Tag Archives: gujarat

Too Much Cheating? Shut Down the Whole Internet.

Mother Jones

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Tim Fernholz reports today that countries around the world have lost billions of dollars in economic output by shutting down the internet for various reasons:

The countries most affected? India, accounting for $968 million in lost output….shut off internet service during school exam periods to deter cheating. To keep students honest, India imposed a ban from 9am to 1pm in certain areas.

Say what? They shut down the whole damn internet for four hours to keep kids from cheating on exams? Yes indeed. And they aren’t the only ones:

India: “Mobile internet services will be blocked from 9 am to 1 pm in Ahmedabad….The Revenue Talatis Recruitment Exam is being conducted by ‘Gaun Seva Pasandgi Mandal’ (Gujarat State Subsidiary Selection Board or GSSSB) across the state….Considering the sensitive nature of the exam for recruitment of talatis, internet service providers have been asked to shut down all internet-based social media services from 9 am to 1 pm to prevent the misuse of mobiles during the exam.”

Uzbekistan: “Uzbek authorities suspended Internet and messaging services across the country on August 1 to prevent cheating at university entrance exams….The restrictions on the additional services have become an annual practice on exam day as authorities fight against corruption and cheating.”

Algeria: “Algerian authorities have temporarily blocked access to Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites to try to stop cheats posting high school exam papers online, state media reported on Sunday….’This is to protect students from the publication of false papers for these exams.’ “

Iraq: “Iraq has shut down the entire country’s internet in efforts to prevent students from cheating in exams….Wondering why the Iraqi government chose to take such a drastic step just for sixth grade finals? The reason why preventing sixth graders from cheating is such a high priority to the government is because, according to Iraqi law, education is compulsory only till the 6th grade. As a result, the pressure is fairly high on sixth graders to score well, as those who don’t make the cut are almost definitely pulled out of school.”

As you can see, this practice extends all the way from sixth grade to high school to universities to civil service exams. I guess building Faraday cages at all the test centers was too expensive, while strip searching every test taker was considered a step too far. The only option left was to shut down the internet for everyone.

All this said, the most common reason for shutting down the internet was in response to protests and other forms of civil strife. So I guess everyone is sort of used to it.

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Too Much Cheating? Shut Down the Whole Internet.

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The U.S. and India keep pushing toward a climate deal

The U.S. and India keep pushing toward a climate deal

By on 12 Jan 2015 12:40 pmcommentsShare

Preparations are well underway for President Obama’s visit to India later this month. New Delhi is emptying the cattle from its streets. The U.S. Secret Service is installing anti-aircraft guns on the city’s rooftops. And U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry just made a visit himself to lay the groundwork for some big announcements — most notably on climate change.

Officials in the U.S. delegation traveling with Kerry told the Associated Press that there could soon be news about a solar energy deal, a joint effort to bring electricity to the country’s rural areas, and, possibly, a carbon-reduction pact, hinted about for months, that Obama and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi would both sign.

The possibility of a climate deal between the U.S. and India, the world’s third largest annual emitter of greenhouse gases, is inviting comparisons to the big U.S.-China announcement late last year. It’s unlikely, however, that we can expect anything so far-reaching; India has repeatedly reminded the world that its people are very poor, and argued that it therefore deserves some leeway on the whole emission-reduction thing. The country points out that even as its emissions continue to grow (see graph on the left below), its per-capita emissions are well below the world average (see graph on the right).

(Click to embiggen.)

Still, in the run-up to Obama’s visit, Kerry, who brokered the China-U.S. deal, has been putting climate change front and center. At a speech yesterday in Gujarat, Modi’s home state — at which both U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and World Bank President Jim Yong Kim were present — Kerry used dire terms to call for action in the face of an impending crisis.

“There is one enormous cloud hanging over all of us which requires responsibility from leaders,” Kerry said. “Global climate change is already violently affecting communities not just across India but around the world. It is disrupting commerce, development, and economic growth. It’s costing farmers crops. It’s costing insurance companies unbelievable payouts. It’s raising the cost of doing business, and believe me, if it continues down the current trend-line, we will see climate refugees fighting each other for water and seeking food and new opportunity.”

