📰 Himalayas losing rare fossils to souvenir hunters
Coral reefs from Triassic period are among items on sale
•Fossils dating back a couple of hundred million years, in remote villages of Lahaul and Spiti valley of Himachal Pradesh, are being mined and sold as cheap tourist souvenirs, destroying key links in the ancient geological history of the Indian subcontinent.
•These fossils can be bought for as low as Rs. 50 from local shops and eateries where they are displayed. Of several shapes and sizes, the common fossils on sale are coral reef of the Triassic period, between 250 million and 199 million years old, and ammonoids of Triassic-Jurassic period, between 199 million and 145 million years ago.
•The geological remnants, described as part of a marine sequence, can be found in the hills near Lalung, Mud, Komic, Hikkim and Langza villages in the Lahaul and Spiti district in Spiti valley about 200 km from Shimla.
•What is more, two of the three places where giant scorpion trace fossils along with trilobite traces were found in Parahio valley have been destroyed during construction of a road to Pin valley. The giant scorpion traces are unique and found only in Antarctica, Australia and Spiti Valley.
•During construction of a canal, Middle Norian Coral reef in Ratangnala, a tributary of Spiti river was mined to provide building materials. The excavated earth has covered what is left of the reef.
•Another geologically significant feature belonging to the era when continents first stabilised, a Paleoproterozoic paleosol in the Sutlej valley, was exposed during the construction of Hindustan-Tibet Road in Himachal Pradesh. Walls have been constructed on either side and nothing can be observed now.
•Rising tourism has contributed to the erosion in Spiti valley, which paleontologists say is the “museum of Indian Geology”. Many tourists are aware of the availability of fossils here and offer to buy them in large numbers, spurring locals, including children, to identify and pick fossils at various sites. The fossils have hit the internet, with the Spiti valley souvenirs featuring on travel sites and blogs, and some tour operators offering to take customers directly to the sites to acquire fossils between May and October.
•“Fossils have been in high demand, especially in the last two years as the number of tourists has increased. Everyone coming to Kaza is aware of fossils on sale. We try to create awareness, but often fail,” says Tanya Roy, who runs Wanderer’s Nest, a homestay at Kaza. She is the founder of Earthroute, which works to protect indigenous culture and promotes sustainability.
📰 is there some worry about the rupee?
How has the rupee performed?
•After falling 2.6% against the dollar in 2016, the rupee is on a roll in 2017. In this calendar year, the rupee is one of the best performing Asian currencies which has strengthened 5.9% against the dollar. It is the best performing currency in Asia after the Thai Baht, the Singapore dollar, and the Taiwanese dollar. On August 4, when it touched 63.56 against the dollar, it was on a two-year high, since July 22, 2015. On Friday, August 11, however, it closed at 64.13 against the dollar on sustained demand from importers and corporates.
When did the turnaround begin?
•Many currency experts said the Union Budget in which Finance Minister Arun Jaitley showed a resolve to stick to the path of fiscal discipline and the government’s thrust on reforms boosted investors’ confidence. The budget was followed by the monetary policy of the central bank which changed its stance from accommodative to neutral, indicating it wanted to keep inflation under check. This further boosted investor sentiment — as reflected in the rise of the equity indices — both Sensex and Nifty touching all-time highs in recent weeks, though there has been some correction in the last few weeks. Since February, portfolio capital flows were over $25 billion which boosted the rupee.
How are the authorities reacting?
•For a long time, the sharp appreciation of the rupee was seen as a worry as it hurts exports. However, it seems there is a change in the thought process of the Narendra Modi-led NDA government. There were several comments from Union Minister of State (Independent Charge) for Commerce and Industry Nirmala Sitharaman which suggests the country may have developed a higher level of tolerance for the rupee’s upside. Ms. Sitharaman has suggested that the exchange rate is not the only factor for exports to grow. On its part, the central bank is not intervening in the foreign exchange now as it was doing a few years ago. The Reserve Bank of India always maintains that it intervenes in the foreign exchange market to curb volatility and does not target any level.
What is the worry?
