INDIAN EXPRESS
- Behind Iran’s Nuclear Defiance:
On Monday, Iran told the world that it had accumulated more low-enriched uranium than it was allowed to have under a landmark 2015 nuclear deal it had signed with the United States and five other countries. The deliberate violation of the provisions of that agreement, Iran has said, was in response to the reimposition of economic and other sanctions by the US after it unilaterally pulled out of the deal last year.
Iran’s latest move has put further strains on an already precarious agreement that seeks to prevent it from acquiring nuclear weapons in exchange for the easing of economic sanctions. But Iran has kept the room open for negotiations, saying its move was “reversible”.
What is enriched uranium, and how much has Iran accumulated?
Uranium is the most common fuel used in nuclear reactors, and is required for nuclear electricity generation as well as to make nuclear weapons. On the other hand, naturally occurring uranium, which is predominantly composed of a stabler isotope, uranium-238, is not fissionable, meaning its nucleus cannot be split in a way that can sustain a chain reaction. To be used in nuclear reactors, natural uranium has to be ‘enriched’ with uranium-235 that can sustain fission chain reactions. Naturally occurring uranium has less than 1% of the uranium-235 isotope.
Even a small amount of enrichment, in the range of 3% to 5%, called “low enrichment”, is sufficient to run nuclear power reactors which allow only controlled fission reactions. For making nuclear weapons, however, “highly enriched” uranium — with more than 90% uranium-235 — is needed. More enrichment means more uranium-235 nuclei are available to be split, which in turn means greater heat and energy can be generated.
Under the 2015 nuclear deal, Iran is required to ensure that, for the next 15 years, its stockpile of uranium is not enriched beyond 3.67%. Further, this stockpile of 3.67% enriched uranium itself is not supposed to exceed 300 kg.
It is this 300-kg limit that Iran has now said it has exceeded. However, it has not specified how much more low-enriched uranium it has created. Iran has also said that its next step would be to enrich uranium beyond the 3.67% limit.
Under what circumstances was the deal with Iran signed?
The deal signed in July 2015 was an attempt by the US and other major world powers to ensure that Iran did not acquire nuclear weapons, which it has been suspected of trying to do for several years now. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which is a sort of an international regulatory body on nuclear energy, had in 2003 reported the possibility of Iran secretly trying to develop nuclear weapons at one of its nuclear facilities. That had invited economic sanctions from the US and other countries.
After protracted negotiations that lasted over a decade, Iran and the US reached an agreement to restrict Tehran’s nuclear programme to only civilian uses in exchange for lifting of the sanctions. Apart from the US, the other parties to the deal are Russia, the UK, France, China and Germany, together called the P5+1.
The complex agreement specifies a large number of steps that Iran needs to take and requirements that it needs to meet to keep the economically crippling sanctions away. Most of the provisions of this agreement are supposed to run for the next 15 years, but some, like international monitoring of Iran’s uranium mines and mills, or of its nuclear power production facilities, are meant to be in force for the next 25 years.
In return, the US agreed to cease its sanctions against Iran’s oil and banking sector, allowing their re-entry into the international systems. It also allowed the sale of commercial passenger aircraft to Iran, which had been put on hold. The UN and European Union also eased their own sanctions on Iran.
So, why did the US withdraw from the deal and reimpose sanctions?
The agreement was negotiated when the Barack Obama administration was in power in the US. Current President Donald Trump has never shied away from expressing his discomfort with the deal, which he claims, was detrimental to the American interests. The Trump administration has advocated tougher provisions in the agreement, particularly with regard to the expiry dates on restrictions related to uranium enrichment. It does not want these restrictions to have any end-date.
After its offer to renegotiate the deal did not find acceptance from Iran, the US withdrew from the deal last year. It also slapped fresh sanctions on Iran. The five other countries, however, continued to be parties to the deal, thereby weakening the impact of US sanctions. However, these sanctions were still damaging enough for Iran to finally respond after a year.
What happens to the deal now?
Iran’s defiance of the provisions of the agreement is being seen as largely a bargaining ploy in its ongoing confrontation with the US, especially since it has explicitly said that it was open to reversing its decision if the sanctions against it were lifted. It is being seen as an attempt to put pressure on the other parties to convince the US of the need to keep the agreement, however fragile, in place. The Trump administration, however, has maintained a hardened stance towards Iran, and, in the absence of a diplomatic breakthrough, this could result in the unravelling of the deal.
