Innholdsfortegnelse for July 20, 2020 i India Today

Covid-19’s worldwide rampage has so far killed 552,512 people and infected over 12 million. The respiratory illness shows no signs of slowing down. Closer home, India has displaced Russia to become the third country most affected by the corona-virus with over 767,000 cases and 21,000 deaths. There is thus a global clamour for either a drug to cure the disease or a vaccine to inoculate the healthy population. Unfortunately, as of now there is neither a cure nor a vaccine for Covid-19 and that’s what makes the spread of the disease so terrifying. Worse, it doesn’t seem to be going away in a hurry. The pandemic has led to desperate measures like lockdowns, which as we have discovered in India, can at best be stop-gap arrangements to slow down the…

West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee had launched the ‘Didi Ke Bolo (Tell Didi)’ helpline in 2019 for citizens to report corruption in public life. Last September, she even released data showing a million complaints had been lodged, but there’s been no word on the helpline since. Then the BJP launched a copycat and short-lived ‘Dada Ke Bolo’ campaign last year. Now, an apolitical group has launched an online campaign, ‘Baap Ke Bolo’, inviting corruption complaints against officials and politicians. In Bengal politics, it’s Didi who sets the trend.…

If you shed tears when you miss the sun, you also miss the stars.” This famous line by Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore reminds us of the need to stay sober and focus on the positives as tensions rise between India and China. Tagore first visited China in 1924 at the invitation of renowned Chinese intellectuals Liang Qichao and Cai Yuanpei. He charmed his Chinese friends and audiences as he travelled and lectured from Shanghai all the way to Beijing. He developed close ties with Chinese scholars such as the poet Xu Zhimo and painter Xu Beihong. Tagore met Chinese scholar Tan Yun-Shan in Malaya in 1927 and invited him to Santiniketan in West Bengal to teach. He helped Tan establish Cheen Bhavan (the China Institute) at Visva-Bharati University in 1937.…

Among the more ambitious targets Prime Minister Narendra Modi set for his government in its first term was to take electricity to the farthest reaches of the country. If that drive had a fair degree of success, what continues to hobble India's power sector—and industry that critically depends on it—is reliable supply at competitive rates. It's not very different for the domestic sector, even though notionally India now boasts 100 per cent coverage. On average, Indians put up with about five and a half hours of load shedding every day, even though India has installed capacity to generate about 370 GW of power and has a peak demand of only about 170 GW. According to the Central Electricity Authority, about half of India’s rural population gets only about 12 hours…

Q. You are the first Indian to win the Richard Dawkins award, given to one ‘who publicly proclaims the values of secularism and rationalism, upholding scientific truth wherever it may lead’. Do you feel these aspects are flourishing or wanting? If you are a rationalist, you lead towards scientific truth. They are not two separate things. I feel there is a huge number of people who are closet atheists and rationalists and their number is growing by the day. They keep their opinions to themselves because they don’t want to become a target of criticism. Also, whenever I have shared my lack of faith in front of a larger audience, I noticed that many approve silently with a nod or a smile. Q. A malicious misinformation campaign started after the…

SUGAR RUSH A baking competition where four teams compete with each other over the course of three rounds for a $10,000 prize Netflix NAILED IT! A show that brings together contestants with minimal baking skills, who are then challenged to recreate complex cakes and confectionery. A fun watch, with predictably bad cakes Netflix MASTERCHEF AUSTRALIA One of the most successful shows of its kind, this has amateur cooks participating in cook-offs, masterclasses and challenges until one is crowned Masterchef Amazon Prime…

The RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) is reaching out to the TV industry in Mumbai. Manmohan Vaidya, the Sangh’s joint general secretary, recently held a video conference with a dozen TV producers. He told them how several Bhim Army activists from Madhya Pradesh had joined the Bajrang Dal after watching the recent re-run of Ramayan on TV. The producers, though, had more pressing concerns and sought Vaidya’s help in arranging a meeting with Union I&B minister Prakash Javadekar. A diplomatic Vaidya said he would convey their concerns.…

There is an object lesson here in the perils of personal diplomacy and of decision-making by small groups of the like-minded Francine Frankel has written a thoughtful and perceptive study of India-US relations until the 1962 war with China, analysing the early causes of the deep and abiding suspicions between India and the US. The book reflects Frankel’s lifetime of deep scholarship on India, and draws on documents that have now become available from all the relevant official archives—the US, UK, Soviet Union, non-aligned countries like Indonesia and Yugoslavia, and even briefly China—except India’s. It is consequently rich in fact and follows the evidence, as good history should. The book concentrates on three main themes: India-US relations, India’s policy of friendship with China, and V.K. Krishna Menon’s role in the…

To fight a war and win, Sun Tzu, the 6th century BCE Chinese military strategist and author of The Art of War, advises that you first know your enemy well. So, first let’s get to know Covid-19—the world’s Enemy No. 1 that has afflicted over 12 million people in 213 countries and territories and caused more than half a million deaths, at last count. In India alone, there are 700,000 cases with over 20,000 dead—putting us in the unenviable position of being No. 3 in the list of countries with the biggest toll of Covid cases, behind only Brazil and the United States. A recent study by MIT predicts that given the size of India’s population, we may have as many 270,000 cases a day by February 2021. This could…

The institution of a National Electricity Contract Enforcement Authority, which threatens to take away powers from state electricity regulatory commissions and civil courts A national selection committee to select a panel for states to appoint chairperson/ members of state regulatory commissions State governments have few funding sources left—for the past five years, banks have refused to lend to loss-making power companies States with dues to gencos/ transcos beyond 90 days to be barred from accessing spot markets Loss-making discoms to need state backing to borrow from PFC/ REC Cross-subsidies to be brought down to 20 per cent in the next five years All electricity connections, including to farms, to be metered Regulators asked to recommend cost-reflective tariffs, without considering subsidies States to transfer subsidies directly to beneficiary accounts…

