📰 Crypto came tumbling after
As crypto assets are digital assets, the rate of return is sensitive to changes in the global liquidity conditions
•The precipitous downturn of the crypto market has brought cryptocurrencies back in the news. People wonder if this is the end of the crypto boom. The answer is ‘no’. Cryptocurrency is not really a currency. It is an asset that allows people to keep their money outside the formal financial system and make it accessible so that it can be used anywhere in the world. In today’s world, such an asset would be in great demand until some other asset innovation allows owners to achieve this objective in a more efficient way.
Price increases and decreases
•Crypto assets like Bitcoin have been subject to wide fluctuations in their prices since their inception. The current downturn is not the first of its kind. There have been similar fluctuations in the past. The phenomenal rise in the price of Bitcoin in recent years has dwarfed the fluctuations in its price in the past. The popularity of Bitcoin is obvious from the price differentials with Ethereum and Litecoin. Most of the fluctuations in the price of Bitcoin are brought about by changes in the demand side as the asset’s supply moves very slowly given the enormous cost of mining an additional Bitcoin at this stage.
•The rise in the price of crypto assets began at the onset of the pandemic as people with excess funds parked them in crypto assets. This made sense given the lack of investment opportunities on account of the uncertainty arising from lockdowns. As the COVID-19 spread slowed down, people may have wanted to move their funds out of crypto assets and into more lucrative real investment opportunities arising from a recovering economy. This led to the eventual decline in prices. The halt in withdrawal by Celsius especially led to panic among investors as this company is supposed to be one of the biggest crypto lenders.
•Notwithstanding the effects of these specific events, we must acknowledge that a crypto asset is only one of the assets in an individual’s portfolio. Therefore, changes in the general availability of profitable business opportunities and movement in the prices of other assets will definitely affect the price of crypto assets. Recently, there have been changes in the price of an important class of assets: government bonds issued by the governments of developed countries. Many central banks across the developed world have been raising their policy interest rates to combat rising inflation. For example, the Federal Funds Rate was hovering around zero for most of the pandemic. The Federal Reserve raised it recently leading to a sustained rise in the Federal Funds Rate as well as the three- month Treasury Bill Secondary Market Rate.
Safe assets
•Debt raised by developed country governments, especially the U.S. but also by U.K. and Germany, is an important class of assets because these are deemed as safe assets across the world. In an influential paper published in 2017, Ricardo Caballero and Emmanuel Farhi defined a safe asset as a simple debt instrument that is expected to preserve its value during adverse systemic events. As the central banks of these countries raise their policy interest rates, the rate of return is also expected to go up, motivating large institutional investors to buy more of these. Accordingly, these investors would get out of some current investments and use the newly realised liquidity to buy these safe assets.
•U.S. government bonds form a large fraction of safe asset portfolios, such as the portfolios of many central banks including that of India. The world over, demand for safe assets has increased as many developing countries have grown fast and accumulated enormous foreign exchange reserves. These countries then demanded USD-denominated assets to preserve the value of their portfolios. Events like the pandemic only increased the demand further for safe assets. Unfortunately, the supply of safe assets has not kept up with this demand as the developed countries that produce these assets have grown at a much slower rate. Given that there is generally a shortage of safe assets, it is likely that the demand and prices of crypto assets will change frequently as institutions look for alternatives with slight movements in the rate of return on safe assets. For example, Celsius reportedly could not raise additional liquidity because of tightening of interest rates leading to suspension of its operations.
•Overall, investors must understand the nature of crypto assets and their demand and not ignore the interconnectedness of financial markets at the global level. As crypto assets are digital assets that can be mined and transacted from anywhere in the world, the rate of return of crypto assets is more sensitive to changes in the global liquidity conditions than to local conditions.
The Finance Minister should do away with all the confusing tax slabs in one fell swoop
•In December 2018, the late Finance Minister, Arun Jaitley, announced that the 28% GST slab, which he called the “dying slab”, would be phased out, except for luxury items. India, he said, would eventually have just two slabs: 5% and a standard rate between 12% and 18% (apart from exempt items). Tragically, he passed away less than a year before fulfilling his assurances.
•Simplicity is not easy to achieve. Great sages, artists and designers have preached simplicity. It was the mantra of Henry David Thoreau, who influenced Mahatma Gandhi.
