📰 ‘Leprosy must not continue to be a ground for divorce’
The archaic laws relating to the disease should be re-examined, says NCPEDP which is organising a special consultation on July 19-20
•Leprosy must not continue to be a ground for divorce noted the National Centre for Promotion of Employment for Disabled People (NCPEDP) stating that this disease is now fully curable, and that the archaic laws relating to leprosy must be relooked at.
•Leprosy is one of the world’s oldest diseases with India accounting for over 60% of the annual new cases of leprosy and a home to around 800 self-settled leprosy colonies.
•World Health Organisations (WHO) data reveals that in 2016, a total of 2,14,783 cases of leprosy were reported worldwide. There were 18,000 child cases and 12,437 cases who were already suffering from serious disabilities at the time of diagnosis. India had 1,35,485 cases.
Still face discrimination
•“While recognised as a disability under the Persons with Disabilities (Equal Opportunities, Protection of Rights and Full Participation) Act of 1995, and being completely curable, persons affected by leprosy continue to face discrimination not only from the larger society but also the disability sector itself,” noted a release issued by the NCPEDP.
•India’s archaic laws need to be changed if this has to happen said the NCPEDP.
•The release noted that there are currently 119 provisions across various Acts passed by the Central and State governments that continue to discriminate against people affected by leprosy (PAL).
•These are also directly in contrast with the provisions of the Rights of Person with Disabilities Act 2016, that mandates non-discrimination and equality for all irrespective of disability.
Push to repeal provisions
•“These 119 provisions not only violate the RPWD Act but also Articles 14, 19 and 21 of the Constitution of India. Article 14 protects the right to equality of all persons, Article 19 protects the freedom of citizens to move freely throughout the territory of India and practise any profession, occupation, trade or carry on any business, while Article 21 protects the right to life and dignity of all persons. It is to give momentum to this discourse that we are organising a special consultation on the issue as part of the larger national disability consultation being organised by us on July 19 and 20 and we hope the sector will come together as a collective force to push for repealing of these provisions,” said Som Mittal of the NCPEDP.
•The NCPEDP has now constituted a core group on leprosy consisting of persons affected by leprosy, disability sector leaders, lawyers and activists and has also thrown its weight behind Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy, which has filed a civil writ petition asking the Supreme Court of India to declare these provisions as unconstitutional because they discriminate against persons affected by leprosy.
📰 How the LGBTQ rights movement in India gained momentum
Tracing the storied, 25-plus years of the fight for LGBTQ rights in India that came to a head this week
•It was August 11, 1992. Outside the police headquarters in the ITO area of Delhi, the first known protest for gay rights in India was being held.
•It was sparked off by the police picking up men from Central Park in Connaught Place on suspicion of homosexuality — in those days, this kind of harassment was still a ‘normal’ practice. But activists from an organisation called AIDS Bhedbhav Virodhi Andolan (ABVA) decided not to let it pass this time and blocked the entrance to the police headquarters to protest the harassment.
Nothing came of it.
•Two years later, in 1994, a medical team landed up at Tihar Jail to investigate the high incidence of sodomy reported from the quarters. ABVA activists wanted to distribute condoms to the prisoners, but Kiran Bedi, then Inspector General of Prisons, refused permission. Bedi argued that it would amount to tacit admission that homosexual relations were prevalent in Tihar; more pertinently, that availability of condoms would encourage the practice. Tihar decided to deal with the “menace of homosexuality”, as Bedi termed it, by mandatorily testing inmates for HIV and segregating those found positive.
•In 1994, ABVA filed a public interest litigation (PIL) in Delhi High Court, challenging the constitutional validity of Section 377 — it was one of the first legal protests against government repression of the LGBTQ community.
Brave and prescient
•The PIL also gave India its first champion of gay rights, Siddhartha Gautam, who had become involved in the gay rights movement in the U.S. when he went to study at Yale in 1989. He had co-founded ABVA on his return, and published a ground-breaking pamphlet, ‘Less Than Gay’, a citizens’ report on the discrimination faced by the community in India. Gautam died of Hodgkin’s lymphoma a few months after the publication of the report.
•“ABVA’s claim for the rights of queer people in India was brave, prescient and forthright,” says Naisargi Dave in his book Queer Activism in India: A Story in the Anthropology of Ethics. But after Gautam’s death, ABVA failed to follow through, and the petition was dismissed in 2001. But it had set the ball rolling.
