aditya
15:19
Shankar IAS Monthly Mainstorming April 2021 PDF
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Wednesday, May 05, 2021
The HINDU Notes – 05th May 2021
aditya
15:09
📰 Scientists see flaws in govt-backed model's approach to forecast pandemic
A parameter that was inaccurate and calibration errors may have led to predictions that did not signal the catastrophic second wave.
•With close to 4,00,000 cases being added every day, questions are being raised by many scientists on whether a government-backed model, called SUTRA, to forecast the rise and ebb of the COVID-19 pandemic, may have had an outsized role in creating the perception that a catastrophic second wave was unlikely in India.
•An official connected with the COVID-19 management exercise said, on condition of anonymity, that the SUTRA model input was “an important one, but not unique or determining”.
•The SUTRA group had presented its views to Dr. V.K. Paul, who chaired a committee that got inputs from several modellers and sources. “The worst case predictions from this ensemble were used by the National Empowered Group on Vaccines and the groups headed by Dr. Paul to take measures. However, the surge was several times what any of the modellers had predicted,” the official said.
•On May 2, the SUTRA group put out a statement, carried by the Press Information Bureau, that the government had solicited its inputs where it said a “second wave” would peak by the third week of April and stay around 1 lakh cases. “Clearly the model predictions in this instance were incorrect,” the group noted.
Past its peak
•SUTRA (Susceptible, Undetected, Tested (positive), and Removed Approach) first came into public attention when one of its expert members announced in October that India was “past its peak”. After new cases reached 97,000 a day in September, there was a steady decline and one of the scientists associated with the model development, M. Vidyasagar, said at a press conference then that the model showed the COVID burden was expected to be capped at 10.6 million symptomatic infections by early 2021, with less than 50,000 active cases from December. In October, at that time, there were 7.4 million confirmed cases of which about 7,80,000 were active infections.
•Computational biologist Mukund Thattai, of the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bengaluru, in a Twitter thread summarised instances of the SUTRA forecasts being far out of bounds of the actual case load. “The so-called Covid ‘supermodel’ commissioned by the Govt of India is fundamentally flawed,” he tweeted. “Based on Prof. Agrawal’s [Manindra Agrawal of IIT-Kanpur] own posts, it was quite clear that the predictions of the SUTRA model were too variable to guide government policy. Many models got things wrong but the question is why the government continued to rely on this model, than consult epidemiologists and public health experts,” he told The Hindu.
•Mr. Agrawal was one of the scientists involved in developing the model. In an email to The Hindu, Mr. Agrawal admitted that the model, which had multiple purposes, didn’t work well on a metric of “predicting the future under different scenarios”.
•He said unlike many epidemiological models that extrapolated cases based on the existing number of cases, the behaviour of the virus and manner of spread, the SUTRA model chose a “data centric approach”. The equation that gave out estimates of what the number of future infections might be and the likelihood of when a peak might occur, needed certain ‘constants’. These numbers kept changing and their values relied on the number of infections being reported at various intervals. However, the equation couldn’t tell when a constant changed. A rapid acceleration of cases couldn’t be predicted in advance.
Too many parameters
•Rahul Siddharthan, a computational biologist at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, in an email said no model, without external input from real-world data, could have predicted the second wave. However, the SUTRA model was problematic as it relied on too many parameters, and recalibrated those parameters whenever its predictions “broke down”. “The more parameters you have, the more you are in danger of ‘overfitting’. You can fit any curve over a short time window with 3 or 4 parameters. If you keep resetting those parameters, you can literally fit anything,” Mr. Siddharthan said.
•According to Mr. Agrawal, one of the main reasons for the model not gauging an impending, exponential rise was that a constant indicating contact between people and populations went wrong. “We assumed it can at best go up to pre-lockdown value. However, it went well above that due to new strains of virus,” he said.
•Further the model was ‘calibrated’ incorrectly. The model relied on a serosurvey conducted by the ICMR in May that said 0.73% of India’s population may have been infected at that time. “ I have strong reasons to believe now that the results of the first survey were not correct (actual infected population was much lower than reported). This calibration led our model to the conclusion that more than 50% population was immune by January. In addition, there is also the possibility that a good percentage of immune population lost immunity with time,” Mr. Agrawal said.
