Current Affairs for IAS Exams - 4 March 2018

::NATIONAL::

SRB again low

A recent report from the NITI Aayog said sex ratio at birth (SRB) nationwide had dropped from 906 in 2012-2014 to 900 in 2013-2015.
The SRB is the number of girls born for every 1,000 boys. In all, 17 of 21 large Indian States saw a drop in the SRB, with Gujarat performing the worst, declining 53 points.
While the NITI Aayog report used data up to 2013-15, newer data from India’s Sample Registration System show the SRB fell even further in 2014-2016, from 900 to 898.
While this is a highly disturbing trend, it isn’t new for India, which has seen a consistent lowering of the SRB since the 1970s.
In natural circumstances, the SRB hovers around 952 girls for every 1,000 boys.
The number of girls born is naturally lower than the number of boys, and demographers speculate that this may be nature’s way of offsetting the higher risk that men have of dying — male babies are biologically weaker than females, and men have historically seen higher mortality rates owing to risk-taking behaviour and participation in wars.
This evens out the sex ratio of a population as it grows older.
But India is a special case. Its SRB is far lower than 952 because of the preference for the male child.
This means we are killing girl children in the womb. As on today, around 63 million girls are estimated to be ‘missing’ in India because of such actions.
Till the 1970s, female infanticide was the preferred way of killing the girl child, notes a review in the journal Genetics in Medicine .
But in the Seventies, sex selection technologies like amniocentesis came about, in which doctors can test the amniotic fluid around a developing foetus for genetic abnormalities. But people soon realised this method could be used to determine the child’s sex and to abort it, if female.
Other technologies, including the cheaper and less invasive ultrasound, followed, allowing more people to use them. As a 2010 report from the Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI) puts it, these technologies gave son preference “a tiny, sleek technological nudge”. Families who were killing baby girls till then made the shift to abortions.
A thriving market for sex selection sprung up with doctors openly advertising their services. In 1994, the government took notice and introduced the Prenatal Diagnostics Techniques Act which punishes healthcare professionals for telling expectant parents the sex of a child with imprisonment and hefty fines.
Low SRBs starting from the Seventies have led to large numbers of “surplus men” today in countries like India and China. There are concerns that skewed sex ratios lead to more violence against both men and women, as well as human-trafficking.
In India, some villages in Haryana and Punjab have such poor sex ratios that men “import” brides from other States.
This is often accompanied by the exploitation of these brides.
India must implement the PC-PNDT more stringently, but must also dedicate more resources to fighting the preference for boys.
The Drugs Technical Advisory Board decided that ultrasound machines should be included in the Drugs and Cosmetics Act, so that their import is regulated.

Violation of Child rights in body piercing rituals

The annual festivals at the Attukal Devi Temple in the State capital and the Chettikulangara Devi Temple in Alappuzha district have shot into unusual prominence for the ritualistic body piercing ceremonies known as ‘Kuthiyottam’ and ‘Chooral Muriyal’.
At Attukal in the State capital, the practice of keeping around 1,000 teenage boys on the temple premises for five days.
This leading up to the grand finale when thousands of women arrive in the city to offer pongala (made with rice and jaggery) to the female deity, has come in for criticism from the State’s Director General of Prisons R. Sreelekha.
She raised the question of how elders could allow hooks to be pierced into the sides of the boys, even ritualistically, in gross violation of their rights to protection and security.
Ms. Sreelekha is Kerala’s first woman IPS officer. Her writing earned the wrath of right wing sympathisers. She has received no support the CPI(M)-led government.
A fortnight ago, on February 22, religious fervour found its expression in the ritual called ‘Chooral Muriyal’ at the Chettikulangara Devi temple in Alappuzha. It was thronged by thousands of devotees on the ‘Bharani’ day in the Malayalam calendar.
Those who offer Kuthiyottam performances to the deity ‘adopt’ young boys aged between 8 and 14 from other families.
These boys are then taken care of by their adopted households for the next 10 days. They are taught the ritual dance of Kuthiyottam with the help of asan s (masters).
The boys are then “offered” to the goddess.
In the ritual of Chooral Muriyal, either sides of the boys’ midriffs are pierced and gold strings passed through their piercings.
One end of the thread is tied around the neck. Later, children with painted faces, an arecanut fixed on the tip of a knife held high over their head, are garlanded and taken in a procession to the temple, their pain drowned by beating of drums and music. At the temple, young boys dance facing the sanctum.
In the end, the gold threads are pulled out and offered to the deity along with drops of blood on it, in a symbolic sacrifice.
The Kerala State Commission for Protection of Child Rights (KeSCPCR) in 2016 banned the practice, noting that it should be abolished from society, like the practice of sati.
Dismissing a petition filed by an organisation, which sought the ban to be overturned, the Kerala High Court last month observed that children should not be subjected to any form of physical or mental suffering in the name of such ceremonies.
However, despite a ban, at least 12 households performed the ritual this year.
The ritual is performed as a wish-fulfilling offering to the deity. The ‘masters’ who train the children in Kuthiyottam performances maintain that the boys are offered to the goddess to bring her joy, and the ritual cannot be be seen as a sacrifice.