•The introduction of a uniform GST was a watershed moment in India since the country’s earlier regime of taxes and cesses, both at the Centre and the States, was a big barrier to free trade and economic growth and was a cesspool of corruption.
Complex and confusing
•However, GST is still a complicated tax regime with different slabs. It is not easy to comprehend or comply with, and is open to interpretation, harassment and avoidable litigation. To simplify it, Finance Ministry officials must be reminded of KISS.
•KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) is a well-known acronym and an accepted credo in business. Attributed to Lockheed aircraft engineer Kelly Johnson, it was meant to urge engineers to keep aircraft design so simple that even a stupid person would be able to repair the aircraft with ordinary tools on the combat field.
•Bureaucracy, the world over, is usually oblivious to the KISS principle. An Amazon ad boasts that it sells more than a crore of different products, besides myriad services. More categories are added every day. In this context, asking bureaucrats to identify and categorise all products and services for differential tax slabs in the GST regime is the surest way to get into a muddle.
•Empirical data from across the world on the benefits of a unified single tax is incontrovertible. So, an unambiguous directive to the bureaucracy is necessary from the ruling dispensation to come up with just two categories: goods eligible for zero tax and goods that will fall under a single rate, say 10% or 12%. That means everything except those specifically exempt, is taxed.
•This needs bold and clear reformist thinking at the political level. Imposing a high GST in some areas does not make sense. ‘Sin’ taxes, for instance, are at cross purposes with the government’s policy of generating growth and creating jobs under ‘Make in India’. A typical 300-room five-star hotel generates direct employment for around 500 people of whom 90% are waiters, housekeeping staff, front desk staff, security and concierge staff, besides cooks, financial and clerical staff. There are a host of others employed in associated services such as the spa, gift shops and swimming pool. The hotel also generates indirect employment in ancillary areas: it buys bed linen, furnishings, rugs and carpets, air conditioners, cutlery, electrical fittings and furniture, and consumes enormous quantities of food produce. All these generate jobs and income for farmers, construction contractors, artisans and other manufacturers. Five-star hotels also generate foreign exchange by attracting rich tourists and visitors. So, it’s unwise to tax these hotels to death.
•Similarly, high taxes on air-conditioners, air conditioned restaurants, chocolates and luxury cars create an economic ripple effect downstream, in a complex web of businesses that have symbiotic relationships. The effect finally reaches down to the bottom of the employment pyramid.
•The plan must be to figure out how to rev up the economy by making the rich and upper middle class spend and move more people up the value chain in order that more chocolates and ACs and automobiles are bought by them, instead of designing a tax system that keeps these products out of the new consumer class’s reach.
•Instead, the current regime is plain confusing. At an Iyengar Bakery, GST on bread is zero, but the vegetable sandwich is in the 5% tax slab, hitting the vegetable grower directly. The GST on buns is zero, but buns with a few raisins fall in the 5% slab. The GST on masala peanuts, murukku and namkeen is 12%. And the GST on cakes and chocolates is 18%. The same lack of logic applies to taxes on wine, rum and beer, which generate large-scale employment and are the backbone of grape and sugarcane farming and the cocoa industry. The ancient art of toddy tapping in villages, a large employment generator and income booster in rural areas, was killed by unthinking politicians and bureaucrats and replaced with Indian-made foreign liquor. Imagine killing the wine industry in France? It would be sacrilege.
•In the automobile sector, the GST on electric cars, tractors, cycles, bikes, low-end and luxury cars ranges anywhere from 5% to 50%. The sale of automobiles is the barometer of an economy.
•The confusion has given rise to several disputes. ID Fresh Food, for instance, which makes ready-to-eat foods like chapatis, rotis, parotas and sells various types of idli and dosa batter, appealed against a GST ruling of the Authority for Advance Rulings (Karnataka bench). The ruling had called for a distinction between rotis and parotas and had subjected parotas to a higher GST rate of 18% since the food item did not fall under the category of “khakhra, plain chapati, or roti” (which fall under the 5% slab) and needed to be processed or heated for further consumption. Can a country aspire to be a $5 trillion economy if its taxmen turn gourmet chefs and get bogged down by researching the differences between various kinds of food items prepared with dough?
