Press Clips-4 Index
102.
Two-day strike from today may hit life across
country - The hindu
103.
China
104.
E-learning is the way to go - The hindu
105.
Fourteen years that shook the
world - The hindu
106.
The passing of a giant – The Hindu
107.
When water flows like money – The Hindu
111. The overuse of rankings– The Hindu
112. After
e-tickets, boarding pass on mobiles for domestic flyers? – TOI
113. JNU opens Central Library e-resources for
students – The Hindu
114. Visions of drones swarming American skies hit
bipartisan nerve– The Hindu
115. The long and short of open defecation– The
Hindu
116. Manning’s testimony leaked online–
The Hindu
117. Sting
operation reveals money laundering by top banks – TOI
118. Rains or Not, India
NEW DELHI, February 20, 2013
Two-day strike from today may hit life across country
Central Ministers had urged the unions to postpone strike without resolving their demands
Despite the Union Government’s last-ditch dissuasive attempt, the 11 Central trade unions on Tuesday made elaborate countrywide arrangements to launch a two-day general strike from Wednesday.
The strike is meant to press the unions’ 10-point charter of demands such as control of inflation and price rise, adequate social security for the unorganised sector workers and fixing of minimum wage at Rs.10,000 a month.
The strike is likely to have its impact on the functioning of banks (including the Reserve Bank of India), port and dock works, public transport such as autos, taxis and government/private buses, insurance firms, power sector companies, coal and oil industries, post and telecom sector, offices of the State/Central governments, industrial sectors, and State/Central government undertakings.
As various chambers of commerce and industries’ federations feared that loss to the economy during the strike could be around Rs.20,000 crore, president of the Indian National Trade Union Congress (INTUC), labour wing of the ruling Congress, G. Sanjeeva Reddy told The Hindu that the unions had no option but go on strike after giving a long rope to the government.
Even during the talks held by Central ministers A.K. Antony, Sharad Pawar and Mallikarjun Kharge with the unions here on Monday, there was no concrete formula to meet the unions’ demands. They, instead, asked the unions to postpone the strike first and said the demands could be talked out later.
“But we said ‘no’,” Mr. Reddy said.
CPI MP and AITUC general secretary Gurudas Dasgupta felt sorry for the inconvenience the strike might cause to people.
“But what else we can do to take up the social cause as this government is not listening and is very insensitive to the sufferings of the masses and the working class,” he said.
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February 19, 2013 23:05 IST
China army behind cyber attacks: report
U.S. firm says organisations across the globe, including in India, targeted
A shadowy Chinese military unit has been named as the source of cyber-attacks on hundreds of organisations around the world, after a Virginia-based security company traced the “Advanced Persistent Threat” to a nondescript building in Shanghai.
The cyber-security company, Mandiant, said in a report that the source — which it labelled APT1 — was “believed to be the 2nd Bureau of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) General Staff Department’s (GSD) 3rd Department, which is most commonly known by its Military Unit Cover Designator (MUCD) as Unit 61398”.
While the nature of Unit 61398’s work was considered by China to be a state secret, Mandiant said it believed the unit engaged in harmful network operations from its site on Datong Road in Gaoqiaozhen, Pudong New Area of Shanghai.
APT1 had apparently “systematically stolen hundreds of terabytes of data from at least 141 organizations, and... demonstrated the capability and intent to steal from dozens of organizations simultaneously”, said Mandiant. The company mapped the wide-range of victims of Unit 61398’s alleged cyber-attacks, including three organisations in India. Countries that faced attacks included Canada, France, the United Kingdom, Norway, Belgium, Luxembourg, Israel, Switzerland, South Africa, Singapore, Taiwan and Japan.
The report on the alleged cyber-attacks comes exactly a week after U.S. President Barack Obama’s State of the Union remarks on the need to bolster cyber-security.
Obama’s order
In his address last Tuesday, Mr. Obama said, “We know hackers steal people’s identities and infiltrate private e-mails. We know foreign countries and companies swipe our corporate secrets. Now our enemies are also seeking the ability to sabotage our power grid, our financial institutions, our air traffic control systems.” “We cannot look back years from now and wonder why we did nothing in the face of real threats to our security and our economy,” he added.
However numerous organisations have criticised an executive order that the President passed last week to strengthen U.S. cyber defences. Some experts said Mr. Obama had yielded to pressure from Republicans and business lobbyists and agreed that the minimum security standards for companies to follow would be voluntary, not mandatory.
Well organised
While U.S. companies may be slow to gear up for the cyber-security challenge, the Mandiant report left little doubt that the alleged hackers were well-organised. Mandiant explained that Unit 61398’s central building was a 12-storey, 130,663-square-foot facility staffed by hundreds, perhaps thousands, and supplied by China Telecom with special fibre-optic communications infrastructure.
Government role
On the role of the Chinese government, Mandiant added that in a January 2010 report it had said: “The Chinese government may authorise this activity, but there’s no way to determine the extent of its involvement.” However, three years later the security firm said it had obtained evidence to change its assessment and “The details we have analysed during hundreds of investigations convince us that the groups conducting these activities are based primarily in China and that the Chinese Government is aware of them.”
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February 20, 2013 05:01 IST
E-learning is the way to go
Tablet PCs and availability of books onthe digital platform from across the worldhave fuelled the growth of e-learningin the country.
Once a supplementary tool or an assistive technology, online learning now is emerging as a fast, convenient and contemporary tool for students and teachers. “When I was in India, I would opt for a traditional paper-pen test, even if there was a provision to go for an online test,” says K. Seethapathy, who is pursuing his masters in biotechnology in New Jersey. “There is a huge proliferation of digital books here. There are e-book rental schemes, skill refresher videos and online tutorials for everything. There is no way you can escape that here,” he says.
The situation, here seems to be changing too. For instance, Attano, an Educational eBook Store, launched its last-minute preparation packs for the CBSE and ICSE board examinations recently. In fact the company also offers a money-back policy. “We have enough confidence in our product to offer a unique money-back guarantee to those students whose final exam scores are not higher than their prelims. If a student does not get higher marks, Attano will refund the purchase. All a student has to do is email a scanned copy of their preliminary results and their final Board results to us,” said Soumya Banerjee, CEO, Attano said. Many publishers have turned to manufacturing online content for students. For instance, Classle.net, an online learning portal enables students to interact with various institutions and professionals. Once the students register themselves, they can attend online classes; interact with other professionals and experts in their field.
Online learning here involves quizzes, projects, workshops and library and sometimes even simulated group studies, special classes and test activities before exams. According to the website, nearly 45,000 students and professionals across the country and reputed engineering colleges like IIT Madras, IIT Patna and PSG college of Technology Coimbatore are connected through the company.
To tackle the shortage of faculty members, many colleges are in the process of installing e-learning systems in their laboratories. Many of them are also intended to assist teachers and aid students with extra training. “E-learning might be the best way to tackle poor-quality teaching,” says E. Balaguruswamy, former V-C of Anna University. ICT options such as e-learning and EDUSAT are available for educational institutions but you have lessons at untimely hours. “The strength of online learning is flexibility in learning pattern,” he adds.
E-learning platforms such as NPTEL, a collaborative attempt by IITs and IISc, have been received well by students. The IITs have more than 268 courses, giving anyone with an internet connection access to over 10,000 video lectures. But it is heavily tilted towards science and technology, unlike universities abroad such as MIT, Harvard and Yale University each of which offers over 200 free online courses in subjects including art, humanities, library science and environment, besides sciences and engineering. For the first time now, Anna University engineering syllabus too, is available to students via the BSNL tablet launched recently.
The tablets are loaded with Bodhi Access, an e-learning platform that delivers content to engineering students of all branches. With animation and stylised audio-visual content, the application is meant to keep students engaged via small module. BSNL officials say the demand for the tablets is quite high, at least in private colleges where there is a shortage of good teachers. “An engineering student spends at least Rs. 5,000 a semester on engineering books and that too, mostly secondhand books with outdated content. There are legal options for acquiring them online — Amazon and eBay. But those options are more expensive than print,” says R. Madhusudhan, internet security consultant with Anna University.
