THE MELTDOWN

The United Nations said that swathes of mountain ranges worldwide risk losing their glaciers by the end of the century if global warming continues at its projected rate.
The arctic ice cap, since the last ice age, 125000 years ago, for the first time could be circumnavigated this year due to the rapidly melting ice.

Outside of the polar ice caps, the Himalyas are the largest store of water, feeding atleast 10 Asian rivers including the Ganga, Brahmaputra and the Yamuna. Between 1996 and 2005 the Himalayan glaciers lost on an average, a mass of more than twice the ice loss of the previous decade.As the glaciers recede they leave behind glacial lakes. With the rapid melting of the glaciers there stands the problem of swelling glacial lakes. A burst in a glacial lake could cause flash floods in India, Nepal, Bhutan and Bangladesh. There however isn't an institutionalised system, of studying the Himalayan glaciers and the rate at which they are receding or the glacial lakes, in order in our country.
The BBC reported that according to the WWF, India, China and Nepal could experience floods followed by droughts in the coming decades. It has been reported that the glaciers which regulate the water supply to the Ganges and Brahmaputra besides some other rivers, are retreating at a rate of about 10-15 metres anually. The New York Times, in a report on the receding Himalyan glaciers, reported a study conducted on 466 glaciers by the Indian Space Research Organisation using sattelite imaging, which found that there had been a 20% reduction in size of the Himalayan glaciers between 1962 and 2001.

Even though it is a natural cycle for glaciers to melt and regulate the flow of water in the rivers and get rebuilt during snowfall, the survival of a glacier depends on the balance between the melting and the buildup. Over the last 2 decades the mean air temperature in the North Western Himalyas had risen by 2.2 degrees celsius, a rate considerably higher than the rate of increase over the last 100 years resulting in a much higher melting rate .The rate of warming of the climate continues to be very high.
The 20th century's last two decades were the hottest in 400 years.The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reported that 11 of the 12 warmest years since 1850 have been after 1990. A report, based on the work of 2,500 scientists in more than 130 countries, concluded that humans have caused all or most of the current planetary warming. Human caused global warming is often called anthropogenic climate change.

Industrialization, deforestation, and pollution have greatly increased atmospheric concentrations of water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide, all greenhouse gases that help trap heat near the Earth's surface.These gases persist in the atmosphere for years, which means that even if such emissions were eliminated, it would not immideately stop global warming.
It has been pointed out that natural cycles in Earth's orbit can also alter the planet's exposure to sunlight, which may explain the current trend of increased global warming. Earth has indeed experienced warming and cooling cycles roughly every hundred thousand years due to these orbital shifts, but such changes have occurred over the span of several centuries. Today's changes have taken place over the past hundred years or less.

India's per capita share of emmissions is 1/20th that of industrialised countries.India has largely therefore resisted emmission caps on green house gasses as it would also result in stunting its economic growth. America claimed that it will face a cost of atleast $ 400 billion if it complies with the emmission standards imposed under the Kyoto Protocol. The United States of America is the only developed country that has not yet given its consent to comply with the treaty on climate change. However a number of companies in the US have started to make efforts to reduce emmissions to confirm to the standards that have been set.
Through Carbon Trading projects under the Clean Development Mechanism, India will be avoiding more than 5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide by 2012, cutting back 10% of the country's greenhouse gas emissions every year.
The Clean Development Mechanism is an arrangement under the Kyoto Protocol,allowing industrialised countries which have to reduce their green house emissions to invest in projects that reduce emissions in developing countries as an alternative to emission reductions in their own countries that will prove to be more expensive. Carbon credits are a key component of national and international emission trading schemes that have been implemented to reduce global warming. Credits can be exchanged between businesses or bought and sold in international markets.
India is making a significant contribution through this tool, in reducing the pressure that industrial development is mounting on the Earth's climate.

Keeping in mind the changing climate.. the melting glaciers in the world's largest storehouse of water outside the polar ice caps.. and the carbon trading..the rather cliche' question stands to pose again - Are we doing enough?
Obviously, if India is set to avoid more than 5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide by 2012, then it sounds like quite a lot is being done...

... that however is an exception to the fact that we still aren't too sure if our refrigerators use the most energy efficient technology, we don't even know which of our body sprays, hair sprays etc. have CFCs or if all body sprays have CFCs in them, leaving the air conditioner on for longer than needed has most usually only one effect - a senior member of the family paranoid about the unnecessarily huge elctricity bill...and thats all.

