An Indian supercomputer by 2017. Umm...

This is a tricky question. And for background, here's the tweet from IBN Live that caught my eye.

https://twitter.com/ibnlive/status/247262774898593792

(If you didn't read the IBN piece, this is the gist. India, rather Kapil Sibal, our present telecom minister, will have a state-of-the-art supercomputer, 61 times faster than current-leader Sequoia, built indigenously by 2017 at a cost of Rs. 4,700 crore across 5 years.)

[caption id="attachment_24026" align="aligncenter" width="351"] Kapil Sibal[/caption]

India already has many supercomputers: NAL's Flosolver, C-DAC's PARAM, DRDO's PACE/ANURAG, BARC's Anupam, IMS's Kabru-Linux cluster and CRL's Eka (both versions of PARAM), and ISRO's Saga 220.

The most-powerful among them, PARAM (through its latest version), is ranked 58th in the world. It was designed and deployed by the Pune-based Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) and the Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DEITY - how apt) in 1991. Its first version, PARAM 8000, used 8,000 Inmos transputers (a microprocessor architecture built with parallel-processing in mind); subsequent versions include PARAM 10000, Padma, and the latest Yuva. Yuva came into operation in November 2008 and boasts a peak speed of 54 teraflops (1 teraflops = 1 trillion floating point operations per second; floating point is a data type that stores numbers as {significant digits * base^exponent}).

Interestingly, in July 2009, C-DAC had announced that a new version of PARAM was in the works and that it would be deployed in 2012 with a computing power of more than 1 petaflops (1 petalfops = 1,000 teraflops) at a cost of Rs. 500 crore. Where is it?

Then, in May, 2011, it was announced that India would spend Rs. 10,000 crore in building a 132.8-exaflops supercomputer by 2017. Does that make today's announcement an effective reduction in budget as well as diminishing of ambitions? If so, then why? If not, then are we going to have two high-power supercomputers?!

Such high-power supercomputers that the proposed 2017-supercomputer will compete with usually find use in computational fluid dynamics simulations, weather forecasting, finite element analysis, seismic modelling, e-governance, telemedicine, and administering high-speed network activities. Obviously, these are tasks that operate with a lot of probabilities thrown into the simulation and calculation mix, and require hundreds of millions of operation per second to be solved within an "acceptable" chance of the answer being right. As a result, and because of the broad scale of these applications, such supercomputers are built only when the need for the answers is already present. They are not installed to create needs but only to satisfy them.

So, that said, why does India need such a high-power supercomputer? Deploying a supercomputer is no easy task, and deploying one that's so far ahead of the field also involves an overhaul of the existing system and network architectures. What needs is the government creating that might require so much power? Will we be able to afford it?

In fact, I worry that Mr. Kapil Sibal has announced the decision to build such a device simply because India doesn't feature in the list of top 10 countries that have high-power supercomputers. Because, beyond being able to predict weather patterns and further extend the country's space-faring capabilities, what will the device be used for? Are there records that the ones already in place are being used effectively?

Fizzed-out futures

Initiatives are arising to plug holes in the Indian education system, or so they claim. Many are ambitious, some even overreaching, but they also exist in the company of those that are honest. However, the cause for concern is that such projects are being viewed as extracurricular to the prevailing education system-even by those who have founded the initiatives. Thoughtful engagement is sought after, an awareness of the "outside world"–a summation of the realities extraneous to the student's chosen field–is deemed lacking and designated a goal.

Most such initiatives are by students, or recent graduates, and with them, they carry fresh memories of incomplete lessons and half-mentored theses. As their activities grow in scope–which they surely do–there is an attrition between a tendency to remain experimentalist and the certainty provided by going commercial through installing a secure source of support and a fundamental incentive. The last is necessary even though many students remain in denial of it: one man's idea cannot be shared with the same intensity throughout unless there is a need to depend on it. Money, many fail to realize, maintains currency, too.

The prevalent belief is that the Indian way of learning sidelines the humanities: if a job doesn't fetch a fat cheque, it concludes there is no point in studying for it. Unfortunately, however, such a view also degrades the pros of technical learning. Subsequently, the responses are disappointingly reactionary. If a student has found it difficult to inculcate a skill, he simply participates in the overarching institution of frustration and dissatisfaction, and assumes the problem is faced by everyone. That is never true, has never been. However, it finds enough purchase to surface as fixes.



In many parts of the country, young graduates and final-year students gather in small rooms on terraces and in garages. For the most part, they discuss the different activities they could perform to compensate for what they think they ought to have learned in the classroom but didn’t. They quickly conclude that original thought is missing-which is very true-and proceed to talk about what they’d need to inculcate it. These are, obviously, surface-level problems. As time passes, the incentive to meet each subsequent week and debate and act or whatever peters out. Essentially, such students’ and graduates’ concerns have been for the short-term.

The long-term concern, it seems, can be addressed more effectively at the individual level than at the systemic level. The institution can encourage extracurricular tasks, point at the dearth of invention and abundance of innovation, and build up an army of youngsters to fix the nation’s most pressing problems. However, the only solution that can pluck India out of this moshpit of unoriginality is to do what is required of all youngsters no matter where they are these days: ideate. Ideas, whether original or otherwise, are necessary; even better when they are distilled out from a knowledge pool that is vast.

Whatever the most dollar-guzzling problems are, the ones that are solved by continuous ideation are what will keep the machine from descending into a standstill. May the humanities be sidelined, may the rote-learner be celebrated, may technical learning signify the staple diet that deprives most Indian students’ of the indulgence of the arts-we are not in need of a paradigm shift to rectify matters. What we need most is to build ourselves to achieve even in the absence of expectations. What we need most is to transcend our cubicles and classrooms and disintegrate the institutionalized frustration. By not doing so, we are letting our communal objectives be defined by a chance mistake.

Science in India

What really is the attitude toward science in India?

In many of the other countries that do or don't have strong science programmes, the attitude toward science is well known. In China, for example, where the space programme is picking up well, high-speed railway lines are being built, and the annual investment in science has grown at more than 20 per cent annually since 2000 (now in the neighbourhood of $100 billion), there is open support for the cause of science and the role it must play in the country's development. In India, however, investments in R&D are half-hearted in that they don't enjoy or suffer either widespread support or cynicism. Moreover, where in most cases science funding is seen at least as a move toward indigenous military empowerment, India lacks that, too.

In a December 2010 report titled 2011 Global R&D Funding Forecast, going with a study sponsored by R&D Mag, India's share of global R&D spending is 3.0 per cent (0.80% of GDP), measly in comparison with the countries it is seen as competing with: America (34.0%), Japan (12.1%), China (12.9% = 1.44% of GDP), and Europe (23.2%). The immediate solution is definitely not to step up spending but to look at why a country that has used science to rise to where it is now is doing so without any support for it at the basic level, as if it sees science as a mere tool that will be dropped the moment its goals are achieved.

Looking at the status quo from a mediaperson's vantage point, a few habits come immediately to light. The first is a lack of outreach programmes by Indian science institutions. For a country brimming with engineers, there are too few fora that cater to the science-minded. On either sides of the locus charted by science-stream in classes XI and XII, engineering education in either the IITs or the NITs, and then a job with the engineering sector, there is no place to engage with scientists and technicians simply because one might enjoy interacting with them, find out more about what they do and how it is impacting the society at large. The one other place to do all this is from within media circles.

Even in the political sphere, there is abysmal engagement by the politicians with the people and vice versa at the scientific level. Granted, we are only now setting out on a path of getting as many people educated as possible through the means of reservations and constitutionally established compulsions. However, that does not mean there is nothing to look at higher up the pyramid: for becoming the focus of the world for its abundance of engineers and doctors, for launching manned missions to the moon in the near future, and for being at the forefront of nuclear science research, the most politicians are willing to talk about is shutting down crucial nuclear power plants.

[caption id="attachment_22951" align="aligncenter" width="540"] The Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant[/caption]

Apparently, science has already assumed a degenerate form in the country, where it can be sidelined to accrue people-support ahead of the elections. Unfortunately, these are also some of the more easily-kept promises. Science often isn't public opinion, and there is a lot of work required in that direction to mend the people's idea of its importance and the roles it plays in shaping equanimous progress.

Still, where are the broader ambitions that politicians must have about safeguarding the nation's support in the field of cutting-edge physics? Where are the broader ambitions that address the country's role in nuclear non-proliferation (apart from when heads of state come visiting)? Where are the broader ambitions concerned with furthering nanotechnology research in the country in keeping with its growing domination as a centre for medical tourism?

In fact, let us not attend to such broad considerations now: a look at the attitude toward the IT-sector in South India should do. The most successful R&D contribution of J Jayalalithaa, the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, to date has been the setting up of IT parks in and around Chennai (a move borrowed suspiciously from the Hyderabad- and Bangalore-models without too much foresight). As the subsidization of IT products drew in a large volume of software engineers that led to a siphon effect, so also did focus shift away from other non-subsidized industries. Now, the Pallikaranai marshlands on which most of the IT offices are set up have taken a severe beating.

