Ø Former journalist Santanu Saikia, arrested for allegedly selling
official documents to corporate houses, had worked with several media
publications, including Business India , The Economic Times , The Indian Express and The Financial Express . As a reporter who specialised in the
energy sector, he had a reputation for breaking several major stories, former
colleagues said. This is not the first time he has had a brush with the
law. The earlier occasion, too, involved the publication of a secret document.
In 1999, the CBI filed a case against Mr. Saikia under the Official Secrets Act
for publishing a secret Cabinet note on disinvestment. The case went on for 10
years before he was acquitted in 2009 after a trial court in Delhi ruled in his
favour. The court ruled that the publication of a document merely
labelled “secret” should not render the journalist liable for prosecution under
the Act. The court said the publication of a disinvestment document was
unlikely to affect the sovereignty and integrity of India or jeopardise
friendly relations with foreign states. Mr. Saikia represented himself
in the case and contended that an archaic Act framed to capture spies — the
Official Secrets Act was framed in 1923 — was being used to harass a
journalist. In an interview, he had spoken of the mental torture of appearing
in court every month for 10 years for a legitimate story. In early 2000,
Mr. Saikia decided to turn entrepreneur and started a website, indianpetro.com,
to provide information on the oil and gas industry for subscribers. He soon
followed this up with two other sites —indianfertilizer.com and
energylineindia.com. By the middle of the decade, an industry analyst
said indianpetro.com had become a fairly respected portal which often carried
informative and insightful reports about the sector. A web profile of him says
that he earned himself the sobriquet Mr. Petrol.
Ø Santanu Saikia, a former journalist and now an energy consultant running
a website, who has been arrested by the Delhi Police in connection with the Oil
Ministry document theft case, said on Saturday that he was trying to uncover a
Rs. 10,000-crore scam. His statement has come at a time when the
police said the documents seized from corporate executives related to
“national security” could attract provisions of the Official Secrets Act.
Ø India and Russia have generally agreed upon the amount and division of
work during the research and development (R&D) stage of the fifth
generation fighter aircraft (FGFA) project. The work share of Hindustan
Aeronautics Limited (HAL) has been a contentious issue as the project will have
equal investment between India and Russia and is likely to cost over $30
billion for about 400 aircraft. India plans to induct 144 of them. But
HAL’s share in the work has been limited to a meagre 13 per cent so far which
will not build any critical technological gains. Both sides have been holding
discussions to sort this out before the final agreement. FGFA is crucial
for Indian Air Force’s evolving structure as was recently acknowledged by the
air chief recently. The final announcement could come later this year with
President Pranab Mukherjee visiting Moscow in June, and Prime Minister Narendra
Modi expected to visit Russia twice.
Ø Over half of India’s population is exposed to deadly air pollution and
live in areas where fine particulate matter pollution is above the country’s
standards for what is considered safe. Using a combination of
ground-level in situ measurements and satellite-based remote sensing data, a
new study by economists from three U.S. universities — Chicago, Harvard and
Yale — has calculated that 660 million people live in areas that exceed the
Indian National Ambient Air Quality Standard (NAAQS) for fine particulate
matter (PM 2.5) pollution.
Ø Pakistan may now be on the fast track to weaponising spent nuclear fuel
through its plutonium reprocessing plant in Chashma in Punjab, according to
recent satellite imagery, which indicates that all the ongoing construction
around a tall building, suspected to be the reprocessing facility in question,
has been completed. In its report, the Institute for Science and
International Security (ISIS), a think tank here, said that while the
operational status of this reprocessing plant was yet to be confirmed, “satellite
imagery signatures suggest it may have recently become operational, [a
development that] would significantly increase Pakistan’s plutonium separation
capability and ability to make nuclear weapons.” Speaking to The
Hindu one
of the report’s authors, Serena Vergantini, said that ISIS had determined from
open source information that there was a plan to build a reprocessing plant at
Chashma several years ago although it was difficult to know which building was
the reprocessing facility. However, in 2007, ISIS located a tall
building in a site southwest of the Chashma Nuclear Power Complex, which
incidentally hosts Chinese-supplied nuclear power reactors, where “a
considerable amount of construction” had taken place between 2002 and 2005,
including ponds nearby excavated, roads paved and a potential plutonium
management building and waste facility built nearby. The latest
satellite imagery obtained by ISIS through Digital Global indicates that all
such construction work appears complete, which makes it most likely that the
reprocessing facility is “close to complete,” and “possibly operational,” Ms.
Vergantini noted. Last month, another ISIS report had hinted that
Pakistan may have accelerated its covert nuclear weapons development programme
and rendered operational a nuclear reactor structure located at its Khushab
plant, some 120 km by road from the Chashma site.
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