Khurshid to head Indian delegation at CHOGM Summit
External Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid will head the Indian
delegation at the CHOGM Summit to be held in Sri Lanka next week with
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh deciding against undertaking the visit in
view of the opposition by parties in Tamil Nadu as well as a section in
Congress.
The decision on level of Indian representation and
Singh skipping the meet will be communicated to the Lankan government by
Sunday, sources said.
“The Prime Minister is likely to write
to Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa by Sunday regarding his
decision,” government sources said. - PTI
The fight for Chhattisgarh
[TheHindu]
It is not often that the main opposition party is forced on the
defensive in an election. In Chhattisgarh, voter fatigue and the
anti-incumbency sentiment seem to be a bigger drag on the Congress,
which heads the United Progressive Alliance government at the Centre,
than on the ruling Bharatiya Janata
Party. With the Lok Sabha election
only a few months away, the Congress is finding it difficult to keep the
focus on issues relevant to the State Assembly election during the
campaign. The BJP is seeking a third term in Chhattisgarh, but it is the
Congress that is on the back foot fending off attacks on the Manmohan
Singh government’s governance record at the Centre. Narendra Modi, the
prime ministerial candidate of the BJP, divides his campaign time
between attacking the failures of the Congress at the Centre and
praising the achievements of the Raman Singh government in the last ten
years. As the campaign hots up in Chhattisgarh, Mr. Modi, who sees
Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi as his principal rival, is setting
the campaign agenda in the tribal-dominated State. Issues relating to
land acquisition, jobs and development remain central to Chhattisgarh,
but these seem to have been crowded out by the bigger picture of the Lok
Sabha election.
Chhattisgarh is one of the States most affected by Maoist violence, but
Mr. Modi would rather harp on the bomb blasts at the venue of his rally
in Patna than on the failure of Chief Minister Raman Singh to contain
the threat from Naxalites. Although leaders of the Congress were the
victims of a brutal attack by Maoist elements in Darbha, the party seems
unable to politically capitalise on the failures of the BJP government
on the law and order front. If the Congress is to recover lost ground in
the battle for Chhattisgarh, the party’s leaders need to re-focus on
the development agenda, addressing the livelihood concerns of the
people. Although Raman Singh initiated a hugely successful food security
programme involving distribution of heavily subsidised rice to poor
households, under his chief ministership employment opportunities have
been lacking for the State’s youth. Government jobs, especially in
schools, remain the only escape route for the people in the tribal
areas, but recruitment in these areas does not match the available
unemployed and underemployed workforce. The Congress needs to tap into
this underlying resentment if it is to unseat the BJP in Chhattisgarh.
Opinion polls show the BJP ahead, but this is a close fight, and the
Congress might still be able to turn things around with a more
aggressive campaign studded with promises of jobs and development.
Assad’s gambit
The destruction of Syria’s chemical weapons production and mixing
equipment may have been completed ahead of schedule but its problems
remain far from resolved. The U.S.-Russia deal struck in Geneva earlier
this year — paving the way for international inspection of Syria’s toxic
munitions — has delivered its first tangible result. The Organization
for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons has kept alive the spirit of the
Geneva communiqué, and with it the chances of international mediation.
However, the principal actors in Syria’s conflict seem to remain
unconvinced of the need for dialogue. In extending his cooperation to
the OPCW – which has until June 2014 to oversee the elimination of
Syria’s chemical stockpile – President Bashar al-Assad has signalled his
indispensability to a diplomatic settlement. Mr. Assad has underlined
that not only is he in control but he is also willing to make tactical
concessions. The odds are now stacked heavily against the Syrian rebels.
After the United States shelved its plan to intervene militarily,
opposition groups have had to reconcile themselves to the option of
sharing power with Damascus. That al-Qaeda and other terror outfits have
infiltrated the rebels’ ranks has also substantially diminished the
support they initially received from the West. Not surprisingly, many of
the rebel factions have expressed their reluctance to participate in
the “Geneva 2” diplomatic conference scheduled for later this year. Mr.
Assad, on the other hand, has made the Syrian government’s participation
contingent on his being allowed to complete a full term in office.