Why? Because we can't seem to understand the importance of a young man's or woman's employment in the same light as the importance of a healthy local ecosystem.

Those within the scientific community are no exception, either. Forget the science outreach programmes—they are only secondary considerations. Instead: where are the science magazines a la Scientific American? Don't Indians possess a tradition of invention and discovery dating back to about 4,000 years? What killed it, then? A couple of days ago, a friend of mine had a tough time locating doctors working on stem cell research in India because university websites were severely outdated! The popular opinion of the sports-and-political-news hegemon is that the paucity of media representation would have driven researchers to speak about their research with quite some zeal, but no. Even contacting a scientist has become a hassle.

[caption id="attachment_22958" align="aligncenter" width="540"] A good example of a science institution's website that goes nowhere is that of the Department of Biotechnology (affiliated with the Government of India)[/caption]

Moreover, the contactable ones are often tight-lipped when answering questions on studies done by them, and not necessarily on subjects that have debatable ethical concerns attached, such as soil sedimentation, state of plumbing, safety in power plants, metallurgy and materials engineering, greenhouse gas emissions, and renewable energy (quoting from experience). Have their ought-to-be profligate opinions dried up because of the subjects' misguided depiction in the media in the past? How do we fix it?

It is hard to imagine that the answer to these and such questions is colonialism because India's rapid rise to a position of power seems to have caused all the problems. For example, sustained mishandling of the planning, construction and operation of dams alone is sure to have dented rural India's idea of technology. Now, with a disturbing experience of the national government's contumacious attitude toward rural authority, we are obliged to push harder even for all-round legitimate projects. In fact, perspectives have turned so skewed that "all-round legitimacy" has become the rallying point for contention between environmentalists and any kind of developers. Now, you can't say "development" and not be expected to be tossed into a political maelstrom.

Circling back to the first point: what is the attitude toward science in India? The nation has enjoyed a pluralism of cultures, languages, and traditions for centuries now, and is it that science, too, is being granted that privilege? If you think that isn't too bad, think again: the thing about science that it always has one right answer, ergo there is always only one way to use it. Of course, the course of its action can be deftly regulated, but not to a point where many journalists don't or can't understand what science really is up to in the country.

Science is not the Big Dam, the Big Metro Line, the Big Power Plant that displaces thousands of people without sufficient recourse, that robs livelihoods and impregnates men and women with carcinogens, that is the call to arms of the poor against the rich. No!; science is now the helpless instrument in the hands of the short-sighted power-monger, and it must be removed from there. To do so, at least all that I have mentioned in this post must be fixed.

Science education and statistical issues

This image below speaks volumes.

[caption id="attachment_21435" align="aligncenter" width="529" caption="From a report titled 'ASPIRES: Science and career aspirations (age 10-14)' compiled by the ASPIRES Project, London, 2012."][/caption]

What's keeping away the kids? More specifically, why is there an observable offset of interest from aspiration for children in the age group, as the report claims, 10-14? Here are some snippets from an otherwise incredibly boring report.

Research shows that young people’s aspirations are strongly influenced by their social backgrounds (e.g. by ‘race’/ethnicity, social class and gender) and family contexts where identity and cultural factors play an important role in shaping the perception of science as ‘not for me’.

To this, the report suggests as a solution a broadening of scope in classrooms, to make science a "conceivable career" for students. But that seems to be trivializing the problem, which I think won't get sorted until classrooms are targeted individually. The problems of race and social class (or of caste and poverty in India) cannot be generalized impact-wise in any sense.

... countries with high attainment and participation rates in mathematics (such as Japan) also record amongst the lowest levels of student liking for the subject.

In India, in 1966, the Kothari Commission Report was submitted by Dr. D. S. Kothari to the Prime Minister. The report recommended that the government had to focus on a carefully chosen set of subjects in order to bolster its economy to meet certain important targets in the engineering sector.

Unfortunately, the curriculum that was created those five decades ago spurred a surplus of science and engineering graduates as well as colleges and institutions, conceiving a fixation that these and related courses translated to job security. Even though the situation may seem to be different today, a close examination will reveal that any Indian family is half-composed of engineers and management graduates.

My point is that participation rates - which could be purely because parents insist that their children study this or that and nothing else - don't necessarily translate into liking for the subjects. And when participation rates in schools are used by committees and organizations to predict what the future composition of graduates will be, their reports are likely to discourage further action in the sector.

The next point I strongly agree with, in both global and Indian contexts.

Science education policy has been strongly criticised for assuming that its primary importance is to prepare the next generation of the nation’s professional scientists (the ‘science pipeline’ model).

The 'science pipeline' model also goes on to create a certain profile of the larger science population (such as the image of a geek), to which certain minority groups may not be able to relate. That leads to discouragement and a closeting of aspirations.

The solution? I don't know. Maybe awareness? I'm skeptical.

Plays of the day

One unemployed fellow

This is a tweet by Hindustan Times, an Indian newspaper, that appeared earlier today.



Is the Indian government obliged to secure the livelihood of even the descendants of people who turned a murderer in? Because if the historical context is removed, that's what Nathuram Godse is; moreover, there is no clause in the Indian Constitution that allows the inheritance of historical significance.

However, the article goes on to state that a job was promised by the Maharashtra government for a kin of Sergeant Dev Raj Singh Thakur, the man who caught Godse. This points at a larger story: that the government is not living up to its promises of employment for the kinsmen of those did the nation service. If anything, an article running on Martyrs' Day could have and should have touched upon this.

England judges you!

So, the British government is going to cherry-pick its immigrants, eh? I can think of a lot of reactions to this. First off, if the country is looking for "world-class artists, musicians and intellectuals", then immigrant students shouldn't be hit much because the establishment of their world-classness lies with the universities they will be attending. And if the university is able to justify a student's selection, what more could the ministry want?

Second, this shift in policy is more likely to hit the working population harder. This is because even though there are enough seats available for local and international students, the case is not so for jobs. In fact, since 2008, employers have already been under pressure to justify the hiring of a foreign national, including having to have checked if no other British national was available for the same position.

Third, the Conservatives-led coalition government did promise a reduction in immigrants' numbers in its election manifesto less than two years ago. However, the Conservatives first only stressed on the UK being able to attract the best: that only presaged a development of infrastructure and associated resources, so that the "best" of the lot had incentives to pick the UK out of other destination options.

From an academic point of view, this nationalistic turn of events prompts the question: having better facilities than are there in other parts of the world, will the country now be using a slump in its economy to restrict who gets access to those facilities?

Let me put it this way, and hypothetically. The UK first charted out an inclusive perspective toward growth and then upgraded infrastructure, etc. One of the products of the upgrade was a device called Instrument X that Jack really wanted to work on. Soon, Jack applies to work in the UK on Instrument X. Now, in light of this new policy, the country plans to turn away those who cannot bring back what Britain has lost, and it seems Britain definitely hasn't lost what Instrument X could have brought. On that basis, Jack's application is rejected.

Looking closely, it becomes evident that important academic potential is being redirected to other places just because something else has gone wrong. This consolidation of responsibility is what makes cherry-picking an iffy thing.

Cutting waste =/= saving

The following (promoted) tweet appeared on my feed, and it screamed desperation.



Then, I took a trip to their site and saw this.

We’ve done it by recommending a change in nozzles, which lower water flow but also increase pressure.

They've conserved one billion gallons of water in two years by shifting nozzles that pump water into a poultry farm, in turn reducing water flow. If water was saved by conserving the losses from low pressure transmission, then Walmart by itself hasn't reduced its usage of water: it has only perfected its plumbing system which was sub-par all these years. That's CSR just the way it shouldn't be.

The glorified recycle bin

One of the better dailies in south India, The Hindu, brings out a science and technology section once a week (every Thursday). When you read the page, it becomes immediately evident that their science staff is either non-existent - which I hope is the case - or utterly incompetent.

For starters, none of the pieces they run on this page is original. All of them are picked from either science journalism organizations, like Discovery Magazine, PhysOrg, io9 or LiveScience, or from the blogs of prolific science journalists, like Ed Yong, Tom Levenson or Jennifer Ouellette. I'd have appreciated it had an effort been taken to contextualize those stories to an Indian audience, but all that's done is a textbook copy-paste manoeuvre.

[caption id="attachment_21377" align="aligncenter" width="254" caption="N. Ram, The Hindu's (now former) editor-in-chief"][/caption]

Further, the stories that the editor chooses to print on that day on that page are stories that have no time-value, i.e. the stories won't get stale even if they're read after a week. Things like muscles we thought we never had, weird animals, and some new images snapped by NASA's space telescopes make it there, and when I read them, I learn nothing knew that could be relevant except in a quiz.