•One of the downside risks of the rupee’s recent rising spree is that a large part of the import portfolio is unhedged. Hedging would have helped companies with foreign currency exposure to shield themselves from fluctuations in rates. According to State Bank of India’s estimate, at least 40% of the importers’ portfolio is unhedged. In 2013, when the rupee was tumbling, the unhedged position of exporters was seen as a major worry for banks. Now, it is mandated that banks have to set aside capital, in terms of provision, if their corporate clients don’t hedge their portfolio.
•“While rupee appreciation does have positive consequences in terms of lower imported inflation, in times of lower oil prices, we could perhaps live with a little bit of rupee depreciation,” said Soumya Kanti Ghosh, chief economist, State Bank of India. Mr. Ghosh also argued that with regard to trade with China, if the rupee continued to appreciate it could adversely impact the production of these domestic industries. The rupee also appreciated about 3.7% against the Chinese Renminbi since February. This has resulted in a surge in cheaper imports from China. “Even the IIP data reveal that industries such as electrical equipment; motor vehicles, trailers and semi-trailers; fabricated metal products; and chemical industries are showing negative growth in the past few months,” he said in a note.
What lies ahead?
•While some correction is due for the currency in the near term, currency experts said trend in local stocks could guide the direction of the rupee. “Over this year, any correction in domestic equity beyond 2% from highs have triggered 1% sell-off in USD-INR,” Kotak Securities said in a note to investors. “At the same time, Nifty has not yet witnessed a 5% or more of correction since the intermediate rally began in December 2016, the longest streak in nearly two decades. Therefore, there is always scope that the correction could morph into something bigger than the 2-3% declines the market has witnessed in the past eight months. In USD-INR, as we remain structurally bearish, we would view a Nifty-led sell-off in INR as an opportunity to scale into positional longs in the high real yield pair,” it said.
📰 U.S. must promote education to counter radicalisation
Unesco at a critical juncture, says the French candidate for Director-General, stressing need for dialogue among members
•As the race for the Unesco Director-General heats up, the nine candidates from different countries are making their way to India, seen as one of the most important votes to get. In an interview , Audrey Azoulay, who as French presidential adviser on culture had led many programmes on preserving culture and history, including rescuing Syrian monuments desecrated by ISIS, says the biggest problem for the U.N. organisation today is the withdrawal of funding, particularly from the U.S.
You hope to lead Unesco at a time of financial crisis. What has caused this situation, and what solutions you would like to implement?
•This issue cannot be resolved without addressing how the organisation operates and assessing its work. Some member states have raised questions as to Unesco’s reliability and efficiency, and it is in our responsibility to rebuild a true confidence pact with both public and private contributors.
•It is necessary to rebuild dialogue with the U.S. and all member states in arrears of their contribution to the organisation.
How significant will changes in world leadership, especially in the U.S. be to Unesco’s future and that of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)? How do you hope to counter the Trump administration’s disinterest in funding the United Nations and Unesco in particular?
•It is in the interest of Americans to promote education all over the world as the response to terrorism and radicalisation cannot be only taking security measures; it must naturally be through education. I understand that a new dialogue will have to be established with the current U.S. administration. All programmes implemented in the organisation are of interest to American society and actors. I believe strongly in the benefits of multilateralism. But if this conviction is not shared, there is little that can be achieved.
France is a member of the P-5, but you are up against China, as well as candidates from the Arab world — a region that has not yet had a term, including the Egyptian candidate who is backed by the African Union. Why do you propose that India would support your candidature over the others?
•The selection procedure for the Director-General’s position is based on an open pool of candidacies. As you are aware, there are nine candidates in all: four from the Arab Group and five from other geographical groups, including one from Latin America and three from Asia (Azerbaijan, China and Vietnam).
•The competition is thus, balanced and fair. As Unesco Director-General, I will always be fair-minded and willing to listen to each geographical group, and I will do my utmost to ensure that no group feels marginalized or unacknowledged.
•As regards India, it is a key player in Unesco, highly valued for its commitment in each of the fields of action of the organization: education, heritage and culture, sciences, freedom of the press. Your country’s involvement in Unesco is fully in line with the spirit in which the French Government presented my candidacy for the post of Director General.
On the subject of representation, seven of 10 previous D-G’s of Unesco have belonged to Europe or America. Shouldn’t this election see a candidate from the “East” succeed instead?
•Unesco is at a critical turning point in its history. The real issue is the future of Unesco, not the nationality of the candidates.