•It was only a couple of years later that Vivek Divan, who would go on to head the HIV unit of Lawyers Collective, a legal aid organisation fighting for gay rights, stumbled upon ‘Less Than Gay’. Divan, then a queer 20-something law student in Mumbai, found the pamphlet in the library run by Humsafar Trust, an NGO that provided support to Mumbai’s emerging gay community.
•Divan says the pamphlet ‘happened’ to him, as if it was a force of nature. “It was path-breaking for that time. There was no gay community, gay literature, or HIV movement then. I started attending support group meetings at Humsafar, and in 1997 I attended a workshop by Lawyers Collective. That’s when I quit my practice to work full-time in its HIV unit,” says Divan, emerging at the end of the first day’s hearing in the Supreme Court on Section 377 on July 9.
•On July 7, 2001, matters came to a head. Enthusiastic about enforcing Section 377, Lucknow police raided a park and once again arrested a few men on the grounds of suspected homosexuality. One of them was a health worker with an NGO called the Bharosa Trust, and the police immediately raided the offices of Bharosa, seized documents and arrested nine more people. “The police confiscated safe-sex aids like condoms, lubricants, instructional videos — and much to the delight of a giddy press — a variety of dildos,” writes Dave in his book.
•“When the Lucknow incident happened, we were already contemplating a petition. The media sensationalised the arrests, describing it as the busting of a sex racket. For the most part, journalism around gay rights then was uninformed, non-nuanced and sensationalist,” says Divan.
•The nine arrested were denied bail, with the court stating that “the work of the accused is like a curse on society”. It took a month for Lawyers Collective to establish that Bharosa was not involved in a sex racket, and bail out the arrested members .
A public health measure
•Meanwhile, the health ministry was facing a different problem. By 2002, government estimates put India’s HIV affected population at around 3.97 million people — more than any other country except South Africa.
•This was before the appearance of generic anti-retrovirals, and prevention was literally the only cure. The homosexual community was in the throes of the epidemic, but the health ministry could not convince the police to stop harassing them when they came forward for treatment.
•Former Union health secretary Sujatha Rao recalls visiting NGOs in Bengaluru in 2006. “I was stunned and shocked to hear about the police violence and the amount of fear and exploitation these people were under. That visit strongly influenced my thinking,” says Rao, who played a key role in convincing the health ministry to take a pro-LGBTQ stand.
•“The then Home Minister Shivraj Patil was bitterly opposed, but Health Minister Anbumani Ramadoss was firmly in support,” says Rao.
•Lawyers exploited this difference of opinion between the two ministries to their advantage. “We wanted to make the most of it,” says Anand Grover, president of Lawyers Collective. “I got an affidavit from Rao supporting our case. At that point, we could only argue this as a public health measure in order to succeed.”
•When asked what the upcoming Supreme Court verdict means to him, Divan narrates an incident. In 2006, Lucknow police picked up six men from the chat room of Planet Romeo, a website for gay, bisexual and transgender men. The newspapers mentioned their real names, contact details, and even landline numbers. “These were married men, with wives and children. Their lives were destroyed,” Divan recalls.
•As this goes to press, the country awaits the Supreme Court’s ruling. Awaits a decision that will prevent more lives from being destroyed.
📰 In Manipur, incursions on the border
•Border disputes in the northeast are usually associated with China’s claim on Arunachal Pradesh and alleged intrusion by Chinese soldiers. The 1,643-km border with Myanmar along Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Manipur and Mizoram often has more to do with smuggling of drugs, gold and wildlife body parts, as well as raids by the northeastern extremist groups from their hideouts beyond the boundary. The spotlight is on this frontier for alleged incursions by Myanmar soldiers.
Where is the incursion?
•Villagers along Manipur’s border say incursions are nothing new. For instance, Myanmar nationals have been occupying Govajang village near the trade town of Moreh in Tengnoupal district, the predominantly Thadou people of the area say. But the aggression has increased over the past six months. The action has been in the newly created Tengnoupal district, though the other three border districts — Chandel, Kamjong and Ukhrul — have issues too. According to the United Naga Council (UNC) of Manipur, an umbrella socio-economic and cultural group of the Naga tribes, Myanmar soldiers on April 29 vandalised a saw mill in Tengnoupal’s H. Lhangcham, a Maring Naga-inhabited village between border pillars 75 and 76. Two days later, Myanmar soldiers raided N. Satsang and Choktong, also in Tengnoupal, and made 62 tribal families flee. They dismantled the Indian boundary pillar number 82 and planted their own. These villages are within 10 km north of Moreh. The latest incident was reported from Kwatha Khunou further north, near where border pillar 81 used to stand. Notably, only a 10-km stretch (Moreh area) of the India-Myanmar border is fenced.
