08-10-2016 (Important News Clippings)
Date: 08-10-16
Water water everywhere, but not a drop to drink
This document covers a wide range of options, but surprisingly has no mention of possibly the single-largest source of water for the country: seawater. Our water planners continue to be stuck in the perception of the high cost of seawater conversion, and are not aware of the advancement of technology in the field. The product water from the desalination process is generally suitable for most domestic, industrial and agricultural uses.It is, therefore, increasingly becoming a vital option for alleviating severe water shortage around the world. Israel now gets 55% of its domestic water from desalination, and that has helped turn one of the driest countries into the unlikeliest of water giants.
Countries in North Africa, the Caribbeans, West Asia and like the US, Australia and South Africa are some of the others who have adopted desalination to good effect. According to the UN World Water Development Report, 2014, more than 17,000 desalination plants are now operating in 150 countries worldwide, a capacity that could nearly be doubled by 2020. Desalination produces 21billion gallons of water aday and provides a crucial water source in arid regions.
Even in India, desalination plants have been established in Tamil Nadu, Puducherry, Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat. The largest seawater desalination plant operating through the reverse osmosis (RO) process supplying 100 million litres of fresh water to Chennai has been around for some time.According to the Indian Desalination Association, there are more than 1,000 membrane-based desalination plants of various capacities ranging from 20 cu m per day to 10,000 cu m per day in the country. So, there is no dearth of information and experience in this area. Seawater can now be reclaimed with a single pass-through RO membrane.
In RO systems, water from a pressurised saline solution is separated from the dissolved salts by flowing through a water-permeable membrane. The permeate — liquid flowing through a water-permeable membrane — is encouraged to flow through by the pressure differential created between pressurised feed water and the product water. The major energy requirement is for the initial pressurisation of the feed water.The operating pressure for seawater desalination ranges between 800 and 1,000 pounds per sq inch (psi). Nanotechnology-based solutions are gaining prominence in providing solutions to address water quality problems.Israel has come out with several state-of-the-art technologies. In the US, a cutting-edge RO facility has been built near San Diego. At least 15 other plants using RO in the US west coast are currently under implementation.
Researchers at the Zuckerberg Institute for Water Research in Israel have made many breakthroughs in membrane technology that have made desalination much more efficient. India’s Department of Atomic Energy (DAE), too, has developed indigenous desalination and water purification technologies. Sadly, the RO desalination plants established are limited in meeting the industrial and potable drinking water requirements of DAE units.
The costs of desalination have decreased sharply over the years. Water produced by desalination costs just a third of what it did in the 1990s. The world’s largest facility, Sorek Desalination Plant, near Tel Aviv in Israel, can produce a thousand litres of drinking water for 58 cents. The production cost of a brackish water desalination plant is Rs 10-15 per cu m, while the production cost for seawater desalination plant is Rs 40-50 per cu m.That of desalted water from effluent varies from Rs 15 to Rs 50 per cu m. On an average, the cost of conversion of seawater into desalinated water is about 10 paise a litre water produce. The energy cost — a major component — can be brought down further if solar, wind or tidal wave are utilised.The National Water Policy must include utilisation of seawater resources as a core component of the strategy for meeting the country’s water needs. A development strategy needs to be formulated along the lines of the Solar Mission.The financing cost of seawater conversion plants may be shared by the Centre, state government, local bodies and private companies.Astarting point could be the Sagarmala project, where setting up of anumber of major development projects is being contemplated in coastal states. Most, if not all, groundwater-based development should be discouraged.
S C Lahiry The writer is former adviser, Planning Commission of India
Date: 08-10-16
No place for triple talaq in democracy
The government has done well to tell the Supreme Court that it opposes triple talaq.
The government has done well to tell the Supreme Court that it opposes triple talaq, a practice supported by Muslim personal law in India, under which a Muslim man can divorce his wife just by repeating the word talaq (meaning divorce) three times — sometimes even by text message or over Skype.
The court, while hearing a petition challenging the constitutional validity of triple talaq, polygamy and halala, which mandates a divorced woman to marry and consummate marriage with another man before remarrying her former husband, had asked the central government for its opinion.These are not essential parts of the religion, the Centre has told the court and further asserted that these provisions violate gender justice, equality and women’s dignity.
