📰 LCA-Mk2 to roll out next year, first flight in 2023, says scientist
‘Detailed design has been completed and metal cutting is to start shortly’
•The configuration for the Light Combat Aircraft (LCA)-Mk2 has been frozen and steel cutting is expected to begin soon while configuration for the fifth-generation Advanced Medium Combat Aircraft (AMCA) has been frozen and preliminary design completed, a senior scientist from the Aeronautical Development Agency (ADA) has said.
•“The detailed design is complete. In fact, we are in the critical design review stage and metal cutting should start very shortly. Roll-out of the aircraft (Mk2) is planned next year and the first flight in early 2023. We are well on track to achieve these goals,” Girish S. Deodhare, Programme Director (Combat Aircraft) & Director, ADA, said at an event by the Centre for Air Power Studies and Society of Indian Defence Manufacturers.
Enhabced range
•The aircraft features enhanced range and endurance including an onboard oxygen generation system, which is being integrated for the first time, Dr. Deodhare said.
•Heavy weapons of the class of Scalp, Crystal Maze and Spice-2000 will also be integrated on the Mk2. The LCA-Mk2 will be a heavier and much more capable aircraft than the current LCA variants.
•The Mk2 is 1,350 mm longer featuring canards and can carry a payload of 6,500 kg compared to 3,500 kg the LCA can carry.
•In February, the Defence Ministry signed a ₹48,000-crore deal with Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd. (HAL) to supply 83 LCA-Mk1A to the Indian Air Force. In August, the HAL signed a $716 million deal with GE Aviation of the U.S. for 99 F404 aircraft engines and support services to power the Mk-1A. The Mk2 will be powered by a more powerful GE-414 engine.
•The Indian Air Force (IAF) has one squadron of the LCA in initial operational clearance and deliveries of the second squadron in final operational clearance configuration are under way.
•The HAL has already set up a second assembly line to ramp up production from eight aircraft a year to 16. Order for 83 Mk-1A is expected to be completed by 2028-29, Dr. Deodhare said.
Stealth aircraft
•Stating that the initial design of the AMCA was started way back in 2009, Dr. Deodhare said that it would be a twin engine stealth aircraft with an internal weapons bay and a diverterless supersonic intake, which has been developed for the first time for which the design is complete.
•It will be a 25-tonne aircraft with internal carriage of 1,500 kg of payload and 5,500-kg external payload with 6,500 kg of internal fuel.
•On the current status of the AMCA, Dr. Deodhare said the configuration had been frozen, preliminary service quality requirements finalised and preliminary design review completed.
•“We are moving to critical design review by the middle of next year with the roll-out planned in 2024 and first flight planned in 2025.”
•The AMCA will have stealth and non-stealth configuration and will be developed in two phases, AMCA Mk1 with existing GE414 engine and an AMCA Mk2 with an advanced, more powerful engine to be developed later along with a foreign partner, Dr. Deodhare added.
•The manufacturing and production of the aircraft will be through a special purpose vehicle, which will also have participation of private industry.
•Simultaneously, the project for development of a twin-engine deck-based fighter jet meant to fly from the Navy’s aircraft carriers is also making progress. On the various programmes under way, Dr. Deodhare said there was commonality of systems and technologies.
Experts welcome major overhaul of B.Sc. Nursing curriculum, aimed at standardisation
•India’s B.Sc (nursing programme) has undergone its first major overhaul after 1947, making it a competency-based nursing curriculum. To be implemented from January 2022, the revised curriculum has been standardised, updated and aimed at bringing in uniformity in nursing education across India.
•Medical ethics has been introduced for the first time.
•The new system now adopts a credit-based, semester pattern with more emphasis on acquiring competency in each area of study. Also, forensic nursing and nursing informatics have been introduced in the syllabus.
•Dr. Satendra Singh who teaches in a medical college and is a guest faculty at Florence Nightingale Nursing School at GTB Hospital, said the Indian Nursing Council (INC) has revised, and developed the syllabus under Section 16 of the Indian Nursing Council (INC) Act, to ensure uniform standard of nursing education in the country.
