Megacity plan for Little Andaman

• The proposed construction of a mega financial-tourist complex on Little Andaman Island will place at risk a fragile ecosystem and result in habitat loss of the vulnerable Onge tribe and rare wildlife
• A plan for the sustainable and holistic development of the 680 sq km, fragile Little Andaman Island in the Andaman and Nicobar group has raised the alarm among conservationists.
• The ‘Sustainable Development of Little Andaman Island - Vision Document’, is the NITI Aayog’s proposal to leverage the strategic location and natural features of the island.
• This, the vision says, will be done by building a new greenfield coastal city there, that will be developed as a free trade zone and will compete with Singapore and Hong Kong.

Other provisions

• There will be ‘underwater’ resorts, casinos, golf courses, convention centres, plug-and-play office complexes, a drone port with fully automated drone delivery system, nature cure institutes and more.
• An international airport capable of handling all types of aircraft will be central to this development vision because “all successful case studies and references” studied by the visioning team indicate that an international airport is key for development.
• The only jetty on the island will be expanded and a marina will be developed next to the tourist entertainment district.
• A 100 km greenfield ring road will be constructed parallel to the coastline from east to west and will be supplemented with a mass rapid transit network with stations at regular intervals.
• The vision plan is not in the public domain, even though it is said to have been finalised months ago. The comparison with Singapore, for instance, is one key.
• The vision document, described by conservationists as a first bullet through the heart of the island, is to be followed by a second one soon.

• The proposal is pivoted along 3 development anchors and zones.

  1. Zone 1 — spread over 102 sq km along the east coast of Little Andaman — will be the financial district and medi city and will include an aerocity, and a tourism and hospital district. Spread over 85 sq km of pristine forest,

  2. Zone 2, the leisure zone, will have a film city, a residential district and a tourism SEZ.

  3. Zone 3 — on 52 sq km of pristine forest — will be a nature zone, further categorised into three districts: an exclusive forest resort, a natural healing district and a nature retreat, all on the western coast.

• There will be ‘underwater’ resorts, casinos, golf courses, convention centres, plug-and-play office complexes, a drone port with a fully automated drone delivery system, nature cure institutes and more.

• An international airport capable of handling all types of aircraft will be central to this development vision because “all successful case studies and references” studied by the visioning team indicate that an international airport is key for development.

Challenges to development

• There are certain factors, the vision document notes, that could prevent Little Andaman from becoming the new Singapore — factors that are “stopping us from developing these into veritable jewels for the country”.
• These include a lack of good connectivity with the Indian mainland and global cities, fragile biodiversity and natural ecosystems and certain Supreme Court notifications that pose an impediment to development.
• Another key factor is the “presence of indigenous tribes and concerns for their welfare”.
• There are other concrete obstacles that the vision takes note of 95% of Little Andaman is covered in forest, a large part of it the pristine evergreen type. Some 640 sq km of the island is Reserve Forest under the Indian Forest Act, and nearly 450 sq km is protected as the Onge Tribal Reserve, creating a unique and rare socio-ecological-historical complex of high importance.
• The vision document has maps with no legends or explanations and uses inappropriate photographs plagiarised from the Internet.
• It talks of the conservation of a national park/wildlife sanctuary on Little Andaman when none exists here and it has no mention of the geological vulnerability of the place, which was amongst the worst affected in the earthquake-tsunami combination in 2004.
• The plan has no financial details, no budgeting, or incentivisation of forests and ecological wealth and no details of any impact assessment.
• The nature resort complex proposed at West Bay on the western coast is to have theme resorts, floating/underwater resorts, beach hotels, and high-end residential villas. It is today a secluded and difficult-to-reach part, one of the most important nesting sites of the globally endangered Giant Leatherback sea turtle which is being studied by the Dakshin Foundation, the Andaman and Nicobar Environment Team and the island administration’s Forest Department.
• The only jetty on the island will be expanded and a marina will be developed next to the tourist entertainment district. A 100 km greenfield ring road will be constructed parallel to the coastline from east to west and will be supplemented with a mass rapid transit network with stations at regular intervals.
• The vision plan is not in the public domain, even though it is said to have been finalised months ago. The comparison with Singapore, for instance, is one key. It has a map of Little Andaman overlaid on Singapore’s, along with the following statistics: “The population density of the Andaman and Nicobar is 47 people per sq km while it’s (sic) 7,615 persons per sq km in Singapore. Its per capita income is $1,789 compared to Singapore's $55,182.”

