Loss of vultures damaging for humans, ecosystem: study
Decline in vulture populations in some parts of the world, including India, may have serious consequences for ecosystems and humans alike, according to a new study that suggests poisoning is the greatest extinction risk facing the scavengers.Poisoning is the greatest extinction risk facing vultures, and impacts 88 per cent of threatened vulture species.
They are unfortunate victims
In many continents, vultures are the unfortunate victims of poisoned carcasses — especially impactful because dozens, or even hundreds — of vultures can feast on a single carcass.Populations of most vulture species around the world are now either declining or on the brink of extinction.
Other scavengers will enter human habitat
Losses of vultures can allow other scavengers to flourish. Proliferation of such scavengers could bring bacteria and viruses from carcasses into human cities .
Their make could be their unmaking
The results suggest several inherent ecological traits that likely contribute to vultures’ extinction risk, including their large body masses, slow reproductive rates and highly specialised diets.In the mid-1990s India experienced a precipitous vulture decline, with more than 95 per cent of vultures disappearing by the early 2000s.
The cause was eventually traced to diclofenac, a veterinary anti-inflammatory drug that relieved pain in cattle, but proved highly toxic to vultures.Hundreds of vultures would flock to each cattle carcass.And if the cattle had recently been treated with diclofenac, hundreds of vultures would die.Because of this highly gregarious feeding behaviour, less than one per cent of cattle carcasses contaminated with diclofenac could account for the steep vulture decline.
Spurt in feral dogs and the rabies link
Following the decline of vultures, India experienced a strong uptick in feral dogs — by an estimated seven million.The increase in dogs, potentially feeding on disease-ridden carcasses, is thought to have at least partially caused the rabies outbreak that was estimated to have killed 48,000 people from 1992-2006 in India — deaths that may have been avoided if not for the disappearance of vultures.
It is happening in sub-Saharan Africa
Now, the centre of the vulture crisis is in sub-Saharan Africa.In Africa, it is a lot more challenging. It is a darker story.
Bhakti Saint- Ramanuja
One thousand years have gone by. Ten centuries. In India alone, so many kingdoms which would do their best to put an end to the religious and cultural traditions that had flourished from time immemorial. The Delhi Sultanate, the five Sultanates of the South – Berar, Bidar, Golkonda, Bijapur and Ahmednagar. Sher Shah and the Suri interregnum. The Moghuls. The British Empire. In spite of all that, Vedic culture not only survived but also gained new spaces. For, the adherents of the culture have had the benefit of leadership by spiritual personalities from time to time, re-formatting the culture in a positive manner without losing any of its seminal strengths. Of such great men, Sri Ramanuja, who was born in the 11 century, takes the pride of place as he remains relevant even today.
How shall we crown Sri Ramanuja? Is he a fine-tuned philosopher or a poet? Does his sociological thinking exceed the commentator? Does he loom large as a temple-builder or as a management expert? Does his concern for helping the common man out-top his blazing spirituality? Is he greater as a student or as a teacher? A deeper and wider engagement in his life and ministry makes it very, very difficult to decide. But one thing is clear. His virtue was compassion: his means, integration. The two main reasons why Sri Ramanuja remains perfectly relevant even today.
Sister Nivedita said that the history of India is the land itself. Applied to Sri Ramanuja, we can read his life in the temples, the rituals he set up, in his philosophy and poetry, and his untiring and patient moves to bring down man-made differences and integrate the society by applying the ideal of compassion. Since he did all this by his personal example and involvement, and remained active throughout his life, he became the progenitor of the Neo-Vedantists of modern Indian renaissance. Hadn’t he opened the doors of spirituality for one and all, as Swami Vivekananda had pointed out in his lecture on ‘The Sages of India’ –
Though there are several documentations of the Acharya’s life, the main events can be summarised easily. Forty-five kilometres west of Chennai is the village of Sriperumbudur he took birth.An apt pupil for his scholarly father, Ramanuja grew up to be an erudite scholar and was married to Thanjamambal at the appropriate age. But the father’s sudden passing was a great blow indeed. He continued his studies under the scholar Yadavaprakasa. Since he was not very happy with the ways of the teacher, he turned to Tirukachchi Nambi for further studies.