•All candidacies are relevant. Mine is coherent with my personal experience and the values of humanism, cultural diversity, multilateralism, universalism — promoted and implemented by France, and all member states and partners that share these common values. Bolstered by these values and this tradition, France is in a position to dialogue with everyone and build consensus.
On the whole, Unesco has been impacted by “politicisation” for example on the votes over Kosovo, or over the ownership of Jerusalem and Hebron. As D-G, how will you work to reduce the politicisation?
•The organisation is indeed divided on these issues, but division is not inevitable. Unesco is the only place where men and women of goodwill can address sensitive issues on a level playing field, transcending the balances of power between states. Unesco must represent the hopes of our new generations.
📰 Israel is getting a new wall, this time with a twist
To spend more than $1 billion to build an underground barrier along Gaza, military says the purpose is to defend Israelis
•Israel is building another wall to protect itself from its enemies. But rather than a major eyesore, much of this one will be invisible.
•In the coming months, military officials say, the army will be accelerating construction of a subterranean barrier around the Gaza Strip, designed to cut off tunnels running beneath the border into Israel like the ones Hamas militants used to ambush Israeli military posts during the summer-long war of 2014.
•Challenged by hostile forces on most of its fronts, Israel is already pretty much walled in. Aboveground fences and sections of concrete wall run along and through parts of the West Bank, a legacy of Palestinian suicide bombings during the second intifada . Formidable steel fences also stretch along the northern frontiers with Lebanon and Syria, the southern borders with Jordan and the Egyptian Sinai, and around Gaza, the isolated Palestinian coastal enclave controlled for the last decade by Hamas, the Islamic militant group.
•The approach seems to have caught on internationally. President Donald Trump invoked Israel’s “wall” — without specifying which one — as a model for the barrier he has vowed to build along the U.S.’s border with Mexico. And the migrant crisis has spurred European interest in Israeli fence-building techniques.
•Israeli military officials are being understandably cagey about how the new underground barrier will work, other than to say it will also include an aboveground section and incorporate layers of advanced technological systems. The cost is expected to be about 4 billion shekels (more than $1 billion), according to Israeli news reports, which suggest it will plunge to a depth of about 130 feet. Maj. Gen. Eyal Zamir, commander of the military’s Southern Command, told reporters this week it would be completed within about two years.
No new war
•In the meantime, the Israeli military is working to ensure that the project does not prompt the next war.
•Military commanders are insisting that the wall is meant only to defend Israelis, and emphasising that it will be built in Israeli territory, in the hope of removing any justification for Hamas to attack the construction teams and set off another round of fighting.
•Israel’s technologically advanced army invested heavily to combat Hamas’ lower-tech weapons. Israel developed the Iron Dome air defence system to knock out the crude rockets Hamas and other militant groups fired at its cities. Faced with the precision of Iron Dome, Hamas went underground and focused on building tunnels.
•Hamas officials insisted they would not be fazed by Israel’s subterranean wall. “The threats of the occupation do not frighten the resistance,” Hazim Kassim, a Hamas spokesman, said in an interview Thursday, referring to Israel.
•He added, “Judging by previous experience, the resistance will find ways to overcome these obstacles.”NYT
📰 Turned away in a crisis
Kerala’s plans to bring down the emergency response time could fail if systems are not maintained and ethics are ignored
•He was involved in a road accident, then rushed to hospital in an ambulance but ended up being shunted from hospital to hospital for seven hours, from Kollam to Thiruvananthapuram. No one took him in. The death of migrant worker Murugan, in Kerala last week, who was turned away from four hospitals on the grounds of not having the facilities to treat him, has highlighted the abysmal level of emergency care in the country.
Trauma care project
•An ambitious five-year Rs. 128 crore project was mooted in Kerala last October to improve emergency care facilities, where it is planned to bring down the emergency response time to between 15 to 20 minutes. Once functional, it will operate through a centralised helpline. Here, control room operators, using live updates on the number of ventilators and beds available at the nearest hospital and information on the kind of injuries sustained by a patient, can direct an ambulance driver to the nearest Level 1 or Level 2 hospital, according to Dr. Mohammad Asheel, the nodal officer for the Comprehensive Trauma Care Project. “We believe we can bring down accident response time to 15 to 20 minutes using this model,” he says. The project entails upgrading 35 hospitals in the State, along with the operation of 315 ‘Basic Life Support’ ambulances and 35 ‘Advanced Life Support’ ambulances for inter-facility transfer.
