📰 186 elephants killed on railway tracks in over 10 years: MoEFCC
Various measures had been taken to avoid elephant casualties on railway lines
•A total of 186 elephants were killed after being hit by trains across India between 2009-10 and 2020-21, according to the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC), Government of India.
•As per the data furnished by the Project Elephant Division of the Ministry, Assam accounted for the highest number of elephant casualties on railway tracks (62), followed by West Bengal (57), and Odisha (27). Uttar Pradesh saw a single death.
•Trains claimed the highest number of pachyderms in 2012-13, when 27 elephants were killed in 10 States as per the data accessed by activist R. Pandiyaraja from Tenkasi district in Tamil Nadu through the Right to Information (RTI) Act.
•K. Muthamizh Selvan, Scientist ‘D’ and Central Public Information Officer (Project Elephant), said in the RTI reply that various measures had been taken to avoid elephant casualties on railway lines.
•According to the Ministry, a Permanent Coordination Committee has been constituted between the Ministry of Railways (Railway Board) and the MoEFCC for preventing elephant deaths in train accidents.
•The formation of coordination committees of officers of Indian Railways and State Forest Departments; clearing of vegetation along railway tracks to enable clear view for loco pilots; signage boards at suitable points to alert loco pilots about elephant presence; moderating slopes of elevated sections of railway tracks; underpass/overpass for safe passage of elephants; regulation of train speed from sunset to sunrise in vulnerable stretches; and regular patrolling of vulnerable stretches of railway tracks by frontline staff of the Forest Department and wildlife watchers, were among other initiatives the Ministry had undertaken.
•The MoEFCC also stated that it released ₹212.49 crore to elephant range States under Centrally Sponsored Schemes (CSS) of Project Elephant to protect elephants, their habitat and corridors, to address issues of man-elephant conflict and welfare of captive elephants, between 2011-12 and 2020-21. Kerala stood at the top in getting CSS funds of ₹35.39 crore during the period. Punjab received the lowest of the funds — ₹ 1.82 lakh, said the RTI document.
Herpetologists have warned that the invasive red-eared slider, released in natural water bodies by people who keep them as ‘cute’ pets, could turn nasty for 29 native species of turtles and tortoises.
•A ‘cute’ American turtle popular as a pet is threatening to invade the natural water bodies across the Northeast, home to 21 of the 29 vulnerable native Indian species of freshwater turtles and tortoises.
•Between August 2018 and June 2019, a team of herpetologists from NGO Help Earth found red-eared sliders in the Deepor Beel Wildlife Sanctuary and the Ugratara temple pond – both in Guwahati. They published the “grim” finding in ‘Reptiles & Amphibians’, journal of the U.S.-based International Reptile Conservation Foundation in August 2020.
•But the alarm was raised after H.T. Lalremsanga and eight others from Mizoram University’s Department of Zoology published another report in the same journal in April this year. Their report said a red-eared slider was collected from an unnamed stream, connected to the Tlawng River, on a farm near Mizoram capital Aizawl.
•The red-eared slider (Trachemys scripta elegans) derives its name from red stripes around the part where its ears would be and from its ability to slide quickly off any surface into the water.
•“Native to the U.S. and northern Mexico, this turtle is an extremely popular pet due to its small size, easy maintenance, and relatively low cost. But on the flip side, they grow fast and virtually leaves nothing for the native species to eat,” Mr. Lalremsanga told The Hindu on Friday.
•“Much like the Burmese python that went to the U.S. as a pet to damage the South Florida Everglades ecosystem, the red-eared slider has already affected States such as Karnataka and Gujarat, where it has been found in 33 natural water bodies,” Jayaditya Purkayastha of the Guwahati-based Help Earth said.
•“But more than elsewhere in India, preventing this invasive species from overtaking the Brahmaputra and other river ecosystems in the Northeast is crucial because the Northeast is home to more than 72% of the turtle and tortoise species in the country, all of them very rare,” he said.
•Mr. Purkayastha said the red-eared slider presents a Catch-22 situation. People who keep it as pets become sensitive about turtle conservation but endanger the local ecosystem, probably unknowingly, by releasing them in natural water bodies after they outgrow an aquarium, tank or pool at home.
•“Although the red-eared slider is traded legally, the time has come for the government to come up with regulations against keeping invasive as pets,” he said.
•Alternatively, Help Earth has been working on a project on a repository for red-eared slider and other pets that are invasive. “We are trying to create awareness among pet traders for maintaining a database of red-eared slider buyers. They can be contacted to hand over the turtles to the repository insulated from any wetland or natural water body,” Mr. Purkayastha said.
