Editorial 1 : Why is Bihar’s caste-based survey facing legal challenges?
Context
The Supreme Court is set to hear on August 18, petitions challenging the Patna High Court (HC)’s verdict upholding the Bihar government’s ongoing caste survey.
Caste-based survey
- The year, the State government launched a two-phase caste survey in Bihar, stating that detailed information on socio-economic conditions would help create better government policies for disadvantaged groups.
- The survey is estimated to collect the socio-economic data for a population of 12.70 crore in the 38 districts of Bihar.
- The first phase of the survey, which involved a house listing exercise, was carried out and in the middle of the second phase, the survey was halted due to a stay order from the HC.
- However, a recent HC verdict dismissed all petitions opposing the move, and the government on August 2 resumed work on the second phase of the survey. In the second phase, data related to castes, sub-castes, and religions of all people is to be collected.
- The final survey report can be expected in September, less than a year before the 2024 election.
Need for a caste based census
- The Census conducted at the beginning of every decade does not record any caste data other than for those listed as Scheduled Castes (SCs).
- In the absence of such a census, there is no proper estimate for the population of OBCs, various groups within the OBCs, and others.
- Despite this ambiguity, the Union government has categorically ruled out conducting a socio-economic caste census, saying it is unfeasible, ‘administratively difficult and cumbersome.’
- Responding to a writ petition filed by the State of Maharashtra, the Centre in its affidavit said that excluding any castes other than the SCs and Scheduled Tribes was a ‘conscious policy decision’ adopted since the 1951 Census, and that there was a policy of ‘official discouragement of caste’.
- The Union government in 2011 had undertaken a survey of castes through the Socio-Economic and Caste Census of 2011. However, the collected raw data of nearly 130 crore Indians was never made public due to flaws in the data.
- On August 13, 1990, the V.P. Singh government announced the decision to implement the Mandal Commission report, which recommended a 27%reservation for Other Backward Classes (OBC).
- In 1992, with the Supreme Court ruling in Indra Sawhney & Others versus Union of India (1992) that caste was an acceptable indicator of backwardness, the recommendations of the Mandal Commission were finally implemented. The Mandal Commission estimated the OBC population at 52%.
- However, it is debatable whether the estimate holds true today. Opposition parties, have continued to demand a caste census saying that such an exercise is necessary to streamline welfare policies.
The challenge
- The petitions in the Supreme Court contend that the survey is unconstitutional since only the Centre is exclusively authorised to conduct a census under the Constitution.
- They also point out that the State Government does not have any independent power to appoint District Magistrates and local authorities for collating data, without a notification under Section 3 of the Census Act, 1948 by the Centre.
- The HC verdict has also been assailed on the ground that it violates the Puttaswamy judgment as it permits the collection of personal data by the State under an executive order.
Conclusion
- India runs the world’s largest affirmative welfare programme based on caste identity.
- Reservation in educational institutes and government jobs are provided on the basis of caste identities. The absence of fresh caste census data means that the caste estimates of 1931 are being projected for formulating welfare policies in 2021.
Editorial 2 : Want to catch a supernova? There’s a new app for that
Context
Astronomers have a grandstand view of the dynamic cosmos every time they peer through their telescopes. But now technology has made it possible for any space enthusiast, too, to watch these cosmic events called transients (typically lasting fractions of a second to days or even years), with the help of nothing more than a smartphone.
Pocket planetaria
- The ubiquitous smartphone is a powerful tool to collect astronomy data not just for the professional astronomer but for the casual stargazer as well.
- The app transforms into a powerful pocket toolkit, its compass and gyro sensors precisely aligning your telescope, or binoculars, with the focus of our observation in the sky.
- The Google Sky Map, for example, is described as “a hand-held planetarium for your Android device” and can locate and identify stars, planets, and nebulae (enormous clouds of gas and dust in interstellar space) in seconds.
- NASA’s free smartphone app, one of the most popular all-in-one space-focused apps around, does even more: besides helping you find your way around the sky, it also provides images, videos, and exclusive updates on current and scheduled space missions.
The App
- The app uses the open-source Sky Map and adds data daily from the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF)’s robotic telescope at the Palomar Observatory in California.
- Palomar is also home to one of the oldest, largest, and most powerful telescopes in the world: the 200-inch Hale reflector.
- The ZTF scans the entire northern sky every two days and uses the data to make large area sky maps that have important applications in tracking near-earth asteroids and studying supernovae.
- The new app, called ZARTH, short for ‘ZTF Augmented Reality Transient Hunter’, is built along the lines of the augmented reality mobile game Pokemon Go.
- Students from the Indian Institutes of Technology at Mandi and Gandhinagar were also involved in developing ZARTH.
- Once a player catches a transient, ZARTH shares more information about it, earn points, and go on to collect more transients.
- Tracking down transients on ZARTH is easy: the app is loaded daily with transients detected in real-time by the ZTF, an incredible 100,000 every night.
- These include, apart from supernovae, flaring stars (variable stars that flare up for a short while), white dwarf binaries (burnt remains of dead stars that orbit one another and often merge and explode in supernovae), active galactic nuclei, and several other types.
The importances
- ZTF researchers hope that ZARTH will help augment the data on transients as more and more citizen scientists devote their time to it.
- Feedback on these would be the kind that may help improve our machine learning algorithms, especially if users find a certain pattern across multiple such sources.
- It’s introduction in schools and college classrooms has vast potential for incorporating it into STEM and also doing citizen science.
Conclusion
As astronomers increasingly turn to machine-learning and artificial intelligence to study transients, apps like ZARTH will raise the bar for detecting rare and new astronomical events dramatically. With such human-AI collaboration, astronomers and smartphone-toting citizen scientists can look forward to exciting discoveries.