•In the SUTRA approach, the factor by which reported cases differ from actual ones is a parameter in the model that could be estimated from just reported data, (covid19india.org), according to Mr. Agrawal. “I understand it may appear a bit mysterious, but the math shows how. This, in fact, is one of our central contributions,” he told The Hindu. This has been described in a preprint research paper that has been available online since January.
•The modelling study called the “COVID-19 India National Supermodel” was the result of analysis by an expert committee consisting of mathematicians and epidemiologists — though in a research paper explaining how the model worked, there are three authors: Mr. Agrawal, M. Vidyasagar, a professor of electrical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad and Madhuri Kanitkar, paediatric nephrologist and Deputy Chief, Integrated Defence Staff (Medical) in the Army.
•While many groups of epidemiologists, disease experts and groups of mathematicians had developed several kinds of models to predict the outcome of the pandemic, this group was facilitated by the Department of Science and Technology and was the only one among several forecast groups, whose numbers were relayed using the government’s publicity channels.
•Until February, the model seemed more or less right, the curve was declining and as of mid-February while 10,000-12,000 new cases were added daily, the overall numbers were close to 10 million.
Overall caseload
•In an interview with this newspaper published on February 27, Mr. Agrawal asserted that a “second wave was unlikely” though a slight pick-up — to about 15,000 cases a day — had begun. India’s overall caseload wouldn’t extend beyond mid-March and only 3,00,000-5,00,000 new confirmed infections over the next 10 weeks were expected which would bring the overall load to 11.3 or 11.5 million infections by April 2021. This was premised partly on 60% of the population having been exposed to the virus.
•On April 2, he told the Press Trust of India that the new cases would “peak” by April 15-20 — in line with the SUTRA team’s public statement.
•On April 23, he again reported a new peak at May 11-15 with 3.3-3.5 million total ‘active’ cases and a decline by the end of May. India is currently at about 3.4 million active cases.
•Gautam Menon, a modeller and Professor, Ashoka University, Sonepat, Haryana, who also worked on estimating the spread of COVID-19 disagreed with the approach, on the grounds that it was “somewhat simplistic and insufficiently informed by epidemiological data and expertise”.
•At best, the SUTRA model could be used along with an ‘ensemble’ — where results from various scenarios were grouped. “The use of machine learning to forecast epidemic spread is a relatively recent advance. Some of those models do quite well. But the problems with those methods is that you can’t really figure out what they are doing and how sensitive they are to simply bad data. I would use those models, if we had them, along with an ensemble of other models, but would not repose utter faith in them.”
•The SUTRA model’s omission of the importance of the behaviour of the virus; the fact that some people were bigger transmitters of the virus than others (say a barber or a receptionist more than someone who worked from home); a lack of accounting for social or geographic heterogeneity and not stratifying the population by age as it didn’t account for contacts between different age groups also undermined its validity.
New variants
•Mr. Agrawal — who now regularly tweets on the evolution of the pandemic in States and districts — responded that new variants showed up in the SUTRA model as increase in value of parameter called ‘beta’ (that estimated contact rate). “As far as the model is concerned, it is observing changes in parameter values. It does not care about what is the reason behind the change. And computing new beta value is good enough for the model to predict the new trajectory well.”
•He conceded that a combination of good epidemiologists, data-centric modelling like SUTRA and time-series models worked best. “Time-series based predictions are good at detecting changes in data patterns. So they can flag, early on, phase changes. SUTRA-type data-centric models can explain the past very well [and in studying what was the effect of policy actions, leading to a better knowledge base for the future]. They are also very good at predicting future trajectory assuming phase does not change.”
•In 2002, Mr. Agrawal and two of his students developed a mathematical test called AKS primality that could efficiently determine if one could tell a big number was prime that won them global accolades. He used a computer science approach to solve a problem of pure math. “This is the second time I am entering a domain as a complete outsider. First was when I proved primality theorem. Mathematicians all over the world welcomed a computer scientist in their fold, and in fact went out of their way to celebrate it. Our paper was not written in standard math style, however, experts quickly shut down anyone who questioned the presentation or minor errors in the paper. In contrast, I am experiencing a hostile reaction from epidemiologists, at least in India,” he said.