Hence, many students depend on coding websites, engineering tutorials and a variety of sites that offer free books and peer-to-peer file-sharing site. Online learning methods are often dependent on what learning tools you normally use. “Official guides to GRE and GMAT and even course material have been online for a long time. The simulated tests on the CD are the closest to the actual test experience so the preparation is also largely dependent on online tools,” says Roshni Manikandan, an English trainer with a GRE coaching institute.
Online learning is extensively used by many software companies. Besides, improved training costs, decreased material costs, there is a great deal of standardisation e-learning platforms bring into training modules. While, for instance, last year British Telecom delivered e-business training to 23,000 employees in three months, Ernst & Young condensed about nearly 2,900 hours of classroom training into 700 hours of web-based learning, 200 hours of distance learning and 500 hours of classroom instruction, resulting in a significant cost cutting, say consultants.
There is a great deal of discipline that online learning infuses in employees, feels Radhika Shekawat, executive with IBM technologies. “Online learning is the best way to gauge employee’s capabilities and make sure they undergo refresher courses. There are timely tests, evaluations but it is between the employee and the project head. The practice tests are not even monitored which give every employee sufficient time to realise and work on her areas of strength.”
But for all these developments, there are at least some for whom e-learning is yet to be part of life “I will prefer print to online books. I get easily distracted, or not being able to underline the text does not make the process complete for me,” said Aishwarya Gopalan, a final-year MBA student.
To tackle the shortage of faculty members, many colleges are in the process of installing e-learning systems in their laboratories.
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March 7, 2013
Fourteen years that shook the world
Hugo Rafael Chávez Frias, President of Venezuela, who died on March 5, 2013 at the age of 58, was a defining figure in Latin American politics for 14 years, becoming almost synonymous with the popular tide that has elected and re-elected left and centre-left governments across the continent in that time.
A gifted orator who could hold an audience for hours, Mr. Chávez combined p
olitical courage with immense conviction and an extraordinary sense of destiny. Born to schoolteacher parents in Sabaneta in 1954, he qualified in military arts and sciences at the National Military Academy, became an officer in a paratrooper unit, and started his political career in the early 1980s by founding a secret organisation, the Revolutionary Bolivarian Movement, which took its name from the Latin American independence leader Simón Bolivar. His first big move was an attempted military coup against the government of Carlos Andres Perez in 1992, for which he was imprisoned for two years before being pardoned.
olitical courage with immense conviction and an extraordinary sense of destiny. Born to schoolteacher parents in Sabaneta in 1954, he qualified in military arts and sciences at the National Military Academy, became an officer in a paratrooper unit, and started his political career in the early 1980s by founding a secret organisation, the Revolutionary Bolivarian Movement, which took its name from the Latin American independence leader Simón Bolivar. His first big move was an attempted military coup against the government of Carlos Andres Perez in 1992, for which he was imprisoned for two years before being pardoned.
Mr. Chávez, however, renamed his group the Movement of the Fifth Republic (which a decade later merged with other groups to form the United Socialist Party of Venezuela, or PSUV) and won the 1998 presidential election on a socialist manifesto, promising millions relief from a system which had put oil wealth into luxurious lives for the rich and profits for the oil corporations.
Social parameters
Mr. Chávez removed corrupt military officers and started a national reform programme. Venezuela, according to the United States Department of Energy, has the world’s largest oil reserves at 1.36 trillion barrels, and the new President promptly nationalised the main oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), putting the profits into very effective social programmes. Carles Mutaner, Joan Benach, and Maria Paez Victor note that between 2000 and 2010, social spending increased by 61 per cent or $772 billion; the country has the region’s lowest level of inequality, with a reduction in its Gini coefficient of 54 per cent. Poverty is down from 71 per cent in 1996 to 21 now, and extreme poverty is down from 40 per cent to 7.3. The social programmes, or Misiones, he started have reached 20 million people, and 2.1 million have received senior citizens’ pensions, a sevenfold increase under Mr. Chávez.
The country has also cut food imports from 90 per cent to 30 per cent of its consumption, and has reduced child malnutrition from 7.7 per cent in 1990 to 5 today; infant mortality has declined from 25/1000 to 13 in the same period, and the country now has 58 doctors per 10,000 people (as against 18 in 1996). As many as 96 per cent of the population now have access to clean water, and with school attendance at 85 per cent, one in three Venezuelans is enrolled in free education up to and including university.
Oil royalties help. A 2001 law cut the sale price share of foreign companies from 84 to 70 per cent, and they now pay royalties of 16.6 per cent on Orinoco basin heavy crude; they used to pay 1 per cent earlier. Exxon and Conoco Philips rejected these terms, as Deepak Bhojwani notes in the Economic and Political Weekly (December 22, 2012), and were expelled, but Chevron stayed.
Mr. Chávez of course infuriated the mainly white elites, some of whom talked of him in racist terms, as well as the United States government and press, both of which have consistently vilified him in language bordering on the delusional. The State Department greeted the 2002 coup against Mr. Chávez by expressing solidarity with the Venezuelan people and looking forward to “working with all democratic forces in Venezuela.” The statement also said Mr. Chávez had dismissed the Vice-President and Cabinet. In fact it was the coup figurehead, Pedro Carmona Estanga, who, according to the Notable Names Database, dissolved the national assembly, disbanded the Supreme Court, closed the attorney-general’s and comptroller’s offices, and repealed 48 redistributive laws meant to help the poor.
U.S. relations
Yet huge public support for Mr. Chávez meant the putschist regime collapsed within days. The President was reinstated, but the then U.S. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice hectored him to “respect the constitution.” Greg Palast points out in The Progressive that the George W. Bush administration’s National Security Strategy of 2006 called him a demagogue out to undermine democracy and destabilise Venezuela.
The U.S. press dutifully played its part. In September 2012, the WorldNet columnist Drew Zahn called Mr. Chávez a “socialist dictator,” when the President was about to win a fourth successive election. All those elections were of far greater probity than the respective U.S. presidential elections of 2000 and 2004; this time Mr. Chávez won by 11 percentage points on a turnout of 80 per cent. Other U.S. media bodies have spread partial truths about the Caracas government, saying it bloats the public sector and lets the budget deficit spiral. In fact, as Mark Weisbrot notes in the Guardian , 18.4 per cent of Venezuela’s work force is in the public sector, in contrast to Norway’s 29 per cent, and its 2012 budget deficit, projected at 51.3 per cent of GDP, is lower than the European Union average of 82.5 per cent; inflation has declined too, from 27 per cent in 2010 to 19 per cent now. Weisbrot also points out that TheNew York Times — which welcomed the coup — has taken 14 years, longer even than other American media outfits, to publish any arguments for Mr. Chávez. Carles Mutaner and colleagues comment that U.S. analysts ask what Venezuela will do when the oil runs out, but do not ask that about other oil exporters like Saudi Arabia and Canada; neither do critics note that the country’s interest payments are only about three per cent of export earnings.
One of Washington’s problems is that, as Greg Palast recognises, Mr. Chávez kept oil revenues within Latin America; unlike Saudi Arabia, which buys U.S. treasury bills and other assets, Venezuela at one point withdrew $20 billion from the U.S. Federal Reserve, and since 2007 has aided other Latin American countries with $36 billion, most of which has been repaid. In effect, this supplants the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and possibly also its neoliberal fellow-crusader the World Bank. Even more unpalatably for Washington, Chávismo represents a clear political programme for pan-Latin American transformation, which Palast calls a close replica of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, with progressive income tax, public works, social security, and cheap electricity. For Bolivarians, such things are rights; they are even reminiscent of T.H. Marshall’s view that they are integral to substantive citizenship. Worst of all for U.S. regional hegemony, Mr. Chávez himself said Venezuela is no longer an oil colony, that it has regained its oil sovereignty, and that he wanted to replace the IMF with an International Humanitarian Bank based on cooperation; Uruguay already pays for Venezuelan oil with cows. Mr. Chávez wished the IMF and the World Bank would “disappear,” and his passionate concern for Latin American countries’ sovereignty made him a decisive figure in the 2011 creation of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (Celac).
