3 JANUARY 2015: Pak's napak attack foiled by vigilant coast guard

Ø  Indian and U.S. officials are expected to meet in Delhi next week to discuss two proposals made by India to clear the nuclear logjam, with an added push coming from U.S. President Obama’s impending visit on January 24. It is learnt that the proposals were put forward during the first contact group meeting on civil nuclear issues held on December 16-17 that had been tasked by President Obama and Prime Minister Modi with finding a way around U.S. objections to India’s supplier liability law. According to one official present at the meeting, India put up a revised proposal of an “insurance pool” using General Insurance Company (GIC) to alleviate the risk to U.S. suppliers. An earlier proposal had been made during the UPA government’s tenure in March 2014, but had been rejected. Officials say the new offer would include a pool of GIC, New India Assurance, Oriental Insurance, National Insurance and United India, that would generate a risk cover of about $242 million. A second proposal, that US officials have taken back to discuss with lawyers and representatives of American companies GE-Hitachi and Westinghouse, would entail a “clarification of Section 46” of the law that has been described as “vague” . At present, Section 46 says that nothing in the law will “exempt the operator from any proceeding which might, apart from the act, be instituted against the operator.” This has been read to mean that U.S. suppliers could face tort claims, that is, be sued by victims of an accident where the nuclear parts are deemed faulty. U.S. officials will bring both proposals back to Delhi next week.

Ø  Interception by the Coast Guard of a suspicious Pakistani fishing boat which blew itself up in the Arabian Sea, showed that India’s coastal surveillance system, put in place in the wake of 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks, was working well, security analysts said. Though the sea route which the boat took definitely indicated a 26/11 type of clandestine operation, security experts said it would be too early to come to any conclusion. Something can be said with certainty only after image and forensic analysis of the nature of explosives and what kind of weapons the crew was armed with. However, Commodore Uday Bhaskar who heads the Society for Policy Studies (SPS) said the Coast Guard acted on “actionable intelligence’’ and the pre-emptive action showed the credibility and competence of the coastal surveillance grid that had come up after the November 2008 terror attack in Mumbai. Normally, six weeks before the U.S. President visits any place, American agencies get active in sanitising spaces. It would be interesting to know if any chatter was picked up by the U.S. agencies. Terming the incident as the most serious one after 26/11, S. K. Sharma of the Institute of Defence and Security Analyses (IDSA) said the presence of explosives and armed crew indicated that their “mission’’ was to target “sensitive installations’’ in the coastal cities of the country. Incidentally, Navy Chief Admiral R.K. Dhowan had in December warned of “rising threat’’ through the sea route.

Ø   Kiran B. Vadodaria of Sambhaav Metro was elected president of Indian Newspaper Society (INS) for 2014-15 at its 75th annual general meeting.

Ø  Approval for the India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO) Project in Theni, Tamil Nadu, is likely to be announced soon. The INO is a Rs 1,600-crore science project conceived nearly 15 years ago and can put India on the world map in the field of neutrino physics. It will house a massive iron detector which will be placed more than a kilometre below the surface of the earth. With a weight of nearly 50,000 tonnes, it will be the largest particle detector in the world, by present standards. Scientists from nearly 25 institutions across India are involved in this project, and it promises to engage engineers and the industry as the massive detector and tunnel would be built up indigenously, the source said. In fact, setting up this observatory would mean a revival of a lost opportunity for India because in 1965 pioneering Indian scientists at the Kolar Gold Field (KGF) observatory were among the first in the world to discover traces of the atmospheric neutrinos. With the closure of KGF mines in the mid-1990s, experimental research on neutrinos came to an end in India.

Ø  China has taken a firm step to extend the Silk Road Economic Belt to South Asia, by working out a blueprint of connecting Nepal with the Eurasian transport corridor. Nepal formally signed a four-point document endorsing the Silk Road Economic Belt — a pet project of President Xi Jinping for connecting Asia with Europe along a land corridor, with China as its hub. The agreement was signed during a meeting in Beijing of the Nepal-China Inter-governmental Business and Investment Coordination. Analysts point out that Nepal has joined a project that China has marshalled along with Russia as its core partner, to counter the Washington-led “Asia Pivot” doctrine, which has the containment of a rising China at its heart. Under the new Silk Route blueprint, the Chinese want to open up the transportation channel from the Pacific to the Baltic Sea, from which would radiate rail and road routes, which would also connect with East Asia, West Asia, and South Asia. China wants to connect with Nepal and South Asia through an extension of the Qinghai-Tibet railway. The rail line from Lhasa has already been extended to Shigatse, Tibet’s second largest city, 253 km away. The Chinese plan to build two lines from Shigatse. One would lead to Kerung, the nearest Chinese town from Nepal, from where it would be extended to Rasuwagadhi in Nepal. The other line would head to Yadong on the India-Bhutan border.

Ø  China’s Three Gorges dam has broken the world record for annual hydroelectric power production, more than a decade after it became the world’s largest power plant. The Yangtze river power station generated 98.8 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity in 2014, the Three Gorges Dam Corporation said in a statement, topping the 2013 production from the Brazilian-Paraguayan Itaipu dam. The amount of electricity generated by the Three Gorges plant is roughly equivalent to burning 49 million tonnes of coal, said Thursday’s statement, thereby preventing 100 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions. But Concerns have been raised about its environmental and human cost of the huge project. Campaign groups say it has damaged biodiversity, threatening the critically endangered Yangtze river dolphin.