The latter is the core of the issue.The country’s Constitution upholds fundamental democratic rights and counts rights of minorities to profess, practise and propagate their religion as part of democratic rights.Minority rights are not patronage, as they were under many kings in the past. These are part and parcel of democratic rights.However, when minority custom comes in conflict with basic democratic rights, custom must yield to democratic rights. Undemocratic and unequal practices cannot continue in the name of minority rights.The notion that Muslim existence would be jeopardised if some sections of the sharia relating to the treatment of women are abandoned is spurious. Some of these practices have been rendered illegal in several Muslim-majority countries.Besides, Muslims in India suffer no religious derogation for not following the sharia in criminal justice or financial matters. It should be noted that the Goa civil code, Portuguese till the 1960s, has no discriminatory provisions for Muslim women.
जीवन की सांझ के अंधेरे आसार
अंग्रेजों के समय में सरकारी नौकरी में रिटायरमेंट की उम्र 55 साल थी। उस समय ऐसा माना जाता था कि लोगों की औसत उम्र 60 साल है। तब सरकार को पेंशन मुश्किल से पांच वर्ष तक देनी पड़ती थी। जीवन स्तर में सुधार से आम नागरिक की औसत उम्र अब 70 वर्ष हो गई है। इसलिए किसी राज्य में रिटायरमेंट की उम्र 60 वर्ष है, तो कहीं-कहीं 58 वर्ष है। इंग्लैंड, अमेरिका और जापान में लोगों की औसत उम्र कभी 60 वर्ष थी और अब 80 वर्ष हो गई है।
वहां अधिकतर लोग 60 वर्ष की उम्र में रिटायर कर जाते हैं और सरकारी तथा प्राइवेट कंपिनयों के लिए इतने लंबे समय तक पेंशन दे पाना संभव नहीं होता है। अनुमान है कि दुनिया में 65 वर्ष से अधिक उम्र के लोगों की आबादी 60 करोड़ से ऊपर जा चुकी है, जो वर्ष 2050 में बढ़कर 1.6 अरब हो जाएगी। जापान में तो एक-तिहाई जनसंख्या 65 वर्ष से अधिक उम्र के लोगों की है। जीवन की संध्या वेला में पहुंच चुके ऐसे लोगों की आबादी हर जगह बढ़ती जा रही है, जो उत्पादन चक्र में कोई महत्वपूर्ण भूमिका अब नहीं निभा सकते।
यह उम्र का ऐसा पड़ाव है, जिसमें व्यक्ति धन का उपार्जन नहीं करता, पर स्वास्थ्य और देखभाल के लिहाज से उसकी जरूरतें काफी बढ़ जाती हैं। चिकित्सा व्यवस्था के निजीकरण के इस दौर में यह बहुत बड़ी समस्या है। पश्चिम के देशों में स्वास्थ्य बीमा जैसी चीजों से बुजुर्गों को कुछ मदद मिल जाती है, लेकिन भारत जैसे देशों में तो इस सुविधा का भी बहुत ज्यादा विस्तार नहीं हुआ है। 50 साल की उम्र से ज्यादा के व्यक्ति का स्वास्थ्य बीमा करने को तो बहुत सी बीमा कंपनियां तैयार ही नहीं होती हैं। भारत जैसे बड़ी आबादी व कम विकसित अर्थव्यवस्था वाले देशों में, जहां आबादी का बहुत बड़ा हिस्सा या तो किसानी करता है, या दस्तकारी जैसे किसी छोटे-मोटे काम में लगा होता है, वहां बुजुर्गों के पास पेंशन जैसा कोई सहारा भी नहीं है। देश में कुछ राज्य सरकारों ने वृद्धावस्था पेंशन जैसी कुछ योजनाएं शुरू की हैं, लेकिन उनके तहत मिलने वाली पेंशन इतनी कम है, उससे किसी का गुजारा भी नहीं हो सकता।