News that never gets old will always be more of information than knowledge because the need of the hour keeps changing. And it keeps changing because our needs change the moment we read the paper and learn something new. Our needs change because we're constantly using knowledge of the world around us in different ways to move ahead, learn more and do more.

In such an environment, I'd like to know more about what's going on - particularly in science because science has been tipping the power scales in Asia's favour for the past few years. We could use such a shift away from the West to give ourselves an increasingly valuable competitive advantage. But no - it is India after all, and we, the newspapers, must feed only what the hungry want, not what the hungry deserve. And that's politics, dance, music and cricket.

I don't understand why only one page out of 20, or effectively only one page out of some 140 accounting for the entire week, is devoted to science and technology. For all that the nation touts to be its future and one of its major exports to the world, science news in the Indian publishing industry is as good as not represented. They can possibly have no excuse for this: there's enough going on just at the city-level to fill an entire page every day.

All I'm asking is, get science stories from the web - no issues - edit them a little, give credit to the original authors, and publish them on that day itself. There are new technologies being born and culled everyday, new inventors and innovators coming into the scene, new products, processes and techniques finding their way into our lives. There's news-value in all of those stories, so make use of it. (I myself read more than 150 articles per day, and that's after filtering out an equal number from my feeds.)

To conclude: dear The Hindu, don't ditch science because you think no one's eating it. No one's eating it because you're ditching it.

The resolved pleasure of rural journalism

On January 2, 2012, I didn't think rural journalism would be something I could come to like. Being a science nerd, amongst other things, I always thought my heart would lie with the urban side of things: huge laboratories smashing the smallest things together, guilt-spasmed corporations funding obscure research, the grand designs and the fervent pursuit of knowledge, and essentially all things developed. However, meeting with the fishermen, farmers and salt pan workers of Tuticorin, Tamil Nadu, shook the foundation I took for granted enough to have me reconsider my options. At first, at least.

The first sensation that becomes apparent is that, in rural journalism, public participation is much greater than on the urban side. In India, that's just because government policy is conspicuously biased toward the urban populace and urbanization, leaving the rural and the poor to fend for themselves in an economic environment that takes more than it gives. When the journalist shows himself, he finds that his place has already been clearly marked out: adversary to the government, darling of the masses, assumed to be sacrificial and, in many cases, leftist.

For the uninitiated, i.e. me, that's the sort of attention I've to really fight to get when working in science journalism. When reporting science stories, I don't have the assured readership of thousands of people, I don't have the constant reminder that if I goof up somewhere, actual lives and livelihoods will be rattled with it, and most of all, I don't have a fresh crop of stories day after day, week after week. Fortunately, and disregarding all these terrible thoughts (that have only the effect of bogging me down), what reportage in rural India will do best is reinforce your purpose as a journalist. That at the lowest level, journalism is as pertinent and life-changing as influencing economic policy is at the highest level.

At the same time, it becomes very easy to get lost in a sea of the micro: micro-political issues are rampant and most of them are self-limiting, and micro-economic issues often restrict the penetration of "urban goodness". With such regular and close contact with the deprived, most journalistic remediation focuses on the micro-issue of mitigation of the effects of resource theft. What IMHO it should focus on is the mitigation of the effects of improper deployment and administration, which is the root cause of all the theft.

For instance, the Sterlite copper smelting plant situated on the coast, next to Tuticorin's harbour, has been accused of severely polluting the neighbouring waters, depleting the water of the Thamirabharani, and undermining the significance of local and more traditional industries. I don't think that's what Sterlite has done. I think that's what all copper smelting plants do when the government can't step up and do its bit: modify policy perspectives to prevent abuse in the face of demand and have a hand on long-term evolution characteristics, broadly speaking.

However, because of a queasy and money-mongering government, Sterlite operations everywhere will take a hit. People will quote the damage the corporation has wrecked in south Tamil Nadu even if a plant is coming up somewhere where the necessary safeguards are in place. Industrialism is not all that dispensable, if you didn't know, and toying around with it for personal gains is only going to delegitimize its already-pocked facade. This is one of the most important perspectives of rural journalists that needs to be emphasized: that stories extend far beyond the interface of the deprived and the depleter, that just because they're not visible to the naked eye doesn't mean they aren't there.

[caption id="attachment_21204" align="aligncenter" width="266" caption="P. Sainath is an award-winning rural journalist who works efficiently between the deprived and the depleter, but his negligence of remedial measures makes him a cynic-in-power."][/caption]

All in all, I had a wonderful time talking to the people in Vagaikulam, Aalanthalai, Rajapandinagar, Nattaathi, Periyakulam, Subramaniyapuram, Srivaikundam, people employed in paddy-farming and banana plantations, raking salt in the salt pans, fishing, pearl-diving, weaving, and trading, people generous with their food, cynicism, homes and opinions. For a change, it felt strangely good to travel vast distances just to solicit the petitions of a few men and women under the grating January sun simply because there was someone waiting for a listen. That was the moment of (selfish?) pleasure that made the trip worth it.

Tackling Redhouse gas emissions

The 17^th conference on the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change claims to have invited delegates from all member states of the UN to discuss on and arrive at a consensus toward the future of the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in December next year. However, recent trends amongst participants have shown that the principle negotiating blocks are the USA, the EU and the BRICS nations: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. Unfortunately, trends have also shown that no consensus on anything is reached until the last moment of the conference, thanks primarily to the lack of commitment each nation is willing to put up.

The Kyoto Protocol, signed in 1997, put a binding legal agreement upon developed nations (or, as it calls them, “annex 1 nations”) to cut down on their emissions or face UN-imposed sanctions. As frail as the embargoes may themselves sound, most developed nations with the exception of the USA ratified the agreement and began the arduous process of, to use an appropriate mathematical term, “leaning” down. A recent study by The Economist has emerged that shows how Czechoslovakia cut down its emissions by as much as 30 per cent. But that misses the point: the focus has since shifted away from every country to a certain group of countries, each with its own brand of interests.

The successor to the Kyoto Protocol, which will take effect from 2015 onward if it is formulated in 2011 or 2012, will have to accommodate the emissions of developing nations. Before the Kyoto Protocol came into effect, more than half of all global emissions came from developed nations; today, 58 per cent of all emissions are by developing nations. This means that a binding legal agreement will have to lean down the USA, the EU as well as the BRICS bloc, and therein lies the rub.

The USA is willing to accede to such an agreement if the same limits and sanctions are imposed on all countries that ratify it, shirking away from a West-specific clause that will jeopardise its capacity to keep the Chinese, Indian and Brazilian economies in check. India, in turn, has a different concern altogether. The average emissions per capita per annum of an Indian are a mere 1.2 tonnes, and with more than 400 million of its people still living in poverty, India’s needs are more pressing than America’s because its need for development is righteously immense. Therefore, leashing both the USA and India with the same amount of rope makes no sense. However, the prospect of finally leashing the USA has the EU excited, which makes the BRICS’s resistance all the more important, all the more precarious.

Because of the significant unified bargaining power of the BRICS block, the biggest threat it could face is one of its members breaking rank, which the head of the Chinese delegate almost did. On December 6, Mr. Xie Zhenhua announced that China was ready to participate in a treaty that would legally bind both developing and developed nations, an announcement that is sure to have sent a shiver down the convention’s spine. However, before anything radical materialized, Mr. Zhenhua clarified that China was willing to participate in a treaty that would bind only the developed nations even though developing nations would be a part of it.

What is he trying to say? That the developing nations will evaluate the greenhouse gas emissions of the developed nations? Or that China was prepared to break away and form its own bargaining front? Or was it simply a case of reckless overstepping that was quickly mitigated by the realization that China would have nowhere to go from thereon? Greenhouse gases can step aside: it seems a blast of hot, red air demands some attention now.

Another look at the displacement v. development debate

What is development?

I would interpret all development as a biological process, one that mimics natural processes. In this framework, development is the process through which each system attains maturity, a position of sufficiency and sustainability.

Maturity in whose interest? In the interests of the people? That is a secular definition that assumes everybody has all kinds of information required to make the decision. Therefore, development comes down to transparency that enables as well as reflects informed decision-making. I say secular because in such a definition of development, it becomes easy to exclude a world of foreign nations, which is not the case.

Consequently, a nation’s developmental trajectory is dictated significantly by foreign interests. In my opinion, thus, the developmental mechanism must work toward increasing the regional purchasing power so that our say in the international trade arena holds more weight.

The problem

Displacement versus development is a problem particularly difficult to explore because, beyond the initial recognition of the government’s role as being “villainous”, there is not much that has been said or done to establish a line beyond which displacement becomes simply necessary. The pursuit of developmental goals by the Indian government has resulted in over 21.3 million being displaced internally according to a 1998 report by the Indian Social Institute. Almost 5.8 per cent, or 1.25 million, of them have been displaced by the establishment of industrial estates1.

