📰 Metropolis of the mind: how Delhi has become a shadow of its old self
Delhi is fast becoming a lost city to its inhabitants, a hazy shadow of its old glorious self
•Delhi in the cooler months, between early October and late March, once a six-month stretch of mild sunshine, blue skies, crisp air, festivals of every major religious community, associated with agricultural cycles, equinoxes and other natural and cultural punctuations of the annual solar calendar braided with the monthly lunar calendar, lives now only in memory. A pall of the world’s worst air pollution descends on the city at the beginning of what used to be the festive season, and lifts only, if at all, as the harsh summer approaches, bringing with it its own problems of excessive heat and water scarcity. Our lifespans have been shortened, we are told, by sustained exposure to various pollutants, but things have reached a stage where one can only see this as a relief from having to live on in a place no longer fit for human habitation.
•We cough, gasp and choke our way through these punishing winter months, with poor visibility, skies neither blue nor sunny, and a feeling of being trapped in a long nightmare from which we cannot awaken. A public health emergency engulfs us all, from children with permanently compromised respiratory systems to the elderly struck by lung cancer towards the end of their lives. The persistent itch in our throats and the dull ache in our heads will not go away for weeks at a time. Mornings and evenings are unsafe for walks; any outdoor activity necessitates the use of masks if not inhalers; natural light can only be seen when one leaves town. Eerily simultaneously, a political fog descended on the capital in 2014.
Lost cities
•In late August Ashis Nandy delivered the Daya Krishna Memorial lecture in Delhi, titled “Lost Cities and Their Inhabitants”. He was careful to define and delineate what he meant by “lost”. A “lost city” is one whose past one can remember and relate to; one whose memory as a living city is not overwritten by an episode of final destruction. Thus Hiroshima is not a lost city, since it was completely destroyed in the form in which it had existed by the detonation of an atomic bomb in August 1945. A city may be called lost when people remember its life and not its death. The city as it continues to be and the city’s lost self are, in a sense, discontinuous with one another.
•Lost cities are autonomous, to use Prof. Nandy’s term, from their real counterparts. He spoke about Bombay and Jerusalem, Cochin and Dhaka, Lahore and Hyderabad, Calcutta and Lucknow. Needless to say, histories of war, genocide and mass migration are implicit in the stories of these cities, and many others in the world, ancient as well as modern. An age passes, sometimes, before our very eyes, and what used to be our home and our haven becomes the site of myth and legend. The past serves our emotional and psychological needs, so that we keep it alive in memory to nourish our desiccated present. But it is not easy to return to or take refuge in a lost city. To try to go there is a kind of madness; to try to keep on living there is to reiterate and perpetuate our trauma of the loss and alienation we experienced when we were overwhelmed by historical forces.
•Delhi seems to exemplify the lost city. It has had so many lives that perhaps it is always a lost city, from the vantage of any present, looking back at a vanished past which would be but the most recent of a series of receding pasts that disappeared sequentially one after the other. We live in the debris of the Islamicate Sultanates and the Mughal Empire, Lutyens’ city and its Nehruvian descendant. Both its medieval and modernist avatars survive in a hybrid and fragmentary fashion, joined by a colonial hinge, altogether a peculiar but graceful mélange of eras and styles spread out over more than a millennium.
•Moments of catastrophic transformation — 1857, 1947 — at once break and remake the city, never the same, no going back. For my generation, the line splitting a before and an after in terms of politics is surely 1984. But whatever our identity and our affiliations, we will remember a Delhi not yet laid low by environmental pollution, reckless urbanisation and climate change. We are condemned to struggle for the rest of our days to mentally re-inhabit that idyll of blue sky, green grass, broad avenues, massive trees, a flowing Yamuna, clean air and slumbering monuments.
Campus, city, nation
•The precipitous decline of Delhi has also been playing out in a microcosmic way on the once vibrant and verdant campus of Jawaharlal Nehru University. Led by a Vice Chancellor almost Shakespearean in his animus against the university in his charge, JNU has been on its own death march for the past three years. The university administration has declared war on students, faculty and non-teaching staff alike, attacking the institution from within on all fronts, ranging from the pedagogic, the intellectual and the ideological to the financial, the bureaucratic and the infrastructural. Teaching, learning and research are no longer permitted. A blanket of hazardous particulate matter coats the red brick buildings and the wild forest in which they are set; hapless denizens can scarcely remember what a normal academic year felt like.
•The most recent battlefront has been opened at JNU’s iconic gathering place: Ganga Dhaba, a nondescript tea-shop on the right soon after you enter the main gate, opposite Ganga Hostel. Don’t be fooled by the unassuming appearance of this spot, which you could easily miss if you didn’t already know it was there. The Dhaba is where students hang out, talk, argue, gossip, smoke, flirt, fight and grow up into articulate, opinionated adults, and have done for decades. It is the seedbed of JNU’s political culture and its argumentative nerve centre — the fountainhead of revolutions. For the very same reasons that students gravitate there, the current administration sees it as a threat to the BJP’s rightwing government and its Hindutva agenda.