Meanwhile Sri Yamunacharya who headed the community of Srivaishnavas in Srirangam expressed his wish to have Ramanuja succeed him, before he passed away. Sri Ramanuja consciously prepared himself for the onerous duties of becoming a religious-spiritual head by undergoing studies in the scriptures, vedanta as also the hymns of the Alvars. His teachers were all great eminences like Peria Nambi, Tirukoshtiyur Nambi, Maladhara and Vararanga. Soon he was in demand as a teacher too.
But now a big change occurred in his family life. Sri Ramanuja’s liberal ways and avoidance of caste-born arrogance, and readiness to help others even if it cost his own peace of mind was not relished by Thanjamambal, who had been brought up in strict orthodoxy. After sending his wife to her natal home, he renounced the world. Soon he went to Srirangam assumed his duties as the head of the Srivaishnava community.
In Srirangam, he was also entrusted with the management of the famous temple of Sri Ranganatha. The temple needed a thorough overhauling and flushing out the innumerable ‘old bandicoots’ turned out to be a thorny exercise. However, the Acharya was no confrontationist. He simply withdrew to the nearby hillock of Tiruvellarai for a couple of years. He returned to Srirangam after the poison had drained away. His management of the temple involving all sections of the society and introducing several socially relevant schemes like plentiful ‘annadaana’ have endured till this day as we see the innumerable Ramanuja Koots spread all over India.
Satellites under operation in Country
Currently, 34 satellites are operational in the country comprising of :-
(i) 13 Communication Satellites namely, INSAT-3A, INSAT-3C, INSAT-4A, INSAT-4B, INSAT-4CR, GSAT-6, GSAT-7, GSAT-8, GSAT-10, GSAT-12, GSAT-14, GSAT-15 and GSAT-16.
(ii) 12 Earth Observation Satellites namely, Resourcesat-2, RISAT-1, RISAT-2, Cartosat-1, Cartosat-2, Cartosat-2A, Cartosat-2B, Oceansat-2, SARAL, Kalpana-1, Megha-Tropiques and INSAT-3D.
(iii) 7 Navigational Satellites namely, IRNSS-1A, 1B, 1C, 1D, 1E, 1F & 1G.
(iv) 2 Space science Satellites namely Mars Orbiter Mission & Astrosat.
President of India confers Niryat Shree and Niryat Bandhu Awards at the Golden Jubilee celebrations of FIEO
“Niryat Shree” and “Niryat Bandhu” are awarded to companies from various sectors of exports besides service providers, banks, various facilitating agencies promoting exports during the Golden Jubilee Celebration of Federation of Indian Export Organisations (FIEO).
Among the awardees Reliance Industry was adjudged as the top foreign exchange earner and leading exporter of last 50 years. In IT Services, TCS bagged the Gold Award. Exporters from engineering, chemicals, textiles, agro & processed sector, etc. were also given Gold/Silver/Bronze awards. Amongst the supporting institutions, State Bank of India got the Gold award followed by Canara Bank and Punjab National Bank.
Plan for Giving Warning about Natural Calamities
As part of this, a Program on ‘Seismicity & Earthquake Precursor’ has been initiated by Ministry of Earth Sciences ( MoES), through a multi-institutional and multi-disciplinary mechanism to adopt an integrated approach of generation, assimilation and analyses of a variety of earthquake precursory phenomena in critical seismotectonic environments in the country in a comprehensive manner.
MoES has also initiated a major project on drilling a deep bore hole in the seismically active Koyna-Warna region in Maharashtra, to study in detail the ongoing earthquake generation processes in the region. The proposed scientific deep drilling investigations in the seismically active Koyna region will provide a unique opportunity and the much desired data sets to better understand the mechanisms of faulting, physics of reservoir triggered earthquakes and also contribute towards earthquake hazard assessment and develop models for earthquake forecast in future.
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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.