Monthly Archives: August 2012

Borlaug award

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This week saw another alumnus of the Presidency College, fondly called the Oxford of the East, do India proud by bagging Rockefeller Foundation’s first ever Borlaug Field Award, which has been constituted to recognise young researchers helping farmers and hungry people around the world through science. Earlier this month string theorist Ashoke Sen, another Presidency product, wowed the world when he was named one among the eight scientists worldwide to receive the three million dollar Fundamental Physics Prize in its first edition.

Presidency College, now Presidency University, counts among its illustrious alumi the famous scientists Jagadish Chandra Bose,  Satyendra Nath Bose, Meghnad Saha and statistician Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis. Something in the air at this grand institution that breeds such wonderful science and scientists?

Coming back to the young social scientist who influenced policy through her work , after Presidency College, Aditi Mukherji studied at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi; and the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai; and completed a Ph.D degree in Human Geography at the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom.
Her research on groundwater resources in agriculture has done thousands of farmers in West Bengal a world of good. According to the press release announcing the honour, Mukherji a senior researcher at the International Water Management Institute’s New Delhi office, has surveyed more than 4,000 groundwater users to discover that smallholder farmers in water-abundant eastern India were unable to get water for their irrigation needs due to policy restrictions that actually were made keeping in mind the water scarcity in other parts of the country. She became the voice of the voiceless working closely with farmers and villagers to record their concerns.
Through research and political engagement, she became instrumental in getting two critical policy changes in two years— one to remove a restrictive permit requirement for operating low-power irrigation pumps; and another to reduce the electrification cost to run the pumps. Following these policy changes, the farmers now have easier and more universal access to groundwater for irrigation and will be able to intensify their cropping systems, earn better livelihoods and emerge out of poverty, the award committee noted. Mukherji presented her research to the government convincing them that the situation in water-rich east India was different from other parts of the country facing scarcity and depletion of groundwater.
Mukherji will get the 10,000 dollar award at the World Food Prize international symposium in the US in October.
Here’s raising a toast to the Oxford of the East for nurturing some of the best brains this country has produced!

Reporting climate change

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Climate change seems to be our favourite punch bag, whatever the calamity — droughts, failed monsoons, floods or cyclones. How much science goes into deciding which of these natural phenomena are an offshoot of the global climate change phenomenon? Is climate change reporting as robust (or weak?) as the scientific evidence to back accentuated glacial melts or sea level rise?

The workshop

A regional meet of climate change communicators from the SAARC nations currently underway in Kathmandu, Nepal (August 24-30, 2012) is seeking to look at all that is good with our reportage and all that we need to improve. It would look and feel like any of the umpteen such well meaning ‘workshops’ which fail to make much headway but for the presence of some real ‘experts’ who have toiled it out on the ground. From Nepalese journalists who have trekked the Hindukush range to Sri Lankan scribes who have shrugged off the ‘small island nation’ tag to influence policy across south Asia; spirited Editors of newspapers, magazines and television channels from SAARC countries to radio reporters whose voices reach the farthest corners of our villages — the mix at the meet organised by PANOS is eclectic and therefore works.

The basic premise of their coming together is to corroborate what we know all along but need occasional nudging to recall — that the rules of science and the rules of journalism are actually the same: to question, to inquire and to investigate.

The rigour of the week-long workshop and its academic nature notwithstanding, the stand-out feature has been the brilliant anecdotal asides that each session throws up, which the editor of a Bhutanese daily described as media’s ‘dazzle’ stories on climate change.

For instance, shepherds in the Hindukush Himalayas are actually happy with the tiny lakes being formed from glacial melts — it means fresh water and more pastures for their sheep. Women in some Indian villages have been rendered unmarriagable because of the water scarcity in the region (who wants water-stingy in-laws?) . No cars can ply on the roads of Bhutan on Tuesdays, even if you are dying and need to be rushed to a hospital — an example of an extreme step taken by the government to keep the effects of climate change at bay. While wildlife activists in Colombo might be fighting hard to protect their cultural emblem — the elephant –, villagers facing the wrath of the pachyderms want the beasts to die. They just won’t cast their votes unless the government ensures electric fencing around villages to keep wild elephants away.

Climate change communicators from across South Asia are attending the workshop.

These lesser known stories and many more such have thrown open another debate on the sharp urban-rural perception divide on issues such as environment, wildlife and climate change. While we were busy framing protocols and worrying about wording them correctly, people most affected by climate change were sitting in faraway foothills and forests oblivious of the threat posed by the burning global issue.

