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January 11, 2018 Priyanka Pulla The National Medical Commission Bill has to be fine-tuned, especially in planning for rural health care The National Medical Commission Bill, aimed at reforming Indian  medical education  and practice, is in trouble. After countrywide protests by the Indian Medical Association, the Bill was referred by the Lok Sabha to a Parliamentary Standing Committee for a re-look. Whatever be the outcome of this exercise, the altered Bill is unlikely to please everyone. This is because the questions it seeks to address are knotty, with no straightforward answers. First, how can India produce enough competent doctors to meet its evolving health-care challenges? Second, how can it minimise opportunities for rent-seeking in medical education and practice? So poorly did India’s current medical regulator, the Medical Council of India (MCI), perform on both counts that policymakers believed the only way to redeem the body was to replace it. MCI’s failure

January 09, 2018 Ravinder Vasudeva A new brand of Sikh militancy has surfaced in Punjab — educated, suave, clean shaven and mostly millennial young men and women from families with no links to the pro-Khalistan movement, according to police. Radicalised through social media by Khalistani groups active abroad, these young Sikhs are recruited to kill specific targets set by their handlers, said police after busting several modules behind “targeted killings” in Punjab last year. “It’s a new way of spreading terrorism. Pro-Khalistani forces are radicalising people using cyber space… That’s why we handed the probe into all such cases to the National Investigation Agency (NIA),” state director general of police Suresh Arora said. “You never know how many such modules they have prepared for anti-national activities.” The alarm rang after police arrested five men who are said to be part of a module that had shot dead Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) members in Ludhiana, Dera Sacha

 January 10, 2018  Abantika Ghosh, India has missed the 2017 deadline that Finance Minister  Arun Jaitley  had announced for elimination of Kala Azar (black fever) in his Budget speech last year. In fact, endemic blocks have increased from 61 to 68 in 17 districts of Bihar and Jharkhand. The matter was taken up at a meeting of the health ministry last month. Officials told health secretary Preeti Sudan that a request to the Ministry of Rural Development for expediting construction of concrete houses, pending since 2001-02, was the primary reason behind the failure to control the disease. Elimination is defined as reducing the annual incidence of Kala Azar (KA) to less than 1 case per 10,000 people at the sub-district level. Further, a little-known skin condition called Post Kala Azar Dermal Leishmaniasis (PKDL) — a red flag for transmission of KA — has been growing steadily over the past few years. KA is a slow progressing indigenous disease caused by a single-celled para

January 10, 2018 India’s rice exports likely jumped 22 per cent in 2017 to a record 12.3 million tonnes as neighbouring Bangladesh ramped up purchases after flooding hit its crops, industry officials told Reuters. The boost in shipments from the world’s top exporter of the grain is set to extend into 2018 as Bangladesh and Sri Lanka continue to buy aggressively amid depleting inventories in No.2 exporter Thailand, the officials said. “Bangladesh was actively buying throughout 2017. It offset the impact of slightly weaker demand from African countries,” said M Adishankar, Executive Director at Sri Lalitha, a leading rice exporter located in Andhra Pradesh. Bangladesh’s purchases likely lifted India’s non-basmati  rice  exports by 38 per cent in 2017 to 8.4 million tonnes and total exports to 12.3 million tonnes, the officials and exporters said. That would surpass 2014’s record of 11.5 million tonnes. They based the 2017 export figures on their estimates for December s

January 10, 2018 Coal India has raised thermal coal prices across certain grades effective from Tuesday. The move, which will inflate prices by an average of around 9 per cent, is expected to earn the miner Rs 1,956 crore on coal sales between January and March 2018 and Rs 6,421 crore annually from the next financial year. The decision to raise thermal coal prices follows a levy of Rs 50 per tonne on coal evacuation introduced by the public sector miner last month, which will add Rs 800 crore to its topline in 2017-18 and Rs 2,500 crore every year from the next financial year. In a filing to the BSE, Coal India has said its board of directors in a meeting on Monday has approved the increase in price applicable across all the subsidiaries of the miner for both the regulated and the non-regulated sectors. It had hiked prices across all its subsidiaries for both the regulated and the non-regulated sectors by around 6.3 per cent in May 2016. Coal India sources said the increa

