Phil Schiller in India to Mark Official Opening of Apple's App Accelerator in Bengaluru

In the wake of the gas leak at a factory in Visakhapatnam, the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) has issued detailed guidelines for restarting industries after the lockdown and the precautions to be taken for the safety of the plants as well as the workers.

In a communication to all states and union territories, the NDMA said due to several weeks of lockdown and the closure of industrial units, it is possible that some of the operators might not have followed the established standard operating procedures.

As a result, some of the manufacturing facilities, pipelines, valves may have residual chemicals, which may pose risk. The same is true for the storage facilities with hazardous chemicals and flammable materials, it said.

The NDMA guidelines said while restarting a unit, the first week should be considered as the trial or test run period after ensuring all safety protocols.

Companies should not try to achieve high production targets. There should be 24-hour sanitisation of the factory premises, it said.

The factories need to maintain a sanitisation routine every two-three hours especially in the common areas that include lunch rooms and common tables which will have to be wiped clean with disinfectants after every single use, it added.

For accommodation, the NDMA said, sanitisation needs to be performed regularly to ensure worker safety and reduce the spread of contamination.

To minimise the risk, it is important that employees who work on specific equipment are sensitised and made aware of the need to identify abnormalities like strange sounds or smell, exposed wires, vibrations, leaks, smoke, abnormal wobbling, irregular grinding or other potentially hazardous signs which indicate the need for immediate maintenance or if required shutdown, it said.

At least 11 people lost their lives and about 1,000 others were exposed to a gas leak at a factory in Andhra Pradesh''s Visakhapatnam on May 7.

The incident took place after it restarted operations when the government allowed industrial activities in certain sectors following several weeks of lockdown.

The lockdown was first announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on March 24 for 21 days in a bid to combat the coronavirus threat. The lockdown was then extended till May 3 and again till May 17.

Washington DC, Jun 8: Astronomers acting on a hunch have likely resolved a mystery about young, still-forming stars and regions rich in organic molecules closely surrounding some of them.

They used the National Science Foundation's Karl G Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) to reveal one such region that previously had eluded detection and that revelation answered a longstanding question.

The regions around the young protostars contain complex organic molecules which can further combine into prebiotic molecules that are the first steps on the road to life.

The regions, dubbed "hot corinos" by astronomers, are typically about the size of our solar system and are much warmer than their surroundings, though still quite cold by terrestrial standards.

The first hot corino was discovered in 2003 and only about a dozen have been found so far. Most of these are in binary systems, with two protostars forming simultaneously.

Astronomers have been puzzled by the fact that, in some of these binary systems, they found evidence for a hot corino around one of the protostars but not the other.

"Since the two stars are forming from the same molecular cloud and at the same time, it seemed strange that one would be surrounded by a dense region of complex organic molecules and the other wouldn't," said Cecilia Ceccarelli, of the Institute for Planetary Sciences and Astrophysics at the University of Grenoble (IPAG) in France.

The complex organic molecules were found by detecting specific radio frequencies, called spectral lines, emitted by the molecules. Those characteristic radio frequencies serve as "fingerprints" to identify the chemicals.

The astronomers noted that all the chemicals found in hot corinos had been found by detecting these "fingerprints" at radio frequencies corresponding to wavelengths of only a few millimetres.

"We know that dust blocks those wavelengths, so we decided to look for evidence of these chemicals at longer wavelengths that can easily pass through dust," said Claire Chandler of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, and principal investigator on the project.

"It struck us that dust might be what was preventing us from detecting the molecules in one of the twin protostars," added Chandler.

The astronomers used the VLA to observe a pair of protostars called IRAS 4A, in a star-forming region about 1,000 light-years from Earth. They observed the pair at wavelengths of centimetres.

At those wavelengths, they sought radio emissions from methanol, CH3OH (wood alcohol, not for drinking). This was a pair in which one protostar clearly had a hot corino and the other did not, as seen using the much shorter wavelengths.

The result confirmed their hunch. "With the VLA, both protostars showed strong evidence of methanol surrounding them. This means that both protostars have hot corinos. The reason we did not see the one at shorter wavelengths was because of dust," said Marta de Simone, a graduate student at IPAG who led the data analysis for this object.

The astronomers cautioned that while both hot corinos now are known to contain methanol, there still may be some chemical differences between them. That, they said, can be settled by looking for other molecules at wavelengths not obscured by dust.

"This result tells us that using centimetre radio wavelengths is necessary to properly study hot corinos," Claudio Codella of Arcetri Astrophysical Observatory in Florence, Italy, said.

"In the future, planned new telescopes such as the next-generation VLA and SKA, will be very important to understanding these objects," added Codella.