Meanwhile, the humanitarian crisis in Syria continues unabated. Refugee
influx into neighbouring countries like Lebanon and Turkey has reached
massive proportions. The World Health Organisation recently confirmed an
outbreak of polio in the country with aid groups finding it difficult
to deliver food and medicines in war-affected districts. A ceasefire
between the government and the rebels has simply not materialised. The
Syrian conflict continues to be manipulated by regional actors. Amidst
opposition to Iran’s participation in the conference, U.N. and Arab
League Envoy for Syria Lakdhar Brahimi has rightly suggested that
Tehran’s presence is “natural and necessary.” It seems probable Syria
will soon be free from the scourge of Weapons of Mass Destruction. But
the OPCW’s commendable work is only a means to an end – if within the
next few months, the international community is not able to bring the
country’s warring parties before the negotiating table, the chances of a
political solution will diminish considerably. This can only happen if
external actors stop aiding the militarisation of this conflict.
The politics of public memorials
By taking the moral high ground on the Sardar Patel statue issue,
the Congress has conveniently forgotten that it was among the earliest
to take to statues in a big way.
Art has never been the objective of public statuary in India, but
politics is. State-sponsored memorials are unabashed political projects,
and no party is an exception to this practice. Hence, it is strange to
see the Congress party take the moral high ground and criticise Narendra
Modi’s proposal to build the statue of Sardar Patel, to be the tallest
public sculpture in the world, as political propaganda. Its own track
record is not any different. This episode also lays bare another
entrenched prejudice: the commemorative practices of regional parties
such as the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam
(DMK) are often derided as memorial mania, while that of the national
parties are passed off as honourable collective remembering. The
Modi-Congress spat reiterates the fact that no matter who had built it
or what they are clad with, all memorials are political spectacles.
Portrait figures in temples and other confined spaces were prevalent in
pre-colonial India, but installing statues of public figures in civic
spaces is largely a colonial legacy. The Congress has conveniently
forgotten that, after independence, it was among the earliest political
parties to take to statues in a big way. Nehru’s opposition to
installing Gandhiji’s statue inside Parliament is often cited as the
Congress’s sober approach to memorials. But the lesser known fact is
that Nehru was inconsistent in his position and participated in memorial
projects. As irony would have it, this became evident in Tamil Nadu,
which is often looked down upon as badlands of regional memorials.
Kamaraj statues
In 1961, Kamaraj, a prominent Congress leader and Chief Minister of
Tamil Nadu, consented to the city Corporation installing his statue in
Madras. The party and Kamaraj were not perturbed that they are
self-sanctioning the statue of a political person in his own lifetime
and imposing it on the city. They invited Nehru to sanctify the event
and unveil the statue. Nehru inaugurated and tried to justify it. He had
come to honour “a dear friend and colleague,” he said. “Kamaraj is a
notable example of a real representative of people with extraordinary
capacity,” Nehru explained, and implied he deserved a statue. When
similar sentiments were echoed by the DMK while unveiling statues of
Annadurai, the founder leader, in 1967, it was criticised.
What Nehru could not admit in public was that the influence of the
Congress was waning in Tamil Nadu in the 1960s, and the meteoric rise of
the DMK, founded in 1949, was threatening its political future. The
party resorted to inscribing the cityscape with memorials as a part of
its political propaganda. When the DMK came to power in 1967, it lined
up statues of its own leaders on the same road where Kamaraj had his
statue unveiled.
Later, inspired by the series of memorials along the Yamuna river, the
DMK expanded its commemorative project along the Marina beachfront, the
most popular civic space in the city. This scheme predictably left out
Kamaraj and other Congress affiliates. The peeved Congress party had to
wait until 1976, when the Emergency was in force, to get another Kamaraj
statue installed on Marina beach.
For ‘national’ leaders
The Congress also favours another myth: the commemoration of “national”
leaders (read Congress leaders) had the full support of people. But
history has a different story to narrate. Efforts to mobilise a memorial
fund for Nehru after he died met with poor response. Karan Singh,
Secretary of the Nehru Memorial Trust in 1966 admitted that even two
years since the proposal was mooted, only Rs.1 crore was collected
against the targeted amount of Rs.20 crore. Even in States such as
Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh where the Congress was a dominant
political party, the collection was pathetic. Maharashtra contributed
Rs.17 lakh of the targeted Rs.2 crore; Andhra pitched in with only Rs.18
lakh instead of Rs.1.3 crore that was expected of it, and Tamil Nadu
contributed a meagre Rs.2 lakh instead of Rs.1.5 crore assigned to it.
