Navy commissions aviation simulators

• The Southern Naval Command commissioned two state-of-the-art simulators to train naval aircrew in enhanced safety measures.

• While the Flight and Tactical Simulator for the Seaking helicopter — Navy’s mainstay in commando airlift and anti-submarine warfare operations — is a full-flight simulator offering a handling experience close to real, the Water Survival Training Facility, which provides a virtual experience of escape from an aircraft that has crashed into the sea, is the first of its kind in Asia and the third in the world.

• The WSTF, built at a cost of Rs. 20 crore by Survival Systems India, Mumbai, sports the entire range of survival training simulation theatre with several components.
• The helicopter underwater escape and cockpit underwater escape suits, forming part of the package, train aircrew in escaping from a submerged aircraft under various sea and environmental conditions.
• Its parachute disengagement and drag trainer provides a realistic experience in water entry while descending on a parachute to the sea, while the rescue hoist trainer provides the aircrew rescue procedures and techniques while being rescued.

This perverse rage against the poor

• This week’s received wisdom insists that the Indian economy has irretrievably collapsed because on Lok Sabha passed the National Food Security Bill (NFSB).
• Once every few decades comes a moment in a Republic’s life when a few fundamental commitments have to be renewed — or rejected.
• This is one such week, a time to test our core beliefs.

• It is also the time to ask a fundamental question: since when in this country has a veto been ceded to the markets and its manipulators, at home and abroad, to decide the issues of equity, social justice and economic fairness?

• There is something inherently perverse in the suggestion that this much-needed welfare measure would send out the “wrong” signals. Pray to whom?
• Those half-a-dozen professional financial manipulators in London?
• Indeed, economists can always be relied upon to argue that there is always a better way to do anything.

• Some are competing among themselves to declare that this food security initiative will neither work, nor fetch any votes for the ruling party. Let us make no mistake. Beyond all these sophisticated arguments is a certain class prejudice, resentful that so many resources are being “wasted” for the poor and other socially disadvantaged people, that in this age of “reforms,” political considerations and calculations are being allowed to determine the allocation of societal resources.

• This misses the very essence of the concept of political legitimacy in a democratic arrangement.
• A democracy survives and prospers only when every stakeholder gets an abiding sense of participation, partnership and entitlement.
• We often seem to keep forgetting that politics is all about who gets what at whose expense. During these last five years, at least for most of the time, the corporates and their policy preferences have been accorded unprecedented acceptance. The time is ripe to strike a new balance. And the NFSB does just that.

Sources: Various News Paper