•Then there are items that are exempt from GST. Petrol, diesel, aviation turbine fuel are not under the purview of GST, but come under Central excise and State taxes. Central excise duties and varying State taxes contribute over 50% of the retail price of petrol and diesel, probably the highest in the world barring banana republics. There is distrust between the States and the Centre on revenue sharing. There is also anger at the Centre for riding roughshod over the States’ autonomy and disregarding the federal structure of the Constitution. Opposition-ruled States point fingers at Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who ironically accused the United Progressive Alliance regime of trampling on the rights of the States while he was Gujarat Chief Minister.
Use the KISS principle
•The low-cost airline model is successful because of the KISS principle. All the frills such as food, freebies and assigned seats are dispensed with. Single class seating, point-to-point travel with no code sharing, direct Internet booking, no middlemen. etc. have sustained this model. It’s an Udupi self-service hotel in the sky.
•The Finance Minister should take a cue from the Prime Minister, who hinted at major reforms in the aftermath of COVID-19, and do away with all the confusing tax slabs in one fell swoop. She can then usher in a truly single low tax regime along with a list of exempt items. That will ensure compliance, widen the tax net, improve ease of doing business, boost the economy, create jobs, increase tax collections and reduce corruption as witnessed in many countries – a move that will be both populist and well-regarded by economists.
📰 Four new corals recorded from Indian waters
The species newly found off Andaman and Nicobar Islands belong to same family
•Scientists have recorded four species of corals for the first time from Indian waters. These new species of azooxanthellate corals were found from the waters off the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.
•The azooxanthellate corals are a group of corals that do not contain zooxanthellae and derive nourishment not from the sun but from capturing different forms of planktons.
•They are deep-sea representatives with the majority of species being reported from depths between 200 metres and 1,000 metres. They are also reported from shallow waters unlike zooxanthellate corals that are restricted to shallow waters.
•The details of the new species have been published in Thalassas: An International Journal of Marine Sciences.
•The Zoological Survey of India (ZSI) scientist behind these new findings, Tamal Mondal, said all the four groups of corals are from the same family, Flabellidae.
•Truncatoflabellum crassum (Milne Edwards and Haime, 1848), T. incrustatum (Cairns, 1989), T. aculeatum (Milne Edwards and Haime, 1848), and T. irregulare (Semper, 1872) under the family Flabellidae were previously found in Japan, the Philippines and Australian waters, while only T. crassum was reported with the range of Indo-West Pacific distribution.
Solitary corals
•Mr. Mondal said azooxanthellate corals are a group of hard corals and the four new species recorded are not only solitary but have a highly compressed skeletal structure. “Most studies of hard corals in India have been concentrated on reef-building corals while much is not known about non-reef-building corals. These new species enhance our knowledge about non-reef-building solitary corals,” he added.
•Dhriti Banerjee, director of ZSI, said coral reefs are one of the most productive ecosystems in oceans. “Hard corals are the prime and intrinsic part of the coral reef ecosystem. ZSI has given special emphasis on the exploration of the coastal and marine biodiversity of India in recent times. It has come out with several new discoveries,” she said.
•The new species enhance the national database of biological resources of India and also define the expansion of scope to explore these unexplored and non-reef building corals, she said.
📰 Heal the nation before healing the rest of the world
Political or geopolitical expediency or cultural chauvinism should not be allowed to undercut India’s health interests
•Bolstering health human resources has been a prime focus of many of the Union government’s recent initiatives and policy pronouncements. The Union health Budget 2022 made handsome appropriations for the same, much in line with the Fifteenth Finance Commission’s recommendations which laid a conspicuous emphasis on utilising existing capacities at the district and sub-district levels to train different cadres of health-care personnel. Much to the ecstasy of public health advocates, the Health Ministry recently released a set of implementation guidelines for a long over-due Indian public health cadre.
•A more recent announcement, however, raises concerns over the coherence of India’s vision with respect to health human resources. The Centre under the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission and the “Heal by India” initiative is reportedly developing an exhaustive online repository of all categories of health-care professionals in the country. Though such an innovation is much needed because of the currently fragmented nature of such data, one of its proposed primary purposes is to aid external stakeholders, viz. foreign employers and patients in finding a right Indian match for their respective needs. It is an atavistic return to the widely shunned principles of liberalisation in health care, which is not only gratuitous today but also menacing.
