joint function. Currently, in people with osteoarthritis, it is not possible to reverse the fate of permanent cartilage that has become a temporary-like cartilage. The work done by a team led by Prof. Amitabha Bandyopadhyay from the Department of Biological Sciences and Bioengineering at IIT Kanpur suggests that it might be possible to prevent osteoarthritis from worsening if intervened at an early stage. The results were published in the journal Development. The work was carried out in collaboration with the laboratory of Prof. Paula Murphy of Trinity College Dublin.
Transient cartilage
•BMP signalling — which helps in the formation of transient cartilage — is normally not present in permanent cartilage cells in a joint. That transient cartilage forms in the place of permanent cartilage due to joint immobilisation was already known. And independently, the team had shown that BMP signalling promotes transient cartilage formation. “So we wanted to find out if immobilising the joints in a chick embryo allows the BMP signalling to come up in the joint cartilage cells. We did find that happening,” Prof. Bandyopadhyay says.
•The investigation into what causes the BMP signalling to be present in future permanent cartilage cells when the joint is immobilised led them to a surprise finding. The lead author, Pratik Singh, found out that an inhibitor of BMP signalling (Smurf1) is absent in the joint that is immobilised resulting in increased BMP signalling. “The role of the Smurf1 inhibitor is to maintain a BMP-free area thereby enabling the progenitor cells to become permanent cartilage. But due to increased BMP signalling the permanent cartilage gets converted into transient-like cartilage,” says Prof. Bandyopadhyay.
•The Smurf1 inhibitor is not directly involved in joint cartilage formation but creates an environment that permits the formation of permanent cartilage by keeping the BMP signalling under check.
Toggle switch
•Mechanical movement seems to act like a toggle switch. In the presence of it, Wnt – the signal that promotes joint cartilage – is on and BMP signalling is off in the joint cartilage cells. The opposite is true when the joint is immobilized. This is the reason why immobilisation of joints causes greater disturbance to permanent cartilage than even inhibition of Wnt signalling. “We are now investigating if osteoarthritis is also associated with appearance of BMP signalling in the wrong place. If so, we can block the BMP signalling in these cells during the early-stage of osteoarthritis to possibly prevent the condition from worsening,” he says.
📰 No sign of new neurons in adult humans, says study
The last new neurons were observed in 13 year olds
•The human brain may not be as pliant as was believed, a recent study shows. In this study, bound to provoke argument, researchers observe that the latest neurons form in the brain when the subject is about 13 years old and no later. This finding, published in Nature, contradicts earlier experiments, according to which neurons in the hippocampal region of the brain could be formed even late in adulthood.
Hippocampus
•The hippocampus is a region which is believed to be the abode of long-term memory and emotional responses. This was also believed to be true in other mammals such as chimpanzees and rodents.
•In the study, the researchers took advantage of the fact that specific antibodies could bind to proteins of interest and indicate their locations in tissue. They thereby identified the locations of the neural precursor cells, proliferating cells and immature neurons in samples from 59 human subjects and traced the development from the foetal stage to old age. Up to 14 weeks of gestation, the three cell types migrated from their point of genesis to the region within the hippocampus – the dentate gyrus – where they stayed and developed. The oldest individual they observed with immature neurons was 13 years old.
•The researchers observe that a lack of neurogenesis in the hippocampal region has been suggested in the case of some aquatic mammals like dolphins, porpoises and whales. This is interesting because these mammals are known for their intelligence, longevity and complex behaviour, too. They also offer a reason for why humans appear to differ so drastically from other mammals studied.
📰 IIT Guwahati develops superhydrophobic coating that mimics lotus leaves or rose petals
The coating has diverse applications depending on whether it is made adhesive or non-adhesive
•A polymeric coating that is extremely water-repelling (superhydrophobic) and will allow water to roll off from the surface like in the case of a lotus leaf or stick to the surface as in the case of rose petals has been synthesised by a two-member team from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Guwahati.
•It can be spray-coated on various surfaces (glass, plastic, metal, wood and concrete) of diverse chemical composition, texture (smooth or rough surface), geometry (plain sheet or complex shape such as shoes), and size. The researchers led by Dr. Uttam Manna from the institute’s Department of Chemistry found the water-repelling property of the coating remained intact even when subjected to severe physical and chemical abuse.