•The university plans to shut down outlets such as the Ganga Dhaba construct a food court on the campus. This new structure will be sanitised, serving “clean” food and beverages, mirroring the drive to allow the circulation of only those ideas that the Modi regime considers palatable for India’s youth. Dust, flies, anti-nationals and mavericks: all will be evicted. Countless social scientists, journalists, activists and artists, all graduates of JNU, met their conversation partners and life partners at Ganga Dhaba: almost every one of these relationships, friendships and marriages broke the rules of caste, class, religion, language and region.
Before it’s too late
•A crucible of diversity, dissent and solidarity, Ganga Dhaba, for all its apparent decrepitude, symbolises every value of a free, democratic and plural India that the current majoritarian dispensation is bent on destroying. Like the city of Delhi that surrounds it, JNU too is fast approaching the state of being lost. Can we attempt to save the city that is ours and the university that we love, before it is too late?
📰 Norway streets grow quieter
The country is witnessing a boom in electric cars, fuelled by the government
•A silent revolution has transformed driving in Norway.
•Eerily quiet vehicles are ubiquitous on the fjord-side roads and mountain passes of this wealthy European nation of 5.3 million. Some 30% of all new cars sport plug-in cables rather than gasoline tanks, compared with 2% across Europe overall and 1-2% in the U.S.
•As countries around the world, including China, the world’s biggest auto market try to encourage more people to buy electric cars to fight climate change, Norway’s success has one key driver — the government. It offered big subsidies and perks that it is now due to phase out, but only so long as electric cars remain attractive to buy compared with traditional ones.
•“It should always be cheaper to have a zero emissions car than a regular car,” says Climate and Environment Minister Ola Elvestuen, who helped push through a commitment to have only sell zero-emissions cars sold in Norway by 2025. The plan supports Norway’s CO2 reduction targets under the 2015 Paris climate accord, which nations last agreed rigorous rules for to ensure emissions goals are met.
•To help sales, the Norwegian government waived hefty vehicle import duties and registration and sales taxes for buyers of electric cars. Owners don’t have to pay road tolls, and get free use of ferries and bus lanes in congested city centres.
Higher taxes
•These perks, which are costing the government almost $1 billion this year, are being phased out in 2021, though any road tolls and fees would be limited to half of what gasoline car owners must pay. Gradually, subsidies for electric cars will be replaced by higher taxes on traditional cars.
•Mr. Elvestuen pledges that the incentives for electric vehicles will be adjusted in such a way that it does not scupper the 2025 target. “What is important is that our aim is not just to give incentives,” he says. “It is that we are taxing emissions from regular cars.”
•Using taxes to encourage consumers to shift to cleaner energy can be tricky for a government protests erupted in France this autumn over a fuel tax that hurt the livelihood of poorer families, especially in rural areas where driving is often the only means of transportation.
•In this sense, Norway is an outlier. The country is very wealthy after exporting for decades the kind of fossil fuels the world is trying to wean itself off of. Incomes are higher than the rest of Europe, as are prices.
•Norway has pledged to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases by 40% by 2030, compared with 1990 levels. The country has work to do — by 2017, emissions were up 3% compared to the 1990 baseline. Cutting emissions from road transport will allow Norway to reduce the amount it has to spend buying up emissions certificates from other European countries to meet its target. The savings are likely to run into billions, potentially balancing out the cost of subsidising electric cars.
•Experts say the electric vehicle market needs to develop more for sales to keep growing. Battery life on smaller vehicles is slim and the resale market is untested. Fast battery charging points are slow compared with gasoline pumps, and on Norway’s often empty mountain roads, these points are uneconomical despite government subsidies for the private companies that set them up.
•Even in city centers, construction of such points has not kept pace with sales. Ida Vihovde, drums her fingers as she waits for a charging station to free up. “If the government put up more of these it would be OK,” she says beside her electric VW Golf. “Right now there are no more chargers so I have to sit and wait.”
📰 Elon Musk bores tunnel to revolutionise city driving
Unveils prototype of high-speed transportation system
•Elon Musk on Tuesday took a break from futuristic electric cars and private space travel to unveil a low-cost tunnel he sees as a godsend for city traffic.
•The billionaire behind Tesla and SpaceX late on Tuesday put the spotlight on a 1.8 km tunnel created by his Boring Company for about $10 million. The sample tunnel is part of Mr. Musk’s vision to have an underground network that cars, preferably Teslas, can be lowered to by lifts, then slotted into tracks and propelled along at speeds up to 150 mph (241 kmh).
•“The only way to solve this is to go 3D, for the transport system to match the living quarters,” Mr. Musk said of solving the problem of traffic congestion in urban areas. “It’s all relatively simple. No Nobel Prize is needed here.”
•Mr. Musk founded the Boring company two years ago as a self-financed, side-endeavour to his work at Tesla and SpaceX. Specially designed equipment drills tunnels wide enough to accommodate a car on a track. The network envisioned is an expandable mesh of tunnels and elevators capable of having more than 4,000 cars pass through per hour.
•“The profound breakthrough is very simple: it’s the ability to turn a normal car into a passively stable vehicle by adding the deployable tracking wheels, stabilising wheels, so that it can travel at high speed through a small tunnel.”
•The idea for the project came to Mr. Musk when he was fuming at the wheel of his car, trapped in traffic jams between his Bel Air villa and the SpaceX offices in Hawthorne near Los Angeles. It is a journey that takes him more than 90 minutes and that he considered “soul-crushing”.
