1) Zero TB Cities project:-
- Chennai has been chosen as one of two cities in the world where the Zero TB Cities project will try to create an “island of elimination”; Lima in Peru is the other city.
- The project will be implemented by the Municipal Corporation of Chennai with the Chennai-based REACH and the National Institute for Research in Tuberculosis (NIRT) assisting it
- In India, there is evidence that transmission of TB is much higher in cities, and cities are often the source of infection for rural communities. So, getting to zero in cities will eliminate important reservoirs of TB
2)Rising oil, auto, power demand point to strong revival: report
- Good growth in oil, power and auto demand for the past two months points to a reviving economic momentum,” Swiss brockerage Credit Suisse has said in a report
- Given the government focus on bottom-up growth rather than top-down, it believes the first signs of recovery are likely to come from broad-based indicators. Good growth in oil, power and auto demand for the past two months points to a reviving economic momentum,
- Demand growth in oil, which hit an 11-year high in September and October, coupled with rising consumption of power and auto sales point to a strong economic revival that was missing for many years
- Demand for plastics has hit a 10-year high at 54 per cent against a 4 per cent fall in the past two years.
- A 54 per cent rise in bitumen consumption points to road construction doing well. Demand growth supports restart and ramp-up of Haldia Petrochemicals and explains some of the naphtha growth and strong plastics demand, the report has said.
3)Regenerating bones through nanoparticles:-
- A recent study by scientists at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru suggests that ‘3D scaffolds’ of graphene composites can be used for bone tissue regeneration as they mimic the environment of the bone
- The researchers from the department of Materials Engineering went about ‘strengthening’ Polycaprolactone (PCL) — a biodegradable polymer — by adding graphene, a two-dimensional hexagonal lattice of carbon atoms.
- Though PCL is biodegradable, it is considered too soft to be used as a bone template. However, graphene has a strength that is more than 200 times that of steel.
- The addition of graphene dioxide was found to have increased the strength of PCL by 22 per cent and its capacity to resist deformation by 44 per cent — enough to sustain bone growth, while also being biodegradable
- Arrangement of cells in 3D scaffolds is similar to what is seen inside bone tissue.The purpose of the scaffold is to provide only a temporary home for the regenerating cells. The scaffold should degrade slowly over time allowing for healthy tissue to eventually replace the scaffold
4)East Asia Summit :-
- The East Asia Summit (EAS) is a forum held annually by leaders of, initially, 16 countries in the East Asian and South East Asian region. Membership expanded to 18 countries including the United States and Russia at the Sixth EAS in 2011. EAS meetings are held after annual ASEAN leaders’ meetings. The first summit was held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia on 14 December 2005.
- PM attends East Asia Summit in Kuala Lumpur, unveils Statue of Swami Vivekananda, addresses Indian Community.PM at East Asia Summit: The shadow of terrorism stretches across our societies and our world
- Areas of Engagement :-
- Environment and Energy Cooperation
- Education Cooperation
- Finance Cooperation
- Cooperation on Global Health Issues and Pandemic Diseases
- Cooperation on Natural Disaster Management
- Cooperation on ASEAN Connectivity
- Food Security Cooperation
- Institutional and Financial Arrangements for the Implementation of this Plan of Action:-
- The initiatives mentioned in this Plan of Action will be implemented through existing regional frameworks and mechanisms of ASEAN, in close consultation with and support from EAS participating countries, and with appropriate support and from relevant regional and international organizations, including Asian Development Bank (ADB), United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP), World Bank, and Economic Research Institute of ASEAN and East Asia (ERIA)
5)India revives its eastern-most airfield at Teju:-
- Teju is part of the six strategic airfields that were planned for Arunachal Pradesh. Five more airports are underway at Tawang, Daparizo, Anini, Koloriang and Hollangi. But the Teju airfield which will increase air connectivity with the region is unique as it is the easternmost landing strip in the country.
6)Public Heath Infrastructure – Lesson from Odisha:-
- It has been two months since news and reports of the deaths of 40 infants at Shishubhawan, the largest paediatric care centre in eastern India, broke. The facility is for critically-ill children from Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Odisha. By the end of September, 56 deaths were reported in a span on 12 days.
- The bad news first: it is not the hospital’s fault. It was not medical negligence. Nor was it due to a sudden outbreak of infection. What happened at the hospital is symptomatic of how deep the rot is in India’s crumbling public health infrastructure.
- This was a worst case scenario at an ill-equipped hospital with overworked doctors making a bad case a bit worse. And everyone agrees. Yes, the hospital needs more hands. Yes, the laboratory closed too soon. Yes, the children were brought in too late. Yes, the media parachuted in, misread the situation and began screaming cold-blooded murder.
- Shishubhawan, officially known as the Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel Post Graduate Institute of Paediatrics, does not deserve the bad press. The centre is an extramural hospital, which means that every baby admitted was born elsewhere but referred there after complications.
- Unlike private hospitals that refer dying patients to government hospitals and keep their mortality rates clean, Shishubhawan cannot refer the patients anywhere, hence mortality is obviously high.Many of the babies reach too late to the hospital.
