📰 West Bengal Assembly passes resolution to rename State as ‘Bangla’
•The West Bengal Assembly on Thursday passed a resolution to change the name of the State as ‘Bangla’ in three languages — Bengali, English and Hindi.
•The proposal has been pending since August 2016, when the Assembly passed a resolution to change the name to ‘Bengal’ in English, ‘Bangla’ in Bengali and ‘Bangal’ in Hindi. The Centre, however, turned it down in 2017, objecting to having three names in three languages.
•Education Minister Partha Chatterjee moved the resolution which was unanimously passed.
•Participating in the discussion, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee said she had personally taken up the issue with the Home Ministry. “They said that there cannot be three different names and we should stick to one name. “Even though we wanted three names, we have to follow instructions. Let us pass resolution for Bangla,” she said.
•When the fresh proposal comes to the Home Ministry, it will prepare a note for the Union Cabinet for an amendment to the Schedule 1 of the Constitution, officials said in Delhi. Thereafter, a Constitution Amendment Bill will be introduced in Parliament, which has to approve it with a simple majority, before the President gives his assent to it, they said.
📰 India denies any change at Doklam
China resumed activities: U.S. official
•Responding to the comments by a U.S. official during a U.S. Congressional hearing that China has quietly resumed its activities in the Doklam area, India said on Thursday that there was no change in status quo since the standoff between India and China ended in August 2017.
•“I would reiterate that since the disengagement of Indian and Chinese border personnel in the Doklam area on August 28, 2017, there have been no new developments at the face-off site and its vicinity. The status quo prevails in this area,” the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) spokesperson said in a statement.
•At a U.S. Congress subcommittee hearing on budget priorities for South Asia on July 25, Congresswoman Ann Wagner referred to the standoff at Doklam and said: “Although both countries backed down, China has quietly resumed its activities in Doklam and neither Bhutan nor India has sought to dissuade it. China’s activities in the Himalayas remind me of its South China Sea policies.”
•Ms. Wagner further asked how the U.S. failure to respond to the militarisation of the South China Sea would inform the international response to these Himalayan border disputes.
•In response, Alice G. Wells, the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asia without directly referring to Doklam said, “I would assess that India is vigorously defending its northern borders and this is a subject of concern to India.”
•The Indian Army also reiterated that there has been no change in the status quo at the disputed site. “They (China) have not crossed the Torsa Nala. Whatever activities, small or big, they have undertaken is in the same area they are already there,” an Army source said.
•Last year, the two armies were engaged in a 73-day standoff at Doklam near the India-Bhutan-China tri-junction after Indian soldiers prevented Chinese soldiers from building a road in the disputed territory.
U.S. strategy
•Ms. Wells said as India looks ahead to its own strategic stability, it “certainly helps to drive and is a factor in driving closer partnership that we (U.S.) enjoy with India.” In this regard, she observed that the Indo-Pacific strategy put forward by the Trump administration was taken in light of the South China Sea Strategy.
•China, which claims most of the energy rich South China Sea, has reclaimed several islands in the sea and has recently militarised them.
•Stressing on the need to maintain maritime security and keep the region open through which 70% of global trade passes, Ms. Wells said, “We need to do that by giving authority to sovereign nations to have choices in how they develop, to have choices in their partnerships.”
•Ms. Wells added that the U.S. is trying to gather like minded countries who can bring resources to the table, who can coordinate assistance and an effort so as “to provide countries with meaningful alternatives.”
📰 Has the Right to Information Act been weakened?
The amendments being proposed will structurally weaken and nullify the entire Act
•The Right to Information (RTI) Act of 2005 is being weakened absolutely and decisively. Let’s understand how. For over a decade, citizens of India have tenaciously protected and guarded this people’s legislation, preventing repeated attempts to dilute the Act through amendments. Interestingly, no government has bothered to propose amendments which would make the RTI Act more robust and effective.
•The BJP-led NDA government has diabolically planned and moved a set of targeted and fashioned amendments to the RTI Act which will not only undermine one part of the Act but structurally weaken the independence and authority of the only body that gives it teeth, thereby nullifying the entire Act.
Access to information
•One unique and attractive feature of the RTI Act was that it did not create a new bureaucracy for implementing the law. The RTI Act tasked and mandated officials in every office to change their attitude and duty from one of secrecy to one of sharing and openness. Despite many officials having a vested interest in not sharing information, the RTI statute carefully and deliberately empowered the Information Commission to be the highest authority in the country with the mandate to order any office in the country to provide information as per the provisions of the Act. And it empowered the Commission to fine any official who did not follow the mandate. This was enough of a strategic deterrence, and with all its difficulties, information did begin to flow out of government files and offices. In the stifling and dark atmosphere of governance that excluded people, this was a blast of fresh air and sunshine.
