📰 New plan to save jumbos from train hits
Geographical patterns to be analysed; measures that can be implemented by Railways to be proposed
•With 186 elephants officially reported to have been killed in collisions with trains in the past decade, the Environment and Railway Ministries are exploring a project to minimise the number of such accidents.
•While piecemeal measures have been taken in States, the latest initiative is to analyse patterns geographically and propose measures that the Railways can feasibly implement.
•The Wildlife Institute of India (WII), Dehradun, an autonomous body, and the Environment Ministry have had an initial round of discussions with Railway officials, said S.P. Yadav of the National Tiger Conservation Authority.
•Bilal Habib, a scientist at the WII and one of the leaders of the project, said a draft document was expected to be readied in July. A preliminary analysis showed the States with the highest elephant numbers were not always the ones with the most deaths. Assam, West Bengal and Uttarakhand were hilly States that saw the most number of casualties, Mr. Habib said. Slopes were a tricky terrain for elephants and when the animals attempted to cross railway lines, they lingered longer near or on tracks resulting in collisions. “An elephant is the only mammal with six toes, one of which is exclusively for gripping slopes. Due to this, they take more time to descend slopes and when tracks are located at such locations, they tend to result in accidents,” Mr. Habib said.
•Creating underpasses or dedicated elephant passes near existing lines are not always feasible for the Railways, given the expenses, as it required as much as 20 km of pathway on either side of the track.
•Mr. Yadav cited instances of elephants refusing to abandon their young were they to get trapped on the lines, resulting in casualties.
•In response to questions raised in Parliament on such collisions, the government said that it had put in place measures, such as providing fencing at selected locations, erecting signage boards to warn locomotive pilots about identified elephant corridors, sensitising train crew and stationmasters on a regular basis, clearing vegetation on the sides of the track within railway land, deputing a Forest Department staffer in Railway control offices to liaison with Railway, and have the Forest Department engage elephant trackers for timely action by alerting stationmasters and locomotive pilots.
Data show rate of joblessness fell to 4.2% in 2020-21, compared with 4.8% earlier
•The unemployment rate saw a decrease of 0.6% and fell to 4.2% in 2020-21, compared with 4.8% in 2019-20, according to the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) for 2020-21 released by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation here on Tuesday.
•This means that only 4.2% of adults who looked for jobs could not get any work in rural and urban areas of the country in 2020-21.
•Rural areas recorded an unemployment rate of 3.3% and urban areas 6.7%.
•The National Statistical Office (NSO) uses “rotational panel sampling design” in urban areas to assess the labour force participation rate (LFPR), worker population ratio (WPR) and the unemployment rate, and visits select households in urban areas four times. There was, however, no revisit for the rural samples.
•The sample size for the first visit during July 2020-June 2021 in rural and urban areas was 12,800 first-stage sampling units (FSU) in 7,024 villages and 5,776 urban frame survey blocks.
First-stage sampling
•Out of this, 12,562 FSUs (6,930 villages and 5,632 urban blocks) were surveyed for canvassing the PLFS schedule.
•“The number of households surveyed was 1,00,344 (55,389 in rural areas and 44,955 in urban areas) and number of persons surveyed was 4,10,818 (2,36,279 in rural areas and 1,74,539 in urban areas),” the Ministry said in a release.
•The LFPR, the percentage of persons in the labour force (that is, working or seeking work or available for work) in the population, was 41.6% during 2020-21. It was 40.1% in the previous year. The WPR was 39.8%, an increase from 38.2% of the previous year. The WPR is defined as the percentage of employed persons in the population.
•Migrants are defined in the survey as a household member whose last usual place of residence, at any time in the past, was different from the present place of enumeration. The migration rate, according to the survey, is 28.9%. The migration rate among women was 48% and 47.8% in rural and urban areas, respectively.
Rural jobs
•Experts point out that a second visit to the households in rural areas could have provided a bigger and larger picture of unemployment, which did not happen in the survey.
•“Overall, the report suggests shifting the government’s policy directions as it has become more rural-centric. Creation of rural jobs other than in the agricultural sector and MGNREGA (Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act) could be priorities for the government at the Union and State levels,” Sridhar Kundu, senior research analyst at the Indian School of Business, said.
📰 Centre clears Agnipath scheme
‘Agniveers’ can apply for regular employment after 4 years and may get priority
•Defence Minister Rajnath Singh on Tuesday announced the ‘Agnipath’ scheme for recruitment of youth in the armed forces for four years. The process of recruitment will commence in 90 days with a planned intake of 46,000 young men and women this year. This will be the only form of recruitment of soldiers into the three defence services from now.