What does Delhi say?
•The External Affairs Ministry has said India has not shifted pillars demarcating the border with Myanmar and the boundary is settled and there is no confusion over its alignment. Manipur Chief Minister N. Biren Singh has said his government has formed a high-power committee to investigate the incursions; it will seek a fresh survey if any discrepancy is found. But UNC leader Gaidon Kamei said Myanmar soldiers and civilians have illegally occupied a large chunk of land on the Manipur side of the boundary from pillar number 81 to 88. A Congress team that visited Kwatha Khunou a fortnight ago found a subsidiary Myanmar pillar 100 metres in India from pillar 81. The team also found Burmese graffiti and a symbol of Myanmar flag on the base of a tree that the Meitei people worship as a deity and claimed that Myanmar took over half of Molfei village inhabited by the Kuki. Union Minister Kiren Rijiju, who was in Manipur at that time, insisted that there was no border dispute. The Congress and some NGOs took it as admission that India gifted land to “please Myanmar, whose rulers are getting closer to China.” Why then do Assam Rifles soldiers stop people from inspecting the border and why don’t Indian surveyors visit the area, they ask.
Is history responsible?
•The BJP had earlier blamed Manipur’s boundary problem with Myanmar on Jawaharlal Nehru for not claiming the Kabaw Valley (in Myanmar) during demarcation in 1947. In the medieval ages, Manipur and Burmese kings often wrested the valley from each other until the British defeated the Burmese and signed the Treaty of Yandaboo in 1826. But the valley was returned to Burma in the second treaty of 1834 and a boundary line between British India and Burma was drawn by Captain R.B. Pemberton. The Pemberton Line had left out certain restive Kuki areas that were included in a rectified boundary in 1881 called Johnstone Line. The boundary was redrawn again in 1896 to have 38 pillars and be known as Maxwell or Pemberton-Johnstone-Maxwell Line. But Burma never participated in these exercises until India and Burma became independent. After negotiations started in 1953, both ratified the 1896 line via the Rangoon Agreement on March 10, 1967. Border residents in Manipur hope New Delhi makes it clear to Myanmar that history needs to be respected.
📰 Convince the student first
Regulatory change won’t persuade students that they’re getting a better education
•Last year, when my son graduated, he told me that he wanted to do a postgraduate course in International Security from Sciences Po in Paris. Till then, I had heard of neither the course nor the institution, but he rattled off facts: Sciences Po was one of France’s handful of Grandes Écoles, which are elite universities outside the French public university system; the university (and the course) was amongst the highest rated both in Europe and the world; and Sciences Po had produced every French President since World War II. He is now in the second year of his course, a Masters degree, and enjoying it very much.
Nothing beats word of mouth
•The point of this autobiographical preamble is that when it comes to education, particularly higher education, quality and desirability lie in the eye of the beholder. Certification by the government or self-marketing by the institution cannot take the place of word of mouth and, more importantly, the profile and performance of past alumni in making a place desirable in the eyes of a student on the verge of making a life-altering decision regarding her choice of subject and place of study. To the best of my knowledge, Sciences Po had neither done anything to market itself to potential students in India, nor did it have any government certification to flaunt. Nevertheless, a 20-year-old Delhi student had managed to acquire all the necessary information required to help make up his mind.
•This helps to contextualise the real problem with the government’s recent move to once again try to ‘reform’ the higher education set-up in India. The draft Higher Education Commission of India (Repeal of University Grants Commission Act) Bill has been widely — and perhaps justifiably — panned for increasing bureaucratic and political control of higher education in the name of autonomy. The Bill proposes that the HECI will oversee accreditation, curricular and quality issues, while the Human Resources Devbelopment Ministry will control the funding and grant-giving process. And as with any attempt by the government to create a so-called independent regulator, the fear of regulatory and governance capture by vested interests is real, and stems from bitter past experience in other sectors where this has been attempted.
•Perhaps the most telling comment on the real position of Indian institutes of higher learning vis-à-vis the quality of education they provide is that over half a million young Indian men and women leave our shores every year to study abroad. Together, they (rather, their families) spend over ₹65,000 crore a year on equipping themselves with the chance to be competitive in this rapidly changing world.
