Will this election see a higher turnout?
Some facts:
1. Urban voters have always voted in lesser numbers compared to rural voters or voters living in semi-urban constituencies.
2. The gap between the turnout of men and women was much higher in the 1950s and 60s, but has narrowed down substantially in recent elections. However, participatory trends among women voters seem to have changed in recent years. Not only are women participating more but have even outnumbered men in various States.
3. Post-Mandal, electoral politics in India has witnessed more participation of voters from the lower social and economic order. Findings from the surveys conducted by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) indicate that Dalits, Adivasis and Muslims now vote on a par with voters from the upper castes, which was not the case during elections held in the 1980s.
The rise of various regional parties having a strong support base among particular castes and their use of strong strategies for mobilising people has resulted in bringing about this change.
News: The rupee’s recent appreciation to below 60 a dollar — it is hovering around those levels
This shows the changing perceptions of investors, especially from abroad, of the Indian economy.
But GDP growth is still below the 5% mark. So the reasons of such changed perceptions are:
1. reduction in the current account deficit on top of a satisfactory trade balance. From last year’s unacceptable levels of being over 5 per cent of GDP, CAD is down to an eminently manageable 2.3 per cent during the third quarter of the current year, according to RBI figures.
2. expectation of a “business-friendly” government taking office in May appears to have influenced foreign investors to flood the stock markets with relatively cheap money borrowed from abroad.
The rupee’s sharp appreciation poses to the RBI a different set of challenges than what it has been used to.
Since rupee has strengthened ---> RBI trying to increase its dollar reserves ---> more money in the market ---> more liquidity ---> Inflation
Determining the correct level of the rupee is always an onerous task, especially when the sharp improvement in CAD is due not to any sustained export revival but to a contraction in gold imports and a fall in non-oil imports. Policy measures to suppress gold imports cannot last for long and have besides led to smuggling. There is really no way out to stabilise the current account except to boost exports, for which a strong rupee will be a deterrent.
WHO joins clamour to make new hepatitis C pills affordable
The World Health Organization wants a “concerted effort” to drive down the cost of new hepatitis C drugs that offer a cure for the liver-destroying virus but are unaffordable for most infected people worldwide.
The agency’s comments on Wednesday add to pressure on drug makers such as Gilead Sciences, which is already facing protests in the U.S. over its $1,000-a-day pill, to do more to improve access.
In its first-ever treatment guidelines for the disease, issued at a meeting of international liver experts in London, the WHO strongly recommended new drugs from Gilead and Johnson & Johnson — with a big caveat on their cost.
Treating the approximately 150 million people in the world living with chronic hepatitis C infection is the new front-line in the battle over access to medicines.
Modern drugs are transforming the ability to fight hepatitis C because pills such as Gilead’s Sovaldi are far more effective and better-tolerated than older injection regimens, with cure rates well above 90 per cent in many cases. “These drugs are fantastic,” Markus Peck-Radosavljevic, a professor of medicine in Vienna said. “But the prices are too high.”
Pharmaceutical companies say they need to charge high prices on new successful drugs to cover the huge cost of development.
In a few months from now, children in India with paediatric TB will stand a better chance of being diagnosed early and treated without much delay.
This will become possible with the Indian Academy of Paediatrics (IAP) partnering with the Child TB Division of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare and RNTCP to train doctors. IAP will target :
1. paediatricians from the private sector and
2. medical officers at public health centres (PHCs) and
3. family practitioners.
Why important?
- WHO : 10-20 per cent of all TB cases occur in children in high-burden countries like India.
- only seven per cent (84,000 cases) of childhood TB cases were diagnosed in 2011, notes a March 2013 paper in the Indian Pediatrics journal.
Issues related to childhood TB are:
- near-total neglect of childhood TB
- difficulty in diagnosing TB in children aged under five years : Children under five years of age have difficulty in producing sputum, the most basic sample required for bacteriological confirmation of the disease.