•Work is nearing completion at four centres across the State which includes Trivandrum Medical College (Level 1), which is being upgraded at a cost of Rs. 6.5 crore. “Three more hospitals in Ernakulam, Neyyattinkara and Alappuzha will be upgraded and functional in six months,” says Dr. Asheel.
•However, without support from private hospitals which have an extensive network of facilities across the State and often the first places to treat road accident victims, the system looks set to fail. Referring to the Kollam incident, Dr. Asheel says a Government Order states that the inability of an accident victim to pay cannot be a reason to refuse him treatment.
•“We hope that once the Clinical Establishments Act comes into action, there will be greater regulation over private hospitals and information on [the] number[s] of equipment and facilities provided to patients is made available to the government easily,” he adds. After furore over Murugan’s death in the State, the Kerala Clinical Establishments (Registration and Regulation) Bill, 2017, which had been pending for years, was presented in the Kerala Assembly last week.
In Karnataka
•In neighbouring Karnataka, after complaints of ambulance services being misused to facilitate the private sector, the Karnataka Health and Family Welfare Department ended its association with GVK-EMRI (Emergency Management and Research Institute) to provide emergency care through its ambulance services. According to the Health Department, misuse of funds, and an increasing number of referrals to private hospitals were some of the reasons for terminating the contract. Meanwhile, the Health Department’s promised centralised ventilator helpline across the State has still to be functional even after two years.
•Any health-care system requires regular checks and maintenance without which medical help can be hard to get even in places with large amounts of footfall. Last Tuesday, a man in his fifties who suffered an acute heart attack at Kempegowda bus station, Bengaluru’s central bus terminal, had to wait for an hour and fifteen minutes for an ambulance to arrive. A bystander, Rajesh N., who noticed his discomfiture, tried to get him medical help but was told by the Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation that the only ambulance available had broke down while ferrying another patient to a hospital. “While there was a medical room, it did not have the required medicines. A doctor had to intervene and send an employee to get medicines to treat the man,” says Mr. Rajesh. The man was lucky to survive, but it is disheartening that a central commute point in a metropolitan city such as Bengaluru, where lakhs of passengers travel every day, has just the bare minimum as far as emergency care facilities are concerned.
•Unfortunately, even the best of schemes fail when systems are not maintained and ethics are ignored, which was what happened to the unfortunate migrant worker in Kerala.
📰 Our problems are solvable now
What is lacking is the will, the focus, and clear plans
•The release of the second part of the Economic Survey for 2016-17 — the part which contains all those interminable tables and graphs which our honourable MPs usually tended to skip over when the Survey used to be presented as a single document — has once again shifted the current topic of public discussion away from the showdown of the strongmen in Gujarat to more fundamental questions like roti, kapda, makaan and whether achhe din are finally around the corner or not.
•This is all to the good. As a nation, we tend to outrage over inconsequential things like whether Amazon Canada is selling slippers with pictures of Hindu gods on them, and tend to skim over the really life-altering ones like demonetisation and GST. So, some talk about the economy is good.
The gloomy growth horizon
•The consensus of first-cut opinion on the Survey-II’s findings is that the news is not good. There are dark clouds looming over the growth horizon, and not of the good, rain-bearing type. From a GDP growth rate projection of 6.75-7.5% in February (during the Budget), the Survey says meeting the higher end of the band is pretty much not possible, with the “balance of risks” having shifted to the downside.
•Amongst the risks, the Survey points out the growing crisis in Indian farming, with rising agrarian distress and unremunerative prices for almost all non-cereal crops; the balance sheet risks of the rising tide of farm loan waivers in States; India’s growing private sector balance sheet crisis; and the real threat of deflation.
•To me though, there are other takeaways from the kind of overall view of an economy the size and complexity of India’s that a document like the Economic Survey provides, takeaways which should form the basis for detailed reflection on where we are as an economy, how far we have travelled towards the many goals that we have set for ourselves, and more importantly, picking and prioritising which problems we can, and should, solve first.