यह समस्या इसलिए भी परेशान करने वाली है कि हमारे यहां अचानक ही संयुक्त परिवार की वह व्यवस्था खत्म हो गई है, जो घर के बुजुर्गों को सहारा भी देती थी और सम्मान भी। दो-तीन पीढ़ी पहले जिन लोगों ने परंपरागत समाज व्यवस्था से आगे बढ़कर शहरों, खासकर महानगरों में एकल परिवारों का नया चलन शुरू किया था, अब वे जब रिटायर हो रहे हैं, तो इस बदलाव के कड़वे अनुभव उनके स्वागत के लिए तैयार खडे़ हैं। और अब तो संयुक्त परिवार कस्बों, यहां तक कि ग्रामीण इलाकों में भी खत्म हो रहे हैं। एक तरफ, जहां पूरी दुनिया में सरकारें बुजुर्ग होती आबादी के सामने आने वाली समस्याओं के समाधान तलाश रही हैं, तो वहीं भारत में इस समस्या पर अभी विचार भी नहीं हो रहा।
गौरीशंकर राजहंस, पूर्व सांसद और पूर्व राजदूत (ये लेखक के अपने विचार हैं)
भेदभाव का इलाज
इससे बड़ी विडंबना क्या होगी कि कोई व्यक्ति असाध्य रोग से पीड़ित हो और उसे सामाजिक उपेक्षा और भेदभाव का दंश भी झेलना पड़े।
दरअसल, एचआइवी-एड्स पीड़ितों के साथ भेदभाव या उपेक्षापूर्ण व्यवहार करने वाले लोग यह सामान्य समझ विकसित नहीं कर पा रहे थे कि इस बीमारी के फैलने की प्रक्रिया साथ बैठने, खाने, छूने आदि से नहीं जुड़ी है, बल्कि असुरक्षित यौन-संबंध, आनुवंशिकता, एचआइवी से संक्रमित खून और सुई या किसी औजार का शरीर में प्रवेश इसकी वजहें हैं। लेकिन एक विचित्र धारणा लोगों के मन में बैठी हुई है कि यह जानलेवा रोग छूने तक से हो जाता है। जबकि सिर्फ धारणा से सच नहीं बदल जाता। अव्वल तो एचआइवी के एड्स में तब्दील होने की एक लंबी प्रक्रिया है और इस स्थिति में व्यक्ति बिल्कुल एक सामान्य और स्वस्थ व्यक्ति की तरह जीवन जीता है। उससे किसी को किसी तरह का नुकसान नहीं है। फिर अगर आगे चल कर वह एड्स की चपेट में आता भी है, तो उसकी गतिविधियां और इलाज किसी दूसरी बीमारी के मरीज की तरह ही होती हैं।
मगर हालत यह है कि न केवल समाज के गैरजागरूक लोगों की ओर से, बल्कि कई बार अस्पतालों तक में ऐसे पीड़ितों को भेदभाव और उपेक्षा का शिकार होना पड़ता है। एक समय कुष्ठ और टीबी के मरीजों को भी ऐसे ही भेदभाव का सामना करना पड़ता था। दरअसल, ऐसे व्यवहार में इन बीमारियों के संक्रमण के डर के साथ कई तरह के सामाजिक पूर्वग्रह भी घुल जाते हैं और पीड़ित लोगों की संवेदना पर गहरी चोट करते हैं। बीमारी के बजाय मानसिक आघात की वजह से भी उसकी मृत्यु हो जा सकती है। जबकि किसी भी रोग के मरीज के साथ संवेदनशील और अपनापे का व्यवहार उसके इलाज में बड़ा सहायक पक्ष माना गया है। इसलिए एचआइवी-एड्स रोगी के साथ अगर समाज से लेकर समूचा तंत्र अपने को संवेदनशील बनाए रखे, तो शायद किसी के खिलाफ कानूनी सख्ती की जरूरत नहीं पड़ेगी।
Farewell to NAM
Non-alignment has not been in the vocabulary of PM Modi. But India does not have to denounce non-alignment to follow its present foreign policy
A summit of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) without the Indian Prime Minister is like Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark and that is what was enacted in Venezuela recently. The only other time when an Indian Prime Minister stayed home was in 1979, when the historic Havana summit took place. Prime Minister Charan Singh’s absence, however, had nothing to do with NAM; this time, the absence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi had a political message.
Sources close to the Prime Minister have taken pains to explain that his absence was deliberate as he did not find NAM to be important enough for him to spend a couple of days in distant Venezuela. Therefore, the explanation given by the head of the Indian delegation, Vice President Hamid Ansari, that the summit was not a conference of Prime Ministers and, therefore, Indian participation was adequate did not carry conviction.
