📰 Maharashtra govt. clears action plan to protect heritage trees
State to amend Act to preserve trees more than 50 years old in urban areas
•The Maharashtra Cabinet on Thursday passed an action plan to protect and preserve trees older than 50 years in urban areas by terming them heritage trees.
•The plan includes the concept of heritage tree and plan of action for conservation; method to define age of the tree; compensatory plantation; rules to be followed before hacking trees; formation of the Maharashtra Tree Authority; structure of the local tree authority and their duties; tree census; fixing land of tree plantation; transplantation of trees; and tree cess and fine to be charged.
•The State will also bring about amendments in the Maharashtra (Urban Area) Protection and Preservation of Trees Act. As per the plan, trees older than 50 will be termed heritage trees. The Environment and Climate Change Department will issue guidelines in consultation with the State Forest Department based on the existing methods.
•Compensatory plantation will include planting the number of trees equivalent to the age of trees to be cut. The saplings need to be six to eight feet in height while planting and they will undergo geo-tagging with seven years of caring period. The option of monetary compensation has also been given, instead of compensatory plantation.
•A State-level Tree Authority will be formed to protect and preserve heritage trees. The authority will hear applications seeking permission to cut 200 or more trees that are five or more years old. The local tree authorities will come under this body. Tree experts will be part of the local tree authorities. These bodies will ensure that the tree census is conducted after every five years. They will also be in charge of counting heritage trees, ensuring their preservation, keeping tabs on tree plantation, pruning and caring of trees, and ensuring that 33% of government land is used for tree plantation.
•The State authority will issue directions for the use of tree cess. The fine amount cannot be more than ₹1 lakh per tree in case of violations.
The two leaders inspected documents related to the Atlantic Charter
•President Joe Biden and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson met for the first time on Thursday, looking to highlight their nations’ famed “special relationship” but doing so against a backdrop of differences both political and personal.
•At their first meeting in the seaside resort of Carbis Bay, the two leaders inspected documents on Thursday related to the Atlantic Charter, a declaration signed by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt in August 1941, setting out common goals for the world after Second World War. Those goals included freer trade, disarmament and the right to self-determination of all people. It is often cited as a cornerstone of the trans-Atlantic “special relationship.”
•Mr. Johnson noted that the charter laid the foundation for the United Nations and NATO. “Yeah, I know,” Mr. Biden said.
Finding common ground
•At their meeting, the two leaders plan to sign what they’re calling a new Atlantic Charter, pledging to “defend the principles, values, and institutions of democracy and open societies.”
•Mr. Biden hopes to use his first overseas trip as President to reassure European allies that the U.S. had shed the transactional tendencies of Donald Trump’s term and is a reliable partner again. But tensions could simmer beneath the surface of Mr. Biden’s meeting with Mr. Johnson.
•The President staunchly opposed the Brexit movement, the British exodus from the European Union that Mr. Johnson championed, and has expressed great concern with the future of Northern Ireland. And Mr. Biden once called the British leader a “physical and emotional clone” of Mr. Trump.
•The British government has worked hard to overcome that impression, stressing Mr. Johnson’s common ground with Mr. Biden on issues such as climate change and his support for global institutions. But Mr. Johnson, the host for the G-7 summit that will follow his sit-down with Mr. Biden, has been frustrated by the lack of a new trade deal with the U.S.
📰 CHIME telescope yields unprecedented results
Scientific collaboration detects more than 500 mysterious fast radio bursts in its first year of operation
•Scientists with the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) Collaboration, who include researchers at the Pune-based Tata Institute for Fundamental Research (TIFR) and the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics (NCRA), have assembled the largest collection of fast radio bursts (FRBs) in the telescope’s first FRB catalogue.
•While catching sight of an FRB is considered a rare thing in the field of radio astronomy, prior to the CHIME project, radio astronomers had only caught sight of around 140 bursts in their scopes since the first FRB was spotted in 2007.