- How suicide counts varies among the states, across the age groups:
Among all states, Maharashtra had the highest number of suicides in 2015, according to National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data tabled by the government in Parliament on Tuesday. The NCRB’s ‘Accidental Deaths and Suicides in India’ report for 2015 is the latest such report, and lists 1,336,623 suicides across the country that year.
Most of the larger states had higher suicide counts than smaller states, but there were exceptions. Uttar Pradesh, the most populous state, had the 11th highest suicide count. UP had 3,902 suicides in 2015 while Tamil Nadu had four times as many at 15,777, second only to Maharashtra’s 16,970. Bihar, one of the country’s most populous states, was another exception, with its count of 516 suicides lower than that of many smaller states.
Minister of State (Home) Nityanand Rai tabled the NCRB data in Lok Sabha in reply to a question by Poonam Mahajan. Among various aspects, she had sought to know whether young adults account for 33% of the suicide cases in India. The NCRB data show that one-third of the suicides in the country in 2015 were committed by young adults under age 30, and another one-third by people in the age group 30-45,. Of the 1,336,623 suicides, 43,852 involved people who were aged over 18 and under 30, while another 44,593 were of people who were aged over 30 and under 45.
- How Global warming could impact jobs in India?
By 2030, heat stress will cause loss of 5.8% of working hours in India, equivalent to 34 mn jobs: global stud.
By 2030, India is expected to lose an equivalent of 34 million jobs as a result of global warming, says a report released by the International Labour Organisation. The report, ‘Working on a warmer planet: The impact of heat stress on labour productivity and decent work’ anticipates an increase in “heat stress” resulting from global warming. It projects global productivity losses equivalent to 80 million full-time jobs in 2030, and the projection of 34 million jobs would make India the worst affected.
How it was worked out
The report defines heat stress as heat in excess of what the body can tolerate without suffering physiological impairment. It generally occurs at temperatures above 35°C, in high humidity. Excess heat during work is an occupational health risk and restricts workers’ physical functions and capabilities, work capacity and thus, productivity.
The report makes its projections based on a global temperature rise of 1.5°C by the end of the century, and also on labour force trends. These projections “suggest that in 2030, 2.2 per cent of total working hours worldwide will be lost because of higher temperatures, a loss equivalent to 80 million full-time jobs. This is equivalent to global economic losses of US$2,400 billion,” says the report.
The ILO says this is a conservative estimate, assuming that the global mean temperature does not rise more than 1.5°C.
The India projection
The region projected to lose the most working hours is southern Asia, at 5% in 2030, corresponding to around 43 million jobs, respectively. A third of the southern Asian countries have already incurred losses greater than 4%, it said.
India, which lost 4.3% of working hours in 1995 because of heat stress, is projected to lose 5.8% of its working hours in 2030, which corresponds to 34 million jobs.
The report projects losses in working hours as 9.04% in agriculture (in shade), 5.29% in manufacturing, 9.04% in construction, and 1.48% in services. “Although most of the impact in India will be felt in the agricultural sector, more and more working hours are expected to be lost in the construction sector, where heat stress affects both male and female workers,” the report says.
Director, Centre for Sustainable Employment at the Azim Premji University, Amit Basole said while there is little data in the country to corroborate trends of climate change and employment, the effects can already be seen. “There are two aspects which have affected and is transforming the agriculture sector in particular, over the past few years. First is that of heat. But the more noticeable one is that of water depletion. Most areas have drought like conditions so what we have found is migration of agricultural workers to urban areas — usually to work in the construction sector,” he said.
He added, however, that there has been no direct job loss at present, with distressed workers switching from one vulnerable sector to another.
The big picture
Globally, the two sectors projected to be hit worst are agriculture and construction, with agriculture worse affected. The ILO says 940 million people around the world work in the agricultural sector, which is projected to account for 60% of working hours lost due to heat stress by 2030. In construction, an estimated 19% of global working hours is likely to be lost.
Catherine Saget, Chief of Unit in the ILO’s research department and one of the main authors of the report, wrote: “In addition to the massive economic costs of heat stress, we can expect to see more inequality between low and high income countries and worsening working conditions for the most vulnerable, as well as displacement of people. To adapt to this new reality appropriate measures by governments, employers and workers, focusing on protecting the most vulnerable, are urgently needed.”
