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The Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH) has urged the government to conserve the historically significant structures, including the 600-year-old ‘Vilakkumadom’, an exquisite granite structure, at the Sree Mahavishnu Temple at Thirunelly in Wayanad district of Kerala during the on-going renovation of the temple.
The renovation is being done by the Tourism Department at a cost of ₹3.8 crore. V. Jayarajan and Archana Kamath, conveners of INTACH Kasaragod and Kozhikode chapters respectively, in a letter to Devaswom Minister K. Radhakrishnan and Malabar Devaswom Board president, expressed concern over the loss of historically significant valuable precincts including the ‘Vilakkumadom’.
With its history tracing back to the 15th century AD, we observe that its key elements have not been valued during the ‘renovation’ process.
The possible completion of the ‘Vilakkumadom’ structure and the total destruction of ‘Chuttambalam’ had resulted in a loss of heritage creating a gap in its value and importance that could be forgotten in the future.
The incomplete structure that stood as testimony to a rich cultural heritage has been remodelled in an insensitive way.
Explainer
Understanding temperature anomalies (Page no. 10)
(GS Paper 3, Environment)
There was news recently that March 2023 was the second warmest March on record. The monthly report and the subsequent end-of-the-year annual summary by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) serves as an excellent resource to contextualise the individual month’s ranking by temperature anomalies.
March 2023 was indeed the second warmest in the instrumental record. The warmest March occurred just a few years ago in 2016, when the biggest El Niño of the 21st century triggered a ‘mini’ global warming.
But the January-to-March average temperature anomaly ranks 2023 as the fourth warmest such period on record. This raises some obvious questions.
As seen in the figure below, each year’s March can be warmer or cooler than the March of the year before. Natural climate variability, including events like El Niño, can temporarily spike temperatures.
The old adage (often mistakenly attributed to Mark Twain) says that climate is what we expect and weather is what we get. In India, we expect March to be the beginning of the scorching summer season.
But a particular year’s March may be cooler due to some other climate factors, such as a La Niña, and especially when averaged over a region as large as India or even an Indian State.
A year is an ‘El Niño year’ if warmer water spreads in a band from west to east over the equatorial Pacific Ocean. In a ‘La Niña year’, cooler water spreads east to west in the same region.
Both phenomena have distinct and significant effects on the global climate. (Global mean temperatures themselves represent the increasing amount of additional energy we are trapping in the earth system and preventing its escape to space by, among other things, increasing the atmospheric concentration of heat-trapping greenhouse gases.)
The distribution of temperature deviations for March 2023 from the baseline long-term average March temperature is visible in the global map of temperature anomalies.
The monstrous warming to the west to north of India begins to tell the story of the weather anomalies that rendered a cooler March over Mumbai, excess pre-monsoon rains over the northwest, and scorching heatwaves in Kerala and Odisha.
The Arabian Sea has also warmed more than expected this March. We must watch carefully if this continues: it can favour a stronger monsoon but may also enhance cyclogenesis (i.e. birth of cyclonic circulation) over the Arabian Sea.
Genome sequencing and the Genome India Project (Page no. 10)
(GS Paper 3, Science and Technology)
The Department of Biotechnology recently said that the exercise to sequence 10,000 Indian human genomes and create a database under the Centre-backed Genome India Project is about two-thirds complete. About 7,000 Indian genomes have already been sequenced of which 3,000 are available for public access to researchers.
The human genome is the entire set of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) residing in the nucleus of every cell of the human body. It carries the complete genetic information responsible for the development and functioning of an organism. The DNA consists of a double-stranded molecule built up by four bases.
While the sequence of base pairs is identical in all humans, there are differences in the genome of every human being that makes them unique. The process of deciphering the order of base pairs, to decode the genetic fingerprint of a human is called genome sequencing.
In 1990, a group of scientists began to work on determining the whole sequence of the human genome under the Human Genome Project. The Project released its latest version of the complete human genome in 2023, with a 0.3% error margin.
This shows that genomic sequencing has now evolved to a stage where large sequencers can process thousands of samples simultaneously. There are several approaches to genome sequencing, including whole genome sequencing.
The process of whole-genome sequencing, made possible by the Human Genome Project, now facilitates the reading of a person’s individual genome to identify differences from the average human genome.
Genome sequencing has been used to evaluate rare disorders, preconditions for disorders and even cancer from the viewpoint of genetics, rather than as diseases of certain organs. Nearly 10,000 diseases — including cystic fibrosis and thalassemia — are known to be the result of a single gene malfunctioning.
In public health, however, sequencing has been used to read the codes of viruses. One of its first practical usages was in 2014, when a group of scientists from M.I.T and Harvard sequenced samples of Ebola from infected African patients to show how genomic data of viruses could reveal hidden pathways of transmission.
In January 2020, at the start of the pandemic,Chinese scientist Yong-Zhen Zhang, sequenced the genome of a novel pathogen causing infections in the city of Wuhan.
Mr. Zhang then shared it with his virologist friend Edward Holmes in Australia, who published the genomic code online. It was after this that virologists began evaluating the sequence to try and understand how to combat the virus, track the mutating variants and their intensity and spread, and to come up with a vaccine.
Text & Context
On the Code on Social Security for platform-based gig Workers (Page no. 11)
(GS Paper 3, Economy)
The new Code on Social Security allows a platform worker to be defined by their vulnerability — not their labour, nor the vulnerabilities of platform work.
Swiggy workers have been essential during the pandemic. Even so, they have faced a continuous dip in pay and no rewards for being essential workers.
During the last six months, many platform workers have unionised under the All-India Gig Workers Union and have protested day in and day out, deploring Swiggy for reducing their base pay from ₹35 to ₹10 per delivery order.
It has been truly remarkable to see the ‘food delivery’ identity being developed through collective action, just as that of Uber and Ola taxi drivers has been taking shape for a few years now. Stable terms of earning have been a key demand of delivery-persons and drivers through years of protests.
The three new labour codes passed by Parliament recently acknowledge platform and gig workers as new occupational categories in the making, in a bid to keep India’s young workforce secure as it embraces ‘new kinds of work’, like delivery, in the digital economy.
What a platform worker is allowed to claim as rights, responsibilities and working conditions that can be legally upheld is the key question in these codes, such as for factory workers, who have been an important industrial element in India and around the world.
The specific issues of working in factories, the duration of time needed on a factory floor, and associated issues are recognised as the parameters for defining an ideal worker under most labour laws, and this has not shifted much.
The Code on Wages, 2019, tries to expand this idea by using ‘wages’ as the primary definition of who an ‘employee’ is. The wage relationship is an important relationship in the world of work, especially in the context of a large informal economy.
Even so, the terms ‘gig worker’, ‘platform worker’ and ‘gig economy’ appear elsewhere in the Code on Social Security.
Since the laws are prescriptive, what is written within them creates the limits to what rights can be demanded, and how these rights can be demanded.
Hence, the categories and where they appear become key signs for understanding what kind of identity different workers can have under these new laws. Platform delivery people can claim benefits, but not labour rights.