WHO forecast for India
•The concerns are legitimised by the current estimates and future projections of health manpower in the country, which paint a not-so-salutary picture. A World Health Organization (WHO) 2020 report projected a requirement of nearly two million more doctors and nursing professionals for India in order to attain the minimum threshold ratio of health-care professionals to the population.
•As per a study by WHO and the Public Health Foundation of India, over and above a veritable shortage of health-care personnel and their skewed skill-mix across a number of States, their current pace of growth is unlikely to result in any significant improvement in the density or skill-mix of health-care professionals by 2030. Such inadequacies are further compounded by the legions of health-care professionals who remain inactive and outside the labour force. In the face of these colossal challenges, the current measure which aims to subtly reinforce medical tourism and worsen the out-migration of health-care professionals from the country is utterly counter-intuitive.
Soft power projection
•In the mid-1990s, the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) aimed to create an unprecedented scope for cross-border trade in medical and health-care services. While the health equity implications of this neoliberal offshoot are well known and its central tenets have been widely criticised, health care particularly in the post-COVID-19 era has been a fertile ground for countries to project soft power — at times even at the expense of the nation’s own health interests. A crucial distinction must always be drawn between exporting products such as vaccines and that of health-care professionals.
•While the first is characterised by a much simpler transactional math, training health-care manpower entails large subsidies (even a fraction of which is hardly recovered through remittances and skill transfers), thus entailing a net drain of resources from the native country.
•A similar draw on scarce national health-care resources is laid through medical tourism which is almost always to the detriment of health equity, particularly in developing settings such as India. The magnitude of these could be somewhat attenuated by the use of telemedicine and virtual platforms, though the larger concerns shall persist. While neither medical tourism nor out-migration can or need to be dispensed with in their entirety, to pursue them actively when the country is reeling under acute shortages in an aspirational decade for health care is least warranted.
India needs a registry
•It is also hard to justify an immediate need for this measure. While an online health-care professionals repository will certainly aid foreign stakeholders in finding their right choices, there is neither a strong demand-side desperation nor a significant supply-side scarcity preventing a market to function well in its absence. For instance, a recruiter from a developed country willing to hire Indian nurses and remunerate them handsomely will not be hard pressed to find suitable candidates regardless of the assistance rendered by an online repository, and the latter would only be marginally helpful.
•Rather, it is at the national and sub-national levels that such an exhaustive and updated registry of health-care professionals is the need of the hour, for addressing the many challenges and disparities in health manpower availability, distribution, and skill mix. This would also come to strongly complement measures such as an integrated public health cadre and the initiatives to train, deploy and retain more local manpower.
•In health care, which is characterised by perennially scarce resources and a surfeit of challenges, everything revolves around identifying the priorities right. And no amount of political or geopolitical expediency or cultural chauvinism should be allowed to undercut national health interests. It is time to go all out to address national health-care workforce challenges and heal the nation before embarking on a healing cruise of the world.
📰 The role of caste in economic transformation
The divergent outcomes in structural transformation in the global South, i.e., India, China and S.E. Asia, are illustrative
•India has been in a phase of jobless growth for at least two decades now, coupled with rising poverty and discontent in rural areas. The ongoing protests against the Agnipath programme, agitations against farm laws a year before, and agitation for reservation by agriculture castes are all arguably an outcome simmering discontent due to this jobless economic growth. Why could India not generate a pattern of growth that produces jobs and inclusive development in the way most of the East Asian countries have done? Caste, which is mostly confined to politics, could be among the answers, a structural factor that impedes economic transformation in India.
•Indeed, there is a link between economic transformation and caste in India, which is often missed by academics. In contemporary literature too, caste enters as a post-facto category in understanding inequalities in economic and social outcomes when the fact is that caste is central to economic transformation itself. Caste through its rigid social control and networks facilitates economic mobility for some and erects barriers for others by mounting disadvantages on them. Caste also shapes the ownership pattern of land and capital and simultaneously regulates access to political, social, and economic capital too.
Ways it impedes
•There are three ways in which caste impedes the economic transformation in India: ownership and land inequality related to productivity failure within the farm sector; elite bias in higher education and historical neglect of mass education, and caste-based entry barriers and exclusive networks in the modern sector.
