Congress president Rahul Gandhi, on Friday, dared Prime Minister Narendra Modi for a public debate with him on corruption, seeking to bring the various scams involving the NDA Government back into the Lok Sabha poll agenda.

Addressing consecutive public rallies at Dhule in North Maharashtra and then in Mumbai, Gandhi castigated Modi for “politicising” the current conflict with Pakistan, to cover up for his “miserable failure” at creating jobs and for handing out a measly cash assistance of Rs 17 a day per farmer family under the PM Kisan scheme.

Taking Modi head on the issue of corruption at a large public rally held at MMRDA ground, Gandhi had a caustic dig at the Prime Minister for his failure to address even one press conference during the course of his five year tenure and said: “I regularly address press conferences…. Aap kabi desh ka chowkidar ko press ke saamne dekha hain? Inko 15 minute dedo, Mera saamne bithado. Dudh ka dudh pani pani kardenge (Have you ever seen the country’s chowkidar address the media?. Make him sit in front of me 15 minutes, I will call his bluff)”.

“Mai Narendra Modi ko challenge deta hun. Brashtachar ka mamle pe aap aake mera saath baat karo. Inko samne khada kardo nahi tho mera nahi tho do minute debate kardo do minute. Hindustan se bagna na  pad jay mai deklunga ( I am challenging Narendra Modi. Let him debate with me on the issue of corruption. Let me him stand in front of me stand beside me and debate with me on corruption for two minutes. I will see how he will not run away from the country).

Responding a shout from a member in the audience “Chor bhag jayega” shout, Gandhi said, “Darpok hain. Khada nahi ho pata hain (He is scared. He can’t stand before me). … Kaisa aasakta hain. Wo nahi aayega (How will he come to debate with me? He will never come).

Gandhi, who began his 25-minute speech after conceding to a request from the audiences to indulge his supporters with “chowkidar chor hain” sloganeering, said that “chowkidar chor bhi darpok bi hain” ( Chowkidar is not merely a thief but a coward)

At his earlier rally at Dhule, Gandhi went hammers and tongs at Modi over the Rafale issue and demanded to know as to why the Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL), which had experiences of fighter aircraft for 70 years and made aircraft like like Mirage, Sukhoi and Jaguar, was denied the Rafale contract. He said that the Government had no answers for the specific questions raised by him in Parliament and outside.

“Did Anil Ambani make Mirages or Sukhois?. For 70 years HAL has been making planes. Anil Ambani cannot even make paper planes,” Gandhi said.

Dubbing demonetisation as  a big failure, Gandhi said:  “You stood in a queue outside banks… Did Anil Ambani, Nirav Modi, Mehul Choksi, Lalit Modi, Vijay Mallya stand in queues…while you were standing in queues outside banks, they were busy making their black money into white on the rear side of the banks,” he said.

“Modi  ji said (before 2014 elections)…do not make me Prime Minister, make me ‘chowkidar’….and once he becomes PM, he puts Rs 30,000 crore in pocket of Anil Ambani,” Gandhi said..

Slamming Modi for politicising the ongoing conflict with Pakistan, Gandhi said: “On day one, I had told my party men not to politicise Pulwama and the subsequent air strike on terror camps and that we stand by the Government. But, the Prime Minister blatantly politicised the issue and attacked the Congress at the national memorial event”.

“Here is a Prime Minister who cannot stay away from public relations exercises for even five minutes. He has been doing precisely that during the ongoing military stand-off with Pakistani,” the Congress president.

Ridiculing Modi for handing out measly cash assistance of Rs 17 a day per farmer family under the PM Kisan scheme, Gandhi said: “I was surprised to see Piyush Goyal getting thunderous applause from the treasury benches during his budget speech. I wondered what it was all about. The applause was for the Government giving a dole of  Rs 17 per farmer family per day under the PM Kisan scheme. Which in essence means that the Government is giving meagre Rs 3.5 per person per day as cash assistance”.

“Modi should be ashamed of himself. On one hand loans worth Rs 3.5 lakh crore of corporate bigwigs crore waived and on the other hand Rs 3.50 is being given to each person per day in farmer family,” he said.

The Congress president said that while the Modi government could waive loans amounting to Rs 3.5 crore piled up by 15 corporate bigwigs, it did not have money to waive the loans of farmers. “Its crop insurance scheme is a big scam. The private insurance companies owned by Anil Ambani take money from farmers and give a pittance back to farmers as compensation while pocketing the rest,” Gandhi said.

Coming down heavily on the Modi government for his “miserable failure” to create jobs in the country, Gandhi said: “Modi promised two crore jobs a year but failed to deliver. He merely wasted five years of his tenure through false promises”.

Gandhi said that in the event of the Congress coming to power at the Centre in the 2019 elections, India would compete with China in creation of jobs.

Among other things, Gandhi promised a “minimum income programme” to the poor and needy people in the country, under which money would be transferred directly to the accounts of beneficiaries and 500 square houses to the slum dwellers in Mumbai under the Slum Redevelopment Scheme.

“The BJP government in the state is promising slum dwellers 250 sq foot houses under the Slum Redevelopment Scheme. Within 10 days of our coming to power in the state, we will take this decision,” Gandhi said.

Courtesy: The Pioneer

Writer: TN Raghunatha

The superjumbo that was touted to be the future of air travel might have been doomed with a dramatic change in the manner of flying, but it’s not an end for this hallmark of engineering

Make no mistakes: Airbus A380 is a hallmark of engineering – a plane unlike any other ever produced. A fully-loaded Airbus A380 weighs 575 tonnes and the plane rising off the ground seems to defy the laws of physics. As someone who professes to be an aviation geek, every time this writer sees an Airbus A380, he feels rather awestruck. Flying on one of these aircraft is an amazing feeling. True, this writer admits, that the older Boeing 747 certainly looks more graceful with cleaner lines and in some paint jobs, is absolutely stunning. While the A380 is undoubtedly a remarkable feat of engineering, it is not what one would describe as a “looker.” But as the European aircraft manufacturer, Airbus, announced that it is about to pull the plug on producing A380 by 2021, one felt a bit sad. In fact, it was an irony that Airbus announced the impending closure of the A380 line just as when Boeing 747 celebrated the 50th anniversary of its first flight. Indeed, the old queen might even outlast the behemoth on the production line as demand for Boeing 747 freighters has kept up slow with steady production.