Mr. Chávez could also be ruthless; in 2010 a military court sentenced his former key ally Raúl Isaias Baduel to just under eight years for embezzlement after a long-delayed trial, and Baduel is now banned from future political office, almost certainly because he criticised constitutional reforms which would allow a president more than two terms. Mr. Chávez was, however, no doctrinaire leader. Although a Christian, he criticised clerical collusion with theancien régime , and did not accept the Church’s authority in politics. And though a socialist, his model even includes a respect for private property. He also thought seriously about political economy. Bhojwani notes that he favoured a form of 21st century socialism partly derived from the work of Heinz Dieterich Steffan. For Mr. Chávez, ethics, morality, cooperativism, and associationism make for strong public economic activity and in turn protect the equality which is essential to liberty. The Venezuelan electorate has repeatedly endorsed this; in the December 2012 gubernatorial elections — the first ones in 14 years in which Mr. Chávez himself did not campaign — his allies won 20 out of 23 states. After the President’s win in October, Argentina’s President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner had sent him a message saying, “Your victory is also ours.” Billions, and not only poor people, around the world would agree: Tu victoria también es la nuestra.
arvind.sivaramakrishnan
@thehindu.co.in
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March 7, 2013 17:00 IST
The passing of a giant
President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, who died of cancer in Caracas on Tuesday, was not just a visionary committed to improving the lives of the great majority of his people but a masterly politician who knew how to achieve that end. First elected in 1998 and then surviving a right-wing putsch in 2002 which collapsed in the face of huge public support for him, Mr. Chávez turned his nation of 29 million into a pivot for the political and economic renewal of an entire continent. With a clear commitment to his country’s and to Latin America’s sovereignty, the ‘Bolivarian Revolution’ that Mr. Chávez set in motion sought to reassert the independence of a region that the Libertador Simón Bolivar had set out to unify in the 19th century. Mr. Chávez started by nationalising the biggest domestic oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), and negotiating vastly improved terms with the foreign oil companies which had been making colossal sums out of the world’s greatest known hydrocarbon reserves while paying a pittance in royalties. Mr. Chávez put the revenues to good use, raising social spending by over 60 per cent to $772 billion in a decade and reducing extreme poverty from 40 per cent to 7.3, in addition to expanding healthcare services; furthermore, one in three Venezuelans now gets free education up to and including university level. As for the rest of the region, soon after assuming office, Mr. Chávez accepted the services of Cuban doctors in exchange for oil supplies to a country victimised by U.S. sanctions for over 40 years. Other countries too benefited from his acts of solidarity.
Chávismo, as this approach came to be called, infuriated the United States, which had long dominated Latin America through brutal dictatorships and oligarchical democracies. Washington all but publicly welcomed the 2002 coup against President Chávez and spent the better part of the decade which followed seeking to undermine his government in one way or the other. Will his death now produce the outcome that his enemies in Venezuela and North America sought all these years? One of the weaknesses of the Chávez model was the central role that the President himself played in the system. But its strength lay in the active involvement of dozens of social movements, some of which coalesced with the socialist party he built while others remained supportive from the outside. His choice of Nicolás Maduro as Vice President was also one calculated to energise the rank and file of this extraordinary coalition. However, it is the better life which millions of Venezuelans enjoy today that will serve as the first line of defence for Chávismo as the U.S. and its allies try to turn the clock back.
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March 6, 2013 12:55 IST
When water flows like money
If drought is making many in Osmanabad struggle for survival, it is also boosting a 24-hour trade that thrives on scarcity
Bharat Raut spends around Rs.800 a month on petrol — just to fetch water that belongs to him. So do a lot of others in Takwiki village in Osmanabad district in Marathwada. Almost every household in Takwiki (and other villages) has one member locked into a single task each day: fetching water from wherever they can. Nearly every vehicle you see on Osmanabad’s roads is ferrying water somewhere. That includes cycles, bullock carts, motorbikes, jeeps, lorries, vans and tankers. And women carrying it in pots on their heads, hips and shoulders. The drought ensures that most do it for sheer survival. Some, for a neat profit.
Timings and distances
“Yes, every household has a person on full-time water duty,” says Bharat a small farmer with five-and-a-half acres. In his family, he is the one. “I fetch the water that comes sporadically from the borewell on our own fields. But it’s a little over three kilometres away from home.” So Bharat hooks four ghadas (plastic pots) to his Hero Honda and makes three trips a day to his fields to return with around 60 litres of water each time. “I go there just for the little water the bore gives,” he says. “The crop itself is dying.” There are some 25 motorcycles in this village roving about on this task at any time.
Since each round trip is over six kilometres, Bharat clocks close to 20 km each day, or 600 km a month. That takes up 11 litres of petrol, or around Rs.800 a month for just this task alone. “The water timings alternate each week,” explains Ajay Niture, who visits a government-controlled source. “This week we have power from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. so we get water during those hours. Next week it will be from midnight to 10 a.m.” He does his two-three kilometre trips on a bicycle mounted with seven plastic pots. And he’s been to the local hospital twice — “it really hurts your shoulders.”
Landless workers run into trouble with employers. “Some days you turn up late. Some days you don’t make it at all,” says Jhambhar Yadav. “That delays chores like feeding the animals, which is bad. And this has been on for five months now.” Jhambhar has already made two trips with six ghadas on his cycle this morning.
Impacting women
Yet their efforts are eclipsed by the women of Takwiki who do multiple trips daily on foot, carrying two to three pots with them. “That’s 8-10 hours a day on the job,” they explain at one of the water sources where they’ve congregated. They also tell us of their recycling of water: “First you use it for your bath. Then you use that same water for washing clothes. And finally for cleaning out the utensils.” The distances the women walk are often greater than those covered by the men on motorbikes. They do far more trips and log over 15-20 km in a day. The stress causes several to fall ill.
Women like Phulwantibai Dhepe have it worse. She is a Dalit and so excluded from many water sources. Even at the government-acquired well from where she fetches her water, “I am always last in the line.”
Sugarcane and rain
Scarcity impacts on livestock too. With little water and less fodder, “those like me who sell milk are in a bad way. My cows are suffering and so am I. I used to make Rs.300 a day selling milk,” says Suresh Ved Pathak. “Now the yields have fallen and I make just a third of that.”
Takwiki is a microcosm of Osmanabad’s built-in problems. The village has less than 4,000 people, but maybe 1,500 borewells for irrigation needs. “The ones being drilled now are going to 550 feet and beyond,” says Bharat Raut. And the main crop in this drought-prone district is sugarcane. “We got 397 mm of rainfall least season, as against our normal average rainfall of 767 mm,” says Osmanabad Collector K.M. Nagargoje. “In itself, 800 mm is not at all bad rainfall. And some regions get by on 400 mm, too.”
But you can’t get by, even on 800 mm, if your output is 2.6 million metric tons of sugarcane. A crop that demands roughly 18 million litres of water per acre. (Enough to fill seven-and-a-half Olympic swimming pools.) And the number of farmers who can afford to save on water by using drip is very small, just a handful in Takwiki.
Collector Nagargoje has serious trouble on his hands. And having had a stint with the Groundwater Department, he knows it. Almost all the district’s big or medium water projects are at dead storage level. That’s when water is below the point from where it can be pumped out or controlled. At that stage, it serves to keep the fish alive. He does have around 3.45 million metric cubic feet left in the district’s small projects. That can’t last too long in this district of 1.7 million people. He also has 169 water tankers presently serving two towns and 78 villages. And a district where private borewells for irrigation are spreading rapidly.
“The ground water table this January was at around 10.75 metres. That’s five metres below the five-year average in this region,” he says. “In some blocks, it’s even lower.” He remains optimistic about the district’s capacity to handle the crisis this year. But knows the existing cropping patterns will thwart rescue plans in the next one.
Private trade rules
Back in Takwiki, indebtedness grows as income falls. “The sahucari (money lending) rate here is now anything between Rs.5 to Rs.10 per hundred per month, explains Santosh Yadav. (That’s 60 to 120 per cent annually.) Yadav’s own family spent nearly Rs.10 lakh in laying down pipelines — all of which have run dry — to their fields. And summer isn’t far away. Yadav asks: “Who can think of that? We’re focused on getting past today. One day at a time is all we can handle.”