•If Arthur Lewis, a Nobel Prize winner for development economics, emphasised accumulation of physical capital for economic transformation in the developing world, Theodore William Schultz, an American economist who shared the prize with him the same year in 1979, underscored the need for human capital for better transition to modern sectors. For him, an educated workforce enhances productivity while entrepreneurship ability is increased through education, training, experience and so on.
•Hence, the divergent outcomes in structural transformation between countries in the global South, particularly India, China and South East Asia, is due to these three factors. All the nations which succeeded in achieving inclusive growth in the Global South had land reforms combined with human capital, invested in infrastructure by promoting capitalism from below and began industrialisation in the rural sector. Only India lost on all three counts.
Land ownership, productivity
•India has one of the highest land inequalities in the world today. Unequal distribution of land was perpetuated by British colonial intervention that legalised a traditional disparity. Some castes were assigned land ownership at the expense of others by the British for its administrative practices. The British inscribed caste in land governance categories and procedures that still underpin post-colonial land ownership pattern in India. They made an artificial distinction between proper cultivators who belong to certain castes and those labourers — lower caste subjects who cultivated granted/gifted lands (Panchami, etc.) that have institutionalised caste within the land revenue bureaucracy. The prescribed categories and practices have entrenched caste inequality in land ownership. Even the subsequent land reform that took place after India’s independence largely excluded Dalits and lower castes. It emboldened and empowered mainly intermediate castes at the expense of others in rural India.
•Even the Green Revolution that brought changes in the farm sector did not alter land inequality as it was mostly achieved through technological intervention. Though India has certainly seen surplus food production since then, the castes that were associated with this land pattern and benefited from the Green Revolution tightened their social control over others in rural India. Land still defines social status and pride in many parts of rural India.
•While land has lost its productive capacity since the 1990s, thanks to the real estate and construction turn in the Indian economy, it still works as a source of inheritance, family lineage and speculative capital. In that sense, the economic reforms of the 1990s were a watershed moment. The farm lobby lost its power. Even those who made surplus in farm sectors could not transform their status from cultivators to capitalist entrepreneurs in the modern sectors, except a few castes in western and southern India. Those castes that had a stake in agriculture did not benefit from the economic reforms for two reasons — historical neglect of education and the entry barriers erected by the upper castes in modern sectors. The recent agitations by the Jats in Haryana and Punjab, the Marathas in Maharashtra and the Patels in Gujarat, demanding, among other things, reservation for their castes in higher education and formal jobs exemplify this new trend.
Neglect of education
•If strong growth in productivity within the farm sector is crucial for sustained economic growth, an educated workforce is equally necessary to move to the modern sectors. India failed on both accounts. The Indian education system has been suffering from an elite bias since colonial times. British colonialists educated tiny groups of elites, largely from upper castes, for their own administrative purpose.
•As political scientist Myron Weiner had argued, India suffered from caste bias in education. Although the Indian Constitution guaranteed free and compulsory education under its directive principles, it was hardly translated into practice. Instead, attention was given to higher education for the elites. Hence, inequality in access to education got translated into inequality in other economic domains including wage differentials in India. Indian elites in fact sustained their position at the top by denying education to a substantial proportion of the population till positive-discrimination policies were implemented in higher education. India’s turn toward service growth — particularly its claims of emerging as a leader in software development and a natural inheritor of soft power — is arguably an outcome of this historic elite bias in education.
•In contrast, Chinese and other East Asian countries invested in basic education and gradually shifted towards higher education. Their success in manufacturing is a direct outcome of the investment in human capital. One can find such trends even in the contemporary global labour market mirroring this skill spectrum; as South East Asia and China captured low-end manufacturing jobs, India largely concentrated in high-end technology jobs. China taking over India in manufacturing is due to this neglect in human capital formation. Here, a comparison with China is illustrative. Yasheng Huang, a Chinese economist, argues that rural entrepreneurship was able to grow out of the traditional agricultural sector on a massive scale. Rural India, in contrast, hampered by a poor endowment of human capital, could not start entrepreneurial ventures even remotely on the scale of the Chinese.