•“The revised syllabus, which is the first major overhaul after 1947, has the word “dignity’ in at least six places which is a welcome addition and the introduction of ethics is also an enhanced addition,” said Dr. Singh.
Disability ignored
•He added that unfortunately the revised curriculum does not include disability rights as well as disability competencies.
•“It still includes the pejorative expressions ‘handicapped’, ‘mentally challenged’ and physically challenged. The Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act mandates inclusion of disability rights in the higher education. Curriculum also excludes gender expression and identity components which Transgender Persons Act mandates be included,” he said.
•Member of the INC and Professor (Dr.) Roy K. George said the changes will add quality and standardisation to the programme.
•He said that based on the new curriculum, simulation based training is given specific importance in practical (10% of the practical are in the simulation lab).
Only Science students
•“So students will go to the clinical area after the compulsory training in the simulation laboratories. Also the gazette does not permit the admission for non-science background students for B.Sc. Nursing program and minimum qualifying marks for entrance test shall be 50%. In the university theory paper pattern (For 75 marks), multiple choice questions have been added,” said Dr. George.
•He added that internal assessment guidelines will now see continuous assessment based on attendance, written assignments, seminars, microteaching, individual presentation and group project, work and reports.
•“The new system has also brought in mandatory modules for each specialisation and the student has to pass in all mandatory modules placed within courses and the pass mark for each module is 50%,” he said.
•As per the new norms, colleges of nursing should mandatorily have 100 bedded parent or own hospitals. The trustee/ member/ director of the trust or society or company would not allow the hospital to be treated parent/ affiliated hospital to any other nursing institution and will be for a minimum 30 years. The beds of parent hospital shall be in one Unitary Hospital i.e. in the same building/same campus.
•The revised rules also state that no institution or university will modify the syllabi prescribed by the Council for a course or program. However they can add units or subjects if required.
•“It is mandatory that an institution shall have its own building within two years of its establishment,” the revised rule states.
📰 Cleaning the Yamuna: A story of missed deadlines
Though only around 22 km of the 1,400-km river flows between Wazirabad and Okhla in Delhi, the national capital accounts for 76% of the pollution load on the river. Numerous projects have been launched to clean the river but they have so far yielded little to no results
•The draft NCR Regional Plan-2041 prepared by the National Capital Region Planning Board (NCRPB) has fixed 2026 as the new deadline to ensure ‘zero discharge of untreated sewage and industrial discharge into the Yamuna’.
•The story of cleaning up the Yamuna has so far been that of missed deadlines. The first Yamuna Action Plan (YAP), for which a loan agreement was signed in 1992, was for “improvement of water quality conservation in the river, and hygiene environment in the cities in the river basin”.
•After the first and second plans, YAP-III is presently under way, but the Yamuna is not even fit for bathing in the Delhi stretch, except for Palla — the point where the river enters Delhi — according to city government data.
•On January 19, 2020, in the run up to the Assembly election, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal announced a 10-point guarantee card and said: “The Yamuna will be cleaned and made pollution-free. We promise that after five years, anyone will be able to take a dip in the Yamuna without fear of diseases due to dirty water.”
•But currently, levels of fecal coliform (microbes from human and animal excreta) is beyond the desirable levels in all points except for Palla. At some points, the concentration is 760 times the desirable level.
•On March 9, during his budget speech, Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia said: “The Yamuna can now be cleaned completely within the next three years.”
•Officials say the Yamuna can be cleaned, but experts say it cannot be done with “business as usual” attitude. “We can clean the Yamuna and I will say that with a very big ‘but’. The way things are right now, it is not going to happen, but it can be done if the government really wants to do it,” said Manoj Misra, convener of the Yamuna Jiye Abhiyaan, a civil society initiative for the river’s rejuvenation.
•The Yamuna originates in the Yamunotri glacier in the Himalayas and travels through Himachal Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Haryana, Rajasthan and Delhi before its confluence with the Ganga.
•Though only 2% of the 1,400-km river flows between Wazirabad and Okhla in Delhi, the city accounts for 76% of the pollution load on the river, as per one of the reports of a monitoring committee formed by the National Green Tribunal (NGT).
•The Supreme Court and the NGT have also pulled up various authorities responsible for cleaning the river for their laxity.