📰 Explained: Israel’s Iron Dome rocket defence system
It is an all-weather system and can engage multiple targets simultaneously and can be deployed over land and sea
•The Iron Dome aerial defence system just intercepted a Hamas Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) that crossed from Gaza into Israel, Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) said around 1 p.m. IST on Friday on social media. IDF said on Thursday that in the last three days, Hamas has fired more than 1,500 rockets from Gaza all the way into Israel. The night sky over Israel has been ablaze with interceptor missiles from Iron Dome shooting down the incoming rockets in the sky.
What is Iron Dome?
•Iron Dome is a multi-mission system capable of intercepting rockets, artillery, mortars and Precision Guided Munitions like very short range air defence (V-SHORAD) systems as well as aircraft, helicopters and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) over short ranges of up to 70 km. It is an all-weather system and can engage multiple targets simultaneously and be deployed over land and sea.
•Iron Dome is manufactured by Rafael Advanced Defence Systems Limited and has been in service with Israeli Air Force since 2011. The radar system was developed by Elta. Its development was prompted after a series of rocket attacks on Israel by Hezbollah and Hamas in the 2000s. In the 2006 Lebanon war, around 4,000 rockets were fired on the northern parts of Israel resulting in the death of about 44 Israeli civilians and evacuation of around 250,000 citizens following the development of the system was taken up.
How does it work?
•An Iron Dome battery consists of a battle management control unit, a detection and tracking radar and a firing unit of three vertical launchers, with 20 interceptor missiles each. The interceptor missile uses a proximity fuse to detonate the target warhead in the air. The Iron Dome is deployed in a layered defence along with David’s Sling and Arrow missile defence system which are designed for medium- and long-range threats.
•According to a 2013 research paper by Yiftah S. Shapur titled ‘Lessons from the Iron Dome’ in Military and Strategic Affairs, one of the system’s important advantages is its ability to identify the anticipated point of impact of the threatening rocket, to calculate whether it will fall in a built-up area or not, and to decide on this basis whether or not to engage it. This prevents unnecessary interception of rockets that will fall in open areas and thus not cause damage, the paper states.
•The system has intercepted thousands of rockets so far and, according to Rafael, its success rate is over 90%. The I-DOME is the mobile variant with all components on a single truck and C-DOME is the naval version for deployment on ships.
What are the limitations of the system?
•The system has performed very well so far. However, the system can see limitations when it is overwhelmed with a barrage of projectiles. “The system has a ‘saturation point’. It is capable of engaging a certain (unpublished) number of targets at the same time, and no more. Additional rockets fired in a crowded salvo could succeed in breaching defences and cause damage,” Mr. Shapur says in the paper.
•Several assessments suggest that Hamas is developing mitigating strategies including lowering the trajectories of the projectiles while also continuing to accumulate thousands of rockets with improved precision. According to Mr. Shapur, one of the possible limitations is the system’s inability to cope with very short range threats as estimates put the Iron Dome’s minimum interception range at 5-7 kilometres. The other factor is the cost of interception is high. The cost of the interceptor missile is about $40,000-50,000, according to Mr. Shapur.
•According to a November 2017 commentary on RAND Corporation blog by Elizabeth M. Bartels, the system is built to intercept a certain of projectiles and can be overwhelmed by a more capable adversary. According to Ms. Bartels, the planning scenario for a war with “Hezbollah involves 1,000-1,500 rockets per day fired at Israeli population centres.” Taking North Korea as a context, the study puts estimates of forward-deployed conventional artillery of North Korea would be “capable of firing 500,000 shells an hour for several hours, or firing tens-of-thousands of shells per day over an extended period.” “This rate of fire would easily overwhelm a variant of Iron Dome, which is currently being proposed as a solution,” it states.
📰 Out of line: On West Bengal Governor's visit to violence-hit areas
Governor Dhankhar’s visit to violence-hit areas is a breach of constitutional propriety
•There is little doubt that West Bengal Governor Jagdeep Dhankhar’s visit to areas hit by post-poll violence in Cooch Behar constitutes a grave transgression of the bounds of constitutional propriety. A habitual critic of the Mamata Banerjee regime, he has been given to ignoring the principle that constitutional heads should not air their differences with the elected regimes in public. As recently as December 2020, Ms. Banerjee had appealed to the President to recall the Governor for political statements that she believed were being made by him at the behest of the BJP-led Union government. One would have thought that a fresh election, in which Ms. Banerjee’s TMC has won a resounding victory, would be a reminder, if one was needed at all, that the norms of representative government ought to be a natural restraint on Mr. Dhankhar’s gubernatorial propensity to speak out of turn and step out of line.
