Women's reservation bill-Feedback on NDTV debate

Feedback: For once it was good to see the real fire power behind the women's reservations bill. There was a substantial amount of Nari Shakti on that panel yesterday. My sympathies with Mr Yadav and with Vikram. But I must say the two gentelmen conducted themselves well by not losing their cool. I think Vikram's efforts, particularly, were commendable. He did well to inject humour when needed to cool frayed tempers and bring the discussion back on track. On a more serious note though, I got the impression that the supporters of the bill have an air of desparation about them to get the bill through without thinking through what is really needed to ensure that it achieves its primary objective: that of empowering women. Miss Lamba and the BJP representative (organizers should ensure names of panelists are displayed on the lectern) certainly appeared to typify that desparation in their refusal to even consider alternatives suggestions. As Prod Madhu pointed out, I think the 33% reservation for party tickets would have been a sound first step in this direction. As she noted no political party would want to risk one-third of its seats so the fears expressed by the critics of this suggestion seem quite unfounded to me. In my view the other suggestion i.e to increase the number of parliamentary seats should not even be considered. It is not as if we are short of legislators to run our deomicratic institutions. Far from it. The suggestion appears to portray our legisltative institutions as a mere equal opportunities employer rather than as temples of democracy which is what they are meant to be. My my main concern is that the ongoing debate does not consider some of the other, perhaps more critical, enabling factors that are prerequisites for women's political empowerment. To me it smacks of an easy-to -implement quick fix effort to achieve an objective that will in reality take a lot more sustained effort to achieve. A sttrong long term focus upgrading the knowledge and skills of our legislators is needed. Such efforts and, more importantly, the thought process to implement them, are in short supply. In this context I am reminded of a recent news report about a delegation of Ministers of State who had to approach the PM becuase they were not being alloted any kind of work by their senior ministers. The continuing high absenteeism amongs MPs during important debates is another indicator that the key enabling infrastructure for upgrading the skills needed for legislative and governance roles is missing. Among the current lot of parliamentarians only a small select group of people seem to have the required level of confidence and skills for this job. For most parliamentarians their debating and reasoning skills appear to be good enough to allow them to score political brownie points against each other in very superficial debates. For most these skills are not backed up by an in-depth knowledge of how political and governance institutions are meant to work. In this environemnt if we introducing new members with perhaps even fewer skills and lesser experience, I think it is not conducive to the growth of parliamentary democracy. Consider Miss Lamba, for example. Despite her 16 years of political experience did not inspire confidence yesterday that she is ready for the role of a Parliamentarian. He arguments yesterday simply did not have the substance to inspire such confidence. While Mrs Suhasini Ali at the other end was certainly doing a much more impressive job of it. We already have enough people in our legislatures who can make a lot of noise. We need people who can contribute to a constructive on issues that concern a vast and complex country. Pakistani democracy is another example of this failing: women representatives in percentage terms far outnumber those in India and yet barring a few exceptions the quality of political debate in Pakistan remains very poor. At the other end of the spectrum there are countries like UK where despite no reservations women parliamentarians contribute very effectively to political debate. This obviously has as much to do with their primary and higher education system as with their efforts to continuously update and upgrade the skills and knowledge of their MP's about key issues before they are put in positions of responsibility. In our country by introducing this bill at this stage I think we are making the mistake of putting the cart before the horse. Without putting in place the infrastructure needed for ensuring / upgrading the skills of our parliamentarians if we go ahead and reserve seats for them in the parliament we only set the stage for more political corruption. It is no secret that when people without the necassary skills and capability are put in positions of responsibility they often resort to questionable practices to ensure they a secure future for themselves. And these are not ordinary positions we are talking about. These are some of the most politically empowered positions in the country. I hope when this Bill is introduced in the Lok Sabha for debate some of these issues I have written about are considered for further debate. ...more

Women's reservation bill

Reservations are acceptable as long as they are viewed as a means of facilitating equality of opportunity for the weaker sections of scoeity. The way to do it, however, would be to introduce a reservation bill in the parliamnent that has a specific expiry date. Every time the law comes up for renewal the govt should be required to support it with a white paper clearly stating what the policy has achieved and what it expects it to achieve further in the future. Such a white paper would also provide a proper basis for stimulating a proper debate on any reservations policy. In the absence of supporting facts any debate around reservations merely becomes a forum for posturing. It is one of the key reasons the women's reservations bill has been hanging fire for the last 14 years with little meaningful debate but at a substantial cost to the taxpayer. I hope the govt rectifies its mistake and issues a white paper before introducing the bill in the Lok Sabha