As India’s carbon emissions continue to grow, Modi has been making a number of decisions on the environment that combine a gung-ho attitude toward technology and innovation with a deregulatory approach to business. It makes for an interesting environmental agenda in which polluters anticipate facing less scrutiny while the country simultaneously pushes renewable energy and encourages building sustainability.

Modi has been particularly keen on seeking foreign investment for solar power, which, at the moment, still costs up to 50 percent more than India’s No. 1 source of power, coal. At the same investment summit where Kerry spoke on Sunday, U.S.-based SunEdison and the Indian energy conglomerate Adani Enterprises announced a $4 billion investment in a joint project to produce low-cost solar panels. The proposed factory would become one of India’s largest manufacturers of solar panels, with plans to make them so cheaply that they “can compete head to head, unsubsidized and without incentives, with fossil fuels,” according Ahmad Chatila, president and CEO of SunEdison. (Adani, apparently hedging its bets, also announced an agreement to explore liquified natural gas opportunities with an Australian energy company.)

The announcement of any emission-reduction agreement between the U.S. and India will come, if it comes, in two weeks, when Obama comes to New Delhi for the city’s Republic Day celebration. Reuters notes that there’s a possibility that the leaders will be wreathed in air pollution during a Jan. 26 parade, at which Obama will be guest of honor. New Delhi’s smog is dense, and lately it’s been bad enough, according to a U.S. EPA scale, to cause “significant aggravation of heart or lung disease and premature mortality in persons with cardiopulmonary disease and the elderly” and a “significant increase in respiratory effects in the general population.” At the 2010 Republic Day celebration, the pollution was so thick that the crowds couldn’t see that year’s guest of honor, the president of South Korea.

The pollution would tinge any environmental announcement between the two leaders with a bit of irony. Even if India, with its low per-capita emissions, wants to leave the fight against climate change up to countries that bear more historical responsibility for the problem, there is a strong interest in improving air quality for the tens of millions of Indians living in its major cities. That, too, could prompt the country to come up with a plan to shift away from or limit the use of dirty fuels.

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The U.S. and India keep pushing toward a climate deal

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, global climate change, LAI, LG, ONA, Prepara, solar, solar panels, solar power, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The U.S. and India keep pushing toward a climate deal

We can provide power to everyone without a huge leap in emissions, study finds

We can provide power to everyone without a huge leap in emissions, study finds

20 Oct 2014 2:51 PM

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When we talk about international climate action, it’s often taken for granted that developing countries need room to pollute as they pull their citizens out of poverty. More than a billion people worldwide don’t have access to electricity, the argument goes, and getting them connected will require major development projects that will come hand-in-hand with significant new emissions.

But that might be a false assumption, according to a new paper in Nature Climate Change.

Shonali Pachauri, a researcher with the Austrian International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, finds that the world’s poorest people use so little energy at the moment that initially, upon being connected to the grid, they will not make much of a difference at all.

New Scientist writes:

The test case is rural India, where more unplugged people live than anywhere else — 400 million of them. But that is changing. India has connected an estimated 650 million people to the grid in the past 30 years, and Pachauri analysed government data on electricity use to find out what difference it made.

She found that the emissions of the newly connected, most in poor villages, amounted to just 50 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year. That was less than 4 per cent of the increase in national emissions during that time, which was overwhelmingly from cities and industry.

The big reason for this relatively tiny increase is that many poor households in developing countries just don’t have that much stuff to plug in. The average Indian household uses less than one tenth of the energy of an American household.

Of course, as nations become wealthier and more electrified, this will change: Their people will get more stuff, and use more energy. So getting growing countries’ energy economies on the right track now will help to keep their emissions from spiraling out of control in the future.