January 10, 2018  Birendra Singh Ghunawat Indian Government Mint has stopped the production of coins as of January 8, 2018. Indian Government Mint operates four mints for the production of coins. The mints are located in Noida, Mumbai, Kolkata and Hyderabad. These mints are responsible for the production of coins which in turn are circulated by RBI. The Union of these mints has issued a notice to the General Managers of the four mints to stop the production of coins w.e.f January 8. This is being done as the government storage rooms are full. Manufactured coins in large quantities are stored in these store rooms leaving no room for more coins. According to sources, there are around 2500 million pieces of manufactured coins in the storage rooms waiting to be picked up by the RBI. "The RBI is not the concerned authority for the minting of coins. The General Managers of the Government Mints would be the right authority to comment on it," the RBI spokesperson sa

January 10, 2018 Time was when some of the best-known industrialists in India would find their perfect life partners among airhostesses. Now, an alleged  hawala  operator has been accused of befriending an airhostess and persuading her to smuggle out dollars. The Jet Airways airhostess has been arrested on the charge of trying to smuggle out $480,200 (over Rs 3 crore), wrapped in aluminium foil to evade X-ray scanners, the directorate of revenue intelligence (DRI) said. The 25-year-old stewardess was picked up from a plane at 3am on Monday before it took off for Hong Kong from Delhi. The DRI feels the cash was part of a wider racket run by bullion dealers using in-flight crew to buy gold abroad. Amit Malhotra, the alleged  hawala  operator, has also been arrested. Malhotra is said to have befriended the airhostess six months ago during a flight to India. The airhostess had allegedly made seven trips to Hong Kong, carrying dollars worth Rs 10 crore. "Malhotra would

January 10,2018 Shailja Neelkantani As  Washington's relations with Islamabad hit an all-time low +  , the US may be considering not using  Pakistan  as a route to send supplies to  Afghanistan , a US  State Department  official hinted today. He was answering a specific question about what the US will do if an angry Pakistan cuts off access to the routes through which military and other supplies get to Afghanistan. "Is the US talking with the Central Asian countries or Russia about trying to expand resupply - like northern resupply - routes to have alternatives if Pakistan cuts that off," was the question asked of the State Department official Steven Goldstein. He replied in the affirmative. "We always look at that," said Goldstein, emphasising though that the recent suspension of as much as $2 billion in funds to Pakistan was just that - a suspension - not an end. "...this is a suspension and not a cut-off. No funds have been reprogrammed,

January 10, 2018 Jean Dreze Like all the detained youth, I was beaten, and hung upside down. I was kept naked, tied to a rope, my genitals and toes were given electric shocks, and a roller was run over my legs.” This is not the memory of a German concentration camp survivor, or of a torture victim in Congo. It is the testimony of a young resident of Anantnag in Kashmir, who was picked up and interrogated by the Special Operations Group of the Jammu and Kashmir State Police in 2004. And this is just one among hundreds of similar testimonies presented in  Structures of Violence , a monumental study of state violence in Kashmir released two years ago by the Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society (JKCCS). The report has been widely read in Kashmir, but studiously ignored by the Indian media. JKCCS was co-founded by Parvez Imroz and Parvez Khurram, two public-spirited lawyers who have done sterling work on human rights in Kashmir for many years. I met them on the occasion of m

January 10,2018 Jyoti Malhotra In a corner of Gwadar Bay, 34 km from the Iran-Pakistan border, is the small town of Jiwani. According to legend,  Queen Victoria had expressed a desire to watch the sunset from this edge of the British Empire — the Pakistan Coast Guards still maintain a “Victoria Hut” in Jiwani. The town on Pakistan’s Makran coast finally looks set for its date with history. China plans to build its second military base overseas — after Djibouti at the mouth of the Red Sea — in Jiwani. Only 90 km to the east is the Gwadar deep sea port, a culmination point of the ambitious China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), which will be able to handle 13 million tonnes of cargo annually within five years — and an astounding 400 million tonnes annually by 2030 — to be transported to landlocked Central Asia and to western China. The first report naming Jiwani as a possible site for a Chinese joint naval and air facility appeared on December 12, 2017 on the web site of the

January 09,2018 Scientists have developed a platinum and copper alloy catalyst that can convert methane in shale gas into hydrocarbon fuels.  Platinum or nickel are known to break the carbon-hydrogen bonds in methane found in shale gas to make hydrocarbon fuels and other useful chemicals. However, this process causes ‘coking’ – the metal becomes coated with a carbon layer rendering it ineffective by blocking reactions from happening at the surface. The new alloy catalyst developed by scientists at University College London (UCL) in the UK and Tufts University in the US is resistant to coking, so it retains its activity and requires less energy to break the bonds than other materials. Currently, methane reforming processes are extremely energy intense, requiring temperatures of about 900 degrees Celsius. This new material could lower this to 400 degrees Celsius, saving energy, researchers said. The study, published in the journal Nature Chemistry, demonstrates the