Modulated functionality
•By modulating the functionality of the coating with small amine molecules, the coated surface was made to behave either as non-adhesive superhydrophobic coating (where water rolls off as in a lotus leaf) or adhesive superhydrophobic coating where the droplets stick to the surface like in the case of rose petals. The results were published in the Journal of Materials Chemistry A.
•“There is a fundamental difference in the way the trapped air is present at the interface between the surface and water droplets and this makes the coated surface either adhesive or non-adhesive superhydrophobic,” says Dr. Manna. In the case of the non-adhesive superhydrophobic coating, the trapped air is continuous and uniformly distributed. This leads to the trapped air minimising the contact area between the water droplet and the substrate. With adhesive superhydrophobic coating, the trapped air is not continuous and the contact area between the water droplet and the substrate is more thereby causing the droplets to stick to the surface up to 20 degrees tilt angle.
•The superhydrophobic coating was prepared by mixing a polymer (branched poly(ethyleneimine)) and a reactive small molecule (dipentaerythritol penta-acrylate) in different alcoholic solvents — ethanol to pentanol.
•“We were able to achieve a stable coating only when pentanol solvent was used,” says Dr. Manna. The polymer and the small molecule react rapidly in the presence of pentanol. Also, the volatility (rate of evaporation) of pentanol is way less compared with other alcoholic solvents.
•“As pentanol evaporates slowly, it allows the reaction between the polymer and small molecule to be completed thus making the coating to be stable and uniform,” says Koushik Maji from the Department of Chemistry at IIT Guwahati and first author of the paper. “With other solvents, the reaction is slower and the solvents evaporate quickly leading to less stable coating (cracking and peeling).”
•The coating is highly chemically reactive and this makes it possible to post modify the coating with amines containing small molecules to make it either adhesive or non-adhesive superhydrophobic. Unlike in other cases, the reactants themselves get covalently cross-linked thus making the use of external binder or cross-linker for stability redundant.
•The superhydrophobic coating has diverse applications depending on whether it is made adhesive or non-adhesive. The non-adhesive one can be used for oil-water separation and making the surface self-cleaning.
•Since the coating remains adhesive up to 20 degrees of tilt, the adhesive coating can be used in open microfluidic devices for diagnostic purposes where controlled transfer of aqueous droplets without any loss in volume is needed.
📰 Novel nanoparticles to help cell imaging
The biomolecules that bind to cancer cells give a green fluorescence
•New fluorescent nanoparticles created from simple biomolecules can now help light up cancer cells for better imaging.
•Scientists from Indian Association for the Cultivation of Sciences (IACS), Kolkata have created nanoparticles from folic acid, riboflavin and lactose and tuned the molecules to give a green fluorescence to help in cell imaging using bright-field microscopy.
•“The cadmium selenium quantum dots currently used for imaging purposes are highly toxic to the human cells. But we have used simple molecules which are found within the human body as basic ingredients to do the same work,” says Dr. Nikhil R Jana, Professor and corresponding author of the paper published inMRS Advances.
Green flourescence
•The newly created nanoparticles are mixed with the cell culture medium, kept for 2-3 hours, washed and then viewed under the microscope. The nanoparticles label the cancer cells alone and are seen with a green fluorescence under the microscope.
•The nanoparticles exhibit specific labelling properties. Since oral cancer cells have folate and riboflavin receptors, the nanoparticles prepared from folic acid and riboflavin bind to these receptors. Folic acid nanoparticles bind to ovary cancer cells, while nanoparticles made from lactose bind to galactose receptors found on liver cancer cells.
•They found that the green fluorescence depended mainly on the temperature at which they were treated. “We used a wide range of temperature for cooking the molecules (90-340 degree C). The broadness of the fluorescence spectra increased with the lowering of the reaction temperature,” says Hayder Ali, PhD scholar and first author of the paper. “These new nanoparticles are less than 10 nanometre in size and can also be used for targeted drug delivery as they seem to have specific labelling abilities.”