But if the drought makes many struggle for survival, it also boosts a trade that thrives on scarcity. This is visible everywhere. “We spend whole days on cell phones trying desperately to buy water from those who have it because they own borewells or some other source,” says Bharati Thawale, a social worker. “I struck a deal with one of these water-sellers. He was to give me 500 litres for Rs.120. But on the way he got offered Rs.200 for it and sold out. Many frantic calls later, he brought me the water I needed, at 9 p.m. the next night.” After that, she’s been buying water from a neighbour.
The brisk trade in water is on around the clock across the district. Scarcity drives the rates upwards. The government has requisitioned 720 wells of water. It pays the owners of each of these Rs.12,000 a month. Water from these is free for the public. But the long distances and the huge crowds at these points can be daunting. Which means privateers rule. With them, you bargain by the litre. The price can go well above Rs.200 for 500 litres. The rate spikes sharply if you are buying small quantities. And it will all get worse in coming days. Every colony now has someone with a borewell or other source, milking the scarcity. Here, water flows like money.
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March 9, 2013 02:13 IST
The overuse of rankings
The HinduNOT TOP 10: Many outstanding institutions worldwide do not appear in the rankings because they do not fit into the specific criteria measured.
Global university ordering is limited in what it measures. The exercise provides only an incomplete perspective on higher education
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh recently chastised Indian universities for having no institutions in the “top 200” of the global higher education rankings. He sees this poor showing as an indication of the low quality of Indian higher education. Indian authorities also said that only overseas universities in the global “top 500” would be permitted to establish a branch campus or joint-degree programme in India. Other countries use the global rankings for internal purposes. Singapore uses them as a benchmark and as an indicator, where scholarship students may be sent. Russia has bemoaned its poor showing, has provided extra funding for selected universities, and is considering major additional resources for a few — in order to ensure that several will be in the top ranks soon. Kazakhstan is committed to having a university in the top tier and looks to rankings as a guideline. At least one American university president has been offered a salary bonus if his university improves its rank. The list goes on.
Anatomy and critique
There are, of course, many rankings. Most are national and some are specialised. The majority are sponsored by magazines and other for-profit organisations. Many, if not most, are worthless, because their methodologies are flawed or there is no methodology at all. Dr. Singh and most of the countries mentioned here refer to the three well-known international rankings. Two of these, the Academic Ranking of World Universities, popularly known as the “Shanghai rankings,” and the World University Rankings of Times Higher Education are methodologically respectable and can be taken seriously.
But these rankings are quite limited in what they measure and thus provide only an incomplete perspective on higher education and on the universities that are ranked. The Shanghai rankings are quite clear in what is assessed — only research, research impact, and a few variables related to research — such as prizes awarded to professors and numbers of Nobel winners associated with the institution. Times Higher Education measures a wider array of variables. Research and its impact is at the top of the list, but reputation is also included as are several other variables — such as teaching quality and internationalisation. But since there is no real way to measure teaching or internationalisation, weak proxies are used. Reputation is perhaps the most controversial element in most of the national and global rankings. Even asking a selected group of academics and university leaders for their opinions about which universities are best yields questionable results. How much will physicists in Bulgaria or university rectors in Germany know about the quality of universities in India or Russia? It is not surprising, therefore, that only the Indian Institutes of Technology are ranked. They are among the few Indian institutions receiving international attention. In general, the more reputation is used as a key variable, the less accurate a ranking is likely to be. Further, respondents filling out reputational surveys for rankings will judge an institution on its research reputation — teaching excellence, national relevance, or university-university linkages are not part of the knowledge base.
In addition, certain kinds of research receive the greatest attention — the research that appears in recognised international refereed journals. The journals that are chosen for inclusion in the Web of Science, Science Citation Index, Social Sciences Citation Index, and a few others are considered “legitimate.” This limitation dramatically privileges publication in English — the language of the vast majority of the internationally recognised journals. Further, research that adheres to the norms and values of editors and peer reviewers, who are mainly in the top Western universities, will tend to get published. The hard sciences receive much more attention than soft fields such as the arts and humanities. Universities that are strong in technology, life sciences, and related fields have significant advantages.
Distortions
Many outstanding institutions worldwide do not appear in the rankings because they do not happen to fit into the specific criteria measured. In general, specialised universities, other than those in technology, do not do well. America’s elite liberal arts colleges, by most accounts offering some of the best-quality education in the world, are nowhere to be found. Universities that do not have engineering or medicine are probably undercounted. Most important, perhaps, is the disadvantages faced by developing and emerging economies. Researchers do not have easy access to the top journals, must write in English, and perhaps most important, the topics and the methodologies of the research must be appealing to editors and reviewers in the central academic powers.
Usefulness of rankings
To an extent, the rankings provide a way of benchmarking for the small number of research universities worldwide. By looking carefully at the structures, governance, funding, and academic cultures of the universities that do well in the rankings, lessons can be learned. Even though the budgets of the research superpowers can seldom be matched and the access of these institutions to top international talent will be impossible for most, there are global academic practices that may yield insights.
Guidelines not models
For India, or other developing countries, to obsess about the rankings is a mistake. There may be lessons, but not rules. It is much more important that a balanced and differentiated academic system emerges, and as part of such a system there may be a few universities that can aspire to the middle or even the upper reaches of the ranking in time. To limit academic cooperation to those universities that are listed in the global rankings is also a mistake, since many outstanding institutions do not fit the rankings model but nonetheless may be excellent global partners. When it comes to universities, one size does not fit all. The global rankings measure just one kind of academic excellence, and even here the tools of measurement are far from perfect.
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After e-tickets, boarding pass on mobiles for domestic flyers?
E-boarding cards will take the mobile technology initiative forward. Airlines will email boarding cards to passengers once they check-in online or telephonically.
NEW DELHI: Domestic flyers will soon be able to skip check-in queues at airports and board the aircraft by simply flashing their smartphones. The aviation ministry has asked the Bureau of Civil Aviation Security (BCAS) to develop a protocol for flyers to get bar-coded boarding cards on their phones with which they can proceed for security checks.
Passengers are now allowed to enter airports by showing the electronic tickets on their phones instead of hard copies of the same. E-boarding cards will take the mobile technology initiative forward. Airlines will email boarding cards to passengers once they check-in online or telephonically.
"The concept has been cleared. There is only one hitch: During security check, passengers' mobile phones pass through X-ray machines and they get them back after they are cleared. At present, Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) stamp boarding passes after frisking passengers and this stamp is seen before a flyer is allowed to get on a plane. So we have to work on the issue of allowing mobile phones with passengers during security check so that CISF personnel can see the card, doing away with the practice of stamping cards," said an official who is working on the project.
Passengers are now allowed to enter airports by showing the electronic tickets on their phones instead of hard copies of the same. E-boarding cards will take the mobile technology initiative forward. Airlines will email boarding cards to passengers once they check-in online or telephonically.
"The concept has been cleared. There is only one hitch: During security check, passengers' mobile phones pass through X-ray machines and they get them back after they are cleared. At present, Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) stamp boarding passes after frisking passengers and this stamp is seen before a flyer is allowed to get on a plane. So we have to work on the issue of allowing mobile phones with passengers during security check so that CISF personnel can see the card, doing away with the practice of stamping cards," said an official who is working on the project.
A senior aviation ministry official said the security issues would be sorted out soon. "We hope to implement the boarding card on mobile project in the coming weeks," said the official.
Meanwhile, many airport developers have requested the aviation ministry to do away with the practice of CISF stamping baggage tags after bags are X-rayed and cleared to be taken on board aircraft. This practice is proving to be a logistical nightmare at big airports such as Delhi's Terminal 3.
"We have numerous instances of security personnel looking for CISF security check stamp on hand bag tags but either the tag is missing or the stamp is missing. Then passengers have to run all the way back to security counters to get a stamped tag. This is causing huge inconvenience and we have requested the ministry to do away with this practice in Delhi," said a senior Delhi airport official.
Meanwhile, many airport developers have requested the aviation ministry to do away with the practice of CISF stamping baggage tags after bags are X-rayed and cleared to be taken on board aircraft. This practice is proving to be a logistical nightmare at big airports such as Delhi's Terminal 3.