•FRBs are oddly bright flashes of light, registering in the radio band of the electromagnetic spectrum, which blaze for a few milliseconds before vanishing without a trace. These brief and mysterious beacons have been spotted in various and distant parts of the universe, as well as in our own galaxy. Their origins are unknown and their appearance is highly unpredictable.
•But the advent of the CHIME project — a large stationary radio telescope in British Columbia, Canada — has been a game-changer and has nearly quadrupled the number of fast radio bursts discovered to date. With more observations, astronomers hope soon to pin down the extreme origins of these curiously bright signals.
•The telescope has detected a whopping 535 new fast radio bursts in its first year of operation itself, between 2018 and 2019.
•“Before CHIME came along, different telescopes had observed a handful of FRBs each, but with their own selection criteria and software. But now, with the help of CHIME, we can observe a large swathe of the sky round the clock and were able to detect FRBs at an unprecedented rate. We could gather the first large sample of FRBs with a single instrument and a single, well-understood selection criteria which is allowing us to get a far better understanding of the properties of the FRBs as a population,” said CHIME/FRB member Shriharsh Tendulkar, also a faculty member at the TIFR-NCRA.
•The new catalogue significantly expands the current library of known FRBs, and is already yielding clues as to their properties. For instance, the newly discovered bursts appear to fall in two distinct classes: those that repeat, and those that don’t. Scientists have identified 18 FRB sources that burst repeatedly, while the rest appear to be one-offs.
•When the scientists mapped their locations, they found the bursts were evenly distributed in space, seeming to arise from any and all parts of the sky. From the FRBs that CHIME was able to detect, the scientists calculated that bright fast radio bursts occur at a rate of about 800 per day across the entire sky — the most precise estimate of FRBs overall rate to date.
•The first FRB catalogue is to be presented later this week at the American Astronomical Society Meeting.
•Mr. Tendulkar said that observations showed that the repeaters looked different, with each burst lasting slightly longer and emitting more focused radio frequencies than bursts from single, non-repeating FRBs.
•“We find that repeaters emit bursts of longer duration with the radiation being detected in a narrower range of frequencies compared to the one-off FRBs. These differences strongly suggest that emission from repeaters and non-repeaters is generated either by different physical mechanisms or in different astrophysical environments,” said Pragya Chawla, a Ph.D. candidate at McGill University and a member of the CHIME team.
•CHIME comprises four massive cylindrical radio antennas, roughly the size and shape of snowboarding half-pipes, located at the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory, operated by the National Research Council of Canada in British Columbia. The telescope receives radio signals each day from half of the sky as the Earth rotates.
•While most radio astronomy is done by swivelling a large dish to focus light from different parts of the sky, CHIME stares, motionless, at the sky, and focuses incoming signals using a correlator — a powerful digital signal processor that can work through huge amounts of data, at a rate of about seven terrabytes per second, equivalent to a few per cent of the world’s Internet traffic.
•“Digital signal processing is what makes CHIME able to reconstruct and ‘look’ in thousands of directions simultaneously. That is what helps us detect FRBs a thousand times more often than a traditional telescope,” says Kiyoshi Masui, Assistant Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), who will lead the group’s conference presentation at the American Astronomical Society Meeting.
•For each of the 535 FRBs that CHIME detected, Professor Masui and his colleagues measured its dispersion and found that most bursts likely originated from far-off sources within distant galaxies.
•The fact that the bursts were bright enough to be detected by CHIME suggests that they must have been produced by extremely energetic sources, he said. As the telescope detects more FRBs, scientists hope to pin down exactly what kind of exotic phenomena could generate such ultra bright, ultra fast signals.
•According to Professor Masui, the scientists plan to use the bursts, and their dispersion estimates, to map the distribution of gas throughout the universe.