Flawed assumptions about NAM
Non-alignment has not been in the vocabulary of Prime Minister Modi. He has been on a quest for selective alignments to suit his needs for India’s development and security. His advisers have now begun to rationalise India’s distancing from NAM. One argument is that NAM did not have any binding principles and that it was a marriage of convenience among disparate countries. This argument arises from the narrow, literary interpretation of non-alignment. Many commentators had felt, right from the beginning, that the word ‘non-alignment’ conveyed the wrong notion that it was not aligning with the power blocs and that the be-all and end-all of non-alignment was to remain unaligned. But the quintessence of non-alignment was freedom of judgment and action and it remained valid, whether there was one bloc or two. Seen in that context, non-military alliances can also be within the ambit of non-alignment, which was subsequently characterised as ‘strategic autonomy’. In other words, India does not have to denounce non-alignment to follow its present foreign policy.
Another argument being heard is that NAM countries did not come to our help on any of the critical occasions when India needed solidarity, such as the Chinese aggression in 1962 or the Bangladesh war in 1971. Even in the latest struggle against terror, NAM has not come to assist India in any way. But the whole philosophy of NAM is that it remains united on larger global issues, even if does not side with a member on a specific issue. India itself has followed this approach, whenever the members had problems with others either inside or outside the movement. NAM positions have always been the reflection of the lowest common denominator in any given situation.
That NAM has no ideal or ideology as a glue is a wrong assumption. Though the criteria for NAM membership are general, anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism and anti-racism were essential attributes of NAM countries. There was a consensus on nuclear disarmament also till India broke ranks by keeping out of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. The diversity reflected in both Singapore and Cuba being NAM members has been its strength. Therefore, Egypt signing the Camp David Accords with Israel in 1978 or India signing the Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Cooperation with the Soviet Union in 1971 did not result in any disruption of membership.
A heritage we can leverage
All said and done, the golden age in India’s foreign policy was in the first 15 years after Independence, when NAM provided a constituency for India because of our non-violent victory over the British and the leadership it provided to the newly independent countries. Our problems were different from the small and impoverished nations that thronged the movement, but Jawaharlal Nehru’s vision and statesmanship inspired them. We did not seek to resolve our problems through the machinery of dispute resolution in NAM, but actively assisted those who sought such assistance. India led the NAM effort to resolve the Iran-Iraq dispute.As expected, political issues continued to engage NAM and we benefitted from its activism occasionally. In fact, it was through NAM that we operated to counter the efforts to expand the UN Security Council by including just Germany and Japan as permanent members. NAM submitted its own proposal and ensured that no quick fix was permitted.
The question we need to ask is whether our continued involvement with NAM would stand in the way of our 21st century ambitions. The very informal nature of NAM permits members to operate individually. It also has the facility of members reserving their positions, as we did on the non-proliferation positions of NAM. Our new nearness to the U.S. is not a red rag in NAM and our ability to be helpful in formulating U.S. policies gives us an advantage. No NAM country may agree to isolate Pakistan, but the NAM forum will be an effective instrument to project our anti-terrorist sentiments.
NAM is particularly important in elections at the UN, including the possible identification of new permanent members of the Security Council. The NAM position may not be decisive, but in the normal process of consultations, every grouping will get its own weightage and it is convenient to have a lobby behind us. NAM today, like the Commonwealth has always been, is a heritage we need not discard.The decision to say farewell to NAM is very much in keeping with the new transactional nature of the foreign policy we are developing. NAM was a part of our larger vision for the world, but today it is seen as inconsequential to our present preoccupations. This transformation will not be lost on the world community.
T.P. Sreenivasan, former Ambassador of India and Governor for India of the International Atomic Energy Agency, is Director General, Kerala International Centre.
Copy-wrongs and the invisible subsidy
Academic publishers challenged the right of Indian students to photocopied texts. Their suit shows how much they themselves benefitted from the intellectual commons
C R Sasikumar
The Delhi High Court recently delivered a landmark judgement dismissing a suit jointly filed by three global academic publishing corporations and their Indian subsidiaries, Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, and Taylor and Francis. The suit charged a photocopy shop at the Delhi School of Economics, and its legal “employer”, the University of Delhi, with infringement of copyright because the shop was selling “course packs”, or spiral-bound compilations of photocopied extracts from books and journals that are prescribed reading materials for courses of study at the university. In a lucid judgement that is radical in the classical sense of going to the root of the issue, Justice Rajiv Sahai Endlaw held that, since copyright is a statutory right created by the law, rather than a pre-existent natural or common-law right, exceptions to this right carry the same legal weight as the right itself. When defining what constitutes infringements of copyright, the Indian Copyright Act carves out an exception for the educational use of copyrighted materials, including their reproduction “in the course of instruction.” Finding that “course packs” fall within this exception, Justice Endlaw dismissed the case. The plaintiffs have since filed an appeal against this judgement.