📰 G7 seeks common front on China
Revenues from GST
aditya
07:26
Why in news?
Recently revenues from the GST hit an all-time high, surpassing the previous month’s record.
Why the revenue was high?
- In April 2020, GST collections had dipped to a mere Rs. 32,172 crore due to national wide lockdown which affected all the economic activity.
- In October 2020, GST revenues was around Rs. 1.05 lakh crore and since then there was a steady increase with hopes of a sustained recovery.
- In April 2021, revenues from the GST was Rs. 1,41,384 crore surpassing the previous month’s record of about Rs. 1.24 lakh crore.
- This is essentially driven by the transactions in previous month, due to heightened economic activity.
- The rising COVID-19 cases and the fear of an impending lockdown could have driven people to make advance purchases in anticipation.
- Moreover, firms in the process of closing annual accounts may have remitted higher GST based on audit advice.
- Also gradual tightening of the compliance regime, pro-active co-ordinated probes against taxpayers using fake bills to evade liabilities has also played a significant role.
What are the future prospects?
Clean Energy Vision and Natural Gas
aditya
07:22
What is the issue?
- Global powers are fixated on the concept of “net zero carbon emissions” and the appropriate target year for achieving it.
- While securing a global consensus around this target is important, the immediate priority should be to lay out the stepping stones; here is why natural gas is crucial in this regard.
What is the need now and how does natural gas help?
YOJANA Magazine April 2021 English PDF
aditya
07:17
YOJANA Magazine April 2021 English PDF
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Tuesday, May 04, 2021
GS SCORE FACT FILE- IUCN Red List Of Threatened Species PDF
aditya
18:30
GS SCORE FACT FILE- IUCN Red List Of Threatened Species PDF
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Daily Current Affairs, 04th May 2021
aditya
18:22
1) Coal Miners’ Day: 4 May
•Coal Miners’ Day is celebrated on May 4 to recognize the hard work of some of the great unsung heroes of the Industrial Revolution. The day is celebrated to show appreciation for the coal miners and honour their accomplishments. Coal miners spend most of the days digging, tunnelling and extracting coal from the mines. They dig deep into the Earth to bring out the riches that help to sustain our life. Coal mining is one of the toughest professions.
2) International Firefighters’ Day: 04 May
•The International Firefighters’ Day (IFFD) is observed on May 4 every year since 1999. The day is celebrated to recognise and honour the sacrifices that firefighters make to ensure that their communities and environment are as safe as possible. The day was instituted, after the deaths of five firefighters in tragic circumstances in a bushfire in Australia on 2 December 1998.
3) World Asthma Day 2021: 04 May
•World Asthma Day is observed every year on the 1st Tuesday of May. This year, World Asthma Day is observed on May 4, 2021. The day spread awareness about asthma disease and care around the world. Whilst the primary focus is supporting the person with asthma, support may also extend to family, friends and caregivers. The theme for 2021 World Asthma Day is “Uncovering Asthma Misconceptions“.
4) Barclays Projects India’s GDP Growth Forecast to 10% in FY22
•UK-based global brokerage firm Barclays has cut India’s GDP growth estimate for 2021-22 (FY22) to 10 per cent from its earlier estimate of 11 per cent. Apart from this, Barclays has estimated the economy to contract by 7.6 per cent in FY21.
5) Kotak Mahindra Life appoints Mahesh Balasubramanian as MD
•Kotak Mahindra Life Insurance Company Limited (KLI) on 1st May announced it has appointed Mahesh Balasubramanian as managing director of the company. He has been appointed following the retirement of G Murlidhar.
•The company is in receipt of approval from the Insurance Regulatory Development Authority of India for the appointment of Balasubramanian. The appointment is for a period of three years. Suresh Agarwal has been elevated to MD & CEO of Kotak General Insurance.
6) Justice Pant appointed NHRC acting chairperson
•The National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) member Justice (retired) Prafulla Chandra Pant had been appointed as the acting chairperson of the Commission with effect from April 25. A former Supreme Court judge, Justice Pant was appointed member of the NHRC on April 22, 2019. The post of a chairperson has been vacant since Justice H.L. Dattu, a former Chief Justice of India, completed his tenure on December 2, 2020.