But that does not answer the question as to why Airbus A380 failed in the pile of Airbus’ marketing hubris? Part of the answer is Airbus’ own manufacturing issues around the plane. Given the way Airbus is structured — it is a pan-European company with factories across France, Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom — different sub-assemblies of the aircraft were brought from different parts. This is standard practice for Airbus, which ferries fuselage sections between France and Germany and the wings are brought from Wales on a fleet of outsize and specialised airborne freighters. This works fine for the Airbus’ money-maker, the A320 family of narrow-body planes that power low-cost travel across the world, but A380 is a different scale. Even sub-assemblies are so huge that they have to be brought in on river barges and on oversize trucks through narrow passages. In order to keep various nations of the consortium happy, this was needed instead of the more logical solution of making everything at one place.

Of course, this is a logistical issue and even Airbus’ American rival, Boeing, went down this route when it came to Boeing 787 Dreamliner, which sees its parts flown from all over the world and across oceans on modified Boeing 747s. Logistical issues can be dealt with but engineering problems are a lot tougher and Airbus’ engineers made a huge mistake when they used two different versions of the same 3D modelling and simulation software to design the plane. While one may think that two different versions of the same software might not be a critical issue, think of it more on the lines of operating systems like Windows and MacOS. Things were completely incompatible and when translated into the real world, it meant that wiring harnesses and floor panels did not quite align perfectly.

For very good reasons, aviation is a safety oriented industry. Jugaad solutions elevated in India cannot work in a safety-oriented environment and fixes had to be made. Particularly, when you consider that Airbus A380 has over 530 km of wiring, this wasn’t easy at all. Although much of the wiring was not flight-related as Airbus managed to produce and fly prototypes by 2005, the wiring was essential for creature comforts of passengers for things like lighting, entertainment systems and for galleys  where the food is prepared. While A380 was certified as a perfectly capable flying machine by the end of 2006, albeit with almost a year’s delay, deliveries were nowhere on the horizon.

Slippages happen on many major engineering projects — whether they are in civil, software or an aircraft. Even Boeing suffered multi-year delays on the 787 Dreamliner because it did not anticipate the scale of problems that it would face while moving  from aluminum to carbon fibre. But delays also give buyers a second thought. When Airbus launched the A3XX, as it was called in 2000, it was surrounded by too much hype — it was this big, new, shiny aircraft that airlines just had to have. Think of it like when a car company launches a new product, the marketing machine hypes it up and even manufactures a case for one to buy that car. This was the case with airlines and A380. But if there is any delay, and there are minimal or no penalties for cancelling the order, airlines began, like normal consumers would, to sit back and think about the order.

Airbus’ logic was that A380 would be a perfect replacement for Boeing 747 and would continue with the airline’s policy of flying from one major city to another from where passengers could take connecting flights to their onward destinations. A few years, ago when one wanted to travel from New Delhi to Madrid, for example, he/she would have to fly to a major European hub, such as Frankfurt or London, transit through a massive airport while sleepy or dragging a child and then connect to a new plane. But that sort of travel vanished quickly, partially thanks to Boeing 787 Dreamliner; although the change had begun a few years before the Dreamliner entered production. Because twin-engined aircraft are so much more efficient and easier to maintain — their smaller size being perfect for what airlines call ‘thinner’ routes where demand is more limited — it can easily fit in a plane like Boeing 787 and this is what started happening. Today, for example, one can fly directly between New Delhi and Madrid on a Boeing 787.

Then there was another problem: Boeing 777 and Airbus’ new A350 aircraft, whose larger versions can carry almost 80 percent of the Airbus A380’s load in terms of passengers and cargo, could do so at half the cost. Airbus A380 is a big, large plane with four engines while others are smaller (only just) and have just two engines. This in itself makes it more efficient. So, for the same cost of operating one A380, airlines could operate two flights on a 777 or A350, carrying half as many additional passengers. Also, these new planes could fly very far. While a flight between Mumbai and New York would have meant a stop or two a decade ago, today, there are two non-stop flights between the two cities. The same reason is also applicable to Boeing 747, whose latest passenger version has also stalled on the sales front. But since Boeing 777 and 787 are doing so well and because the latest version of 747 was a cheaper (relatively speaking) re-engineering job than the estimated $25 billion that the A380 cost to develop, it survived.

For sure, the end of production of Airbus A380 will not mean that the plane will stop flying. In some slot-restricted airports, such as Heathrow Airport in London, where one can see multiple A380s from different airlines, it will continue. Also Dubai’s Emirates airline, which is the largest operator of the plane with 110 flying and most of the remaining 20-odd deliveries going to that country, will continue to be a huge operator of this plane as that airline builds up its massive hub policy. It is very likely that some later-built A380 aircraft will easily fly on till 2030, so there is no rush to get on a A380 just yet.

In fact, Emirates flies A380 into Mumbai and Lufthansa and Singapore Airlines fly the beast into New Delhi. All the three airlines are expected to fly these aircraft into India in the foreseeable future. That said, as someone who has flown on the big plane, on demonstration flights when Vijay Mallya had brought one to India for the longest-scheduled A380 service in the world between Dubai and Los Angeles, and experienced the wonderful bar at the end of the upper deck, flying on this plane is an experience that one must put on his/her bucket list.