That said, all victims certainly are not  ignorant or unperturbed. A number of cases of indigenous knowledge in action also got into the anecdotes lore of the workshop. Like the heart-warming story of 75-year-old civil engineer Chewang Norphel who is building artificial glaciers in the driest villages of Ladakh for perennial water supply. Or the Lahore man who lives in a quiet ‘green’ house in a neighbourhood hopelessly drowned in the whir of generators.

The media’s coverage of climate change came in for scrutiny as data from University of Colorado was pulled out to show peaks in the graph only during significant annual events such as the Copenhagen climate change conference of 2009 or the Cancun or Durban conferences. The graph also peaked when there was a natural calamity — a drought, a flood, a cyclone — presumably linked to climate change. This, the workshop felt, needs to be changed with more regular policy features, success stories and informed opinion. The media’s role to warn policy makers and imminent victims in the run up to a natural disaster through science-backed reportage was also discussed at length.

And since I must end with a smiley,  here it is. They are hunting like crazy for the unique half-plant-half-insect Cordyceps sinesis in the highlands of Bhutan, Nepal and India. It sells for a couple of lakhs of rupees a kilogram for its aphrodisiac virtues.  As we know, Bhutan measures its progress with the Gross National Happiness (GNP) index (into which an environment component is built in, by the way). I’m sure there are a lot of happy people in the beautiful ‘60% forests country’ right now!

GM debate

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The long-drawn debate over genetically modified (GM) crops in India saw another shocker this week when one of the country’s Parliamentary committees said it was ‘highly disconcerted’ over the pressure being created by the GM industry over the body responsible for approval of GM crops in India (press release). The parliamentary committee smells a ‘collusion of a worst kind’ happening between the approving committee and the industry and has recommended a thorough independent probe into the introduction and subsequent moratorium on Bt. brinjal in India.

In 2008, the Indian Council for Agricultural Research (ICAR) had noted in a report that when lambs were fed with Bt. cotton seeds, the weights of their liver and testicles increased and the WBC in their blood decreased.  The parliamentary committee took note of this and has recommended a professional evaluation of these developments to decide biosafety and health safety aspects of Bt. cotton.

Another interesting observation that the committee makes is that considering India’s rich biodiversity and the irretrievability of transgenic crops released in the environment, any further research and development on transgenics in agricultural crops should only be done in strict containment. Field trials ‘under any garb’ should be a strict no-no. Serious concerns have been raised over the poor policies governing GM crops, absence of a powerful implementing authority, the likely impact of transgenics on agricultural and medicinal crops and labeling of GM products.

The report has met support from independent think tanks and is being seen as a clear indication that the government is waking up to the need for a more broad based debate over introduction of GM crops in India. Sunita Narain, who heads New Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment says GM technologies need a robust and credible regulatory framework to work in the interest of people and environment. She deposed in front of the Parliamentary committee earlier and believes that this new report paves the way for a more matured debate on GM crops in India.

Hopefully we will have more indigenous R&D and healthier debates to support or trash each move of the government and the industry towards introduction of GM crops in this country.

Physics award

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In 2008, while Nature India was analysing the contribution of the eastern part of India to basic and applied science in this country, a name came up pretty regularly during interviews with scientists from the region. The name was that of Ashoke Sen. The physicist, an alumnus of east India’s Oxford — Presidency College — does not live or work in the east. In fact, his workplace for long years has been up north at the Harish Chandra Institute in Allahabad. But almost everyone in West Bengal talks of him reverentially. He was the scientist with the highest number of publications in this country. And one sticking on to the ‘string theory’ to unravel newer facets of it with every publication.

Ashoke Sen{credit}Infosys foundation{/credit}

This week, the east was celebrating as much as the north of India. The reason: Ashoke Sen was awarded the maiden Fundamental Physics Prize  instituted by Russian billionaire entrepreneur Yuri Borisovich Milner. Sen has been picked up by Milner’s not-for-profit foundation for ‘uncovering striking evidence of strong-weak duality in certain supersymmetric string theories and gauge theories’, opening the path to the realization that all string theories are different limits of the same underlying theory.

The Indian scientist has received a prize money of three million US dollars — almost thrice the amount that a Nobel prize winner gets. He is with eight such awardees (seven from America and one from France) on  in the inaugural edition of the prize list.

It is a glory for physics — traditionally a stronghold for science in India — as also for basic science research.

Sen has has shown characteristic equanimity after he heard of the award. Though some reports suggest the prize money did create some excitement in the family. After all, it was equal to both the Nobel prize and Templeton prize put together — the most lucrative academic prize in the world.

Congratulations to Ashoke Sen and more strength to string theory!