•The first is that we are a pretty large economy, whether in rupee or dollar terms. Gross National Income grew from a mere Rs. 10,360 crore in 1950-51 to a staggering Rs. 1,49,94,109 crore in 2016-17. When we cheer 70 years of Independence come August 15, this is a number we can certainly cheer to. Per capita income grew from just Rs. 254 in 1950-51 (current prices) to Rs. 1,03,219 in 2016-17. This is the first time in our history that (even if notionally, and on paper), every single Indian is a lakhpati.
•The size and financial strength of the government, too, has grown in proportion. The first interim Budget of India estimated total government revenues at just Rs. 171.5 crore. In 2016-17, the total budgetary outlay of the Central and State governments and Union Territories together amounted to Rs. 38,38,558 crore. That is nearly $608 billion. In a single year.
•That still pales in comparison to the trillion dollar-plus budgets of the U.S. and China, but six hundred billion dollars is not chump change. There are a lot of problems that you can solve by spending that kind of money every year. The question is, are we solving the right problems?
Lagging behind smaller nations
•We may be among the fastest growing economies in the world, we may be militarily strong enough to rattle sabres at China, but for a vast number of our people, the growth or development or strength is yet to touch them in any meaningful way. India ranks 131 out of 188 countries in the Human Development Index. The Survey admits: “In comparison to other nations in the BRICS grouping, India has the lowest rank… The Life Expectancy at Birth (LEB) is also lower than that of Bangladesh, Brazil, China, and Russia.”
•It is now 42 years since India launched the Integrated Child Development Services, the world’s largest early childhood intervention programme. During this period, India’s Infant Mortality Rate dropped 68% — but at 40.5/1,000, is still much higher than neighbouring Bangladesh, Pakistan or Nepal and well shy of the 29 deaths per 1,000 live births target which was meant to be achieved by 2015.
•Now this is a problem we can fix with $600 billion, with enough and more left over to tackle another big problem: education. The mean years of schooling for India are the lowest in comparison to other BRICS nations. According to a Pratham report, about 42% of children in Class 3 are able to read at Class 1 level in 2016. “The fact that the ASER report compares the skills of Standard 3 children in Standard 1 levels is an example of the state of the learning outcomes of the primary education,” the Survey admits.
•I could go on, but the point is that we are in the big league now and have the technology and the money to solve problems which even little league nations have cracked. What we need is a clear focus on what to solve — and steadfast execution.
📰 Is generic drug deflation good?
•Not all drug prices are going up. Amid the public fury over the escalating costs of brand-name medications, the prices of generic drugs have been falling, raising fears about the profitability of major generic manufacturers.
•This may seem like good news for consumers, but it’s unclear how much they will save.
Why are prices falling?
•Generic drugs are copycat versions of brand-name products and — to a point — their prices are expected to drop over time. When a brand-name drug first loses its patent protection, prices fall slowly. Over the next couple of years, as more competitors enter the market, the prices drop even more, until the pills become commodities and sell for pennies. Blockbuster drugs that have recently taken this path include Lipitor and Plavix, the cholesterol-lowering and blood-thinning pills that now cost as little as $10 for a monthly prescription.
•Generic drug prices have been declining in the United States since at least 2010, according to an August 2016 report by the Government Accountability Office.
•They have fallen even in the face of high-profile exceptions: Dozens of old generic drugs have risen in price in recent years, for reasons that include supply disruptions and competitors’ leaving the market.
•Despite these cases, the trend toward deflating generic prices appears to have accelerated as companies have more aggressively undercut each other’s prices.
•Making matters worse for the generics companies, they are missing out on peak profit potential because not as many brand-name products are losing patent protection. The six-month period after a drug goes generic is typically the most lucrative time for the first company to market. And the Food and Drug Administration has been clearing out a backlog of generic-drug approvals, meaning more competitors are now entering markets for certain drugs.
•In a recent call with Wall Street analysts, George S. Barrett, the chairman and chief executive of Cardinal Health, a major drug distributor that reported declining profits last week, said generic deflation was not new, but that the company historically had been able to anticipate it. “It just looked a little different than we had seen,” he said. In recent years, generic companies have gone on acquisition sprees in an effort to head off some of these challenges. But they have been outmanoeuvred by those who buy their products, a trend that has been intensifying. Major pharmacy chains, drug wholesalers and pharmacy benefit managers (which operate drug plans for insurers) have united into colossal buying groups.