This, however, did not stop the Congress from taking up numerous
memorial projects for Nehru. When it did, not everyone welcomed it. When
Jawahar Jyoti, an eternal flame, was installed in Teen Murti House
where Nehru lived, and later converted into a museum, P. Rajeswara Rao, a
reader from Eluru wrote in The Hindu that it was a waste of
money. Apart from lamenting the frivolous use of precious fuel, he
complained about the wasteful employment of four persons to maintain it.
He was “surprised and even shocked” to see the manner in which such
commemorations were carried out. Similarly, people were critical of
converting houses where Congress leaders lived, including that of Nehru
and Lal Bahadur Sastri, into a memorial. Writing in The Hindu, in 1969, K. Ramaswamy, a reader from Bombay, disapproved it as unnecessary “hero worship.”
Sriperumbudur memorial
Even as recently as in 1991, when the Congress government proposed a
large memorial for Rajiv Gandhi on a 12.19 acre piece of land belonging
to a temple in Sriperumbudur, it was met with resistance. The head of
the centuries old Vaishnavite Mutt, who was a flight lieutenant with the
Indian Air Force, opposed the memorial coming up on temple land. He
said that the structure would block the temple’s rituals, while renaming
the town, as Rajivpuram, would override local history and religious
significance of the place. The site of Rajiv’s “martyrdom” was too
important for the party to give up. The Congress, which was once
reluctant to acquire Birla House to commemorate Gandhiji’s death,
managed the resistance and built the memorial.
In Mumbai
The Congress would try to defend its memorials as modest public gestures
and differentiate them from that of the monumental and propagating ones
such as the Modi’s statue project. But such arguments would not wash.
The Shiv Sena tried a similar strategy. After the Maharashtra government
denied it permission to build a memorial for Bal Thackeray in Shivaji
Park in Mumbai, it wanted to take over the Mahalaxmi Racecourse for this
purpose. It tried hard to disguise its intention as a call for creating
public space, but the government called the Shiv Sena’s bluff.
If there was any difference in commemorative practices, it would be, as Erika Doss, the author of the book Memorial Mania, points out, only materialistic: temporary or permanent. Otherwise, they are all in political service.
Down but not out
Following Indonesia’s vigorous counter-terrorism operations of the
last decade, terrorists are once again concentrating on fighting the
state and its symbols with a local, rather than global, agenda.
The archipelago of Indonesia conjures up images of palm fronds and white
sand beaches, but for much of the 21st century, it has also been
associated with bomb blasts and terrorists. Since 2000, the country has
been victim to a series of bombings at embassies, hotels and nightclubs.
The deadliest of these attacks was in October 2002 when blasts in and
around nightclubs in Bali’s touristy Kuta district, killed 202 people.
Muscular response
The Indonesian state’s response to the terrorist threat has been
muscular. Densus 88, the elite police counter-terrorism unit, has been
at the forefront of neutralising the Jema’ah Islamiah (JI), the group
behind most of the mass civilian bombings of the last decade. Using
sophisticated surveillance equipment and by investing in the training of
anti-terror forces in the best international intelligence-gathering
practices, terrorist networks in Indonesia have been effectively
disrupted and their organisational capacity crippled. Since 2002, more
than 800 suspected terrorists have been arrested and scores killed. As a
result, no major terrorist attack has taken place since the 2009
bombings of the JW Marriott and the Ritz-Carlton hotels in Jakarta that
claimed seven victims.
Today, sniffer dogs and security guards may still be a ubiquitous sight
at malls and hotels across the country, but threat perceptions are
clearly down. Security guards often check handbags only cursorily and
there is little sense of fear among the general populace who freely
throng markets and other public spaces.