📰 The rope of federalism and an unwanted tug-of-war
The controversy in West Bengal, over political and administrative issues, is an aberration in the federal polity
•The Centre-West Bengal controversy on the conduct of Bengal’s former Chief Secretary, Alapan Bandyopadhyay in the final days of his tenure, in May, has thrown up several political and administrative issues that deserve our attention for the future health of our federal polity.
•In the overall context, there are two elements which need to be kept in mind while discussing this subject. First, India is a ‘union of states’ and in this union, the State governments are not subordinate agencies of the central government. There are, no doubt, matters enunciated in our Constitution, where the Centre’s decisions have primacy over those of the State governments, but this does not extend to holding of meetings, even if these are called by the Prime Minister. A State’s functionaries — both political and administrative — are requested or advised to attend such meetings and this necessitates courtesy and consideration on the part of both sides. It is possible that due to the no-holds-barred electoral campaigns in the recently held Assembly elections, which included West Bengal, these considerations were given a go-by; the result is an unseemly controversy which is best avoided for healthy Centre-State relations.
Relief and the third tier
•Second, the meeting that became a flashpoint was the one called by the Prime Minister on May 28 to review cyclone relief work — in connection with cyclone Yaas — in West Bengal. The allegation is that Mr. Bandyopadhyay reached the meeting late and then left abruptly along with West Bengal Chief Minister, Mamata Banerjee, to visit the cyclone-affected areas in her State. In real life, most relief and rehabilitation work in the event of a natural calamity or management of a disaster is of a local nature and is carried out by the district, sub-divisional and village level officials working under the State governments. Over time, the States have conceded space to the Centre for disaster management for getting financial, technical and logistical support. Even then, the comprehensive framework under the Disaster Management Act, 2005 operates mainly at the State, district and local levels.
•The conduct of Mr. Bandyopadhyay, an Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer, must be seen in this overall context along with the central government’s reactions which together raise issues regarding the norms of civil service conduct, political and administrative arrogance and revengeful behaviour. New Delhi has sent showcause notices and a charge sheet for Mr. Bandyopadhyay’s failure in fully and properly participating in the meeting called by the Prime Minister in West Bengal for cyclone relief review. He has since replied to the Centre.
The services and fine balance
•The All-India Services, that includes the IAS, were conceived by the makers of our Constitution to provide uniformity and high standards of public service in both the Centre and the States, and to provide a measure of administrative unity in our diverse and plural society. The architecture has been exquisitely designed. To ensure quality and as a measure of convenience, IAS officers are recruited by the Union Public Service Commission and formally appointed by the President of India. But they are ultimately borne in State cadres which makes them subject to the control of the respective State governments as well, especially when they are in the employment of their States. To that extent their position is somewhat different from that of the central services who go through similar recruitment procedures but are under the Centre’s total control.
•The IAS officers work for the central government on “deputation” from their respective State cadres and during their central deputation, their loyalty is of course to the central government. IAS officers will face acute trust-deficit, if while working for a State government, they show preferential allegiance or loyalty to central government functionaries by reason of the fact that they were initially appointed by the President of India.
High-handed approach
•As a measure of the vindictive assertion of its rights and power, Mr. Bandyopadhyay was initially called to the Centre on ‘deputation’ and asked to report in New Delhi on the day he was to superannuate. It is a different matter that he chose to retire on that day instead of availing himself of the three-month extension given to him earlier. Several commentators have pointed out that the “concurrence” of the relevant State government is required before an officer of its cadre is deputed to the Centre. Also, there must be prior consultation between the Centre and the State for the latter’s viewpoint to be overruled. The Central government did not exactly cover itself with glory by violating these requirements.
•Further, action has been initiated against Mr. Bandyopadhyay under Section 51(b) of the Disaster Management Act for failing to comply with the Centre’s direction to attend the review meeting taken by the Prime Minister.
