Tribune Reporters

Barnala/Fazilka, January 18

To observe ‘Mahila Kisan Diwas’, thousands of women today converged on the grain market at Dhanaula town in Barnala and raised their voice against the central farm laws. Protesters said they chose Dhanaula because BJP leader Harjeet Singh Grewal belongs to this town.

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“The implementation of black farm laws will further burden the debt-ridden farmers of Punjab and impact the farming community adversely. BJP leaders like Grewal are trying to weaken our protest, and we would not allow that to happen at any cost,” said Manjit Kaur Barnala, spokesperson for BKU (Ugrahan).

Another woman leader, Gupreet Kaur, alleged the BJP-led central government first implemented the farm laws without any consultation with farmers and now its leaders were trying to convince farmers by distorting the facts about laws.

“The central government has been elected not by corporate houses, but the common man. It is hell-bent on destroying the agriculture sector,” alleged Komal Khanauri, BKU (Ugrahan) leader during the event.

Women and other activists of BKU (Ugrahan) from Sangrur, Fatehgarh Sahib, Patiala, Ludhiana, Mansa and Barnala districts participated in protest.

“Our protests at all venues, including New Delhi borders and Punjab, are gaining strength by the day and more and more residents are joining us. We would compel central government to rollback the black laws” said Jarnail Singh Badra, general secretary, BKU (Ugrahan) Barnala.

In Fazilka, a large number of farmers, including hundreds of women, participated in a massive protest held outside the residence of BJP coordination committee chairman Surjit Kumar Jyani at his native Katehra village to observe ‘Mahila Kisan Diwas’ today.

The protest was led by BKU (Ekta Ugrahan) general secretary Sukhdev Singh Kokri Kalan. After the failure of several rounds of talks with the central government, all factions of the BKU have decided to observe ‘Mahila Kisan Diwas’ to honour women for their incredible contribution in the protests.

Woman farmer leaders Gurpreet Kaur Jethuke from Bathinda and Kuldeep Kaur from Moga and Khet Mazdoor leaders Krishna Devi and Gurmel Kaur while addressing the gathering alleged that their rights were being snatched by the Centre and the three laws would ruin the farming community.

Kokri Kalan condemned BJP leaders Surjit Kumar Jyani and Harjeet Singh Grewal for their alleged anti-farmer stand. He said the protests against these leaders would continue. He demanded the repeal of the contentious laws, power amendment Bill and stubble pollution related ordinances.

Meanwhile, the farmers also observed a two-minute silence to pay tributes to farmers who have lost their lives during the protests.

New Delhi, January 18

Fibre optics – say the words and people think of high-speed internet cables. More knowledgeable ones might also know it is the science of transmitting light through flexible fibre. But very few would even have an inkling that the man who coined the term “fibre optics” was born and educated in India.

Fewer still realise that the contributions of Narinder Singh Kapany find application in the lives of billions of people on this planet, in ways big and small.

Kapany died in the US last month, a trailblazer in the field of fibre optics, a role model for optical engineers but an unsung hero, unknown to so many whose lives he touched with his innovations.

Kapany, 94, passed away peacefully in Redwood City, California, a world away from Moga in Punjab where he was born and the hill town of Dehradun where he grew up. He graduated in 1948 from Agra University, later receiving his doctorate from Imperial College, London, in 1955.

The wide applications of the field that has gone on to revolutionise the internet age stand on the shoulders of Kapany who demonstrated that light transmission is possible with flexible fibre bundles.

Credited with coining the term “fibre optics”, Kapany was a true visionary in his field who earned over 100 patents, say scientists. His seminal research in fibre optics, lasers and solar energy have found applications in bio-medical instruments, defence, communications and pollution-monitoring. Inspiration struck early.

“When I was a high school student at Dehradun in the beautiful foothills of the Himalayas, it occurred to me that light need not travel in a straight line, that it could be bent. I carried the idea to college,” Indian physicist Shivanand Kanavi quoted Kapany as saying in his 2003 book ‘Sand to Silicon: The Amazing Story of Digital Technology’.

Kanavi is among the several scientists who believe Kapany’s contribution may have gone unnoticed by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences which grants the Nobel Prize.

While Chinese scientist Charles K Kao was one of the recipients of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2009 “for groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibres for optical communication”, it was Kapany who first demonstrated successfully that light can be transmitted through bent glass fibres, Kanavi said.