BJP wins in Tripura

Marking its ascendancy in the northeast, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won the Tripura Assembly elections, ending the 25-year reign of the CPI(M), and put itself in a position to form an alliance government in Nagaland.
In Meghalaya, it prevented the Congress from winning a majority, and could well be part of a coalition regime.
The BJP swept Tripura in partnership with the Indigenous People’s Front of Twipra (IPFT) to end the Left Front’s rule and managed to tone down its Hindutva image to improve its performance in Nagaland.
Despite the Congress emerging as the single largest party in instability-prone Meghalaya, the BJP could form a coalition government with regional parties.
While Tripura gave a clear result, the verdicts in Meghalaya and Nagaland were fractured.
At the end of the day, it was clear that neither of the two major regional players in Nagaland — the ruling Naga People’s Front (NPF) and the breakaway Nationalist Democratic Progressive Party (NDPP) — was in a position to form the government without the BJP, which upped its tally to 11 from one in 2013.
The BJP inked a pre-poll alliance with the NDPP, but kept its options open to accommodate the NPF, which had been an ally in Nagaland since 2003.
Both the BJP-NDPP combine and the NPF fell short of a majority, but the former appeared set to form the government by garnering support from an independent and the lone Janata Dal (United) candidate, who had earlier sided with NPF.
The Congress, wiped out in Tripura and Nagaland, has not given up hope of forming a government in Meghalaya, but is wary of a Manipur-like situation where it emerged as the single largest party in the Assembly elections last year but lost seven MLAs to the BJP that cobbled up an alliance government.
If the BJP forms the government in Meghalaya with two regional parties — the National People’s Party (NPP) and the United Democratic Party (UDP), both constituents of an anti-Congress front named the North East Development Alliance — it will leave only Mizoram and Sikkim where the party is yet to make inroads.
What worked for the BJP was its slogan of ‘Chalo paltai’ (Let’s change) that caught the imagination of the electorate.
Among the factors that worked in favour of the BJP-IPFT alliance were anti-incumbency, alleged corruption by the Left Front government, and allegations that the CPI(M) worked for the benefit of only its workers and leaders.