SIT summons for Mr Narendra Modi

Powerful debate yesterday. I liked the fact that the debate didn’t really get stuck around the Modi issue alone. There is a larger issue at stake here and that came out quite well in the discussion. Establishing the rule of law is clearly important for a progressive democracy. To ensure this happens, the criminal justice system needs to gear up to keep up with the needs of the country. Bhagalpur, the anti Sikh riots of 1984 and Gujarat are clear indicators that our criminal justice system runs the risk of rendering itself obsolete if it doesn’t ensure timely delivery of justice. As the Gujarat example show when justice is delayed other much stronger forces tend to take over and end up bypassing the institutions of civil society. In the debate yesterday there were some interesting comments from the younger participants as well. Someone asked if development since Godhra can compensate for the Godhra violence itself. Someone else answered that morality should be viewed as an issue separate from development. Comparing the two is like comparing apples and oranges. I think that is a dangerous argument. Perhaps in the short term it does work that way. However, if we turn back to history there are numerous examples to show that once development has been used as an excuse to subvert social and criminal justice it doesn’t just stop after one incident. As this acceptance sets a precedence and becomes widespread everything gradually becomes subservient to objectives of development and ultimately civilizations and empires collapse because there just isn’t enough of a value system to sustain them. In its early years Great Britain was established as a nation state based on some of the finest democratic principles. Its conversion to an imperialist power is one example of this phenomenon. Ultimately the empire on which ‘the sun could never set’ was lost. Some would say, in the post war period, the US has too has been drifting the same way. Communist Soviet Union also crumbled as it gradually departed from its lofty pro-poor ideology to an ideology that was solely focussed on preserving its regional/global hegemony. Last but not the least, Hitler’s Germany was also a victim of the syndrome that development justifies all kinds of excesses. Starting with the ancient civilizations history is replete with such examples. And we appear to have taken a few steps in the same direction with Gujarat in 2002 and with the ongoing conflict in tribal areas of the country now. We have gradually come to adopt the idea that development is a justification for police/military action. So, no, I don’t think development can compensate for loss of human values. And I don’t think the two reside in different buckets either. Lasting prosperity can only be had by upholding these values. In a democracy these values can only be upheld by presence of strong and ever vigilant institutions like the criminal justice system. But in the long term the real force that upholds the integrity of such institutions themselves are neither the people who run them nor the laws and procedures that underpin them. The real force is provided by the value system of the people who these institutions are meant to serve. In post independence India we have given ourselves a national constitution and a set of laws. But it would be a mistake to believe they alone can our sense of ethics and values. It is the other way round. As a people if we do not protect and continuously redefine our values and ethics all our pillars of democracy will ultimately collapse. In my view our education system which is so devoid of a focus on ethics and values, is primarily responsible for the weakening of this moral force. There is a strong need to re-visit our curricula to enquire if there is a need for a change of focus. The problem today is that our education is so devoid of morality and values that those who at least do have the benefit of education can hardly think of anything more important than a sustainable GDP growth rate. Education is far too much sanitized and rendered quite devoid of a robust ethics and value base. Amazingly enough there is hardly any debate or discussion on these issues. If we continue to produce educated youngsters whose skills and ambitions are not underpinned by a robust value system we should not expect our pillars of democracy remain strong. This hopelessness that seemed so evident by the end of the debate would only continue. We will continue to have more Godhras and many more equally polarized debates without any real progress. The people who subvert the law will just keep taking advantage of this state of affairs for their own short term gains. Unless, of course, education reforms step in quickly to stem this moral rot.

