Author: Explains

Highlights of the Bill

1. Dispute Resolution Cmtee (DRC) will try to settle disputes through negotiations within 1 yr, extendable by another 6 months
2. If the negotiations fail after 18 months (1yr + 6 mths) the dispute will be referred to the Tribunal
3. Members of DRC will comprise relevant subject matter experts as decided by the centre
4. The Tribunal

• the Bill proposes a single permanent Tribunal with multiple benches
• all the existing tribunals will be merged into it
• each dispute has to be solved within 4.5 yrs
• appeal agains the tribunal’s verdict is not allowed. The decision is final and binding.

For each river basin (at the national level) a dedicated agency will be established by the centre for data collection.

The system at present (ISWDA, 1956)

1. A new tribunal has to be formed each time a state approaches the centre with the request and the latter is convinced.
2. 8 such Tribunals have been formed till date.
3. The Judiciary does not have jurisdiction over such disputes. It can, however, interpret verdicts of tribunals
4. The system has had some successes especially with the 1st gen Tribunals (Krishna, Narmada and Godavari)
5. But in general, the system has struggled to offer equitable awards.

• Out of the 8, only 3 tribunals'(Krishna, Narmada and Godavari) awards have been accepted by the states.
• Tribunals like Cauvery and Ravi-Beas have been in existence for over 26 and 30 years respectively without any award.

Problems with ISWDA, 1956

1. Protracted proceedings and extreme delays in dispute resolution

Reasons for delays

• no time limit for adjudication by a Tribunal
• no upper age limit for the Chairman or the Members
• work getting stalled due to the occurrence of any vacancy, and
• no time limit for publishing the report of the Tribunal
• politicization of the issue compounds the problem

eg. recent eruption of Cauvery dispute as an identity issue b/w Tamils and Kannadigas

• Opacity in institutional framework and guidelines

1. procedural complexities + India’s messy federal polity (Water – state list ; Regulation and dvpt of inter-state rivers – union list) = muddled adjudication

• The tribunals have largely failed in ensuring compliance of verdicts, especially in the coalition era.

eg. Punjab refused to accept the Ravi-Beas Tribunal’s verdict

1. An absence of authoritative water data makes adjudication difficult.

The new system (2017 Bill) vs. The existing system (1956 Act)

• Will address problem 1 (of Delays (see above)) as
• the Bill proposes defined timelines and qualifications for members, and
• obviates the need for notification of the award in official gazette by the centre

• Will NOT address the problem – of Opacity – because of procedural complexities
• the DRC’s functions sound similar to the current techno-legal procedures of Tribunals
• India’s messy federal polity will continue to haunt satisfactory resolution
• as the Bill continues with the extant constitutional arrangement on ‘Water’
• Will NOT address problem 3 – of Compliance – as
• today, inter-state water disputes are no longer just about water allocation, public opinion matters too.
• the Bill lacks a transparent and robust institutional framework to secure public opinion and ensure quick implementation
• About problem 4 – related to establishment of a data bank and information system
  1. despite a similar provision in the extant law, tenuous centre-state relations have obscured success.
  2. the challenge is not about gathering data and information but more about consensus over the gathered data.
  3. moreover, the capacity to process this data to deliver ‘knowledge’ that could fasten adjudication remains elusive

Way forward

• Collaborative, not competitive approach to water disputes
  1. states should be sensitive to each others’ needs
  2. the govt must bring in a comprehensive legislation in place of the River Boards Act, 1956
• Implementation / Compliance
  1. set up a transparent and robust institutional framework
  2. the SC should restrain itself in accepting the inevitable “Spl Leave Petitions” against the Tribunal’s award
• Put ‘Water’ in the concurrent list to avoid legal complexities
• Improve awareness about rising water stress.
• Adopt a participatory approach (involve the public) to improve water use-efficiency.
• Incentivize sustainable use of water, especially in agriculture and industry.

Why in news?

1. The Government has shortlisted Six Institutions of Eminence (IoEs)  including 3 from Public Sector and 3 from Private Sector
2. It is expected that the above-selected Institutions will come up in the top 500 of the world ranking in 10 years and in top 100 of the world ranking eventually overtime
3. Each public Institution selected as ‘Institution of Eminence’ will get financial assistance up to Rs. 1000 Crore over the period of five years under this scheme

What will be the benefit of this decision to institutes?