Courtesy: The Pioneer

Writer: Kushan Mitra, Managing Editor, The Pioneer

The new Honda Civic is definitely gifted with awesome looks, with or without its front-end. But will this tenth-generation set the roads alight in India as the previous Civic did? The launch of the first Civic by Honda Cars India a decade and a half ago heralded a revolution. The car, which was the eighth-generation of the Japanese carmaker’s popular sedan (and hatchback in European countries), was a sales success. But Honda was not able to continue the Civic’s successful run in India for too long for a multitude of reasons. However, one has to admit that a major reason why sales of the Civic tailed off was India’s growing love affair with oil-burners, that is diesel cars. Honda globally did not have a smaller diesel motor that they could bring to India back then and that played a role in the company ceding the segment to its rivals, first the Chevrolet Cruze and then further on the Toyota Corolla Altis and Skoda Octavia.

But now the Honda Civic is back and after skipping one global generation, Honda cars India has brought in the tenth-generation. This time, they have ensured that it has a diesel engine alongside a zippy petrol motor. So let us deal with the headline numbers first. The 1.6-litre turbocharged diesel engine, which shares duty on the other recently introduced Honda, the CR-V, produces a decent 120 horsepower. The company claims that thanks to their “Earth Dreams” technology, the Civic i-DTEC returns an astounding 26 km per litre under Indian test conditions. The Civic also comes with a 1.8 litre i-VTEC petrol that produces a fairly decent 140 horsepower. Disappointingly for Civic fans, Honda has not brought either of the powerful engines that do service on this particular sedan in the United  States, which are a 158 horsepower 2.0 i-VTEC and the very impressive 200 horsepower turbocharged 1.5-litre engine. Of course, India is a fuel-economy obsessed market but Honda has bucked the trend in the past with cars like the Honda Accord V6, which all car nuts in India who drove, including me, remember as a rocket, a thirsty rocket, but a rocket nonetheless. Even today, good second-hand examples of this car, like the original Honda City VTEC, which was another amazing car, command top dollar.

But can the new Honda Civic become a future classic like its illustrious predecessors? Well, it does certainly knock the door on the looks front. Yes, the snout of the car is a bit incongruous. In fact, the chrome slab across the front grille, which is apparently a Honda signature, does make the car look quite weird. Because from the side and particularly from the rear, it looks fabulous. In fact, the rear three-quarter look of this vehicle is among the prettiest I have seen on a car in India. This car looks as attractive as a supermodel sashaying down the ramp with some toilet paper stuck to her heel. Still very, very pretty but you know, something is off.

What I did find interesting is that despite the looks, particularly the coupe-shaped sloping roofline which makes you assume that the car would be very tight inside, it really is not. I will not say it is the most spacious car in its segment but it does not feel cramped. After all, the Civic sedan is designed for the American market, where people are not quite small or short. Headroom in the front is not bad at all, and I am 5’11.” In the rear, even with the front seats pushed back, space is more than sufficient for myself and while three adults on the rear bench is a squeeze on any car, it will not feel so bad on the Civic. The only issue is possibly the fact that in order to get the space in the front and rear, the seats ride rather low and although the Indian Civic is 10 mm higher than the outgoing model, ingress and egress is a bit clumsy the first few times until you get the hang of it.

But you never buy a car for its looks alone, you do care about the performance too. So how is the new Civic? Well, first a disclaimer, this is a first drive, not a detailed test drive where I drive and experience a vehicle over a few days during my commute. We drove the car around the highways near Bengaluru airport and up the twisty roads on Nandi Hills. Initially, I had the i-DTEC which comes with a six-speed manual transmission. Now, I have a strong opinion about six-speed manual transmissions in India because I still believe it is one gear too many on any car. That said, on the highway you can easily put the car into sixth and just cruise at 80-100 km per hour, the diesel purring along. What does not purr along are the tyres? Because of the need to derive higher fuel economy, the i-DTEC comes with low rolling resistance tyres and those are noticeably noisy. You can drown that out by pumping the volume on the smart infotainment system, which is similar to those on other new Hondas, and comes with support for Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, standard across variants.

Now, on the twisty sections you really do need to mash the gears to keep the motor in its narrow power band. While the car does take the corners very steadily indeed, you do feel that it could do a bit more. Maybe with grippier tyres it could. Then again, even with enthusiastic driving, the Civic Diesel returned almost 15 km per litre. This is clearly a car designed to be an economical long-distance hauler, but a boy racer.

So on to the iVTEC, first things first, there is no manual version on this Civic. Nope. Nada. Nyet. What you get is Honda’s very nice Continuously Variable Transmission (CVT) with a Torque Converter and seven forward speeds as standard, as well as a paddle-shift system when you want to have fun. Now, Honda’s CVTs are very smooth — I loved the CVT on the diesel Amaze for example — but they are not designed again for very enthusiastic driving. On regular day-to-day driving on the highway and in the city, gear shifts are brilliant and kick-down power when you need to get a move on gets delivered promptly. But you do start to sense some shift-lag when you start using the paddles a lot. Possibly I am saying this because dual-clutch gearboxes and their millisecond shifts have spoiled me. While this CVT is not what I would call lazy, it again feels tuned more to regular urban commuting.

And you know what? Urban commuting is what most buyers of the Civic will do, and once you begin to live with it, you can work your way around the CVT transmission and figure it out. As such both the iDTEC and iVTEC Civics are very well suited for that role and look fantastic as well.

The problem Honda India faces has actually less to do with the Civic and more to do with the segment, because the segment is moribund.  India’s love affair with the Sports Utility Vehicle continues, anybody buying a car in the Rs 15-18 lakh range is looking lustfully at the Hyundai Creta. The Civic, which one expects to match the Corolla Altis for price, meaning it would be around the Rs 18-24 lakh segment, will have people look at the Hyundai Tucson, or have people who want space just look at the Toyota Innova. There is no doubt the new Honda Civic is a good car and an excellent looking one at that, but I’m not sure it can make the Indian buyer start looking at sedans again.

