‘We can reverse poverty, but not global warming’

Q& A

Paris-based political scientist Susan George, one of Europe’s best-known public intellectuals, spoke to Pamela Philipose during her recent visit to Delhi:

Would you change the argument you made in your first book of the 1970s, ‘How The Other Half Dies’?
No. Unfortunately. Of course, there have been changes in the scope of hunger and where it’s most prevalent. Another big change is the fact that the food riots of last spring were global in scope. That’s a world first: earlier they were either local or national. It’s obvious now that neo-liberal answers to the crisis are discredited. Meanwhile, millions of small farmers have been ruined. They have been dispossessed of any possibility of either growing their food or buying it because they don’t have jobs. Governments, if they continue like this, are playing with fire because they are not only contributing to destroying the base of food security, they are creating conditions for future social upheaval. So, it seems to me that this is a time when one can advocate different policies and hope governments listen.

Women seem to be among the worst affected in such times.
In most societies, women are the first victims of hunger. I was shocked to read that nine out of 10 pregnant women in India are getting less than 80 per cent of the necessary caloric and protein supply. Women are very often food producers but are not in control of its marketing and, therefore, the resultant income. This is an ongoing problem. It has nothing to do with the actual amount of food available. Cultural and anthropological factors determine how food is distributed — inside families, communities, countries.

What do you see as the big crisis facing the world?
There are so many that you can talk about them in many plurals. The social crisis of poverty is getting worse: the rich are getting richer, the poor, poorer. There’s no hope of ever reaching the Millennium Development Goals. The social crisis is aggravated by the food crisis. There’s a water crisis, which means increasing numbers won’t have access to sanitation and drinking water, which in turn means a health crisis. Then, of course, recently, we had the financial crisis, which affects everybody even if they don’t have a rupee in the stock market because it impacts the real economy.

But the most serious crisis of all is the ecological crisis. We can reverse poverty today, but not global warming. Once it’s off the charts, it’s off the charts. It’s going to make the lives of poor people unbearable in large swathes of the world. This process is happening faster than scientists had predicted. We haven’t even begun to measure the impacts of this crisis. So that’s the one that keeps me awake.

Women’s Feature Service

Now, learn the ABCs of regional languages for free

Pronoti Datta | TNN

Mumbai: It’s a common lament among Indian language teachers in the city. As English has become the unequivocal language of progress, regional languages are being consigned to the attic of anachronisms along with letter writing and safari suits. It’s a sorry state of affairs if finding an individual below the age of 40 who can read Bankim Chandra in Bengali is about as hard as locating an honest man in the BMC. However, staving off imminent endangerment are a bunch of valiant language schools that entice students with the offer of free classes.

Suhasini Kirtikar has been teaching Marathi at Mumbai Marathi Sahitya Sangh (MMSS) for the past 34 years. Apart from the MMSS headquarter at Girgaum, classes are held at branches of the Bombay Tamil Sangham in Chembur and Sion, which also has free classes in Tamil. “We teach there just for our pleasure,’’ Kirtikar says.

It was a keenness for languages that led 23-year-old singer Sagar Sawarkar to Pratima Goswami’s Bengali class in Goregaon. It was a good experience, he says.

Goswami rues the fact that there are few youngsters in the despairingly small class she conducts. A teacher for the past 29 years, she runs one of the three centres of Kolkata’s Banga Bhasha Prachar Samiti (BBPS)—the other centres are in Thane and Powai—where she instructs a class of about eight students. “Bengalis in Mumbai are not interested in learning the language,’’ she says angrily.

The Bengali teacher would find a sympathiser in Satram Makhija, a retired ayurvedic doctor who runs a month-long Sindhi class in Thane every May. Makhija began his summer class in 1991 in an attempt to teach his language to as many youngsters as he could. He says he used to have nearly 80 students a few years ago. These days, attendance is down by half.

On the other hand, Zuber Azmi will be starting free Urdu classes to remind Mumbaikars that the Hindi they speak is full of the lofty north Indian tongue. “Urdu is the common minimum language,’’ he points out. Azmi’s dream is to restore to the language the glory of the early twentieth century when the tea shops of Nagpada and Mohammed Ali Road resounded with Urdu verse by poets and writers such as Kaifi Azmi and Sadat Hasan Manto.

