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Mubarak goes, finally Choosing a fighter
aircraft |
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Trains to
travellers’ rescue
In conflict with
the State
Governor’s
Khidmatgar
Farming on
shrinking land
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Choosing a fighter aircraft
Before yearend, the government is expected to sign one of the country’s most expensive defence deal estimated at $11 billion for purchasing 126 medium multi-role combat aircraft (equivalent to seven squadrons) for the Indian Air Force (IAF). The induction of these aircraft, proposed several years ago, is aimed at replacing some of the IAF’s antiquated fighter fleet. It should also assist in making up for a steady depletion in the number of the IAF’s fighter squadrons. Considering the huge monies involved and the significant post-Cold War improvement in India’s relations with the West, notably with the US, New Delhi is being offered top of the line fighter aircraft from five companies — Boeing and Lockheed Martin from the United States, Saab from Sweden, Dassault from France, the European consortium EADS and the Russian MiG-RAC. As India gets underway with negotiations, the months ahead are likely to witness considerable lobbying by these companies. Offers of bribe and kickback are not uncommon, especially when big sums of money are involved. The government, therefore, needs to tread cautiously in the next few months during negotiations. India is already lagging behind in modernisation of its considerably antiquated armed forces, and it can ill afford a controversy that could lead to cancellation of such a deal and hence delay. For almost a decade India was haunted by the Bofors episode in the late 1980s. Unnerved by the spate of inquiries and adverse media reports following allegations of kickbacks, successive governments at the Centre suffered from a near paralysis in making defence purchases for almost a decade. This, in addition to other reasons, resulted in a major setback to India’s defence modernisation process. In recent years, India has either cancelled or aborted three major deals - artillery guns from South Africa, light howitzers from Singapore and helicopters from Europe - following allegations of unethical practices. In addition, the Scorpene submarine deal is already under investigation following similar allegations. The government must tread cautiously and as transparently as possible while equally being mindful of the need to be strategic while finalising a deal of such magnitude and importance. |
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Trains to travellers’ rescue
If
more and more people in Punjab now opt for a train instead of a private or state roadways bus to reach their destination, the reason is simple and well known: it is cheaper. For the past seven consecutive years, the rail fares have not been raised, thanks to populist railway ministers like Lalu Prasad Yadav and Mamata Banerjee. This is despite a steep hike in the operational costs, including the prices of diesel and electricity. That this had an adverse effect on the railway finances and the quality of civic amenities for the travelling public is another story. But as a result, the train has emerged as the favourite mode of travel for the common people, particularly in states where the cost of road transportation has steadily gone up in keeping with the oil price hikes. In fact, some of those used to travel by air have also shifted to trains to cut costs. While this has aggravated the problem of congestion in trains and increased pressure on the railway amenities, the public shift to trains has its advantages — the most prominent being less traffic, congestion and pollution on roads. The bus journey in Punjab is becoming increasingly expensive. Since politicians own and run private bus services, they are quick to hike bus fares. The recent hike was carried out even when the diesel price had not been raised. While private bus owners make profits, public transport is in the red and the state Transport Minister recently blamed the politicians in transport business for its sickness. Private buses run on key routes and often evade taxes. Punjab Roadways and PRTC have been sidelined. Trains, even if crowded, do serve the public need but up to a point. They largely operate on limited, inter-city routes. There is dire need for a reliable, efficient, comfortable and affordable public transport so that people are discouraged to use personal vehicles. This will reduce accidents and traffic snarls on roads. |
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Hold a true friend with both your hands. — Nigerian proverb
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In conflict with the State AN examination of the history of social and political dissent brings out that there have been loyal, upright and law-abiding citizens like Binayak Sen with the belief that they have been driven by their conscience to act in support of the deprived. Mahatma Gandhi, too, had believed in “preaching disaffection towards the existing system of the government” and mere disaffection, he thought, was not a crime if it did not incite violence. As expressed by Noam Chomsky, who has led the international protest against Binayak Sen’s sentence, “The tendency to marginalise dissidents is always there and will always be there as long as grave inequalities in actual power and domination exist. When the actual power to make decisions is narrowly concentrated, then that power will be exercised in the doctrinal institutions as well.” On the one end is the notion of knowledge as power; on the other is the notion of knowledge and belief as a liberating experience, a means of presenting numerous views without the significance of the established law ever restraining individual freedom. This could be the broad definition of dissidence. The polemics between the individual and society has always generated conflict for the enhancement of freedom. State