•It has led to a situation where an estimated 70 lakh people apply for information every year. So probing and effective are many of the questions that powerful vested interests try to threaten, bribe, cajole, browbeat, and when all else fails, kill the person seeking to expose their misdeeds. More than 70 people have been murdered in this fashion. Applicants know that however much the official may try to stonewall, there is an independent authority which can be approached, which can extract the information for them, and which can even fine the official. No other law in the country has set up a mechanism that can, at the initiative and pursuit of an ordinary citizen, make officials pay a fine from their salaries for not doing their duty. All this is sought to be diluted so that the structural credibility of the RTI law crumbles.
Diluting the Act
•One needs to ask why this is being done in the first place. A spurious excuse is trotted out in the Statement of Objects and Reasons of the Bill. It states that equivalence in salaries with the Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) is not acceptable because the CEC is a constitutional authority. The RTI Act does not seek to make the Information Commission a constitutional body. As E.M. Sudarsana Natchiappan, the Chairperson of the Parliamentary Standing Committee that examined the law, said in the Rajya Sabha as the law was being discussed: “This is the essence of the Bill… the mechanism of access to information will depend on effectiveness of this system. It should therefore be ensured that the Commission and its functionaries perform their duties independently and with complete autonomy. For this, it is necessary to elevate their status to that of the Election Commission of India... If this organisation (the Commission) is not going to function properly, then what is the purpose of bringing this enactment? We are not enacting this law just to become a part of the statute book.”
📰 Lok Sabha passes Anti-Trafficking Bill
National Anti-Trafficking Bureau proposed for the surveillance of trafficking cases
•The Lok Sabha on Thursday passed the Trafficking of Persons (Prevention, Protection and Rehabilitation) Bill, 2018.
•Some Members of Parliament, including those from the Congress, the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M), Communist Party of India (the CPI) and the Biju Janata Dal (BJD), demanded that it be sent to the Standing Committee.
•The Bill lays down a stringent punishment of 10 years to life imprisonment for aggravated forms of trafficking, which include buying or selling of persons for the purpose of bonded labour, bearing a child, as well as those where chemical substances or hormones are administered, and a survivor acquires life-threatening illnesses such as AIDS.
•The Bill proposes establishing a National Anti-Trafficking Bureau (NATB) for coordinating, monitoring and surveillance of trafficking cases. It also provides for a Relief and Rehabilitation Committee and Rehabilitation Fund with an initial allocation of ₹ 10 crore. It prescribes forfeiture of property used or likely to be used for the commission of an offence.
•“Trafficking is a borderless crime but jurisdiction issues come in the way of investigation. This Bill provides for the NATB to effectively address this aspect,” Women and Child Development Minister Maneka Gandhi said while introducing the Bill in the Lok Sabha.
Parties’ concerns
•The Trinamool Congress’ Pratima Mondal and CPI’s Badaruddoza Khan raised questions about the provisions for confiscation of properties likely to be misused, and the BJD’s Tathagatha Satpathy highlighted the need for community-based rehabilitation for survivors as had been laid down by a Supreme Court-appointed panel on rehabilitation of sex workers.
•Mr. Khan also sought protection for transgender persons under the Bill. Congress MP Shashi Tharoor said trafficking should not be conflated with sex work and the Bill lacks safeguards to ensure that people who voluntarily enter into sex trade are not harassed.
•In her response, Ms. Gandhi assured the House that if there were any lacunae in the Bill, they would be addressed when the rules are framed.
•The Minister also sought to allay concerns about the Bill potentially victimising adult persons voluntarily in sex work and said the Bill was not intended to harass sex workers and that the government was against trafficking and not its victims. However, at the same time, she said, “If the provisions [of this Bill] are implemented, the hellholes of Kamathipura and G.B. Road will be a thing of the past because these will come directly under confiscation of property.” Ms. Gandhi told Parliament.
•Earlier this year, the Cabinet had approved a proposal for making the apex anti-terror body — the National Investigation Agency (NIA) — the nodal authority for probing cases of human trafficking, for which the government is expected to bring a separate amendment to the NIA Act.