For details of classes, call Banga Bhasha Prachar Samiti (Bengali) 2877-4261, Bombay Tamil Sangham (Tamil) 2409-4021, Mumbai Marathi Sahitya Sangh (Marathi) 2385-6303, Satram Makhija (Sindhi) 99204-69040, Zuber Azmi (Urdu) 93226-95208

Ride like the wind with a car that runs on just thin air

London: Soon, your carbon footprint may vanish into thin air, literally. An American company has designed a “green car” that runs on wind energy and can attain a top speed of 249kmph.

Designed in California, the environment friendly Formula AE car will initially use a solar-powered battery to move, but later depend upon the airflow around it to power a turbine. The high performance car will take less than four seconds to accelerate from 0 to 96kmph. The car is expected to cost around £100,000 when it hits the market. The two-seater’s bodywork boasts paper-thin solar panelling that could fully charge the battery in just 1.5 hours. However, this time will be reduced to just six minutes with a new prototype battery. A full battery would enable the drivers to cover more than 322km or to race around a track for at least an hour.

An advanced alternating current induction motor with a power output of 212 kilowatts will propel the Formula AE. The chassis will be constructed from lightweight aluminium and super strong steel in a Formula 1-style monocoque shell. Rory Handel and Maxx Bricklinas from Beverly Hills, California designed the sleek motor of the car, and they expect the prototype to be ready in August.

“The Formula AE car embraces a rarely thought of alternative source of energy,” the Telegraph quoted a RORMaxx spokesman as saying. He said: “The target market would be the sports car, track day, eco-concerned auto-enthusiast. In addition, those enthusiasts who support and would want to promote the future development of revolutionary green technologies.”

He added that funding for the project was from a major “fuel and commodities corporation” which wishes to remain anonymous. And he said that the engineering expertise comes from two professional mechanical engineers and Handel, who used to work for a racing team as an engineer. ANI

Our children may go to school, but do they really learn?

It Does Not Add Up

Rukmini Banerji

One morning in a village in Sultanpur district, Uttar Pradesh, we were making a village report card for education. Every household was asked if its children were enrolled in school. Every child was asked to read a short paragraph and do a simple subtraction problem. As was customary, we went to the Pradhan to tell him what we were doing. The Pradhan took a cursory look at us and said, “Achcha... survey hai? Kariye, kariye” (Oh... It’s a survey? OK, go on). Accustomed to numerous surveys, he did not seem interested in what the survey was about.

We moved systematically household by household, hamlet by hamlet talking to parents, interacting with children. Questions like “Do your children go to school?” got quick and sometimes disinterested answers. But us asking the children to read grabbed everyone’s attention. Children would flock around, wanting to try. Parents would stop working and come to observe. Children playing in the fields put on shirts before coming to read. Mothers and fathers called their children back from wherever they were to be “tested”. The exercise was transformed from a “survey” — collecting data for someone else — into information gathering that everyone wanted right now.

The curiosity was immense. Many parents had no idea whether their children could read or do arithmetic. This was true of both illiterate and literate parents. Young people who were watching the proceedings with interest were requested to help. Within minutes, the whole business turned into a hugely absorbing exercise with people participating in getting children to read or discussing why children could or could not read. Yes, there was some blaming. In Uttar Pradesh, the blame often starts with the British, then moves to the chief minister, then to schools, teachers and onwards.

Finally, the hamlet results were declared: “There are 40 households, 75 children. Seventy children go to school but only 35 of them can read or do sums.” Even as the results were being digested, there was intense discussion about how this was not okay and what could be done to improve things. Clearly the situation would not sort itself out. It needed urgent and rapid change. People agreed that schools must work, teachers must teach but that parents or someone at home or in the neighbourhood too had to help.

Stepping back and looking at the unfolding scene, you could very definitively say that this exercise mattered to those people because it was about children they knew and cared about. It mattered because it was new: people did not know about children’s learning or how to look at it in this simple way. It mattered because they had seen the information being generated right before their eyes. The simplicity of the tool and the method mattered in enabling people to participate. What also mattered was that it was easy to know the results — for your own children and for all the children in the neighbourhood. Whether people were literate or illiterate, it was obvious to all that their own school-going children should be able to do these basic tasks.