•Mr. Singh said the scheme was aimed at strengthening national security and for providing an opportunity to the youth to serve in the armed forces. Recruits under the scheme will be known as ‘Agniveers’. After completing the four-year service, they can apply for regular employment in the armed forces. They may be given priority over others for various jobs in other government departments.
•The move is expected to decrease the average age profile of armed forces personnel from the current 32 to 24-26 years over a period of time, Lieutenant-General Anil Puri, Additional Secretary, Department of Military Affairs, said. Enrolment to all three services will be through a centralised online system, with special rallies and campus interviews at recognised technical institutes such as the Industrial Training Institutes, and the National Skills Qualifications Framework, Lt. Gen. Puri said. Recruitment will be carried out on an “All India All Class” basis with the eligibility age ranging from 17.5 to 21, with medical and physical fitness standards in accordance with existing norms.
•The ‘Agniveers’will receive an annual package of ₹4.76 lakh in the first year to ₹6.92 lakh in the fourth year, apart from risk and hardship and other allowances as applicable. Under the ‘Seva Nidhi’ package, they will receive about ₹11.71 lakh, including contribution and interest, on completion of service. The recruits will have to contribute 30% of their monthly emoluments to Seva Nidhi, with a matching contribution made by the government. There will be no entitlement to gratuity and pension benefits under the scheme. However, the ‘Agniveers’ will be provided a non-contributory life insurance cover of ₹48 lakh during their service.
•Total budget allocation for defence for 2022-23 is ₹5.25 lakh crore, of which revenue allocation is ₹2.33 lakh crore, capital allocation is ₹1.52 lakh crore, and defence pensions add up to ₹1.19 lakh crore.
📰 Can the new Google chatbot be sentient?
Is there a possibility of future Artificial Intelligence technologies becoming ‘conscious’?
•LaMDA, Google’s modern conversational agent is enabled with a neural network capable of deep learning. LaMDA is Google’s answer to the quest for developing a non-goal directed chatbot that dialogues on various subjects. Such advanced software could revolutionise customer interaction and help AI-enabled internet search.
•With access to big data and a powerful processor, deep learning softwares can learn by itself, unsupervised by humans, by sorting and sifting through massive data and finding hidden patterns. Google claims that LaMDA can make sense of nuanced conversation and engage in a natural conversation. However, these seemingly human-like agents rely on pattern recognition, not empathy, wit, candour or intent.
•The challenges of AI metamorphosing into sentient are far in the future; however, unethical AI perpetuating historical bias and echoing hate speech are the real dangers to watch for.
•The story so far: Blake Lemoine, a U.S. military veteran, identifies himself as a priest, an ex-convict and an Artificial Intelligence (AI) researcher. He was engaged by Google to test for bias/hate speech in the Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA), Google’s nextGen conversational agent. He was sent away on paid leave after claiming that the updated software is now sentient. He claims that the neural network with deep learning capacity has the consciousness of a child of seven or eight years old. He argues that consent from the software must be obtained before experiments are run on it. Google and many tech experts have dismissed the claim. However, this episode, which came on the heels of Google firing Timnit Gebru over her warnings on their unethical AI, has caused ripples in social media.
Is AI technology here?
•AI technology appears futuristic. However, Facebook’s facial recognition software which identifies faces in the photos we post, the voice recognition software that translates commands we bark at Alexa, and the Google Translate app are all examples of AI tech already around us.
•Inspired by the mathematician Alan Turing’s answer to the question 'Can a machine think?', AI tech today aims to satisfy the Turing test to qualify as ‘intelligent’. Turing was the designer and builder of the world's first computer, ENIGMA, which was used to break the German codes during the Second World War. To test if a machine 'thinks', Turing devised a practical solution. Place a computer in a closed room and a human in another. If an interrogator interacting with the machine and the human cannot discriminate between them, then Turing said that the computer should be construed as 'intelligent'. We use the reverse Turing test, CAPTCHA, to limit technology access to humans and keep the bots at bay.
Which were the first chatbots to be devised?
