03-05-2016 (Important News Clippings)

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Floods, Now Fire

Mobilise all resources to fight raging forest fires in Uttarakhand

Raging forest fires that have devoured more than 2,500 hectares of land in Uttarakhand have shown up huge gaps in the hill states capacity to prevent calamities. The Uttarakhand fire may have had natural causes but the environmental catastrophe has been exacerbated by the states slow response. The loss of precious wildlife, thousands of trees, and three human lives is a direct consequence. Worryingly, jungle fires are now spreading to Himachal Pradesh and Jammu & Kashmir.

Though forest fires have only made the headlines now, extremely dry weather has meant that large jungle swathes have intermittently been on fire since February, annihilating flora and fauna in 13 districts and threatening to consume Corbett and Rajaji National Parks. It is only now that seven IAF choppers and three army battalions have been pressed into service, along with NDRF. Six thousand personnel have been mobilised. Environment minister Prakash Javadekar says that the first aim is to reduce some 1,200 fires to just 60.

First, with no customary and intermittent rains in April this year, the Uttarakhand administration ought to have cleared dry leaves and highly combustible pine needles in advance. Second, several Uttarakhand environmentalists and activists are blaming timber and land mafia for what they allege are man-made fires. If these allegations are indeed true, exemplary punishments must be meted out to guilty officials. Mismanagement of relief and rehabilitation work by the Uttarakhand government after the 2013 floods, which killed over 5,000 people, is still fresh in the minds of the people. Haphazard urbanisation with utter disregard for environmental norms and a land mafia-local administration nexus has led to India facing an unprecedented challenge of depleting forest cover, exacerbated by climate change. According to the latest estimates, there is a 25% shortage of forest personnel in the country.

The government must fix these lacunae at the earliest. It is saying it will study the cause for such huge fires before preparing an action plan. This is insufficient and highlights a lackadaisical approach to an acute problem which has already reached emergency proportions. The top priority now must be to douse the fires before they spread further, for which all resources must be mobilised. Given that Presidents rule was recently declared in Uttarakhand it is squarely the Centres baby, all the more so because the Centre can best coordinate with neighbouring states where the fires are raging too.

Latest position IRNSS morphs into Navic, bringing India its very own, completely secure GPS systems.

With the deployment of the seventh and last unit of the Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System (IRNSS), India has joined the small group of nations with their own satellite navigation systems. The US GPS was the trailblazer with a global footprint, followed by the Russian GLONASS and French DORIS. The European Unions Galileo and Chinas BeiDou satellite arrays will be globally deployed by the end of the decade. Currently, BeiDou is a more restricted system, like Navic which is the human-utterable name of IRNSS. With a resolution of 10 metres, the new Indian systems footprint extends to 1,500 km beyond Indian borders, and is expected to be operational by July. However, the array of seven satellites is bound to expand over time, opening up wider possibilities for commercial applications.

For the moment, the chief beneficiary of Navic is the military, which now has access to an encrypted and completely secure service. The forces will no longer have to depend on the US service, a weakness that was exposed during the Kargil conflict of 1999, when accurate GPS data on the region was not forthcoming in real time. The geopolitical imperative to develop an indigenous system was immediately obvious and today, it is almost ready to roll. The forces use GPS for the guidance of smart artillery shells and bombs, besides ballistic and cruise missiles. Of course, the most routine uses of GPS remain traditional finding targets, marshalling troops, executing manoeuvres and conducting search and rescue missions.

Apart from an encrypted service for the military, Navic will offer public access to an unsecured service for civilian applications like logistics, transportation, vehicle automation, robotics, disaster management, prospecting, the tracking of vehicles, people, pets and the Internet of Things. This could trigger a boom in GPS applications tuned to Navic. Manufacturing capacity would be a decisive factor, since a critical mass of GPS receivers would be required. In turn, this could provide an occasion for hardware manufacturers to turn protectionist and urge government to force manufacturers of GPS products to patronise the Indian service. However, public access GPS has traditionally been an open system and should remain so. In applications that do not have security implications, users should have the choice of switching to whichever satellite system they find convenient. Such issues with commercial implications will develop over time. For the moment, Navic brings peace of mind to the military.

Lets Cough Out Facts Road restrictions aimed to cut pollution in Delhi have again failed to show any noticeable impact of personal cars on pollution. The only clear

winners in the unscientific and unpopular scheme are the often-unscrupulous people who drive autorickshaws or black-yellow cabs.

For them, restrictions on personal cars was a blessing as their supply is rising faster than demand, while customers are lured to the relatively efficient, convenient and honest services from Uber and Ola. It is pertinent to note that while many volunteers preached green wisdom to motorists, these holier-than-thou advocates of car restrictions were never seen preventing devious autorickshaw drivers from overcharging.

Citizens feel cheated, and not just from autorickshaws. Data from the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology shows that the hardship from road rationing has not cleaned up the air. Air quality deteriorated sharply as soon as the scheme began and improved noticeably as soon as it ended.

Further, the density of small particles, PM2.5, was consistently above the red line throughout the odd-even phase, but was in the safe limit in the preceding two weeks.

The safe limit for PM2.5 density is 60 mg per cubic metre. During road restrictions, the 24-hour average never fell to that level, but was clearly below that twice in the two weeks before the scheme. It shot up to three-digit levels 13 times in April. Eleven of these days were when half of Delhis private vehicles were off the road. The months highest PM2.5 density was also recorded while restrictions were enforced.

This is not to suggest that private cars emit oxygen. It merely reinforces what is already obvious to scientists: dust on the roads, two-wheelers and, above all, trucks are much bigger pollutants. Also, the speed and dire