•There was a time when another West Bengal Governor, Gopalkrishna Gandhi, came in for some criticism for setting aside the restraints of constitutional office by expressing “cold horror” at the police firing that left 14 protesters dead at Nandigram in 2007. Some may believe that the gubernatorial office ought not to be an impediment to the incumbent yielding to the moral urge to condemn incidents of rare enormity. Yet, the larger principle that the Governor should not offer public comment on situations best handled by the representative regime ought to hold good in all circumstances. In the case of Mr. Dhankhar, what worsens his persistent criticism of the TMC regime is the unfortunate congruency between his words and the interests of the BJP. His visit to Cooch Behar can be seen as an action louder even than his words in derogation of the elected regime. A visit to a scene of violence by the Governor cannot be justified as a gesture to show solidarity with victims. M. Channa Reddy, as Tamil Nadu Governor, shocked the AIADMK regime in 1993 by visiting the RSS headquarters in Chennai after a bomb exploded there. It may be argued that the present situation in West Bengal is different from those in which other Governors had shed the restraints of their office. Post-election violence is something that should not be witnessed at all in an electoral democracy. West Bengal is certainly out of step with the rest of the country in allowing post-poll celebrations to degenerate into triumphalism and attacks on the losing side. Yet, the onus is on Ms. Banerjee to restore order and end the violence, even if she believed that the extent of the violence was being exaggerated by the Opposition. Regardless of one’s view of a regime’s inaction, there should be no departure from the principle that any advice or warning the Governor wants to give to the elected government ought to be in private and in confidence.
📰 Lend a helping hand to children the right way
Following the COVID surge, the laws and procedures for the care and protection of orphaned children must be noted
•The second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic now sweeping India has left many children orphaned and vulnerable. Social media is flooded with requests to adopt children who have lost their parents in the pandemic. And a few non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have come forward to help such children.
•However, before handing over an orphan child to any agency, family or person, however well intended the move may be, it is important to be aware of the laws that are prevalent and procedures with regard to the care and the protection of orphan children rather than face legal action for violations later.
Many options to help
•Any individual who finds an orphan child or even any child who needs care and protection under the circumstances, should immediately call the toll free Childline number 1098, an emergency phone outreach service (managed by the Women and Child Development department’s nodal agency, the Childline India Foundation; which operates round the day and on all days across the country. After taking note of the whereabouts of the child, the helpline reaches out immediately and takes charge of the child. These Childline units are nothing but civil society organisations duly approved by the government.
•The second option is to intimate the district protection officer concerned whose contact details can be found on the National Tracking System for Missing and Vulnerable Children portal maintained by the Women and Child Development department of the Government of India.
•The third alternative is to approach the nearest police station or its child welfare police officer who is specially trained to exclusively deal with children either as victims or juvenile delinquents. Nonetheless, one can always dial the Emergency Response Support System (ERSS) which is a pan-India single number (112) based emergency response system for citizens in emergencies (https://112.gov.in/) and seek the necessary help. The non-reporting of such children is also a punishable offence under the JJA or the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015.
Established process
•Once an orphan child is recovered by the outreach agency, it is the duty of the said agency to produce the child within 24 hours before the Child Welfare Committee (CWC) of the district. The CWC, after an inquiry, decides whether to send the child to a children’s home or a fit facility or fit person; if the child is below six years, he or she shall be placed in a specialised adoption agency. The State thus takes care of all such children who are in need of care and protection, till they turn 18 years. In Sampurna Behrua vs Union of India (2018), the Supreme Court of India directed States and Union Territories to ensure that all child care institutions are registered. Thus, any voluntary or NGO which is not registered as per the requirement of the JJA cannot house children in need of care and protection.
•Once a child is declared legally free for adoption by the CWC, adoption can be done either by Indian prospective adoptive parents or non-resident Indians or foreigners, in that order. Another important feature of the JJA is that it is secular in nature and simple in procedure as compared to the Hindu Adoptions and Maintenance Act, 1956 which is not only religion specific but also relatively cumbersome in procedure. Second, the procedure of adoption is totally transparent and its progress can be monitored from the portal of the statutory body, the Central Adoption Resource Authority.