•The “tunnel test” unveiled on Tuesday appeared simple: a narrow tube, only 3.65 m in diameter, freshly painted white, in which a Tesla Model X electric car is fitted with stabilisers on wheels to slot into the track and avoid bumping the walls. The entrance to the tunnel was dug in a parking lot in Hawthorne, with an elevator platform on a street corner raising and lowering cars to the track. Journalists and others attending the event got to bolt through the short tunnel at about 65 kmh in what felt somewhat akin to an amusement park ride.
•Mr. Musk brushed aside worries about earthquakes in temblor-prone California, repeatedly contending that tunnels were the safest place to be when the earth shakes.
📰 LS passes Bill banning commercial surrogacy
•The Lok Sabha on Wednesday passed a Bill banning commercial surrogacy with penal provisions of jail term of up to 10 years and fine of up to ₹10 lakh.
•The Bill, which will become law once the Rajya Sabha approves it, allows only close Indian relatives to be surrogate mothers and purely for “altruistic” reasons. It states an Indian infertile couple, married for five years or more, can go in for ‘altruistic surrogacy’ where the surrogate mother will not be paid any compensation except medical expenses and insurance.
‘Historic legislation’
•Union Health Minister J.P. Nadda termed the proposed legislation historic and thanked the members for a “high-quality” debate, despite noisy protests from the Congress, the TDP and the AIADMK. While the Congress raised the issue of a JPC probe into the Rafale deal, AIADMK members were protesting against the delay in constituting a Cauvery Water Board.
•Opening the debate, Mr. Nadda said India had become a hub of commercial surrogacy and surrogate mothers were being exploited. The Minister claimed that the Bill had the support of every section of society, besides political parties, the Supreme Court and the Law Commission.
•Dr. Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar of the Trinamool Congress, while supporting the Bill, suggested ways to improve it. “The hon. Supreme Court has recently decriminalised Section 377 and the LGBT community has been accepted to be a part of the mainstream. So, we have same- sex couples now. But, in this Bill, there is no mention of them,” she said.
•The Trinamool MP also called for stopping “fashion surrogacy”, alleging that some celebrities were opting for it as they did not want their figures destroyed. Supriya Sule of the NCP urged the government to expand its scope as “the Bill is a good Bill but not modern enough.”
•BJD’s Bhartruhari Mahtab pointed out that it does not define who is a close relative.
•Replying to the debate, Mr. Nadda said the definition of a close relative will be clearly given in the rules of the Bill. He, however, made it clear that only a defined mother and family can avail of surrogacy and it won’t be permitted for live-in partners or single parents.
📰 Rights, revised: on the Transgender Persons Bill, 2018
Lok Sabha has passed a new Bill to protect transgender persons, but concerns remain
•The passage of a Bill in the Lok Sabha to secure the rights of transgender persons is a progressive step towards extending constitutional protection to this highly marginalised community. The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Bill, 2018, as passed, is an improved version of the legislation introduced two years ago. The earlier draft was widely perceived as falling short of the expectations of stakeholders and not adequately rights-based, as envisaged by the Supreme Court in its landmark decision on transgender rights in 2014. Experts, as well as the Standing Committee of Parliament on Social Justice and Empowerment, had criticised the original definition of ‘transgender persons’ for violating the right to self-determined identity. The revised definition omits the reference to a ‘neither male nor female’ formulation, and covers any person whose gender does not match the gender assigned at birth, as well as transmen, transwomen, those with intersex variations, the gender-queer, and those who designate themselves based on socio-cultural identities such as hijra, aravani, kinner and jogta. The requirement that a district screening committee must recommend the issue of a certificate to each transgender may be necessary to prevent misuse, but such a process goes against the principle of self-identification, a key right the Supreme Court had protected. The government has omitted the need to go through the same screening committee to get a revised certificate after a transgender has sex reassignment surgery, but the medical certification requirement remains. Transgender persons may question the need for such external gate-keeping.
•There are other legitimate concerns in the revised Bill, which will now go to the Rajya Sabha. One refers to the bar on forcible separation of transgender persons from their families, except through court orders. It has been revised to cover transgender children. Earlier it covered adults as well, but the committee had noted that it was within the family that many transgender persons faced harassment and abuse, and often felt driven to flee their homes. Another concern is that the Bill criminalises begging by making it an offence for someone to compel or entice a transgender person into seeking alms. When begging itself is no more seen as an offence, it may harm the community if such a means of livelihood – in the absence of employment – is criminalised. The Bill, unfortunately, does not give effect to the far-reaching directive of the Supreme Court to grant backward class reservation to the transgender community. Nor have the Standing Committee’s concerns about recognising civil rights in marriage, divorce and adoption among them been addressed. There is much good intention behind the welfare provisions, but social legislation is much more than high-minded clauses. It needs to be followed up with zealous implementation and framing of deadlines to achieve specific objectives.
📰 We are not subjects of the state
In a democracy, citizens have the freedom to criticise laws that violate their idea of dignity
•“It has become a fashion of the day to make a hue and cry about personal liberty,” the Maharashtra government lamented before the Supreme Court in early December. The government said this in response to activist Gautam Navlakha’s plea that his arrest by the State police in the Bhima Koregaon case was without sufficient evidence. The unease of the Maharashtra government with the idea of personal liberty should have caused alarm. Political parties should have critiqued it. After all, does not our system of parliamentary democracy depend on the idea of freedom of individuals to make their own choices independently, without restrictions from any authority? But nothing of that sort happened. There was hardly a murmur in the media. It almost seems as if we agree with the Maharashtra government that individual liberty is a luxury and is at the mercy of state authorities.