•According to the experts and the committee, two of the major causes of pollution are less water in the river in Delhi and 22 drains dumping sewage and industrial effluents into it.
•To solve the first issue, the water flow has to be increased. The second one can be addressed by treating the sewage and effluents generated in the city.
Missed deadlines
•In 1994, the Supreme Court took cognisance of a newspaper article “Quiet Flows Maily (dirty) Yamuna” and summoned the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) to explain the issue.
•Later, various stakeholders, including the Delhi government, the Delhi Jal Board (DJB), the Delhi municipal corporations, and the Uttar Pradesh and Haryana governments became part of the case.
•In a judgment on January 13, 2015, on a case filed by Mr. Misra, the NGT formed the ‘Maily se nirmal (from dirty to clean) Yamuna Revitalisation Plan, 2017’, which was set to be completed by March 31, 2017. But that did not happen and the NGT, in July 2018, formed a monitoring panel headed by two retired bureaucrats to primarily implement the 2015 judgment. The NGT dissolved the committee in January 2021 and directed Chief Secretaries of various States monitor the progress.
Sewage problem
•In Delhi, it is the duty of the DJB to treat the city’s sewage.
•Though the city generates 720 million gallons per day (MGD) of sewage, the Sewage Treatment Plants have a capacity of 597.26 MGD. Of the total capacity, 514.2 MGD is utilised (86%), leaving about 123 MGD of untreated sewage into the river, according to the DJB.
•Multiple deadlines have been missed by the DJB too, though there is progress.
•The DJB had told the NGT’s monitoring panel that it will increase the utilisation of the existing STPs to 99% by June 2019, but more than two years after the deadline, it stands at 86%.
•Similarly, the Interceptor Sewer Project (ISP), which has been in the plans since 2006, has been delayed multiple times.
•“Entire flow (of sewage in drains) shall be trapped and treated by March 2023 after construction/rehabilitation of Coronation Pillar, Rithala and Kondli STP under YAP-III,” reads a July report of the Delhi government, which states that the project is “completed”.
•Similarly, there are around 1,700 unauthorised colonies in Delhi with a total population of around 40 lakh. Currently, only 561 of these colonies have sewer lines; in the other localities, sewage is dumped directly into the Yamuna via drains. In 595 colonies, work is in progress on laying sewage pipes.
•Mr. Misra, however, said untreated effluents from industries are more toxic. “The government counts only the industries in the industrial area when they say all of them have Effluent Treatment Plants (ETPs), but there are hundreds of illegal industries in residential areas and all across Delhi, whose waste ends up in the Yamuna,” he said.
More water
•If there is more water in the river, it can dilute the pollutants. To assess the minimum required environmental flow of the Yamuna for the stretch between Hathinikund in Haryana to Okhla in Delhi, a study was assigned by the National Mission for Clean Ganga (NMCG) to the National Institute of Hydrology (NIH), Roorkee, in December 2018.
•As per the final draft report of the NIH, a flow of 23 cusecs is needed in the lean season, but increasing the flow is not that easy due to existing interstate water treaties.
•“Ministry of Jal Shakti has observed that the water-sharing agreement of 1994 between Uttarakhand, H.P., U.P., Haryana, Rajasthan and Delhi is due for revision in 2025 unless any of the States so demand, implying that no revision of water sharing will be possible to achieve the environmental flow in the Yamuna,” the July report reads.
•“Zero untreated discharge into Yamuna is a tall order, considering that the DJB is notorious for giving deadlines and then extending it. But it can be done. For instance, to increase the flow of water, all States have to come together and think about the river and not them, but it needs political will,” Mr. Misra said.
📰 A selective nuclear policy
The protracted stand-off over North Korea reinforces the hollowness of the doctrine of deterrence
•The resumption of North Korea’s largest fissile material production reactor, after operations were ceased in December 2018, has sparked speculation about its real and symbolic significance. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has underlined that the restart of activity in Yongbyon constitutes a violation of UN Security Council resolutions.