While the law will take its own course, this case raises fundamental questions about the nature and extent of private property in an inescapably collective context like the world of scholarship and higher education. Just as we are now being asked to ponder the question — who “owns” the Indian cricket team?— this case asks us to reconsider the ownership of books and ideas produced in the intellectual commons. Four facts frame such a reconsideration. The first is that commercial academic publishing is not a commercial enterprise in the normal sense. Unlike ordinary commercial establishments, academic publishers pay almost nothing for their inputs (manuscripts), or key services (refereeing and editorial oversight), but nevertheless claim “full” ownership rights over the products they acquire from the intellectual commons. It is only because academic authors are paid salaries by their parent institutions (mostly public universities and research centres) that they gladly give away their manuscripts for lifetime royalties that are usually less than a single month’s salary. Other salaried teachers and researchers act as referees and editors, once again, for little or no payment. Yet other academics — and their students — provide a captive market, as well as free and effective forms of publicity and promotion. Commercial publishers can and have added value through their own contributions like editing, copy editing, distribution, keeping a book in print, providing differentially priced editions, but it is precisely in these areas that standards have fallen sharply in recent times, despite honourable exceptions.
The second stark fact is that quality higher education is not compatible with an overzealous copyright law. University students are required to read widely, their reading lists change frequently and their numbers can never match those of school students. This is a market with a large and constantly changing range of products, but with sales volumes that cannot leverage the gigantic scale economies available for school textbooks. Buying the readings for even a single course at market prices easily adds up to tens of thousands of rupees, turning a masters’ degree into an unaffordable multi-lakh luxury. Alternatives — like licensing systems that accumulate tiny commissions from thousands of retail outlets — have proved hard to implement in advanced economies and will face insurmountable obstacles in India.
The third crucial fact is the technological transformation of publishing. Academic publishing has always been more or less non-viable on strictly commercial grounds. But it originated in an era when book production was a highly skilled craft and publishers were technologically and organisationally indispensable. Today, digitisation and internet-based distribution threaten to make publishers redundant. Monopolistic pricing and predatory copyrighting have been pushed the hardest by publishers of scholarly journals, and their aggressive greed has provoked a backlash. Hit by spiralling journal subscriptions, some of the richest universities on earth have chosen to challenge commercial publishing. Established in 2011, the Coalition of Open Access Policy Institutions (COAPI) has a growing membership that includes universities like Harvard, MIT, Stanford and Columbia. An international consortium of academic libraries, Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) is “working to correct imbalances in the scholarly publishing system”, and has more than 800 members on four continents. Major research funding organisations like the National Institutes of Health in the United States now require their grantees to publish only in open access journals. Similar initiatives are already underway in India and will surely gather momentum.
The fourth fact is that academic publications are peripheral to the Indian Copyright Act, which is mainly concerned with mass-market, high-value intellectual property like software, films or popular music. The 2012 parliamentary debate on the amendment to the Act invoked the tragic cases of shehnai maestro Bismillah Khan and film music composer Ravi, who died in penury despite their works earning millions for unscrupulous others. With academic publications and especially journals, it is publishers and not authors who make millions from copyrights. Indeed, it is precisely because of their relevance for a public good like education that academic publications and educational use are specifically exempted by the Indian Copyright Act.
Taken together, these four facts suggest that publishers may not gain much even if they succeed in their efforts to overturn the current judgement. Academic publishing has always been, and will continue to be, a low volume market with a business model based on institutional rather than individual sales. The three plaintiffs in this case are gigantic global corporations reporting healthy levels of profitability — they are not going to be bankrupted by one-room photocopy shops serving students in Indian universities. By insisting on their pound of flesh in the face of the letter and spirit of the Indian law, they are inviting attention to the conditions in which they operate and the implicit and explicit subsidies they receive from the intellectual commons. Sadly, they are also helping to obscure the larger truth that students, teachers and academic publishers are natural allies with a strong stake in each other’s well-being.
SATISH DESHPANDE The writer teaches sociology at Delhi University. Views expressed here are personal
सामाजिक सुरक्षा कवच
