Air India Crash, Covid, Rare Earths: Tragic End To The Week
This week saw a major aviation tragedy, signs of a Covid resurgence, central bank moves on liquidity, and key insights from the latest global population report.
The crash of an Air India Boeing Dreamliner aircraft minutes after it took off from Ahmedabad, on its way to London, dominated the events of the last week. At the time of writing this, the death toll is uncertain, although it seems unlikely that there would be many survivors among the 242 on board.
The plane crashed into some residential units, killing and injuring many inhabitants of these buildings as well. Why and how it happened remains to be determined. The crash spells tragedy for those who lost their lives and their loved ones.
It is not good news for Boeing, Air India or Indian aviation in general, either. We offer the families of those bereaved and injured our condolences.
Covid Is Back
Covid is raising its head again, albeit in a desultory fashion. The number of reported cases is 7,000. This, probably, is a serious undercount, as most people have stopped testing for the disease, even after experiencing full-blown symptoms.
Despite stray reports that Covid can, unlike similar viral infections manifesting similar symptoms, induce serious organ damage that persist for long and call for precautionary behaviour on the part of patients, no serious study has been undertaken to assess the specific, accentuated harm that Covid can cause, and to educate the populace on the need to identify the infection they have.
Vaccine Goals Unmet
Nor has there been any public acknowledgement in India of the rare but acute side-effects of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine that was widely administered in India, under its local name, Covishield.
In the UK, once these side-effects were recognised, the authorities stopped administering the vaccine to people below 40, as it had been found that the adverse reactions were more likely to occur in young people, especially women.
Some alternative vaccines are ready. However, the goal of developing vaccine platforms that can be swiftly adapted to specific germs of concern, so that mass production of relevant vaccines can be carried out, remains unmet. India has the requisite scientific and technical manpower. It is the political will to harness them, so that India could emerge a vaccine superpower, that is missing.
A Global Opportunity
India’s automobile industry has been fretting, along with its counterparts around the world, about the Chinese decision to weaponise their control of rare earth supply chains. Rare earths are used in all kinds of electronics and for tuning lasers inside fibre-optic cables, besides in alloys out of which superstrong permanent magnets are made.
Most motors, whether those that drive electric cars or those that operate the windshield wipers or cooling fans inside notebook computers, make use of permanent magnets that use rare earths in their making.
One way to combat this Chinese blackmail is for countries to do their own refining of rare earth minerals, dirty and polluting though the process might be, instead of outsourcing the job to China.
India has had a rare earth facility in the public sector to process the mineral sands of Kerala since 1950. Its focus, however, has been to separate out thorium-bearing rutile, so as to extract thorium for India’s fast breeder nuclear reactor.
Over the years, Indian Rare Earths Ltd has expanded its operations to take in the mineral sands on the East Coast, and set up another facility in Orissa as well. Prospecting, mining and metallurgy expertise has to be augmented to uncover rare earth deposits elsewhere, particularly in the Northeast, and extract the needed metals.
Efficient motors need not all have permanent magnets. Motors that make use of a property called magnetic reluctance can do just as well, provided microelectronics and a governing algorithm can be devised to control these reluctance motors.
This is a global opportunity for Indian engineering, one uncontested by China, whose interest lies in keeping the world wedded to motors that make use of rare-earth-doped permanent magnets.
Just Liquidity Won’t Work
India’s central bank, the Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI’s) Monetary Policy Committee met last Friday and lowered the repo rate by a surprise 50 basis points to 5.5%, and decided to increase liquidity by lowering the bank rate by a full percentage point.
The RBI defended its policy on the grounds that inflation is expected to be tepid, below the earlier forecast of 4%, and that growth was still anaemic.
The reality is that banks are flush with funds and have been struggling to find borrowers. So much so that banks have been investing aggressively in mutual funds. Mutual fund investment by banks has risen over 90%, as of end-March, over the year-ago period, said the RBI Bulletin.
Slashing the repo rate and the proportion of assets banks have to deposit with the central bank increases liquidity in the system further. The net result would be to add to upward pressure on stock prices, without corporate performance going up to justify the price increase.
Anaemia cannot be cured by drinking more water. Iron, in combination with vitamin C, is what will fortify red corpuscles and make blood course through the body with renewed vigour.
For growth to regain vigour, we need something more than yet more liquidity. We need to create conditions that induce the private sector to invest in the domestic economy, rather than abroad. That is a matter of government, rather than monetary policy.
Fertility And Freedom
The UN population arm, UNFPA, came out with its latest publication on demographic trends. It finds that India has become the greatest nation in human history, at least in terms of the population size, which in 2025, is expected to touch 146 crore or 1.46 billion.
The total fertility rate (TFR), which measures the average number of children a woman would have, had dipped below the replacement rate of 2.1 in 2021 itself. Now, it is between 1.9 and 2.0 for India as a whole, although there are huge variations across regions, with some states, like Bihar, still with TFRs well above 2.1.
The population does not either stabilise or start declining as soon as the TFR dips below 2.1. TFR is the average for different age groups. Childbearing women are in the range 15-49. They are typically grouped into seven groups, each group comprising women of five contiguous ages, starting at 15. So we have the age groups 15-19, 20-24, 25-29, 30-34, 35-39, 40-44 and 45-49.
The number of live births per age group is divided by the number of women in that age group to obtain the age-specific fertility rate of that group. These age-specific fertility rates are added up, and the sum is multiplied by 5 to get the TFR.
Some age groups would have fertility higher than the average, and some lower than the average. The youngest and oldest groups tend to have below-average fertility rates. Only after women have moved on into the low-fertility age groups and the average for the total has dipped well-below the replacement level would the population actually begin to stabilise and decline.
The good thing about the latest report from the UN’s population agency is that it focuses on gender justice as the core determinant of the desirable fertility rate. It is presented as reproductive rights, but these rights are not confined to the right to choose to go ahead with a pregnancy or to abort it, but start with the woman’s agency to choose a partner to her liking, to have income security, access to childcare, and extend to not being burdened with all the household and care work traditionally dumped on women.
In the language of an earlier generation, women’s empowerment is the key to healthy fertility choices and desirable population levels. That is a welcome message, at a time when Delhi University has started teaching the Manusmriti, as part of its Sanskrit curriculum. Apart from treating the Brahmin as the Lord of all Creation, the Manusmriti declares that women deserve no autonomy – na stree swatantryamarhati.