- doctors are not fully trained to correctly suspect and diagnose paediatric TB on time, and manage the disease.
- Doctors are also largely unaware of the different techniques available to extract sputum samples
The Academy plans to
1. train paediatricians from the private sector to diagnose and manage paediatric TB cases, while
2. medical officers at PHCs and family practitioners will be trained on when to suspect childhood TB cases and refer the suspected cases to district hospitals or RNTCP programme officers for further investigation. Since, medical officers are the first point of contact for those approaching the PHCs, training them would greatly help in diagnosing more children with TB disease.
The WHO has recommended and RNTCP has also approved contact tracing of children below five years in households where an adult has been recently diagnosed with active pulmonary TB disease. But in reality, awareness about contact screening of such children and its implementation is “sub-optimal” in India.
American professor of oceanography and geology at the University of Colorado, James Syvitski : "Humans are sinking deltas four times faster than the sea level is rising"
- A proliferation of large dams that starve deltas of sediment,
- groundwater mining that causes land compaction, and
- artificial levees that affect river courses,
have been responsible for the subsiding of major Indian deltas including Ganga-Brahmaputra, Krishna-Godavari, Brahmani and Mahanadi.
Anthropocene: a term suggesting that human impact on the environment has been so large post industrial revolution that this era can be counted as an entirely new geological epoch.
Astronomers from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have combined a new analytical technique with a massive data-set to deduce how fast the universe was expanding in its earlier years.
Led by teams from the Berkeley Lab and the Centre de Saclay (France), they used the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS), a spectrograph used to observe how light of different frequencies is being absorbed and emitted by various objects in the universe.
Putting them together, the Berkeley Lab astronomers' results correspond to a 10.5-billion year old universe expanding at 68 km/s for every million light-years away from the observer — which is lower than expected. Today, the rate is 67.15 km/s for every million parsec away from the observer (one parsec is 3.26 light-years), a value established in 2013 using the Planck space telescope.
In some theories of cosmology, the driver of the universe's accelerating expansion is a mysterious entity called dark energy. It accords the vacuum of space with some energy that resists the universe's implosion due to the gravitational pull of billions of galaxies. So, finding a young universe that expanded slowly puts constraints on the origins of dark energy.
165-year-old math problem on verge of solution
There is news for math enthusiasts: the twin prime conjecture, a 165-year-old problem, is on the verge of being solved. Starting from Chinese mathematician Yitang Zhang’s breakthrough in April 2013, there has been steady progress on the problem.
The twin prime conjecture is that there are infinitely many pairs of prime numbers that are separated by two units — (3, 5), (5, 7), (11, 13), (17, 19) etc.
Conjecture : the formation or expression of an opinion or theory without sufficient evidence for proof.
Varicose veins are a widely prevalent condition where veins, typically in the leg, swell and become twisted.
Women can get varicose veins during pregnancy and it is often seen in those who need to stand for long periods of time, such as policemen and shop assistants.
Variants of a gene (FoxC2 gene) that leads to cells in blood vessels producing too much of a protein heighten the risk of developing varicose veins, according to a study carried out by a group of Indian researchers.
India and China will hold the sixth round of their strategic dialogue in Beijing next week, discussing bilateral ties as well as expanding cooperation on common regional challenges such as the situation in Afghanistan.
With the strategic talks taking place amid the on-going Lok Sabha elections, expectations here are that the discussions will likely be routine and focus more on regional and international issues. Beijing, analysts said, is likely to adopt a cautious, wait-and-watch approach before pushing any new major diplomatic initiatives with India until the new government takes charge in New Delhi next month following the elections.
World Bank projects 5.7 % growth for India
The World Bank on Wednesday projected an economic growth rate of 5.7 per cent in fiscal year 2014 for India on the back of a more competitive exchange rate and many large investments going forward.
The World Bank report said in India the problem was the banking sector’s growing exposure to company debt.
The fear was that this could ultimately affect the government’s finances through its ownership of state banks and the need to prop up distressed but systemically important banks, it added.
