Tuesday, April 16, 2013

DECCAN HERALD 11

Panorama
Dateline
Hyderabad
JBS Umanadh

Communal violence bill unlikely to figure in budget session. P 12

Testing time for YSR Cong as Jagan languishes in jail

ith the Central Bureau of Investigation making it amply clear that Kadapa MP and founder of YSR Congress Party, Y S Jagan Mohan Reddy will be staying behind the bars at the Chanchalguda central prison for a longer period, the political atmosphere in the state is once again charged up. In a further embarrassment to the Kiran Kumar government in Andhra Pradesh, states home minister Sabita Indra Reddy has been named accused number 4 in the latest chargesheet filed in the Jagan Mohan Reddys disproportionate assets case. The additional chargesheet disappointed YSRC, which was hoping for a single and final chargesheet as per SCs directions, paving the way for Jagans bail. The CBI joint director Lakshminarayana said in unequivocal terms that

the CBI will be submitting a series of additional chargehseets in the coming days, pertaining to each one of the issues that the central agency is investigating. The CBI also made it clear that the agency has never given an assurance that it would file a final chargesheet as the investigation is complex and involved a plethora of companies domestic and foreign, ministers and private individuals. The fifth chargesheet alone has 62 pages, 53 documents and CBI says they had examined 46 witnesses. It has named 13 accused including Jagan Mohan Reddy as accused number 1. The other accused are Vijay Saireddy, Dalmia Cements MD Puneet, Sabita Indra Reddy, suspended IAS officer Srilaxmi, former mines director VD Rajagopal, and other officials of Raghuram Cements, Ishwar Cements and Dalmia Cements. The Congress-led Kiran Kumar Reddys government, which is technically in minority, thanks to the desertion of MLAs loyal to late YS Rajasekhara Reddy, has some breathing time, delaying the

prospect of facing a free and rejuvenated Jagan. The Congress as of now is comfortable facing a nave and docile Vijayamma, Jagans mother and Jagans sister Sharmila, a political novice. Self-goal With at least three of his ministers including a home minister under CBI scanner

and one in the jail, Kiran Kumar is left pondering whether the Congress has hit a self-goal by rising the quid pro quo issue which ricocheted onto his own cabinet members who were ministers in YSR government and signed the controversial government orders without thinking twice. How can a minister who signed the document be innocent and a person like Jagan who held no position in the government jailed for almost a year without bail?, asks YSRC senior leader Ambati Rambabu. The YSRC honorary president and mother of Jagan, YS Vijayamma holds Congress high command, as well as Kiran Kumar responsible for hampering the judicial process against the accused in the disproportionate assets case. Why the CBI is singling out my son while the chief minister is not allowing a prime accused and minister Dharmana Prasada Rao to be questioned, though he is accused number 5 in the chargesheet relating to the Vampic property case? she asks. Taking advantage of his political backing, Rao has now approached the Andhra

Pradesh high court, pleading that proceedings against him be quashed as the state has not given the sanction to prosecute him. With Jagan in jail and the rudderless YSRC appearing to be losing the steam midway, there seems to be a political realignment of forces based on caste in the highly stratified society of Andhra Pradesh. There is disillusionment in the Reddy caste, which stood by the Congress till the death of YSR Reddy. After Sabitha was named in the new chargesheet, suspicion is growing that Congress has stopped banking on its traditional vote bank and is craving for a honeymoon with the Kapu community. Elevation of Chiranjeevi to Delhi politics and appointment of Botsa Satyanarayana (also a kapu) as APCC chief are seen as a counter to the dissertation of Reddy leaders from the Congress. Immediately after Sabithas name appeared in the chargesheet, many YSRC leaders approached her and advised her to quit Congress and join YSRC. But further delay in Jagans release

might adversely affected the prospects of YSRC as the party was banking mainly on legislators from other parties rather than creating its own brand of new leadership. With the legislators shifting loyalties and Jagans troubles unlikely to end soon, a section of Congress cadres is now rethinking on their moves. Meanwhile, Jagan Mohan Reddy has filed a fresh bail application in the Supreme Court. This is his sixth attempt at getting bail and the second time he has approached the Supreme Court to grant him bail in the disproportionate assets case. The main contention in the bail application is that the CBI has misled the court and violated the SC order that had asked it to file a consolidated chargesheet, said Jagan Mohan Reddys advocate Ashok Reddy. The Kadapa MP has applied for bail twice at the CBI special court at Nampally, twice at the AP high court, and has now approached the Supreme Court for the second time. He had recently filed a memo on the fifth chargesheet and asked the court to treat it as a final chargesheet.