Problem with individual liberty
•The Maharashtra government is neither the first nor alone in expressing its disquiet with the idea of individual liberty in recent times. Let us recall the argument of the Indian state in the Aadhaar case. Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi had said in 2017 that individuals cannot have an absolute right over their bodies and that such an idea was a “myth”. He also said that even if you would like to be forgotten, the state will not be willing to forget you. This is clearly a Kafkaesque expression. Not being allowed to get away from the gaze of the state is a surreal feeling, but this is where we seem to be heading. Being remembered is very often confused with being loved.
•Even before the arrest of the activists and the Aadhaar case, at a joint conference of Chief Justices of High Courts in 2015, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had warned judges not to let their orders be influenced by perceptions that are often driven by “five star activists”. Why did he choose to make the idea of an activist elitist?
•For the state, every individual has the potential to turn into an anti-state actor. That is the premise of extraordinary laws like the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, which criminalises even the intent to indulge in what the state perceives as unlawful. This is an excuse to rob a person of his or her individual liberty.
•Let us be honest in our arguments as well. There is no denying the fact that some of those arrested, not to forget Delhi University professor G.N. Saibaba who is at present languishing in Nagpur Central Jail, do support Maoist ideas. But that cannot become an excuse to deprive them of their individual liberty. So long as they are not involved in any violent act, they cannot be stripped of their right to entertain and express their ideas. For many, the very idea of a Hindu Rashtra is as dangerous and anti-constitutional as the idea of an Islamic democracy or a Sikh nation, but you don’t jail them for espousing these ideas. India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru rejected the suggestion by R.K. Karanjia that organisations like the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh should be banned for opposing the constitutional idea of India as a secular state. Nehru said ideas need to be fought with ideas and not with the coercive power of the state.
•Why? Because the state is also an idea or ideology backed by not only arms but also powered by the law. All states claim to have the best notion of goodness and welfare for their subjects. They try to implement laws that are seemingly non-violent and that are framed through consensus. But we know that such consensus is always temporary and can be subject to change.
Democracy and subjectivity
•Do I have the freedom to criticise or challenge the idea of welfare and goodness propounded through these laws? If not, I am a mere subject of the state; I have not attained my subjectivity. The journey towards democracy is closely tied with the discovery and realisation of this subjectivity. For Karl Marx, capitalism is bad because it does not allow subjectivity to flourish, or because it deifies hierarchy in subjectivities. For him an ideal state would be one in which human beings self-govern or self-rule.
•The objective is to realise the essence of human nature. In this struggle is born the idea of individuality. It is a complex and relatively new notion for us humans who seem to be programmed to think that the standards of human nature are issued from some authority and we are simply its creatures. It is therefore not surprising that the transfer of loyalty from religion to nation is almost seamless. Or, that the nation itself replaces god. The state becomes the sole bearer of the idea of the nation and takes it upon itself to protect it from violators. To criticise the state thus becomes a blasphemous act.
•The state seeks to present itself as a living being. But Mahatma Gandhi rightly said that it is not superior to the individual since the state is a soulless machine whereas the individual has a soul. B.R. Ambedkar also unequivocally placed the individual not only above the state but also above society: “The aim and object of society is the growth of the individual and the development of his personality. Society is not above the individual.” Quoting Jacques Maritain, he said: “Man is an individual who holds himself in hand by his intelligence and his will; he exists not merely in a physical fashion. He has spiritual super-existence through knowledge and love, so that he is, in a way, a universe in himself, a microcosm, in which the great universe in its entirety can be encompassed through knowledge.” He added: “Man’s life is independent. He is born not for the development of the society alone, but for the development of his self.” Of course, what one derives from this principle is that a noble society can only be a community of free individualities.
•The tension between the state or any authority and individuality will remain. A democratic state is not a citizenry which only has the freedom to elect lawmakers. It is more than that. It is one where citizens have the freedom to criticise and disobey laws that they find violating their idea of dignity and goodness.
•In a democracy, I attain my individuality by first recognising this right and then by expressing it. I don’t hand over my judgment to authorities. If the state seeks to restrict me, it becomes my holy duty to resist the state. Only by doing so can I proclaim my individuality.
📰 A river running dry
The Ganga basin will become more fragile if more and more hydropower projects come up
•From aiming for Aviral Dhara (uninterrupted flow) of the Ganga to Nirmal Dhara (unpolluted flow), the government is now simply focussing on a Swachh Ganga (Clean Ganga). While the whole focus of the Clean Ganga project has been on setting up sewage treatments plants and cleaning ghats and banks, the main issue, which is that the river does not have adequate flow of water, has been ignored. With severe pollution destroying the river, and developmental projects critically affecting its flow, the Ganga is in a dire strait.
A fragile region
•Today, several hydropower projects are mushrooming at the source of the river, which is the Garhwal range of the Himalayas. Unlike other ranges, the Garhwal is narrow. It is from here that many rivers and tributaries of the Ganga basin emerge. These spring- or glacier-fed rivers join one another at different points to form an intricate riverine ecosystem in the Himalayas. The entire basin falls in the seismic zone 4-5, and is highly prone to landslides and land subsidence.