Courtesy: The Pioneer

Writer: Kushan Mitra

The Coronavirus outbreak has called into question the ability of governments in predicting, containing and even preventing epidemics. AI and big data can be the answer

In 2019, the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board said that the world was not prepared for the next big pandemic, which could potentially spread between continents in 36 hours and kill up to 80 million people. It pointed out that the climate crisis, global migration and humanitarian conflicts were all breeding grounds for newer outbreaks. The Coronavirus took us by surprise, simultaneously pointing out that systems of the past decade might not be effective in tackling challenges that are taking novel shapes and forms. With one of the largest populations and widening socio-economic divides, India is vulnerable to contagions. Experts claim that this susceptibility hasn’t changed much in the last 100 years, when India was one of the countries worst hit by the Spanish Influenza in 1918. We have been struggling to contain influenza and encephalitis outbreaks for the last four decades. There is a pressing need to overhaul how we respond to outbreaks, both globally and in India, keeping technology at the centre. Coronavirus’ example itself shows that it was two Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled enterprises, BlueDot and Metabiota, that provided the key and  life-saving insights into the containment of this viral eruption. By using Natural Language Processing (NLP), BlueDot sifts through and analyses over 10,000 articles in 65 languages, including foreign news reports, plants and animal disease networks and official proclamations, to issue warnings. It was able to catch and warn about the impending outbreak days before the official announcement was made. Similarly, Metabiota applied AI to the used travel itineraries and flight patterns to determine the likely spread of the disease. It was accurate insofar as it predicted that South Korea, Japan, Taiwan and Thailand had the highest risk of the viral outbreak.

AI for comprehensive disease surveillance: As epidemics spread in phases from introduction to amplification and finally contained transmission, the response and sequence of interventions flow accordingly. Even before diseases erupt, a public health system attempts to anticipate new and re-emerging disease through early detection. Thereafter, the response strategy changes to containment, control and mitigation, followed by re-focus on eradication. Creating a technology-based intervention into pandemic management also needs to consider the response strategies commensurate with the stage of epidemical evolution.

However, technologies have a critical and more successful role to play in some phases of the response cycle as opposed to others. One such is prediction and early warnings, for which integrated disease surveillance programmes exist both in the public and private sectors. These surveillance strategies include Event-Based Surveillance (EBS) and Risk Modelling. EBS systems use unstructured data from multiple sources like internet, official reports, social media and so on, to detect and trace the evidence of an emerging threat and overlay it with traditional surveillance systems to issue public health warnings and formulate mitigation strategies. The Global Public Health Intelligence Network (GPHIN), and HealthMap, an automated electronic information system, are EBS tools that use NLP, text processing algorithms and Machine Learning (ML). These can increase the speed of identifying signs, filtering information, enhance capacity for consuming information and increase accuracy manifold.

The Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases (ProMED), Medical Information System (MedISys) and Pattern-based Understanding and Learning System (PULS) are similar EBS tools. These systems are proving absolutely essential in disseminating information at breakneck speed, characterising transmissibility patterns, contagiousness, illnesses and deaths caused by the pathogen, aiding quicker emergency response. Risk modelling uses statistical tools to characterise and identify factors in populations or individuals that enhance their vulnerabilities to contracting a particular disease. Overlaying this data with open source internet data and climate data accounting for presence, distribution and movement of pathogens can help identify correlations that were invisible to us before. For example, in China, the cases of hand, foot and mouth disease in children were best predicted by AI models that utilised data on weekly temperature and precipitation as well as data on disease-related queries from the Chinese Baidu search engine.

Compared to these, India’s Integrated Disease Surveillance Programme (IDSP) uses manual surveillance, where data on some 24 epidemic-prone diseases is collected on a weekly basis at the primary health centre level and reported upwards. Whenever there is a rising trend of illnesses in any area, it is investigated by the Rapid Response Teams (RRT) to diagnose and control the outbreak. This system is slow and doesn’t use any risk modelling for predictions. A study by the Indian Institute of Public Health, Hyderabad in 2016 pointed out that this procedure suffered a time lag from anything between three to 64 days.

The Media Scanning and Verification Cell of the IDSP was established in 2008 for early warning signals through media reports. However, this activity is limited to manually scanning newspapers/electronic media. Some technologically-adept States use Google alerts to automate the process. Needless to say, State media verification cells are unable to exhaustively scan all media sources with the swiftness that’s needed to respond to outbreaks. The Health Ministry is piloting an Integrated Health Information Platform (IHIP) that can enable near real-time data reporting and hopes to apply modelling and GIS tools to enhance the IDSP. There exists immense scope for integrating emerging technologies within the IHIP platform. But  at present these discussions are nascent.

Focussing on holistic pandemic management: While most technology applications in pandemic response are limited to surveillance, there is a dire need to identify intervention areas in overall pandemic management. AI can not only help us predict where the disease might be travelling to, but it can also offer insights into how people take up health services during emergencies. Accounting for health-seeking behaviours in designing response strategies can substantially boost effectiveness and success of responses.

Learning from behavioural data, ML models can identify less obvious patterns in human behaviour and disease transmission, which could enable a targetted response. This is called infodemiology, where you can integrate internet data into public health informatics to examine individual health-seeking patterns during emergencies. Google Trends Data as well as more-specific Google Dengue Trends have also been used by researchers to develop a holistic understanding of behavioural aspects of citizen response to pandemics. Such insights can be used to determine where health services are imperative to be delivered in times of shortages that mandate trade-offs. In a more mature system, one would also be able to determine if an individual or a group of people is likely to change its location, go out and seek formal assistance, or if they will adhere to treatment routines — all insights that can help authorities make better decisions.