Indias ambitious plans to jumpstart hardware industry

Experts say efforts to foment a high-technology revolution might come to naught once again
By Sean Mclain

Capturing afterglow of the Big Bang

By Lawrence M Krauss

he government of India, home to many of the worlds leading software outsourcing companies, wants to replicate that success by creating a homegrown industry for computer hardware. But software requires little infrastructure; building electronics is a far more demanding business. Chip makers need vast quantities of clean water and reliable electricity. Computer and tablet assemblers depend on economies of scale and easy access to inexpensive parts, which China has spent many years building up. So the Indian government is trying a carrot-and-stick approach. In October, it began mandating that at least half of all laptops, computers, tablets and dot-matrix printers procured by government agencies must come from domestic sourcesa difficult goal to meet, considering that India produces very few of those products. At the same time, it is dangling as much as 150 billion rupees, or about $2.75 billion, in incentives in front of chip makers to entice them to build the first semiconductor manufacturing plant in India, a key step in creating a domestic hardware industry. But like so much of Indian economic policy, it is doubtful that either initiative will have the effect the government is intending. Nobody disputes Indias need to build up manufacturing, said Gaurav Verma, who heads the New York office of the US-India Business Council, a private sector group. Not doing so would be fiscally irresponsible. But Verma said Indian efforts to force international companies to manufacture in the country were futile. The government needs to not mandate this, but create an ecosystem, he said. The domestic purchasing mandate, known as the preferred market access policy, seeks to address a real problem. Imports of electronics are growing so fast that by 2020, they are projected to eclipse oil as the largest import expense for India. The current Indian import bill for semiconductors alone is $6.6 billion a year, and demand is growing about 20 per cent a year, according to the Indian Department of Electronics and Information Technology, which devised the purchasing mandate. For all electronics, Indian imports are projected to grow to $400 billion by 2020 from about $70 billion in 2012. The problem we are facing is that the demand is growing so much that it is reaching nonsustainable levels, said Dr Ajay Kumar, joint secretary of the department. Dot-matrix printers, outdated in most of the world, are among the few electronic products that India manufactures. About 400,000 dot-matrix printers were sold in India in the year ended March 31, an increase of 2 per cent from the year before, according to the Manufacturers Association for Information Technology, a computer industry trade group in India. The government, which accounts for about 40 per cent of the countrys electronicspurchases, hopes to use its purchasing power to jump-start manufacturing of other computer

BIGGER STEP: Software programmers develop applications at the MoFirst Solutions office in Mumbai.

goods. However, the government has adopted a broad definition of what it considers locally made, because so few electronics are manufactured in India. If at least 30 per cent of a computers components are made in India, then it will qualify.The policy also allows prospective suppliers to show value addition instead of actually manufacturing the goods in India, Kumar said. For example, India does not manufacture hard drives, but it assembles and tests them. Under the policy, a hard drive that is assembled in India would be considered to have been made in the country. Computer makers contacted for this article declined to discuss how the new policy would affect their sales. High-technology The big fish the government would like to land is a factory to produce microprocessors for computers. A computer processor typically accounts for 25 per cent to 35 per cent of the total cost of a desktop or laptop computer. India hopes that such a plant, which could cost as much as $5 billion to build, would help encourage a bigger high-technology manufacturing industry, Kumar said. According to Indian news reports, two consortiums have been in talks with the government to construct microprocessor foundries. The first is led by the Jaypee Group, one of the largest construction companies in India, which built the Formula One track in Uttar Pradesh. It has joined up with International Business Machines, a major chip maker,

