Hindu Notes from General Studies-01

Delhi pollution bursts at the seams

News:
Air quality plummeted to ‘severe’, the worst rating on the air quality index (AQI), according to the Central Pollution Control Board’s (CPCB) updated report of Friday.

Beyond News:

• Despite a ban on the sale of crackers, the evening after Deepavali saw the Delhi record its sharpest dip in air quality this year.
• The AQI registered 402 on the scale — the uppermost being 500 — according to data from 14 monitoring stations in Delhi.

Severe smog:

• The severe smog, which built up in the days leading to Deepavali last year, triggered a directive by the Supreme Court to implement a comprehensive pollution management plan.
• A consequence of this plan was that, over the last week, the Badarpur Thermal Power Station was shut down, diesel generators in Delhi banned.
• The AQI on Deepavali day in 2015 was 327, 426 in 2016 and 327 this year, according to the agency’s Deepavali report.
• Concentrations of most categories of pollutants — sulphur dioxide, particulate matter 10 and 2.5 — saw a fall this year across most stations, except for nitrous oxide.
• Air quality this year was slightly better than last time, even though meteorological conditions, such as average wind speeds and mixing heights were almost as unfavourable last year.

Hindu Notes from General Studies-02

France wants India to buy more Rafales

News:

• French Defense Minister Florance Parley will be in New Delhi on an official visit during which she is likely to make a strong pitch to sell additional Rafale fighter jets.

Beyond News:

• In September last year, India and France concluded a €7.87-billion government-to-government deal for 36 Rafale jets in flyaway condition scheduled to be delivered between 2019 and 2022.
• The deal has a 50% offset clause to be executed by Dassault and its partners in India amounting up to Rs. 30,000 crore.
• Following this, Dassault Aviation and Reliance Defence announced a joint venture called “Dassault Reliance Aerospace”, which is likely to execute a major part of the offsets.

Single-engine jet:

• The Indian Air Force has stated its requirement for additional twin-engine fighter jets and has expressed its desire for more Rafale jets.
• The focus is now on procuring a single-engine fighter jet under the newly promulgated Strategic Partnership model,With a depleting fighter strength and several squadrons of MiG-21s and MiG-27s to be phased out,.
• The IAF is operating 32 fighter squadrons against the sanctioned strength of 42, which is set to drop further in the coming years.

U.S. starts anti-dumping probe into PTFE resin from India

News:

• The U.S. has initiated anti-dumping duty investigations against import of polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) resin from India and China, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce.

Beyond News:

• The PTFE is mostly used as a non-stick coating for utensils.
• The department has stated that the estimated dumping margins alleged by the petitioner range from 23.4%-408.9% for China and 15.8% to 128.1% for India.
• In the anti-dumping investigations, it said the department would determine whether imports of the resin from China and India were being dumped in the American market at less than fair value.
• Countries initiate anti-dumping probes to determine if the domestic industry has been hurt by a surge in below-cost imports.
• As a counter-measure, they impose duties under the multilateral WTO regime.
  Anti-dumping measures are taken to ensure fair trade and provide a level-playing field to the domestic industry. They are not a measure to restrict imports or cause an unjustified increase in cost of products.

{Op-Ed}A flood of questions

Key aspect: The National Democratic Alliance government is all set to begin work on an estimated $87 billion plan to connect around 60 of India’s largest rivers; this includes the Ganga. Once complete, it is expected to help end farmers’ dependence on fickle monsoon rains, bring millions of hectares of cultivable land under irrigation and help generate thousands of megawatts of electricity.

• The river-linking plan was first proposed in 2002 by the Atal Bihari Vajpayee-led NDA government. However, it was stalled as States failed to end differences over water sharing contracts and clearances. This government has been able push through clearances for the first phase of the project. Work is now set to link the Betwa and Ken rivers which pass through Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh.

