Quick notes: RTE magic | Toxic Punjab...

• RTE magic: The alarming rise in education costs in new India. Not just the poor but even middle classes are effectively squeezed out of education beyond secondary schooling. . . . . Art. 30, perpetual burden on Hindus



• Baby steps: Centre sets up task force to suggest ways of imparting technical education in mother tongue



• How did Punjab turn toxic? Punjab utilises the highest amount of chemical fertilisers in India. Many of the pesticides sprayed on the state’s crops are classified as Class I by the World Health Organization because of their acute toxicity and are banned in places around the world. A range of studies have shown that the overuse of chemicals has found its way into Punjab’s food, water and soil and had a devastating impact on public health. “Farmers are poisoning their bodies and their land”



• Military lessons from Nagorno-Karabakh: What happened can be likened to a revolution in military affairs. Turkey has perfected new, deadly way to wage war, using militarized ‘drone swarms’. It’s not that the Armenian soldiers were not brave, or well-trained and equipped – they were. It was that they were fighting a kind of war which had been overtaken by technology.



• Dance of greed: China has one powerful friend left in the U.S: Wall Street!



• India plots smartphone dominance: With no original ideas nor research




• How Jio is building its 5G story brick-by-brick: The genesis of O-RAN (Open Radio Access Network) can be traced back to Japanese telecom operator Rakuten Mobile. As the story goes, the company was purchasing branded routers from large companies for $1,000 apiece. The same router would cost a household consumer $50 apiece. The company asked engineers to compare enterprise and consumer-grade routers, and found out that there was hardly any difference. Rakuten thought that it can buy components and develop routers with its own specifications. Then it started thinking on a bigger scale - how to build telecom networks where they have control over everything - costs, components, maintenance, etc.
  
  Today, the telco has developed a platform - Rakuten Communications Platform, a first of its kind - which has the secret recipe on how to integrate all parts of an open network together, and it is licensing this platform to other operators. "The entire network is transitioning from maximum hardware to more software. In 5G, base station has just antenna.The data processing (how to connect, how much speed to allot, how to hand over call from one tower to another) is entirely done in the cloud. It's not done in the equipments at the tower. With the power of cloudification, SDN (software-defined networking) and virtualisation, the role of hardware is going to be minimal. Telcos don't have to get locked in to multi-year contracts with Nokias, Ericssons or Huaweis of the world. Instead, they can do mix and match, and buy the best in the market to build own network.
  
  Jio's self-built 5G solutions could bring down network rollout cost by 10-15% as compared to legacy networks, and open up $10 billion export opportunities for the telco. 



• China to build a super dam on its part of Brahmaputra river: The state media report indicated that the dam could come up in the Medog county of Tibet. The new dam’s ability to generate hydropower could be three times that of central China’s Three Gorges Dam, which has the largest installed hydropower capacity in the world.



• Some Christian Siddis convert to Hinduism: Members of the Siddi community trace their origins back to an African tribe, who sailed to India on board Portuguese ships. However, they escaped from their masters, making the thick forests of Yellapur and Haliyal in Uttara Kannada district their new home. Minority assistance programs have encouraged Siddis to convert to religions other than Hinduism to maintain their minority status and continue receiving federal aid.