Feb 27: With the window to submit comments on India's proposed personal data protection law closing on Tuesday, a period of anxious wait for final version of the Bill started for social media firms.

This comes even as global Internet companies have called on the government for improved transparency related to intermediary Guidelines (Amendment) Rules and allay fears about the prospect of increased surveillance and prompting a fragmentation of the Internet in India that would harm users.

As per the proposed amendments, an intermediary having over 50 lakh users in the country will have to be incorporated in India with a permanent registered office and address.

When required by lawful order, the intermediary shall, within 72 hours of communication, provide such information or assistance as asked for by any government agency or assistance concerning security of the state or cybersecurity.

This means that the government could pull down information provided by platforms such as Wikipedia, potentially hampering its functioning in India.

In the open letter to IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad, leading browser and software development platform like Mozilla, Microsoft-owned GitHub and Cloudflare earlier called for improved transparency by allowing the public an opportunity to see a final version of these amendments prior to their enactment.

According to a Business Insider report, Indian users may lose access to Wikipedia if the new intermediary rules for internet and social media companies are approved.

Since the rules would require the website to take down content deemed illegal by the government, it would require Wikipedia to show different content for different countries.

Anusha Alikhan, senior communications director for Wikimedia told Business Insider that the platform is built though languages and not geographies. Therefore, removing content from one country, while it is still visible to other country users may not work for the company’s model.

India is one of Wikipedia’s largest markets. Over 771 million Indian users accessed the site in just November 2019.

Also read: Explained: What is the Personal Data Protection Bill and why you should care

The Personal Data Protection Bill, 2019, which was introduced in Lok Sabha in the winter session last year, was referred to a Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) of both the Houses.

The government last month decided to seek views and suggestions on the Bill from individuals and associations and bodies concerned and the last date for submitting the comments was on Tuesday.

Prasad, while introducing the Personal Data Protection Bill, 2019, in the Lok Sabha on December 11, announced that the draft Bill empowers the government to ask companies including Facebook, Google and others for anonymised personal data and non-personal data.

There was a buzz when the Bill's latest version was introduced in the Lok Sabha, especially the provision seeking to allow the use of personal and non-personal data of users in some cases, especially when national security is involved.

Several legal experts red-flagged the issue and said the provision will give the government unaccounted access to personal data of users in the country.

In their submission to the JPC, several organisations also flagged that the power to collect non-personal and anonymised data by the government without notice and consent should not form part of the Bill because of issues regarding effective anonymisation and potential abuse.

"Clauses 35 and 36 of the Bill provide unbridled access to personal data to the Central Government by giving it powers to exempt its agencies from the application of the Bill on the basis of various broad worded grounds," SFLC.in, a New Delhi-based not-for-profit legal services organisation, commented.

The Software Alliance, also known as BSA, a trade group which includes tech giants such as Microsoft, IBM and Adobe, among others said that the current version of the privacy bill pose substantial challenges, including the sweeping new powers for the government to acquire non-personal data, restrictions on data transfers, and local storage requirements.

"We urge the Joint Parliamentary Committee, as it considers revisions to the Bill, to eliminate provisions concerning non-personal data from the Personal Data Protection Bill and to remove the data localisation requirements and restrictions on international data flows," said Venkatesh Krishnamoorthy, Country Manager-India, BSA.

The Personal Data Protection (PDP) Bill, 2019 draws its origins from the Justice B.N. Srikrishna Committee on data privacy, which produced a draft of legislation that was made public in 2018 ("the Srikrishna Bill").

The mandatory requirement for storing a mirror copy of all personal data in India as per Section 40 of the Srikrishna Bill has been done away with in the PDP Bill, 2019, meaning that companies like Facebook and Twitter would be able to store data of Indian users abroad if they so wish.

But the bill prohibits processing of sensitive personal data and critical personal data outside India.

What is more, what constitutes critical data has not been clearly defined.

As per the proposals, social media companies will have to modify their application as they are required to have a system in place by which a user can verify themselves.

So legal experts believe that some system to upload identification documents should be there and something like the Twitter blue tick mark should be there to identify verified accounts.

"The 2019 Bill introduces a new category of data fiduciaries called social media intermediaries ('SMIs'). SMIs are a subcategory of significant data fiduciaries ('SDFs') and will be notified by the Central government after due consultation with the DPA, or the Data Protection Authority. Clause 26(4) of the Bill defines SMIs as intermediaries who primarily or solely enable online interaction between two or more users," SFLC.in said.

"On a plain reading of the definition, online platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, ShareChat and WhatsApp are likely to be notified as SMIs under the Bill," it added.