•This is the same reactor that the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, in a bilateral summit in 2019 with then U.S. President Donald Trump, offered to fully dismantle in exchange for securing complete relief from international economic sanctions, but to little avail. The ageing five-megawatt reactor at the Yongbyon complex has been central to the North Korean reprocessing of spent fuel rods to generate plutonium, besides the production of highly enriched uranium for the development of atomic bombs. But observers also point to the diversification of the country’s nuclear weapons and missile programmes to covert locations over time. Hence, they are cautious not to exaggerate the importance of the recent reopening.
Confusion over motives
•Indeed, the opaque nature of Pyongyang’s nuclear programme partly accounts for the current confusion over the motives behind the restart of the reactor. In June 2008, in order to buttress its denuclearisation commitment to the U.S. and four other countries, Pyongyang blew up the cooling tower at the Yongbyon complex. The move did little to assuage the concerns of critics, either regarding the plutonium stockpile the regime had amassed or its engagement in clandestine nuclear proliferation.
•But it nevertheless led former U.S. President George W. Bush to ease some sanctions against North Korea, which he had in 2002 dubbed part of the “axis of evil”. More controversial was Washington’s decision to revoke, less than two years after Pyongyang’s first nuclear explosion of 2006, the designation of “state sponsor of terrorism”. North Korea was placed on the terrorism list after the 1987 bombing of a South Korean airplane.
•A few months after blowing up the cooling tower in 2008, Pyongyang barred IAEA inspectors access to its reprocessing plant in the Yongbyon complex and eventually expelled them the following April. In November 2010 American scientist Siegfried Hecker confirmed accounts that North Korea had rapidly built a uranium enrichment plant at Yongbyon.
•The above sequence of developments was almost a rerun of events nearly a decade earlier. In 1994, Pyongyang barred IAEA access to the Yongbyon complex amid suspicions that the country was generating plutonium from spent fuel. The U.S. had initially planned pre-emptive precision strikes on the nuclear sites, but was deterred against such a misadventure by a blueprint for a peace deal brokered by President Jimmy Carter. The so-called 1994 Agreed Framework, an executive agreement signed by President Bill Clinton, required Pyongyang to freeze all nuclear activity and allow inspection of its military sites in return for the construction of two light water reactors. The accord broke down in 2002.
Pragmatic path
•The Biden administration has adopted a pragmatic path of declaring its readiness to resume negotiations with Pyongyang without the grandiose distractions of the Trump era that amounted to exerting little diplomatic leverage. Meanwhile, Mr. Kim has spurned all such overtures until he can win concrete relief from sanctions, especially those relating to raw materials exports. Apart from the punitive impact of such measures on an impoverished people, the protracted stand-off over North Korea reinforces the hollowness of the doctrine of deterrence and begs the question whether proliferation can ever be prevented just because nuclear weapons states want to perpetuate their dominance. The UN treaty on complete abolition of atomic arms, whose deliberations were boycotted by all nuclear weapons states, is the morally superior alternative.
📰 A global war on terror with no tangible results
If anything, the U.S.-led war has made the world less safe with the scourge of transnational terrorism spreading deeper
•On the day the United States marked two decades since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the Taliban triumphantly hoisted their flag over the Afghan presidential palace to start off their new regime. The unprecedented 9/11 attacks prompted the U.S. not only to invade landlocked, strategically located Afghanistan but also to launch a global war on terror. Yet, the U.S.-led war on terror has yielded no tangible results.
A President’s ‘blunder’
•If anything, it has made the world less safe. The scourge of transnational terrorism has only spread deeper and wider in the world. In fact, the U.S. President Joe Biden’s blunder in facilitating the terrorist takeover of Afghanistan raises the nagging question whether the seeds of another 9/11 have been sown.
•Mr. Biden will be remembered in history for making the world’s deadliest terrorists — the Pakistan-reared Taliban — great again. Historians will be baffled that the U.S. expended considerable blood and treasure in a protracted war to ultimately help its enemy ride triumphantly back to power. The war killed 2,448 American soldiers, 1,144 allied troops, more than 66,000 Afghan security personnel, and countless numbers of civilians.
•The Taliban’s defeat of the world’s most powerful military represents the greatest victory of violent Islamists in the modern history of jihadism, with the Taliban calling it “the most joyful day of our existence”. The triumph over the “Great Satan” is certain to inspire other Islamist and terrorist groups across the world.