•As electronics improved and first-generation computers came about, Joseph Weizenbaum of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory built ELIZA, a computer programme with which users could chat. ALICE (Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity), another early chatbot developed by Richard Wallace, was capable of simulating human interaction. In the 1930s, linguist George Kingsley Zipf analysed the typical human speech and found that most of the utterances began with 2,000 words. Using this information, Wallace theorised that the bulk of commonplace chitchat in everyday interaction was limited. He found that just about 40,000 responses were enough to respond to 95% of what people chatted about. With assistance from about 500 volunteers, Wallace continuously improved ALICE’s responses repertoire by analysing user chats, making the fake conversions look real. The software won the Loebner Prize as “the most human computer” at the Turing Test contests in 2000, 2001, and 2004.
What is a neural network?
•A neural network is an AI tech that attempts to mimic the web of neurons in the brain to learn and behave like humans. Early efforts in building neural networks targeted image recognition. The artificial neural network (ANN) needs to be trained like a dog before being commanded. For example, during the image recognition training, thousands of specific cat images are broken down to pixels and fed into the ANN. Using complex algorithms, the ANN’s mathematical system extracts particular characteristics like the line that curves from right to left at a certain angle, edges or several lines that merge to form a larger shape from each cat image. The software learns to recognise the key patterns that delineate what a general ‘cat’ looks like from these parameters.
•Early machine learning software needed human assistance. The training images had to be labelled as ‘cats’, ‘dogs’ and so on by humans before being fed into the system. In contrast, access to big data and a powerful processor is enough for the emerging deep learning softwares. The App learns by itself, unsupervised by humans, by sorting and sifting through the massive data and finding the hidden patterns.
What is LaMDA?
•LaMDA is short for 'Language Model for Dialogue Applications', Google's modern conversational agent enabled with a neural network capable of deep learning. Instead of images of cats and dogs, the algorithm is trained using 1.56 trillion words of public dialogue data and web text on diverse topics. The neural network built on Google's open-source neural network, Transformer, extracted more than 137 billion parameters from this massive database of language data. The chatbot is not yet public, but users are permitted to interact with it. Google claims that LaMDA can make sense of nuanced conversation and engage in a fluid and natural conversation. The LaMDA 0.1 was unveiled at Google's annual developer conference in May 2021, and the LaMDA 0.2 in 2022.
How is LaMDA different from other chatbots?
•Chatbots like 'Ask Disha' of the Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation Limited (IRCTC) are routinely used for customer engagement. The repertoire of topics and chat responses is narrow. The dialogue is predefined and often goal-directed. For instance, try chatting about the weather with Ask Disha or about the Ukrainian crisis with the Amazon chat app. LaMDA is Google’s answer to the quest for developing a non-goal directed chatbot that dialogues on various subjects. The chatbot would respond the way a family might when they chat over the dinner table; topics meandering from the taste of the food to price rise to bemoaning war in Ukraine. Such advanced conversational agents could revolutionise customer interaction and help AI-enabled internet search, Google hopes.
How intelligent are AI’s?
•The Turing test is a powerful motivator for developing practical AI tools. However, scholars, such as philosopher John Searle, use the ‘Chinese Room Argument’ to demonstrate that passing the Turing test is inadequate to qualify as intelligent.
•Once I used Google Translate to read WhatsApp messages in French from a conference organiser in France and in turn replied back to her in French. For some time, she was fooled into thinking that I could speak French. I would have passed the ‘Turing test’, but no sane person would claim that I know French. This is an example of the Chinese room experiment. The imitation game goes only so far.
•Further scholars point out that AI tech uses a false analogy of learning. A baby learns a language from close interaction with caregivers and not by ploughing through a massive amount of language data. Moreover, whether intelligence is the same as sentience is a moot question. However, the seemingly human-like conversational agents rely on pattern recognition, not empathy, wit, candour or intent.
Is the technology dangerous?
•The challenges of AI metamorphosing into sentient are far in the future; however, unethical AI perpetuating historical bias and echoing hate speech are the real dangers to watch for. Imagine an AI software trained with past data to select the most suitable candidates from applicants for a supervisory role. Women and marginalised communities hardly would have held such positions in the past, not because they were unqualified, but because they were discriminated against. While we imagine the machine to have no bias, AI software learning from historical data could inadvertently perpetuate discrimination.
📰 Elderly lack financial, social security: study
52% of those surveyed reported inadequate income; 40% said they did not feel financially secure
•A national survey carried out by HelpAge India has shown that 47% of elderly people are economically dependent on their families for income and 34% relied on pensions and cash transfers, while 40% of the surveyed people have expressed a desire to work “as long as possible”, highlighting the need to pay greater attention to social security of senior citizens in the country.