Court directives to police
•It is quite often said that ignorance of the law is not an excuse. Therefore, if an orphan child is kept by someone without lawful authority, he or she may land themselves in trouble. According to the Hindu Minority and Guardianship Act, 1956, the father, and in his absence the mother, is the natural guardian. Not even a close relative can look after the child without authorisation.
•The Supreme Court in Bachpan Bachao Andolan vs Union of India directed all Directors General of Police, in May 2013, to register a first information report as a case of trafficking or abduction in every case of a missing child. At least one police officer not below the rank of assistant sub-inspector in each police station is mandatorily required to undergo training to deal with children in conflict with the law and in need of care and protection. They are not required to wear a uniform and need to be child-friendly.
•Similarly, each district is supposed to have its special juvenile police unit, headed by an officer not below the rank of a Deputy Superintendent of Police. The Supreme Court in Re: Exploitation of children in Orphanages in the State of Tamil Nadu (2017) inter alia, specifically asked the National Police Academy, Hyderabad and police training academies in every State to prepare training courses on the JJA and provide regular training to police officers in terms of sensitisation.
•Children are an important national asset, and the well-being of the nation, and its future, depend on how its children grow and develop. The primary purpose of giving a child in adoption is his welfare and restoring his or her right to family. Article 39 of the Constitution prohibits the tender age of the children from being abused. Therefore, orphaned children who have lost both their parents or abandoned or surrendered due to the COVID-19 pandemic must not be neglected and left to face an uncertain future. They must be taken care of by the authorities entrusted with responsibilities under the JJA.
Recent order
•The National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) recently wrote to the Chief Secretaries of all States and Union Territories on the issue of children orphaned due to COVID-19. It said that that ‘if any such information about an abandoned or orphaned child is received by any entity, organisation, or NGO, then the NCPCR has to be informed by email (cp.ncpcr@nic.in) or over the telephone (011-23478200/23478250) for assistance and help to children)’. This directive needs to be implemented in the most humane manner.
📰 In COVID storm, the key principles driven home
Adherence to them would have mitigated the traumatic fallout of the pandemic in India
•Dead men do tell tales and history bears witness that pandemics leave their imprint among those they leave behind. In India, a full reckoning would take place when the pandemic is fully behind us. But even from deep inside the storm there are some first principles that have been driven home. Adherence to them would have undoubtedly mitigated the ghastly fallout of the virus.
Health care, not coverage
•The first is the debate between universal health care and universal health coverage. That stands settled now, in the spirit of the landmark Aneurin Bevan’s-led National Health Service Act in 1946, which revolutionised health care in the United Kingdom by delinking it from a person’s income. It became a benchmark for the recognition that it could not be left to market forces to deal with public health.
•The most comprehensive document prepared so far in India, by the high-level expert group appointed by the Planning Commission, submitted in November 2011, concluded that “progressive strengthening of public facilities” is the only way to reach medical services to the population as a whole. While finance was a concern to be dealt with, the centrepiece of health care was not insurance. After 2014, insurance has instead been a focus — good health to be somehow secured via insurance, as with Ayushman Bharat. But for all the hype, there is no getting away from strengthening public health facilities and making that the fundamental way of ensuring a healthy life for its people. India, already spending woefully limited amounts on health, for all the hoopla and hype, ended up reducing allocations in the February 2021 budget. The results are there to see.
•Kerala, when it started investing heavily in public health care in the 1950s, was told it was too expensive for a poor State like it was then. But as it went on to demonstrate, primary health care was labour-intensive, generating its own virtuous cycle of trained personnel and a well-looked after populace. It enhanced the people’s ability to produce, to be economic assets and enriched the State much more than could be imagined.
Reason, not mumbo-jumbo
•The second principle of so-called ‘New India’, of faith over science and the silencing of rationalists as ‘western’ and ‘alien’ to the ‘Indian ethos’, must be kicked very hard if India has to start breathing again. In the past seven years and even when the novel coronavirus pandemic was looming, top Ministers, including the Health Minister, were seen flanking the sides of a yoga guru proclaiming that he had found a cure for COVID-19. The World Health Organization had to step in and make it clear that it had not endorsed it. The Prime Minister has himself privileged myth over reason, most visibly at a hospital inauguration in Mumbai, in 2014, where he spoke of “plastic surgery” as an Indian invention, citing Lord Ganesh’s trunk. This set India back by centuries. The message downwards was clear; science, rationalism or expertise was ‘Nehruvian’ and not to be encouraged.