Whip against Plan expenditure

The government has yet again cracked the whip against the bid to jack up Plan expenditure by withdrawing substantial sums from the treasury and parking it in public accounts.
After raising the cash withdrawal ceiling from Rs. 2,000 to Rs. 10,000, the department has issued a circular that funds could be transferred from the treasury only to the account of the end beneficiary and not to the public account of any government organisation, public sector undertaking or local self-government institution (LSGIs).
It has also directed that the fund transfer would be permitted only for paying income tax, ESI, provident fund and other benefits.
That also means departments and LSGIs cannot hereafter furnish inflated reports on Plan fund utilisation without incurring actual expenditure.
On finding that substantial sums have been deposited in public accounts of autonomous institutions and various departments, the Centre had curtailed the borrowing limit of the State.
The curtailment, along with the delay in providing the Central transfers, had upset the financial transactions and the government was forced to regulate cash outgo from the treasury.
Recently a Finance Department review found that various departments had deposited about Rs. 5,000 crore in their accounts maintained in the treasury.
The funds of institutions such as the Kerala State Financial Enterprises and the security deposits of government contractors were also deposited in the public accounts in the State treasury.
The Centre had considered all these funds while imposing curbs on the State’s borrowing limit.
The circular clearly says that henceforth officials would be permitted to withdraw only the funds that could be utilised within the next 30 days.
This is being construed as a positive move to avert the strain on State’s finances, avoid bunching of expenditure during the fag end of the financial year and also ensure a meaningful utilisation of the sanctioned funds.

Road map to Amaravati

Work is going on at a brisk pace to complete the roads leading to Andhra Pradesh’s new capital, Amaravati, but the designs for the various buildings, including the Secretariat, are still being finalised.
About 33,000 acres of lush agricultural land on the banks of the Krishna, about 12 km to the northwest of Vijayawada, has been earmarked for Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu’s dream project, estimated to cost Rs. 3 lakh crore. The foundation was laid by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on October 22, 2015.
The government is spending about Rs. 31,615 crore for infrastructure work, setting the stage for the start of construction of permanent facilities in a few months.
Work on government offices is yet to take off as the designs by Foster+Partners and architect Hafeez Contractor are not yet in place.
The capital is coming up on 217 sq km.
Apart from arterial and sub-arterial roads that are being built, the other significant projects that have so far been completed are two universities — SRM and Vellore Institute of Technology.
The government had laid stress on the designs of the Raj Bhavan, the Legislature Complex, the High Court and the Secretariat, which it sent many times for revision, and it is currently under process by Foster+Partners and other consulting firms.
The perspective plan of the capital region, which encompasses 26 mandals in Guntur district and 30 in Krishna districts, has been readied.
This includes the blueprints for transportation, tourism and townships.
Preparation of a slew of detailed project reports (DPRs), various procedures involved in mobilising funds from the Central government and other lending agencies, including the World Bank, and awarding projects through international competitive bidding took time.
The capital city’s master planning and engineering design took up to two years.
Then there is the sheer scale of the project, like the construction of 4,900-odd residential units, nearly 200 bungalows and a maze of roads including those as ambitious as the expressway intended to link the faraway Anantapur to Amaravati.
The government faced legal wrangles in the form of public interest litigation petitions against the construction of Amaravati at the chosen location and in the selection of the master developer.
The State government has received Rs. 2,500 crore from the Central government and is likely to get more funds.
The World Bank had come forward to lend $1 billion for road infrastructure in the capital region, and 10 priority roads are poised for completion at the end of this year.
The construction of the iconic government buildings is likely to begin in a few months, and the laying of the first floor of residential quarters for government employees later this month.
Tenders have been just called for building another bridge across river Krishna from Ibrahimpatnam in Krishna district to Amaravati.
Already 10,000 plots given to the farmers under the land pooling scheme, which began on January 1, 2015, have been registered and 200-300 are getting registered every day.
The Chief Minister has instructed officials to ground the core capital soon, having finished much of the planning and tied up funds.
Nevertheless, considering the magnitude of the task, it is going to take at least two years, if not more, to transform the entire capital region into a world-class city.
The State government is now functioning from the Interim Government Complex built at Velagapudi nearby. Situated nearby are the temporary Assembly and Council halls under a single roof.