"We have numerous instances of security personnel looking for CISF security check stamp on hand bag tags but either the tag is missing or the stamp is missing. Then passengers have to run all the way back to security counters to get a stamped tag. This is causing huge inconvenience and we have requested the ministry to do away with this practice in Delhi," said a senior Delhi airport official.
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NEW DELHI, March 11, 2013
JNU opens Central Library e-resources for students
Students, faculty can now access catalogues, e-journals, e-books, and databases from anywhere, any time
Taking a vacation and working on the thesis just got easier for the scholars at Jawaharlal Nehru University, as all the e-resources of the university’s Central Library will now be accessible from anywhere and at any time.
“The faculty and students can access all of the university’s e-resources including the library catalogues, e-journals, e-books, and all the databases that have been subscribed to in the Central Library from anywhere and any time maybe from their homes/hostels or travelling abroad,” said the university’s librarian Ramesh C. Gaur.
He added that a search engine, similar to “Google”, has also been set up to sort out the problem of multiple databases and e-resources and to provide a single-window access to all e-resources in order to avoid confusion. However, the results will be limited to in-house and subscribed resources only.
Soon, around 8 lakh digital news clippings, 20,000 thesis and dissertations and some in-house publications including reprints of faculty articles will also be made available.
“The current focus of the library is to electronically deliver information to those who physically cannot come here. We want to reach out to as many people as we can with our innovative library and information services,” added Dr. Gaur.
The library has been trying to help students guard against dangers by making available software “TURNITIN” to M.Phil. and Ph.D. students.
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Visions of drones swarming American skies hit bipartisan nerve
That Big Brother imagery — conjured up by Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky during a more than 12-hour filibuster this week — has animated a surprisingly diverse swath of political interests that includes mainstream civil liberties groups, Republican and Democratic lawmakers, conservative research groups, liberal activists and right-wing conspiracy theorists.
They agree on little else. But Mr. Paul’s soliloquy has tapped into a common anxiety on the left and the right about the dangers of unchecked government. And it has exposed fears about ultra-advanced technologies that are fuelled by the increasingly fine line between science fiction and real life.
Drones have become the subject of urgent policy debates in Washington as lawmakers from both parties wrangle with President Barack Obama over their use to prosecute the fight against terrorism from the skies above countries like Pakistan and Yemen.
But they are also a part of the popular culture toys sold by Amazon; central plot points in “Homeland” and a dozen other television shows and movies; the subject of endless macabre humour, notably by The Onion; and even the subject of poetry. (“Ode to the MQ-9 Reaper”, a serious work by New York poet Joe Pan that was just published in the journal Epiphany, describes the drone as “ultra-cool & promo slick, a predatory dart” that is “as self-aware as silverware”.)
Benjamin Wittes, a national security scholar at the Brookings Institution who has written extensively about drones, said he thought Mr. Paul’s marathon was a “dumb publicity stunt”. But he said it had touched a national nerve because the technology, with its myriad implications, had already deeply penetrated the culture.
“Over the last year or so, this thing that was the province of a small number of technologists and national security people has exploded into the larger public consciousness”, Mr. Wittes said.
On the right, Mr. Paul has become an overnight hero since his filibuster. Self-proclaimed defenders of the Constitution have shouted their approval on Twitter, using the hashtag #StandWithRand and declaring him to be a welcomed member of their less-is-better-government club.
“The day that Rand Paul ignited Liberty’s Torch inside the beltway!” one Tea Party activist wrote on Twitter. “May it never be extinguished!”
But even as the right swooned, the left did, too. Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, the only Democrat to join Mr. Paul’s filibuster, said the unexpected array of political forces was just the beginning, especially as Congress and the public face the new technologies of 21st-century warfare.
“I believe there is a new political movement emerging in this country that’s shaking free of party moorings,” Mr. Wyden said. “Americans want a better balance between protecting our security and protecting our liberty.”
P.W. Singer, whose 2009 book Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century anticipated the broad impact of drones, said he believed they had shaken up politics because they were “a revolutionary technology, like the steam engine or the computer”.
“The discussion doesn’t fall along the usual partisan lines”, he said.
The serious issues raised by the government’s lethal drones seem inextricably mixed with the ubiquitous appearance of the technology in art, commerce and satire.
A four-minute video by the Air Force Research Laboratory on “micro aerial vehicles” shows a futuristic bee-size drone flying in an open window and taking out an enemy sniper with a miniature explosive payload.
Since it was posted in 2009, it has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times and reposted all over the Web. — New York Times News Service
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March 14, 2013
The long and short of open defecation
You can learn a lot from measuring children’s height. How tall a child has grown by the time she is a few years old is one of the most important indicators of her well-being. This is not because height is important in itself, but because height reflects a child’s early-life health, absorbed nutrition and experience of disease.
Because health problems that prevent children from growing tall also prevent them from growing into healthy, productive, smart adults, height predicts adult mortality, economic outcomes and cognitive achievement. The first few years of life have critical life-long consequences. Physical or cognitive development that does not happen in these first years is unlikely to be made up later.
So it is entirely appropriate that news reports in India frequently mention child stunting or malnutrition. Indian children are among the shortest in the world. Such widespread stunting is both an emergency for human welfare and a puzzle.
Why are Indian children so short? Stunting is often considered an indicator of “malnutrition,” which sometimes suggests that the problem is that children don’t have enough food. Although it is surely a tragedy that so many people in India are hungry, and it is certainly the case that many families follow poor infant feeding practices, food appears to be unable to explain away the puzzle of Indian stunting.
‘ASIAN ENIGMA’
One difficult fact to explain is that children in India are shorter, on average, than children in Africa, even though people are poorer, on average, in Africa. This surprising fact has been called the “Asian enigma.” The enigma is not resolved by genetic differences between the Indian population and others. Babies adopted very early in life from India into developing countries grow much taller. Indeed, history is full of examples of populations that were deemed genetically short but eventually grew as tall as any other when the environment improved.
So, what input into child health and growth is especially poor in India? One answer that I explore in a recent research paper is widespread open defecation, without using a toilet or latrine. Faeces contain germs that, when released into the environment, make their way onto children’s fingers and feet, into their food and water, and wherever flies take them. Exposure to these germs not only gives children diarrhoea, but over the long term, also can cause changes in the tissues of their intestines that prevent the absorption and use of nutrients in food, even when the child does not seem sick.
More than half of all people in the world who defecate in the open live in India. According to the 2011 Indian census, 53 per cent of households do not use any kind of toilet or latrine. This essentially matches the 55 per cent found by the National Family Health Survey in 2005.
Open defecation is not so common elsewhere. The list of African countries with lower percentage rates of open defecation than India includes Angola, Burundi, Cameroon, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, Malawi, Rwanda, Senegal, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, and more. In 2008, only 32 per cent of Nigerians defecated in the open; in 2005, only 30 per cent of people in Zimbabwe did. No country measured in the last 10 years has a higher rate of open defecation than Bihar. Twelve per cent of all people worldwide who openly defecate live in Uttar Pradesh.
So, can high rates of open defecation in India statistically account for high rates of stunting? Yes, according to data from the highly-regarded Demographic and Health Surveys, an international effort to collect comparable health data in poor and middle-income countries.
International differences in open defecation can statistically account for over half of the variation across countries in child height. Indeed, once open defecation is taken into consideration, Indian stunting is not exceptional at all: Indian children are just about exactly as short as would be expected given sanitation here and the international trend. In contrast, although it is only one example, open defecation is much less common in China, where children are much taller than in India.
Further analysis in the paper suggests that the association between child height and open defecation is not merely due to some other coincidental factor. It is not accounted for by GDP or differences in food availability, governance, female literacy, breastfeeding, immunisation, or other forms of infrastructure such as availability of water or electrification. Because changes over time within countries have an effect on height similar to the effect of differences across countries, it is safe to conclude that the effect is not a coincidental reflection of fixed genetic or cultural differences. I do not have space here to report all of the details of the study, nor to properly acknowledge the many other scholars whose work I draw upon; I hope interested readers will download the full paper at http://goo.gl/PFy43.
DOUBLE THREAT
Of course, poor sanitation is not the only threat to Indian children’s health, nor the only cause of stunting. Sadly, height reflects many dimensions of inequality within India: caste, birth order, women’s status. But evidence suggests that socially privileged and disadvantaged children alike are shorter than they would be in the absence of open defecation.