📰 Magsaysay for ‘3 idiots’ muse
Two Indians are among six winners picked for the award
•Sonam Wangchuk, a 51-year-old educational reformer from Ladakh, widely regarded as the inspiration for Aamir Khan’s character, Phunsuk Wangdu in the film ‘3 Idiots’, is one of two Indians named for the 2018 Ramon Magsaysay Awards.
•The other is Bharat Vatwani, a psychiatrist who works for mentally ill street people in Mumbai. Wangchuk and Vatwani are among six winners of the award, which “celebrates greatness of spirit and transformative leadership in Asia.” The others are Youk Chhang from Cambodia, Maria de Lourdes Martins Cruz from East Timor, Howard Dee from the Philippines and Vo Thi Hoang Yen from Vietnam.
•Wangchuk was a 19-year-old engineering student at the National Institute of Technology in Srinagar, when he took up tutoring. He helped unprepared students pass the national college matriculation exams.
Ladakh movement
•In 1988, after earning his engineering degree, Wangchuk founded the Students’ Education and Cultural Movement of Ladakh to coach Ladakhi students, 95% of whom used to fail the government exams. In 1994, with him in the lead, Operation New Hope was launched to consolidate the programme. Vatwani was recognised for “his tremendous courage and healing compassion” in embracing mentally-afflicted destitute people.
📰 PSUs biggest donors to Clean Ganga Fund
CGF was created in 2014
•Nearly 90% of the dedicated fund that the Water Ministry has collected as part of donations for various projects to clean the Ganga is sourced from State and Central government public sector units (PSU), according to information from the Lok Sabha. The Clean Ganga Fund (CGF), as it is called, was created in 2014 and envisioned as a source of funds from private companies, individuals and institutions.
•On Monday, in response to a question from Congress MP Rajeev Gowda, Minister of State Satyapal Singh reported that ₹220 crore was donated to the CGF as of January 2018. Private companies contributed around ₹20 crore and the public sector, Central public sector and Government Departments contributed about ₹177 crore. The rest were from individual donations.
•“In the early days, many letters were written to public sector units for donations…recently, the Water Minister [Nitin Gadkari] has directed that focus should be on getting money from the private sector,” Rajiv Ranjan Mishra, Director-General, National Mission for Clean Ganga, which coordinates programme activities.
•The government will be putting in place nearly 288 projects, worth ₹ 20,000 crore, and clean up 70%-80% of the river by March.
📰 Tackling HIV
India has brought down HIV incidence, but it must do more in removing social stigma
•A new report from the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS(UNAIDS) bears good news for the global war against the syndrome. Between 2010 and 2017, several countries made rapid progress in reducing HIV incidence and getting antiretroviral therapy to patients. Today, three out of four people with HIV know their status, and 21.7 million get treatment. While the largest reduction in incidence came from eastern and southern Africa, Asia also made gains. India, in particular, brought down the number of new cases and deaths by 27% and 56%, respectively, between 2010 and 2017. As the UNAIDS report says, some satisfaction is warranted. This applies also to India, which has done a few things right. For example, tuberculosis is the biggest killer of HIV patients across the world. India is now able to treat over 90% of notified TB patients for HIV. Social stigma surrounding AIDS-infected people in India, while high, is declining slowly too. Survey data show that in the last decade, the number of people unwilling to buy vegetables from a person with HIV came down from over 30% to 27.6%. But even as India celebrates such progress, it is important to be mindful of the scale of the challenge. With 2.1 million cases, India is among the largest burden countries in the world. And there are critical gaps in its strategy.
•The UNAIDS report points out that a country’s laws can legitimise stigma and give licence to the harassment of groups at the highest risk of HIV. These include men who have sex with other men, people who inject drugs, and sex workers. Indian laws don’t do well on this count. The Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act criminalises several aspects of sex work, while Section 377 of the IPC criminalises gay sex. Studies show that fear of prosecution under such laws prevents homosexual men, drug-users and sex workers from seeking HIV screening and treatment. As a result, these groups lag behind average treatment rates, although their requirements are higher. According to a 2017 UNAIDS report, for example, awareness of their HIV status among men who have sex with other men was 41% in India; 52% of those who knew their status were receiving treatment, and of these, 83% had suppressed viral levels. These are troubling patterns. If India is serious about tackling HIV, it must find ways to reach such groups. Short of changing the law, the Centre can consider targeted interventions. An experiment in Karnataka, between 2004 and 2011, finds favourable mention in the report. It shows that sensitising police personnel and educating female sex workers can greatly reduce arbitrary police raids and arrests. As the UNAIDS report emphasises, the right to health is universal. India must take note of this to ensure that no one is left behind in the fight against HIV.