1. It will ensure complete autonomy to the selected institutions and facilitate them to grow more rapidly
2. They will get more opportunity to scale up their operations with more skills and quality improvement so that they become World Class Institutions in the field of education
3. To achieve the top world ranking, these Institutions shall be provided with:

• Greater autonomy to admit foreign students up to 30% of admitted students
• To recruit foreign faculty up to 25% of faculty strength; to offer online courses up to 20% of its programmes
• To enter into academic collaboration with top 500 in the world ranking Institutions without permission of UGC
• Free to fix and charge fees from foreign students without restriction
• The flexibility of course structure in terms of number of credit hours and years to take a degree
• Complete flexibility in fixing of curriculum and syllabus

The significance of this step

• IoEs will have unprecedented freedom to fund activities and customise courses, bringing creativity to higher education
• It will support infrastructure and research in leading institutions to help them achieve international rankings
• Under this initiative, there is recognition that education and research require strong collaborative environments with other institutions and people of diverse nationalities, cultures and ideas.

Criticism/Challenges

1. Less public universities selected:

• The committee tasked with recommending Institutes of Eminence (IoE) wanted eight public universities and three private ones to get the tag.
• This was from a total of 114 universities that applied for the IoE status and scrutinised by a four-member committee.
• These universities included 74 public, 29 private (brownfield) and 11 private (green field) universities. However, the government mysteriously sanctioned only three public universities.
• The deserving public ones that missed out are IIT Madras, IIT Kharagpur, Delhi University, Jadavpur University and Anna University

2. Many deserving Private universities not selected:

• The deserving private greenfield university applicants that did not make the cut include ISB (Hyderabad), KREA (Raghuram Rajan) and Vedanta. The deserving private universities that did not make the cut include Ashoka University and Amrita University.

3. Very meagre allocation of funds:

• The government will give Rs 1,000 crore over five years to each of the three selected public universities.
• That is a budgetary outlay of Rs 600 crores per year for all the pomp and show. The top 10 universities in the world spend annually an average of Rs 5,800 crore each on research alone.
• The total endowment funds of top 10 universities on an average should be Rs 1,24,000 crore each

4. The impact on the majority of Universities would be minimal:

• India currently has approximately 800 universities, 39,000 colleges and 12,000 standalone institutions and over 34 million young Indians join higher education annually. Given the sheer size and scale of the Indian higher education system, the direct benefits that may accrue from implementing this proposal are likely to be minimal.

5. Complexities of International rankings:

• The idea of using global rankings for assessing universities has drawn some well-justified criticism before. What does a focus on rankings mean for education? Such rankings tend to prioritise impact of publications over the quality of research programs, the latter being equally, if not more, important for advancing knowledge.
• Further, these metrics only speak to individual publications and not the evaluation of research programs or their impact on the communities that they seek to serve.
• In nations such as India, where there is a need for research that addresses society, the usability and impact of applied research becomes important, which is one of the goals of creating IoE. This calls for newer, more holistic approaches to assessment of research quality

Way Forward

With the focus trained just on 6 institutes in this particular proposal, several hundreds of government universities where tens of millions of India’s youth study are being laid to waste by excessive regulation, lack of  leadership, shortage of teaching staff, inadequate funding, lack of infrastructure and maladministration, especially in smaller cities and towns. This ‘bullet-train’ type solution applied to the education field isn’t necessarily bad, but the lack of transparency seems to only benefit a minuscule proportion of the population in more than one way.

In light of the importance and urgency of transforming India’s higher education system, lessons from around the world, it is clear that there is a better way forward for the nation.

Following steps are required

1. To unshackle the higher education system quickly and at scale: integrate the regulatory agencies to create a single-window for establishing new universities, eliminate unnecessary functions of these agencies, and realign their responsibilities.
2. To spur hundreds of universities and thousands of colleges to improve their level of excellence: give all higher education institutions complete autonomy. Let them all compete and get better. In tandem with increased transparency and accountability on outcomes, all the stakeholders—students, industry, society and nation—will benefit.
3. Encourage 40-50 philanthropists to establish world-class universities: removing the regulatory hurdles for all at the outset, and letting them earn their eminent status from stakeholders, just like Stanford and all world-class universities have done, is far more effective and equitable.
4. Create a new agency that provides research funding on merit to faculty members in both public and private universities. This is a well-accepted practice around the world. Peer-reviewed by experts in respective fields, the increased research funding will spur competition between faculty members and institutions, catalyze India’s research and innovation ecosystem, and accelerate solving the nation’s grand challenges.

Conclusion

It is time to unshackle India’s higher education system from the British Raj rules, regulations, and mindset. With a tsunami-scale wave of youth at the gates of higher education, India cannot afford to transform the system six Institutes of Eminence at a time. It is time to make urgent and comprehensive reforms. Now.

Why in News?

The India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO) project has got a fresh lease of life

1. The Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) has taken it up as a special case and granted it environmental clearance to set up the lab in Bodi West Hills

What are neutrinos?