intrusion always results in either resistance by the individual or submissive conformism that marks any neo-right wing system. Society’s methodical and systemic ideals stand challenged wherever individual freedom is put under any restraint. Disagreement with the meddling of the State embodies maverick tendencies that are often non-conformist and crucial to the extent of never stooping down to knowledge and outdated law that emanates from the centre. “You do not become a ‘dissident’ just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society.” These words of playwright Vaclav Havel, former President of Czechoslovakia and a liberal intellectual, are pertinent to the case of Binayak Sen, who was recently sentenced to life imprisonment for supposedly acting as a courier for Maoist leaders, evidence for which is flimsy and mere hearsay. Much condemnation and outrage has rightly been expressed towards the tyrannical court decision in Chhattisgarh for giving the inconsiderate sentence to Sen, drawing attention to the possibility of the verdict being an outcome of the paranoia of the state against the Maoist rebellion ostensibly with the purpose of outlawing non-conformists, who believe in justice and freedom and who are not afraid to raise their voice against the displacement of thousands by corporate mega-projects usurping their land and their natural resources. It is indeed a sad day in the history of jurisprudence that those who wage a struggle to uphold the rights of the neglected are sent to the gallows instead of being complimented. Distinction between hardcore Maoists and progressive intellectuals like Sen cannot be ignored when adjudicating over cases involving sedition. As a mark of a nation-wide protest, the People’s Union for Civil Liberties sent out a call to the people of India to court arrest on January 30 in order to draw attention of the state to the brutal incarceration of Sen on the very day Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated, thereby demanding the repeal of Section 124A, IPC, which “is designed to suppress the liberty of the citizen” and under which Gandhi was also arrested. In this sense, it is the outdated colonial law setting out to define sedition with the underlying design of subverting the freedom of action. The intention is not so much to harass a man who has stood for human rights but to inculcate a deep-seated fear of punishment for believing in a particular ideology and by denying people the right to explore their own histories and cultures. It is, in effect, about the eradication of freedom as is clear from the exercise of such an undemocratic law employed during the colonial “raj” when it was blatantly used against Gandhi and Tilak. The issue of justice is all the more compounded when seen in the light of an action that does not, in any way, incite violence and thus does not amount to sedition. Binayak Sen is a genuine civil liberty activist, known for his sincere social work for decades and his unconditional support for the downtrodden. His ideological leanings along with his professional credentials are tangibly of relevance to any decision that the law takes on his actions. And as evident, his actions have never advocated violence. As if to add insult to injury, the law of the land barely makes a pretence to hide its motives of anti-liberal subversion of an intellectual expression of an ideology, thereby laying bare some of the more stark and sinister aspects of its potential application in a state where the Maoists along with the tribals have taken a violent anti-state stand. The nation-wide debate and backlash on the issue of sedition in the case of Sen calls for the reinvention of the framework of the existing institutions which would be very valuable for people as well as be of priceless service to democracy. The intellectual in India, therefore, has to chastise the system to show his anger against the laws of sedition so as to look into the future as a visionary of a civil society free from abuse and control. Each spirited and angry individual must strive for this hope to be “moral agents, not servants of power”. The only path to the affirmation of the self is to perform, as Edward Said argued, to manifest one’s will, to generate new sets of laws by taking up anti-authoritarian gestures that would face up to not only the middle-of-the-road trust in transcendent values and non-aligned truths, but also to all institutions which thwart unswerving critical work. These, I think, have been Binayak Sen’s motives based on an ideology that he believes in even though they might conflict with state policy. As long as his work projects an intellectual idea without the belligerence of a terrorist, it cannot be silenced or punished. People like him always partake in justifiable political protests against their government out of conviction and allegiance to the cause that the world can be made a better and stronger place through dissent. In fact, we are all dissidents at one time or another. Protest against any kind of exploitation or military dominance has to be allowed in society, as we live in a world that is constantly changing, and it is by protest that the laws are changed for a better future. Public protest or supporting a cause is indeed a right and if intellectuals like Chomsky, Amartya Sen and Arundhati Roy have protested against the sentence of Binayak Sen, it only shows that a bad law cannot be allowed to exist. People have the right to have it abolished or changed. Howard Zinn allows “one to be suspicious of centralised authority, to insist on individual freedom, to be sceptical of all government and to insist on grassroots democracy.” In the case of Binayak Sen, the whole question of judicial reform and opposition to the indifference of the State towards the poor is related to desiring freedom. Committed intellectuals like him are genuinely interested in change. Independent thought and expression cannot be allowed to be smothered by any assault on one’s constitutional
freedom.