📰 AI superpower or client nation?
Time is running out for India to get its policy framework right
•Google’s CEO compares AI (artificial intelligence) with fire and electricity in terms of their role in human civilisation, while Stephan Hawking feared that AI could end humanity. We are facing something really extraordinary. Industrial revolution moved the centres of physical power from human and animal bodies to machines. With the locus of intelligence now also getting disembodied, AI systems are set to transform our economic, social and political organisation.
A radical transformation
•Intelligent systems typically tend to centralise and monopolise control. Sensing that an AI economy will radically concentrate income and wealth, many global digital industry leaders have called for assured basic income for all. Globally, just one or two concentrations of AI power may rule the world. Currently, these are in the U.S. and China.
•Where does India stand in the AI race? Nowhere. And it is fast squandering its great advantages of high IT capabilities and a big domestic market required for data harvesting. Unlike most industrial technologies, AI does not develop in laboratories and then get applied by businesses. AI develops within business processes, as data are mined from digital platforms, and turned into intelligence, which is ploughed back to produce more data and intelligence, in infinite loops. Any country’s AI therefore largely exists within its huge, domestically owned commercial digital/data systems. In the U.S. it is with Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft — and in China with Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent.
•India has no such large domestically owned commercial data systems. And any chance that these could develop is being nipped by allowing takeovers like of Flipkart by Walmart. Soon, Walmart and Amazon will own between them perhaps the most significant set of India’s consumer-behavioural and other economic data, over which they will develop various kinds of AI. In time, such AI will allow them to control practically everything, and every actor, along various economic value chains linked to consumer goods.
•Beyond economic dominance, AI is as much about cultural, political and military power. Russian President Vladimir Putin claims that whoever rules AI will rule the world. A non-AI military against an AI-powered one will be like a hapless infantry unit facing an armoured division. And where does a military get its AI from? Google and Microsoft are partnering with U.S. military on AI applications, and China’s companies even more closely so with its military. Who will help India build its AI for military and other security/strategic purposes?
•Confusion is caused by many Indian IT industry leaders conveying the erroneous message that India is doing well with AI. The problem is that they are jostling for crumbs of IT/digital business when Indian policymakers should be aiming at the highest levels of new value chains that AI will create in every sector. It is mastery over the systemic cores of AI where the real national advantage lies.
•The digital/AI industry works in huge ecosystems with global digital corporations at the centre, and various start-ups and specific digital/AI applications at the peripheries. Amazon and Google both push their cloud services to try to become the default machine learning platforms, which they open source to fence in the largest number of clients and followers possible. They further network selectively to aggrandise digital and AI power. For instance, Google with Walmart and China’s JD.com to counter Amazon and Alibaba’s e-commerce might, and Baidu with Microsoft to develop an autonomous driving platform.
•Start-ups everywhere, including in India, are mostly vying to find a place in such huge global ecosystems, anchored either in the U.S. or China, generally by being bought out.
•All the wonderful AI applications that we read about, which the Niti Aayog’s new AI strategy is also replete with — whether of increased agriculture output, precision medicine or tailored learning — are basically shop-windows of global digital/AI corporations. It is just like they allured us with all the unbelievable Internet and mobile applications, provided for ‘free’. These AI applications may give us spectacular one-off benefits here and there, but gathering further data from each new instance it is the AI engine owned by a Google or Microsoft that becomes ever more intelligent about India’s problems and solutions. They stand to build an epochal fortune around these quickly-scaling AI engines.
AI owner or client?
•A big nation like India cannot derive satisfaction from rapidly becoming a client country for AI, whether as ready users of AI applications in different areas, or by offering out-sourced R&D for global digital/AI corporations through start-ups existentially eager to be bought out. What really counts is whether India owns the centres of systemic AI that comes from controlling huge commercial data ecosystems. In this regard, India’s ambition to be an AI superpower is, frankly, sinking fast.
•Technologies should flow freely across the globe, and we must welcome global technology companies to help India’s digital development. But while technology is global, data are essentially local. Even with all the overlaps, there are some basic differences between core technology businesses and data-driven businesses.
•Data-based sectoral platforms, like in e-commerce, urban transport, agriculture, health, education, etc., should largely be domestic. India has a right to provide such domestic protection through policy, especially if India begins to treat its collective social/economic data as a strategic national asset, as our mineral resources are. (All the talk of data being the new oil… well quite right!)