•The understanding that hydropower projects mean development needs to change. To construct a hydropower project, large sections of land are cleared of forests. But what happens when such deforestation takes place in an already fragile mountain area? Many studies have been conducted near the existing dams along the course of the Ganga. The immediate impacts of these projects have been loss of agriculture, drying of water sources, and landslips. As construction in such projects progresses, there is also dumping of muck, which can pose severe threats. Muck dumping during construction of the Alaknanda hydropower project caused devastation downstream in Srinagar in the 2013 flash floods. Such muck is dumped either into the river or in forest areas. After all the massive deforestation, muck dumping, blasting and tunnelling, the hydropower projects thus constructed eventually dry up the river bed as the water is diverted into tunnels. This causes severe distress to aquatic life, and the river bed is no longer even wet in certain stretches. As the Ganga is diverted into long tunnels, de-silted, and directed to powerhouses to churn turbines and generate power, the barren landscape, dried water sources and the obscene muck slopes narrate a story of destruction. This is a far cry from the promise of development.
•The irony is that even after all this devastation, electricity is not generated as per the intended capacity. For example, the installed capacity of the Maneri dam is 90 MW but it only works at below 40% of its capacity. This is because there is too much silt during the monsoon and reduced flow of water in winters. As glaciers continue to retreat, the silt in the rivers is only going to increase. As the reason for diminished output is natural and not technical, and therefore cannot be remedied, this is only going to cause more problems for future projects. For example, the flow of debris was stopped by barrages in the Alaknanda hydropower project. This escalated the impact of the 2013 disaster, according to the expert committee of the Supreme Court.
•In the case of the Ganga, these projects also prevent sediments from going downstream. This affects the fertility of the delta downstream and also destroys the unique self-purifying properties of the Ganga.
Reports of committees
•Twenty government committees and reports warn about the anthropogenic activities in these fragile areas and recommend conservation of these areas for food and water security. When the late G.D. Agarwal, crusader of the Ganga, fasted to invoke the government to act against these projects, the government proposed an e-flow notification for the Upper Ganga River Basin. It specified that during the dry season (November-March), 20% of monthly average flow has to be maintained, and during the monsoon season, 30% has to be maintained. The notification stated that existing hydel projects that do not meet e-flow norms must comply within three years. The 20% recommendation is less than the scientific recommendation of 50% (only for existing projects). If the government intended to rejuvenate the river, it would have specified that e-flows are only for existing projects. Instead it has opened the floodgates for several such projects as long as the compromised e-flows are maintained.
•The result of such a relentless push for hydropower projects is that only 80 km of a 2,500 km-long river now remains in the Aviral-Nirmal state. Unless we question these projects now, we will not be able to save the Ganga, the lifeline of millions of people.
📰 US weighs complete withdrawal of troops from Syria: officials
“We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency,” President Donald Trump tweeted.
•The United States is considering a total withdrawal of U.S. forces from Syria as it nears the end of its campaign to retake all of the territory once held by Islamic State, U.S. officials told Reuters on Wednesday.
•Such a decision, if confirmed, would upend assumptions about a longer-term U.S. military presence in Syria, which U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and other senior U.S. officials had advocated to help ensure Islamic State cannot re-emerge.
•Still, President Donald Trump has previously expressed a strong desire to bring troops home from Syria when possible. On Wednesday, Trump appeared to declare victory against the group and made clear he saw no further grounds for remaining in Syria.
•“We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency,” he tweeted.
•The timing of the withdrawal was not immediately clear and U.S. officials who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity did not disclose details about the deliberations, including who was involved. It was unclear how soon a decision could be announced.
•The Pentagon and White House declined to comment.
•The United States still has about 2,000 troops in Syria, many of them special operations forces working closely with an alliance of Kurdish and Arab militias known as the Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF.
•The partnership with the SDF over the past several years has led to the defeat of Islamic State in Syria but outraged NATO ally Turkey, which views Kurdish YPG forces in the alliance as an extension of a militant group fighting inside Turkey.
•The deliberations on U.S. troops come as Ankara threatens a new offensive in Syria. To date, U.S. forces in Syria have been seen as a stabilizing factor in the country and have somewhat restrained Turkey's actions against the SDF.
•A complete withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria would still leave a sizeable U.S. military presence in the region, including about 5,200 troops across the border in Iraq.
📰 Explainer: All you need to know about the new peace agreement on Yemen
The events that led to the Stockholm peace agreement and the way forward
What triggered the truce?
•The ceasefire between Yemen’s Houthi rebels and forces loyal to President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi in the port city of Hodeida came into existence on December 18. The agreement was reached in UN-mediated talks held in Stockholm earlier this month. At the time of the negotiations, the city was almost in the hands of the Saudi-led coalition. The coalition had blockaded the port, the main conduit for humanitarian aid to enter Yemen, for months, and the fighters, mostly UAE soldiers, were battling the rebels. But Saudi Arabia came under increased global pressure to stop fighting in Yemen after the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi inside its consulate in Istanbul triggered a global outcry. The spotlight on Yemen and its deteriorating humanitarian situation has been so strong after the Khashoggi affair that even the U.S., which supports Riyadh in the war, cut down its involvement by ending refuelling of coalition aircraft. With the UN also pushing for talks, the Yemeni government backed by Saudi Arabia gave the green light for talks.