Yet, experts believe that complacency is misplaced. The author of The Roots of Terrorism in Indonesia,
Solahuddin, says that terrorism has not so much been vanquished, as
transformed into a more feral, dispersed and amorphous phenomenon.
The ideological underpinnings of Indonesian terrorism stretch back to
the 1940s when a broad-based organisation of Islamists, the Darul Islam
(DI), was founded with the explicit aim of establishing an Islamic state
in Indonesia. Through the 1950s, the DI fought a violent insurgency
against the newly founded Indonesian state because of its repudiation of
a Muslim theocracy in favour of a republic, founded on the doctrine of
Pancasila wherein all recognised religions are granted equal status.
The DI’s fortunes waxed and waned over the next few decades, but it was the progenitor of all subsequent jihadist outfits,
including the JI. Sidney Jones, the Crisis Group’s expert on
counter-terrorism in Indonesia explains how the JI was formed by the
“first generation” of contemporary Indonesian jihadis, men who
went to the Afghanistan-Pakistan border for training in militant camps
between 1985 and 1994. The rationale at the time was not to fight the
Soviets but to get the tools to overthrow General Suharto who ruled
Indonesia at the time.
The “second generation” of jihadis, continues Jones, were men
locally trained in the Southeast Asian region, more specifically, at a
JI camp in Mindanao in the southern Philippines. These militants were
taught skills for fighting in two areas of Indonesia, Ambon and Poso,
where sectarian violence between Muslims and Christians was rife. It was
only now that a global al-Qaeda-like philosophy entered the Indonesian
terrorist discourse. “JI leaders began to take the global framework of
al-Qaeda and fit it into the local context (of Ambon and Poso),”
explains Jones.
Once global, salafi-jihad meshed with the formerly parochial focus of Indonesian jihadi groups,
their targets shifted from the “near enemy” to the “far enemy.” The
result was the kind of large-scale violence that led to the 2002 Bali
bombings where civilians, including western tourists, were deliberately
targeted.
However, following the Indonesian state’s vigorous counter-terrorism
operations of the last decade, the situation has seen somewhat of a
return to ideological beginnings, in that today’s terrorists are once
again concentrating on fighting the Indonesian state and its symbols,
with a local rather than global agenda.
Using size to advantage
Well-organised, hierarchical and disciplined terror outfits like the JI have been replaced by a number of individual jihadis or
small groups of three to five radicals who work autonomously, without
participation in any larger group. They often auto-radicalise with the
aid of information available on the Internet.
For all its success with dismantling large terror outfits, the
Indonesian state has been unable to stamp these out, partly because
their very lack of organisation renders traditional surveillance and
intelligence gathering techniques obsolete.
The targets of these radicals are invariably the police, as symbols of
the (un-Islamic) state. According to Solahuddin, between 2010 and
mid-2013, 29 of the 30 people killed in terror attacks in Indonesia were
policemen. On the other hand, the police killed 67 suspected terrorists
and arrested 302 more, in the same time period.
“Terrorism here has boiled down to a war between the counter terrorism forces and disparate salafis,” says Jones. She admits that the capacity of this new “third generation” of terrorists to inflict damage is limited.
“Learning how to make a bomb on the Internet compared to three years of
training at a militant camp in Afghanistan is the difference between
kindergarten and Harvard University.”
Yet, there are more plots than ever before. Jones refers to the foiled attempt in May this year, by a few jihadis who
collaborated on Facebook, to attack the Myanmar mission in Jakarta amid
anger at the persecution of Muslim Rohingyas in Myanmar.
Even more worrying is the insidious trend in Indonesia of growing
intolerance against religious minorities. Herein lies the country’s
biggest failure, and the greatest succour for would-be terrorists,
according to Solahuddin. “The state takes on terror outfits like the JI
with great force, yet it ignores, even encourages, the activities of
‘soft’ religious extremists like the FPI.”
The FPI (Front Pembela Islam) is a religious organisation notorious for
intimidation and violence against Shia, Ahmadiya Muslims, Christians and
others whom it considers to be apostates or enemies of “real” Islam.
Despite having been involved in numerous cases of criminal violence, the
FPI is tolerated and even supported by certain sections of the
Indonesian polity, who differentiate its agenda of enforcing “proper”
Muslim piety from that of the jihadist agenda of overthrowing the Indonesian state.