Indeed, the situation is even worse for Indian children than the simple percentage rate of open defecation suggests. Living near neighbours who defecate outside is more threatening than living in the same country as people who openly defecate but live far away. This means that height is even more strongly associated with the density of open defecation: the average number of people per square kilometre who do not use latrines. Thus, stunting among Indian children is no surprise: they face a double threat of widespread open defecation and high population density.
The importance of population density demonstrates a simple fact: Open defecation is everybody’s problem. It is the quintessential “public bad” with negative spillover effects even on households that do not practise it. Even the richest 2.5 per cent of children — all in urban households with educated mothers and indoor toilets — are shorter, on average, than healthy norms recommend. They do not openly defecate, but some of their neighbours do. These privileged children are almost exactly as short as children in other countries who are exposed to a similar amount of nearby open defecation.
If open defecation indeed causes stunting in India, then sanitation reflects an emergency not only for health, but also for the economy. After all, stunted children grow into less productive adults.
It is time for communities, leaders, and organisations throughout India to make eliminating open defecation a top priority. This means much more than merely building latrines; it means achieving widespread latrine use. Latrines only make people healthier if they are used for defecation. They do not if they are used to store tools or grain, or provide homes for the family goats, or are taken apart for their building materials. Any response to open defecation must take seriously the thousands of publicly funded latrines that sit unused (at least as toilets) in rural India. Perhaps surprisingly, giving people latrines is not enough.
Ending a behaviour as widespread as open defecation is an immense task. To its considerable credit, the Indian government has committed itself to the work, and has been increasing funding for sanitation. Such a big job will depend on the collaboration of many people, and the solutions that work in different places may prove complex. The assistant responsible for rural sanitation at your local Block Development Office may well have one of the most important jobs in India. Any progress he makes could be a step towards taller children — who become healthier adults and a more productive workforce.
(Dean Spears is an economics PhD candidate at Princeton University and visiting researcher at the Delhi School of Economics.)
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NEW DELHI: An undercover sting investigation across India has shown up startling videos of bank executives of three leading private banks - HDFC, ICICI and Axis - providing ready assistance to a reporter, posing as a minister's aide, for laundering black money into white through the banking system in clear contravention of banking norms and laws.
Shaken by the disclosure, the three banks asserted that they were committed to transparent and lawful banking norms, while saying that they have instituted inquiries into the allegations. Finance ministerP Chidambaram told the media that he had spoken to the chairman of two banks (the third, he said, was abroad). He added government wasn't jumping to conclusions of the basis of the disclosure.
The investigative website, Cobrapost, claimed on Thursday at a press conference here that it has collected hundreds of hours of secret video recording showing bank executives suggesting through various ways in the banking system, to launder money. It uploaded at least 45 tale-tell videos on its website and claimed these were of bankers in various cities, including Delhi, Kolkota, Mumbai, Chennai, Jaipur and Hyderabad.
Among the methods of laundering offered by executive on camera was insurance, where big-amount premium payments don't have to be reported by banks. The executives shown also suggest that the reporter posing as a high networth client deposit his cash in several smaller amounts to evade the attention of tax sleuths. Requirements like PAN card number and other KYC requirements are also offered to be short-circuited. Bank executives were also shown offering large lockers to stash huge amounts of cash (bank lockers can't be used for storing cash, according to the law.)
The website claimed that, given the number of bank executives who offered to launder money, it seemed this was a common practice in private banks for access to cheap deposits and added that the scale indicated that the top management of the banks could not be completely ignorant of the malpractices.
"Our investigation, conducted across dozens and dozens of branches of these banks and their insurance affiliates, across all five zones of the country, revealed...that these money laundering practices are part of a standard set of procedures within these banks," the site said in a statement.
"We talk about people stashing ill-gotten money in tax havens like Switzerland. But the fact is Switzerlands are here in India," it said. The investigation showed that the money laundering services are "being openly offered to even walk-in customers who wish to launder their illicit money," he said.
"The evidence is graphic, crystal-clear and clinching," the site said. "The investigation finds the banks and their managements systematically and deliberately violating several provisions of the Income Tax Act, FEMA, RBI regulations, KYC norms, the Banking Act and Prevention of Money laundering Act (PMLA) with utter disregard to consequences, driven by their desire to boost cheap deposits and thereby increasing their profits," the site said.
The investigation, code named Red Spider, was conducted across India and showed executives of these banks offering various options to wash black money into the banking system. In one instance, an ICICI manager offered to give the politician's henchman an NRI account if he had a passport showing at least a travel abroad.
Another video that purported to be that of a HDFC bank manager in Delhi showed the executive telling the reporter: "HDFC baitha hi hua hai black money khane ke liye (HDFC is here to eat up all the black money)." The site said ways suggested to transform the black money into white were "both imaginative in their range and brazen in their approach."
The bank officers were also shown offering to invest large amounts of cash in insurance products and gold, or to route the cash into various investment schemes of the bank. The officers suggested that the money be split into tranches to get it into the banking system without being detected, and many also suggested using "benami" accounts to facilitate the conversion. For a fee, some executives even offered to use accounts of other customers to channelize the black money into the system.
Some of these bank executives suggested that the black money be used to get demand drafts either from their own banks or from other banks to facilitate investment without it showing up in the client's account. They also suggested they can open and close multiple accounts at will to facilitate the investment of black money.
Cobrapost said it had hundreds of hours of raw video footage and was willing to hand them over to any authorized law enforcement agency that wants to look into the matter.
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These days there seems to be a generation gap in journalism, between mainstream and new media. The world of digital media is dominated by a generation that eats, sleeps, breathes and most importantly thinks online. For them their tablet is the writing pad and the Internet is pretty much the one-stop source for research. They do not labour over an article for days or rewrite endlessly in search of that perfect introduction.
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LONDON: Physicists believe they may have found the elusive Higgs boson. The European Organizationfor Nuclear Research (Cern) said on Thursday that the new particle discovered last July is "looking like the God particle".
After analysing two-and-a-half times more data than was available in July, scientists from Cern's Large Hadron Collider said they found that "the new particle is looking more and more like a Higgs boson, the particle linked to the mechanism that gives mass to elementary particles". "In July we thought it looks like the Higgs boson," Albert De Roeck, head of the 700-strong Higgs Analysis Group, told TOI in London. "But now we are certain. In terms of quantum mechanics, we say these results are 3 sigma — which means the chances of we being wrong is as minute as 1 in a 1,000. I can say with 99.9% certainty that this is a Higgs."
He added: "One of the things we needed to be certain was the speed of the spin of the particle. In our terminology, we needed it to be zero. In July we thought it could be 1 or 2. But our latest data shows it is zero, as it is supposed to be with regard to the Higgs."
Tejinder Virdee from London's Imperial College said that though it looked like a Higgs boson, the team also felt it could be a brand-new particle — like a super electron. A former project leader of the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment, Virdee was leading the experiments to find the Higgs boson.
"The accuracy of our conclusions would be around 30% at present, which might look small but is good enough to say it is a Higgs," Virdee said. "However, a lot more data will be studied over the next few months to make a precise announcement. But it does look like the Higgs boson. Our experiments that will start in 2015 using higher amount of energy will say whether it is a single Higgs boson or multiple."
According to Virdee, it is yet to be determined whether this is the Higgs boson of the Standard Model of particle physics or the lightest of several bosons predicted in some theories.
"More insight into our findings will be made in Barcelona in May but the final, final set of findings that should confirm beyond doubt on the fate of the Higgs boson will be made at the European Physics Society meeting in Stockholm in July," Virdee said.
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Manning’s testimony leaked online
APSome supporters of Bradley Manning released a leaked audio recording on March 12, 2013, of him explaining why he sent hundreds of thousands of classified documents to the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks. File photo
For the first time ever the voice of U.S. Army Private Bradley Manning has been heard around the world after a military court audio clip of the man charged with leaking a massive trove of secret government data, including confidential State Department cables, was posted on the Internet this week.
In contravention of the rules of the trial, under which all media are to be blacked out during the court martial proceedings against Mr. Manning in Fort Meade, Maryland, the Freedom of the Press Foundation published an audio clip and transcript of his statement to the court on February 28.