The problem of ageing dams

• Dams and reservoirs are believed to secure our water needs for the future. However, data and studies show that they can threaten our water security. Here is how.
• It is not a secret anymore that India’s dams are now ageing and concomitantly, reservoir water is being replaced by soil, technically known as silt or sediment.

Becoming obsolete

• India is ranked third in the world in terms of building large dams. Of the over 5,200 large dams built so far, about 1,100 large dams have already reached 50 years of age and some are older than 120 years.
• The number of such dams will increase to 4,400 by 2050. This means that 80% of the nation’s large dams face the prospect of becoming obsolete as they will be 50 years to over 150 years old.
• The situation with hundreds of thousands of medium and minor dams is even more precarious as their shelf life is even lower than that of large dams.
• Krishna Raja Sagar dam was built in 1931 and is now 90 years old. Similarly, the Mettur dam was constructed in 1934 and is now 87 years old. Both these reservoirs are located in the water-scarce Cauvery river basin.
• As dams age, soil replaces the water in the reservoirs. Therefore, the storage capacity cannot be claimed to be the same as it was in the 1900s and 1950s.
• To make matters worse, studies show that the design of many of our reservoirs is flawed.
• In a paper, ‘Supply-side Hydrology: Last gasp’, published in 2003 in Economic & Political Weekly, Rohan D’Souza writes that the observed siltation rate in India’s iconic Bhakra dam is 139.86% higher than originally assumed. At this rate, he wrote, “the Bhakra dam is now expected to function for merely 47 years, virtually halved from the original estimate of 88 years”.
• Similarly, the actual siltation rate observed for the Hirakud, Maithan and Ghod dams is way higher at 141.67%, 808.64% and 426.59%, respectively. Studies in later years showed similar findings.
• Almost every scholarly study on reservoir sedimentation shows that Indian reservoirs are designed with a poor understanding of sedimentation science. The designs underestimate the rate of siltation and overestimate the live storage capacity created.
• Therefore, the storage space in Indian reservoirs is receding at a rate faster than anticipated. Reservoirs are poised to become extinct in less than a few decades with untold consequences already underway.

Consequences

• When soil replaces the water in reservoirs, the supply gets choked. The cropped area begins receiving less and less water as time progresses. The net sown water area either shrink in size or depends on rains or groundwater, which is over-exploited.
• Crop yield gets affected severely and disrupts the farmer’s income.
• In fact, the farmer’s income may get reduced as water is one of the crucial factors for crop yield along with a credit, crop insurance and investment.
• It is important to note that no plan for climate change adaptation will succeed with sediment-packed dams.
• The flawed siltation rates demonstrated by a number of scholarly studies reinforce the argument that the designed flood cushion within several reservoirs across many river basins may have already depleted substantially due to which floods have become more frequent downstream of dams.
• The flooding of Bharuch in 2020, Kerala in 2018 and Chennai in 2015 are a few examples attributed to downstream releases from reservoirs.
• The nation will eventually be unable to find sufficient water in the 21st century to feed the rising population by 2050, grow abundant crops, create sustainable cities, or ensure growth.
• Therefore, it is imperative for all stakeholders to come together to address this situation urgently.