•The report, released by Social Justice and Empowerment Ministry Secretary R. Subrahmanyam on the eve of World Elder Abuse Awareness Day, was based on a survey conducted by the non-governmental organisation with the involvement of 4,399 senior citizens and 2,200 caregivers across 22 cities.
•The report said that 52% of the elderly surveyed reported inadequate income; 40% said they did not feel financially secure; 57% said their expenditure was in excess of their savings; and 45% said the pension amount was not enough for survival.
•“This suggests both financial planning for later years and social security needs much greater attention,” HelpAge India said in a statement, adding that it had been advocating for a universal pension of ₹3,000 a month.
•The survey also found that 71% of senior citizens were not working, while 36% were willing to work and 40% wanted to work “as long as possible”. As much as 30% of the elders were willing to volunteer their time for various social causes.
•“One good news is that 87% elders reported there is availability of healthcare facilities nearby, however 78% elders mentioned unavailability of app-based online healthcare facilities and a significant 67% elderly reported they do not have any health insurance at this critical stage in their lives and only 13% are covered under government insurance schemes,” HelpAge India said.
•The report highlighted the way elder abuse is perceived and reported — 59% of elders felt that elder abuse was “prevalent” in society, but 10% reported being victims themselves.
📰 Dictates for doctors
The draft regulations for professional conduct of doctors require extensive reworking
•The National Medical Commission (NMC) has published a draft of the regulations it proposes for the professional conduct of doctors and invited comments by June 22. Chapters 2 to 6 deal with the professional conduct of doctors, the duties of registered medical practitioners towards their patients, the responsibilities of doctors to each other, the responsibilities of doctors to the public and allied health professionals, and professional misconduct, respectively.
Areas that need reworking
•Much in these chapters is similar to the existing regulations of the erstwhile Medical Council of India. The requirement for every registered medical practitioner to maintain patient records for three years from the last consultation will be difficult to implement for most general practitioners who provide high-quality services at low prices and depend on high volumes of patients to earn a decent income. It will reduce the number of patients who can be attended to, add considerably to costs, and delay treatment. This measure is unwise and should be withdrawn. In the section on informed consent, the statement that “in an operation that may result in sterility, the consent of both husband and wife is required” is poorly thought out and must be redrafted. It is possible that the person requiring such surgery may be single. Even if the individual is married, this regulation is contrary to the principle of individual autonomy.
•Following the chapters detailed above, there are 11 guidelines. These guidelines are a curious mix of templates for certificates and extensive instructions. It is interesting that guideline 3, the NMC code of medical ethics, has dropped the controversial Charak Shapath and returned to the Declaration of Geneva. This is a wise move. India is a founder member of the World Medical Association and contributed to the drafting of the declaration. The guidelines on continuous professional development resemble an edict. All practitioners of medicine need to keep abreast of evolving knowledge in medicine to provide competent care to patients. Such continuing education must be sensitive to the needs of the practising doctor. It cannot be a repetition of college education. The rules suggested demonstrate a schoolteacher’s approach with excessive regulation and control. Renaming continuing medical education as continuing professional development is symptomatic of this bureaucratic approach. Typically, medical practitioners utilise a variety of media to enhance knowledge. The easy availability of high-quality content on the Internet has greatly enhanced accessibility. Medical practitioners are mature learners and do not need the stick to be forced to learn.
•A committee, the draft says, will decide who can impart continuing education and what the content of such education should be. This lays the foundation for the creation of a new set of rent-seekers who will create such content, get it approved by the committee and sell it to the medical professional who has no option but to undergo these courses. Recertification has been required in the U.S. since 2000. Studies have shown that the major beneficiaries have been corporate programmes licensed by the American Board of Medical Specialties called Maintenance of Certification. The experience in the U.S. demonstrates that there is no value in recertification. It is unclear why India should follow a path known to be useless. This guideline should be removed if not extensively reworked.
Lack of harmony
•The blanket prohibition on medical practitioners participating in educational activities sponsored directly or indirectly by pharmaceutical companies and the allied health sector will severely restrict access to the latest developments. It is true that there is much literature on the malign influence of pharmaceutical companies and medical device makers on medical decision-making but prohibiting information flow is unlikely to counter this influence. It is wiser to provide guidelines on such education. In the guidelines on social media, the prohibition of sending scan images on social media will considerably impair communication and needs rethinking.
•The guidelines on telemedicine read more like a briefing paper than a guideline. It is one of the most elaborate sections and there is some repetition, but it provides a good framework in a type of medical consultation that became somewhat common during the COVID-19 pandemic.
