(This is the link to my story on tiger sighting published in The Hindu on February 20, 2010:
http://beta.thehindu.com/sci-tech/energy-and-environment/article109900.ece
And the text is given below.)
*************
It was almost as though the news had reached them. Just over a fortnight ago - February 2 to be exact - five tigers were sighted close to the tourism zone in the Parambikulam Wildlife Sanctuary, Kerala, which was declared the country’s 38th tiger reserve on Friday.
Forest watcher Srinivasan, who spotted the tigers, managed to capture all five together in a single frame with his small digital camera. The big cats seemed to be moving with a new confidence in the open, by a stream.
It is extremely rare, for even the most diligent watcher, to sight a tiger in the south Indian forests because the vegetation allows the animal to move under cover. Sighting five tigers together in the wild is rarer still because tigers are solitary animals. Each one moves within its own, well-demarcated range, which other tigers do not trespass. They are usually seen together only during the mating season or when the cubs are not grown-up enough to leave the mother.
On his way back to the camp, Mr. Srinivasan met wildlife photographer N.A. Naseer. The photographer had set his tripod high up on a branch of a tree to take photographs of a Great Indian Hornbill in its nest on another tree nearby. On being told about the sighting, Mr. Naseer decided to try his luck. With the watcher’s help, the photographer proceeded to the place where the tigers were seen last.
“We approached the stream carefully, taking care to move in absolute silence. The tigers were still there — all five of them. I cannot describe what it was like,” Mr. Naseer said.
At the very first click of the camera, he said, one tiger, who was lying by the stream began twirling its tail, sensing something. It got up and the rest too seemed to sense the intrusion. Two tigers were in the thickets and not within the camera’s range. The visible ones too slipped into the vegetation and disappeared, he said.
The photographer presented his pictures to Union Minister of State for Environment and Forests Jairam Ramesh when the latter came to declare the sanctuary a tiger reserve on Friday.
“He [Mr. Ramesh] was pleasantly surprised when told that there were five tigers in a group,” said the photographer.
According to the last tiger census using the pug-mark identification technique, the Parambikulam forests (of which, 390.89 sq. km. has now been declared the core area of the new reserve and 252.772 sq. km. its buffer zone) is home to an estimated 15 tigers.
*****
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Monday, February 8, 2010
How toads conquered the world
This is the link to my story on a new research find on toads published in The Hindu on February 7:
http://www.hindu.com/2010/02/07/stories/2010020750761600.htm
And, this is the text:
THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Through an extensive analysis of 228 toad species, constituting nearly 43 per cent of the known toad species of the world, scientists have now come up with a list of special traits that could have enabled these amphibians to conquer the world.
Ines Van Bocxlaer, a graduate student of the Free University of Brussels, and her associates list these special traits in the February 5 issue of the journal Science.
In a period of less than 10 million years — which is a relatively short period in the history of the evolution of life — toads have been able to spread across almost all continents of the world. Toads (Bufonidae) originated in the tropics of South America. The roughly 500 known species populating a wide range of habitat types are incredibly diverse in their characteristics, and some species have a larger distribution range than others.
The researchers looked at these characteristics and correlated them with their distribution range. “When we linked adult and developmental traits with the past distribution of toads, we could see that ancestral toads having a combination of certain traits were the ones that expanded their range and spread over the world,” Franky Bossuyt of the Free University of Brussels, under whose joint supervision the study was done, told The Hindu.
S.D. Biju, Associate Professor at Delhi University who collaborated with the study as research supervisor, says these traits could help determine which species of toads could become an invasive presence in a particular environment. He cited the case of the cane toad, which was introduced in Australia in recent times and had by now become infamous for its “invasion” of the whole of the island continent.
One common trait of the wide-populating toads is the ability to live away from water instead of being in high humidity, damp and even wet places to survive.
Other traits that facilitate spreading include the possession of parotoids or poison glands, which deter predators, and inguinal fat bodies, which provide extra energy to hop around expanding range, Dr. Bossuyt said.
The researchers also say that the toads that have come to colonise large parts of the world have relatively larger body sizes. They balloon in size and have greater body volume than other toads to store water, relative to the skin area from where to lose water.
The ability to lay eggs in all kinds of water bodies, large clutch sizes of eggs laid at a time, and the ability of their larvae to feed off nutrients in the environment (which means reduced dependence on the mother toads) are the other common traits found in toads that have been successful with range expansion.
“Much of the research on molecular evolution so far explains the past, but links between geographic expansions and speciation have rarely been demonstrated. This study will probably lead to further discussion about this adaptation,” Dr. Biju said.