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::INTERNATIONAL::

Trump stance on guns confuses law makers

In his quest to tackle gun violence, U.S. President Donald Trump has ricocheted between calling for tougher laws and declaring his fealty to the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms, leaving a trail of befuddled lawmakers and advocates in his wake.
One thing he still has not done — clearly outline his legislative priorities.
Washington’s week closed on Friday without further explanation from the President, the White House indicating that for now, at least, he is backing an incremental proposal on background checks and a Bill that would provide new federal dollars to stem school violence.
Just what Mr. Trump would like to see in the “beautiful” and “comprehensive” Bill he called for earlier in the week remained unclear.
That comment came at a bipartisan meeting with lawmakers on Wednesday, which was quickly followed by a private session with the National Rifle Association (NRA).
Amid the confusion, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has shelved the gun debate for now, saying the Senate will turn next week to other measures.
Disagreement continues among legislators over the appropriate response after the Florida school shooting that left 17 dead.
Republicans have largely backed away from stricter gun limits, while Democrats, emboldened by Mr. Trump’s rhetoric, are pushing for ambitious action, including expanded background checks and even a ban on assault weapons.
White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said on Friday that Mr. Trump supports a limited proposal that would boost participation in the existing federal background check programme, as well as a Bill that would provide new federal grant funding to stem school violence.
Ms. Sanders also sought to clarify Mr. Trump’s comments earlier in the week expressing support for tougher background checks and interest in raising the minimum age to buy certain weapons.
She said he was interested in improving background checks, but “not necessarily universal background checks”.
And she said that while Mr. Trump “conceptually” supports higher age requirements to purchase certain weapons, “he also knows there’s not a lot of broad support for that”. Mr. Trump also wants to use an executive order to bar the use of bump-stock devices that enable guns to fire like automatic weapons.
As part of Mr. Trump’s efforts to consider various responses to gun violence, next week, he plans to host members of the video game industry.
He has repeatedly referenced the violence in the movies and video games during conversations about guns and school safety since the Florida shooting.

::ECONOMY::

Aadhaar to be shielded by Aujas from cyber attack

Srinivas Rao is obsessive about data security. He carries two cell phones, an iPhone for official work and an Android handset for personal use.
It is this kind of obsession among many mobile owners that keeps the 54-year-old CEO of cybersecurity start-up Aujas Networks on his toes and successfully manage information security risks for his clients.
These customers range from Japan‘s largest lender Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group to Aadhaar, the world’s largest domestic biometric identification system.
“You have to be paranoid and you have to be aware because clients are trusting you,” said Mr. Rao, co-founder of Aujas, in an interview.
The Bengaluru-based firm is betting big on managing the cybersecurity programme for Aadhaar.
This includes software-as-a-service based Internet of Things (IoT) platform for the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), the issuer of the unique identity number.
Given the ubiquity of Aadhaar and various use cases requiring authentication, Aujas built the platform for ‘registered device management.’
It said the platform manages every device that is registered under a unique ID resulting in prevention and protection of the device from any “alien invasion” or hacking.
“This (platform) is for managing devices used by banks and telcos to authenticate Aadhaar,” explained Mr. Rao.
Though Aadhaar got embroiled in data privacy security concerns, Mr. Rao said the issue is more about the privacy policy. He said the unique identification project is very mature from a security perspective.
“We must all be proud that a programme of this size and magnitude, probably [the] largest IT project of its kind in the world, has been done [from India],” said Mr. Rao, who co-founded Aujas in 2008.
The firm, which was incubated by venture capital firm IDG Ventures India as part of its Entrepreneur-in-Residence programme, now provides services such as security intelligence, data protection, identity and access and application security in markets such as the United States, South Asia and the Middle East.
The firm, which counts Aadhaar among its biggest clients in India, said it is targeting to achieve a revenue of $50 million in the next three years.
At a time when there has been a spike in hacking incidents as an increasing number of Indians are going digital and doing transactions online, companies like Aujas would play a key role in thwarting cyberattacks.
More than 53,000 cybersecurity incidents were observed in the country during 2017, according to a report by Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In).
These included phishing, website intrusions and defacements, ransomware and denial of service attacks.
But the country would need one million cybersecurity professionals by 2020, according to Nasscom. And that is the one of the biggest challenges for cybersecurity firms like Aujas.