THE HINDU
- Bill on reservation in central academic provides relief to disadvantaged sections
Legislation to overcome the effects of court verdicts is not always a good idea. However, sometimes an exception ought to be made in the larger public interest. One such law is the Centre’s Bill to ensure that reservation for scheduled castes, tribes and other backward classes in appointments to central educational institutions is preserved. The Central Educational Institutions (Reservation in Teachers’ Cadre) Bill, 2019, passed by the Lok Sabha, replaces an ordinance promulgated in March. Its main object is to restore the system of treating an institution or a university as a single unit to apply the reservation roster, and thus help fill 7,000 teaching vacancies. It seeks to get around a 2017 judgment of the Allahabad High Court striking down University Grants Commission regulations that treated the institution as the unit for determining the roster, and directing that each department be the relevant unit. In short, reservation should be department-wise, and not institution-wise, the court ruled. The Supreme Court rejected the Centre’s appeal against the order. But the narrower basis for applying quotas would mean fewer aspirants from OBC and SC/ST sections would be recruited as assistant professors. In the interest of social justice, it had to restore the system of having a wider pool of posts in which the quotas of 27% for OBC, 15% for SC and 7.5% ST could be effectively applied. From this perspective, the Bill provides welcome relief for aspirants from the disadvantaged sections of society.
A $5 trillion Indian Economy may be attainable if domestic saving and investment are stepped up
n early June, at a NITI Aayog meeting, Prime Minister Narendra Modi set a clear and bold economic target — to grow India into a $5 trillion economy by 2024. It is now for ‘Team India’, as the meeting was bannered, to translate this target into a plan and policies and programmes. Historically, such goals by popularly elected leaders have voiced the aspiration of voters and energised nations to realise their potential.
How realistic?
What does the targeted $5 trillion economy mean in familiar economic terms? It is ₹350,00,000 crore of gross domestic product (GDP) at current prices, at ₹70 to a U.S. dollar exchange rate. India’s (provisional) GDP in 2018-19 at current prices is ₹190,10,164 crore (or $2.7 trillion), which means the annual per capita income is ₹1,42,719, or about ₹11,900 per month.
The target implies an output expansion by 84% in five years, or at 13% compound annual growth rate. Assuming an annual price rise of 4%, in line with the Reserve Bank of India’s inflation target, the required growth rate in real, or inflation-adjusted, terms is 9% per year. To get a perspective, India officially grew at 7.1% per year over the last five years, but the annual growth rate never touched 9%. Hence, the target seems ambitious. Is it doable?
How Asia fared
How does the target compare with the Asian experience? China, with a historically unprecedented growth record in its best five years, during 2003-07, grew at 11.7%; South Korea, between 1983 and 1987, grew at 11%. So, Mr. Modi’s target is smaller than the best historical records and may seem realistic.
What would it take to grow at 9%? No country grew at such a pace without mobilising domestic saving and raising fixed investment rates.
In the last five years, on average, the domestic saving rate was 30.8% of gross national domestic income (GNDI), and the investment rate (gross capital formation to GDP ratio) was 32.5%. Assuming the underlying technical coefficients remain constant, a 9% annual growth rate calls for 39% of domestic saving rate and 41.2% of investment rate. Correspondingly, shares of private consumption need to shrink to about 50% of GDP from the current level of 59% of GDP at current prices, assuming foreign capital inflow remains at 1.7% of GDP.
In other words, India will have to turn into an investment-led economy as it happened during the boom last decade (2003-08) before the financial crisis, or like China since the 1980s. Granting that rapid technical progress or changes in output composition could reduce the required incremental capital-output ratio (ICOR), it nevertheless will call for a nearly 8-9 percentage point boost to saving and investment rates.
If, however, the economy has grown at a much slower pace than the officially claimed rate — as the on-going GDP debate suggests and at 4.5% as the former Chief Economic Adviser Arvind Subramanian has pegged it — then Mr. Modi’s growth target would become even more daunting.