How bad is Yemen’s humanitarian situation?
•Since the Saudi intervention in 2015, at least 10,000 people have been killed in Yemen, according to the WHO. The widespread damage caused to infrastructure by the coalition airstrikes and lack of supplies of food and medicines due to the blockade have pushed Yemen into a humanitarian catastrophe. About 12 million people are at the risk of starvation if aid doesn’t reach them fast. The country has also seen a massive cholera outbreak. A child dies every 10 minutes in Yemen from preventable causes, says UNICEF.
Why is Saudi Arabia in Yemen?
•Saudi Arabia interfered in Yemen after the Shia Houthi rebels captured Sana’a, the capital city, and the internationally recognised government of President Hadi moved to the country’s south. The Saudis accuse Iran of bankrolling the Houthis and “destabilising” the Arabian peninsula. The Saudi plan was to expel the Houthis from Sana’a and restore the authority of the government. But almost four years since they launched the attack, the Houthis still control Sana’a and much of the north of Yemen. They also fire short-range missiles across the border into Saudi Arabia, which has become a major security concern for Riyadh.
Will the ceasefire last?
•Barring some violations, the ceasefire held on the second day on Wednesday. Both sides are under pressure. The war reached a stalemate long ago. The Houthis have seen loss of territory in recent months, while the Saudi coalition is facing growing international pressure. According to the agreement, all combatants should withdraw from Hodeida in 21 days. UN observers will set up a monitoring team of government and rebel representatives to oversee the truce. But the Stockholm agreement is primarily focussed on Yemen’s humanitarian conditions. That is why the ceasefire was agreed only in Hodeida. The question is whether the warring parties can extend the truce to other areas of conflict. Both parties are well-entrenched in Yemen’s fractured political landscape. A solution to the conflict can be found only if the rebels and the government make some political concessions.
📰 9% growth by 2022 must to generate jobs: NITI Aayog
The government think-tank pitches for labour reforms, higher women participation, social security
•A growth rate of 9% is essential to generate enough jobs and achieve universal prosperity, according to a vision document released by NITI Aayog on Wednesday.
•Towards this, the ‘Strategy for New India @75’ document recommends a number of steps, including increasing the investment rate, reforming agriculture, and codifying labour laws.
•“An annual rate of growth of 9% by 2022-23 is essential for generating sufficient jobs and achieving prosperity for all,” the report, which was launched by Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, said in the introduction. Later in the report, NITI Aayog said the target should be 8% growth over the period 2018-23.
•“This will raise the economy’s size in real terms from $2.7 trillion in 2017-18 to nearly $4 trillion by 2022-23,” it said. “Besides having rapid growth… it is also necessary to ensure that growth is inclusive, sustained, clean and formalised.”
•On boosting economic growth, the document identified two key steps for increasing the country’s investment rate and the tax-GDP ratio.
•“To raise the rate of investment (gross fixed capital formation as a share of GDP) from about 29% in 2017-18 to about 36% of GDP by 2022-23, a slew of measures will be required to boost both private and public investment,” it said.
•“India’s tax-GDP ratio of around 17% is half the average of OECD countries (35%) and is low even when compared to other emerging economies like Brazil (34%), South Africa (27%) and China (22%).”
•“To enhance public investment, India should aim to increase its tax-GDP ratio to at least 22% of GDP by 2022-23,” the report added.
•While demonetisation and GST have and will continue to contribute positively, the document said efforts need to be made to rationalise direct taxes for both corporate tax and personal income tax.
•It further said that there was a need to ease the tax compliance burden and eliminate direct interface between taxpayers and tax officials using technology.
•“In agriculture, emphasis must shift to converting farmers to ‘agripreneurs’ by further expanding e-National Agriculture Markets (e-NAMs) and replacing the Agricultural Produce Marketing Committee (APMC) Act with the Agricultural Produce and Livestock Marketing (APLM) Act,” the document said.
•“The creation of a unified national market, a freer export regime and abolition of the Essential Commodities Act are essential for boosting agricultural growth,” it said.
•The document also called for a strong push towards ‘Zero Budget Natural Farming’ (ZBNF) techniques that reduce costs, improve land quality, and increase farmers’ incomes.
•In the infrastructure section, it said the share of freight transported by coastal shipping and inland waterways will be doubled by 2022-23.
•“Initially, viability gap funding will be provided until the infrastructure is fully developed,” the document said. “An IT-enabled platform would be developed for integrating different modes of transport and promoting multi-modal and digitised mobility.” In order to enhance rural connectivity and access to government programmes, it said that by the end of 2019 all 2.5 lakh gram panchayats will be “digitally connected” under the Bharat Net programme.
•“In the next phase, the last mile connectivity to the individual villages will be completed,” the document said. “The aim will be to deliver all government services at the State, district, and gram panchayat level digitally by 2022-23, thereby eliminating the digital divide.”
📰 GSAT-7A, ISRO’s ‘angry bird’, takes to the skies
The satellite is primarily for the Air Force’s communication purposes.