AI-assisted genomics research is slowly emerging to be a game changer in the rapid development of treatments and vaccines for contemporary infections. Baidu has developed an algorithm that can significantly speed up RNA structure prediction and subsequently unlock the key to the virus. Developing models that can match patterns embedded in the viral genomes to their animal host and vectors that carry the virus can be a breakthrough in narrowing the search for diseases. This can lead to early interventions in controlling disease upsurge or preventing their emergence altogether.

Building blocks for AI in pandemic response: Building a comprehensive and accurate surveillance system requires massive amounts of quality data from different sources. Meteorological data, for instance, needs to be overlaid with vector-movements and population mobility data to accurately identify hotspots for outbreaks. This requires Government departments coming together in mission-mode and pooling their data into one consolidated programme. It also requires AI-enabled technologies to be integrated into existing workflows for pandemic management and creation of new protocols with adequate capacity-building, so its benefits can flow to all levels.

As pandemics are not constrained by national boundaries, a global surveillance system is imperative, something where multilaterals like the WHO and  international foundations can play a catalytic role. Nations need to be propelled to make disease information public and if possible move towards interoperable surveillance networks that can communicate with their global counterparts.

Can AI fight the next Coronavirus is a question up for debate. But it can bolster our capacity to respond substantially, especially in disease pre-emption, design of accurate interventions and in some cases with more research investment, even prevention of outbreaks.

Therefore, in a fight against outbreaks — one that the global community is not winning — channelising the power of data through AI can be the perfect weapon. Coronavirus and the swiftness that AI-enabled solutions showed here were necessary proof of the concept to incentivise greater resources and collaborations in AI-assisted outbreak management. Now it is upon governments and multilaterals to lead the way in mobilising AI against the next virus.

(Writer: Abhinav Verma yukti sharma; Courtesy: The Pioneer)

Young people will always find innovative ways of getting hurt for thrills. But the latest game craze is plain stupid

When you are young, you feel invincible. And because death feels so far away, you tend to take physical risks that you never will once you cross the 30s. Nobody is saying that older humans are boring and refuse to take challenges. But the physical ability to take risks is far reduced by simple physiology. There is a reason why an average infantryman is 22 years old; you would not want to go to war with a physically old army. But thanks to young people pulling off crazy stunts, we have seen the proliferation of adventure sports and some death-defying feats of human achievement. This has been the story ever since human beings gained cognisance of the idea of “self”, which after all, separates us from animals. Until the dare tempts death.

From every generation, some activity or the other emerges that the adventure sports X-Games might take up. But the latest challenge by the young, called the “Skull breaker” is downright stupid and has parents across the world in a state of panic. As the name implies, the challenge is not a smart one. It involves a trio of teens, who stand in a line and jump, and when the central participant’s feet leaves the ground, his/her companions on either side attempt to knock his/her feet out from under them. The prospect of the central participant making a head fall backwards, with chances of smacking his/her head besides injuring other parts of the body, looms larger. Some children have already been fatally injured and many are suffering the impacts of a concussion. It is beyond one’s rational understanding as to why would anyone want to get a concussion deliberately. However, there are a few things that we must understand: Banning this practice will not end it. The best way to deal with this is to talk to adults at social media firms and actively prevent the widespread sharing of videos. The second way is for parents, teachers and doctors to talk to children and explain what a concussion is and how it can have long-term ramifications. One can get a concussion or an injury while playing sports, particularly contact sports. That is accidental; this stupid activity causes self-harm and it must be classified as such. We must ensure that it is one that is ended and not emulated by future generations while ensuring that the creative physicality of the next generation continues. Just like an army of youth needs a grizzled veteran to maintain discipline and order, this army of children needs some common sense from adults.

(Courtesy: The Pioneer)

The Government wants to promote electric mobility from a pollution perspective. That’s good but how does it propose to pay for it?

You will be surprised to hear that India is well on its way to become a surplus producer of electricity. In fact, even as tens of power plants, built during a debt-fuelled rush, are still to hit the grid, India has more than enough total electricity to meet most of its needs. The problem in our country that any expert on energy will tell you is the abysmal state of the finances of distribution companies that are usually owned by State Governments.

Politicians are used to giving doles of free power, which in some cases, benefit them the most as many leaders make it up to the ranks. India’s large and rich farmers have made matters worse. At the same time, some newer power plants produce energy at slightly higher rates and the urge to keep rates low or subsidised means that politicians would rather deal with load-shedding, which is not a function of power production anymore but one of cost.

We make this argument to answer those critics of electric cars, who ask where is the electricity for electric cars and two-wheelers if India is to go down the electric mobility route? The fact is that there is more than enough electricity in our country. If India were to go down an electric path and if one assumed that by 2030, 10 per cent of all new vehicles sold were electric, it would use under 10 per cent of the installed capacity. Of course, there are all sorts of other problems. We need to address them all.

The first, of course, is the fact that Battery Electric Vehicles are not exactly clean. They are, in the words of many, “emissions elsewhere” vehicles.  This is particularly true in India where a bulk of power remains driven by coal-powered thermal plants. Thermal plants in our country use coal, which has high ash content. This makes the particulate matter problem even worse.

Of course, those living in Delhi won’t care if pollution moves away to a sparsely populated area, say 500 kilometers away, but until a compensatory scheme is worked out, it is not what you would call it to be ‘fair’. Also, according to some carbon mathematics done by both research institutes and car companies, this would make Battery Electric Vehicles more carbon-inefficient than a Plug-In Hybrid Electric Vehicle (PHEV).

Sure, one could argue that electric cars can be powered by green sources of energy, and that is a noble idea, but if you are charging your electric car at night, solar is not quite an option for obvious reasons. On the other hand, wind power is seasonal and needs vast open areas to build the turbines. In countries like Norway, where electric cars have really caught on, a majority of the power produced comes from hydroelectric plants, ironic for a nation that makes its money from selling oil.