•This is an absurd interpretation of the provision that is meant to deal with cases of defiance of the lawful orders or action of the competent authorities (handling disaster management) under the Act. Besides, Mr. Bandyopadhyay was with the Chief Minister, his administrative boss. It is obvious that in the performance of his official duties, an All-India service officer, or any officer for that matter, will have to act under the direction of his official superior. Obviously, Mr. Bandyopadhyay listened to his boss; this is what it should be when IAS officers work for a State government or any other government; otherwise, there will be chaos and indiscipline in administration.
•It is very unfortunate that for some inexplicable reasons, a mountain has been made of a molehill, as the cliché goes. In these circumstances one misses the sagacity, wisdom and sophistication of some of our tall political leaders who steered the destiny of our nation in the past.
📰 Should retired officials be barred from disclosing information?
The restrictions in place must be based on operational calculations
•Last week, the Government of India prohibited retired officials of security and intelligence organisations from publishing anything about their work or organisation without prior clearance from the head of the organisation. Serving civil servants are barred from expressing their personal opinion on policy matters and criticising the government. But once they retire, many of them take part in public debates and enrich our conversations. In a conversation moderated by Varghese K. George, G.K. Pillai and Syed Akbaruddin discuss whether there should be any restrictions on the freedom of expression of a specific category of retired government officials. And if yes, what the limits of such restrictions should be. Edited excerpts:
Mr. Pillai, do you think the restrictions imposed on retired officials of intelligence and security organisations are justifiable?
•G.K. Pillai: We have the Official Secrets Act [of 1923]. Officers of intelligence and security organisations and other departments are privy to a lot of sensitive information. So, all of us in the service take into account the fact that the government needs some control over that information leaking into the public.
•The issue is whether it is all information on which there is not yet much clarity or whether it is sensitive information. Who decides what is sensitive and what is not? The government would like to have some control so that existing intelligence security operations are not affected by such leakage of information. But there is this fine balance which has to be struck and we have so far been managing that. Many retired officers who are in these sensitive organisations actually informally get their draft vetted by the current head of the security services, so that there is no information which is of operational nature and could get compromised. The government has now put it down in a formal manner and we have to see how it goes.
So, you are in favour of some kind of restrictions. The recent announcement makes this restriction lifelong, and the word ‘sensitive’ is left open to subjective interpretations...
•G.K. Pillai: I would put a time limit — say, five years from the time you retire. It is the operational information which is actually more sensitive. In five years, it won’t be of concern in most cases.
Unlike in the U.S., for instance, books by former intelligence officials are infrequent in India. Given that, how do you see the move, Ambassador?
•Syed Akbaruddin: The tradition of understanding history through eyewitness accounts is not new. That tradition, unfortunately, in the past, as far as India is concerned, has been weakened. We gain and the public is better informed of activities, including those taken for the benefit of our own country’s interests, when information is shared from different perspectives. And that should be the broad theme.
•Increasingly, a large number of people at different levels have returned to the tradition. The former Leader of the Opposition, L.K. Advani, has written an excellent book about his own experiences, for instance. There is always tension between the government’s desire to keep information secret on national security grounds and the public’s right to information held by public authorities. But there is a near-universal consensus among decision-makers, not only in India but elsewhere too, that some measure of secrecy is necessary to protect authorised national security activities such as intelligence gathering, military operations, sometimes confidentiality of deliberations and sometimes personal privacy.
So, in a democracy, the public has a right to know. Questions related to national security are considered holy. We have ongoing debates on how best we can ensure democratic accountability of security agencies. Is our problem one of too much of information being in the public domain or too little transparency in the functioning of our national security apparatus?
•G.K. Pillai: One way in which information is actually given to the public is through the declassification of files. In the U.S., at the end of 30 years, after a rigorous examination, they declassify most files and make them available in the public domain. In India, we don’t declassify information enough. For example, the Henderson Brooks report on the 1962 conflict with China. It’s been more than 60 years and I really don’t think there’s anything in that report which we should be worried about now. Copies of it are on the Internet. So, why are we keeping it a secret? Similarly, as Home Secretary, I had suggested that we declassify the Justice Mukherjee report on Subhas Chandra Bose and send it to the National Archives.