•An anxious ISRO Chairman K. Sivan on Wednesday watched the flight path of the GSLV-F11 intently as it soared into the evening sky carrying communication satellite GSAT-7A, meant to enhance the communication infrastructure of the Indian Air Force.
•Three key factors had weighed on the minds of the launch team at ISRO — the weight of the satellite, changes made to the cryogenic stage and the second stage of the vehicle to increase payload capacity, and the possibility of a cyclone looming on the coast that finally changed track gave anxious moments to the team.
Heaviest satellite
•In its Mk-II version, the GSLV with the indigenous cryogenic stage carried on board its heaviest satellite that weighed 2,250 kg, from the second launch pad of the Satish Dhawan Space Centre, SHAR, here at 4.10 p.m.
•“[In] the vehicle, the second stage propellant loading has been increased from 37.5 tonnes to 40 tonnes, and cryogenic stage propellant loading has been increased from 12 tonnes to 15 tonnes along with enhanced thrust value for the cryogenic stage,” Mr. Sivan said after the satellite was placed in a ‘super synchronous transfer orbit’, a little over 19 minutes after launch to enhance its life, pegged at eight years.
•Though the Mission Control team remained tight-lipped about the purported use of the satellite, sources in ISRO and the Indian Air Force said the satellite would enhance the communication capabilities of IAF. “This is primarily for the Indian Air Force’s communication purposes, such as ground to air communication,” one of the sources told The Hindu. The satellite, being dubbed as ‘angry bird’ by some, is likely to enhance the range of communication and also aid in aircraft to aircraft communication.
•“There is always further improvements in GSLV… in the coming GSLV F10s and F12 missions we are going to make bigger payload compartment to accommodate still bigger spacecraft and that is another important challenge in front of us and we are getting ready with that change as well to make sure that GSLV continues to remain very successful and rugged vehicle like PSLV,” said S. Somanath, Director, Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre.
•With ISRO ending the year on a high, having completed 17 missions, Mr. Sivan said he had a ‘great gift’ for his staff. “This year, we completed 17 missions. It is a very good number. The gift is... next year, we are going to have around 32 missions.”
Force multiplier
•“It will be a major booster and force multiplier for the Indian Air Force. When we talk of a network-centric warfare, such type of systems will help achieve full network centricity. From that perspective, it’s a major value addition to the IAF,” said Ajay Lele, Senior Fellow at the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA).
📰 Befriend thy neighbour
How India can develop deep collaborations with China, bypassing the West
•For a few years after it opened its doors to the world in the 1970s, China was still a socialist economy, unused to the ways of the capitalist world. My friend, Stefan Messman, a professor at Central European University, Budapest, and an authority on socialist law, was a key member of a Volkswagen team that finalised a deal with China. He was astonished at the kind of barters that had to be negotiated to set up a car plant in a country that had no market economy at that time.
•China has come a long way since then. Today, it is unrecognisably capitalist, albeit with a communist face. In terms of purchasing power parity (PPP) it is the dominant economic power in the world, directly competing with the U.S. for supremacy in science and technology. India ranks third in PPP.
•Rarely do we ask ourselves how a country that was no better off than India until the mid-1980s, and that suffered depredations under Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong, has left India so far behind. Lacking good institutional mechanisms to understand China, Indians tend to fall for simplistic explanations such as, “We’re a democracy, China is not.” There is more to that country’s spectacular rise than just that one factor.
•For all its vaunted institutions, the West is yet to get a grip on China, but it is constantly seeking to solve the riddle of China’s rise. For example, a recent issue of The Economist examined “How the West Got China Wrong”, and Foreign Affairs magazine attempted to fathom “how China hid its global ambitions” in an article titled “The Stealth Superpower”. Even as the West continues to snarl at China, some of its best institutions and universities have collaborations with that country running into millions of dollars. Harvard University, for instance, has several ongoing programmes with the Chinese government as well as leading universities like Peking and Tsinghua in engineering, the sciences, management, environment, design and the humanities.
•Since science and technology are powering China’s growth, we need to make sense of those by setting up well-funded, world-class interdisciplinary centres not just in universities like Jawaharlal Nehru University but also in the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and the Indian Institutes of Technology which have the best technical and scientific minds in the country. Through these centres we should be able to arrive at our own in-depth understanding of China.
•The time is also right to launch a China-India version of the Needham-Cambridge study on science and technology in China, to take a dispassionate view of how our countries have evolved through history and how they can collaborate to make their rise environmentally sustainable and equitable.
📰 ‘India may need 2,300 planes’
Airline purchases until 2037 to be worth $320 billion, says Boeing
•Airlines in India will need 2,300 moreplanes, valued at $320 billion, until 2037, aerospace major Boeing said on Wednesday in its market outlook. Globally, the number needed in the next 20 years is projected at 42,370 planes worth $6.3 trillion. The Asia-Pacific region accounts for almost 40% of the worldwide estimates, and India for 5%.
Narrow body planes
•As much as 84%, or 1,940 aircraft, of deliveries to India are likely to be of narrow body planes. Wide-body planes will account for 15% of total deliveries or 350 planes. Regional jets will account for the remaining 1% or 10 planes, Boeing said.
•The commercial services market in India is valued higher than that of aircraft purchase and is projected to be worth $430 billion. These services primarily include ground handling, maintenance and engineering and cabin services.