Mechanics of plate tectonism

What I find amazing about the science of geology is the fact that it can arrive at some very intelligent conclusions about what happened during periods of the order of millions of years ago using some very innovative methods. Some of the experiments that geologists manage to conduct in labs to prove their theories are a truly staggering feat of logic and scientific thinking. To illustrate this example I wish to share in this blog what I learnt from a documentary feature titled ‘Earth Story’ that was telecast on a UK channel called ‘Eden’. The documentary essentially explored the mechanics of plate tectonics which has actually been one of the major geological mysteries ever since the plate tectonism has been proposed as a credible theory.
The presenter, himself a well no biologist, was interviewing among others one of the foremost pioneers of the plate tectonic theory, Dan Mckenzie. He had proposed this theory in the 70’s but had had always been intrigued about the underlying mechanism that cause plates to move. He started off by looking at Scandinavia where scientific evidence over the last 250 years has been collected and preserved to show that the sea level has dropped by about 2m despite the fact that everywhere else sea levels have remained relatively steady since the end of the last ice age about 10,000 years ago. So what would explain the drop in seal level in Scandinavia? Scandinavia had lost significant amount of ice by the end of the ice age. So if in line with the observations in the rest of the world we assume that sea levels in Scandinavia have remained steady the only conclusion from this scientific observation is that that the land may itself have risen in Scandinavia. This would only seem plausible if the in its interior the earth would behave like a viscous fluid that would respond to loss in weight at the surface caused by the melting of the ice. This response would involve pushing that piece of land upwards. Dan demonstrated this very cleverly by using an air filled plastic globe where he allowed the pressure of his hand to simulate the weight of ice. As he removed the pressure the surface of the globe tended to bounce back. In Scandinavia this response has obviously been happening over a period of thousands of years which would explain the dropping sea levels even as long as 10000 years after the melting of the ice caps had stopped. This time lag has prompted geologists to propose that the earth’s mantle is composed of rocks that are actually viscoplastic i.e capable of permanent plastic deformation over a period of time.

But that still didn’t explain what drives plate tectonism. To develop their theory further geologists proposed that the earth’s interior is made up of the core, mantle and lithosphere. The outermost part of the mantle and the whole of lithosphere formed the tectonic plates which are relatively solid while the mantle itself is made up of rocks that under considerably higher temperature and pressure conditions experienced at those depths behaved plastically over a period of time. The fact that these different layers within the earth have distinctly different mechanical properties from each other can, in fact, be measured by recording seismic waves generated by minor earthquakes that are occurring regularly across the globe. Earthquakes themselves are one of the more well known outcomes of plate tectonism and are most common at the edge of tectonic plates where one plate tends to slip over another. As one of the scientists in the documentary described it, these earthquakes actually make the earth ring like a bell. And based on the quality of the sound one hears from this bell one can create a pretty accurate picture of the mechanical rock properties within the earth as well as the size of the core, mantle and lithosphere. Scientists have even managed to obtain the rock samples that come out of the mantle with the lava flow to understand the composition (mineralogy) of these rocks. They used the samples to determine the thermal properties of the rocks that constitute the mantle at temperature and pressure conditions very similar to those existing inside the mantle. They use this information about the thermal and mechanical properties and the size of these layers in a model created by using Rayleigh’s equation and conclude that the mantel must definitely be using the convection mechanism to transfer heat from the centre of the earth to its surface.