In a few days we finished the village report card. We went back to the Pradhan. Without looking up from what he was doing he asked where he should sign. The report card had no need of a signature. Pradhanji thought this was very odd. He looked up at me and said, “Numbers have to be sent up and that needs my signature.” I tried to explain what the report card exercise had found. He listened for a minute and then stated loudly, “The numbers are false. No one actually goes and collects information from all households in the village. That is too much work.” I painstakingly took him through the results — hamlet by hamlet. Now he was paying attention. At the end of my explanation, he blurted out, “The figures have to be wrong.

How can it be that children are going to school and they cannot read?” Now we had Pradhanji’s full attention. There was only one way to settle this issue. Armed with the reading tool, Pradhanji walked into the village. Every child he met was asked to read. By the tenth child, Pradhanji sat down and said, “Yeh to meri izzat ka sawal hai” (This is a question of my honour). He asked how this could be the situation in his village, which he didn’t know about.

The fourth ASER (Annual Status of Education Report) for 2008 is being released today. ASER was designed around countless experiences like the one in Sultanpur, scaled for application in every district in the country. For four years, it has been a nationwide citizens’ initiative to understand the status of children’s schooling and learning in every rural district in the country. Using a common set of simple tools and a common sampling frame, in each district there is a local organisation that does an ASER and then disseminates its findings. Like the village report cards, ASER too is fundamentally based on the participation of ordinary people.

If we do not know, we cannot act. Waiting for the government alone to improve things will take a long time. Like Pradhanji and the parents in Sultanpur, it is essential that we get involved in measuring, understanding and acting to improve the future of our children.

The writer is a Delhi-based educationist.

Downturn drives IITians to air force

D Suresh Kumar | TNN

Chennai: Even when your imagination ran wild, you may not have conjured up the image of an IITian wearing a defence uniform. But this is no longer in the realm of fiction—the economic slump is driving IITians to consider a career with the Indian Air Force (IAF).

With the number of financial majors and global consulting firms on campuses dropping this year, over three dozen final year students of the Indian Institute of Technology here (IIT-Madras) have now applied for a career with the IAF.

“More than 40 students applied for the IAF’s technical graduate entry scheme this year. In contrast, last year, not a single student responded when the IAF came for placements,” Jayakumar, deputy registrar (training and placement), IIT-M, told TOI. “I don’t think such a thing has happened in recent years. We have only heard that in the 1960s, there were IITians in the defence services.”

From among the 40-odd aspirants, the IAF services selection board (SSB) has short-listed 17. “How many of them will eventually clear the SSB is a million dollar question. The SSB has a testing process, which includes a psychology test, group task and personal interview,” Jayakumar said. If selected, these students will undergo strenuous physical training like other IAF officers, but their jobs will be confined to the technical wing.

Amit Garg, students secretary (academic affairs), admitted that the move was a fallout of the meltdown. “Recruitments have been slow with just 50% of the 1,000-odd students who had registered for the campus placements being selected. For the first time, we have found that students responded positively to a career with the defence services and even nongovernmental organisations,” he said.

The slowdown has forced the authorities to extend campus placement till April; it usually ends by February. “We decided to extend the season since many companies informed us that they were waiting for the current financial year to end before finalising their manpower requirement,” Garg said. Sensing that those who had come for campus recruitments may not pick all aspirants, the authorities utilised the PanIIT meet to network with alumni and also entrepreneurs running start-ups to ease the situation.

Cambridge univ scholarships for Indian students

New Delhi: The University of Cambridge in the UK has announced the launching of the Manmohan Singh scholarship for Indian students at the under-graduate level. The vice-chancellor of the university, Prof Alison Richard, said the university intends to provide full funding for about 10 Indian students every year under this scholarship, which will cover their fees and other expenses for under-graduate study in any subject.