•There is a lack of harmony in the draft. The first part, the regulations, read like typical bureaucratese. The guidelines on comprehensive professional development have a schoolmarm air, and the one on telemedicine reads like a chapter from a textbook. In summary, the draft needs extensive reworking.
📰 Malnutrition in India is a worry in a modern scenario
The country’s response to its burden of malnutrition and growing anaemia has to be practical and innovative
•Good nutrition has the power to empower the present and future generations. India’s greatest national treasure is its people — especially women and children — but even after 75 years of independence, a majority of them do not get the required diet to meet their nutritional needs. A child’s nutritional status is directly linked to their mother. Poor nutrition among pregnant women affects the nutritional status of the child and has a greater chance to affect future generations. Undernourished children are at risk of under-performing in studies and have limited job prospects. This vicious cycle restrains the development of the country, whose workforce, affected mentally and physically, has reduced work capacity.
Marginal improvement
•While there has been some progress in tackling malnutrition among children and women over the past decade, the improvement has been modest at best. This is despite declining rates of poverty, increased self-sufficiency in food production, and the implementation of a range of government programmes. The National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5) has shown marginal improvement in different nutrition indicators, indicating that the pace of progress is slow. Children in several States are more undernourished now than they were five years ago.
Stunting, wasting, anaemia
•While there was some reduction in stunting rates (35.5% from 38.4% in NFHS-4) 13 States or Union Territories have seen an increase in stunted children since NFHS-4; this includes Gujarat, Maharashtra, West Bengal and Kerala. (Stunting is defined as low height-for-age.) Malnutrition trends across NFHS surveys show that wasting, the most visible and life-threatening form of malnutrition, has either risen or has remained stagnant over the years (Wasting is defined as low weight-for-height).
•India also has the highest prevalence of anaemia in the world (Anaemia is defined as the condition in which the number of red blood cells or the haemoglobin concentration within them is lower than normal). The NFHS-5 survey indicates that more than 57% of women (15-49 years) and over 67% children (six-59 months) suffer from anaemia. My home State, Assam, is among the low-performing States, with a huge burden of anaemic cases — 66.4% of women (15-49 years) and 68.4% children (6-59 months) are affected. It is imperative to introspect about these problems, which remain persistent, pervasive, and serious. Anaemia has major consequences in terms of human health and development: it reduces the work capacity of individuals, in turn impacting the economy and overall national growth. Developing countries lose up to 4.05% in GDP per annum due to iron deficiency anaemia; India loses up to 1.18% of GDP annually.
Step up the financing
•There is a greater need now to increase investment in women and children’s health and nutrition to ensure their sustainable development and improved quality of life. While the Government’s focus has been on the consolidation of several programmes to improve outcomes, there is a need for increased financial commitment. Experts have pointed out that Saksham Anganwadi and the Prime Minister’s Overarching Scheme for Holistic Nourishment (POSHAN) 2.0 programme have seen only a marginal increase in budgetary allocation this year (₹20,263 crore from ₹20,105 crore in 2021-22). Additionally, 32% of funds released under POSHAN Abhiyaan to States and Union Territories have not been utilised.
Monitor constituencies too
•India must adopt an outcome-oriented approach on nutrition programmes. It is crucial that parliamentarians begin monitoring needs and interventions in their constituencies and raise awareness on the issues, impact, and solutions to address the challenges at the local level. There has to be direct engagement with nutritionally vulnerable groups (this includes the elderly, pregnant women, those with special needs and young children), and contribute toward ensuring last-mile delivery of key nutrition services and interventions. This will ensure greater awareness on the one hand and proper planning and implementation of programmes at the grass-roots level on the other, which can then be replicated at the district and national levels.
•With basic education and general awareness, every individual is informed, takes initiatives at the personal level and can become an agent of change. Various studies highlight a strong link between mothers’ education and improved access and compliance with nutrition interventions among children. We must ensure our young population has a competitive advantage; nutrition and health are foundational to that outcome.
Other steps
•I strongly believe that there should be a process to monitor and evaluate programmes and address systemic and on the ground challenges. As a policymaker, I recommend that a new or existing committee or the relevant standing committees meet and deliberate over effective policy decisions, monitor the implementation of schemes, and review nutritional status across States. The country’s response to malnutrition and its growing anaemia burden should be practical and innovative. This is critical to make an India that is malnutrition-free and anaemia-free a reality, and not just an aspiration. Every one is a stakeholder and should contribute towards ending malnutrition and anaemia. We should not become part of a tragedy that is preventable.