which will provide the technology for the plant. The second bid is from Hindustan Semiconductor Manufacturing, which despite its name is an American company that does not yet manufacture any chips. It is working on the bid with ST Microelectronics, a chip maker based in Geneva. Ron Somers, president of the US India Business Council, said he doubted that India could provide a new chip making facility with the infrastructure it needed to even keep the lights on. India has an installed electricity generation of 12,000 megawatts, he said. The chip makers need 16,000 more of additional capacity. Tell me where were going to have a major chip fab thats going to spring up overnight like a blossoming flower, he said. There have been several attempts to set up chip plants in the past. The most recent attempt was in 2008 by SemIndia, an American company run by Indian-American entrepreneurs. It ended acrimoniously, when a dispute arose over the terms of the agreement between the company and the state of Andhra Pradesh, where the plant was to be situated. Some experts warn that India's efforts to foment a high-technology revolution might come to naught once again, unless it reduced some of the barriers to doing business in the country. In the case of some electronics, the import duty on a finished product is less costly than duties on the component parts, said P V G

Menon, the president of the Indian Electronics & Semiconductor Manufacturing Association, an industry group. Costs are also higher because of a lack of reliable power and the extra time it takes to move goods on the countrys roads. Attracted by the new Buy India requirements, Dell, the largest PC retailer in India, considered setting up manufacturing facilities in India. Dell, which is based in Texas, assembles computers in India, but does not manufacture any components. They flew in their suppliers from China and Taiwan to see if they could set up facilities. They said no, said an industry executive, who requested anonymity since he was not authorized to speak on behalf of Dell. The market is too small, and logistically it is a nightmare. Dell declined to comment. India has a model for success, said Verma of the business council: its automobile industry. In the 1980s, India opened its automotive industry to foreign companies, and in 1982, Suzuki Motor bought a majority stake in Maruti Udhyog. The joint venture produced the Maruti 800, Indias first affordable car. However, the real watershed moment came in 1991, when India dropped its local-manufacturing requirements. The industry exploded, and there are now about 40 million cars on Indian roads. India now has the sixth-largest auto industry in the world because of the ecosystem the government created, Verma said.
The New York Times

aby pictures are often boring to everyone but for the parents who show them. But if a baby picture of the universe doesnt inspire your imagination, what can? The European Space Agency recently released the first detailed all-sky images taken from its Planck satellite mission, the latest satellite to probe the afterglow of the Big Bang. This is the radiation coming toward us from all directions from a time when the universe was only 380,000 years old, just after it had cooled sufficiently so that the protons in the hot gas could capture electrons to form neutral hydrogen and the universe then became transparent, and the ambient thermal background of radiation could travel unimpeded to us today. In the intervening 13.7 billion years or so this radiation has cooled close to 3 degrees above absolute zero and comes in the form of microwaves. In fact for those of us old enough to remember television before cable, when the TV stations went off the air and the screen filled with static, about 1 per cent of the static visible on the screen was due to this radiation from the Big Bang. In spite of this, this signal actually remained hidden until it was accidentally found in 1965 by Robert Wilson and Arno Penzias, who later shared the Nobel Prize for its discovery, which confirmed the Big Bang origin of our universe. Because this radiation is so cold, it took almost 30 years before a satellite was launched into space by Nasa to get away from the warm background coming from the Earth and the absorption of radiation in our atmosphere with a sensitivity great enough to actually image this signal. George Smoot, who along with John Mather was awarded a Nobel Prize for this work, exclaimed that looking at this image was like staring at the face of God. This hyperbole can perhaps be forgiven, given the excitement of discovery, but any structure Smoot may have claimed to see was not unlike searches for images of animals in the clouds. The sensitivity of the experiment at the time was barely enough to separate the signal from other random backgrounds in the detector. Another 20 years and now Planck has produced an exquisite picture whose fine-grained detail displays hotspots and coldspots in this background over the whole sky that represent variations in temperature of less than 1/10,000th of a degree from place to place. These miniscule fluctuations never-