Barrier to entrepreneurship
•India did not witness such capitalism from below except in a few cases. Caste shaped policy outcomes, including India’s highly unequal land reform and lack of public provision of education and health, which in turn erected barriers to economic diversification. Caste also worked in building social networks. Castes that were already in control of trading and industrial spaces resisted the entry of others. Even those who had economic surplus in farm sectors could not invest in non-farm modern sectors. Social inequalities have mounted barriers for economic transition. Agrarian capital could not move into modern sectors due to these roadblocks. Even the relative success in South India is being attributed to the ‘Vaishya vacuum’ — an absence of traditional merchant castes. In contrast such a transition took place in South East Asia, where diversification into urban enterprises by agrarian capitalists was possible.
•Truncated transformation is partly an outcome of this interface between caste and economy. For caste is not a residual variable, but is an active agent which stifles economic transformation.
📰 Understanding bird strikes and aviation safety
When are aircraft more prone to bird strikes? How is the DGCA planning to prevent such incidents?
•Following two back-to-back bird strikes incidents, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation in a directive to all airport operators has asked all airports to “review their wildlife hazard management plans” for “within and outside the airfield”.
•An analysis of 62,416 verified records by the International Civil Aviation Organization’s (ICAO) Bird Strike Information System showed that most bird hits were in or near airports during the take-off and approach phases of flight.
•The Salim Ali Centre for Ornithology and Natural History has now expanded a study of air hazard issues to 12 airports across India. Its studies show that each airport in India has its unique ecological setting and therefore the solutions are different.
•The story so far: On June 19, a SpiceJet Boeing 737-800 on the Patna-Delhi sector (SG723) with 185 passengers was in the climbout phase (the period immediately after take-off during which the aircraft climbs to a predetermined cruising altitude) when it suffered a bird hit in its left engine. Ensuing visuals showed flame streaks. The engine was shut down and the flight returned to Patna about 20 minutes later. The same day, an Indigo Airbus A320N (6E-6394, Guwahati-Delhi) was taking off when it experienced a bird hit in the left engine. The aircraft returned to Guwahati about 15 minutes after its departure. In both incidents, some of the engine blades were damaged or had fractures. India’s civil aviation regulatory body, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA), has ordered an inquiry. Further, in a directive to all airport operators, it has asked all airports to “review their wildlife hazard management plans” for “within and outside the airfield”. Being the monsoon season with heightened wildlife activity, this would include grass trimming, runway inspections, garbage disposal in operational areas and ensuring water drainage.
What is the data on bird strikes?
•The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) has been collecting bird strike data since 1965, but it was in 1979 that it requested member states to begin reporting bird strikes to aircraft into a data entry and retrieval system. The ICAO Bird Strike Information System (developed with the help of experts) has been in operation since 1980. An analysis of 62,416 verified records showed that most hits were in or near airports during the take-off and approach phases of flight. About 60% occurred at or below 30 metres or around 100 feet, according to a paper on the ICAO bird strike information system. Another paper, “Bird strikes at commercial airports explained by citizen science and weather radar data”, says that in 2017, “over 14,000 bird strikes were reported only in the United States; for that year alone, the cost was $142 million”. A third paper, “The costs of bird strikes and bird strike prevention”, by Allan J.R., says that, globally, “the annual costs of bird strikes are an estimated $1.2 billion”. Scientists from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and partners say that information on bird movements throughout the year can help avoid aircraft damage and risk to passengers. In 2018, the Federal Aviation Administration data on civilian flights in the U.S. recorded 14,661 collisions with wildlife, which is over 40 cases a day.
•A report says that in India in 2021, DGCA data has recorded over 1,400 suspected and confirmed wildlife incidents (for 20.5 lakh aircraft movements), up from nearly 840 cases in 2016 (for 22.9 lakh aircraft movements). Most of the incidents were reported from Delhi and Mumbai airports.
•In India’s National Aviation Safety Plan (2018-2022), which is in line with ICAO’s Global Aviation Safety Plan, the DGCA has said that one of the key safety priorities (under the Safety Enhancement Initiatives of the Regional Aviation Safety Plan – Asia Pacific) is looking at “wildlife and bird strikes”. It says the audits suggested by the National Bird Control Committee (NBCC) are being followed. Under Safety Performance Indicators of “Number of reported bird strikes at all Indian airports per 10,000 movements”, it lists a Safety Performance Target of 4.26 for the year 2022.