Uranium survey and exploration in 83 sq. km inside Amrabad Tiger Reserve by Atomic Minerals Directorate for Exploration & Research, Telangana Cause of concern: The Amrabad Tiger Reserve, spread over the Nallamala Hills, is rich in biodiversity. The Chenchus, a primitive tribe classified as particularly vulnerable tribal group, live in its foothills. Environmental activists say uranium mining will cause irreparable ecological damage, including loss of biodiversity and contamination of the river Krishna. It will also jeopardise the lives of the Chenchus. Status: The Forest Advisory Committee has deferred the proposal and sought more information from the state government…

190 No. of projects MoEFCC examined for environmental clearances in virtual meetings between April and May 108 No. of days currently taken to decide on environmental clearance, from 640 before 2014. The target now is to reduce it to 70-80 days 2,256 Proposals the MoEFCC has approved of the 2,592 proposals it received for environment clearance between July 2014 and April 24, 2020 87% Clearance rate for proposals 270 Projects out of total have been in and around biodiversity hotspots and national parks 409 sq. km Forest area that has been given away to various projects since 2015…

Pavan K. Varma’s prodigious output triggers an anecdote: on being presented with yet another volume of Edward Gibbon’s monumental Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, his patron, the Earl of Gloucester, is said to have remarked: “Another damn’d thick, square book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble, eh Mr Gibbon?” In point of fact, Varma does a lot more than merely “scribble”. And what is more, the volume in question is neither thick nor square. In fact, it is a handsome book of selections, in Nagari and Roman script, from Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas: The Greatest Ode to Lord Ram—along with English paraphrases. And for those who might want the paraphrases in Hindi, those, too, are provided in an appendix. So, unexceptionable. But that is precisely why this reader is a trifle disappointed.…

Q. Your father made his digital debut on Amazon Prime. A month later, you follow on the same platform. Was this planned? I had committed to my project in 2018. I discussed Gulabo Sitabo’s digitalrelease—tonot interrupt the flow of entertainment—with him as soon as the lockdown happened. Part of what we do as actors is to entertain and our medium is cinema, which is currently facing uncertainty. Here we have a medium which will reach out to, possibly, more people, so why not use it? Once you sit down and think it out, it makes sense. Q. Twelve episodes of 50 minutes each. Is Breathe: Into the Shadows the longest you have spent with a character? I was clocking with great detail the hours I would spend playing Avinash Sabharwal,…

The 1950 movie Rashomon by Akira Kurosawa investigates truth through a plot where four people provide alternative, subjective, self-serving and contradictory versions of the same murder. Kurosawa’s profound message—where you stand depends on where you sit—applies deeply to India’s employer compliance universe of 1,536 Acts, 69,233 compliances and 6,618 filings. Every central, state or local policymaker takes a narrow view of their acts, compliances and filings. So while there are no villains here, there are victims; the complexity of employer compliances increases exponentially with industry, sector, geographic spread, size and headcount. Rationalising, simplifying and digitising this universe will lead to 100 million new formal non-farm jobs, convince China factory refugees to choose India and mitigate the economic damage caused by Covid. India’s poverty—there are 138 countries ahead in per capita…

The Gwalior-Chambal region in Madhya Pradesh accounts for 34 seats in the 230-member assembly. Sixteen of these seats are among the 24 where bypolls will be held, following the resignations of 22 MLAs in March, when Jyotiraditya Scindia and his followers switched from the Congress to the BJP, and the death of two other legislators. The BJP picked 12 ministers for the 34-member Shivraj Singh Chouhan cabinet from the Gwalior-Chambal region as it feels this will brighten its chances of victory in the bypolls. With Scindia being seen as the party’s best bet in the region, seven of the 12 ministers are his nominees.…

Q. We are once again hearing that the power distribution sector is being reformed. Why? We need to change the way business is done to make the sector sustainable. The Electricity Act, 2003, was reformist legislation, but the rules and implementation didn’t achieve the desired results. The idea was to corporatise the electricity sector so that consumers pay for what they consume. If states want to subsidise some sections, they should be free to do so. But they need to pay discoms upfront. The discoms also need to put their house in order—in many states, there are no proper records of consumption in various subsidised sectors. Q. How will you ensure that discoms fall in line? You can’t always throw good money after bad. Most discoms are operationally inefficient and…

Poets and writers, according to Gulzar, perform an essential function—they give the period we live in, our era, a register. “And even if they write a small editorial, they record the times we live in. That is what is happening now,” he says. As the pandemic has worsened, Gulzar has been using a friend’s Facebook wall to publish his recent poems. “I’ve written several poems that illustrate today’s news.” In May this year, for instance, Gulzar published a poem on the plight of migrant workers. It had an affecting refrain: “They will go to die there—where there is life.” Explaining the dichotomy, he says, “The problem is that they had come to cities to stay alive, but they had left life behind.” The 85-year-old poet and lyricist uses everyday examples…

The final book of Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee’s Jesus trilogy is as elusive as its predecessors. The only certainty in The Death of Jesus is the death the title promises. David, the boy protagonist of the series, decides that Simon and Inés (the strangers who took him in) are not his parents, even though they love and care for him. He leaves them to join an orphanage but, soon after, is debilitated by a mysterious disease. David can no longer play soccer or dance—activities we have seen him excel at in previous books—and quickly succumbs to the illness while confined to a hospital room. The plot is not unexpected, nor does it offer the kind of satisfying conclusion typically expected of a novel. Instead, the pulse of the book plays…