In India, the common toad Bufo melanostictus is able to adapt to a diverse range of habitats and is hence able to have a large distribution throughout the country.
*****
http://www.hindu.com/2010/02/07/stories/2010020750761600.htm
And, this is the text:
THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Through an extensive analysis of 228 toad species, constituting nearly 43 per cent of the known toad species of the world, scientists have now come up with a list of special traits that could have enabled these amphibians to conquer the world.
Ines Van Bocxlaer, a graduate student of the Free University of Brussels, and her associates list these special traits in the February 5 issue of the journal Science.
In a period of less than 10 million years — which is a relatively short period in the history of the evolution of life — toads have been able to spread across almost all continents of the world. Toads (Bufonidae) originated in the tropics of South America. The roughly 500 known species populating a wide range of habitat types are incredibly diverse in their characteristics, and some species have a larger distribution range than others.
The researchers looked at these characteristics and correlated them with their distribution range. “When we linked adult and developmental traits with the past distribution of toads, we could see that ancestral toads having a combination of certain traits were the ones that expanded their range and spread over the world,” Franky Bossuyt of the Free University of Brussels, under whose joint supervision the study was done, told The Hindu.
S.D. Biju, Associate Professor at Delhi University who collaborated with the study as research supervisor, says these traits could help determine which species of toads could become an invasive presence in a particular environment. He cited the case of the cane toad, which was introduced in Australia in recent times and had by now become infamous for its “invasion” of the whole of the island continent.
One common trait of the wide-populating toads is the ability to live away from water instead of being in high humidity, damp and even wet places to survive.
Other traits that facilitate spreading include the possession of parotoids or poison glands, which deter predators, and inguinal fat bodies, which provide extra energy to hop around expanding range, Dr. Bossuyt said.
The researchers also say that the toads that have come to colonise large parts of the world have relatively larger body sizes. They balloon in size and have greater body volume than other toads to store water, relative to the skin area from where to lose water.
The ability to lay eggs in all kinds of water bodies, large clutch sizes of eggs laid at a time, and the ability of their larvae to feed off nutrients in the environment (which means reduced dependence on the mother toads) are the other common traits found in toads that have been successful with range expansion.
“Much of the research on molecular evolution so far explains the past, but links between geographic expansions and speciation have rarely been demonstrated. This study will probably lead to further discussion about this adaptation,” Dr. Biju said.
In India, the common toad Bufo melanostictus is able to adapt to a diverse range of habitats and is hence able to have a large distribution throughout the country.
*****
Monday, February 1, 2010
'Too early to say how sustained the global economic turnaround will be'
(This is an interview I did with Vinod Thomas, Director-General and Senior Vice-President at the World Bank, when he visited Thiruvananthapuram recently. Since I am a journalist who is familiar only with Kerala-specific issues, I had approached this work assigned to me with some trepidation. The topic of the interview was actually beyond me. I received a good set of questions from above and familiarised myself with the topic surfing the net for about four hours, enough to aquire just about the basic background of the subject. Then I approached Dr. Vinod Thomas with the emptiness of an empty vessel. On completion of the assignment, I frankly found that this is a good approach for us journalists to take all the time, because we are constantly called upon to write on topics new to us. If you do not have any theories of your own and pre-set positions, and if you do not know much about the subject and is EMPTY to receive everything as it is, you don't distort even unconsciously. With such an approach of total surrender, a journalist covering just the city police beat can cover even international diplomacy.)
This is the link to the interview, published in the opinion page of The Hindu:
http://beta.thehindu.com/opinion/interview/article33548.ece
And, this is the text of the interview:
P. Venugopal
India may have to watch out for further decline in remittances from Indians working abroad because of the lagged impact of the recession, says Vinod Thomas.
Vinod Thomas, Director-General and Senior Vice-President, Independent Evaluation Group at the World Bank, spoke to The Hindu, during a recent visit to India, on why it was too early now to expect a quick and sustained turnaround of the global economy, despite signs of the recession having ended.
In this interview, he says that, with China, India and a few other emerging economies leading the recovery, changes are bound to come in their roles in the global economy and in institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). As an economist and international development expert, he says that what India will have to watch out for in the year to come may be a further decline in remittances from Indians working abroad because of the lagged impact of the recession. He says that Kerala's initiatives to take care of those returning home jobless from a broad and provide conducive conditions for the flow of remittances are positive, but such initiatives have to be pushed further, not only by Kerala, but also the other States similarly affected by the crisis.
The World Bank has generally been more pessimistic than the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in reacting to this crisis, often downgrading its earlier growth forecasts. Should there be such a divergence in the approaches of the two Bretton Woods twins?
