Editorial 1 : Death and desolation in Gaza
Introduction: Days after Israel began its onslaught on Gaza in retaliation to Hamas’s attack of October 7, with the intent — as its own leaders openly claimed — of seeking the complete elimination of Hamas and “total victory”, the US began casting aspersions on press releases from the Palestinian Health Ministry that had a count of the dead and the injured.
The US president denied the actual toll of deaths given by Palestinian authorities
- At a time when the ministry had documented the deaths of more than 7,000 Palestinians, President Joe Biden declared that he had “no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using”, reiterating that “I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed.”
A more sinister design of ‘Orientalism’ is at work from ‘White Masters’
- There is something far more insidious at work here: In Western discourse, a supposed aversion to veracity among “Orientals” is an ingrained idea.
- Curzon, as Viceroy of India, exclaimed before students at Calcutta University that the Indian was accustomed to abiding by a much lesser standard of truth than the Englishman.
- If Palestinians are nothing more than “terrorists”, no one should doubt that they are liars and that they have greatly exaggerated casualties to win global sympathy.
The Contested Credibility of War Casualty Figures in Gaza
- Nine months into the war, it is the credulity of Israel and the US that is at stake.
- On March 7, in his State of the Union address, Biden conceded that more than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed.
- The White House admitted that these figures were drawn from the Gaza Ministry of Health.
- Though two UN agencies — the WHO and the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs — keep track of casualties in war zones, they have not done so in the present conflict; rather, they have furnished reasons for relying on figures released by the Gaza Health Ministry.
The Lancet study on the death count
- The Lancet, a British medical journal, published a correspondence on July 5 titled "Counting the Dead."
- As of June 19, the journal reported 37,396 people had died in Gaza.
- At least another 10,000-lie dead under the rubble of thousands of buildings now in ruins.
- The Lancet describes a picture of despair, desolation, disease, and death in Gaza of a different magnitude.
- The authors assert that in every such conflict, the proportion of "indirect deaths" to "direct deaths" is at least 3:1, sometimes as much as 15:1.
- Over time, many people will succumb to reproductive, communicable, and non-communicable diseases due to the destruction of Gaza.
- The health infrastructure is in shambles; desalination plants have been destroyed.
- Though famine has not been officially declared, malnutrition and starvation are already widespread.
- According to the Lancet, it is reasonable to estimate that up to 186,000 or more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza.
Why Palestinian deaths are centre of focus?
- Oxfam noted, around January 10, that “Israel’s military is killing Palestinians at an average rate of 250 people a day which exceeds the daily death toll of any other major conflict of recent years.”
- But there is much that is distinctive about this conflict.
- The US and the democracies of Western Europe, all erstwhile colonising powers, have condoned what Israel has done at every turn, despite for decades, shouting themselves hoarse with the slogan, “Never again”.
- But there is more to it: Israel tends to act with impunity while claiming special status as a victim nation.
The international safeguards are useless to restrict Israel
- The International Court of Justice has, to simplify its ruling, issued restraining orders on Israel, but it has not made an iota of difference.
- Israel speaks of the International Criminal Court, which has requested arrest warrants in the name of two leaders each of Hamas and Israel, including Benjamin Netanyahu, with contempt.
- Nothing on the horizon suggests that Israel has any intention of changing its approach or that it is truly vulnerable even to pressure from the US.
Conclusion: There is nothing within the known pharmacopoeia of how international relations and violent conflict may be managed which enables the world to deal with such a situation. The Palestinians are paying the cost of international inactivity.
Editorial 2 : Reverse the slide
Introduction: India exported basmati rice valued at over $5.8 billion or Rs 48,389 crore in 2023-24. More than 90 per cent of that comprised varieties such Pusa Basmati 1121 and 1509 bred by the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI).
IARI was the flagbearer of green revolution yet remains suboptimal funded
- IARI varieties also cover roughly a third of the country’s 30 million hectares-plus annual acreage under wheat.
- Yet, this institution, acclaimed as the cradle of India’s Green Revolution, had a budget of just Rs 710 crore last fiscal.
- Out of that, Rs 540 crore went for paying salaries and pensions, and another Rs 98 crore towards administrative expenses.
The consequence of lack of funds to IARI
- No money to invest for research and breeding or investing in equipment — from scanning electron microscopes and robotic DNA sequence analysers to liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry instruments — to enable these through high-throughput screening of large numbers of plants for their morphological and other specific traits of interest.
- Highly underfunded when it comes for attracting talent through lateral recruitment of those with specialisation in genome editing, block chain and artificial intelligence technologies in agriculture.
The R&D in Farm sector in India: an urgent rejuvenation needed
- The public farm R&D system, comprising the various Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) institutes and state agricultural universities, is in dire need of rejuvenation.
- Most of them were set up during the 1960s and 1970s; the IARI campus in New Delhi goes back to 1936.
- There’s definitely a case for a one-time fund of, say, Rs 5,000 crore — over and above ICAR’s nearly Rs 10,000 crore annual budget — to help revamp their dilapidated buildings and create modern research infrastructure.
The infusion of fund should be followed by structural reforms
- Such fund infusion should be accompanied by organisational restructuring and reforms.
- ICAR has too many institutes focusing on single crops (from soyabean and cotton to grapes, litchi, pomegranate and mushroom) and even animals (camel, pig, yak, etc).
- Farmers don’t grow wheat, mustard or chana in isolation; they plant these after harvesting rice, soyabean or maize.
- What’s required is a cropping systems-based research approach tailored to varied agro-climatic zones and, perhaps, more IARIs bringing together specialists across multiple disciplines.
- All these institutions should also have autonomy in hiring the best and raising resources, whether through public-private partnerships and sponsored research or charging royalty on seeds and other technologies.
Todays’ challenges of agriculture are different from that of green revolution period
- Then, it was about producing more crop from more inputs.
- Now, it’s about more output from less nutrients, water and labour, while simultaneously coping with climate change and extreme weather events.
Conclusion: The first budget of this government’s third term would be an apt occasion to bring agricultural research — both in the public and private sector — back to centre stage. This also means providing greater intellectual property protection for breeders and technology developers. The lack of an enabling environment there is already showing in India’s falling cotton and stagnant oilseeds production. That needs to be reversed.