Development seems like a two-faced engine: (1) it works toward increasing our purchasing power regarding resources we may need in the future and (2) it consumes important resources required for its sustenance that the nation may not be in a position to provide. For instance, the proposed installation of two nuclear reactors at Kudankulam will generate 2,000 MW of power, which is over and above Tamil Nadu’s shortage (659 MW). Apart from this, another 11,540 MW is to be added between 2012 and 2016 with the installation of 17 power plants around the state, eight of them having already been sanctioned2.

Now, as environmentalists and others in the area protest against constructing a plant that poses significant risks to the livelihoods of residents, a question that goes under-attended is that of necessity: which are the quarters that require this 12,881 MW(the total 13,540 MW minus the deficit) of energy? What has been done, either by private parties or the government, to determine if such demands are legitimate? We must ask why Kudankulam and why not in Chennai, whose population actually stands to benefit from the operation of the reactors. What else is being done to whittle down unnecessary losses that have resulted in such huge power shortages?

In light of such seeming discrimination, the problem statements are two.

1. Why is the government intent on displacing those peoples who are poised to benefit the least from the projects that displace them?


2. Can development become necessary under any conditions and assume precedence over displacement?

The real villain, the real villainy

In India, I believe that the problem has never purely been one of displacement v. development, even though the conflict between those who champion either cause is what birthed it. According to Dr. Prabhat Patnaik, one of India’s leading economists, the central government’s adoption of a capitalist economic model will produce problems unique to the country because capitalism is being superimposed on an “old order” that hasn’t fully been dismantled. This is where the adivasi resides.

1. Developmental cap - When it comes to the displacement of adivasis, a symbolic cap is necessary to discourage the government from favouring one section of the population more than the other, in the process expanding a gap that it has been elected to work against! Since government accountability for state-instituted displacement, especially as a result of land acquisition, is virtually absent, there is nothing to prevent the problem from worsening except an undertaking on the state’s part.
   
   It must undertake to frame its growth rate according to a plebiscit decreed by the people in the absence of congressmen and patricians at the order of a magistrate or a tribune, and it must work with the plebiscit as a strict guideline. This is similar to what has already been mandated by the new Land Acquisition and Rehabilitation and Resettlement (LARR) Bill, 2011.


2. Consumption cap - If, at the policy level, a framework can be built that prioritizes the rights of the Dongria Kondh over the demand for bauxite mined from the Niyamgiri Hills in Orissa, what are the processes on the other side of the wall that will determine how much we reduce our consumption of aluminium by? Because we cannot plug a hole at one end of the pipe and expect the water levels at the other end to not rise up.

Conclusion

Yes, someone must suffer a loss of some kind for the sake of development, but instead of sustaining growth rates at precarious costs, why isn’t there any faith in the aspirations of the adivasis themselves? Why is it that adivasis are being targeted again and again instead of the state inculcating a program that will successfully reintegrate them into modern society, moderate growth rates to reasonable levels, and ensure that the notion of progress is no longer mired in controversy?

I hold that integration into modern society is more desirable than tribalizing the modern society because of the mechanisms we require to remain on a competitive note with our traders and strategic partners. At the same time, there is no doubt that we have lost control over our own internal homogenization. It is true that our first duty is toward ourselves, but what it has been lost to requires a look at India’s foreign relations and political history, which possesses its own special share of flaws. However, regression in the post-globalization age would be incredibly painful.

My answer is that under some circumstances, displacement could become simply necessary. While, there can be no excuse for the government to snatch land from its citizens for any use, except those expediently required (such as national defence, etc.), that is a matter of enforcement: without rehabilitation and resettlement, it is just unconstitutional.

It would be more harmful for the Indian economy, and the important subsidies it provides that sustains large sections of the rural population, in the short- and long-terms to cease its current trade partnerships and other strategic commitments than to resist globalization and modernization and start on a path toward complete self-sufficiency. The only leeway on top of it is that we need an equitable distribution of development because only that promises the convergence of globalization with our social harmony to some extent.

Sources

1. http://www.fmreview.org/FMRpdfs/FMR08/fmr8.9.pdf


2. http://www.tn.gov.in/policynotes/pdf/energy.pdf

Afterlife of the Kyoto Protocol: A case of development as currency

The Kyoto Protocol will expire in December, 2012, almost exactly a year from today. Its legal bindings will collapse and remove all restrictions on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions it currently places on the 64 countries that ratified it in 1997.

Then, if an apparently weak conscience can be disregarded, and many believe it can, then the only thing standing in the way of ourselves and a future that is environmentally secure and free from the threat of extreme weather events is the adoption of a self-imposed and self-regulated system. A system that plays its part in ensuring the world as a whole has cut its GHG emissions by 50 per cent in 2050, a system that requires no confidence that other countries at least have the intention of doing the same, a system that faces no legally-backed sanctions if it releases alarming amounts of pollutants into the air.

The inherent comedy is evident.

The one recourse of any appreciable moment remaining to mankind before the Kyoto Protocol dissolves is the COP17 in Durban, South Africa. Being the 17th conference of the 194 countries to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the talks will host 15,000 members of state, mediapersons and other dignitaries to discuss the all too familiar problems before them: the different obligations of the rich and the poor, who is going to help the poor incentivize green growth, conservation of forests and funding for the development of clear energy technology.

[caption id="attachment_20842" align="aligncenter" width="593" caption="A march by locals outside the International Convention Center, Durban, South Africa, where the COP17 is underway. (Image from The Telegraph)"][/caption]

Ever since the Kyoto Protocol was signed in 1997, relations between the United States and the rest of the world have been tense: because the USA did not ratify the protocol, it did not find its emissions capped by an internationally binding agreement that its trading partners had decided to abide by. An important case in point would be between the USA and the duo of India and China.

On January 1, 1989, the Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer entered into force with a heartening 196 signatories pledging to phase out and eventually eliminate chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs). It found renewed interest each year for 10 years after it was effected, and in 1999, after the ratification in Beijing, its goals were replaced by the goals of the Kyoto Protocol.

Consequently, an equal amount of interest was expected from national governments in the new protocol. However, because the focus shifted from process regulation to goal regulation, i.e. from the elimination of CFC- and HCFC-emissions to the strict limit on any kinds of emissions overall, the United States decided to give the ratification a skip. At the same time, because it felt obliged due to environmental concerns as such, its government called for a drop in emissions from the international community - especially from India and China - in a hypocritical approach that found scant purchase from all fronts.

While some would believe the justification of such a call pointless and, at worst, irredeemable, it does merit a consideration of the terms of the interface between whatever treaty is fortunate enough to be the successor and the Kyoto Protocol. At first glance, the Protocol fails to take into account that national emissions in 1990, which respectively defines the subsequent cap for each nation, were uneven in various ways. In 1990, East and West Germany unified to become one state after which East Germany's emissions collapsed. Germany, therefore, took the opportunity to take credit for this drop in emissions even though what was West Germany began to step up industrialization. Australia, on a similar vein, had extremely high land clearance rates in 1990, and despite an emerging sentiment in the country to cut back on emissions in the following years, the Protocol in 1997 allowed them an increase. The same goes for Iceland.

[caption id="attachment_20845" align="aligncenter" width="593" caption="Per capita emission in Iceland"][/caption]

By not gauging anyone's contribution to the climate change mess based on net current emissions, the Protocol became a proxy for disguised industrialization. As has been mentioned earlier, it completely retrogressed economically powerful beneficiaries like the United States and Canada to a pre-Montreal Protocol stage.

Since the prevailing consensus amongst attendees of the COP17 is that a legally binding agreement will not be reached before 2015, India and China will want to use the interim period to step up industrial growth or, in other words, industrial emissions. In the same span, the United States will look to garner sufficient political support that it currently lacks to curb climate change (this after Obama's cap-and-trade proposal flopped spectacularly in the US Senate in 2010).

One way or another, scientists and researchers believe that things are going in the wrong direction, but at the same time, the expectations of countries such as those of the European Union from the United States seem to pose an unnecessary hindrance in the way of developing countries enforcing their demands on the United States. This, in turn, comes with the reasonable assumption that developing nations should indeed have more of a say in the matter.

For instance, since the sanctions imposed by the Kyoto Protocol in case of failure to comply are weaker than domestic laws in almost all ratifying nations, the EU fears that the US will attempt to take advantage of this leniency. At the same time, India and China, which are expressing some willingness to ratify a successor protocol if the US is willing to, too, face the risk of even tighter regulations of their emissions simply because the sanctions of the successor will be strengthened to leash the US. The question is: is suffering domestic action a parameter for evaluation at all? If anything, a special clause must be put in place instead of attempting to curb sovereign autonomy. Better yet, the developed nations must unite separately before coming to the negotiations desk.