In the audio Mr. Manning can be heard explaining his motivation for leaking U.S. government data to online whistleblower Wikileaks, saying he wanted to show the American public the “true costs of war… and spark a domestic debate on the role of the military and our foreign policy in general as it related to Iraq and Afghanistan”.
Describing his initial involvement in reading State Department classified cables, Mr. Manning added, “The more I read, the more I was fascinated with the way that we dealt with other nations and organisations. I also began to think the documented backdoor deals and seemingly criminal activity that didn't seem characteristic of the de facto leader of the free world.”
He also spoke of the U.S. Army video showing the July 2007 incident in Baghdad in which troops in an Apache helicopter can be seen attacking and shooting down a group of men including two journalists. Mr Manning said, “[They] dehumanised the individuals they were engaging and seemed to not value human life by referring to them as quote ‘dead [expletive]’ unquote and congratulating each other on the ability to kill in large numbers.”
Commenting on the specifics of that incident he said, “At one point in the video there is an individual on the ground attempting to crawl to safety. The individual is seriously wounded. Instead of calling for medical attention to the location, one of the aerial weapons team crew members verbally asks for the wounded person to pick up a weapon so that he can have a reason to engage. For me, this seems similar to a child torturing ants with a magnifying glass.”
Mr. Manning was arrested in mid-2010 on suspicion of passing on the data to Wikileaks, and has been in prison in the U.S. since then, including in solitary confinement at times. He was arraigned in February 2012. On February 28, 2013, Mr. Manning pled guilty to 10 of the 22 charges against him, facing a potential total sentence of up to 20 years. He was however said not to enter a plea for the charge of “aiding the enemy,” which could carry a life sentence for him.
Freedom of the Press Foundation co-founder Daniel Ellsberg — who is also the 1971 whistleblower for the Pentagon Papers on the U.S.’ military engagement in Vietnam — said that while he did not know who precisely made the recording of Mr. Manning’s court statement, that person “has done the American public a great service”. He added that this marked the first time that the American public could hear Mr. Manning, “in his own voice explain what he did and how he did it”.
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Sting operation reveals money laundering by top banks
Shaken by the disclosure, the three banks asserted that they were committed to transparent and lawful banking norms.
Shaken by the disclosure, the three banks asserted that they were committed to transparent and lawful banking norms, while saying that they have instituted inquiries into the allegations. Finance ministerP Chidambaram told the media that he had spoken to the chairman of two banks (the third, he said, was abroad). He added government wasn't jumping to conclusions of the basis of the disclosure.
The investigative website, Cobrapost, claimed on Thursday at a press conference here that it has collected hundreds of hours of secret video recording showing bank executives suggesting through various ways in the banking system, to launder money. It uploaded at least 45 tale-tell videos on its website and claimed these were of bankers in various cities, including Delhi, Kolkota, Mumbai, Chennai, Jaipur and Hyderabad.
Among the methods of laundering offered by executive on camera was insurance, where big-amount premium payments don't have to be reported by banks. The executives shown also suggest that the reporter posing as a high networth client deposit his cash in several smaller amounts to evade the attention of tax sleuths. Requirements like PAN card number and other KYC requirements are also offered to be short-circuited. Bank executives were also shown offering large lockers to stash huge amounts of cash (bank lockers can't be used for storing cash, according to the law.)
The website claimed that, given the number of bank executives who offered to launder money, it seemed this was a common practice in private banks for access to cheap deposits and added that the scale indicated that the top management of the banks could not be completely ignorant of the malpractices.
"Our investigation, conducted across dozens and dozens of branches of these banks and their insurance affiliates, across all five zones of the country, revealed...that these money laundering practices are part of a standard set of procedures within these banks," the site said in a statement.
"We talk about people stashing ill-gotten money in tax havens like Switzerland. But the fact is Switzerlands are here in India," it said. The investigation showed that the money laundering services are "being openly offered to even walk-in customers who wish to launder their illicit money," he said.
"The evidence is graphic, crystal-clear and clinching," the site said. "The investigation finds the banks and their managements systematically and deliberately violating several provisions of the Income Tax Act, FEMA, RBI regulations, KYC norms, the Banking Act and Prevention of Money laundering Act (PMLA) with utter disregard to consequences, driven by their desire to boost cheap deposits and thereby increasing their profits," the site said.
The investigation, code named Red Spider, was conducted across India and showed executives of these banks offering various options to wash black money into the banking system. In one instance, an ICICI manager offered to give the politician's henchman an NRI account if he had a passport showing at least a travel abroad.
Another video that purported to be that of a HDFC bank manager in Delhi showed the executive telling the reporter: "HDFC baitha hi hua hai black money khane ke liye (HDFC is here to eat up all the black money)." The site said ways suggested to transform the black money into white were "both imaginative in their range and brazen in their approach."
The bank officers were also shown offering to invest large amounts of cash in insurance products and gold, or to route the cash into various investment schemes of the bank. The officers suggested that the money be split into tranches to get it into the banking system without being detected, and many also suggested using "benami" accounts to facilitate the conversion. For a fee, some executives even offered to use accounts of other customers to channelize the black money into the system.
Some of these bank executives suggested that the black money be used to get demand drafts either from their own banks or from other banks to facilitate investment without it showing up in the client's account. They also suggested they can open and close multiple accounts at will to facilitate the investment of black money.
Cobrapost said it had hundreds of hours of raw video footage and was willing to hand them over to any authorized law enforcement agency that wants to look into the matter.
Times Of India
Print vs digital: A new kind of journalist has arrived
"I am still an old fashioned pen and paper person!" Ask a young, online-media reporter and he/she will tell you how often one has heard this remark from seniors or colleagues from the world of print.
These days there seems to be a generation gap in journalism, between mainstream and new media. The world of digital media is dominated by a generation that eats, sleeps, breathes and most importantly thinks online. For them their tablet is the writing pad and the Internet is pretty much the one-stop source for research. They do not labour over an article for days or rewrite endlessly in search of that perfect introduction.
As mainstream media-houses expand their digital business units, there is now a clear difference in how these teams are approaching content.
Product centric perspective
The digital medium is one where content is totally interlinked with the product.
Reporters at a newspaper are not really expected to know how a printing machine operates! But in the digital space, content teams are expected to have knowledge about how search-engines work, be receptive towards trending-topics, drive the site's interactive elements, use multimedia tools for better packaging and in general be aware of what goes into the management of the site.
While a print journo will focus more on the language while framing a headline, a digital media person will think in terms of keywords, trending topics and ease of discovery for the user.
Writing style
Given that digital-content today is not only consumed on the computer, but across multiple platforms, writers are conscious about attention spans. While a print journalist may take pride over an elaborate article that spans over pages; in digital, brevity is the name of the game. Writers are conscious of the fact that their stories are being read on screens smaller than five-inches.
Some of the crafty expressions that would be a pleasure to read in print might not gel well with the digital consumer. Use of complicated phrases is also bad for content discovery, as the average user searches using terms from spoken English. For writers who switch from print to web, this is usually the biggest aspect they find hard to unlearn.
Feedback
The Internet is a ruthless medium and writers are usually not good at handling criticism. But due to the two-way nature of interaction on the web, online reporters are far more used to feedback, as compared to their print peers.
Most online-writers begin as bloggers, so they have an appetite for making as well as digesting nasty comments. But amidst all this commenting-noise there is also space for healthy, constructive criticism.
Web writers are accustomed to regular reality checks from users in case of errors or potentially polarising points of view. And due to this continuous stream of author-user interaction, web-writers are far more detached from their copy, flexible in style and less emotionally invested in their story.
Need for speed
Background research is of top priority to any good journalist. But online writers do not always have the luxury of time. In the era of phablets, digital teams have 24x7 access to their site. And page lineups change several times in response to trending topics. So content that may be 'hot' in the morning might be totally irrelevant by afternoon.
Which is why there are cases of irresponsible reporting, based on Twitter rumours, just to appear high on search. While basic rules of journalism do not change, content writers in the digital space have to have a strong sense of quality check, and constantly filter the information overload.
Convergence
Traditional media still has the advantage of infrastructure. Digital has the power of speed and multimedia presentation.