As discussions and international conferences on climate change continue, India, Nepal, Bhutan are amongst some of the countries from around the world that need to start doing a lot more than just cutting carbon emmissions, as they won't just be hit by fluctuating Earth temperatures but also very soon they will be hit by floods and other natural disasters caused by the receding glaciers on the Himalayas. If Disaster Management were to be a public company, there are chances that you would want to have your shares in it, the Disaster Management guys might just be doing a lot of business in the coming decades.

An all women IIT - effects my development communication paper

President Pratibha Patil, has proposed an all women IIT in Amravati.
'an all women IIT'!!!!!???!!
'Amravati'??!!

Let me first try to understand what 'an all women IIT' would mean, from all the perspectives that i can possibly comprehend.
The first thought is - more women will be IITians.
and now i think - why aren't more women IITians already? After distinctly and consistently having performed better than the boys in the CBSE Class 12th examinations in the science stream - do the women suddenly get scared of the men at the centres of the IIT entrance examinations??!! One of the reasons, i suppose, could be the difference in the number of male and female students pursuing higher education. Is this because there are a whole lot of all men colleges and no women colleges?? I'm sure not.It's possibly because the social conditioning that we recieve pressurises men to get into competitive proffesional courses that will help them get well paying jobs more than women. However over the past decade the number of women making it into the IITs has increased distinctly. So, maybe its a sign of a changing social mind set.Will opening an institute for women encourage this change in social mindset? It is most likely to give out a message supporting education for women. With an IIT clearly reserved for women, many might take the initial education leading them to the level at which they can avail the reservation.
Here the establishment of this institute will be a happy moment if viewed under the topic of women empowerment of my development communication syllabus.


For the current number of seats in the 7 IITs the number of women even appearing for the entrance is less than half of the number men. A common obeservation in many engineering scools in India is that the number of women is very rarely even close to half the number of men.
-This year out of the 626 students pursuing undergraduate courses at IIT Delhi, 83 are women.
-At the existing 7 IITs about 10% of the overall strength are women.
There are 8 new IITs sanctioned under the 11th 5 yr plan. The all women IIT that has been proposed is meant to be besides these 8. Ensuring a higher standard in terms of resources allocated to these IITs might be an imporatnt reason as to why there are going to be 8 new 'IITs', and not just 8 new 'technological institutes'. The standard of teachers if fought hard enough for, might just continue to remain upto its current standard. But a lack of quality incentives might just bring out a major problem as to where the government will find quality faculty for the 8 new IITs besides also the all women IIT.
Finding a way of ensuring that the present quality of students will be maintained - i give up on this one.
Even if all the women studying currently in the IITs (who have made it through on merit) were to be sent off to study at the all women IIT there would be seats for a lot many more. And at the common entrance exam for the IITs more women would have to be taken as opposed to a number of boys who might have faired better.Unless if we agreed to convert the other IITs into all men IITs.Obviously, competition would eventually suffer, as would merit.
The current 7 IITs are recognised as a brand which get a respectable ranking when placed along side some of the extremely good universities internationally.
It would be much fairer, if the new institutes, including the all women IIT could be created after ensuring that a few technological institutes attained the same standard as that of which the IITs boast , rather than creating 'IITs' that cannot match up to the standard that they are expected to maintain.
Considering the compromise on the quality of education provided in the top institutes of India, under the topic 'Education' in my development communication syllabus, the new all women IIT doesn't seem like the best idea.


I'm personally only too happy that Montek Singh Ahluwalia has rejected the proposal of an all women IIT.
And Amravati is in Maharashtra in the Vidarbha district.President Pratibha Patil's former Lok Sabha constituency.

From a conversation with my maid..

..I learnt that her most common ailments are a cold or some minor injuries she used to get while playing.She hasn't ever attented a school and bears no regrets about it. She has learnt needle work from her aunt and her father which she thinks is enough learning for her to get along just fine even if she stopped working as a housemaid. She just got married last year to a man of her choice she shyly admits.She doesn't play anymore, so now her only common ailment is a common cold she says with pride.
When i ask her about children, she says she'll have them only when her in-laws insist on it. Does she plan to educate them,i ask her to which she says- her husband is educated and all the other children in the household go to schools, so she will have to send her children to school too maybe.
Everyone in her family goes to Deen Dayal Upadhyay hospital whenever they feel there is a need for more medication than what the local private clinic can provide. It also happens to be the same hospital that the PHC in my area refers medical cases to. She is the new maid my mother just got.
From a conversation with my maid, i learnt that she is a very cool maid :) she is just 19 years old.
Though I think she would've had a slightly different story to tell me had she been educated. Probably confident enough to open her own little shop as a tailor. When i had asked her why she hasn't done that yet, she said that all the women in the family she has gotten married into,besides her mother in law, do the same work as her and opening a shop will mean keeping accounts, she doesn't know how to that.