At the end of the day, the principle cause of any problems that have to do with a delay in enforcing a new protocol is the employment of development as currency: with developed countries on one side, developing countries on one and the underdeveloped countries left to campaign for a cause of their own, unity seems hopelessly distant. The solution lies in the primary failure of the Kyoto Protocol: instead of basing future action on historic development, it seems only prudent to base future action on future development. Global trade and other strategically relevant programs must be tied in with processes that work toward curbing climate change so that clean and sustainable energy stands a chance to become the new currency - which is what those at Durban this week are looking for.

If those at COP17 feel that development as currency is a legitimate position to begin with, then negotiations are bound to be doomed. Instead, much hope lies with restructuring development so that it is strutted by environmentalism as a developmental entity and not by environmentalism as a socio-economic entity. Yes, capitalistic ideals will seep in, but the world is seeking to do a volte-face on the past, and that demands a volte-face on our past attitudes as well.

We, not the people.

Displacement versus development is a problem particularly difficult to explore because, beyond the initial recognition of the government's role as being "villainous", there is not much that has been said or done to establish a line beyond which displacement, with rehabilitation, becomes simply necessary. The pursuit of developmental goals by the Indian government has resulted in over 21.3 million being displaced internally according to a 1998 report by the Indian Social Institute, and almost 5.8 per cent, or 1.25 million, of them have been displaced by the establishment of industrial estates.

On the one hand, development seems like a two-faced engine that, whilst making possible a future wherein important resources may be purchased, consumes important resources required for its sustenance that the nation may not be in a position to provide. The proposed installation of two nuclear reactors at Kudankulam, for instance, will generate 2,000 MW of power, which is over and above Tamil Nadu's shortage (659 MW). Apart from this, another 11,540 MW is to be added with the proposed installation of 17 power plants around the state, eight of them having already been sanctioned.

Now, as environmentalists and others in the area protest against constructing a plant that poses significant risks to the livelihoods of residents, a question that goes under-attended is that of necessity: which are the quarters that require this 12,881 MW of energy? What has been done, either by private parties or the government, to determine if such demands are legitimate?

Further, in order for the government to be in a position to define future growth in any sector, it must first be in a position to produce the necessary resources indigenously. In an increasingly urbanized context, however, those displaced are usually from the countryside - especially farmers, who are reliant on natural resources directly for their sustenance - and, therefore, upon displacing them, the government is only displacing the nation's principle conservationists. In light of such seeming discrimination, the problem statements are two instead of one.

1. Why is the government intent on displacing those peoples who are poised to benefit the least from the projects that displace them? (It is also that these people are invariably of a particular caste and/or profession, which makes the problem seem motivated)


2. Can development become necessary under any conditions and, therefore, assume precedence over displacement and the problems therewith? (This question includes issues of necessity, too)

In India, I believe that the problem has never purely been one of displacement v. development, even though the conflict between those who champion either cause is what birthed it. According to Dr. Prabhat Patnaik, one of India's leading economists, the central government's adoption of a capitalist economic model will produce problems unique to the country because capitalism is being superimposed on an "old order" that hasn't fully been dismantled. Whether or not it merits dismantlement is another question, but it is definitely unfair to systematically target a certain section of the population.

Subsequently, even before we are in a position to centre a debate around the safeguards against a reactor meltdown at Kudankulam, we must ask why Kudankulam and why not the outskirts of Chennai, whose population actually stands to benefit from the operation of the reactors. We must ask what else is being done to whittle down unnecessary "losses" that have resulted in such huge power shortages.

Considering that the previous argument did not concern itself with the mining of natural resources: when it comes to the displacement of adivasis, a symbolic cap is necessary to discourage the government from favouring one section of the population more than the other, in the process expanding a gap that it has been elected to work against! Since government accountability for state-instituted displacement, especially as a consequence of land acquisition, is virtually absent, there is nothing to prevent the problem from worsening except an undertaking on the state's part: that it will frame its growth rate in consultation with representatives from all industries without exception.

(In the absence of rehabilitation, those displaced from their lands become akin to refugees, such as those displaced by armed conflict, despite the granting of refugee status being at the discretion of political authorities. Post-displacement, projects aimed at rejuvenating the adivasi communities have only been on an ad hoc basis.

Even in the latest Draft National Rehabilitation Policy (NRP) 2006, those affected by the acquisition of their land do not have the right to be consulted before their property is chosen for acquisition. While there are landowners who have indeed agreed to hand over their land to the government, they are reluctant to do so until the Land Acquisition and Rehabilitation and Resettlement (LARR) Act is passed. Unfortunately, the corresponding bill is not listed among the 31 priority bills of the Parliament's winter session in 2011.)

If, at the policy level, a framework can be brought into existence that mandates a process through which, say, the rights of the Dongria Kondh are prioritized over the demand for bauxite mined from the Niyamgiri Hills in Orissa, what are the processes on the other side of the wall that will determine how much we reduce our consumption of aluminium by? Because we cannot plug a hole at one end of the pipe and expect the water levels at the other end to not rise up.

[caption id="attachment_20760" align="aligncenter" width="325" caption="Bauxite mining (top); Vedanta Alumina, a subsidiary of Sterlite Industries, Ltd., which received the controversial clearance from the SC to proceed with bauxite mining in the Niyamgiri Hills"][/caption]

Yes, someone must suffer a loss of some kind for the sake of development, but instead of sustaining growth rates at precarious costs, why isn't there any faith in the aspirations of the adivasis themselves? Why is it that adivasis are being targeted again and again instead of inculcating a program that will successfully reintegrate them into modern society, moderate growth rates to reasonable levels, and ensure that the notion of progress is no longer mired in controversy?

I am not against nuclear power or bauxite mining but for it; what I am against is the government's tendency to define "public interests" without the real interests of the "public" in mind. India needs some amount of aluminium and some amount of energy to realize some of its projected growth rates; what it doesn't need is the dousing of such important issues in a socio-political quagmire. Displacement v. development is, uniquely, a human rights issue, and it is an environmental issue as well, and while we are debating it, it is important to be aware of the human rights and environmental factors that influence the parameters whose traits we take for granted.

More empty classrooms

[caption id="attachment_20671" align="aligncenter" width="474" caption="Source: Annual Report, University Grants Commission, 2009-2010"][/caption]

Two facts are evident from the chart shown above. The first is that while the increase in the number of colleges has been significant between the years 2004 and 2009, a similar growth is not reflected in the number of teachers: 53.7 per cent more colleges versus 28.7 more teachers (both in 2009). This means that while public and private institutes of higher education are established, there is not enough being done to staff them adequately.

The second observation follows from the first: in order to perfectly gauge the adequacy of teachers, it is seen that the percentage increase in the number of colleges is not reflected in the increase in the number of students: 36.7 per cent. Therefore, there are more colleges, more students per teacher, and more vacant seats today than ever before. According to a survey conducted by the Manpower Group in early 2011, 67 per cent of Indian employers experience difficulties in finding the right person for a job - and this statistic stood at just 16 per cent last year. Thus, the problem is both quantitative and, considering an increasing shortage of talent, qualitative.

ITER & India

ITER stands for the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor. The project will aim to demonstrate the technological feasibility of nuclear fusion reactions and its deployment in the power generation sector.

India applied for membership in early 2005, and later that year, in October, its membership was approved by an inspection committee that visited the Institute of Plasma Research (IPR) in Ahmedabad. The group evaluated India’s ability to contribute meaningfully to the software and hardware requirements of ITER.

India’s foray into nuclear physics is not new; ever since the Pokhran test in 1998, the country has been constantly on the forefront of research in the nuclear sciences. Two important reasons drive R&D in the country in this direction.

The first is that the world’s largest reserves of thorium are located in India, with an estimated 650,000 tonnes remaining. Thorium is an important nuclear fuel and yields much more energy during the nuclear fission process than does uranium.

The second reason is, indirectly, the Indian education system, which encourages more science than technology amongst students. Consequently, the nation is a powerhouse for verifying, processing and interpreting second-hand information as can be obtained from CERN in Europe and Fermilab in the USA.

The ITER is scheduled to go online in 2012, and as we approach that date, its significance is gaining in the country because of the opposition the government has met with in setting up more fission reactors around the country. The arguments of the public are justified, but that doesn’t mean we are in a position to abandon the nuclear program.

Like all other sources of energy, there are problems, and the way to deal with these problems is not to brush them aside especially when the solutions can go a long way in resolving the energy crisis that threatens to cripple the nation. If we don’t switch to alternative sources of energy soon enough, fossil fuels will contribute as much as 60% to our energy source, and that is obviously unaffordable.