•Previously, he was appointed the first Chief Justice of the newly established Meghalaya High Court at Shillong on 20th September 2013 and continued till 12th August 2014.
7) Facebook to introduces vaccine finder tool on mobile app in India
•Facebook has partnered with the Indian government to roll out a vaccine finder tool on its mobile app in India, which will help people identify places nearby to get inoculated. The social media giant had, earlier this week, announced a USD 10 million grant for emergency response efforts for the COVID-19 situation in the country.
8) RBI imposes ₹3 crore penalty on ICICI Bank
•The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has imposed a monetary penalty of ₹3 crores on ICICI Bank for non-compliance with its directions in the matter of shifting of securities from one category to another. The monetary penalty has been imposed on the Bank for contravention of certain directions contained in its Master Circular on ‘Prudential Norms for Classification, Valuation and Operation of Investment Portfolio by Banks.’
•This penalty has been imposed in exercise of powers vested in RBI under the provisions of the Banking Regulation Act, 1949 (the Act). RBI observed that an examination of correspondence in the matter of shifting of securities from one category to another revealed, inter alia, contravention of the aforesaid directions issued by it. This action is based on the deficiencies in regulatory compliance and is not intended to pronounce upon the validity of any transaction or agreement entered into by the bank with its customers.
9) Sindhu, Michelle Li appointed ambassadors for IOC’s ‘Believe in Sport’ campaign
•The Badminton World Federation announced that India shuttler PV Sindhu and Canada’s Michelle Li have been nominated as athlete ambassadors for the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) ‘Believe in Sport’ campaign aimed at preventing competition manipulation.
•Sindhu and Li will be working alongside other athlete ambassadors from around the world to raise awareness on the topic of competition manipulation amongst athletes and encourage. The pair have been global ambassadors for BWF’s ‘i am badminton’ campaign since April 2020. The IOC’s ‘Believe in Sport’ campaign was launched in 2018 to raise awareness among athletes, coaches and officials of the threat of competition manipulation.
GS SCORE Current Affairs May 2021 Week 1 PDF
aditya
15:20
GS SCORE Current Affairs May 2021 Week 1 PDF
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The HINDU Notes – 04th May 2021
aditya
15:12
📰 Manipur HC allows 7 Myanmar refugees to approach UNHCR
Manipur High Court says Article 21 encompasses the right of non-refoulement
•The High Court of Manipur on Monday allowed seven Myanmar nationals, who entered India secretly following the February military coup, to travel to New Delhi to seek protection from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
•Though India is not a party to the UN Refugee Conventions, the court observed that the country is a party to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights of 1966. “The far-reaching and myriad protection afforded by Article 21 of our Constitution, as interpreted and adumbrated by our Supreme Court time and again, would indubitably encompass the right of non-refoulement,” the court said.
•Non-refoulement is the principle under international law that a person fleeing from persecution from his own country should not be forced to return.
•“We welcome the judgment upholding the human rights of the seven Myanmar nationals, three of whom are minors,” Babloo Loitongbam, convener of the Citizens’ Committee Manipur (CCM), said.
•The other four are Niang Go Man, Pau Khan Thawn, Cing San Lun and Si Thu Aung.
•The last three are journalists who were working with the Mizzima news service banned by the military junta.
Hiding in Moreh
•They had been hiding in the border town Moreh until they were brought to Imphal following an order of the High Court on April 20.
•“We continue to be deeply concerned about the plight of thousands of other Myanmar nationals taking shelter in the bordering villages of Manipur without any support and protection apart from the hospitality and warmth of the poor villagers,” Mr. Loitongbam said.
•The humanitarian sub-committee CCM has provided food, clothing, medicines and utensils donated by the people of Manipur in four villages in Kamjong district and three each in Tengnoupal and Churachandpur districts, housing more than 500 refugees from Myanmar, he said.
•“Other than ensuring protection for these hapless people in line with the High Court’s judgement, we urge the governments of India and Manipur to consider giving them unhindered access to the UNHCR to offer their mandated humanitarian services,” Mr. Loitongbam said.
📰 Cannot stop media reports on court observations, says Supreme Court