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Governor’s Khidmatgar Seventy
years ago in the month of April, there was a flurry of activity in the then capital of the Punjab at Lahore. There was guesswork, prognostications and assessments regarding the successor to Sir John Colville, the Governor of Punjab. Ultimately, the name of Sir Bertrand James Glancy, a 1906 batch ICS Officer, was announced. He had served as Deputy Commissioner of Ambala and Lahore in his long and illustrious career. One of the close friends of the Governor was Dr Devki Nandan Aggarwal, head of the radiology department in King Edwards Medical College, Lahore. The Governor took oath on 18th April 1941 and the next day, there was a lunch hosted by Dr Aggarwal at his Model Town residence. Several prominent doctors, judges, bureaucrats and other important dignitaries attended it. The newly appointed Governor enquired about the deficiencies in the Governor’s House and was informed that there was a grave shortage of Khidmatgars (attendants) in his office. Sir Bertrand instructed his Military Secretary, Major H. Barlow, to recruit 20 more Khidmatgars. Nagrath was one of them. He belonged to Gujranwala district. He was very proficient in music. Time passed by. In October came the Dasehra festival and Sir Glancy was the chief guest at one such function and to his utter amazement, he saw Nagrath playing the harmonium most impressively. People were spell bound. Next day, the Governor called Khidmatgar Nagrath and interviewed him about his musical skills. He decided to recommend his name to Governor, Bombay Presidency, Sir Roger Lumely, one of his close friends and batchmates. The Bombay Governor on his part sent Nagrath to the then topmost music director Khwaja Khurshid Anwar. Khwaja Sahib agreed to take Nagrath as his assistant. He had other youngsters like Prem Dhawan, Ghulam Mohammad and Rashid Atray as his juniors. After 1949 Khwaja Khurshid Anwar went to Pakistan. All his juniors started working as independent music directors though Rashid Atray went with him to Pakistan. Nagrath, whose full name was Roshan Lal Nagrath, came to be known as music director Roshan and rose to be one of the foremost composers in the film industry. His son Rakesh Roshan became an actor, whereas the other Rajesh Roshan became a music director. Rakesh Roshan’s son, Hrithik Roshan, is also a famous actor these days. Sometimes I wonder what would have been the status and position of this family had the then Governor of Punjab, a Britisher, not shown his magnanimity in abundance. Can one expect such gestures now, from our own
Indians?
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Farming on shrinking land
Hydroponics is a water-based, soil-less way of cultivation. People can grow food in places where traditional agriculture simply isn't possible such as arid, rocky, snow-bound and dense urban areas
Food
is made available to a city by land, sea and air from across a huge hinterland which spans the globe. Over 60 per cent of the human population now lives vertically in cities. The time has arrived for us to transform our traditional techniques of growing food. Vertical farming (VF) is now envisioned as a solution to maladies afflicting agriculture by scientists at Columbia University. The vertical farm project was conceived as a response to increasing pressures of diminishing land resources and fast-changing climatic conditions to reliably produce food at reasonable financial and environmental costs to fulfil global food demand for a conservatively-estimated world population of 9-10 billion by 2050. The idea is simple enough. Imagine a 30-storey building with glass walls, topped off with a huge solar panel. On each floor there would be giant planting beds, indoor fields in effect. There would be a sophisticated irrigation system. And so, crops of all kinds and small livestock could all be grown in a controlled environment in the most urban of settings without soil. The idea of vertical farming was first proposed 11 years ago by Dickson Despommier, Professor of Public Health at British Columbia University.
Big vertical farms do not yet exist, but could be a reality soon. These "vertical farms" would produce crops, poultry and fish year-round in a controlled environment free of pollutants, parasites and dangerous microbes. Despommier suggests that a 30-storey building with a basal area of 5 acres (2.02 ha) has the potential of producing crop yield equivalent to 2,400 acres (971.2 ha) of traditional horizontal farming. Despommier is now conceptualising several projects with administrators around the world. He does not quite divulge details but says that administrators from Chicago and New York are interested, and that he is working with people in other countries as well. Companies are also trying their own variations in smaller scales.