•This sum is more than twice the government higher education budget. The day Indian institutes can get Indian families to spend this money on them instead of some foreign institutes is when one can truly claim that India is providing competitive, world-class higher education.
•But that won’t happen without some major changes. Currently, India’s higher education space, with a handful of honourable exceptions, is populated by government-funded institutions in terminal decline and private institutions, most of which are little more than degree shops. There is rampant politicisation, chronic underfunding, and academic neglect in the government institutions while the private ones charge outrageous sums for the quality of education they provide and make a mockery of the UGC’s ‘not for profit’ condition imposed on such activity. The reason they survive is that demand outstrips supply by a huge margin. India’s gross enrollment ratio in higher education is only around 25%, which means only one in four eligible students actually enrolls for a college or university degree. For instance, over 6.5 lakh students qualify for the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test but there are only 65,000 seats. This means that desperate students take any option available, which leads to the sector’s other big problem: unemployability. There is no match between a candidate’s qualifications and skills. This is why holders of postgraduate and even research degrees seek (and mostly fail to secure) clerical jobs.
What to do
•We are running out of time to fix this problem. A report by the State Bank of India, released last month, warned policymakers that they had less than 10 years to solve this. If they fail, India will be permanently stuck in the developing nation category, since its demographic dividend will not have the required education or skills to make it a productive part of the workforce.
•We need to open the sector to new investment by committed professionals (ditch the ridiculous ‘not for profit’ rule for starters), ramp-up the quality of curriculum and teaching in universities, and ensure quality at all stages, from qualifications to exit. And this will have to be acknowledged by the students. The day Indian students prefer Indian universities, the day an Indian examination is recognised internationally, in the manner that China’s Gaokao is recognised in the U.S., is the day we can claim that we have got a handle on the problem.
📰 Who is T. Vijay Kumar, and what is he doing to promote natural farming in Andhra Pradesh?
•Like many other States, Andhra Pradesh is known for indiscriminate use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides to the extent that residues found their way into mothers’ milk in a few villages in Guntur. As Zero Budget Natural Farming (ZBNF) takes root in Andhra Pradesh, promising to move away from synthetic fertilizers and pesticides and rejuvenate the degraded soil, a retired civil servant, T. Vijay Kumar, is leading the project.
What is the mission?
•Mr. Kumar is being seen as the prime mover of the ZBNF as Andhra Pradesh inches towards becoming India’s first natural farming State, covering 60 lakh farmers and 12,294 gram panchayats by 2024, and 80 lakh hectares or 90% of the cultivable area by 2026.
•For Mr. Kumar, a 1983-batch IAS officer, heralding a natural farming era is a dream and comes at the end of a long career, 28 years of which were spent on the Tribal, Rural and Agriculture Development Departments. After retiring in September 2016, he became adviser to the government on agriculture and vice-chairman of the Rythu Sadhikara Samstha, a not-for-profit company set up by the government to usher in natural farming. According to Mr. Kumar, “'for both farmers and consumers, natural farming is a win-win situation.” Simply put, the ZBNF is a practice that believes in natural growth of crops without fertilizer and pesticide or any other “foreign” elements. The inputs used for seed treatments and other inoculations are cow dung and cow urine. Vidarbha farmer and Padma Shri awardee Subhash Palekar, the biggest champion of the ZBNF, pioneered a cow dung- and cow urine-based concept for seed treatment, inoculation, mulching and soil aeration.
How did he spread the word?
•Mr. Kumar realised that to promote the ZBNF, he would have to speak to the farmer in a language he understands. He prompted the Agriculture Department to identify community resource persons or ‘champion farmers’ from the villages who would motivate other farmers to achieve the ultimate goal of ‘biovillages’ (the entire village taking to natural farming) in phases. The initial committed group of 800, trained in natural farming, were used as CRPs to spread the concept. After preparatory work, this massive task began with Mr. Palekar’s eight-day training for 5,000 farmers in the ZBNF in January 2016. By the end of 2017, 40,000 farmers in 704 villages were covered, 2017-18 saw 1,63,000 being roped in at 972 villages, and during the current year the target is 5,00,000 farmers in 3,015 villages.
What were the challenges?
•For Mr. Kumar, one of the biggest challenges was that of mindset. Farmers had been brought up to believe that chemical-based farming, with external inputs, was necessary to increase yields. But when fellow farmers who had taken to natural farming briefed the others of the benefits, especially of cost, they took to it “like fish to water.”