In democracies like the U.S., there is a challenge that the public will have no way of verifying independently what security agencies put out as information. There is a strong case for increasing transparency, but the direction that democracies in general are taking is the opposite — they want to be in control of more and more information.
•Syed Akbaruddin: Reconciling these divergent interests of national security and the right of the public to know is an ongoing challenge. A stable security policy is always hard to achieve since the boundaries of official secrecy cannot be clearly articulated. And national security issues keep evolving, sometimes dramatically. So, you will always have an unsatisfactory situation regarding this.
•That said, I will go back to where Mr. Pillai mentioned declassification. Now, declassification is an important tool in raising public awareness after a specified period. In our case, there are two issues. One is that we are sometimes less than forthright about declassification. We also over-classify things which perhaps need not have been classified at all. For example, five years ago or maybe less than that, we contested many elections in the UN and one was a very tough election. At that time, we sent some messages, cables, etc. All of that was classified then. But today, everybody knows what happened, the success was ours. Do we still need to keep that classified?
•Coming to the issue of democracies. Now, we need to understand that we don’t want an explosion of deep throats. If you block all avenues of information, or gradually reduce them, you will have to resort to deep throat-kind of activities, which is not good for any society. So, the U.S. itself moved long beyond deep throat. But I think after 9/11, there have been concerns about national security. That’s why a lot of issues relating to national security are being tightened up. So, the phenomenon of non-disclosure of information can be traced back to almost two decades ago. Once you are in that space, it is difficult to roll back because that’s the nature of the beast — that once there is a status quo, you find it difficult to pull back. So, until those are addressed, I would say that this individually will not be addressed so easily.
I think both of you broadly agree that the restrictions that you are favouring must be based on operational calculations. Both of you seem to be okay with the sharing of more information...
•G.K. Pillai: Yeah, I think so. During the 1971 War, every time Pakistan said India was interfering in Bangladesh, we denied it. Once the war was over, a number of books were written on the topic by top Army Commanders, Border Security Force [personnel] and others on how they operated inside Bangladesh. I don’t think the Official Secrets Act has been invoked against anybody who has written about that.
So, we can afford to be much more liberal in terms of declassifying information?
•G.K. Pillai: Declassification is an area where everybody plays safe. I think at least 50% of the top-secret files in the Government of India can be declassified straightaway. Thousands of files were declassified when I was in the Home Ministry, but we still have thousands more which can be declassified. This is not a priority for the department. And that is why I’m also in favour of a time limit.
Do you think compared to other democracies, India is stricter when it comes to sharing official secrets?
•Syed Akbaruddin: If you look at the tradition of these transparency efforts, the first such effort actually goes back to Europe, and by centuries, when parliaments wanted access to the executive authority. However, it was only towards the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century that this proliferation of what we call the right to information in the Indian context took place globally. There are, I think, 95 to 200 countries today which have these disclosure arrangements in place. They still haven’t covered the entire expanse, because there are, of course, caveats to this. But if you see it in the historical context, the availability of information is certainly much more now than it was, say, 25-30 years ago. Whether it is adequate, my answer would be no. Whether it should be expanded — yes. Whether it should be absolute — again, my answer would be no, because no rights to freedom of expression can be absolute; they will always be restricted in certain contexts. It will be best for all of us if these are clarified from time to time, because these circumstances keep evolving and clarification and enunciation of this is a part of the growth of transparency, whether in India or elsewhere.
Both of you are custodians of quite a few official and national secrets which you have accumulated through your careers. I assume that both of you will write books soon. How much will you be willing to reveal and what will be your consideration when it comes to how much to tell? How will you balance public interest and the existing regulations and your own intellectual honesty?