Of course, there can be differences in perception. However, if you look at it closely, there is no significant divergence in the assessment of the crisis and the recovery process; the direction indicated by both institutions is the same. The IMF has forecast three per cent growth for the global economy in 2010 and the World Bank a little less. There are also technical reasons for this difference. In its growth forecast, the IMF uses what is called purchasing power parity figures, whereas the World Bank uses the Atlas method. The combined share of the economies of India and China in the overall global economy is larger in the former case than in the latter. The IMF's method takes into consideration the lower cost of living in India and China, which pushes up the real income and thence the size of their economies. The World Bank's method relies on dollar exchange rates and not rates adjusted against the cost of living.
The IMF, in its latest update to the WEO (October 1), has said that the global economy is out of recession and that world output has turned positive. How do you see that from the World Bank's perspective?
Although the global economy is turning around at the moment, it is too early to say how quick and sustained the turnaround will be. The assessment is that the global economy will shrink by about one per cent in 2009, followed by a growth of little less than three per cent in 2010, driven mostly by China, India and some other emerging economies. China is expected to return to its pre-crisis growth rate of eight - nine per cent and India to six-plus per cent. The growth of industrial countries will remain low. Even with the signs of recovery, however, the unemployment situation continues to be serious. Unemployment reached nearly 10 per cent in the United States this month. The labour market is still not confident. And global poverty has increased by 90 million because of the crisis. So the overall global situation, which will impact India also, is still a matter of concern. And the banking crisis that had inflicted severe damage on the economies of the West needs time to evaporate. The loose regulatory regime that had brought in the banking crisis is being tightened everywhere, wiser by the experience. Also, with more regulations now, its ability to hit a quick turnaround too has been curtailed intentionally. The cleaning up of the old bad portfolios is bound to take time. Part of the reason for the present recovery trend is the increased government spending everywhere. The world economies combined have increased their fiscal deficits by five to six per cent - something unprecedented in history - to stimulate themselves out of the depth of the recession. This cannot go on. Because, increased expenses mean deficits and debts that you have to pay later. Last, but not the least, is the issue of consumer confidence. Consumers are wary; they would rather wait for some more time.
An important outcome of the G20 Summits, especially the last one at Pittsburgh, is the agreement to democratise the World Bank and the IMF. There will be a rebalancing of the quotas in the IMF to give India, China and others five per cent more voting rights. Do we see the emergence of a bigger picture in which developed countries cede their overwhelming influence over the two institutions? Do you see a Chinese or an Indian at the helm of IMF or World Bank in the foreseeable future?
Changes are happening. You know, India and China combined now account for 16 per cent of the world economy. China is now the second largest economy in the world and India, the fourth. The G20 in which they belong is now more influential than the G7, the club of the most developed. The rebalancing is bound to happen. But, with the rebalancing, new responsibilities too will come. Contributions will have to increase. The positions they take on issues such as global poverty, global warming and global trade will all have to evolve. The question of a bigger role for emerging economies should not make us lose sight of the need for greater representations for the poor countries too.
Migrants' (workers') remittances to India have been a major source of strength for India's balance of payments. According to the World Bank, remittances worldwide are likely to decline from $328 billion in 2008 to $304 billion in 2009. How significant is this reduction, which, in any case, is smaller than the decline in private capital flows?
A reduction in remittances can be very significant for India. Developing countries are affected in different ways by this crisis. It can be from decline in trade volumes, private capital flows, remittances, or all these. For instance, China is affected more by trade decline than a decline in private capital flows. I fear that there may be a lagged effect in the year to come, a further reduction in remittances, because many migrants who had lost jobs are somehow managing to keep the flow going, doing part-time jobs or something, waiting for the crisis to blow over. India's remittances in 2008 calendar year was $52 billion, which is 4.3 per cent of India's 2008 GDP of $1,218 billion. You see, there is a serious social angle too in the issue of remittances from migrant workers.
As you know, workers' remittances have benefited the economies of Kerala and a few other States. What steps should the recipient States take to bolster these remittances? The downturn in West Asia has caused job losses especially at the lower end.
Very true. Job losses at the lower end are a real problem. I feel that the recipient States and the country can put in mechanisms for smoother flow of workers' remittances from abroad. The governments should also probe ways to ensure productive investment opportunities for the use of the remittances. Both the money and the skills of the returnees should be used effectively. Kerala has made certain promising initiatives in these directions by announcing new schemes for the returnees to start self employment ventures and small and medium enterprises. Kerala's efforts to use financial instruments to attract remittances for financing profitable projects are also very promising. This is a direction along which Kerala, and also the other States facing the same problem, can go even further.