- As things stand, Odisha has one doctor per 9,729 population as against the national average which by itself is bad.
- With a population of around 4 cr the State has only 19,188 registered doctors, allopathic and AYUSH [Ayurveda, Yoga & Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha and Homeopathy] practitioners included. It is a sign of desperation that a State struggling to find doctors, has fired such a large number of doctors en-masse to cleanse the system from bad doctors.
- The shortage of anaesthesiologists in Odisha is so severe that the State is giving our general practitioners a crash course to allow caesarean section operations. And yet, these 408 doctors had to be fired. All these doctors were on leave for years and were within the system, so we could not hire more doctors for these posts, as they were technically not vacant.
Receive Daily Updates
Recent Posts
Steve Ovett, the famous British middle-distance athlete, won the 800-metres gold medal at the Moscow Olympics of 1980. Just a few days later, he was about to win a 5,000-metres race at London’s Crystal Palace. Known for his burst of acceleration on the home stretch, he had supreme confidence in his ability to out-sprint rivals. With the final 100 metres remaining,
[wptelegram-join-channel link=”https://t.me/s/upsctree” text=”Join @upsctree on Telegram”]Ovett waved to the crowd and raised a hand in triumph. But he had celebrated a bit too early. At the finishing line, Ireland’s John Treacy edged past Ovett. For those few moments, Ovett had lost his sense of reality and ignored the possibility of a negative event.
This analogy works well for the India story and our policy failures , including during the ongoing covid pandemic. While we have never been as well prepared or had significant successes in terms of growth stability as Ovett did in his illustrious running career, we tend to celebrate too early. Indeed, we have done so many times before.
It is as if we’re convinced that India is destined for greater heights, come what may, and so we never run through the finish line. Do we and our policymakers suffer from a collective optimism bias, which, as the Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman once wrote, “may well be the most significant of the cognitive biases”? The optimism bias arises from mistaken beliefs which form expectations that are better than the reality. It makes us underestimate chances of a negative outcome and ignore warnings repeatedly.
The Indian economy had a dream run for five years from 2003-04 to 2007-08, with an average annual growth rate of around 9%. Many believed that India was on its way to clocking consistent double-digit growth and comparisons with China were rife. It was conveniently overlooked that this output expansion had come mainly came from a few sectors: automobiles, telecom and business services.
Indians were made to believe that we could sprint without high-quality education, healthcare, infrastructure or banking sectors, which form the backbone of any stable economy. The plan was to build them as we went along, but then in the euphoria of short-term success, it got lost.
India’s exports of goods grew from $20 billion in 1990-91 to over $310 billion in 2019-20. Looking at these absolute figures it would seem as if India has arrived on the world stage. However, India’s share of global trade has moved up only marginally. Even now, the country accounts for less than 2% of the world’s goods exports.
More importantly, hidden behind this performance was the role played by one sector that should have never made it to India’s list of exports—refined petroleum. The share of refined petroleum exports in India’s goods exports increased from 1.4% in 1996-97 to over 18% in 2011-12.
An import-intensive sector with low labour intensity, exports of refined petroleum zoomed because of the then policy regime of a retail price ceiling on petroleum products in the domestic market. While we have done well in the export of services, our share is still less than 4% of world exports.
India seemed to emerge from the 2008 global financial crisis relatively unscathed. But, a temporary demand push had played a role in the revival—the incomes of many households, both rural and urban, had shot up. Fiscal stimulus to the rural economy and implementation of the Sixth Pay Commission scales had led to the salaries of around 20% of organized-sector employees jumping up. We celebrated, but once again, neither did we resolve the crisis brewing elsewhere in India’s banking sector, nor did we improve our capacity for healthcare or quality education.
Employment saw little economy-wide growth in our boom years. Manufacturing jobs, if anything, shrank. But we continued to celebrate. Youth flocked to low-productivity service-sector jobs, such as those in hotels and restaurants, security and other services. The dependence on such jobs on one hand and high-skilled services on the other was bound to make Indian society more unequal.
And then, there is agriculture, an elephant in the room. If and when farm-sector reforms get implemented, celebrations would once again be premature. The vast majority of India’s farmers have small plots of land, and though these farms are at least as productive as larger ones, net absolute incomes from small plots can only be meagre.
A further rise in farm productivity and consequent increase in supply, if not matched by a demand rise, especially with access to export markets, would result in downward pressure on market prices for farm produce and a further decline in the net incomes of small farmers.
We should learn from what John Treacy did right. He didn’t give up, and pushed for the finish line like it was his only chance at winning. Treacy had years of long-distance practice. The same goes for our economy. A long grind is required to build up its base before we can win and celebrate. And Ovett did not blame anyone for his loss. We play the blame game. Everyone else, right from China and the US to ‘greedy corporates’, seems to be responsible for our failures.
We have lowered absolute poverty levels and had technology-based successes like Aadhaar and digital access to public services. But there are no short cuts to good quality and adequate healthcare and education services. We must remain optimistic but stay firmly away from the optimism bias.
In the end, it is not about how we start, but how we finish. The disastrous second wave of covid and our inability to manage it is a ghastly reminder of this fact.