Building a culture of tolerance
Good article on secularism in India. Useful for mains purpose and essay:
The nationalist struggle was not only a struggle to overthrow the British Raj, but was a moment of manoeuvre to rework a society that had a dismal record and understanding of human dignity and worked on the tyrannical hierarchy of caste that negated self-evident individual rights.
Post Independence also secularism not only meant freedom of religion or state's neutrality towards religion but it also meant to undertake social reforms.
What has complicated the project of secularism in India are two issues. First, the state may be neutral towards religion, but this does not mean that state actors and individuals in society are neutral towards religion. Second, there is no agreement in India that religion should be relegated to the private sphere. In fact, the opposite is true.Indians, of all religions, pray in large numbers in varying frequencies every week and they do so collectively and in public. This has meant that political appeals are often made through religious spaces and spokespersons.
In India, the state cannot afford to be indifferent to religion because societal and individual decisions are still dictated by religious conditioning and imperatives.
more and more members of the bureaucracy are tacitly Hindutva supporters and some court judgments over the last two decades have emphasised religious morality or interpreted Hinduism in particular ways. Increasingly, the urban middle class in tier-one and tier-two cities, business persons and a growing number of women also support Hindutva, even less tacitly.
Theoretically, there is nothing obviously wrong about supporting any political ideology. However, Hindutva is not merely the statement of a political ideology. It is also a process wherein there is an attempt to make Hinduism and Indian nationhood almost coterminous.
Indian society is not yet fully secular. Perhaps the concept better suited to understanding Indian society and its relationship with religion is more like a “scale of tolerance” — in some places, society is more tolerant of other religious and caste groups, in some places less so, but nowhere in India is society perfectly secular, i.e., nowhere in India do people not care about religion or maintain their distance from it.
The problem is that tolerance is an independent, individual choice and cannot be forced onto anyone. It is also a deeply patronising value. Its exercise rests on perceptions an individual possesses about another community and its implementation then becomes a matter of individual dispensation and benevolence.
In recent years, nothing has testified to the breakdown of religious tolerance in society than the various instances of communal and caste clashes. Riots are manufactured in contemporary India and they, more than anything else, tell us that essentially we live in a society where tolerance has a weak societal foundation, evidenced in the easy way mobs are mobilised by political entrepreneurs to engage in killing.
Campaign speeches by our politicians that often invoke hate speech against particular groups do not help the matter.
Let me illustrate this with a few examples.
First, many people in India do not want to rent homes to Muslims, single women and men and people from the northeast.
Second, while broadly practising tolerance in public, many parents brief their children that they cannot marry Muslims, a dark-skinned person or a lower caste person. Matrimonial advertisements still exemplify a demand for same-caste marriages although this has decreased over time as a recent study by Ahuja and Ostermann shows. But the people most likely to marry outside their caste are lower castes, Scheduled Castes and Other Backward Classes (OBC). And while we’re on this subject, khaps in north India have sanctioned honour killings for what they consider bad marriage decisions between people of the same gotra.
Third, conversations and studies of recruiters in private corporations suggest that they reject resumes based on last names, prefer people of the same caste and sometimes profile people based on region. For instance, a call centre recruiter said that she didn’t take people from Bihar because they were bad in English. She also left out the resumes of Muslims. During a study I undertook in Chandni Chowk in New Delhi in 2005, Muslims reported that they were often seen as a credit risk and that banks were unwilling to lend them money. Some also reported that the police had detained them for no reason.
Finally, in recent conversations with educators, many who run private schools are unwilling to implement the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) because it would mean an influx of underprivileged OBC students whose behaviour and language, they suggest, will act as a bad influence on their students. The word used to describe them was ganwaar, or rustic and ill-behaved.
Dhawan named Wisden Cricketer of the year
India’s swashbuckling opening batsman Shikhar Dhawan has been named one of the five Cricketers of the Year, an honour dating back to 1889, by Wisden for his performance in 2013.
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