Low domestic saving rate
These stark facts call for a re-thinking in the ruling dispensation that seems to hail India as a consumption-led growth story. There is a belief that greater foreign capital (FDI) inflow would fill in the investment gap, as evident from the NITI Aayog Vice-Chairman’s various pronouncements. History shows that no country has succeeded in accelerating its growth rate without raising the domestic saving rate to close to 40% of GDP. Foreign capital can fill in some vital gaps but is not a substitute for domestic resources. Even in China, FDI inflows as a proportion of GDP never exceeded 5-6%, most of which was in fact round-tripped capital through Hong Kong for securing better property rights at home.
Gross FDI inflow into India peaked in 2008-09 at 2.7% of GDP, decelerating thereafter. As it increasingly consists of private equity (PE) with a three- to five-year tenure, mostly acquiring capital assets (contrary to the textbook FDI definition as fixed capital formation for the long term) net FDI rate is lower than the gross inflows, standing at 1.5% of GDP in 2017-18. Hence, there is a need for caution against the exuberance (or opportunistic bias) that FDI will help to get to the $5 trillion GDP target.
What is serious is that the economy has slowed down for a while now. The domestic saving rate has declined from 31.4% in 2013-14 to 29.6% in 2016-17; and gross capital formation rate from 33.8% to 30.6% during the same period. The banking sector’s ability to boost credit growth is limited by non-performing assets (NPAs) and the governance crisis in the financial sector. Export to GDP ratio has declined rapidly, with a looming global trade war on the horizon, as has been indicated by the Baltic Dry Index. The highly regarded leading indicator of global trade, currently trading at 1354 is forecasted to decline to less than 1,000 index points by the year-end (a decline from its historic high of 11,793 points in May 2008, just before the financial crisis set in).
Given the foregoing, the $5 trillion target appears daunting. It may yet be doable, provided policymakers begin with a realistic assessment, by willing to step up domestic saving and investment, and not by the wishful thinking of FDI-led growth accelerations in uncertain economic times.
- Healthcare a primary problem
It is imperative to promote community-based care rather than relying only on hospital services
The deaths of 154 children in Bihar due to acute encephalitis syndrome (AES) has laid bare the precarious capacity of the State’s healthcare apparatus to handle outbreaks. AES has been linked to two factors: litchi consumption by starving children and a long, ongoing heat wave. As promises of bolstering the health infrastructure are being made, it is important to analyse what could have formed the ideal line of action.
AES is largely preventable both before and just after the onset of the disease, and treatable with high chances of success on availability of medical intervention within 2-4 hours of symptoms. Therefore, the first signs of an outbreak must prompt strong prevention measures. These include, apart from a robust health education drive and replenishing primary health centres (PHCs) with essential supplies, extensive deployment of peripheral health workers (ASHA workers) and ambulance services to facilitate rapid identification and management of suspected cases. Vacant doctor positions in PHCs must be urgently filled through deputation. Furthermore, short-term scaling-up of the Poshan Abhiyaan and the supplementary nutrition programme — which makes available hot, cooked meals for pre-school children at Anganwadis along with take home ration for mothers and distribution of glucose/ORS packets in risk households — are imperative. Nearly every one of these elements lies undermined in Bihar.
Crumbling healthcare in Bihar
In Bihar, one PHC caters to about 1 lakh people rather than the norm of 1 PHC per 30,000 people. Furthermore, it is critical for such a PHC, catering to more than three times the standard population size, to have at least two doctors. However, three-fourths of the nearly 1,900 PHCs in Bihar have just one doctor each. Muzaffarpur has 103 PHCs (about 70 short of the ideal number) with 98 of them falling short of basic requirements outlined by the Health Management Information System. Bihar, one of the most populous States, had a doctor-population ratio of 1:17,685 in 2018, 60% higher than the national average, and with only 2% of the total MBBS seats in the country. There is also a one-fifth shortage of ASHA personnel, and nearly one-third of the sub-health centres have no health workers at all. While the State reels under the highest load of malnutrition in India, a study found that around 71% and 38% of funds meant for hot, cooked meals and take home ration, respectively, under the supplementary nutrition programme, were pilfered. Meals were served for just more than half the number of prescribed days, and only about half the number of beneficiaries on average actually got them.
This is not all. Even those PHCs with adequate supplies remain underutilised. Perennial subscription to selective healthcare services by PHCs, like family planning and immunisation, have cultivated the perception that PHCs are inept as centres of general healthcare. This leads patients either directly to apex government hospitals situated far away or to unqualified private providers. This results in a patient losing precious time in transit and landing up in a hospital in a critical and often irreversible stage of illness.