“The scholarship is to help needy students get quality education. A 1.5 million pound fund has been set up to support the Indian students,’’ Richard said at a press conference here. The scholarship is being launched with gifts from the Eranda Foundation and Bharti Foundation. The Cambridge University has already started the Dr Manmohan Singh scholarship, funding three post-graduate students from 2008.

The PM has sent a message to the university in which he said this kind of scholarship will encourage Indian students to pursue higher education in Cambridge. The programme will not only strengthen relations between India and the UK but also serve the shared objective of both the countries in creating a better world based on equity and justice, Singh said. The PM completed his masters degree in economics from Cambridge in the late 1950s. Alison said the university would sign an MoU with Infosys for collaboration in the areas of engineering and IT. Some students from Cambridge will be able to come to India for internship at Infosys, she said. AGENCIES

Cambridge has set up a £1.5m fund for the grant. The scholarship will fund 10 needy Indian students. Applicants can study any subject at under-grad leve.

Web searches wreck the environment

Two Google Searches Generate The Same Amount Of CO ² As Boiling A Kettle For A Cup Of Tea: Researchers

Jonathan Leake & Richard Woods

Performing two Google searches from a desktop computer can generate about the same amount of carbon dioxide as boiling a kettle for a cup of tea, according to new research.

While millions of people tap into Google without a thought for the environment, a typical search generates about 7g of carbon dioxide. Boiling a kettle generates about 15g.

“Google operates huge data centers around the world that consume a great deal of power,” said Alex Wissner-Gross, a Harvard University physicist whose research on the environmental impact of computing is due out soon. “A Google search has a definite environmental impact.”

Google is secretive about its energy consumption and carbon footprint. It also refuses to divulge the locations of its dozens of data centers.

However, with more than 200m internet searches estimated globally every day, the level of electricity consumption and greenhouse gas emissions caused by computers and the internet is provoking concern.

A recent report by Gartner, the industry analysts, said the global IT industry generated as much greenhouse gas as the world’s airlines — about 2% of global CO ² emissions. “Data centres are among the most energy-intensive facilities imaginable,” said Evan Mills, a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. Banks of servers storing billions of web pages require power both to run and cool them.

Though Google says it is in the forefront of green computing, its search engine generates high levels of CO ² because of the way it operates. When you type in a Google search for, say, “energy saving tips”, your request doesn’t go to just one server. It goes to several competing against each other.

It may even be sent to servers thousands of miles apart. Google’s infrastructure sends you data from whichever produces the answer fastest. The system minimizes delays but raises energy consumption. Google has servers in the US, Europe, Japan and China.

Wissner-Gross has also calculated the CO ² emissions caused by individual use of the internet. His research indicates that viewing a simple website page generates about 0.02g of CO ² per second. This rises about tenfold to about 0.2g of CO ² a second when viewing a website with complex images, animations or videos.

A separate estimate from John Buckley, managing director of carbonfootprint.com, a British environmental consultancy, puts the CO ² emissions of a Google search at between 1g and 10g, depending on whether you have to start your PC or not. Simply running a PC generates between 40g and 80g of CO ² per hour, he says. SUNDAY TIMES

CBSE tries to make schoolbags lighter

Anahita Mukherji | TNN

Mumbai: Here’s a piece of good news for children groaning under the weight of huge schoolbags. CBSE chairman Vineet Joshi has issued a circular to the board’s schools across the country, asking them to implement a slew of measures in order to lighten the bags, especially in the primary section.

From ensuring that unnecessary textbooks are not prescribed by schools to re-designing the timetable so that soft skills are interspersed with academic subjects, the board has prescribed a slew of solutions to heavy schoolbags.

According to the CBSE circular, the number of prescribed textbooks for a particular class should not exceed the number prescribed by the National Council of Education Research and Training (NCERT) for that class. The circular adds that “schools should ensure strict compliance with the number of books prescribed so that students and parents are not burdened academically or financially’’.

The board has also asked schools to maintain the bags of children up to Std II in the institute itself and suggested the setting up a class library, which can lend texts to students who have forgotten their books at home.

The circular goes on to discuss a more modern pedagogy of education in order to lighten schoolbags. These include integrating soft skills with “main course teaching’’, using interesting alternatives to homework and adopting a continuous as well as comprehensive method of evaluation.