How is it from a pilot’s perspective?
•A senior commander who flies the Airbus A320 aircraft told The Hindu that bird hits are a risk that flight crew have to be constantly ready for, especially during the take-off phase as the aircraft is fully loaded and fuel-laden. If a bird hit is suspected, the crew have to watch all parameters. There are the usual places where the crew knows the bird hit has occurred, i.e., the windshield, the belly and the engines. Damage to the engines can vary with twisted fan blades, blade separation and vibrations. This could result in an engine imbalance as well. Apart from this there can be damage to the wing surfaces (flaps, spoilers and slats) and the airframe too. This results in huge losses for the airline operator.
•He added that there are crew standard/operating procedures laid down by the manufacturers and the airline company, followed by simulator checks. He said adherence to wildlife management rules is imperative within and around the airport and its vicinity.
What is the perspective from experts? What is being done to help minimise instances of bird hits?
•Captain A. (Mohan) Ranganathan, a former airline instructor pilot and aviation safety adviser — he brought out a bird strike handout when he was part of the Bird Strike Committee in 2011 — told The Hindu that the recent bird hit incidents show that all areas surrounding an airport ought to be clear of slaughter houses and garbage dumping (factors which can attract wildlife and increase risks). Airports are also expected to have incinerators to dispose of garbage removed from aircraft. The expert said that airlines are supposed to have some standard operating procedures for bird strike prevention. He added that for pilots, it is important to have constant monitoring. After lift-off, the pilot flying should have his eyes on the instruments and the pilot not flying has to have his/her eyes outside to look out for birds. This has to be emphasised during training. Finally, he said, understanding bird behaviour is something crew and operators need to be familiar with. Close to the ground, the instinctive response of birds is to get away from the aircraft path. Bird strikes occur when pilots try to climb over them during the initial take-off phase. Birds get sucked into an engine as an aircraft engine’s field of ingestion is quite high with take-off thrust. Over 100ft, birds tend to dive to avoid an aircraft. Therefore, it is important to understand bird behaviour.
•The Hindu also spoke to Dr. P. Pramod, Principal Scientist, Salim Ali Centre for Ornithology and Natural History (SACON), Coimbatore, which is a Centre of Excellence under the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change. SACON has been closely associated with the Airports Authority of India (AAI) and the Indian Air Force (IAF) as bird hits affect both organisations. From 2017-2020, SACON undertook a study of air hazard issues at three airports — Coimbatore (Tamil Nadu), Ahmedabad (Gujarat) and Kannur (Kerala). An analysis of the ecosystem (a radius of 10 km) revealed that the problems are not the same everywhere.
•SACON has now expanded the study to 12 airports across India based on a memorandum of understanding signed in February 2020 with the AAI. A similar arrangement is being worked out with the IAF. SACON is to start a series of training programmes from August 2022 involving airport bird hazard management teams. The scientist says that it must be noted that each airport in India has its unique ecological setting and therefore the solutions are different. For example, if there are 60 avian species that could be around an airport, only five to six could pose a problem. A study of birds over a year would lead to a specific list of recommendations on how to handle the dynamics of these species. There are good results in airports where there is 100% implementation.
•Highlighting an example, he said that in Coimbatore, 90% of bird hits involved the lapwing, a ground-nesting bird. It was found that the species was using the airport area as a nesting ground, seeking the open soil stretches near the runway. SACON recommended reintroducing grass in these areas as it was an instance of habitat management. SACON has also worked on engineering solutions at airports and surroundings to keep problematic birds at bay.
•As far as bird hits are concerned, Category I hits, which involve large birds such as kites that are dangerous to aircraft, are on the decline. It is hits that involve small birds that are on the rise now, he added. In civil aviation, it has been observed that a height of 100 metres is usually where most of the hits occur when the aircraft is in either the take-off or landing phase.
•In the Indian scenario, a proper database needs to be developed that collects essential details such as the bird species, the height of occurrence and exact geospatial coordinates.
•The scientist also highlighted SACON’s National Avian Forensic Laboratory which can identify the bird species using just blood samples, tissue and feathers (through DNA and feather microstructure) — which is usually what aircraft engineers get from a bird-hit aircraft. He added that SACON was reaching out to Indian airports on the need to ensure proper forensics and a data reporting and management system.