Poor telecom infrastructure in North East is a threat to India

A recent Chinese incursion into Arunachal Pradesh could have been averted had there been effective mobile connectivity in the area, says a Member of Parliament.
He has cautioned that the poor telecom infrastructure in the northeast is now a serious security threat to India.
Ninong Ering, representing Arunachal East constituency in the Lok Sabha, in a recent letter to Telecom Minister Manoj Sinha, has pointed out that failure of the government to provide basic communication services in the region may have led to a delayed response from the army following the incursion by Chinese troops in December into Bishing village of Arunachal Pradesh.
“…the connectivity on all [points of] the Chinese border is very important. As you must have witnessed during the last incursion of Chinese in Bishing in Tuting area of Arunachal Pradesh, the information received by the Army personnel was very late,” Mr. Ering said in the letter.
“If the mobile tower had been installed, the incursion could have been stopped,” he added.
In the last week of December, a group of Chinese undertook track alignment activity about 1 km inside the Line of Actual Control at Tuting.
This was noticed by some locals, who then alerted the Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP), who informed the Army.
On December 28, a joint team of the Army and the ITBP stopped them, following which they left.
The transgressions across the Line of Actual Control by China are a regular occurrence, he said.
“If there [had been a] mobile network in Bishing village, somebody could have called and informed the Army that something like this [incursion] is happening. Across the border, they [Chinese] have all facilities. Even the roads have actually come up till Bishing, whereas from the Indian side it takes about 3-4 days of march… the basic infrastructure should be there so that people in advent of any kind of emergency can call,” Mr. Ering told.
He added that most times people are able to latch on to the Chinese telecom network. “We are Indians and we are unable to use Indian networks here.”
Improving mobile connectivity in the northeast region was one of the pet projects of the NDA government.
However, it has suffered repeated delays due to issues with equipment testing and “indecisiveness from USOF,” accompanied by a difficult terrain. It is targeted to be completed by March 2019.
The government gave a go ahead to the Comprehensive Telecom Development Plan for the North-Eastern Regions — aimed at providing mobile coverage to 8,621 identified, uncovered villages by installation of about 6,673 mobile towers and 321 mobile tower sites along National Highways, in September 2014.
Of this, about 2,000 towers were to come up in remote villages of Arunachal Pradesh, three of which were approved for Bishing, where the Chinese intrusion took place.
With an estimated cost of more than Rs. 5,000 crore, the project was to bring connectivity to strategically important states such as Arunachal Pradesh and Sikkim that share borders with China.
It was to be funded by the Universal Service Obligation Fund (USOF), under the DoT.
An MoU was signed between the BSNL and USOF to set up 2,817 mobile towers by BSNL recently, while the work of setting up of 2,004 towers in six other States had been initiated by Bharti Airtel in December 2017 and is expected to be completed in 18 months.
Mr. Ering told that while it was good the government was discussing bringing 4G technology to the northeast, “the fact is that more than Internet and access to social media, there is a need for basic calling facility.”

::SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY::

Waste heat into Electricity

A novel compound that exhibits poor thermal conductivity in the 25-425 degree C range but shows good electrical conductivity has been developed by a team of researchers led by Dr Kanishka Biswas from Bengaluru’s Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR).
The compound, silver copper telluride (AgCuTe), shows promise as a thermoelectric material for converting waste heat into electricity.
Since nearly 65% of utilized energy is wasted as heat, the focus is on developing materials that exhibit good thermoelectric property with both glass- and metal-like properties.
Potential applications of the thermoelectric technology are in automobile industry, chemical, thermal and steel power plants where large quantities of heat are wasted.
Due to the low thermal conductivity of the material developed by JNCASR, one end of the 8 mm-long rod that is contact with waste heat remains hot while the other end maintains cold temperature.
The temperature difference is essential for the generation of electrical voltage. At the same time, the material exhibits good electrical conductivity like metal. The results were published in the journal Angewandte Chemie.
In the AgCuTe material, the silver atoms (cation) are weakly bound, giving rise to poor thermal conductivity due to the slow vibration of the lattice (soft lattice).
At high temperatures, copper in the material further lowers the thermal conductivity along with silver.
In contrast, the tellurium atoms (anion) are strongly bound and the lattice is very rigid. The strongly bound tellurium provides a conduction channel for holes thus rendering good electrical conductivity as seen in metals.
It is a challenging task to have glassy and metallic properties in a single material, which is the fundamental challenge in the field of thermoelectrics.
The calculated efficiency to convert heat into electricity is 14% for the new material developed by JNCASR researchers.
The lead telluride (PbTe) has higher efficiency of 18%.
The theoretical calculation to know the electronic structure was done.