Education Data: Gender issues

• Each year in December, the prestigious Nobel Prize is awarded to scientists who, during the preceding year, have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind.
• However, since its inception in 1901, only 25 women have won a Nobel Prize in Physics, Chemistry, Medicine and Economics — a distressing disparity that reflects deeply ingrained gender stereotypes, biases and male-dominated cultures.
• Worldwide, women are not encouraged to pursue educations and careers in science and technology. Biases, both conscious and unconscious, limit girls’ and women’s progress within these fields.
• Not only are people more likely to associate science and technology with men than with women, but also often hold negative opinions of women in “masculine” positions like computer scientists and engineers.
• Moreover, women are often judged less competent than their male colleagues. The few women who decide to pursue careers in science and technology are also paid less for their work compared to men and experience huge difficulties in advancing in their careers.
• India tops world rankings in producing female graduates in STEM with 43% but employs only 14% of them.
• In comparison, Sweden produces 35% female STEM graduates and employs 34% of them.
• According to research from New York University’s AI Now Institute, 80% of AI professors are male and the situation is equally distressing on the industry side.
• Tech giants like Facebook and Google might be on the cutting-edge of AI technology and research, but only 10-15% of their AI workforces are women. This is problematic as algorithms written by men end up skewed to favour men, especially white men.
• When deployed in society (and increasingly so at a large scale), this translates into preferential treatment for one group (white men), while other groups may be ignored.
• With the rapid digitisation transforming global societies at an unprecedented scale, the under-representation of women in science and technology puts them at the high risk of being displaced by technology.
• The fight against gender disparity in science and technology must be fought by all — families, educational institutions, companies and governments.
• Gender equality is not just an ethical imperative, but also a business priority. Organisations with greater diversity among their executive teams tend to have higher profits and greater innovation capability.
• In fact, McKinsey & Company’s Global Institute report found that narrowing the gender gap could add between $12 and $28 trillion to the global GDP.

Analysis of Economic Survey 2020-21

• The Economic Survey for 2020-21 is an expansive attempt at reviewing the developments in the Indian economy during the current financial year and providing an outlook for its near-term prospects.
• Spread over 700 pages, the survey opts for a self-congratulatory tone while highlighting the policy achievements of the government in steering the economy through the treacherous shoals of “the most unfathomable global health emergency experienced in modern history”.
• Citing an approach that used ‘graded public health measures to transform the short-term trade-off between lives and livelihoods into a win-win that would save both lives and livelihoods over the longer term’, the survey asserts that India established a globally unique model of strategic policymaking in containing the COVID-19 pandemic while helping the economy recover quickly from its deleterious impact.
• There is no denying that the country appears to have not only flattened the curve but also, crucially, so far avoided a bruising second wave of infections seen in much of Europe and the U.S.
• While it may be debatable as to how much of the turn in the pandemic’s progress could be attributed wholly to proactive policy measures, the survey’s contention that India has turned the crisis into an opportunity to strengthen its long-term growth potential through ‘seminal reforms’ sounds off-key, especially given the ongoing farmers’ agitation against the new farm laws as well as the plight of the struggling small and medium-scale industries and informal sectors.
• The survey goes on to forecast that the economy is currently experiencing a V-shaped recovery that would enable GDP to expand, even by a ‘conservative estimate’, by 11% in real terms in 2021-22.
• Still, to achieve that level of real growth, retail inflation must moderate substantially to average 4.4% or less over the 12-month period through March 2022, given that the survey has projected nominal growth at 15.4%.
• Also, while batting for a fiscal push to support the reviving economy, it posits an upside to the growth prognosis predicated on, among other factors, a rapid roll-out of the COVID-19 vaccines and a recovery in demand in the battered services sector.
• However, the document fails in providing an honest assessment of the on-ground economic situation by overlooking key aspects including the extent of unemployment even as it hints at the level of rural joblessness, which followed the return of millions of urban casual workers in the wake of last year’s hastily implemented lockdown.
• This it does by taking credit for a record 311.92 crore person-days of work generated over the last 10 months under MGNREGA.
• And in contending that growth should be prioritised over inequality in tackling poverty, when the pandemic has exacerbated the gap between the rich and the poor and the Finance Minister is set to present her Budget, the survey seems to privilege wealth creation over all else.

Biomethanation plants

• Prime Minister Narendra Modi, during his first Mann Ki Baat address for the year, made mention of the garbage-to-power plant being commissioned inside the Dr B.R. Ambedkar Agriculture Market in Bowenpally, Telangana.
• Vegetable and fruit waste is used to generate power to the extent of 500 units a day and 30 kilos of green manure at the plant.
• This is being done by making use of 10 tonnes of leftover market waste. The power generated is being used to light up the market and also run the canteen on the premises enabling the market committee to make substantial savings in power bills.
• In his address, Mr. Modi said, it was amazing that the market waste was being used profitably. “This is the power of innovation, it was nice to learn about it. This is the journey of turning garbage into gold,” the Prime Minister remarked.
• The CSIR-Indian Institute of Chemical Technology (IICT) has designed and patented the high-rate bio methanation technology-based Anaerobic Gas lift Reactor (AGR) for this. 3 crore project funded by the Department of Biotechnology and the Telangana government’s Agriculture Marketing Department.