•Public allocations for science have fallen and Indian scientists criticised two speakers at the Indian Science Congress “for making bizarre, unscientific claims, including that ancient Hindus invented stem-cell science”. Scientists held protests against the unscientific statements in Bengaluru, Kochi, Kolkata and Thiruvananthapuram on January 6, 2019. With the Ministry of Ayurveda, Yoga and Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha and Homoeopathy (AYUSH) coming under fire frequently for peddling non-cures with the weight of the Government of India behind it, it appears as if science itself was perceived as a threat to the ruling party’s ecosystem.
•All through last year, no public health expert — and India has many — was empowered enough to be seen advising, directing, taking questions or giving out advice that the public could trust, and on occasion question policy. The thali banging, candle lighting, abrupt lockdowns, were all done via public addresses to the nation by the Prime Minister. There was no group with respected scientists or public health experts who could challenge government diktats or test decisions taken by the Narendra Modi government against scientific principles. The Prime Minister took to declaring victory over the pandemic on January 28. The Home Minister authoritatively announced to the media that rallies were not causing the surge in the middle of a crowded Bengal campaign. On if the Kumbh Mela should be allowed a year earlier, it was the Akhil Bhartiya Akhada Parishad that had the last word, not epidemiologists. It took hundreds of anguished scientists to write a letter urging that genomic data be collected and shared, like other civilised democracies, on the virus for the protocol to be altered. The wholesale junking of science even deep into the pandemic worsened the situation.
Data integrity, not hesitancy
•Third, comes data integrity, which is shorthand for the credibility of any government, at any time. Data-hesitancy has been a feature of this government, whether it was about economic data, on making the GDP look good or on recording employment statistics. So changing baselines, withholding periodic labour force surveys or consumption survey data, set the path for continued data denial over testing last year and this year, over COVID-19 deaths. Other than the moral and human imperative of owing it to each Indian who dies, the basic courtesy of recording her existence and departure, not recording deaths faithfully, has deep practical implications. If you do not track it honestly and accurately, you do not understand the disease, and if you do not do that then you cannot handle it and lesser still, rescue the future by accurate predictions. In the case of COVID-19, India’s mortality data are many times lower than what is officially acknowledged, as discussed in detail by the latest assessments of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, and experts such as Dr. Bhramar Mukherjee, Dr. Ashish K. Jha and Dr. Murad Banaji. The discrepancy is above the regular margin of error seen in many countries. This is deeply damaging to India’s international standing as a reliable recorder of information. Not recording or diligently sharing data has consequences, for India and the world.
Our economics and the poor
•The fourth and final principle that the pandemic has driven home is the importance of centring good economics around improving the lives of those worst-off. Recently, India has been anxious about turning into a ‘5 trillion’ economy. But there is no Security Council seat or grand entry into the big rich clubs of the world if India’s overwhelming majority, those who live under $1.90 a day, cannot be lifted out of the morass. Numerous surveys and reports have consistently hammered at the slide into poverty. The latest report by the Azim Premji University talks of 230 million Indians slipping below the breadline during the pandemic. India’s obsession with being Vishwaguru, egged on by misleading analysts deriding “Povertarianism”, talking of “freebies” cannot be a replacement to sound welfarism which must prioritise the majority of Indians who need a social security net. It is stunning disregard for global experience, whether it is Joe Biden’s big spending, Boris Johnson ending the age of austerity, Germany launching the biggest state spend since the war or China’s historic drive to end absolute poverty, and India’s own, when the International Monetary Fund acknowledged the fastest decline in poverty globally occurring in India between 2005-06 and 2015-16. Understanding “good economics” as what helps its majority, the most poor and vulnerable, must be a principle rather than a matter of embarrassment.
•The virus is no sociologist but it responds to how society and human beings behave with it. Allowing gargles of cow urine to double as cures, giving it a free run to travel and diversify amongst large unprotected crowds or in a desperation to win elections such as in West Bengal, actively courting and boasting about mass gatherings till just days ago were all invitations to disaster, providing the virus with what it wanted — a chance to multiply, diversify, jump hosts and regions rapidly, adding as accelerators to the second wave.
•This was contrary to what India did with smallpox and polio, with far fewer resources. There, its adherence to basic scientific and rational principles, helped its people, and the world beat back the disease.
•The least good that might be hoped for, at an unimaginably high cost, is for COVID-19 to cure us of the basic distortion in our public and political culture which has been on a speed pill for the last seven years. Else, it would be hard to stop analysts from terming this the man-made, Indian, or worse still, Modi variant.