Damming the Himalayas is fraught with seismic risks and large electricity generating dams on the plains like the Sardar Sarovar project have huge issues surrounding land acquisition. This is not to say that storage solutions to store solar energy generated in the day will not be available, some companies like Tesla are developing both home and commercial storage facilities for solar power. This could mean that solar power can charge your car and even meet the ‘peak’ demand for power, which in India is usually a Friday evening at 7 PM.

The problem is actually not so much about electricity generation but primarily one of storage and distribution. In fact, even in localities, where there is no problem of electricity supply, improvements need to be made to transformers and charging infrastructure if widespread electric private mobility takes off. And that will cost a lot.

Then there will also arise the question as to who will pay the electricity bill? This is the big problem in India — the bill. Further, there are unintended consequences as well, both Central and State Governments make huge amounts of money from taxing liquids. The liquids in question being alcohol and petroleum products. Here is the strange situation about subsidising electric cars and electricity for electric cars. More owners of electric cars and two-wheelers, who pay lower taxes and then don’t buy highly taxed petroleum, actually hurt Government revenues.

Of course, if that is the price to pay for lower emissions, some might argue that it is a price worth paying. But the overall benefit from battery-powered vehicles is questionable as we have already discussed, emissions move elsewhere and overall carbon benefits are lower than plug-in hybrids.

In fact, if one looks at battery-powered e-rickshaws, India has already adapted to electric vehicles but unintended consequences here have meant that millions of lead-acid batteries have to be processed and that has to be thought of. Cases of battery theft, too, have shot up in Delhi. This columnist has argued before that hybrid vehicles are the best thing to do in the short-term while charging infrastructure and the solutions for many of these problems are thought.

The Government has to think of ways to replace revenue while spending money on grid improvement. Subsidies for electric vehicles, particularly for cheap power, may be a self-defeating idea for Governments in the short term. Parking solutions have to be found. Where will people charge vehicles if they don’t have parking at their own house? Residential society bylaws have to be changed if people put chargers inside the parking areas and these will have to be thought of by policy-makers at the Centre, state and municipalities.

Writer: Kushan Mitra, Managing Editor, The Pioneer

Courtesy: The Pioneer

Vijay Mallya lived it up once. The liquor tycoon owned India’s biggest beer brand, which he leveraged into starting an airline by the same name. Simultaneously, he started a calendar that featured India’s top models, including some well-known Bollywood faces of today, whom he gave a break. He was famous for his parties in Mumbai, Goa and Monte Carlo that featured tens of nubile models around his arm and many suspected much more. He called himself the biggest brand ambassador of his airline and booze brands but as the old saying goes, the fastest way to become a millionaire is to be a billionaire and establish an airline. And Kingfisher Airlines cost Mallya a lot — he was forced to sell his brewery and spirits firms to foreign players. The airline collapsed in a mountain of debt, employees lost jobs and a few even committed suicides. It also crumbled with billions of dollars worth of debt with the Indian public sector banks holding the can.

Today, the ruins of Kingfisher Airlines are still visible in Chennai and Mumbai where the once-serviceable planes are rusting away. The impact of the collapse of the airline is also evident on the huge non-performing asset crisis that has overtaken Indian banks. Unlike many other non-performing assets though, Kingfisher Airlines collapsed with nothing left to sell — most of the planes were owned by leasing companies — other than a few buildings and a private jet. To be fair, businesses collapse all the time and to hold people criminally liable for a business failing is unfair. However, to claim that there was no criminal negligence in Kingfisher Airlines’ case is wrong. Mallya used his airline’s brand valued at an obscene amount of money, he was forwarded loans under strange circumstances, leading to speculation that a quid pro quo deal had happened. So, Mallya’s imminent extradition from the United Kingdom should be welcomed and he should be questioned and face criminal proceedings for some of the fraudulent activities that took place. However, to blame Mallya alone would be wrong. Indeed, if he goes to jail, so should the bank officers who lent him money, the consultants that boosted his brand value as well as those politicians, who ensured that banks lent him the money. Mallya should pay if he has committed any crime. The Government’s aggressive new law officers should be commended but Mallya should not become a scapegoat.

Writer and Courtesy: The Pioneer

Change has become inevitable in today’s business scenario. The Internet was the new industrial revolution, bringing with it not only technological change but one that was societal and epic in scope. Access to information combined with global supply and demand is reshaping established conventions and destroying old world definitions. Social media has forever changed the way businesses market their products/services, leading to newer ways of engaging customers and thereby increasing brand exposure in unimaginable ways. The social web and mobile technologies have accelerated the rate at which relationships develop, information is shared and influence takes hold. People now use social technology to help shape the world’s events and culture. From the Arab Spring to the Occupy movement, citizens of all nations are more empowered than ever before. Connected individuals have rallied crowds, created a vast audience and toppled political establishments by communicating their message through social networks.

Now is the time of crowd culture and the new benchmark is how it has influenced the way companies are branded. Crowd culture is defined as diverse, widespread groups of people who join together in support of, or even opposition to, a brand. It is a creation of the digital age that produces digital communities and sub-cultures. Marketers, whether for big or small businesses and even social media, must be proficient in their techniques to grab the attention of these crowds when working at building a following. Branded content has now become an outdated concept. The popular advertisement campaigns like Nike’s “Just Do It” became famous by entertaining the audience. These campaigns also worked because the entertainment media comprised oligopolies, limiting cultural competition. Only a few television networks and movie companies distributed content, so consumer marketing companies could buy their way to success by paying to place their brands in this tightly controlled cultural arena.

Brands also infiltrated culture by sponsoring TV shows and events, attaching themselves to successful content. Since fans had limited access to their favourite entertainers, brands could act as intermediaries. For decades, we were accustomed to fast food chains sponsoring new blockbuster films, luxury autos bringing us golf and tennis competitions and youth brands underwriting bands and festivals. Technology revolutionised the whole concept and allowed people to opt out of ads and for the first time, advertisers had to compete with real entertainment. Companies innovated by creating entertainment content, such as BMW’s short movies for the internet in the hope of gathering a huge audience around their brands. However, branded content could not withstand its latest competition, not from other media houses, but from the crowd itself.

