Farmers blame Siddaramaiah govt for diluting price norms

TNN
November 20, 2018

Bengaluru, Nov 20: Protesting farmers, who are demanding Rs 200 more per tonne of sugarcane over and above the fair and remunerative price(FRP) announced by the Centre in July, blame the previous Siddaramaiah government for their problems.

The Siddaramaiah government, bowed to pressure from the sugar lobby to forego its power to fix the sugarcane state advisory price (SAP), compromising the interest of cane growers, they say.

Politicians own around 40% of the major sugar mills in the state and dominate the sugar lobby in Karnataka. The Karnataka Sugarcane (Purchase and Supply Control) Act, 2013, enacted by the BJP government headed by Jagadish Shettar after a decadelong struggle by farmers, vested with the state government the power to fix the sugarcane price each year. It also gives the government the power to seize or take over mills that fail to pay the SAP.

The government calculated the SAP by taking into account the revenue of sugar mills, including from byproducts like bagasse and molasses. The farmers were happy because the SAP was usually higher than the fair and remunerative price (FRP) fixed every year by the central Commission for Agricultural Price and Costs. The Siddaramaiah government implemented the act by fixing SAP for two years despite a stiff opposition from sugar mill owners. Some mill owners refused to pay the SAP but gave in after a favourable court order for the farmers and the government. This led mill owners to get the government to amend the act.

“Since the SAP has legal backing, the mills decided do away with the provision completely,” said Subhash Shirabur, a former member of Karnataka Sugarcane Control Board and a cane grower from Bagalkot. “Unfortunately, the government readily agreed. Now we have to beg the mills for the right price.”

In place of SAP, the government brought in a revenue-sharing formula in which the farmers and the mill owners divide profits at a ratio of 70:30.

“As per the amendment, the sugar mills have to pay the FRP within 15 days of cane supply and wait till the end of the season to share the profit,” said Muttappa Komar, Bagalkot zilla panchayat vice-president. “But in the four years since the amendment came into force, the farmers have not received any money apart from the FRP.” Former CM Jagadish Shettar says issues like pending dues and irregular payment have cropped up again because the government has no control over the mills. “Re-enacting the SAP law is the only solution to this problem,” he said. “The government should seriously consider this.”

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Agencies
January 12,2020

Washington D.C., Jan 12: A recent study has claimed that people end up wasting almost an entire day when they take a vacation.

This can happen while standing in a queue or searching for places to visit, people do not keep a count of the time they have actually utilised during the trip. As a result, they end up doing much lesser activities than they originally had planned.

According to a recent report in Fox News, the study has also shared the fact that people try to justify time waste with planning and scheduling activities whereas the truth is that these things can be done well ahead to save time during the trip.

The average time waste according to the study commissioned by Sykes Holiday Cottages also said the people taking a seven days' trip waste a minimum of 17-and-a-half hours to figure out various factors.

But there are other causes involved as well. When one visits any crowded location, the real-time spent to enjoy the location is lesser than the time spent on reaching and trying to get involved. For instance, if one visits an amusement park, the activities take lesser time than the preparatory and other phases.

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Agencies
July 2,2020

Leiden, Jul 2: Astronomers have discovered a luminous galaxy caught in the act of reionizing its surrounding gas only 800 million years after the Big Bang.

The research, led by Romain Meyer, PhD student at UCL in London, UK, has been presented at the virtual annual meeting of the European Astronomical Society (EAS).

Studying the first galaxies that formed 13 billion years ago is essential to understanding our cosmic origins. One of the current hot topics in extragalactic astronomy is 'cosmic reionization,' the process in which the intergalactic gas was ionized (atoms stripped of their electrons).

Cosmic reionization is similar to an unsolved murder: We have clear evidence for it, but who did it, how and when? We now have strong evidence that hydrogen reionization was completed about 13 billion years ago, in the first billion years of the universe, with bubbles of ionized gas slowly growing and overlapping.

The objects capable of creating such ionized hydrogen bubbles have however remained mysterious until now: the discovery of a luminous galaxy in which 60-100 percent of ionizing photons escape, is likely responsible for ionizing its local bubble. This suggests the case is closer to being solved.

The two main suspects for cosmic reionization are usually 1) a population of numerous faint galaxies leaking ~10 percent of their energetic photons, and 2) an 'oligarchy' of luminous galaxies with a much larger percentage (>50 percent) of photons escaping each galaxy.

In either case, these first galaxies were very different from those today: galaxies in the local universe are very inefficient leakers, with only <2-3 percent of ionizing photons escaping their host. To understand which galaxies governed cosmic reionization, astronomers must measure the so-called escape fractions of galaxies in the reionization era.

The detection of light from excited hydrogen atoms (the so-called Lyman-alpha line) can be used to infer the fraction of escaping photons. On the one hand, such detections are rare because reionization-era galaxies are surrounded by neutral gas which absorbs that signature hydrogen emission.

On the other hand, if this hydrogen signal is detected it represents a 'smoking gun' for a large ionized bubble, meaning we have caught a galaxy reionizing its surroundings. The size of the bubble and the galaxy's luminosity determines whether it is solely responsible for creating this ionized bubble or if unseen accomplices are necessary.

The discovery of a luminous galaxy 800 million years after the Big Bang supports the scenario where an 'oligarchy' of bright leakers emits most of the ionizing photons.

"It is the first time we can point to an object responsible for creating an ionized bubble, without the need for a contribution from unseen galaxies.

Additional observations with the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope will enable us to study further what is likely one of the best suspects for the unsolved case of cosmic reionization," said Meyer.

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Agencies
January 19,2020

New Delhi, Jan 19: Messaging service WhatsApp which on Sunday faced issues in transmitting multimedia content including pictures and images, prompting social media users to share hilarious memes and messages, resumed regular services after over two hours.

#WhatsAppDown was the trending hashtag on Twitter for most part of Sunday afternoon in India along with several other countries such as Brazil, Europe and also parts of Middle-East including UAE, reported downdetector.in, a realtime problem and outage monitoring website.

Users of the popular messaging app were unable to send media files, stickers and GIFs.

Most users immediately went to Twitter to find out about the problem and check if others were facing the same issue.

Numerous tweets and memes took over the internet as soon as the news broke about the WhatsApp tech issue. After around two hours of technical glitch, the app resumed full service.

Even after full recovery of media transfer, people globally still continued checking the status of the messaging app.

WhatsApp has been one of the prime messaging apps since May 2009 and has recently collaborated with Facebook.

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