If the ITER becomes successful – and the chances are great that it will – then India’s full partnership with the program will translate into reduced costs when it comes to setting up nuclear fusion reactors. We need to give it some time, say, until 2016, for the technology to become fully deployable as a safe solution.

The ITER is not the only super-project that India is currently involved in. In Theni, about 500 km from here, a massive cavern is being excavated in the Bodi Hills to situate India’s first particle physics observatory. Called the India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO), it will house the world’s largest neutrino detector that will study neutrinos coming from outer space as well as receive particles from the LHC at CERN for further study. The investment in the project is somewhere around Rs. 1,250 crore, and is expected to start functioning in 2012.

The national investment in R&D in India is currently 1.9% of the GDP. This translates to the faith the Indian government has begun to express in the scientific community. Right now, it does look like we are at a crossroads, where we must decide immediately to switch from nuclear fission reactors to solar power generators, but that’s not the end of the road.

Yes, renewable energy can be harnessed, but our research on that front is minimal, if not negligible. We can set up local grids that produce power and then feed it into the national grid at a feed-in tariff provided by the government, and that way, we can gradually reduce the load on the central grid.

At some point of time, we even might be able to define future growth rates based on just solar or wind power. However, nuclear fusion technology and the capabilities it purchases for growth and prosperity cannot be beat any time soon, and India’s emergence as a particle physics superpower is tied in to that goal.

ITER & India

ITER stands for the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor. The project will aim to demonstrate the technological feasibility of nuclear fusion reactions and its deployment in the power generation sector.

India applied for membership in early 2005, and later that year, in October, its membership was approved by an inspection committee that visited the Institute of Plasma Research (IPR) in Ahmedabad. The group evaluated India’s ability to contribute meaningfully to the software and hardware requirements of ITER.

India’s foray into nuclear physics is not new; ever since the Pokhran test in 1998, the country has been constantly on the forefront of research in the nuclear sciences. Two important reasons drive R&D in the country in this direction.

The first is that the world’s largest reserves of thorium are located in India, with an estimated 650,000 tonnes remaining. Thorium is an important nuclear fuel and yields much more energy during the nuclear fission process than does uranium.

The second reason is, indirectly, the Indian education system, which encourages more science than technology amongst students. Consequently, the nation is a powerhouse for verifying, processing and interpreting second-hand information as can be obtained from CERN in Europe and Fermilab in the USA.

The ITER is scheduled to go online in 2012, and as we approach that date, its significance is gaining in the country because of the opposition the government has met with in setting up more fission reactors around the country. The arguments of the public are justified, but that doesn’t mean we are in a position to abandon the nuclear program.

Like all other sources of energy, there are problems, and the way to deal with these problems is not to brush them aside especially when the solutions can go a long way in resolving the energy crisis that threatens to cripple the nation. If we don’t switch to alternative sources of energy soon enough, fossil fuels will contribute as much as 60% to our energy source, and that is obviously unaffordable.

If the ITER becomes successful – and the chances are great that it will – then India’s full partnership with the program will translate into reduced costs when it comes to setting up nuclear fusion reactors. We need to give it some time, say, until 2016, for the technology to become fully deployable as a safe solution.

The ITER is not the only super-project that India is currently involved in. In Theni, about 500 km from here, a massive cavern is being excavated in the Bodi Hills to situate India’s first particle physics observatory. Called the India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO), it will house the world’s largest neutrino detector that will study neutrinos coming from outer space as well as receive particles from the LHC at CERN for further study. The investment in the project is somewhere around Rs. 1,250 crore, and is expected to start functioning in 2012.

The national investment in R&D in India is currently 1.9% of the GDP. This translates to the faith the Indian government has begun to express in the scientific community. Right now, it does look like we are at a crossroads, where we must decide immediately to switch from nuclear fission reactors to solar power generators, but that’s not the end of the road.

Yes, renewable energy can be harnessed, but our research on that front is minimal, if not negligible. We can set up local grids that produce power and then feed it into the national grid at a feed-in tariff provided by the government, and that way, we can gradually reduce the load on the central grid.

At some point of time, we even might be able to define future growth rates based on just solar or wind power. However, nuclear fusion technology and the capabilities it purchases for growth and prosperity cannot be beat any time soon, and India’s emergence as a particle physics superpower is tied in to that goal.

Star of the Orient

India’s first particle physics observatory is to be constructed in the district of Theni in Tamil Nadu at an expense of Rs. 1,200 crore (USD 250 million). Called the India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO), the entire experiment will be situated 1.3 km under a hill to keep other radiations and cosmic rays from interfering with the study. This is because the neutrinos that the detector will be studying rarely interact with matter and pass through it at the rate of three or four interactions per nearly 85 trillion trillion trillion. The gouging of a tunnel 7m wide and 1.9km long for accessing the cavern that will house the systems was commenced on October 14, Friday, and is expected to take a year.

Twenty-seven days ago, a startling discovery set off tremors across the scientific community when the Gran Sasso National Laboratory inItalyreported that certain fundamental particles called neutrinos had been observed moving faster than light. The reason this observation caused such dissonance and a flurry of excitement is that, according to the physics megagiant Albert Einstein, the Universe would allow nothing to travel faster than light.

Then again, conclusive proof was not presented by the physicists at the lab—at least, not anything that was within the infamous six-sigma accuracy tolerance limit: 99.99999 per cent. It was little surprise, then, that within a week of the report, engineers were working in full-swing atJapan's Kamioka reactor, at theUSA's dreaded Fermilab, at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory inCanada, to recreate the conditions at Gran Sasso. Far away, in India, a country that had until then been the principle centre for processing second-hand information, a 22-year old plan was finally being mobilized.

With just a 29-year old history, the energy frontier of physics research was supposed to last at least until 2018—the year of the Super Large Hadron Collider. With such unprecedented discoveries, however, a shift away from high-energy research and toward ultra-rare processes has become conspicuous. For the INO, the timing couldn’t have been better.

The decision to locate the observatory at Theni was finalized after evaluating the local topography, seismic stability, environmental disturbance, rock quality, availability of electricity and water, and rain patterns. In order to further minimize the impact of the project’s logistical and infrastructural operations, an extant but little-used road is being re-laid for the trucks and earthmovers to use, instead of having them move through five villages.

Funded by the government of India and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), and coordinated by the Institute of Mathematical Sciences (IMS), the INO will host a supersensitive static detector called the Iron Calorimeter (ICAL), incorporating a magnet exactly four times as large as the one in use at the Large Hadron Collider. Such an effort will involve the INO-industry interface in a big way, drawing heavily on available industrial infrastructure, in issues related to mechanical structure, electronics and detector-related technology.

The detector will consist of a stack of alternating plates of iron and borosilicate glass, each totally numbering 30,000 and measuring 12m to a side. The glass plates, in turn, will consist of glass sheets with a noble gas sandwiched in between—an arrangement referred to collectively as a resistive plate chamber (RPC). When a neutrino interacts with iron, it will knock out an electron from its orbit around an atom and send it into the RPC. Once there, the electron will be picked up by positively charged electrodes sewn into the glass, translated into a signal, and sent to the data processors.

The source of the neutrinos will be the sun, supernovae, cosmic rays and other intergalactic phenomena, and the output will correspond to the particle’s mass, position of interaction, velocity, type, degree of oscillation and charge.

There are two reasons the INO stands out from its peers: the first is that the ICAL is going to be devoted to studying neutrinos and neutrinos only, and the second is that the ICAL will study them continuously without stopping (except for scheduled maintenance). Because of such principled and technical dedication, physicists expect the detector to shine light on some of the more elusive characteristics of neutrinos, such as flavour oscillations and neutrino-neutrino interactions.

These are boom times for Indian science. The national spending on science and technology has gone up in the last five years and is inching towards two per cent ofIndia's GDP. Hordes of new institutes are coming up in the nook and corner of the country—30 new central universities, 5 new Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research, 8 new Indian Institutes of Technology and 20 new Indian Institutes of Information Technology are in various stages of conception and completion.

However, simply increasing the number of institutes will not lead to better scientific prowess. The education system needs a complete rethink in order to attract more students to science and produce world class scientists (the last home-grown scientist to win a Nobel Prize was Sir C. V. Raman in 1930). In this direction, the INO is a giant leap forward because of its capacity to sustain research in subjects at the energy and cosmic frontiers, because of the special and exotic experimentation environments it will support, and because of the invaluable access it will provide to the Indian scientific community to cutting-edge information.

Star of the Orient

India’s first particle physics observatory is to be constructed in the district of Theni in Tamil Nadu at an expense of Rs. 1,200 crore (USD 250 million). Called the India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO), the entire experiment will be situated 1.3 km under a hill to keep other radiations and cosmic rays from interfering with the study. This is because the neutrinos that the detector will be studying rarely interact with matter and pass through it at the rate of three or four interactions per nearly 85 trillion trillion trillion. The gouging of a tunnel 7m wide and 1.9km long for accessing the cavern that will house the systems was commenced on October 14, Friday, and is expected to take a year.