•Such policy protection alone will ensure that we have large-scale data-driven Indian companies able to develop the highest AI in every sector, by employing huge Indian data to solve (equally huge) Indian problems. Once enough AI proficiency and strength has been developed domestically, it should then be used to go global.
•There is no other route to becoming an AI superpower. With its highest IT as well as entrepreneurial/managerial competence, and a huge domestic market, India is among extremely few countries that can make it. But the time is running out fast.
📰 New models for airport management
On the amendments to the AERA Bill
•India has emerged as the third largest domestic aviation market in the world. The number of major airports increased from 12 to 27 between 2007 and 2017.
•The Airports Economic Regulatory Authority of India Act, 2008, was enacted to provide an independent authority to protect the interests of airports, airlines and passengers, and to primarily regulate tariff for aeronautical services rendered at airports. Aeronautical services include navigation, surveillance and supportive communication for air traffic management; services for the landing, housing or parking of an aircraft; ground safety, fuel and handling services; and so on.
•Exponential growth in the sector has pushed the government to propose an Amendment Bill in 2018. The Airports Economic Regulatory Authority has been under tremendous pressure with an increase in the number of private operators entering the airline/airport sector. Some of the major airports now function under public-private partnerships. It was felt that if too many airports come under the purview of the Authority, it would be difficult to efficiently determine the tariffs and monitor the service standards of major airports. For engaging private partners in infrastructure projects, several business models like predetermined tariff or tariff-based bidding have come into place. The airport project is awarded to the concessionaire who offers the lowest tariff.
•In this model, the government has found that the market itself determines the charges. The regulator is not required to fix charges after the award of the project. The 2008 Act does not cover such complexities. Thus, the Airports Economic Regulatory Authority of India (Amendment) Bill, 2018, proposes to first amend the definition of “major airport” as any airport with passengers in excess of 3.5 million from the existing 1.5 million.
•The AERA Bill, importantly, seeks to update Section 13 of the 2008 Act in tune with the current business models and tariff system. This would mean changes in the tariff for aeronautical services at major airports. Section 13 is an umbrella provision in the Act which further covers capital expenditure incurred and timely investment in improvement of airport facilities; the service provided, its quality and other relevant factors; cost for improving efficiency; and economic and viable operation of major airports; among others.
📰 Einstein was right: astronomers confirm key theory of relativity
They observed the gravitational effects of a black hole on a star zipping past it
•A consortium of astronomers said on Thursday they had for the first time confirmed a prediction of Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity by observing the gravitational effects of a supermassive black hole on a star zipping by it.
•The German-born theoretical physicist had posited that large gravitational forces could stretch light, much like the compression and stretching of sound waves we perceive with the change of pitch of a passing train.
•Researchers from the GRAVITY consortium led by the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics realised that they had a “perfect laboratory” to test Einstein’s theory with the black hole, Sagittarius A*, in the centre of the Milky Way.
•Black holes are so dense that their gravitational pull can trap even light, and the supermassive Sagittarius A* has mass four million times that of our sun, making it the biggest in our galaxy.
•Astronomers followed the S2 star as it passed close to the black hole on May 19 at a speed in excess of 25 million kmper hour. They then calculated its velocity and position using a number of instruments and compared it with predictions made by Einstein that the light would be stretched by the gravity, in an effect called gravitational redshift. Newtonian physics doesn’t allow for a redshift.
First observation
•“The results are perfectly in line with the theory of general relativity” and are “a major breakthrough towards better understanding the effects of intense gravitational fields,” said the research team, whose findings are published in Friday’s issue of Astronomy & Astrophysics .
•This is the first time observers have been able to measure such an effect.
•The European Southern Observatory, whose Very Large Telescope in Chile was used to make the observations, had watched S2 pass by Sagittarius A* in 2016 but the instruments it was using then were not sensitive enough to detect the gravitational redshift. “More than 100 years after he published his paper setting out the equations of general relativity, Einstein has been proved right once more — in a much more extreme laboratory than he could have possibly imagined,” said the ESO in a statement.
Practical utility
•Astronomers already use another effect predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity — that a black hole can bend passing light. Called gravitational lensing, researchers have used it to peer behind black holes.
•Astronomers hope they can make practical use of the latest confirmation of Einstein’s theory to track shifts in S2’s trajectory due to gravity, which could yield information on mass distribution around the black hole.
•“I am blown away by Einstein’s predictions, by the power of his reasoning which yielded this theory and which has never been faulted,” French astrophysicist Guy Perrin, a member of the consortium, said.