•Syed Akbaruddin: Your assumption is not wrong; I am working on something. As a citizen of a free and democratic country, which is based on the free flow of information and the right of the public to be aware about situations, I would start from the premise that as much as is feasible can be revealed without, of course, revealing national secrets or difficult situations. In policy debates, you may have differences of opinion. Those differences can be reflected without indicating where individuals are involved. I would come from the proposition that greater transparency, greater public awareness, and the tradition of eyewitnesses providing factual perspectives of their own should be my pathway.
P.V. Narasimha Rao once told an interviewer that a lot of secrets will perish with him. How much of the secrets that you know can be shared, Mr. Pillai? More than 50%?
•G.K. Pillai: I think about 80% can be shared. Some 20% can’t be shared partly because the people involved are living contemporaries. And especially if they are in the political sphere, you don’t want either their opponents or them to take advantage of what you have written. So, those are some of the reservations we have. Insofar as general administration, governance issues, policy, etc. are concerned, I don’t think there is much of a problem in trying to put some of those things down. Many IAS officers have done it.
📰 Making peace with nature
A decade of protecting and reviving the ecosystem will help India in various ways
•There has never been a more urgent need to restore damaged ecosystems. The COVID-19 pandemic is a direct result of the degradation of natural areas, species loss, and exploitation. Zoonotic pathogens are more frequently jumping from wildlife to humans, creating public health emergencies. Healthier ecosystems and a healthier respect for the wild spaces of our world will give us a healthier planet and healthier people.
•It is time to change how we cultivate our land, use our soils, exploit coastal and marine ecosystems, and manage our forests. The damage has been done over decades and the destruction cannot be reversed overnight. But we need to start somewhere. That’s why this World Environment Day, the UN Environment Programme and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization launched the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration to prevent, halt and reverse the degradation of ecosystems on every continent and in every ocean.
•India must participate actively in this decade of restoration. Ten years of sustained action to protect and revive the country’s ecosystems will help India to end poverty by enhancing livelihoods, combat climate change by reviving natural carbon stores, and halt the collapse of biodiversity by rebuilding homes for wildlife. Ecosystem restoration benefits people and nature.
Path towards restoration
•Prime Minister Narendra Modi has already set India on this path. In 2019, he announced that India would raise its ambition for restoration, promising an increase in restored degraded land from 21 to 26 million hectares by 2030. There are several steps we can take to build on this commitment. First, there must be a concerted effort to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Climate change is dangerous to humans, but also to the fragile ecosystems that sustain all life on earth. Globally, we must reduce net carbon dioxide emissions by 45% by 2030 compared to 2010. And we must reach net-zero emissions by 2050 to have a hope of achieving the 1.5°C Paris Agreement target. India needs to work towards this by transforming energy systems, land use, agriculture, forest protection, urban development, infrastructure, and lifestyles. Crucially, this has to be aligned with conserving and restoring biodiversity and minimising air and water pollution and waste. Given the interconnectedness of nature, all problems have to be dealt with simultaneously. We already have the goals, targets, commitments, and mechanisms under international environmental conventions that can direct this ambition. Let us use them.
•Second, we need to transform our economic, financial and production systems towards sustainability. Including natural capital in decision-making, eliminating environmentally harmful subsidies, and investing in low-carbon and nature-friendly technologies are key elements of this. By making investments in sustainable development financially attractive, we can shift the financial flows and investment patterns towards sustainability. We already have the knowledge base, the scientific expertise, and the policymaking know-how through national and international scientific bodies that can guide this process. Let us use it.
•Finally, the power to revive our environment lies with us as individuals. For a better future, India must work towards creating food systems that work with nature, reduce waste, and are adaptive to change and resilient to shocks. Empowering small-scale farmers and women farmers, changing patterns of consumption and challenging social norms and business practices are key. This can be achieved through capacity building and education. We already have the power to effect change through cooperation and collaboration, and through changing how we consume, travel and use energy. Let us not shirk this responsibility. As UN Secretary-General António Guterres has stated, making peace with nature is the defining task of the 21st century.