Ghats: Roadkills of wild animals

The roads that Valparai’s tourists love driving through to spot wildlife also see numerous animal deaths.
Road surveys show that almost 3,000 animals died on approximately 1,500 km of roads in Tamil Nadu's Valparai plateau in 2011-12 alone.
Valparai’s road network meanders through rainforest fragments and tea, coffee, cardamom and eucalyptus plantations in the Anamalai Hills of the Western Ghats.
Along with people, animals – including endangered Asian elephants and lion-tailed macaques – also live on this high-elevation plateau.
However, fragmentation of habitats ensures that wildlife have to cross roads when they move about. A study recorded 73 reptile deaths on the Valparai roads in 2001; mammal and insect deaths are also frequent here.
Scientists of the Nature Conservation Foundation (NCF) walked along eleven road sections passing through various habitats in the Valparai plateau.
They noted roadkills of all animal taxa across seasons (surveying totally1473.4 kms, including a State Highway) in 2011-12.
Their results, published in the journal Current Science, show that 2,969 animals died on Valparai’s roads during this time, which translates approximately to an average of 21 animals per 10 km of road.
Almost 50% of these kills comprised amphibians — toads, frogs and caecilians (limbless, snake-like amphibians).
Rodents and shrews comprised a majority of the 148 mammal kills. The Indian crested porcupine, the brown palm civet (a fruit-eater endemic to the Western Ghats), larger mammals like sambar deer and endemic lion-tailed macaques also figured in the list of mammal roadkills.
When the team compared deaths across seasons, they found that roadkill rates were 2.4 times higher during the monsoons than during summer.
This could be because many amphibians breed and move across land during the monsoon, write the authors.
What habitat the road passed through also mattered; roads passing through tea plantations, followed by forests habitats, saw the highest deaths at 1,402 and 948, respectively. Forest patches had the highest mammal roadkills.
The team’s findings could help identify specific management measures for different habitats to prevent or reduce roadkills in Valparai and similar places.
According to the authors, roads through forest patches need urgent attention because forest-dependant and endemic species died most here.
Drains along roadsides with underpasses at regular intervals can also provide safe passages for small-sized taxa like amphibians.

Discarded Lithium ion batteries turned into Supercapacitor

Used old batteries can now help create supercapacitors, which can in turn create better long-lasting batteries.
Scientists from CSIR–Central Electrochemical Research Institute (CSIR-CECRI) in Karaikudi, Tamilnadu, and CSIR–Central Salt and Marine Chemicals Research Institute (CSIR-CSMCRI) in Bhavnagar, Gujarat, collected discarded lithium-ion batteries and created reduced graphene oxide from them.
This new material showed high specific capacity at low current making it an ideal material for next generation high-performance supercapacitor.
The new electrodes made using the reduced graphene oxide showed high stability even after 20,000 cycles. They also had high retention capacity where 70% of the efficiency was retained even after 85 cycles.
The efficiency slowly increased and reached 108% after 20,000 cycles. The long-term stability and robustness of the capacitor are the key parameters for qualifying as suitable candidates for commercial application.
The graphite anode and aluminium and stainless steel from dismantled batteries were used.
The graphite was converted into graphene oxide by oxidation and subsequent exfoliation. Graphene oxide was further reduced to reduced graphene oxide.
Supercapacitors are now being used explicitly in wind turbine pitch control, rail (on-board or wayside), automotive (including hybrid vehicles), heavy industrial equipment, UPS and Telecom systems for power delivery and memory backup.