“There is increasing fluidity between anti-vice organisations that the state tolerates and jihadis,”
agrees Jones. She gives the example of the Hisbah group in the city of
Solo, which started off as a vigilante outfit, similar to the FPI, but
that eventually morphed into a jihadi group responsible for a
suicide bombing at a police mosque in Cirebon city. “Groups can easily
move from using sticks and stones in the name of upholding morality and
curbing ‘deviance’ to using bombs and guns.”
Solahuddin concludes that arrests and convictions of known terrorists is
not enough. Unless there is a greater stress on the ‘soft” end of
counter-terrorism by nipping hate-related preaching at mosques and
Islamic schools, and discouraging intolerant attitudes and behaviours,
the roots of terror will remain unaddressed. Until then the spectre of
the Bali bombings will continue to resist being put to bed.
Cabinet clears climate negotiation strategy
Team to reassert importance of historical emissions in the discussions at Warsaw
The Union Environment and Forests Minister Jayanthi
Natarajan and climate negotiators’ team got the approval from the Union
Cabinet on Thursday to reassert the importance of historical emissions
in the new climate agreement, which is to be discussed at Warsaw
beginning November 11.
The Cabinet cleared the
non-negotiable lines for the team deciding that India would ensure that
in a pledge-based top-down agreement the onus to take emission cuts for
meeting the 2 degree Celsius target lies strongly on the developed
countries.
At the ongoing U.N. Framework Convention
on Climate Change (UNFCCC) talks, the 195-member countries have all but
come around to having what is called a bottoms-up approach under the new
global climate compact to be signed in 2015. In this format each
country volunteers targets for emission reduction based on its
capability instead of a top-down approach where targets are set down
through the negotiations for each country. Some countries have suggested
that the volunteered targets can then be assessed to see if they add up
to meet the requirement of keeping the global temperature rise below 2
degree Celsius. The U.S. has disagreed and demanded that increasing the
volunteered targets should be left to the respective country to decide
and there should not be a formal mechanism forcing the nations to do so.
In
the Cabinet decision taken on Thursday, the government has decided that
the global agreement should be along the bottoms-up approach but any
gap between volunteered cuts of all countries and the cumulative global
agreement should be met by the developed countries which have a
historical obligation to fight climate change.
Along the lines of Ms. Natarajan’s statement in the interview to The Hindu,
the government has left the door open to make a voluntary commitment
under the 2015 agreement to reduce the growth of emissions. But India
would not agree to processes outside the UNFCCC set up to fight climate
change become mandatory. The Cabinet also decided that sector-specific
targets or targets for administrative entities lower than the Union
government, such as city and town councils, would not be agreed to.
The
2015 agreement would have to be under the existing U.N. convention and
not in breach of any of its elements and principles for India to be part
of it, the Cabinet decided.
Ms. Natarajan will lead
the Ministerial round of the two-week negotiations and has been
empowered to work with the BASIC and the Like-Minded Developing
Countries to ensure that the rich countries put a clear timeline to how
and when they shall provide the promised U.S. $100 billion by 2020.
India
will not permit private investments in green technologies from
developed world be sold as a replacement for inter-country transfers.
The
Cabinet has also reasserted India’s position on the controversial issue
of HFCs — refrigerant gases that harm the climate — which had recently
found support from China and select other G20 countries besides other.
The
Indian climate team has been tasked to ensure that any phase out of the
gases is done under the principles of the UNFCCC which includes the
principle of common but differentiated responsibility and equity.
Nuclear-capable Agni-I missile test fired successfully
India on Friday successfully test-fired nuclear weapons-capable,
surface-to-surface Agni-1 missile for its full range of 700 km from
Wheeler Island, off the Odisha coast.
The single-stage, solid-fuelled missile was launched at 9.34 a.m. from a
road mobile launcher by personnel of the Strategic Forces Command as
part of a regular training exercise. It was a text-book launch and the
missile, carrying a dummy payload weighing one tonne, splashed down near
the pre-designated target point with double-digit accuracy, a top
Defence Research and Development Organisation scientist said.