Twenty-seven days ago, a startling discovery set off tremors across the scientific community when the Gran Sasso National Laboratory inItalyreported that certain fundamental particles called neutrinos had been observed moving faster than light. The reason this observation caused such dissonance and a flurry of excitement is that, according to the physics megagiant Albert Einstein, the Universe would allow nothing to travel faster than light.

Then again, conclusive proof was not presented by the physicists at the lab—at least, not anything that was within the infamous six-sigma accuracy tolerance limit: 99.99999 per cent. It was little surprise, then, that within a week of the report, engineers were working in full-swing atJapan's Kamioka reactor, at theUSA's dreaded Fermilab, at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory inCanada, to recreate the conditions at Gran Sasso. Far away, in India, a country that had until then been the principle centre for processing second-hand information, a 22-year old plan was finally being mobilized.

With just a 29-year old history, the energy frontier of physics research was supposed to last at least until 2018—the year of the Super Large Hadron Collider. With such unprecedented discoveries, however, a shift away from high-energy research and toward ultra-rare processes has become conspicuous. For the INO, the timing couldn’t have been better.

The decision to locate the observatory at Theni was finalized after evaluating the local topography, seismic stability, environmental disturbance, rock quality, availability of electricity and water, and rain patterns. In order to further minimize the impact of the project’s logistical and infrastructural operations, an extant but little-used road is being re-laid for the trucks and earthmovers to use, instead of having them move through five villages.

Funded by the government of India and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), and coordinated by the Institute of Mathematical Sciences (IMS), the INO will host a supersensitive static detector called the Iron Calorimeter (ICAL), incorporating a magnet exactly four times as large as the one in use at the Large Hadron Collider. Such an effort will involve the INO-industry interface in a big way, drawing heavily on available industrial infrastructure, in issues related to mechanical structure, electronics and detector-related technology.

The detector will consist of a stack of alternating plates of iron and borosilicate glass, each totally numbering 30,000 and measuring 12m to a side. The glass plates, in turn, will consist of glass sheets with a noble gas sandwiched in between—an arrangement referred to collectively as a resistive plate chamber (RPC). When a neutrino interacts with iron, it will knock out an electron from its orbit around an atom and send it into the RPC. Once there, the electron will be picked up by positively charged electrodes sewn into the glass, translated into a signal, and sent to the data processors.

The source of the neutrinos will be the sun, supernovae, cosmic rays and other intergalactic phenomena, and the output will correspond to the particle’s mass, position of interaction, velocity, type, degree of oscillation and charge.

There are two reasons the INO stands out from its peers: the first is that the ICAL is going to be devoted to studying neutrinos and neutrinos only, and the second is that the ICAL will study them continuously without stopping (except for scheduled maintenance). Because of such principled and technical dedication, physicists expect the detector to shine light on some of the more elusive characteristics of neutrinos, such as flavour oscillations and neutrino-neutrino interactions.

These are boom times for Indian science. The national spending on science and technology has gone up in the last five years and is inching towards two per cent ofIndia's GDP. Hordes of new institutes are coming up in the nook and corner of the country—30 new central universities, 5 new Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research, 8 new Indian Institutes of Technology and 20 new Indian Institutes of Information Technology are in various stages of conception and completion.

However, simply increasing the number of institutes will not lead to better scientific prowess. The education system needs a complete rethink in order to attract more students to science and produce world class scientists (the last home-grown scientist to win a Nobel Prize was Sir C. V. Raman in 1930). In this direction, the INO is a giant leap forward because of its capacity to sustain research in subjects at the energy and cosmic frontiers, because of the special and exotic experimentation environments it will support, and because of the invaluable access it will provide to the Indian scientific community to cutting-edge information.

Clear and present danger

“Revolutions in information and communication technologies have always been based on small findings in solid state physics” quips Dr. G. Baskaran, firmly establishing both the place and scope of technology. Affiliated with the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Canada, Dr. Baskaran is a renowned theoretical physicist. He recently delivered a short lecture at the Asian College of Journalism, speaking on everything from the role of science and the ongoing battle to explain super-luminary neutrinos to the future of science.

His statement couldn’t have come at a better time to remind the world of the necessity of science – and its techniques that we call technology. In the face of looming budget cuts in the USA and Europe, politicians and policy-makers have been raising serious questions about the necessity of everything from privately-owned small research labs to proposed upgrades to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN.

The evolution of science and technology has been associated with greater unity amongst peoples, Dr. Baskaran said, and better health, wealth, education and opportunities to preserve our culture. “There is some responsibility also”, he adds with a confidence mature with experience.

With likely the greatest ICT revolution at its peak, his words suggest that the technology fuelling it is also maturing in the sense of its acceptance and social penetration. Perhaps it is time for the world to get on the wagon, increase its investments in R&D, and start saving up. The future it seems can stand only to gain because historical ties are snapping in the face of a rupture that is allowing previously-lagging nations like India and China give past-leader USA a run for its money. Increased capitalist traction in the form of tablet computers and smartphones should be thanked for this.

Perhaps the best example of such an opportunity is the increasing feasibility of multi-state-owned research laboratories. The pioneer in this regard is CERN, which was funded and built by 12 countries in 1954, a number that has increased to 20 since, and currently receives funding from 69 countries worldwide. Next in line are the soon-to-come International Linear Collider (ILC) quartered in Japan and the ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) in France, as brought to light by Dr. Baskaran.

Such projects ease the burden on countries that wish they had the data from experiments but can’t provide the land to build the lab in the first place. In the case of CERN, the land belongs to two countries, the running costs to 69 nations, the responsibility to more than 7,300 physicists and engineers, and the experimental data to 6.6 billion people. Such overwhelming benefits require only a distributed investment model and cross-border trust to encash it. Alas, the last factor is the most impeding.

Consider the discovery of the super-luminary muon neutrinos detected at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy on September 23. In the absence of a unifying agency, the data would have been consumed by Italian researchers alone, keeping the world at bay for howsoever long it took to verify the results and get them published.

Now, a Puerto Rican or a Chilean has as much chance of explaining the phenomenon as does a Pakistani or Indian scientist. In fact, not only does the entire scientific community benefit by the sharing, but the chances of discovering something that will define the next big revolution are also increased.

(When asked about the strange occurrence, Dr. Baskaran asserted that owing to the small mass and low interactivity of the neutrinos, the existing energy generation technologies would not change as much our perceptions of the Universe. That, in turn, he said, will present new possibilities to produce more energy.)

A persisting sign of hope for India is its assistance with the construction of superconducting magnets at the LHC that even now are energizing beams of protons, and its significant contribution to the establishment of ITER. Further, Dr. Baskaran also revealed the news of a proposed Indian Neutrino Observatory (INO) at Theni, to be run by the government of India.

Alright, enough of taking comfort from the successes of the present; where are we headed? What does the future of science look like? The Tevatron has been closed, the baton has been passed to Europe to continue to look for the Higgs boson, the INO is under construction, and scientific representation is on the up. What about nanotechnology? It’s common knowledge that the Indians didn’t pay sufficient heed to Mr. Feynman. Is there still some space at the bottom?

We wouldn’t know, or, as Dr. Baskaran says, “There is nanomoney being spent on nanotechnology.” Employing India’s rise as an important centre for cheap but good medical care, he points out the important sectors our industries can capitalize on if it only took nanotech to the common man, akin to Gandhi’s talisman. There’s drug delivery, magnetic-resonance imaging, NEMS (nano-electromechanical systems), and, on another note, quantum computing. With continuing failure to look into these sectors, we're not only losing out on the international arena but we are also denying our citizens the opportunities to employment, to knowledge, to possibility.

So, are we again looking at the dearth of planning that has failed to incentivize the study of science in the country? Yes, at least in part. However, initiatives like InSPIRE – which is a 5-week long immersion program that reconnects Indians abroad to Indians at home – bear promise. On a final note, Dr. Baskaran insists that instead of continuing to depend on the government, which in turn depends on internally available resources, it is time to utilize the abundance of intellectual property within the nation and trust in the democracy of science.

Clear and present danger

“Revolutions in information and communication technologies have always been based on small findings in solid state physics” quips Dr. G. Baskaran, firmly establishing both the place and scope of technology. Affiliated with the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Canada, Dr. Baskaran is a renowned theoretical physicist. He recently delivered a short lecture at the Asian College of Journalism, speaking on everything from the role of science and the ongoing battle to explain super-luminary neutrinos to the future of science.

His statement couldn’t have come at a better time to remind the world of the necessity of science – and its techniques that we call technology. In the face of looming budget cuts in the USA and Europe, politicians and policy-makers have been raising serious questions about the necessity of everything from privately-owned small research labs to proposed upgrades to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN.