•Having worked for rural welfare for years, Mr. Kumar found it easy to reach out to the community. In service, he had initiated the novel concept of Community Coordinators. Under it, young professionals from reputed institutes, like the IITs, would spend three years in a tribal village. Then as CEO of the Society for Elimination of Rural Poverty of the undivided Andhra Pradesh government from 2000 to 2010, he implemented a poverty eradication programme on an outlay of over ₹2,600 crore. The programme, covering all villages, was successful in organising 1.15 crore rural poor women in thrift and credit-based self-help groups. The key impact is that these groups mobilised bank credit to the tune of ₹65,000 crore in the undivided State as on March 2014.
What lies in store?
•Mr. Kumar is looking forward to the day, most likely by 2024, when Andhra Pradesh will be called a natural farming State.
📰 The lowdown on Triumf system
What is it?How did it come about?Why does it matter?What next?
•S-400 Triumf is one of the world’s most advanced air defence systems that can simultaneously track numerous incoming objects — all kinds of aircraft, missiles and UAVs — in a radius of a few hundred kilometres and launch appropriate missiles to neutralise them. It is now bang in the middle of the ongoing stand-off between Russia and Western nations. Among the countries under pressure from the U.S. not to buy this weapon is India. The system is a large complex of radars, control systems and different types of missiles. The highly automated S-400 has radars that can pick up an incoming object up to a 1,000 kilometres away, track several dozen incoming objects simultaneously, distribute the targets to appropriate missile systems and ensure a high success rate. The command post detects, tracks and identifies the target. Then the tracked object is taken over by manned anti-aircraft missile systems of the complex, which launch the counter attack. The development of S-400 (NATO name SA-21 Growler) was started towards the end of the Soviet Union in the 1980s and was disrupted by the collapse of the Communist bloc in 1991. The system is specifically designed to detect and destroy an array of targets — strategic bombers; aircraft used for electronic warfare, early warning, and reconnaissance; fighter jets such as F-16 and F-22; and incoming missiles such as Tomahawk. Russian forces have deployed at least half-a-dozen S-400 regiments, at least two of them are for the protection of Moscow. Russia has also deployed at least two S-400 systems in Syria, much to the concern of observers who fear the system could contribute to a global conflict breaking out in Syria. A single unit, consisting of eight launchers, 112 missiles and command and support vehicles, costs at least $400 million (Rs. 2,500 crore).
•S-400 traces its origins to the desperation of the Cold War period to find a credible counter to the threat from missiles and incoming enemy aircraft. S-400 is a dramatic improvement from its predecessor S-300, which was the mainstay of Soviet Union’s air defence during the Cold War, when nuclear missile threat was at its peak. S-300 was initially developed against incoming cruise missiles and aircraft, but the latter versions could also intercept ballistic missiles. They were deployed in the 1970s across Soviet Union for protecting key industrial complexes, cities, and other strategic assets.
•Today, the S-400 uses four different types of missiles and can track and shoot down incoming objects as far away as 400 kilometres, while it also has shorter-range missiles to track and shoot down objects that are closer.
•The acquisition of S-400 by countries such as India and Turkey has taken centre stage in the American diplomacy regarding Russia. Upfront, the recent sanctions against Russian entities, especially its military manufacturers and suppliers, mean any country buying the system may run into trouble. Besides, the U.S. has singled out the acquisition of S-400, telling potential customers such as India and Turkey that it is opposed to the move. It believes that S-400 could access sensitive U.S. military technologies in service with the potential buyers. Congressman Mac Thornberry, Chairman of the U.S. House Armed Services Committee, during a recent visit to New Delhi, said: “There is lot of concern in the U.S. over the S-400 system. There is concern that any country, and not just India, that chooses to acquire the system will make it harder to have the level of interoperability we want to have.”
•Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Friday said the negotiations for the S-400 were in a “conclusive stage.” There are conflicting reports about Turkey’s plan. American diplomats have accused Russia of “flipping” Turkey with the S-400 offer, while Turkey claims it is a defensive system. At the NATO summit in Brussels early this week, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said the first batch of the S-400 system would be in Turkey by late 2019.
📰 Why is there a row over Ayushman Bharat rates?
Why are hospitals displeased?