Unlike print, thinking purely in terms of text doesn't work here. So whether it is using a video from a TV bulletin or a slideshow of images, they all make for engaging tools to hook the reader, and provide a complete audio-visual experience. The packaging and aesthetics of the content are of supreme importance and digital journalists think of this aspect very seriously, while planning and publishing their story.
User generated content
The Internet exposes journalists to a plethora of user-generated content. At a time when camera-phones and social-media have made citizen journalism a reality, reporters have to pay attention to the voice of the reader.
So while purists may find Kolaveri Di trivial, news websites cannot ignore viral content. A print journalist may wait for viral content to become a rage, before considering it for a story - But the online counterpart has to identify a trend way in advance, and sense its viral potential much before mainstream media.
If print journos have to be alert about the world around them, the ones on the web have to be in touch with the sentiment of the online community, which can often be very unique from the real-world-view.
Way forward
Given the dynamic mature of the medium, and real-time access to analytics, content writers have to keep an eye on the performance of their story, and make tweaks based on traffic rankings and search results. These digital media reporters have earned their stripes in the age of social-media, where headlines are driven by trending hash-tags. And the speed, at which you publish your story, is almost as important as the story itself.
So while the Internet still reports the same facts as traditional media, the ones writing for the web care a lot more for user engagement than self-satisfying literary indulgence.
The digital journalist is a lot more in tune with what's on people's minds, and is perhaps more of an opinion moderator/aggregator rather than an opinion generator. News has become totally democratic and the digital medium is where journalists are truly talking to the people and not 'at them'.
Cern 99.9% certain Higgs boson has been found
After analysing two-and-a-half times more data than was available in July, scientists from Cern's Large Hadron Collider said they found that "the new particle is looking more and more like a Higgs boson, the particle linked to the mechanism that gives mass to elementary particles". "In July we thought it looks like the Higgs boson," Albert De Roeck, head of the 700-strong Higgs Analysis Group, told TOI in London. "But now we are certain. In terms of quantum mechanics, we say these results are 3 sigma — which means the chances of we being wrong is as minute as 1 in a 1,000. I can say with 99.9% certainty that this is a Higgs."
He added: "One of the things we needed to be certain was the speed of the spin of the particle. In our terminology, we needed it to be zero. In July we thought it could be 1 or 2. But our latest data shows it is zero, as it is supposed to be with regard to the Higgs."
Tejinder Virdee from London's Imperial College said that though it looked like a Higgs boson, the team also felt it could be a brand-new particle — like a super electron. A former project leader of the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment, Virdee was leading the experiments to find the Higgs boson.
"The accuracy of our conclusions would be around 30% at present, which might look small but is good enough to say it is a Higgs," Virdee said. "However, a lot more data will be studied over the next few months to make a precise announcement. But it does look like the Higgs boson. Our experiments that will start in 2015 using higher amount of energy will say whether it is a single Higgs boson or multiple."
According to Virdee, it is yet to be determined whether this is the Higgs boson of the Standard Model of particle physics or the lightest of several bosons predicted in some theories.
"More insight into our findings will be made in Barcelona in May but the final, final set of findings that should confirm beyond doubt on the fate of the Higgs boson will be made at the European Physics Society meeting in Stockholm in July," Virdee said.
Rains or Not, India Is Falling Short on Drinkable Water
By GARDINER HARRIS
¶CHERRAPUNJI, India — Almost no place on Earth gets more rain than this small hill town. Nearly 40 feet falls every year — more than 12 times what Seattle gets. Storms often drop more than a foot a day. The monsoon is epic.
¶But during the dry season from November through March, many in this corner of India struggle to find water. Some are forced to walk long distances to fill jugs in springs or streams. Taps in Shillong, the capital of Meghalaya State, spout water for just a few hours a day. And when it arrives, the water is often not drinkable.
¶That people in one of the rainiest places on the planet struggle to get potable water is emblematic of the profound water challenges that India faces. Every year, about 600,000 Indian children die because of diarrhea or pneumonia, often caused by toxic water and poor hygiene, according to Unicef.
¶Half of the water supply in rural areas, where 70 percent of India’s population lives, is routinely contaminated with toxic bacteria. Employment in manufacturing in India has declined in recent years, and a prime reason may be the difficulty companies face getting water.
¶And India’s water problems are likely to worsen. A report that McKinsey & Company helped to write predicted that India would need to double its water-generation capacity by the year 2030 to meet the demands of its surging population.
¶A separate analysis concluded that groundwater supplies in many of India’s cities — including Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad and Chennai — are declining at such a rapid rate that they may run dry within a few years.
¶The water situation in Gurgaon, the new mega-city south of Delhi, became so acute last year that a judge ordered a halt to new construction until projects could prove they were using recycled water instead of groundwater.
¶On Feb. 28, India’s finance minister, Palaniappan Chidambaram, proposed providing $2.8 billion to the Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation in the coming fiscal year, a 17 percent increase.
¶But water experts describe this as very little in a country where more than 100 million people scrounge for water from unimproved sources.
¶Some water problems stem from India’s difficult geography. Vast parts of the country are arid, and India has just 4 percent of the world’s fresh water shared among 16 percent of its people.
¶But the country’s struggle to provide water security to the 2.6 million residents of Meghalaya, blessed with more rain than almost any place, shows that the problems are not all environmental.
¶Arphisha lives in Sohrarim, a village in Meghalaya, and she must walk a mile during the dry season to the local spring, a trip she makes four to five times a day. Sometimes her husband fetches water in the morning, but mostly the task is left to her. Indeed, fetching water is mostly women’s work in India.
¶On a recent day, Arphisha, who has only one name, took the family laundry to the spring, which is a pipe set in a cement abutment. While her 2-year-old son, Kevinson, played nearby, Arphisha beat clothes on a cement and stone platform in front of the spring. Her home has electricity several hours a day and heat from a coal stove. But there is no running water. When it rains, she uses a barrel to capture runoff from her roof.
¶“It’s nice having the sunshine now, but my life is much easier during the monsoon,” she said.
¶Kevinson interrupted her work by bringing her an empty plastic bottle. “Water,” he said. Arphisha bent down, filled the bottle and gave it back to him. “Say, ‘Thank you,’ ” she said. “Say, ‘Thank you.’ ” When he silently drank, turned and went back to playing, Arphisha laughed and shrugged her shoulders.
¶In the somewhat larger town of Mawmihthied several miles away, Khrawbok, the village headman, walked nearly a mile on a goat path to point out the spring most residents visit to get drinking water. Taps in Mawmihthied have running water for two hours every morning, but the water is not fit to drink.
¶Khrawbok said that officials would like to provide better water, but that there was no money.
¶Even in India’s great cities, water problems are endemic, in part because system maintenance is nearly nonexistent. Water plants in New Delhi, for instance, generate far more water per customer than many cities in Europe, but taps in the city operate on average just three hours a day because 30 percent to 70 percent of the water is lost to leaky pipes and theft.
¶As a result, many residents install pumps to pull as much water out of the pipes as possible. But those pumps also suck contaminants from surrounding soil.
¶The collective annual costs of pumps and other such measures are three times what the city would need to maintain its water system adequately, said Smita Misra, a senior economist at the World Bank.
¶“India is lagging far behind the rest of the world in providing water and sanitation both to its rural and urban populations,” Ms. Misra said. “Not one city in India provides water on an all-day, everyday basis.”
¶And even as towns and cities increase water supplies, most fail to build the far more expensive infrastructure to treat sewage. So as families connect their homes to new water lines and build toilets, many flush the resulting untreated sewage into the nearest creek, making many of the less sophisticated water systems that much more dangerous.
¶“As drinking water reaches more households, all the resulting sewage has become a huge problem,” said Tatiana Gallego-Lizon, a principal urban development specialist at the Asian Development Bank.
¶In Meghalaya, efforts to improve the area’s water supply have been stymied by bickering among competing government agencies, said John F. Kharshiing, chairman of the Grand Council of Chiefs of Meghalaya. In one infamous example, the state built a pump near a river to bring water to towns at higher elevations.
¶“But they didn’t realize that the pump would be underwater during the monsoon,” Mr. Kharshiing said. “So it shorted out that first year, and it’s never been used since.”
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