Issues should be sorted out first before billions of rupees are spent on a project:

First, Water is listed as entry 17 in List II of the Seventh Schedule of the Constitution. While the government has initiated discussions to bring the subject under the concurrent list, it may not be an easy task to achieve.Without having a full-fledged architecture to solve disputes, it would not be prudent to embark on a mammoth project like this.

Second, India is technically poor with respect to data related to the water sector. Unlike other countries, the Central Statistics Office has neither attempted nor funded studies to gather data on water tables at an all-India or State level. Many water stressed countries produce these on a regular basis at a regional level and link them to national accounts statistics.
Third,In addition to facilitating the integration and sharing of a more comprehensive knowledge base, the natural resource accounting framework provides the basis for evaluating the consistency between the objectives and priorities of water resource management and broader goals of economic development planning and policy at a national and local scale. This in turn improves communication between various agencies generating and using information about water for various purposes and contributes to better coordination, packaging and analyses of such information that are more relevant to the needs of water managers and policy-makers’.
Fourth, the government should pay more attention to its ‘more crop per drop’ mission, to what extent Indian agriculture follows this practice and whether water-stressed regions are water exporters due to the crops they cultivate.

current scenario:
Among the north zone States, Punjab has the highest water losses, while Maharashtra (west) and Tamil Nadu (south) the highest water savings in 1996–2005 and 2005–2014, respectively. Therefore, at a subnational scale, VW( virtual wate) flows are not consistent with relative water scarcity. This finding is also crucial as it emphasises the need to carry out a subnational VW flow assessment. Such analysis for all the major crops at subnational levels is a must for efficient planning of a scarce resource such as water.

Hindu Notes from General Studies-03

Most pollution-linked deaths occur in India

News: 
India is ranked number one globally on the toll taken by pollution, with a staggering 2.51 million deaths in 2015, an international commission has reported.

Beyond News:

• Out of an estimated 9 million premature deaths linked to pollution worldwide, the country accounted for about 28%.
• Air pollution, the leading cause, killed 6.5 million people around the world.
• India and Bangladesh recorded the largest increases in pollution-related deaths among the 10 most populous countries for the year.
  Nearly a quarter of all deaths in India in 2015 were attributed to pollution; Pakistan, China, Bangladesh, and Kenya too reported one in four deaths due to the same cause.
• Again, air pollution took the heaviest toll in India (1.81 million), followed by water (0.64 million).
• Deaths linked to air pollution were a result of heart disease, stroke, lung cancer, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).
• The Lancet Commission on Pollution and Health is a two-year project that involved over 40 international health and environmental authors.

{Op-Ed}Darjeeling deadlock

Key aspect: The 104-day shutdown in the Darjeeling hills called by the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha (GJM) may have been lifted in late September, but peace remains elusive.

Background:

• On October 15, the Union Home Ministry wrote to the State government that it was calling back 10 of the 15 companies of the Central Armed Police Forces posted in the hills.
• In response, two days later Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee moved the Calcutta High Court and got a stay. GJM chief Bimal Gurung is on the run.
• While the announcement to end the shutdown had come from him after the Centre appealed to protesters and offered to talk, the State government has raided his properties, lodged several cases against him, including for misappropriation of funds and triggering violence.
• In an attempt to exploit differences within the GJM, the State government propped up rebel Gorkha leader Binoy Tamang, naming him chief of a new board of administrators to head the Gorkhaland Territorial Administration, which had been set up in 2012 as a semi-autonomous body.

Current scenario:

• With peace yet to be restored fully, the Central and State governments need to urgently sink their differences, hold tripartite talks and meaningfully empower the GTA.
• The economy of the Darjeeling hills has taken a severe hit with both the tea and tourism industries having suffered huge losses and struggling to chart a way out.
• The tea industry, for example, lost almost all its second flush crop, with losses estimated at Rs. 400 crore and counting.
• Tourists have begun to trickle back, but the peak season is over. With the West Bengal government looking to be in no mood to talk to Mr. Gurung, the political crisis is far from over.
• It was Ms. Banerjee’s initial statement that Bengali would be made compulsory in the State, including in the hills, that revived the Gorkhaland stir.

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