*****
This is the link to the interview, published in the opinion page of The Hindu:
http://beta.thehindu.com/opinion/interview/article33548.ece
And, this is the text of the interview:
P. Venugopal
India may have to watch out for further decline in remittances from Indians working abroad because of the lagged impact of the recession, says Vinod Thomas.
Vinod Thomas, Director-General and Senior Vice-President, Independent Evaluation Group at the World Bank, spoke to The Hindu, during a recent visit to India, on why it was too early now to expect a quick and sustained turnaround of the global economy, despite signs of the recession having ended.
In this interview, he says that, with China, India and a few other emerging economies leading the recovery, changes are bound to come in their roles in the global economy and in institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). As an economist and international development expert, he says that what India will have to watch out for in the year to come may be a further decline in remittances from Indians working abroad because of the lagged impact of the recession. He says that Kerala's initiatives to take care of those returning home jobless from a broad and provide conducive conditions for the flow of remittances are positive, but such initiatives have to be pushed further, not only by Kerala, but also the other States similarly affected by the crisis.
The World Bank has generally been more pessimistic than the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in reacting to this crisis, often downgrading its earlier growth forecasts. Should there be such a divergence in the approaches of the two Bretton Woods twins?
Of course, there can be differences in perception. However, if you look at it closely, there is no significant divergence in the assessment of the crisis and the recovery process; the direction indicated by both institutions is the same. The IMF has forecast three per cent growth for the global economy in 2010 and the World Bank a little less. There are also technical reasons for this difference. In its growth forecast, the IMF uses what is called purchasing power parity figures, whereas the World Bank uses the Atlas method. The combined share of the economies of India and China in the overall global economy is larger in the former case than in the latter. The IMF's method takes into consideration the lower cost of living in India and China, which pushes up the real income and thence the size of their economies. The World Bank's method relies on dollar exchange rates and not rates adjusted against the cost of living.
The IMF, in its latest update to the WEO (October 1), has said that the global economy is out of recession and that world output has turned positive. How do you see that from the World Bank's perspective?
Although the global economy is turning around at the moment, it is too early to say how quick and sustained the turnaround will be. The assessment is that the global economy will shrink by about one per cent in 2009, followed by a growth of little less than three per cent in 2010, driven mostly by China, India and some other emerging economies. China is expected to return to its pre-crisis growth rate of eight - nine per cent and India to six-plus per cent. The growth of industrial countries will remain low. Even with the signs of recovery, however, the unemployment situation continues to be serious. Unemployment reached nearly 10 per cent in the United States this month. The labour market is still not confident. And global poverty has increased by 90 million because of the crisis. So the overall global situation, which will impact India also, is still a matter of concern. And the banking crisis that had inflicted severe damage on the economies of the West needs time to evaporate. The loose regulatory regime that had brought in the banking crisis is being tightened everywhere, wiser by the experience. Also, with more regulations now, its ability to hit a quick turnaround too has been curtailed intentionally. The cleaning up of the old bad portfolios is bound to take time. Part of the reason for the present recovery trend is the increased government spending everywhere. The world economies combined have increased their fiscal deficits by five to six per cent - something unprecedented in history - to stimulate themselves out of the depth of the recession. This cannot go on. Because, increased expenses mean deficits and debts that you have to pay later. Last, but not the least, is the issue of consumer confidence. Consumers are wary; they would rather wait for some more time.
An important outcome of the G20 Summits, especially the last one at Pittsburgh, is the agreement to democratise the World Bank and the IMF. There will be a rebalancing of the quotas in the IMF to give India, China and others five per cent more voting rights. Do we see the emergence of a bigger picture in which developed countries cede their overwhelming influence over the two institutions? Do you see a Chinese or an Indian at the helm of IMF or World Bank in the foreseeable future?
Changes are happening. You know, India and China combined now account for 16 per cent of the world economy. China is now the second largest economy in the world and India, the fourth. The G20 in which they belong is now more influential than the G7, the club of the most developed. The rebalancing is bound to happen. But, with the rebalancing, new responsibilities too will come. Contributions will have to increase. The positions they take on issues such as global poverty, global warming and global trade will all have to evolve. The question of a bigger role for emerging economies should not make us lose sight of the need for greater representations for the poor countries too.
Migrants' (workers') remittances to India have been a major source of strength for India's balance of payments. According to the World Bank, remittances worldwide are likely to decline from $328 billion in 2008 to $304 billion in 2009. How significant is this reduction, which, in any case, is smaller than the decline in private capital flows?