Fortunately, in the case of India, recently elected Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been touting a plan to get the rural poor hooked up to solar power. As chief minister of Gujarat, a state in the western part of India, he encouraged the rapid development of solar — and he’s now pushing to expand similar incentives across the country.

But in an essay this summer in New Scientist looking at central Africa, Fred Pearce noted that it is important that development efforts like this be big enough to actually make a difference.

… a couple of panels on the roof can charge phones and run a few lights and a radio but would be no good for anything more demanding, like boiling a kettle. Most Kenyans would probably prefer to be hooked up to centralised power, but the grid only reaches one-fifth of the country. …

That is especially troubling if the main argument for solar power is to tackle climate change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change argues that reducing poverty is vital to helping poor communities become more resilient. So it would be criminal if green technologies were imposed on poor people to help hold back carbon emissions — only to leave them even more vulnerable.

So off-grid, low-capacity solar arrays might not be the whole answer. Bigger, more robust renewable energy projects would be better. Finding the right form for those projects will be the challenge.

Source:
Powering up the poor shouldn’t hurt the climate

, New Scientist.

Access to electricity in India has no impact on climate change

, The Economic Times.

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We can provide power to everyone without a huge leap in emissions, study finds

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Travels Through India’s Sexual Revolution

Mother Jones

In late 2012, Jyoti Singh, a 23-year-old medical student, boarded a bus in Delhi headed towards home. She never made it to her destination. While on the bus, she was gang-raped by six men who left her with fatal injuries.

But unlike in the past, when Singh’s story might have remained hushed, tens of thousands of men and women poured into the streets to protest the rape. This public pressure led to the passage of a bill that criminalized stalking, voyeurism, and sexual harassment (though it falls short of criminalizing marital rape). The January 2013 anti-rape uprisings are part of a socio-sexual revolution unfolding in India, argues journalist Sally Howard in her book The Kama Sutra Diaries: Intimate Journeys Through Modern India, which hit American shelves in May.

Anti-rape protests in India Courtesy Sally Howard

Originally from the UK, Howard has been traveling to India for the past 15 years, writing for Indian and British publications like the Telegraph, the

Guardian, and the Sunday Times. India is a land steeped in contradiction, observes Howard; a place which gave the world the revolutionary Kama Sutra, but remains hooked on the idea of arranged marriages; “where families bow down to a graphic depiction of a conjoined phallus and vagina, the Shivaling, but where couples are routinely attacked by the police for the indiscretion of holding hands in public,” she writes in The Kama Sutra Diaries.

But over the last decade, Howard argues that a sexual revolution has begun in India, one with very different characteristics than the West’s transformation during the 1960s. “While the Western sexual revolution was propelled by contraception and feminism,” she tells me, “India’s revolution has more to do with a young generation rediscovering sex, and pushing up against parental expectations.” Today, more than half of India’s population is under the age of 25, with 65 percent of the population under 35. “And these young are saying we’ve had enough, we want to have sex. They’re telling their parents ‘I don’t want the life you have ascribed to me,'” says Howard.

Kama Sutra temples in Madhya Pradesh Kirat Sodhi

Howard’s travel partner Dimple, a 32-year-old Delhiite who left a loveless arranged marriage, exemplifies this social shift. “I was married at 21 by arrangement to a man I didn’t know,” Dimple told Howard. “The consummation of my marriage was like being hit with a cricket bat. Now I’m 32 and I’m a divorcée. My mother, who was herself very unhappy, and my grandmother, couldn’t think of getting divorced. So this is a big change for my generation.”

Over the course of two years, Howard and Dimple journey to the Kama Sutra temples of Madhya Pradesh, the hillside station at Shimla where Indians had a history of sexual escapades with the colonial British, and to Delhi, rocked by the recent rape uprisings. In Gujarat, Howard interviews a gay prince who is setting up a retirement home for gay and hijra (third gender) Indians, many of whom don’t have families to rely on for support as they age.