•So are consumers saving any money? The declining prices are broadly beneficial to the health care system, and may put some slight brake on rising premiums. But most of those with health insurance pay a fixed co-payment — $10, for example — for each generic prescription, and therefore don’t pay more or less, regardless of any fluctuation in the actual price. And even those who pay cash for generics may not notice a drop in price because many are already cheap.
•Retail drug prices dropped 2.4% over the last year, based on a weighted average of 92 generics that have been on the market for at least a year, according to an analysis conducted for The New York Times and ProPublica by GoodRx, a site that tracks prices that consumers pay at the pharmacy. (Weighted averages account for how often each drug is prescribed.) But that figure hides vast variations.
Does this mean the problem with high drug costs has eased?
•Overall drug spending is still on the rise because of the skyrocketing price of new, brand-name drugs.
Will this continue?
•Generic manufacturers say they expect it will, and are worried that lower prices could put pressure on profits and threaten the viability of the companies. This could lead to a wave of mergers and acquisitions, reducing competition and leading to higher prices.
📰 IIT Guwahati develops silk patch to repair damaged heart tissue
The 3D patch has high cell density, a foremost requirement for heart tissue
•Scientists at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Guwahati have fabricated a 3D cardiac tissue patch using silk protein membranes seeded with heart muscle cells. The patch can potentially be used for regenerating damaged heart tissue.
•“The 3D patch that we fabricated can be implanted at the site of damage to help the heart regain normal function. It can also be used for sealing holes in the heart,” says Biman Mandal from the Department of Biosciences and Bioengineering, IIT Guwahati, who led the research.
•Cardiac tissue gets permanently damaged when oxygen supply is reduced or cut off during a heart attack. The damaged portion gets scarred and does not contract and relax, which over time leads to a change in the shape of the heart and reduced pumping capacity.
•While currently available grafts fail to mimic the structure and the function of the native heart tissue as well as maintain high cell numbers, the patch developed by the IIT Guwahati researchers scores over these on many counts. The results were published in the Journal of Materials Chemistry B.
•The team led by Prof. Mandal tested both mulberry (Bombyx mori) and non-mulberry (Antheraea assama) silk to fabricate the membrane. Silk proteins extracted from raw silk were used for fabricating the membrane by using a mould. The nano-groove structure on the mould was transferred to the silk membrane and this helped guide the heart muscle to grow in a linear fashion and parallel to each other thus mimicking the heart tissue structure. “We focused on developing a silk-based tissue engineered membrane which will allow the cardiac cells to grow while maintaining the structural anisotropy,” says Prof. Mandal.
Seeding the silk
•Heart cell lines and cells taken from the heart tissue were used for seeding the silk membrane. The presence of certain cell-binding protein sequences (RGD motifs) and greater surface roughness of the non-mulberry silk, which is endemic to north-east India (locally called muga silk), facilitated better anchorage and cell binding. “The cells grew and proliferated, filling the membrane 7-10 days after it was seeded,” he says.
•As heart tissue continuously contracts and relaxes, the engineered tissue should have good elasticity. “The muga silk exhibited good elasticity and mechanical strength comparable to native heart tissue as we used only 2% silk proteins to make the membrane,” says Shreya Mehrotra, Department of Biosciences and Bioengineering and first author of the paper. “When tested on mice, we found the muga silk was immunologically compatible and hence not rejected by the immune system,” she adds.
Making a 3D patch
•The single membranes with proliferating cells were then stacked one over the other to form a 3D patch. “In 5-6 days, the cells present on top of the membrane bound to the membrane above it leading to the layers sticking to each other,” Prof. Mandal says.
•“Stacking the membranes to form a 3D patch overcomes the drawbacks of current scaffolds used for cardiac tissue engineering in terms of creating a high cell dense anisotropic patch, a foremost requirement for this tissue,” he stresses.
•The silk in the patch supports the cells till the newly formed cardiac tissue integrates with the native heart tissue and degrades once the integration takes place. “This method is better than the conventional direct delivery of cardiac cells to repair the damaged portion of the heart as the cells get washed out from the injected site,” says Ms. Mehrotra.