The evolution of science and technology has been associated with greater unity amongst peoples, Dr. Baskaran said, and better health, wealth, education and opportunities to preserve our culture. “There is some responsibility also”, he adds with a confidence mature with experience.

With likely the greatest ICT revolution at its peak, his words suggest that the technology fuelling it is also maturing in the sense of its acceptance and social penetration. Perhaps it is time for the world to get on the wagon, increase its investments in R&D, and start saving up. The future it seems can stand only to gain because historical ties are snapping in the face of a rupture that is allowing previously-lagging nations like India and China give past-leader USA a run for its money. Increased capitalist traction in the form of tablet computers and smartphones should be thanked for this.

Perhaps the best example of such an opportunity is the increasing feasibility of multi-state-owned research laboratories. The pioneer in this regard is CERN, which was funded and built by 12 countries in 1954, a number that has increased to 20 since, and currently receives funding from 69 countries worldwide. Next in line are the soon-to-come International Linear Collider (ILC) quartered in Japan and the ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) in France, as brought to light by Dr. Baskaran.

Such projects ease the burden on countries that wish they had the data from experiments but can’t provide the land to build the lab in the first place. In the case of CERN, the land belongs to two countries, the running costs to 69 nations, the responsibility to more than 7,300 physicists and engineers, and the experimental data to 6.6 billion people. Such overwhelming benefits require only a distributed investment model and cross-border trust to encash it. Alas, the last factor is the most impeding.

Consider the discovery of the super-luminary muon neutrinos detected at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy on September 23. In the absence of a unifying agency, the data would have been consumed by Italian researchers alone, keeping the world at bay for howsoever long it took to verify the results and get them published.

Now, a Puerto Rican or a Chilean has as much chance of explaining the phenomenon as does a Pakistani or Indian scientist. In fact, not only does the entire scientific community benefit by the sharing, but the chances of discovering something that will define the next big revolution are also increased.

(When asked about the strange occurrence, Dr. Baskaran asserted that owing to the small mass and low interactivity of the neutrinos, the existing energy generation technologies would not change as much our perceptions of the Universe. That, in turn, he said, will present new possibilities to produce more energy.)

A persisting sign of hope for India is its assistance with the construction of superconducting magnets at the LHC that even now are energizing beams of protons, and its significant contribution to the establishment of ITER. Further, Dr. Baskaran also revealed the news of a proposed Indian Neutrino Observatory (INO) at Theni, to be run by the government of India.

Alright, enough of taking comfort from the successes of the present; where are we headed? What does the future of science look like? The Tevatron has been closed, the baton has been passed to Europe to continue to look for the Higgs boson, the INO is under construction, and scientific representation is on the up. What about nanotechnology? It’s common knowledge that the Indians didn’t pay sufficient heed to Mr. Feynman. Is there still some space at the bottom?

We wouldn’t know, or, as Dr. Baskaran says, “There is nanomoney being spent on nanotechnology.” Employing India’s rise as an important centre for cheap but good medical care, he points out the important sectors our industries can capitalize on if it only took nanotech to the common man, akin to Gandhi’s talisman. There’s drug delivery, magnetic-resonance imaging, NEMS (nano-electromechanical systems), and, on another note, quantum computing. With continuing failure to look into these sectors, we're not only losing out on the international arena but we are also denying our citizens the opportunities to employment, to knowledge, to possibility.

So, are we again looking at the dearth of planning that has failed to incentivize the study of science in the country? Yes, at least in part. However, initiatives like InSPIRE – which is a 5-week long immersion program that reconnects Indians abroad to Indians at home – bear promise. On a final note, Dr. Baskaran insists that instead of continuing to depend on the government, which in turn depends on internally available resources, it is time to utilize the abundance of intellectual property within the nation and trust in the democracy of science.

A man more annoyed than me

The following are the points I considered worth taking down during an amusing lecture delivered by Dalit activist Kancha Ilaiah at the Asian College of Journalism on the 12th day of August, 2011.

--

Film censorship

1. Why curtain a film that hasn't been screened? (Aarakshan)


2. Freedom of expression, right to that freedom


3. M. F. Hussain - afforded dissimilar treatment in response to similar issues


4. Freedom of expression of small social groups vs. freedom to exist of the majority


5. Where do we draw the line?

Art of neutrality

1. Any Dalits in the censor board?


2. Do men and women have adequate representation on the board?


3. Do SC/STs and OBCs have adequate representation on the board?


4. No objectivity anywhere


5. Subjectivity pervades


6. Objectivity intervenes in certain stages


7. The drive to achieve is the drive of objectivity

The caste question

1. Is reservation required in the censor board?


2. 75% of the Indian population is non-FC


3. Why then does representation in the censor board so incongruent?


4. Conscious avoidance?


5. Accidental absence?


6. No censor board has ever contained an SC/ST or an OBC


7. Inter-caste marriage as a filmographic theme since inception of Indian cinema


8. Misrepresentation of reality by films


9. The duty of films toward a society wherein caste is important?


10. Global viewership share of Muslims is 30%


11. The film industry has more often than not misrepresented Indian society

"A film on reservation cannot quell public unrest on the issue when it does not possess adequate representation in situ in India."

"Khans exist as Khans because of bin Laden - just as Jews exist as Jews because of Hitler."

Subjectivity and objectivity

1. The perspective toward films and of films is wholly of subjective origins


2. However, there is an historical background that is wholly objective


3. Idol-worship


4. Can Dalits take a position on anything and be considered as perpetrators of non-caste agitations?

"The penetration of caste deep into society and politics has resulted in the infiltration of its influence into the sphere of arts, style, public image, etc."

Hermeneutics

1. Interpretation of texts keeping in mind one's social background


2. Hindu mythology does not "account" for the rise of Dalits


3. "Cows as religious symbols because its historical significance deigns it so - why not worship buffaloes when they are significant as the largest producers of milk today?"

"Gods have shaven faces while the 'Untouchables' were barbers."

Caste, politics & caste politics

1. Globalization of cultural systems as a consequence of "democratic evangelism"


2. Religion plays a major role in a capitalist society, and more the religious penetration, more the infiltration of those factors that influenced our perceptions of religion

"Washermen who discovered soap in ancient India were not credited with the discovery as such, either nationally or globally. That suppression - a consequence of the suppression of the Dalits?"

A man more annoyed than me

The following are the points I considered worth taking down during an amusing lecture delivered by Dalit activist Kancha Ilaiah at the Asian College of Journalism on the 12th day of August, 2011.

--

Film censorship

1. Why curtain a film that hasn't been screened? (Aarakshan)


2. Freedom of expression, right to that freedom


3. M. F. Hussain - afforded dissimilar treatment in response to similar issues


4. Freedom of expression of small social groups vs. freedom to exist of the majority


5. Where do we draw the line?

Art of neutrality

1. Any Dalits in the censor board?


2. Do men and women have adequate representation on the board?


3. Do SC/STs and OBCs have adequate representation on the board?


4. No objectivity anywhere


5. Subjectivity pervades


6. Objectivity intervenes in certain stages


7. The drive to achieve is the drive of objectivity

The caste question

1. Is reservation required in the censor board?


2. 75% of the Indian population is non-FC


3. Why then does representation in the censor board so incongruent?


4. Conscious avoidance?


5. Accidental absence?


6. No censor board has ever contained an SC/ST or an OBC


7. Inter-caste marriage as a filmographic theme since inception of Indian cinema


8. Misrepresentation of reality by films


9. The duty of films toward a society wherein caste is important?


10. Global viewership share of Muslims is 30%


11. The film industry has more often than not misrepresented Indian society

"A film on reservation cannot quell public unrest on the issue when it does not possess adequate representation in situ in India."

"Khans exist as Khans because of bin Laden - just as Jews exist as Jews because of Hitler."

Subjectivity and objectivity

1. The perspective toward films and of films is wholly of subjective origins


2. However, there is an historical background that is wholly objective


3. Idol-worship


4. Can Dalits take a position on anything and be considered as perpetrators of non-caste agitations?

"The penetration of caste deep into society and politics has resulted in the infiltration of its influence into the sphere of arts, style, public image, etc."

Hermeneutics

1. Interpretation of texts keeping in mind one's social background


2. Hindu mythology does not "account" for the rise of Dalits


3. "Cows as religious symbols because its historical significance deigns it so - why not worship buffaloes when they are significant as the largest producers of milk today?"

"Gods have shaven faces while the 'Untouchables' were barbers."

Caste, politics & caste politics

1. Globalization of cultural systems as a consequence of "democratic evangelism"


2. Religion plays a major role in a capitalist society, and more the religious penetration, more the infiltration of those factors that influenced our perceptions of religion

"Washermen who discovered soap in ancient India were not credited with the discovery as such, either nationally or globally. That suppression - a consequence of the suppression of the Dalits?"