•Ayushman Bharat, the world’s largest health insurance scheme aimed at covering 50 crore Indians, is facing teething troubles. In May, the government published the rates that insurance companies would pay hospitals for the 1,350 procedures covered under the scheme. These rates have become a sticking point for hospitals, which have criticised them as arbitrary and low. For example, the price of Caesarean section, at ₹9,000 for five days of hospital stay, food and consultation, is “laughable,” says Girdhar Gyani, director-general of the Association for Healthcare Providers India (AHPI). Even government hospitals incur ₹7,000 a day just to maintain a bed, he adds. Doctors have also criticised the clustering of medical conditions in the rate list. For example, treatment for tuberculosis and HIV with complications will be reimbursed at the same rate of ₹2,000 a day. Anupam Singh, assistant professor, medicine, at Ghaziabad’s Santhosh Medical College, says this is irrational. “HIV complications can be pretty serious. Cryptococcal meningitis requires costly anti-fungals,” he points out. This means both illnesses must be compensated differently, he says. The fundamental problem, according to doctors and hospitals, is that the reimbursement rates were not calculated in a scientific manner.
•Ayushman Bharat did rely on a study of over 100 hospitals in 60 cities, according to Dinesh Arora, director of the scheme. But these were mostly hospitals with under 50 beds in tier-2 and tier-3 cities. The cost structure of these hospitals is substantially different from tertiary-care hospitals in tier-1 cities for multiple reasons. Tertiary-care hospitals have super-specialists, a greater nurse/bed ratio, and hi-tech facilities such as catheterization labs, all of which cost more. Mr. Gyani says almost all neurosurgical procedures, and several cardio procedures, have to be carried out in such facilities, because few smaller hospitals can do so. But the Ayushman Bharat rates don’t account for these differences.
What is the government stand?
•For now, the government is committed to the launch date of August 15. But officials have acknowledged that the rates will be revised. Ayushman Bharat has asked the AHPI to submit a list of 100 key procedures, for which a detailed cost study will be done. The results may come out around January 2019, says Mr. Arora. Until then, Ayushman Bharat has asked hospitals to cooperate, and the AHPI has agreed. “We have more or less agreed to support the scheme until then,” says Mr. Gyani.
Aren’t there costing studies?
•In 2016, the Karnataka Knowledge Commission, a body under the State government, did a small study comparing the costs of 20 frequent medical procedures with reimbursement rates under the Vajpayee Arogyashree, Yeshaswini and CGHS insurance schemes. The study found rates to be lower than costs for almost all procedures under all schemes. For example, if a surgery to repair an atrial septal defect (a hole in the wall between heart chambers) cost hospitals ₹1,59,438, they received between 29% and 34% of this amount under the CGHS. The problem was that this study covered only four private hospitals in Bengaluru, and was not representative of Indian variations. But it showed that hospitals could be subsidising medical procedures greatly.
•One reason reimbursement rates are low under the CGHS is that they are decided through a tender system, which picks the lower quotes from hospitals. Further, even these rates are not paid on time. A 2010 paper from the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations calculated that the average delay in paying hospitals under the CGHS was four months. Furthermore, the AHPI claims the CGHS still owes hospitals ₹400 crore in back payments.
How will payment delays be avoided?
•Mr. Arora says the problems plaguing the CGHS will not affect Ayushman Bharat. “We are committed to this. If you see our guidelines, we say the payments will be made within 15 days.” A memorandum of understanding to this effect will be signed with the States.
📰 ‘Sacred Games’, a coming of age for Indian television
While the series provides some pleasures, its numerous historical and political references could be lost on a Western audience
•The unfamiliar thrumming is hard to identify at first. As it grows louder coming over the hill, you guess it’s not something on the ground but something aerial. Suddenly, the celestial war drumming is right overhead and you can see the three machines that are aurally carpet-bombing north London. The creatures look like a combination of helicopters and old turbo-prop airplanes, except the twin engines on each are pointed upwards, comically priapic, the wings extending beyond the propellers looking extremely small, somewhat like a fat man with tiny hands. The loud things head southwards and then begin to curve back. As I walk to my friend’s house near Finsbury Park, the choppers seem to be going around, keeping me in the centre of the circle, and also coming lower and lower.