“There’s a lot that needs to be done when it comes to reducing the load children carry to school. Several private schools insist on a number of unnecessary books. When I recently went to a book shop and asked for an NCERT text, I was immediately offered a whole range of workbooks, which were double the price of the textbook,’’ said Anita Rampal, Delhi University professor in the department of education and chairperson of the NCERT’s primary textbook development committee.

Rampal said though the NCERT policy clearly stated that only languages and math should be taught in Std I and II, several CBSE schools—both private as well as Kendriya Vidyalayas—often insisted on teaching environmental science in these classes and even prescribe textbooks for the same. “This is against the NCERT policy,’’ she adds.

Schools have welcomed the move to lighten schoolbags. “They need to implement the policy more effectively and come up with alternatives to textbooks—such as worksheets and creative activities—in the classroom,’’ said Dr K B Kushal, director of the DAV group of schools.

Heavy schoolbags have been a concern for a long time,’’ said Avnita Bir, principal of RN Podar School in Santa Cruz. Bir, however, pointed out that it wasn’t just the content of a schoolbag that was to blame. “The shape of schoolbags that are currently used causes an imbalance in the distribution of weight,’’ she added. Students whom TOI spoke to said the CBSE move was a step in the right direction.

anahita.mukherji@timesgroup.com

ALL WORK, NO PLAY

[Ants have always fascinated me. As a kid I used spend hours tracing their line and finding out their hideout - used to wonder how they communicate - used to notice how two ants passing by each other would pause just for a moment, may be to greet each other - something like - 'hey man, wats up' or 'how r ya, where r u headed' - then I also remember calculating the speed of an ant when i was 12, using a calculator and then finding out the ratio of human body to an ant's body - then comparing the speed of a human v/s an ant - i don't exactly remember the results of that comparision - was a decade ago when i did it - though I remember that the result was an eye opener - it increased my love and respect towards the ant community :) - sandeep r. sharma]

Worker ants don’t allow any hanky panky in their colony

Worker ants in colonies with a queen are physically attacked by their peers if they try to reproduce, a study says. In ant society, workers normally give up reproducing to care for the queen’s offspring, who are also their brothers and sisters.

The researchers found that chemicals produced by the sneaky ants gave away their fertility status, the BBC reported on Saturday.

The findings by a US-German team of researchers are published in the journal Current Biology.

To test the idea, scientists applied a synthetic compound typical of fertile individuals to non-reproductive worker ants belonging to the species Aphaenogaster cockerelli. In colonies where a queen was present, the workers with the hydrocarbon chemical applied to them were attacked by other ants. The researchers reported that deceitful ants were bitten and pulled by their peers. But this was not the case in colonies without a queen, where ants were free to reproduce.

Co-author Jurgen Liebig of Arizona State University in Tempe, US, said the hydrocarbon chemicals produced by the cheating ants were an “inherently reliable signal”. This “reproductive policing” plays an important role in maintaining harmony in the ant world, Dr Liebig explained.

For cheating to be a successful strategy for some ants, the researchers say, two conditions would need to be satisfied. Firstly, worker ants would need to suppress the hydrocarbon signals on their bodies. Secondly, they would need to continue to express the signal on their eggs, so that their offspring could not be distinguished from those of the queen. AGENCIES

TOP OF THE MIND

Let’s light up the lives of India’s poor millions

R K PACHAURI

One important message that the voters have given, in states where elections were held recently, is a clear preference for performance and development. India’s place in global affairs has been enhanced substantially in recent years, largely because of impressive economic growth. The strength of this country and the influence it is able to exert in global affairs would depend essentially on India’s place as a global economic power. Political leaders, therefore, must not only live up to the expectations of their individual constituencies but ensure the growing economic strength of India. And also see to it that the benefits reach out to every citizen of the country.

Against this background, policy makers must show extreme sensitivity, particularly as we move along the New Year, to ensure reducing disparities between the rich and poor This can happen only if opportunities are created for the poor, and if government expenditure is utilized effectively. Development continues to be lopsided in the country.

