25 MAY 2016

Ø  Former Union Minister for Youth Affairs and Sports Sarbananda Sonowal was sworn in as the fourteenth Chief Minister of Assam on Tuesday in the presence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and several Cabinet ministers.

Ø  Potassium bromate, the chemical additive widely prevalent in bread and refined flour and associated with cancer, is in the same league as coffee, aloe vera, mobile phone radiation and carbon black, a key ingredient in eye-liner. It also is less toxic than processed and red meat, according to a perusal by The Hindu of the list of agents deemed potentially cancerous by the International Agency For Research on Cancer (IARC) — a World Health Organisation body. Potassium bromate, according to an investigation made public on Monday by the Centre for Science and Environment, was ubiquitous in several brands of bread and refined flour products including burgers and pizza, in Delhi. Based on the quantity and quality of scientific evidence that is available through peer-reviewed literature and documented reports on the risk of cancer, the IARC follows a five-step grading scheme, the highest of which is Grade 1, or substances that are proven to cause cancer in humans, and the lowest at Grade 4 where there is definite proof that there is no link to cancer. Active smoking, according to the IARC’s primer on interpreting cancer categories, carried a much higher risk of lung cancer than air pollution, although both are categorised in Group 1.

Ø  The Central government is all set to ban the use of potassium bromate — the cancer-causing chemical found in bread samples tested by the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) — as a food additive. Health Minister J. P. Nadda asserted that the government will take speedy and appropriate action.

Ø  At more than 8,000 ft above sea level, Mt. Everest remains a compelling challenge to all mountaineers. Early on May 20, S. Prabhakaran from Tiruvannamalai, became the first Indian Forest Service officer to reach the top of the world. A 2011-batch officer from the Karnataka cadre, Mr. Prabhakaran with five other teammates from India, left for Kathmandu on April 8. In 2015, an All India Services Expedition to Mount Everest was formed with five members and Prime Minister Narendra Modi flagged off our journey on March 27. Due to the earthquake which hit Nepal, the team had to come back from 6,000 meters.

Ø  After successfully testing a technology demonstrator of a reusable launch vehicle, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is planning to test an air-breathing propulsion system, which aims to capitalise on the oxygen in the atmosphere instead of liquefied oxygen while in flight. The mission to test the technology would be launched either in the last week of June or early July from Satish Dhawan Space Centre at Sriharikota. The mission would be on a sounding rocket. Generally, vehicles used to launch satellites into space use combustion of propellants with oxidiser and fuel. Air breathing propulsion system aims at use oxygen present in the atmosphere up to 50 km from the earth’s surface to burn the fuel stored in the rocket. The new propulsion system, once mastered, would complement ISRO’s aim to develop a reusable launch vehicle, which would have longer flight duration. The system, involving the scramjet engine, would become crucial while sending up the spacecraft.

Ø  Indian Naval Sailing Vessel (INSV) Mhadei set sail from Goa on Tuesday with an all-woman crew for a voyage to Port Louis in Mauritius skippered by Lt. Cdr. Vartika Joshi, a Naval Constructor. The ship was flagged-off by R.Adm K.K. Pandey from INS Mandovi at Verem in north Goa at a ceremony on Tuesday.

Ø  A trilateral transport corridor project, inked in Tehran this week by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the leaders of Iran and Afghanistan, has the potential to alter the geopolitical map of South and Central Asia. Mr. Modi’s visit also put an end to years of ambivalence on the development of Iran’s Chabahar port on the Gulf of Oman, the focal point of the corridor project. New Delhi and Tehran had agreed in 2003 to develop the port, near the Iran-Pakistan border. But the project did not take off, mainly owing to international sanctions against Iran over its nuclear programme, but also on account of inertia in Delhi. The removal of sanctions after Iran’s nuclear deal has provided New Delhi an opportunity to revitalise bilateral ties. The road, rail and port development projects, once implemented, will change the way India, Afghanistan and Iran do business. For India, the projects have specific economic and strategic significance. India and Afghanistan have failed to realise the full economic potential of their friendship owing to connectivity problems. The Pakistan link between India and landlocked Afghanistan has been an obstacle, given Islamabad’s tense diplomatic ties with both New Delhi and Kabul, and sometimes with Tehran too. Once the Chabahar port is developed, Indian ships will get direct access to the Iranian coast; a rail line to the Afghan border town of Zaranj will allow India a route around Pakistan. This will surely boost trade with Iran and Afghanistan. Besides, the proposed free trade zone in the Chabahar area offers Indian companies a new investment destination at a well-connected port city. India has already said its companies will set up “plants in sectors such as fertilizers, petrochemicals and metallurgy” in the zone. It will also supply $400 million worth of steel rails to Tehran to build the railway link. From a strategic point of view, Chabahar is situated just 100 km from Pakistan’s Gwadar port, the centrepiece of a $46 billion economic corridor that China is building. Though the Indian investment in Chabahar, at $500 million, does not match the scale of the Chinese project, the Chabahar port will act as a gateway for India to Central Asia bypassing the China-Pakistan arc. The long-term potential of this connectivity is immense. The real challenge lies in execution. India’s record in finishing big-ticket projects abroad is far from consistent. Also, with Tehran becoming the new destination of global powers, India needs to energise its diplomacy to keep engagement with Iran on an even keel, irrespective of outside pressure. With the Chabahar project, India has raised the stakes in Tehran substantially, and also raised the bar on its own regional ambitions. It cannot afford to let bilateral ties drift again, as it happened over the past decade.

Ø  With the successful launch on Monday of the first technology demonstrator of the indigenously made Reusable Launch Vehicle (RLV), the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has taken a baby step in building a vehicle that can be reused multiple times to launch satellites into orbit. The hypersonic flight, that lasted about 770 seconds from lift-off to splashdown in the Bay of Bengal, reached an altitude of about 65 km before re-entering the atmosphere at nearly five times the speed of sound. Many more such successful launches have to be undertaken before the RLV becomes a reusable launch system to put satellites into orbit. Some of the objectives of this week’s launch were to test the aero-thermodynamic characterisation of the vehicle with wings when it re-enters the atmosphere at hypersonic speed; the control and guidance system; the control system to land the vehicle at a specific location; and the hot structure, the basic body-carrying part of the vehicle with heat protecting tiles. The ultimate objective is to test the vehicle’s performance when it travels at a speed of Mach 25 using air-breathing propulsion. It will take 10 to 15 years, and several more launches, before ISRO readies a reusable launch vehicle for commercial use. Building a fully and rapidly reusable launch vehicle will play a pivotal role in cutting down by as much as 80 per cent the cost of launching satellites into orbit. In fact, ISRO is already well-known for launching satellites at a far cheaper cost than other space agencies. Currently, the bulk of the launch cost comes from building the rocket, which can be used just once, as the rockets get burnt on re-entry into the atmosphere. No other space agency has reusable launch vehicles in operation, and ISRO has taken a lead in developing one. Learning from the mistakes of the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in its space shuttle programme, ISRO will not use the same reusable vehicle to launch satellites and carry astronauts as it drastically reduces the payload capacity and thereby increases the cost per kg. ISRO will also use cutting-edge technology to shield the launch vehicle from intense heat to reduce, if not completely eliminate, refurbishment expenses. Getting this right would enable the vehicle to be reused within a very short span of time. If all works as per plan, ISRO should be able to break even after 25 to 50 launches, bringing down the cost of further launches on the same vehicle.