The vertical farm is more than just a produce factory. It also offers an alternative to rebuild a city's infrastructure to mimic natural-resource cycles in the tower's basement, where sewage provides the farm's most crucial resources: energy and water. The surrounding city's sewage system would be redirected to the farm where half of it would enter a "SlurryCarb" machine developed by EnerTech, a green-energy start-up in Atlanta. The device heats and pressurises the sludge, breaking it down into its base components-carbon and water. The machine extracts the water and the solid, coal-like slurry burns to power steam turbines that generate electricity. The rest of the sewage is treated with bacteria-killing chemicals and turned into topsoil through a heating and drying process developed by N-Viro, an Ohio-based biosolids-recycling company. Water extracted from both processes is filtered through natural "bioremediators" such as zebra mussels, cattails and sawgrass that clean it until it's suitable for agriculture or further refine it for drinking. Any farming waste is composted to make fertiliser and methane gas, which can utilised for energy production. The basis of vertical farming is hydroponic (water based and soil-less) culture in nutrient solutions. For hydroponic cultivation, the nutrients consist of five macro elements (required in large quantity) and six micro elements (needed in small quantity). For the fixing of roots, a variety of inert supporting media like sand, gravel, coco coir, vermiculite, perlite, rookwool, and dihydro are used. Two types of hydroponic systems employed are: passive or open system where nutrients are not recycled and do not use any power or pumps. The drawbacks of such a system are that it requires less care but are used for small plants with little produce and fresh items like salads and other greens. The active or closed systems involve power driven with pumps for the circulation of nutrients solutions through roots. These are more efficient but require more care and are used for large-scale cultivation. The active systems may (ebb and flow, drip irrigation) or may not contain the root supporting media. Though hydroponics is the technology-based farming method for future, it has been utilised for hundreds of years by a variety of people. As noted in "Hydroponic Food Production" (fifth edition, Woodbridge Press, 1997, page 23) by Howard M. Resh: The hanging gardens of Babylon, the floating gardens of the Aztecs of Mexico and those of the Chinese are examples of hydroponic culture. Egyptian hieroglyphic records dating back several hundred years B.C. describe the growing of plants in water. Vegetables are being cultivated successfully in space, South Pole and atomic submarines through vertical farming using hydroponic systems. Anna Heiney of NASA's John F. Kennedy Space Center says "NASA has extensive hydroponics research plans in place, which will benefit current space exploration as well as future, long-term colonisation of the Mars or the moon. As we haven't yet found soil that can support life in space, and the logistics of transporting soil via the space shuttles seems impractical, hydroponics could be the key to food for astronauts thousands of miles from earth". They could grow crops that would not only supplement a healthy diet but also remove toxic carbon dioxide from the air inside their spacecraft and create life-sustaining oxygen. "If you continually re-supply and deliver commodities like food that will become much more costly than producing your own food," says Ray Wheeler, Plant Physiologist at Kennedy Space Center's Space Life Sciences Lab. In fact, hydroponics was chosen as the food production technology at the South Pole but the 1978 Antarctic Conservation Act prohibits the importation of soils to the continent. However, with so much fresh water available in the form of ice, the soil-less culture of hydroponics could be a perfect fit. The McMurdo food growth chamber provides the 200-plus station personnel with fresh salads and veggies like cantaloupes, pepper, broccoli, tomatoes, cucumber, besides a bright, green environment that is missed during the dark months when working through the Antarctic winter. First, hydroponics offer people the ability to grow food in places where traditional agriculture simply isn't possible. In areas with arid climates like Arizona and Israel, hydroponics has been in use for decades. This technique allows people to enjoy locally grown produce and enhance their food production. Similarly, hydroponics is useful in dense urban areas. In Tokyo, hydroponics is used in lieu of traditional soil-based agriculture. Rice is harvested in underground vaults without the use of soil. Because the environment is perfectly controlled, four cycles of harvest can be performed annually instead of the traditional single harvest. Hydroponics is also useful in remote locales such as Bermuda. With so little space available for planting, Bermudians have turned to hydroponic systems which take around 20 per cent of the land usually required for crop growth. This allows the citizens of the island to enjoy year-round local produce without the expense and delay of importation. Finally, areas that don't receive consistent sunlight or warm weather can benefit from hydroponics. Places like Alaska and Russia where growing seasons are shorter use hydroponic greenhouses with controlled conditions. Interestingly, after a strawberry farm in Florida was wiped out by hurricane Andrew, the owners built a hydroponic farm. By growing strawberries indoors and stacking layers on top of each other, they now produce on one acre of land what used to require 30 acres. In the US, hydroponic tomatoes yield 150 tonnes per acre annually, which is 18 times of what is produced through conventional soil methods. A 10-acre site can yield 3 million pounds annually. In Canada, the average per capita consumption of tomatoes is 20 lbs. Thus, with a population of 20 million, the total annual consumption of tomatoes is 400 million pounds (200, 000 tonnes). Enough tomatoes for the entire population of Canada for a whole year could be grown hydroponically on just 1,300 acres of land! The Institute of Simplified Hydroponics (ISH), USA, along with the Institute of Simplified Hydroponics, India, launched the "Pet Bharo - Hydroponics for sustainability" project in Bangalore and the "Women of Hope Project" in Hyderabad in January, 2009. These projects were launched to empower the people of India by making available low-cost, easy-to-learn hydroponics or soil-less production. The major goal of the ISH is to remove hunger and malnutrition and generate some income for the poor and less privileged families. This writer has some experience in growing "hydroponic tomato" and does not find growing vegetables in soil-less culture using nutrient solutions very expensive. Indeed, this type of simple farming would be a boon to entrepreneurs in the remote and snow-bound areas of the North-East, Jammu and Kashmir and Himachal Pradesh which remain cut off from the rest of the country during winter months. People in these areas, while confined to their four walls due to adverse climatic conditions, can produce fresh vegetables and salads. The defence forces, too, can make use of this technology for their personnel in inaccessible areas during the inclement weather. The writer is a Professor of Plant Physiology at Himachal Pradesh Agricultural University, Palampur
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