A reduction in remittances can be very significant for India. Developing countries are affected in different ways by this crisis. It can be from decline in trade volumes, private capital flows, remittances, or all these. For instance, China is affected more by trade decline than a decline in private capital flows. I fear that there may be a lagged effect in the year to come, a further reduction in remittances, because many migrants who had lost jobs are somehow managing to keep the flow going, doing part-time jobs or something, waiting for the crisis to blow over. India's remittances in 2008 calendar year was $52 billion, which is 4.3 per cent of India's 2008 GDP of $1,218 billion. You see, there is a serious social angle too in the issue of remittances from migrant workers.
As you know, workers' remittances have benefited the economies of Kerala and a few other States. What steps should the recipient States take to bolster these remittances? The downturn in West Asia has caused job losses especially at the lower end.
Very true. Job losses at the lower end are a real problem. I feel that the recipient States and the country can put in mechanisms for smoother flow of workers' remittances from abroad. The governments should also probe ways to ensure productive investment opportunities for the use of the remittances. Both the money and the skills of the returnees should be used effectively. Kerala has made certain promising initiatives in these directions by announcing new schemes for the returnees to start self employment ventures and small and medium enterprises. Kerala's efforts to use financial instruments to attract remittances for financing profitable projects are also very promising. This is a direction along which Kerala, and also the other States facing the same problem, can go even further.
*****
Collector advises against notifying Munnar forests
Link to my edited story on Munnar published in The Hindu on January 29, 2010: http://www.hindu.com/2010/01/29/stories/2010012950100100.htm
This is the text of the published article:
P. Venugopal
THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Even as the Kerala High Court’s directions to the State government on January 21 to initiate action against illegal encroachments in Munnar remained, the District Collector of Idukki on January 25 wrote to the State government not to go ahead with its plan to declare the unreserved forests of the region as reserved forests based on the existing survey records, informed sources in the government have revealed.
The faxed letter said he had “come to know from press news and reliable sources that the government wants to notify 17,985 acres of land as reserved forests,” apparently a reference to reports quoting Forest Minister Benoy Viswom that appeared on January 25 and 26 saying that the government was attending to the legal formalities related to handing over 17,922 acres of unreserved forests in Munnar, now with the Revenue Department, to the Forest Department.
The Collector also stated that the “extent of area arrived at [by the] forest [department] suffers from infirmity and resurvey records prepared [by the Revenue Department] do not have any credibility and lacks integrity.”
Seven ‘glaring facts’
He listed seven “glaring facts which had come to my notice” to point out why the “boundary and area mentioned in re-survey records may not be relied upon.” He added that the “actual area going to be notified may be verified on ground, as a lot of area has been notified in KDH village which is outside the custody of forest department.”
The Idukki Collector, it has been stated, faxed the letter to the Principal Secretary to the Chief Minister, Private Secretary to the Revenue Minister, Secretary to the Forest Department, the Principal Chief Conservator of Forests and the Chief Conservator of Forests based in Kottayam, who has jurisdiction over Munnar in Idukki district.
*****
This is the text of the published article:
P. Venugopal
THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Even as the Kerala High Court’s directions to the State government on January 21 to initiate action against illegal encroachments in Munnar remained, the District Collector of Idukki on January 25 wrote to the State government not to go ahead with its plan to declare the unreserved forests of the region as reserved forests based on the existing survey records, informed sources in the government have revealed.
The faxed letter said he had “come to know from press news and reliable sources that the government wants to notify 17,985 acres of land as reserved forests,” apparently a reference to reports quoting Forest Minister Benoy Viswom that appeared on January 25 and 26 saying that the government was attending to the legal formalities related to handing over 17,922 acres of unreserved forests in Munnar, now with the Revenue Department, to the Forest Department.
The Collector also stated that the “extent of area arrived at [by the] forest [department] suffers from infirmity and resurvey records prepared [by the Revenue Department] do not have any credibility and lacks integrity.”
Seven ‘glaring facts’
He listed seven “glaring facts which had come to my notice” to point out why the “boundary and area mentioned in re-survey records may not be relied upon.” He added that the “actual area going to be notified may be verified on ground, as a lot of area has been notified in KDH village which is outside the custody of forest department.”
The Idukki Collector, it has been stated, faxed the letter to the Principal Secretary to the Chief Minister, Private Secretary to the Revenue Minister, Secretary to the Forest Department, the Principal Chief Conservator of Forests and the Chief Conservator of Forests based in Kottayam, who has jurisdiction over Munnar in Idukki district.
*****
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