India has miles to go in improving human development indicators. For instance, of the nearly four million deaths of new-born children globally in 2007, 28% occurred in India. Despite massive efforts towards immunization, 40% of all the world’s children who are not immunized live in India After 61 years as an independent nation, over half of India’s population practices open defecation. Similarly, despite efforts to universalize primary education, more than one in every five of all primary age children out of school, are in India. It is not as though government funding for programs in the country has been deficient in these areas, but there is clearly a lack of effectiveness in the manner in which programs are delivered.

Officialdom in this country re quires urgent overhaul, and to this extent the latest report of the Administrative Reforms Commission has some far-reaching recommendations, which should be given urgent attention. It is necessary to initiate a countrywide public debate on some of these recommendations in which all stakeholders, including government, businessmen, various professionals and civil society must take part actively. Also, given the growth of entrepreneurial capabilities across the entire spectrum of Indian society, there is a need for closer partnerships between government and the private sector. Indeed, in some areas this has worked well already, where government has wisely vacated the field for private sector operators, for example in the case of mobile telephones. A revolutionary change of similar character is required in the field of renewable energy generation as well, which would bring substantial benefits to some of the poorest citizens living in rural India. The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) has launched a program called Lighting a Billion Lives, which ad dresses the sad situation of 1.6 billion people globally who have no access to electricity. Unfortunately, 25% of these — 400 million — live in India. Yet, this problem can be ad dressed and solved within a year, if required, through provision of solar lanterns which in the aggregate would cost less than the subsidy provided on kerosene. It is well known, based on studies by respectable organizations, that over 40% of this subsidy goes to benefit those who are in the business of adulteration of other petroleum products. Yet, a rational shift of this nature is obstructed largely by political considerations.

As the country gears up for the general elections and while we are at this exciting juncture of carving out new opportunities for the people of India two lessons are important for political leaders to reflect on. First, some of the basic problems associated with poor human development need urgent readdress. This would happen only if a major overhaul of the government machinery was to take place. Secondly there is a need for rationalizing subsidies and prices that often pervert the very purpose for which they are designed. One hopes that this year will see some new thinking on these critical issues and a change in direction for the benefit of the Indian society.

The writer is chairman, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)

India tracks Armstrong’s path

Chandrayaan Maps Landing Sites Of Apollos & 1st Human Steps On Moon

Srinivas Laxman | TNN

Pune: India’s maiden moon mission, Chandrayaan-I, zoomed into the memory lane as it mapped the landing sites of the six Apollo missions that were launched between July 1969 and December 1972.

Among the flights was Apollo 11 which created history in space exploration, taking on board Neil Armstrong, the first human to step on the lunar surface on July 20, 1969.

Talking to TOI, P Sreekumar, a space scientist who quit his job in the US to be a part of the Indian moon mission, said the mapping process began on January 7 and was completed on Saturday. It includes the landing sites of Apollo 12, 14, 15 and 17, besides the historic mission.

“Our purpose of carrying out this exercise was to validate and confirm through global mapping the data about moon’s surface and rocks, which had been obtained by these Apollo flights,’’ said Sreekumar, who is in Pune to participate in the inauguration of the International Year of Astronomy programme at the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics.

He added that the mapping was done by six of the 11 scientific payloads on board Chandrayaan, which included the indigenous Terrain Mapping Camera and the Hyper Spectral Imaging Camera. Among the others are Nasa’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper, Radom from Bulgaria and the Near Infra-Red Spectrometer (Sir-2) of Germany.

Sreekumar further explained that despite the Chandrayaan flying in the north-south polar orbit, it was successfully covering the entire lunar surface and tracking the Apollo landing sites, which were located on the equatorial region of the moon.

The Sub-Kev Atom Reflecting Analyser (SARA), a payload of the ESA from the Swedish Institute of Space Physics, the Space Physics Laboratory and the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, Thiruvanathanapuram, was activated on board the Chandrayaan this week.

The role of this equipment is to image the moon’s surface composition, including the permanently shadowed areas, study the solar wind interaction and carry out studies connected with space weathering.

TOTAL RECALL: The Indian moon mission is also tracing the landing site of Apollo 11, which took on board Neil Armstrong, the first human to land on the lunar surface