Merely strengthening the tertiary care sector will be inefficient and ineffective. Most attention was focused on the poor state of the Sri Krishna Medical College and Hospital in Muzaffarpur, with 600 beds, already functioning beyond its full capacity. Hospitals in Muzzafarpur have a bed occupancy of over 300%, three times the full occupancy. In such a case, even a significant addition of hospital beds and ICUs won’t solve the problem. ICUs can only deal with the most advanced cases. A narrow focus on the hospital sector will wastefully increase costs, ignore the majority of cases, increase the number of cases that are in advanced stages, while continuing to overstretch public hospitals.
Revamp primary health infrastructure
The solution lies in building more functional PHCs and sub-health centers; scaling-up the cadres of ASHA workers; strict monitoring of nutrition programmes; and addressing the maldistribution of doctors and medical colleges. The resultant robust primary care system can then be geared towards being more responsive to future outbreaks. We should also bolster our technical capacity to better investigate the causes of such outbreaks and operationalise a concrete long-term strategy.
Policy documents, while emphasising on financial and managerial aspects of public health, fail to address the aberrant developmental paradigm of our health services. Decades of hospital-centric growth of health services have eroded faith in community-based healthcare. In these circumstances, even easily manageable illnesses increase demand for hospital services rather than PHCs. There is need to work on inculcating confidence in community-based care.
- Why Policemen kill themselves
Long hours of work, no holidays and large vacancies in the force cause stress and depression
On May 11, 2018, senior Maharashtra IPS officer Himanshu Roy committed suicide in Mumbai. He was suffering from cancer and resultant depression. Another IPS officer, Surendra Kumar Das, committed suicide in Kanpur in September 2018 due to “family issues”. Ajay Kumar of the Delhi Police, who was suffering from depression, chose to end his life in New Delhi on April 4 this year.
Reasons for suicide
These are just a few instances of suicide in the police. Over 940 police personnel committed suicide in the five years till December 2018. This includes personnel of the Central Armed Police Forces. As many as 54 Delhi Police personnel chose to end their lives in the last four years. In Tamil Nadu, 166 policemen took their lives between 2010 and 2014, while in Maharashtra and Kerala, the figure was 161 and 61, respectively. In the last three years, 105 personnel of the Central Reserve Police Force, entrusted with the onerous responsibility of looking after the internal security of the whole country, committed suicide.
The reasons for suicide among the police are manifold. Police personnel have no fixed hours of duty. They are considered to be on duty all the time. This deprives them of the luxury of spending time with their families. They are frequently made to work for anywhere up to 16 hours a day. Families are ignored and this leads to familial conflicts. Festivals are given a go-by as they have to be on duty to ensure peace in their areas. K. Annamalai, a 2011 batch IPS officer of the Karnataka cadre, who resigned from service recently, said that though he enjoyed the challenges of being a police officer, he missed many important functions and “the small things in life”.
Denial of leave is another sore point that affects the efficiency of the police and leads to frustration. Though no superior generally likes to deny leave to his or her subordinates, operational requirements most often warrant a full-strength force to deal with varied law and order problems. While it is easy to apportion blame on the officers for suicide or fratricide, it is the system that stands to be inculpated. Due to large vacancies in the police forces, a huge responsibility rests on the available personnel to maintain law and order.
The health of police personnel has taken a toll because of erratic working hours and lack of physical exercise. Many of them are known to suffer from stress-related diseases such as depression and obesity. Unable to cope, they end their lives.
Filling up vacancies
To arrest the growing incidence of suicides, the government needs to take multi-pronged steps with urgency. An acute shortage of personnel in the police has to be of immediate concern. In 2014, there was a shortage of over 5.6 lakh personnel against the sanctioned strength of 22.8 lakh. An in-depth study of the requirement of police personnel over the next decade would be conducive to plan recruitment and training in a phased manner.
Senior officers need to identify personnel with deviant behaviour. The Delhi Police has taken a step forward in this direction to identify personnel with psychological disorders to put them through counselling sessions. Frequent interactions between officers and subordinates will help subordinates air their grievances freely. Solutions can be jointly worked out. Even if the grievances are not immediately redressed, it will be soothing for an officer to share his or her problems with a senior officer. It might even forestall a suicide attempt.