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When South African and Namibian experts raised “serious concerns” over the way the cheetah project is being managed, in two letters in mid-July when the cheetah death count hit eight, they underlined that some of these deaths could have been avoided. But a combination of secrecy, lack of expertise, and mismanagement got in the way.
From inept monitoring that led to radio-collar infections going undetected to regular feeding of cheetahs released in the wild — against protocol — and a rapid fall in the prey base in Kuno, serious lapses put question marks on the Cheetah project.
Several site visits and interviews with Kuno forest staff, cheetah project biologists and vets, technical and support staff hired for the project and local villagers revealed telling details.
This is the protocol: once they land in India, cheetahs are shifted to expansive hunting bomas (enclosures) after spending a few weeks in quarantine. After a cheetah starts hunting regularly.
Govt tweaks Bharatnet, clears Rs 1.39 lakh cr for last mile broadband link (Page no. 3)
(GS Paper 3, Economy)
The Union Cabinet approved Rs 1.39 lakh crore for modernising the BharatNet project which involves changing its execution strategy and providing fiber connections to the last mile through Village Level Entrepreneurs, official sources said.
With this upgrade, the government is looking to speed up its process in connecting all 640,000 villages over the next 2.5 years.
Just like private telcos Airtel and Jio, which involve local cable operators to provide fixed home broadband services, the government, under the revamped model, will involve village level entrepreneurs or Udyamis to take the fiber connections to the homes on a 50:50 revenue-sharing basis.
The cost for taking the infrastructure to the home will be borne by the government; the rural enterpreneur will only need to be involved in maintenance and operations of home connections, including addressing consumer complaints related to fiber cuts, etc.
We laid the fiber under the BharatNet but the issue was how to give the fiber-based internet to households using the same. We ran the pilot in 60,000 villages a year back involving local partners in the villages to connect the households.
That was successful,” a government official said, adding that involving the Udyamis for the project is expected to give employment to about 250,000 people.
Opinion
Legislating authoritarianism (Page no. 13)
(GS Paper 2, Governance)
Authoritarianism is the antithesis of government according to law. Under authoritarianism, there is reduction in the rule of law, rejection of plurality, centralisation of power and imposition of the will of the majority or, sometimes, one person.
Authoritarianism is usually associated with rubber-stamp parliaments where all or nearly all seats in parliament are held by the ruling dispensation.
Unfortunately, democratically-elected parliaments have begun to copy authoritarian parliaments. And pass laws that may or may not pass the test of legality.
Such laws, in my view, certainly do not pass the test of legitimacy. A recent example of a legislation lacking in legitimacy is the Bill passed by Israel’s parliament (the Knesset) restricting the power of the courts to review the validity of laws made by parliament.
India is not far behind. [Since fingers will be pointed to the Constitution Amendments and legislation passed during the Emergency (June 25, 1975 to March 21, 1977), let me straightaway admit that many of the amendments made and laws passed did not satisfy the test of either legality or legitimacy.
That shop-worn argument out of the way, let’s look at examples of recent legislation that were passed by the Parliament of India.
World
NASA restores contact with voyager 2 after two weeks of silence (Page no. 14)
(GS Paper 3, Science and Technology)
NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft was back chatting it up Friday after flight controllers corrected a mistake that had led to weeks of silence.
Hurtling ever deeper into interstellar space billions of miles away, Voyager 2 stopped communicating two weeks ago. Controllers sent the wrong command to the 46-year-old spacecraft and tilted its antenna away from Earth.
On Wednesday, NASA’s Deep Space Network sent a new command in hopes of repointing the antenna, using the highest powered transmitter at the huge radio dish antenna in Australia. Voyager 2’s antenna needed to be shifted a mere 2 degrees.
It took more than 18 hours for the command to reach Voyager 2 — more than 12 billion miles (19 billion kilometers) away — and another 18 hours to hear back.
The long shot paid off. On Friday, the spacecraft started returning data again, according to officials at California’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Voyager 2 has been hurtling through space since its launch in 1977 to explore the outer solar system. Launched two weeks later, its twin, Voyager 1, is now the most distant spacecraft — 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) away — and still in contact.
Iran boosts Navy as US offers guards for Gulf ships (Page no. 14)
(GS Paper 2, International Relation)
Iran has equipped its Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) navy with drones and 1,000-kilometer-range missiles, Iranian news agencies reported on August 5, as the United State offers to put guards on commercial ships going through the Persian Gulf's Strait of Hormuz.
Referring to the possible presence of U.S. guards, Iranian armed forces spokesman Brigadier General Abolfazl Shekarchi said the region's countries were "capable of ensuring Persian Gulf security" themselves.
Amazon rainforest gold mining is poisoning threatened species (Page no. 14)
(GS Paper 3, Environment)
In a camping tent in the Peruvian jungle, four scientists crowded around a tiny patient: An Amazonian rodent that could fit in the palm of a human hand.
The researchers placed the small-eared pygmy rice rat into a plastic chamber and piped in anesthetic gas until it rolled over, asleep.
Removing the creature from the chamber, they fitted it with a miniature anesthetic mask and measured its body parts with a ruler before gently pulling hairs from its back with tweezers.
The hairs, bundled into a tiny plastic bag, would be carried to a nearby lab at the Los Amigos Biological Station for testing to determine whether the rat is yet another victim of mercury contamination.
Los Amigos lies in the rainforest of southeastern Peru’s Madre de Dios region where some 46,000 miners are searching for gold along river banks in the country’s epicenter of small-scale mining.
Tests like this are providing the first extensive indications that mercury from illegal and poorly regulated mining is affecting terrestrial mammals in the Amazon rainforest, according to preliminary findings from a world-first study shared with Reuters.
Absorbing or ingesting mercury-contaminated water or food has been found to cause neurological illness, immune diseases and reproductive failure in humans and some birds.
But scientists don’t yet know its full effects on other forest animals in the Amazon, where more than 10,000 species of plants and animals are at a high risk of extinction due to destruction of the rainforest.
Economy
How the online dispute resolution system announced by SEBI will work (Page no. 15)
(GS Paper 3, Economy)
A new online dispute resolution (ODR) system involving institutions, conciliators and arbitrators for the capital market is on its way.
On July 31, market regulator Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) issued a circular, streamlining the existing dispute resolution mechanism in the securities market under the aegis of stock exchanges and depositories — Market Infrastructure Institutions — by establishing a common ODR portal.
The new system will harness online conciliation and online arbitration for resolution of disputes arising in the securities market.
According to SEBI, each MII will identify and empanel one or more independent ODR institutions. These institutions will have qualified conciliators and arbitrators.
MIIs will, in consultation with their empanelled ODR institutions, establish and operate a common ODR portal. All listed companies, specified intermediaries and regulated entities in the securities market (referred to as market participants) will enrol on the ODR portal.
SEBI has not specified who will qualify as ODR institutions. “Prima facie it looks like outsourcing of investor dispute resolution with the involvement of private ODR institutions.