It is worrying allies
•America’s close partner, India, with its location right next to the Afghanistan-Pakistan belt, is likely to be one big loser from Mr. Biden’s Afghan debacle. The rejuvenated epicentre for terrorism next door could leave India less space to counter an expansionist China at a time when Indian and Chinese forces remain locked in multiple border standoffs since last year.
•Despite the Afghan fiasco, Mr. Biden plans to withdraw from Iraq this year, in keeping with what he declared in his August 31 address to the nation: “This decision about Afghanistan is not just about Afghanistan. It’s about ending an era of major military operations to remake other countries.” This realignment of strategic objectives is rattling allies — from Taiwan to Ukraine — who fear being abandoned the way the U.S. threw the Afghan government under the bus.
•Afghanistan may not be the last blunder of the Biden presidency. Robert Gates, who served as Secretary of Defense under U.S. Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, wrote in a 2014 memoir that Mr. Biden “has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades”. Mr. Gates has proved right.
•In fact, al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, in a May 2010 letter found in his Pakistan compound after he was killed by U.S. forces, advised al Qaeda not to target then-Vice President Biden, hoping he would one day become President. “Biden is totally unprepared for that post, which will lead the U.S. into a crisis,” bin Laden wrote. He too has proved correct, to the delight of all jihadists.
Misleading distinctions
•Mr. Biden, like his predecessors since 2001, has disregarded the lessons of 9/11. This is apparent from Mr. Biden’s attempts to paint the Taliban as “good” terrorists and ISIS-K (Islamic State Khorasan), al Qaeda and the Haqqani Network as “bad” terrorists. He even claimed that “ISIS-K terrorists” are “sworn enemies of the Taliban”, ignoring the Pentagon’s acknowledgment that one of the Taliban’s first actions after conquest was to free thousands of ISIS-K prisoners from Afghan jails.
•The misleading distinctions Mr. Biden has sought to draw between interlinked terrorist groups are part of his administration’s public relations campaign to downplay the implications of the Taliban conquest. Indeed, extending its good-terrorists-versus-bad-terrorists thesis, Team Biden has sought to court the Taliban as America’s new partner to help contain the “bad” guys, with United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken saying publicly that the U.S. is ready to work on “counterterrorism” with the Taliban.
•This flies in the face of a key 9/11 lesson — that the viper reared against one state is a viper against others. Drawing distinctions between those who threaten U.S. security and those who threaten others is a sure recipe for failure, as terrorist cells and networks must be targeted wherever they exist on a sustained basis in order to achieve enduring results against the forces of global jihad.
Terror interconnections
•In reality, the Taliban are closely entwined with other terror groups. As a United Nations Security Council report has said, “the Taliban and al-Qaida remain closely aligned” and cooperate through the Haqqani Network. Since their victory, the Taliban have not only refused to utter a critical word about al Qaeda but also have claimed there is “no proof” that bin Laden was responsible for 9/11.
•The Taliban and Haqqani Network are not “two separate entities,” as the State Department has claimed, but closely integrated, as the line-up of the new Cabinet ministers shows. And, although Mr. Biden sought to insulate the Taliban from the Kabul Airport bombing (August 26) by quickly pinning the blame on ISIS-K, the fact is that ISIS-K has little relationship with the ISIS founded by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Rather, as part of Pakistani intelligence’s deception operations to build plausible deniability in terror attacks, ISIS-K draws its cadres largely from the Haqqani Network.
•Afghanistan is set to again become a haven for transnational terrorists under an all-male regime dominated by former Guantanamo inmates and U.N.-listed or U.S.-designated terrorists, including the interim Prime Minister who was instrumental in the 2001 destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas. The world is reaping the bitter fruits of a geopolitics-driven war on terror.
On the anniversary
•The 20th anniversary of 9/11 should have been an occasion to reflect on the forgotten lessons of those attacks, including the importance of not coddling terrorism-supporting regimes. With the global war on terror having gone off the rails, the anniversary was also a reminder of the imperative to build a new international consensus to help drain the terrorism-breeding swamps. It is not too late for western powers to absorb the lessons from national policies that gave rise to Frankenstein’s monsters.