•Over the same period, India would continue to be the fastest-growing market at 7.8% growth rate with a huge appetite for air travel — while 0.1% of the Indian population took a flight in 2017, the same figure for U.S. was 3%.
•Despite the growth projection for India, there was a note of caution for airlines to bring discipline in airfares.
•“Irrational prices are a matter of concern. These are currently at 14-5% less than where airlines can earn break even. Given fuel prices are at a one-year low and forex, too, has dropped to ₹70 to a dollar, airlines should use this as an opportunity and address the issue,” said Dinesh Keskar, senior VP, Asia Pacific and India sales, Boeing Commercial Airplanes. He clarified, though, the lack of profitability of Indian airlines hadn’t impacted Boeing’s order book.
📰 Packaging of foodgrain in jute bags made mandatory
Centre’s order aims at bringing buoyancy to raw jute market
•The Centre has mandated the packaging of 100% of foodgrain and 20% of sugar in jute bags for 2018-19 but has also left the window open for the dilution of the order. This includes a stipulation on placing 10% of the orders through reverse auction on the government e-marketplace.
•The order follows the Jute Packaging Materials (Compulsory Use in Packing Commodities) Act (JPM), which was enacted in 1987 to protect the jute sector from the plastic packaging segment.
•While West Bengal and Andhra Pradesh are the two largest jute goods producers, Punjab is the largest procuring State. It plans to initiate the procurement on a trial basis for 10% of the indents.
•Gunny bags now account for about 63% of raw jute consumption, according to official statistics. The sector employs about 3.7 lakh mill workers directly besides supporting several lakh farmer families. Since 1987, the JPM Act has been mandating compulsory use of sacks in certain areas to bring buoyancy to the raw jute market.
Seepage issue
•While initially there was reservation for sugar, cement, fertiliser and foodgrain packaging over time, certain sectors have been taken out of the ambit for various reasons, including market demand for alternative packaging as there was seepage of materials through gunny sacks.
•This is the first time since 2012-13 that 100% reservation had been announced for foodgrain. It was 90% last year.
•In 2018-19, the total quantity of bags manufactured by the mills is anticipated to be 9.3 lakh metric tonnes. In view of the increased kharif production and assuming the requirement for the rabi season would be maintained at last year’s level, the requirement is pegged at 7.5 lakh MT of jute bags for foodgrain packaging.
•In case of sugar, the government has stipulated that diversified jute bags be used as traditional bags are not being preferred by the user-sector due to contaminants like jute fibre, batching oil moisture pick-up and sugar spillage. The recent order is effective from November 30, 2018 to June 2019.
Jute bags auction
•For quite sometime, the government has been keen to introduce a system for auction or reverse auction for selling jute bags through the national e- procurement portal of the government. However, these attempts have not been very successful as jute bags are under an administrative price control system and mills do not quote below the declared price.
•Keen to roll out the auction system, the government has said to the extent that jute mills fail to supply through the government e-marketplace portal, the Union Textiles Ministry (the industry’s parent Ministry) will allow dilution if the mandatory packaging norm, modifying it to incentivise jute mills’ participation in the government e-market place
•Dilution would also be made if there is disruption in supply of jute packaging material. Similarly, jute mills will also get relief if there is bunching of orders . The Ministry has also kept outside the purview of the order export consignments, small consumer packs of 10 kg and below for foodgrain and 25 kg and below for sugar, bigger packs of more than 100 kg and sugar fortified with vitamins.
📰 e-library of rare books launched in Pune
BORI houses one of South Asia’s largest collection of rare manuscripts
•The Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute (BORI), which houses one of South Asia’s largest and most invaluable agglomeration of rare manuscripts, opened its treasure vault digitally by launching an e-library of ancient religious and historical works on Wednesday.
•Nearly 1,000 rare books and manuscripts in Sanskrit and its related languages are presently available for readers worldwide to savour in this first phase of digitisation.
•The institute, named after legendary Indologist Ramkrishna Gopal Bhandarkar, was set up in 1917 and has in its possession nearly two-and-a-half-lakh rare books and manuscripts, some of them in an extremely brittle state. “The rationale behind the e-library is to preserve at least some of these books. Hence, we chose to digitise 20,000 among the rarest-of-the rare books and four to five thousand will be available for readers to read them online for free,” said noted Indologist Prof. Shrikant Bahulkar.
•Three fully-automated Zeutschel high-resolution German scanners were specially procured by the institute at a cost of ₹15 lakh each.
•“ We began with screening the two lakh-plus manuscripts to zero down on the ones we would digitise,” said Mithilesh Kulkarni of Nyansa, a firm specialising in heritage digitisation.
•Chinmay Bhandari of Nyansa said that the entire process was one of ‘non-destructive’ digitising, which ensured that even books in decrepit condition were preserved while scanning. “For the past two years, our 15-member team was working in three shifts every day and we digitised more than 3 lakh pages each month,” Mr. Bhandari said.
•Among the BORI’s notable publications are a 19-volume edition of The Mahabharata, collated with copious critical material, and legendary Sanskrit scholar P.V. Kane’s five-volume History of Dharmashastra (1930). “The work on the Mahabharata, universally acknowledged by scholars and researchers the world, is still on with the Cultural Index to the Mahabharata still being prepared under the guidance of scholar Dr. Ganesh Umakant Thite,” said Prof. Bahulkar.