In his illustrious career as scientist, engineer and entrepreneur, Kapany authored four books on fibre optics and entrepreneurship. In 1999, Fortune named him one of seven ‘Unsung Heroes’ in their ‘Businessmen of the Century’ issue.

The first breakthrough came in 1953 when Kapany, along with his PhD guide Harold Horace Hopkins at Imperial College London, became the first to successfully transmit high-quality images through fibre bundles. With Hopkins, Kapany carefully assembled 10,000 to 20,000 fibre bundles, each the diameter of 1/1000 of an inch, as fine as a single strand of the average human hair, and showed light guidance and imaging through a 75-centimetre-long fibre.

The duo published their results in the journal Nature on January 2, 1954, and there was no looking back after that.

Following this pioneering feat, he came up with the term “fibre optics” in a famous article for Scientific American in 1960. “If light is directed into one end of a glass fiber, it will emerge at the other end. Bundles of such fibers can be used to conduct images over a tortuous path and to transform them in various ways,” Kapany wrote, describing the potential applications of the field.

Kapany realised that bundles of thin glass fibres could bend more easily. “Initially, my primary interest was to use them in medical instruments for looking inside the human body. The broad potential of optic fibers did not dawn on me till 1955. It was then that I coined the term fibre optics,” he told Kanavi, who is an adjunct faculty at the National Institute of Advanced Studies in Bengaluru.

The principle behind fibre optic technology is the concept of total internal reflection in which light, when beamed through a glass slab at specific angles, reflects it back completely.

Indian Institute of Technology professor Deepa Venkitesh explained that optical fibre is nothing but hair-thin silica glass drawn to kilometres of length.

“Now if you launch light correctly into this fibre, the light bounces multiple times at the interface and is trapped in the fibre, propagating until it reaches the far end of the fiber,” the fibre optics researcher told PTI.

She said the importance of fibre optics had grown in this era of working from home.

“The backbone that enables high-speed connectivity in front-end mobile devices is in fact the humongous fibre optic communication network that spans the globe,” Venkitesh said.

“Kapany’s key contributions are the demonstration of a system utilising optical fibres for the purpose of transmission of an image over a reasonable distance and the coining of the term fibre optics and sort of introducing the field to a wider audience through an article in the Scientific American,” added VR Supradeepa, associate professor, Centre for Nano Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru.

He said it is hard to find areas which had not been affected by advances in fibre optic communication.

“Any application which involves the internet and similar computer networks is built upon fibre optic communication. The field has come a long way since the early demonstrations by Dr Kapany. From his demonstrations of the first static optical fiber link over a fiber bundle, we now have multi terabits (1 trillion bits) per second communications over a single fibre strand,” the IISc scientist added.

Science writer Jeff Hecht noted in his book, ‘City of Light: The Story of Fiber Optics’ that Kapany was the lead author on 46 scientific papers and co-author of 10 more in the years between 1955 and 1965. “That represented a staggering 30 per cent of all the papers published on fiber optics during those years, including reports on medical treatment,” he said.

After migrating to the US, Kapany first worked at Rochester University, then at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago.

In 1961, he founded Optics Technology Inc successfully taking it public in 1967 – the first Sikh Indian to take a company public in Silicon Valley. He created the Sikh Foundation in 1967 which pioneered the display of Sikh arts at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, DC, and at the Rubin Museum in New York.

Kapany, who is survived by wife Satinder Kaur, two children and four grandchildren, was witness to the horrors of Partition during his years in Dehradun.

Sharing his firsthand accounts with the 1947 Partition Archive, a non-profit organisation, he recalled a mob turning up at their home and demanding that he hand over a Muslim domestic help.

“They were shouting and said, ‘You have a Muslim living here, give him to us’,” he recalled in his interview with the organisation. But he was prepared to use his double-barrel gun to protect the house help.

“I think there were some wise people there who found that I meant it. I wasn’t going to let anybody hurt him,” he said.

Kapany’s last book, a memoir titled ‘The Man Who Bent Light’, is expected to be available in spring this year. PTI

New Delhi, January 18

Protesting union leaders on Monday said that farmers have a constitutional right to take out their tractor rally peacefully and asserted that thousands of people will participate in the proposed event on January 26.