Manvendra Singh Gohil, a gay prince who established a retirement home for eunuchs Hemant Bhavsar

Howard’s journey voyage helps her uncover some shifts in sexual attitudes across the country. “Middle class Indians are getting more flexibility in choosing their own mate, and finding the space to be together and experimenting,” she tells me. And aided by new digital tools, Indians seem more piqued by sex. Over the past decade, Google searches for the word “porn” in India have increased fivefold. In 2012, people in New Delhi searched for the word “porn” at a higher rate than anywhere else in the world. A survey by India Today showed that 35 percent of Indian women consume porn as opposed to 13 percent a decade ago. Fifty percent of women disapprove of pre-marital sex, as opposed to 64 percent in 2003. But remnants of a misogynist past still linger. The same India Today survey revealed that 36 percent of men blamed women’s revealing clothes for India’s rape crisis.

Not surprisingly, Howard notes, the shift in thinking about sex is happening mostly with younger generations. But that doesn’t mean the past is trivial. In fact, India’s ancient texts may better inform contemporary lust than America’s Puritanical roots. “I hope that the new sexual story the land of the Kama Sutra tells itself will feature some of the depths of romantic feeling of the old courtly poets—that it might rediscover the deep sentiments that gave the world its finest physical embodiment of romantic love: the Taj Mahal.”

The Kama Sutra Diaries is equal parts travelogue and cultural analysis, blending vivid characters with upbeat prose and humor. With this entertaining read, Howard pushes past taboo to give us a more exposed India.

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Travels Through India’s Sexual Revolution

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India’s new prime minister is big on solar power

India’s new prime minister is big on solar power

Al Jazeera English on Flickr

The world’s biggest-ever election just spat out a potentially worrying result. Narendra Modi, a conservative Hindu nationalist who ran on a pro-development platform, will soon be India’s prime minister. What does that mean for the climate?

An American accustomed to conservative attacks on climate science and clean energy could be forgiven for assuming that it is bad news. But not all cultures equate conservatism with profligate fossil fuel burning and utter disregard for the climate. Despite his conservative chops, Modi is talking big when it comes to solar energy.

We’ve previously told you that India is making tremendous strides in building powerful solar arrays, boosting its grid-connected solar capacity from 18 megawatts to more than 2,000 megawatts in just four years. That’s a heartening trend in a nation that depends heavily on coal and frequently runs short of power — and that has shown belligerence in the face of international pressure to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

Fortunately, on solar development, Modi looks set to continue the outgoing government’s admirable quest for more. Bloomberg reports:

“We look upon solar as having the potential to completely transform the way we look at the energy space,” said Narendra Taneja, convener of the energy division at Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, which swept to power on May 16 in the biggest electoral win in three decades. …

Expanding clean-power generation will be the administration’s top energy-related priority, especially solar because it has the potential to create jobs and supply millions of scattered households not connected to the grid, he said.

Modi, as chief minister of Gujarat state, pioneered India’s first incentives for large-scale solar power in 2009. The party will take lessons from Gujarat’s program as it designs policies on a national level that will include both larger, grid-connected photovoltaic projects and smaller, decentralized applications for solar, Taneja said.

Modi will inherit the awkward issue of a burgeoning trade dispute in which the U.S. is complaining about India’s protectionist policies that are designed to spur a domestic solar industry. India’s outgoing government has been working up a counter-complaint, arguing that America’s own solar policies violate World Trade Organization rules. It’s hard to imagine Modi’s administration backing away from this fight, particularly given that American environmentalists are on India’s side.

Modi is already not on great terms with the American government. The U.S. denied him a visa following accusations that he fueled ethnic violence that left nearly 1,000 people dead, most of them Muslims, in his home state of Gujarat in 2002, where he has served as the equivalent of a governor since 2001. But after his party won the election last week, Obama called to congratulate him and invite him for a visit to Washington, D.C. If Modi accepts the invitation, maybe he’ll get the opportunity to see the new solar array on the White House roof.


Source
Modi to Use Solar to Bring Power to Every Home by 2019, Bloomberg

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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India’s new prime minister is big on solar power

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