the less reflect small excesses of matter that would later grow due to gravity to form all the structures we observe today galaxies, stars, planets, and everything they house. Of more interest is the question of where these lumps of matter and energy came from. We currently have many reasons to think they hearken back to a time much earlier than 380,000 years after the Big Bang, and may have been created a millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second into the history of our universe. As long as humans have been human, we have been fascinated by cosmic questions. How did the universe begin? Where did we come from? Are we alone? Attempting to answer these questions may not produce a better toaster or a faster airplane, but it is nothing short of remarkable that modern science is revealing facets of our universe that are changing our perspectives on such foundational cosmic questions. It is too early to assess what new changes will result from the Planck data. When compared with earlier results they seem to suggest a slightly older universe, maybe 13.8 billion years old instead of 13.7 billion years old. And there are intriguing anomalies, as there usually are in data at the edge of our detection abilities. The northern hemisphere of the sky apparently has some larger hotspots and coldspots than the southern hemisphere, and there is one particularly large coldspot in the north that seems out of place. If history is any guide, most of these anomalies will disappear. It is an unfortunate facet of science reporting that it isnt often made clear that most anomalies in experiments tend to go away, just as most theoretical ideas turn out to be wrong. Instead of attributing significance to potentially strange results, it is the business of science to try and prove them wrong before we blindly move forward. I expect we will never achieve answers to all the fundamental questions we may have; each new result breeds new questions, after all. But to live in times such as these, when we are plausibly exploring realms of nature that previously may have been thought to be in the domain of philosophy or theology is for me unbelievably tantalizing. Looking out at the vast universe, it appears that our own existence in the cosmos may be more capricious and insignificant than we may have thought. But this should not be cause for despair, but rather a source for awe and wonder.

WHATS THE BUZZ

Brain imaging helps fight eating disorder

Advanced brain imaging technologies are helping scientists understand the neurobiology of eating disorders and improve treatments. Current treatments for anorexia and bulimia nervosa are often limited and ineffective. Patients relapse. They become chronically ill. They face a higher risk of dying. A major reason contributing to the difficulty in developing new treatments for these disorders

is our limited understanding of how brain function may contribute to eating disorder symptoms, said Walter H. Kaye, MD, professor of psychiatry and director of the Eating Disorder Treatment and Research Program at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine.

Sulfur converted to lightweight plastic for better batteries

A University of Arizona-led research team has discovered a simple process for making a new lightweight plastic from the inexpensive and abundant element sulfur. The new chemical process can transform waste sulfur into a lightweight plastic that may

improve batteries for electric cars, the researchers said. The new plastic has other potential uses, including optical uses. The team has successfully used the new plastic to make lithium-sulfur batteries. Next-generation lithium-sulfur, or Li-S, batteries will be better for electric and hybrid cars and for military uses because they are more efficient, lighter and cheaper than those currently used, lead researcher Jeffrey Pyun said, a UA associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry. The new plastic has great promise as something that can be produced easily and inexpensively on an industrial scale, he said. The team's discovery could provide a new use for the sulfur left over when oil and natural gas are refined into cleaner-burning fuels.

The researchers have filed an international patent for their new chemical process and for the new polymeric electrode materials for Li-S batteries.

Bird flu strain seen adapting to mammals, humans

A genetic analysis of the avian flu virus responsible for at least nine human deaths in China portrays a virus evolving to adapt to human cells, a study has said. This has sparked concern about its potential to spark a new global flu pandemic, says the collaborative study, conducted by a group led by Masato Tashiro of the Influenza Virus Research Center,

National Institute of Infectious Diseases, and Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Tokyo. The group examined the genetic sequences of H7N9 isolates from four of the pathogen's human victims as well as samples derived from birds and the environs of a Shanghai market. Kawaoka, a leading expert on avian influenza said that the human isolates, but not the avian and environmental ones, have a protein mutation that allows for efficient growth in human cells and that also allows them to grow at a temperature that corresponds to the upper respiratory tract of humans, which is lower than you find in birds.