It was the 11th launch of Agni-1, and the on-board computer and the
inertial navigation system steered the missile towards its target.
Agni-1 was developed by DRDO missile technologists in a short span of 15
months after the need for it was perceived by the defence services
following the Kargil conflict.
At 25, JNCASR has the ‘highest impact’
As the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR)
here is turning 25, it has been recognised as the institution with the
“highest impact” based on a study of the Science Citation Index for
2010-11.
The Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, has the highest number papers published.
The rating was arrived at after an analysis of 90,958 papers published by Indian scientists in 2010-11.
C.N.R. Rao, head of the Scientific Advisory Council to the Prime
Minister and founder-director of the JNCASR, said this recognition
marked a major scientific achievement.
He was speaking at a press conference on Friday to announce the silver jubilee programmes.
12 patents
Over the years, the JNCASR has filed 150 patent applications and received 12 patents from various countries.
Two of them were received last week from the United States, Prof. Rao
said. It was looking for partners to convert these findings into
technology that could reach people.
Prof. Rao said India made great strides in nanotechnology and stood
third in the world, while it figured nowhere 10 years ago. This was an
area where the JNCASR had contributed significantly. In the last 25
years, the institute had taken up specialised research in several areas,
including specific strains of the HIV virus.
The orbiter’s apogee has been raised from 28,814 to 40,186 km
The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO)
successfully boosted for the second time the orbit of its Mars
spacecraft on Friday, thus raising the orbiter’s apogee from 28,814 km
to 40,186 km.
The spacecraft’s orbit went up after
the ISRO Telemetry, Tracking and Command Network (ISTRAC) station at
Bangalore issued commands to the 440 Newton engine on board the
spacecraft to fire and the engine came alive for about 570 seconds from
2.18 a.m. The ISTRAC had increased the orbiter’s apogee for the first
time early Thursday morning by revving up the engine, which uses liquid
propellants. The ISRO’s Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV-25) had put
India’s Mars orbiter in an earthbound orbit with a perigee of 247 km
and an apogee of 23,566 km on November 5.
The third
orbit-raising operation will take place early in the morning of Saturday
(November 9) to boost the apogee from 40,186 km to 70,656 km. The sixth
and final firing will take place on December 1 when the spacecraft will
be sent out of the earth’s orbit into a sun-centric orbit. Then the
spacecraft will go around the sun in such a way as to cruise along for
nine months and approach Mars.
On September 24,
2014, ISRO will reorient the spacecraft and fire the Newton engine again
to slow down the orbiter so that it can enter the Martian orbit. The
spacecraft will then have a periapsis of 377 km and an apoapsis of
80,000 km.
If India’s Mars spacecraft successfully
enters the Martian orbit, ISRO will activate the five instruments on
board the spacecraft to look for methane on the Red Planet and study its
surface features, upper atmosphere and mineralogy. After the second
orbit-raising manoeuvre on Friday, the spacecraft’s health continued to
be good, said an ISRO official.
Mars spacecraft orbit raised again
The orbiter’s apogee has been raised from 28,814 to 40,186 km
The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO)
successfully boosted for the second time the orbit of its Mars
spacecraft on Friday, thus raising the orbiter’s apogee from 28,814 km
to 40,186 km.
The spacecraft’s orbit went up after
the ISRO Telemetry, Tracking and Command Network (ISTRAC) station at
Bangalore issued commands to the 440 Newton engine on board the
spacecraft to fire and the engine came alive for about 570 seconds from
2.18 a.m. The ISTRAC had increased the orbiter’s apogee for the first
time early Thursday morning by revving up the engine, which uses liquid
propellants. The ISRO’s Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV-25) had put
India’s Mars orbiter in an earthbound orbit with a perigee of 247 km
and an apogee of 23,566 km on November 5.
The third
orbit-raising operation will take place early in the morning of Saturday
(November 9) to boost the apogee from 40,186 km to 70,656 km. The sixth
and final firing will take place on December 1 when the spacecraft will
be sent out of the earth’s orbit into a sun-centric orbit. Then the
spacecraft will go around the sun in such a way as to cruise along for
nine months and approach Mars.