Despite the billions spent on creating content, only three brands are in the YouTube Top 500. McDonald’s has 204,000 YouTube subscribers and  PewDiePie has 41 million subscribers. Even Red Bull, considered the biggest branded content success stories with a $2 billion annual branded content budget, only has 4.9 million subscribers, way behind dozens of crowd culture start-ups with production budgets under $100,000. Dude Perfect, started by five Texas university athletes who make videos of trick shots and goofy athletic feats, has eight million subscribers, three million more than Red Bull. It turns out that consumers have little interest in the content that brands churn out. Very few people want it in their feed. In fact, many brands are struggling to unlock the apparent value of social media. A recent analysis conducted by Tania Yuki, founder of social content analytics firm Shareablee, finds that of 65 billion actions prompted by posts made by US brands across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, only seven per cent involved sharing the brand’s content. Douglas Holt, the famous branding expert, suggests that people actually want to follow people, not brands. A look at any social media shows that ranking and brands come a distant second to celebrities: Cristiano Ronaldo, Shakira or Vin Diesel on Facebook, Katy Perry, Justin Bieber and Barrack Obama on Twitter, or Taylor Swift, Selena Gomez and Kim Kardashian on Instagram.

Holt also draws our attention to a different type of celebrity, focussing on e-sports, names that most of us have only heard casually like PewDiePie, VanossGaming and CaptainSparklez. These gamers and gaming commentators attract millions of followers on YouTube, dwarfing the efforts of major brands and at a fraction of the cost. Brands should take inspiration from digital micro-cultures like e-sports, identifying the ideology that underlies their passion and leveraging it online to sustain their own cultural relevance. So how does social media play a role in the rise of crowd culture? It is all the more path-breaking as it has the ability to bind together geographically isolated communities, in the process greatly increasing the pace and intensity of collaboration and thereby making their cultural influence more direct and substantial. These new crowd cultures come into two types: Subcultures, which incubate new ideologies and practices; and art worlds, which break new ground on entertainment. First, social media has democratised and expanded sub culture. Previously, people had to gather physically with limited ways to communicate on niche topics, maybe magazines or newsletters, or small meetings. Now there are crowd cultures around virtually every topic — ice cream, bacon, poker, tarot reading et al and these groups are worldwide, allowing people to interact and share ideas, products, practices, news and aesthetics, and most importantly bypass the mass-culture gatekeepers. Social media has made cultural innovators and early adopters the same. Second, producing innovative popular entertainment requires a distinctive mode of organisation, that sociologists describe as an art world where artists gather in collaborative competition, and learn from one another by working together and pushing each other.

Given the emergence of crowd culture, marketers can use the concept of “cultural branding” to become successful in social media. The first step is to understand what is currently considered ‘common sense’ and map the cultural orthodoxy. In cultural branding, the brand promotes an innovative ideology that breaks with category conventions. The second step is to locate the cultural opportunity. Over time, cultural orthodoxy begins to lose traction as people understand alternatives. Before social media, the influence of these alternatives would have been marginal, as the mainstream controlled the conversation.

Social media, however, allows the crowd to convert a niche conversation into mainstream beliefs. One example would be travel, where for generations people thought about certain destinations (Florida, London, the Bahamas) as the places to vacation. Then with people sharing pictures and stories of the Maldives, Patagonia, Seychelles, et al, the travel industry changed dramatically. Thus, people were not only open but looking for alternatives to traditional destinations. Third, make an idea meaningful to as many people as possible. A brand idea also needs to have a potential scale. If a brand becomes too associated with a specific sub culture, it can become defined and limited by that association. Take the example of Toyota’s Scion brand in the US. Designed to appeal to a younger, anti-establishment audience, Scion was marketed through tactics like the creation of its own record label, guerrilla marketing and sponsorship, including the infamous Slayer car. The problem was that while Scion may have become well-known within the heavy metal crowd, more mainstream buyers did not know about it at all. Attempts to remedy this came too late. Later, Toyota declared Scion dead.

Fourth, once you understand the cultural opportunity, target the crowd culture. If it is adventure travel, build an offering or a company around it. Fifth, rather than just creating branded content, create entertainment that leverages the identified cultural opportunity. The entertainment does not need to be great, it needs to tap into the vein of the crowd culture. And finally, innovate continually, using cultural flashpoints. A brand can sustain its cultural relevance by playing off particularly intriguing or contentious issues that dominate social media conversations related to an ideology. That’s what Ben & Jerry’s does in championing its sustainable business philosophy. The company uses new product introductions to show its ideology on a range of political issues.

In pursuit of relevance, most brands chase trends. But this is a commodity approach to branding as thousands are doing exactly the same thing with the same generic list of trends. Thus, consumers do not pay attention. By targeting novel ideologies flowing out of crowd cultures, brands can assert a point of view that stands out in the overstuffed media environment. The key is rather than trying to force a story on a captive audience, you need to build a story and product that is consistent with the desires of the social media crowd.

(The writer is Assistant Professor, Amity University)

Writer & Courtesy: The Pioneer

The Delhi Traffic Police issues over 17,700 traffic challans daily but less than a quarter of a per cent of those are for talking on the mobile phone. This is a truly shocking statistic given that on any given day, if you are on the roads of Delhi, you will notice hundreds of people talking on the mobile phones while driving. And this is not restricted to car drivers, even those driving heavy commercial vehicles, buses, two-wheelers, rickshaws, cycle rickshaws and even cyclists talk over the phone while driving. The mobile phone revolution in India might have put a phone in every hand but it has also made Indian roads extremely dangerous. According to one survey, 47 per cent of drivers in Delhi admitted to talking on the phone while driving. Be assured that a majority of the remaining 53 per cent are liars. A joke that does the rounds among some in the industry is that Indians will evolve bent necks as two-wheeler riders chat on the phone while riding a motorcycle. Unsurprisingly, statistics have emerged that mobile phones played a role in almost 20 per cent of road accidents.