Noisy copters and baby blimps
•I ring my friend’s doorbell and he lets me in. It seems odd that the house isn’t shaking with the copter noise. “Aliens. And it’s clearly you they are after,” my friend says. I shake my head. Could it be the RAF showing off some new toys for its 100th anniversary? We check on the Net and identify the machines as V-22 Ospreys belonging to Donald Trump’s U.S. Marine Corps escort. The jokes are already flying about on the Net: “Is Trump trying to bomb us or is it Boris Johnson attempting a military coup?” And: “This is how Putin will make the U.K. submit — via a pawn POTUS and his Air Force.” Then: “First Hitler’s Stukas, now Trump’s Ospreys, but we shall never surrender!” This last comparison is actually quite apt: the Stuka dive bomber was designed to make a terrorising wail as it plunged to bomb hapless civilians. No doubt the good folks at Bell Boeing kept that in mind while designing the sound output of their Ospreys. But what was it that Trump’s (or the mangled apricot hellbeast as he has memorably been called) security escort was looking for exactly? The V-22s had already been seen over different parts of London and its vicinity, but this evening they seemed to be concentrating on Finsbury Park. We concluded that they were letting the people at the Finsbury Park mosque know they were around. “Maybe they can smell missiles. Or rogue nukes,” said my friend. “Or Trump baby balloons. Maybe they are here to shoot down the blimp,” I added.
Some thoughts on ‘Sacred Games’
•Talking about rogue nukes, my Indian host and I have been binge watching Netflix’s Sacred Games. This is not the place for a proper review of the series based on Vikram Chandra’s novel, but watching the episodes sitting in London at this moment does throw up some thoughts.
•First of all, for Indians of a certain generation, such as my host pal and myself, the series provides some real pleasures. There is the tectonic layering of Bombay from the late ’70s till now, plotting and action which is understated when compared to most Bollywood films, and the background score by Alokananda Dasgupta, which is a real triumph. Saif Ali Khan’s overweight cop Sartaj Singh is the most convincing role the actor has played since, perhaps,Omkara, showing us that when the ball is in his hitting zone, he can score heavily. Nawazuddin Siddiqui’s Ganesh Gaitonde has moments of great, powerful acting and moments of OTT bathos, but it’s true that Nawazuddin has the best lines and comic moments.
•Most importantly though, this series is a kind of coming of age for Indian cinema and TV in that it brings in real historical events and political figures and deals with them without kid gloves. We are used to seeing European and American films and TV series depicting historical leaders critically and making fun of them — of U.S. Presidents Kennedy and Nixon, and British Prime Ministers Churchill, Aden, Macmillan and Thatcher, for instance. This is how it should be. It is pleasing that the Congress, specifically Rajiv Gandhi, and the Hindutva brigade, with Advani’s role underlined, catch it a bit in the series. Bal Thackeray is missing, yet the most present in fictionalised form. Hindutva terror leaders start coming to the fore by the end of Season 1, something I will happily take given the rarity of such portrayals.
•However, the references to recent Indian history and the intricacies of Indian politics will be totally lost on the normal Western viewer. If you’re someone who has studied India in your undergraduate days, you may get some stuff, but mostly the very texturing my friend and I are so happy to see in a Indian work of filmed fiction will work as an almost opaque filler for most foreign viewers. The Shah Bano case, the Mandal upheavals and the Babri destruction may hold pivotal value for us in following the story of Sacred Games, but the realisation also hits home that, at least in the near future, these references will always be carpet-bombed by the noise of events closer to home in Europe and north America.
📰 IIT Bombay: Breakthrough in stem cell proliferation
With the new method, stem cells retained the stem cell-like nature for up to 51 days
•A major obstacle in using human mesenchymal stem cells (hMSCs) to treat a variety of diseases has been successfully overcome by a team of researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay. The team led by Dr. Abhijit Majumder from the institute’s Department of Chemical Engineering found hydrogel plate made of polyacrylamide was a perfect replacement for conventionally used plastic culture plates. Unlike the plastic plates, the hydrogel ensured that stem cells multiplied and retained the stem cell-like nature (stemness) for up to 51 days (20 generations) and differentiated into bone, cartilage or fat cells. The pre-print findings are reported in bioRxiv.
•When grown on plastic culture plates, the mesenchymal stem cells become large and flat, and also irregular in shape. The cells stop multiplying and growing (reach senescence) after a certain number of cell divisions. While only limited number of mesenchymal stem cells can be obtained from the body, a large number of cells is required for clinical applications. The only way to increase the number in the lab is to allow them to multiply. But multiplication to reach the desired numbers is currently not possible using plastic culture plates. And that is where the team’s success with hydrogel substrate to grow the cells holds great promise.
•“The problem becomes particularly acute in elderly patients as fewer number of mesenchymal stem cells can be recovered,” he says.
Novel culture plates
•“We did see senescence setting in at an early stage itself (day 5-6) and gradually increasing when plastic plates were used. But in the case of gel, there was an increase in senescence around day six but it remained constant after that,” says Dr. Majumder. “Traction reduced, and the proliferative nature of stem cells got prolonged when we used the gel.”