On September 24,
2014, ISRO will reorient the spacecraft and fire the Newton engine again
to slow down the orbiter so that it can enter the Martian orbit. The
spacecraft will then have a periapsis of 377 km and an apoapsis of
80,000 km.
If India’s Mars spacecraft successfully
enters the Martian orbit, ISRO will activate the five instruments on
board the spacecraft to look for methane on the Red Planet and study its
surface features, upper atmosphere and mineralogy. After the second
orbit-raising manoeuvre on Friday, the spacecraft’s health continued to
be good, said an ISRO official.
Oil leak destroys mangroves on Mumbai coast
The Hindu
A portion of the mangroves destroyed by oil leak at Mahul coast. The
leak has affected the livelihood of many local fishermen. Photo: Vivek
Bendre
Mangroves stretching over several kilometres along the coast in the
eastern suburb of Mahul have been destroyed due to an oil leak from a
pipeline carrying furnace oil from the sea to a refinery in the area.
The sprawling black sheet of oil has settled on the mudflats too,
affecting the seedlings of mangroves.
Forest officials told The Hindu that the damage was serious and
had happened over a period of time. “We did not know the source of the
oil leak then, but we issued a preliminary report on October 17 pointing
out that oil was continuously leaking in the area,” Sanjay Mali,
divisional forest officer told The Hindu after inspecting the location on Thursday.
The pipeline is owned and operated by the Mumbai Port Trust (MbPT),
which denied that the extensive damage was caused by their leaked
pipeline alone.
“We have plugged the leak and will inspect all pipelines in the area,” said MbPT spokesperson Mohan Chandran.
Forest officials said they would soon conduct a survey to gauge the extent of damage.
“It is difficult to estimate the exact area of damage as we will have to
conduct a detailed survey through the sea route,” Mr. Mali said. But
oil slick-damaged mangroves could be seen on the entire stretch of the
coastline from Mahul to the area behind the Bhabha Atomic Research
Centre. Local fishermen claimed that the slick had spread at least three
kilometres till Sewri on the opposite side too. The entire stretch is
at least 10 kilometres.
Contaminated catch
The slick has impacted the local fishing community. “Our boats and nets
have got damaged due to the oil. The thick layer which settles on the
nets is difficult to clean. The fish that we catch are either dead or
contaminated. We are not getting a good price for our catch,” says
Jitendra Waman Koli (36), a fisherman from Mahul village said.
Many said their health had been affected. “ There are rashes all over
the body. We feel weak, suffer from ailments. How often will we keep
going to the doctor?” asks Dharma Koli (42).
Mahul village has around 15,000 people, mostly fisherfolk. “Different
communities fish from different locations, but the oil has been
spreading, affecting most of them,” said former corporator Rajendra
Mahulkar. “We have submitted a written complaint to the Maharashtra
Pollution Control Board and the local police,” Mr. Mahulkar said.
There are several oil refineries in the area. Among them are those of
Bharat Petroleum Corporation Limited, Hindustan Petroleum Corporation
Limited, Indian Oil Corporation Limited. However, none of them reported
this extensive leak.
It was finally the local fishermen who complained to the Maharashtra
Pollution Control Board on November 1. It had taken the MPCB almost five
months to locate the source of the leak. “We have visited the location.
We will summon the highest officials of the MbPT and BPCL, and take a
detailed action plan from them to contain this,” MPCB assistant
secretary P.K. Mirase told The Hindu.
Inspection of the leakage site shows timely action could have prevented
the damage. “It was a small crack. Had it been plugged immediately, it
would have saved the mangroves, fish and livelihoods,” said Suryakant
Vaiti, the president of Vanewale Macchimaar Mandal.
Patchy repair
Even as MbPT has claimed it has plugged the leak, this correspondent
found that the officials had only hammered a plank of wood on the crack.
Officials said they will need time to fix the crack permanently.
Moreover, no agency has taken the responsibility of clean-up.
“The leak has not happened due to any act of omission or commission on
the part of MbPT. The mudflats don’t fall under our jurisdiction. But we
will work together with other stakeholders to restore whatever is
possible,” a spokesperson of MbPT said.