Apart from the fact that driving or riding is a two-handed activity, where both hands ought to be steering, the fact is that talking on the mobile phone is a very distracting activity. In fact, some studies in the United States have shown that if a mobile conversation distracts you, it can be more dangerous than driving over the alcohol limit. Imagine driving while arguing with your spouse; most human beings are unable to disassociate the act of driving from the anger they feel towards their spouse and as a result drive very poorly. And while new technologies such as CarPlay from Apple and Android Auto from Google have enabled high-tech Artificial Intelligence assistance in cars via smartphones, they do not take away the distraction, even if some of them now feature the ability to receive and send messages. While hands-free technology may not be a solution, it does not subtract from the fact that hand-held calls while driving or riding are dangerous. India’s roads are already the deadliest in the world with over 150,000 people dying annually. Talking on your mobile phones is making it even more dangerous. And while the traffic police force, even in cities like Delhi, is very stretched, it must start cracking down on those who think the road is a great place for a chat through CCTVs and tech-enabled means.

Writer and Courtesy: The Pioneer

For once, the launch of DRDO’s imaging satellite didn’t steal the limelight except the drama of a midnight launch at Sriharikota and its military uses. That we are told was to make sure that the satellite traverses the Indian subcontinent when there is maximum sunlight on it and the launch time decides its diurnal rhythms. But along with it, Isro also launched KalamSat, the lightest communication satellite, almost as heavy as a chair at 1.2 kg, developed by students, free. Built at a cost of Rs 12 lakh, the 10-cm cube satellite has a life span of two months and will be the first to use the PSLV rocket’s fourth stage as an orbital platform and conduct experiments. Its utility? This one will study the communication systems of nano satellites, which can be applied in disaster management. While the next lunar mission and preparations for Gaganyaan or the manned mission, intended for 2022, make news, the significance of ISRO’s latest launch lies in the fact that besides cost-effectiveness, it is also looking at developing the scientific temperament among our youth, encouraging education satellites and piloting their trial modules in real time. Soon it will be launching its TV as an interface platform with millennials.

The most noteworthy aspect of the student initiative is that the young scientists came from remote corners of the country. This will further embolden young Indians to commit themselves to the Indian space programme and conduct experiments that may result in breakthrough technological solutions for our lives on earth. The multiple applications of ISRO’s projects already have demonstrable spin-offs. For example, the lithium ion battery for our rockets and spacecraft is finding very good application in electric vehicles. Similarly, now that the Gaganyaan space suits are being developed in a cost-effective manner with fire-resistant chemicals, the fire-retardant technology can be used in hazardous industries to protect workers. ISRO is perhaps these days the best example of the Government’s “Make in India” programme. In fact, the Gaganyaan mission will be a national project in the true sense because it won’t just be confined to ISRO but will include research institutions and private industry.

Space, therefore, is quickly turning into not just our final frontier, but a profitable, multi-dimensional one. ISRO has, in a quick spurt of a decade or so, emerged as one of the key players in the global space market, particularly as a low-cost carrier of surveillance and communication satellites. Ever since we launched 104 satellites in a single rocket (PSLV-C37), 96 of which were from the US, even the big space-probing nations have acknowledged our credibility. The New York Times commended ISRO for the high-risk launch “because the satellites, released in rapid-fire fashion every few seconds from a single rocket as it travelled at 17,000 miles an hour, could collide with one another in space if ejected into the wrong path.”

With many of our landmark missions too now costing much lesser than equivalents in Russia, Europe and the US, India can now proudly proclaim to have shifted the axis of the space race to Asia. And by now partnering with altruistic  missions, ISRO has shown that space programmes are not just about extra-terrestrial influence but an Elysium for Earth itself.

Writer and Courtesy: The Pioneer

ISRO is using a half-humanoid robot to smoothen out creases for Gaganyaan, our manned mission

So what if we have to wait awhile to send an Indian woman into space, we have a half-humanoid robot in the shape of one doing so. And she will test-pilot drills for our first manned mission as part of the Gaganyaan project. The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) will be sending Vyommitra to mimic humanistic functions in the spacecraft, even converse with intended astronauts and respond to their queries. This preparatory drill is being done to ensure that Indian astronauts can complete their historic manoeuvre without a glitch. India though is not the first nation to send a robot into space to ensure safety of manned flights. NASA had sent Robonaut 2 to the International Space Station (ISS) in 2011 and Japan’s Kirobo had landed there in 2014. Advanced versions are being developed to do a recce for human settlements. Post the failed lunar mission last year, ISRO seems to have learnt its lessons well and is proceeding with extreme caution with AI-aided dry runs.

While the nation would rather not talk about Chandrayaan 2 simply because its rover failed to land on the dark side of the moon, it has had its own success. Forget the lost rover, at the end of the day, it is indigenously developed and manufactured and is testimony to not only R&D and innovation but the ability of home-grown companies to expand capabilities. The Gaganyaan is a logical follow-through of this mission. India has already set a benchmark in PSLV and GSLV launches. It recently launched the high-power communication satellite GSAT-30. This is expected to provide improved coverage and will enable Indian broadcasters to air content in the Middle East, Australia and other parts of Asia, widening the arc of our soft diplomacy. The commercial satellite launch market is estimated to be $30 billion by 2025 and ISRO is certain to be a top player in it. With Vyommitra, ISRO hopes to expand  its ability to analyse data and ensure trajectory and payload optimisation for bigger missions. NASA is using AI for its next rover mission to Mars, too. But then a word of caution here. Robots aren’t heroes. As much they promise a new era in space exploration, they must ascend the curve with utmost care.

(Courtesy: The Pioneer)