📰 Increased hunting of waterbirds leads to reduced diversity
Hunting, apart from being a serious threat, is also one of the least studied causes of diversity loss
•What used to be low-intensity, subsistence hunting has now transformed into a commercial, lucrative livelihood option. A recent study shows that increased hunting of wild waterbirds is decreasing bird numbers as well as drastically altering bird communities in some of the country’s wetlands.
•India’s wetlands — natural and manmade — account for nearly 4.7% of the country's total geographic area. They provide numerous ecosystem services, including serving as refugia for nearly one-fifth of the country’s biodiversity, such as migratory birds. However, many of these waterbirds are hunted illegally in wetlands.
•Scientists documented waterbird communities and their habitats in 27 wetlands in Tamil Nadu’s Kanchipuram district and interviewed 272 practising hunters to know the species hunted, hunting intensities and motivations for hunting.
•Of the 53 bird species recorded in these 27 wetlands, 47 are hunted. Hunters usually preferred to poach larger birds, thus altering bird communities by skewing it towards smaller species, as the results published in the journal Ambio show.
•The large waterbirds hunted include black-headed ibis, Asian openbill, Eurasian spoonbill, glossy ibis, great egret, painted stork and spot-billed pelican.
•Birds even in protected wetland sites were not spared — hunting was prevalent in one (Karikilli bird sanctuary) of the two protected wetland sites. Nearly 1,750 waterbirds are hunted per wetland each season every year. The hunting is primarily between December and April and at dawn and dusk when birds are more active.
Wild meat
•Contrary to belief, hunting was driven by market demand and not subsistence: a hunter made an average of Rs.12,500 per month with just a few hours’ effort daily. More than 70% of hunters said that there was an increase in demand for waterbird meat over the past decade from local eateries — three-quarters of the hunters supplied waterbirds to 426 eateries in the region. However, only eight of the 681 eateries surveyed acknowledged that they serve wild waterbird meat. Customers often had no knowledge that they were eating illegally-caught wild meat and not the domestic chicken or duck.
•This hunting is causing drastic declines in waterbird diversity and numbers. The scale of hunting is shocking, says lead author Ramesh Ramachandran who currently works with the Wildlife Trust of India. “Habitat deterioration and wetland conversion are often cited as important pressures for waterbirds. Here, we demonstrate that illegal hunting is an additional and serious threat,” they write. Incidentally, hunting remains “one of the least studied aspects of biodiversity conservation”.
•“In seven days, over visits to five open markets alone, we counted 21,864 birds for sale,” Ramachandran says.
•“Law enforcement is crucial here. However, it should be targeted at buyers and middlemen. Direct enforcement will not be able to curb the over-three-lakh such hunters who operate in the state.” If consumption of wild meat continues, a zoonotic disease outbreak may also not be far away, he adds.
📰 Scientists gene-edit piglets, bring transplants to humans closer
•Scientists have successfully edited the genetic code of piglets to remove dormant viral infections, a breakthrough that could eventually pave the way for animal-to-human organ transplants.
•Their work, documented in the journal Science on Thursday, could save lives by reducing organ donor waiting lists that have risen over the years, partly thanks to better road safety. There are some 117,000 people on the US transplant waiting list alone, according to official data. Around 22 people die each day waiting for an organ.
•Harvard University geneticists George Church and Luhan Yang, together with a team of Danish and Chinese collaborators, placed edited embryonic cells into a chemical cocktail that encouraged growth and overcame the destructive effect inherent in the modification process.
•They then used a standard cloning technique to insert the edited DNA into egg cells that were placed into a surrogate mother.
Retroviruses
•“Before our study, there was huge scientific uncertainty about whether the pig [produced after this editing] is viable,” Yang said.
•Luhan Yang added that the team had now produced 37 piglets free of the porcine endogenous retroviruses (PERVs).
•“If this is correct, it’s a great achievement,” said virologist Joachim Denner of the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin, an expert in the retroviruses.
•It is not clear whether PERVs would infect humans who receive pig organs, but lab studies have shown human cells can be infected by the viruses in a dish.
•Humans can already receive pig heart valves and pancreases, but scientists have long sought to make their entire organs, which grow to around human size, available for harvest.
Xenotransplantation
•But the goal of xenotransplantation remains some way off. Researchers still need to edit pig genes to avoid triggering a human immune system reaction and prevent toxic interactions in blood.
•These steps “are probably more challenging” than removing the dormant infections, said Yang.