1. Neutrinos are electrically neutral, elementary weakly interacting subatomic particles with half-integer spin. They belong to the lepton family.
2. Neutrinos were first proposed by Swiss scientist Wolfgang Pauli, are the second most widely occurring particle in the universe, only second to photons, the particle which makes up light.
3. Neutrinos are similar to the more familiar electron, with one crucial difference: neutrinos do not carry electric charge. Because neutrinos are electrically neutral, they are not affected by the electromagnetic forces which act on electrons.

How are atmospheric neutrinos produced in nature?

1. Atmospheric neutrinos are produced from cosmic rays which consist of protons and heavy nuclei.
2. These collide with atmospheric molecules such as Nitrogen to give off pions and muons which further decay to produce neutrinos.

 Why study neutrinos?

• Properties of the sun

Solar neutrinos, produced in the core of the sun give us information about the interior of the sun. Studying these neutrinos can help us understand what goes on in the interior of the sun.

• What makes up the universe?

If the properties of neutrinos are understood better, they can be used in astronomy to discover what the universe is made up of.

• Probing Early Universe

The extragalactic neutrinos we observe may be coming from the distant past. These inviolate messengers can give us a clue about the origin of the universe and the early stages of the infant universe, soon after the Big Bang.

• In Nuclear non-proliferation:

It may have a role to play in nuclear non-proliferation through the remote monitoring of nuclear reactors. Using appropriate neutrino detectors, the plutonium content can be monitored remotely and used to detect any pilferage.

• Improve telecom and internet services:

They may open up a faster way to send data than the current ‘around the earth’ model, using towers, cables or satellites.

Such a communication system using neutrinos will be free of transmission losses as neutrinos rarely react with the atoms in their path. This can open up new vistas for telecom and Internet services.

• To detect mineral and oil deposits deep in the earth:

Neutrinos tend to change their “flavour” depending on how far they have travelled and how much matter they have passed through in the way, this same property might help us detect early geological defects deep within the earth, and thereby might be the answer to an early warning system against earthquakes.

India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO)

1. India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO) is a particle physics research project under construction to primarily study atmospheric neutrinos in a 1,300 meters (4,300 ft) deep cave under Ino Peak near Theni, Tamil Nadu, India
2. This project is notable in that it is anticipated to provide a precise measurement of neutrino mixing parameters
3. The project is a multi-institute collaboration and one of the biggest experimental particle physics projects undertaken in India
4. When completed, the main magnetized iron calorimeter (ICAL) experiment will include the world’s largest magnet, four times larger than the 12,500-tonne magnet in the Compact Muon Solenoid detector at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland
5. The initial goal of INO is to study neutrinos
6. Neutrinos are fundamental particles belonging to the lepton family. They come in three flavors, one associated with electrons and the others with their heavier cousins the muon and the Tau
7. Recent experiments indicate that these charge-neutral fundamental particles have finite but small mass which is unknown

What’s special about locating the INO in the South?

1. A project report says most of the neutrino detectors are at latitudes over 35 deg. It is possible to push such a detector down to almost 8 deg latitude in South India, within proximity to the Equator.
2. This permits neutrino astronomy searches covering the whole celestial sky and study of solar neutrinos passing through the Earth’s core.

Why does INO need the mountain?

1. The mountain consists of 1km of solid rock that filters away most of the charged particles from the cosmic rays.
2. The filtered set consists of a part of the incident cosmic ray protons and pions and practically all the neutrinos.

Why does the experiment have to be underground?

1. If the detector was placed at the surface of the mountain, it would pick up billions of cosmic ray muons every hour and about 10 neutrino events per day.
2. After placing inside the rock, it would detect only 300 muon events per hour and about 10 neutrino events per day of which 3 will be the desired muon neutrino events.

Who else has a neutrino facility?

1. Underground: SNO, Canada, Kamioka in Japan and Gran Sasso, Italy.
2. Underwater: Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, Antarctica. Antares – under the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Toulon, France.

Why are the locals opposing it?

1. Locals fear that the excavation and blasts needed to bore the tunnel in the mountains will endanger the biodiversity of the Western Ghats.
2. Some of the concerns voiced range from radiation, structural damage to the mountain to emission of hazardous chemicals.

Other concerns and way forward

1. Yet another concern is that spending crores on scientific research of this kind is a waste of money. Scientists counter this argument by highlighting the enormous achievements 20th century has brought in on the pillars of relativity and quantum mechanics.
2. Furthermore, they point out that the INO faculty will give Indian particle physics students the chance to do cutting-edge research at home. This counter-argument gains significance considering the fact that more than half the Nobel Prizes in physics in the past 50 years have been awarded to basic research in particle physics — this includes the 2015 Prize for the discovery of neutrino oscillations!.
3. Thus, while public apprehensions about projects like INO are understandable, they also illustrate the fact that communication between the scientific community and citizens needs to be more basic and more democratic. At a time when India is battling a brain drain epidemic, doing this could give its scientific community a much-needed boost while making science accessible to the larger public