•Mesenchymal stem cells adhere to the substrate and the cells tend to contract, causing traction force to set in. The traction force applied by cells increases with stiffness of the substrate on which it is grown.
•Substrate stiffness, possibly via modulating cellular traction, determines how long the stem cells maintain their stem-like nature. Plastic plates have greater stiffness (in gigapascals), while gel used in the experiments have only 5 kPa.
•“When we used gels that are too soft (1-2 kPa) stem cells failed to proliferate. Cells started dividing as we increased the stiffness of the gel. But beyond 5 kPa, the cell spread area [size] got affected and the ability to maintain proliferation was compromised,” says Sanjay K. Kureel from IIT Bombay and first author of the paper.
•When mesenchymal stem cells derived from umbilical cord were cultured on plastic plates and gel, the cells lost their morphology and entered senescence much earlier in the case of plastic plates. Similar results were seen in the case of mesenchymal stem cells derived from bone marrow.
•“While the stem cells maintained their shape and proliferative potential for 33 days and beyond when cultured on gel, the proliferative potential started to reduce after day 15 when grown on plastic plates. That’s why we got more cells at the end of the experiment when we used gel,” says Pankaj Mogha from IIT Bombay and the other first author of the paper. “The doubling time [time taken for cells to double in number] also increased when plastic was used.”
•Thus by 50 days, a huge difference in the doubling time was seen — 512 times more stem cells were obtained when they were cultured on gel than on plastic plates. Put simply, one cell multiplied to become 4 million cells after 50 days when cultured on plastic plates, while one cell cultured on gel gave rise to 2,000 million (2 billion) cells.
•“We could show that physical microenvironment is associated with senescence. And the use of gel reduces the time taken to attain a large number of cells that can differentiate into specialised cells. This becomes particularly important when we seek to treat patients who are more vulnerable to infection or need immediate therapy,” Dr. Majumder says.
📰 Rethinking the risks
Study challenges orthodoxy on how weight management, obesity are viewed
•Obesity on its own isn’t a killer. A study by researchers at York University’s Faculty of Health, Canada, has found that patients with metabolic healthy obesity, but no other metabolic risk factors, do not have an increased rate of mortality. The results could force a rethink in how medicine and health consultants view weight management and obesity, according to Jennifer Kuk, associate professor, School of Kinesiology and Health Science, who led the research team.
•“This is in contrast with most of the literature and we think this is because most studies have defined metabolic healthy obesity as having up to one metabolic risk factor,” Dr. Kuk told Science Daily .
•“This is clearly problematic, as hypertension alone increases your mortality risk and past literature would have called these patients with obesity and hypertension, ‘healthy’. This is likely why most studies have reported that ‘healthy’ obesity is still related with higher mortality risk.”
•Medical literature says that obesity — as a high mortality risk — is in the same league as dyslipidemia, hypertension or diabetes alone. Dr. Kuk and colleagues say this isn’t true.
The categories
•In their study, they analysed profiles from 54,089 men and women from five cohort studies who were categorised as having obesity alone or clustered with a metabolic factor; elevated glucose, blood pressure or lipids alone, or clustered with obesity or another metabolic factor. Researchers looked at how many people within each group died as compared to those within the normal weight population with no metabolic risk factors.
•Current weight management guidelines suggest that anyone with a body mass index over 30 kg/m2 should lose weight. This implies that if you have obesity (even without any other risk factors) it makes you unhealthy. In their report published in the journal, Clinical Obesity , they found that 1 out of 20 individuals with obesity had no other metabolic abnormalities.
•“We’re showing that individuals with metabolically healthy obesity are actually not at an elevated mortality rate. We found that a person of normal weight with no other metabolic risk factors is just as likely to die as the person with obesity and no other risk factors,” says Dr. Kuk. “This means that hundreds of thousands of people with metabolically healthy obesity will be told to lose weight, when it’s questionable how much benefit they’ll actually receive.”
Indian context
•Obesity is major concern in India. The prevalence of obesity is increasing and ranges from 8% to 38% in rural and 13% to 50% in urban areas, according to theIndian Heart Journal . Obesity is a risk factor for development of type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM), hypertension, dyslipidemia, coronary heart disease and many cancers. In Asian Indians, excess abdominal and hepatic fat is associated with increased risk for T2DM and cardiovascular disease.