If we go back in time, by the time this model was developed the size of the tectonic plates, their geographical extent and the direction of their movements was already well known to geologists. All that remained was to provide an explanation for what caused plates to moves. With what had been discovered so far about the rock properties and the size of the mantel, the convection heat transfer mechanism appears to have neatly fitted into the plate tectonic theory to explain the dynamics of this process. But scientists were apparently not satisfied by computer models and calculation for proving this existence of this phenomenon. They were looking for other telltale signs of this mechanism. Lab scale experiments that used viscous syrup deployed in a tank over a uniformly heated reservoir of water clearly showed what kind of convection patterns could be expected. When the heated tank was illuminated by ordinary light the convection was clearly seen to be happening within numerous hexagonal cells that were spread all across the surface of the syrup. The heated fluid appeared to be rising up through a plume located in the centre of each cell and then falling back to tank bottom at the periphery of these cells as the fluid was cooled by the atmosphere above.
Scientists have shown clear evidence of these mantle plumes beneath the islands of Hawaii, Iceland and indeed, India’s own Deccan trap region. These are the areas where it is suspected that plumes have made their way to the surface releasing enormous amounts of volcanic rock that has modified the landscape of these regions. The Deccan was an interesting example. The amount of volcanic rock observed here would normally expected to have come up about 50-60 million years. But measurement of magnetism locked in these rocks clearly indicates that his volcanism has happened over a very short span of time. Only two magnetic field reversals have ever been recorded within the rock structure of the Deccan trap region this corresponds to roughly a period of 1 million years. It is speculated that such a huge release of volcanic fluid in such a short span of time could have been released only if a plume had actually burst through to the surface at some point in Deccan’s geological history. Geologists have dated this event to have happened about 65 Million years ago, which interestingly coincides with the end of the Jurassic era which brought the age of the dinosaurs to an abrupt end. Some scientists go as far as to speculate that this event may itself have had an important role to play in the extinction of the dinosaurs considering the amount of toxic sulphurous gases and CO2 such an event would have released. The example of Hawaii is also interesting in that it illustrates that as the pacific plate moves eastwards the plume beneath the surface remains stationary, a principle that is currently quite well accepted. This relative movement of the oceanic plate relative to the plume would be expected to cause the formation of numerous of islands over a period of time as the plume bursts through a different part of the plate at a different time. This is indeed what has been observed in Hawaii which is essentially a trail of islands running roughly east to west off the western coast of the US. As part of a plume fed formation the lone island of Iceland seems to defy this is explanation. But it’s worth noting that the island of Iceland sits right atop the mid Atlantic ridge which is where the Eurasian plate is separating from the American plate. It’s the only location in the Atlantic where the ridge passes through a landmass that is clearly visible above the sea level. And the reason for this, as explained by geologists, is that this land has been formed from the lava that is being fed by a mantle. It is quite clear that the ridge is not moving anywhere relative to the plume. Therefore instead of a trail of islands as seen in Hawaii a single large island of Iceland has been formed. Interestingly, geologists speculate that the plume at this site may itself have been responsible for splitting the two plates apart causing the formation of the mid-Atlantic ridge at some point of time in earth’s geological history. To the uninitiated plate the mid Atlantic ridge may sound a little implausible. I would encourage them to got to the satellite view of the Atlantic ocean on Google map and you can clearly see for yourself how the existence of this ridge in the middle of the Atlantic splitting apart the big landmasses of America for Eurasia and Africa.

So three different examples were considered in this documentary, each demonstrating how plumes within the mantle have been responsible for shaping a certain part of the earth’s surface. It probably still needs a minor leap of faith to speculate that the convective current these plumes represent may be providing the motive power for plate tectonism. Scientists have used evidence similar to that seen in Hawaii, Deccan and Iceland to map the locations of several such plumes worldwide. The existence of several plumes was, indeed expected, as it was clearly predicted by Dan’s laboratory experiment with the tank full of heated viscous syrup.

It’s pertinent to ask if plate tectonism has had any bearing on any of the other domains of science. As a matter of fact, when geologists started comparing the geology of different planets they viewed Mars as a close twin of earth. They were struck by the fact that despite there being significant evidence of geological activity in the past history of Mars (the famous canals on Mars) there appears to be little evidence of the similar activity today. The convection mechanism and the size of Mars provides on possible explanation. Mars is roughly the size of earth’s core. Being smaller in size it is expected that during its 4.5 billion year history (estimated age of our solar system) somewhere along the way Mars fully exhausted its heat reserves through a similar mechanism of convection. There may have been plate tectonism in the past but the planet was simply too small and its heat reserve too low to sustain it. Geologically speaking today Mars is a dead planet. Though it may sound strange, but plate tectonism is also credited with the evolution of life on earth. Volcanism, which is closely linked to movement of tectonic plates and the phenomenon of plumes bursting through the surface, is thought to have been responsible for driving the carbon cycle on the earth’s surface. Apart from being one of the major building blocks of life carbon based gases are also known to regulate the earth’s climate in a major way. These climatic fluctuations are thought to have permitted the evolution of life on earth to where it is today with its huge diversity. The extinction of the dinosaurs that paved the way for the mammals to survive and ultimately thrive may have something to do with volcanism. Massive volcanism is thought to have released greenhouse gases and ash in sufficient quantity to induce big temperature fluctuations on earth’s surface, phenomenon dinosaurs may have been unable to adapt to.

In closing it is worth mentioning that the theory of plate tectonism, has far reaching implications not only for helping us understand our past but also in making some predictions for our geological future. As tool for understanding our natural world it is definitely one of the key milestones in our scientific history.