•Preliminary in vivo studies using a mouse model show no toxicity, and the researchers are currently working on getting a red emission so that bioimaging can be done with low background signal.
📰 Vitamin B12 supplements may reduce diabetes risk
In general, Indians have low levels of B12
•Researchers from CSIR-Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB), Hyderabad along with scientists from Pune, Singapore and UK studied the molecular pathway to understand how B12 supplements are associated with Type 2 diabetes and its associated genes.
•“Previous studies from our lab have shown that B12 supplementation for a year was able to bring down the level of homocysteine (a marker for cardiovascular diseases). We wanted to explore further as we know that B12 plays an important role in many reactions of the body and influences risk for many diseases including cardio-metabolic disorders,” says Dr. Giriraj R. Chandak, scientist at CSIR-CCMB and corresponding author of the paper published in Epigenomics.
•The study involved 108 children from the Pune maternal nutrition study (PMNS). The children were randomly divided into four groups. One group was not given any supplements while the second was given B12 supplements (10 microgram/day), third B12 with folic acid (known to influence homocysteine levels) and fourth only folic acid.
•After a year, their blood samples were collected and genomic DNA was isolated and studied for differences before and after supplementation.
Crucial factor
•“We found that B12 was a crucial factor in the one-carbon metabolic cycle of the body which determines the levels of different proteins by regulating methylation of their genes. The expression of various genes associated with diabetes was found to be less by methylation. We found four top genes that were associated with diabetes to be less expressed,” he adds.
•“Studies are ongoing in the lab to understand more about how B12 affects the molecular network and signaling pathway of the genes associated with Type 2 diabetes,” says Dr Smeeta Shrestha, postdoctoral fellow and coauthor from CCMB. “Almost 40-70% of the Indian population is vitamin B12 deficient. But this study clearly provides evidence that a micronutrient can immensely influence the risk for a commonly occurring disease like diabetes,” says Dr. Chandak.
📰 Maharashtra’s two potentially endangered endemic shrubs
TheCrotolariaspecies are from the legume family
•Crotolaria species (ripe fruits of which are used by children as rattles) are small shrubs bearing bright yellow blooms and are common across the Indian countryside. But Indian botanists have just discovered two rattlepod species — woody and multi-bracted rattlepods — that survive only in the hill tracts of Maharashtra.
•Of the 85 species of rattlepods or Crotolaria found in India, 73 survive only in peninsular states. Many of these are concentrated along the Western Ghats and it takes a trained eye to discern the (often) slight physical differences between various rattlepod species. On their field trips to Maharashtra’s Kolhapur district in 2011 and 2015, researchers at the University of Delhi’s Department of Botany spotted two types of rattlepods that looked unlike any they had seen before. Intrigued, they collected specimens and measured in detail the fine morphological features specific to these plants in their lab. They found that the width of the keel (one of the petals of a flower) was different from any of the other rattlepod species seen in the area. “The degree to which the keel is twisted in the flowers also emerged as an important characteristic,” says Arun Pandey, professor at the University of Delhi, who led the study published in PLOS ONErecently.
Two species
•To make sure they were looking at two different species, the botanists also analyzed the plants’ DNA and studied portions of two plant genes. Using six samples of the new plants, they built a genetic 'species tree', which shows the plants' genetic affinities with other rattlepod species. This reveals that both the new shrubs are different enough to warrant recognition as separate species.
•The team named one species Crotolaria suffruticosa (’suffruticose’ means woody at its base, but herb-like above). This ‘woody’ rattlepod is found in grasslands and forest edges in two localities in Kolhapur’s Karul Ghat. The second,Crotolaria multibracteata (named after its several bracts – small modified leaves at the bases of flowers) or the ‘multi-bracted’ rattlepod survives on rocky and dry surfaces in just one locality in the nearby Panhala region. This limited geographical distribution necessitates that both plants be classified as ‘endangered’ as per the criteria set by the IUCN, write the authors.
•“Anthropogenic activities such as clearing and burning of forests and grasslands in the non-protected areas where we found them could threaten their existence,” says Prof. Pandey, adding that conserving these habitats is crucial for the rare shrubs.