The Supreme Court said on Monday that the Delhi Police is the first authority to decide the entry of protesting farmers into the national capital.

Also read: On farmers’ planned tractor rally on Republic Day, SC says entry into Delhi to be decided by police

Bhartiya Kisan Union (Lakhowal) Punjab general secretary Paramjit Singh said that farmers are not going to hold their rally on Rajpath and in other high-security areas, adding that they would only take out it on the Outer Ring Road in Delhi and that there will be no disruption in the official Republic Day parade.

“We are stuck at the Delhi borders. We have not decided to sit at these borders ourselves, we have been stopped from entering Delhi. We will take out the rally peacefully without disrupting any law and order. We will exercise our constitutional right and we will definitely enter Delhi,” Singh told PTI.

Another farmer leader Lakhbir Singh, who is vice president (Punjab) of All India Kisan Sabha, said that farmers will return to protest sites after taking out the tractor rally on the Outer Ring Road on January 26.

“We will not go to any place where there might be a government gathering, and all our tractors will have a national flag and the flags of our farmer unions,” Lakhbir said.

Asked about their stand in case the Delhi Police does not give them permission for the tractor parade, BKU (Ekta Ugrahan) president Joginder Singh Ugrahan said that farmers have constitutional rights to hold the tractor rally peacefully.

“If the Delhi Police has some issues over law and order on Republic Day, they can sit with Sankyukt Kisan Morcha and tell about alternatives routes for the tractor rally. Thereafter, our farmers’ committee will decide the same. But, it is very clear that their tractor rally will be taken out in the national capital on January 26,” Ugrahan told PTI.

Thousands of farmers, mostly from Punjab and Haryana, have been camping at several Delhi borders since November 28, demanding a repeal of farm laws and legal guarantee on minimum support price for their crops.

While hearing a petition, the Supreme Court told the Centre that the proposed tractor rally by farmers on the Republic Day on January 26 is a matter of “law and order” and Delhi Police is the first authority to decide who should be allowed to enter the national capital.

A bench headed by Chief Justice S A Bobde, while hearing the Centre’s application seeking an injunction against the proposed tractor or trolley march or any other kind of protest which seeks to disrupt the gathering and celebrations of the Republic Day, said that police has all the authority to deal with the matter.

The tenth round of talks between the government and the protesting farmer unions is scheduled on January 19. On the same day, the Supreme Court-appointed committee to resolve the impasse will hold its first meeting.

The previous nine rounds of formal talks between the Centre and 41 farmer unions have failed to yield any concrete results to end the long-running protest at Delhi’s borders as the latter have stuck to their main demand of a complete repeal of the three acts.

The Supreme Court had on January 11 stayed the implementation of the three laws till further orders and appointed a four-member panel to resolve the impasse.

Bhartiya Kisan Union president Bhupinder Singh Mann, however, recused himself from the committee last week. —PTI

New Delhi, January 17

Three days before the Indian Air Force (IAF) jets launched an air strike at Balakot in Pakistan, Arnab had sent a purported WhatsApp message claiming that it would be “bigger than a normal strike”.

“On Pakistan, the government is confident of striking in a way that people will be elated,” he allegedly said in the same message sent to Dasgupta on February 23, 2019. Three days later, IAF jets indeed struck at Balakot. A day later Dasgupta asked Arnab if this was the “big one he was referring to”.

This chat and on many other matters of national security are part of the chargesheet filed by the Mumbai Police in the TRP scam case.

Arnab’s alleged knowledge about the air strike indicates leakage of highly classified information, including military operations. And why did Arnab, who may have gotten a tip-off as a journalist, share this information with Dasgupta over WhatsApp?

Dasgupta was not connected to news operations, but was heading the BARC, which was supposed to check which channel was getting more viewers.

Similarly, just before the abrogation of Article 370 to strip Jammu and Kashmir of its special status, Arnab claimed on August 2, 2019 – again three days prior to the event — “have set platinum standards in breaking and this story is ours”. He was responding to Dasgupta who had sent him a newsflash on (Republic TV), saying: “Government of India to make Jammu separate state, Kashmir and Ladakh as Union Territories.” — TNS

Mumbai, January 18

The Sharad Pawar-led Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) on Monday asked the government to set up a Joint Parliamentary Committee to probe the purported chats between Republic TV editor-in-chief Arnab Goswami and former Broadcast Audience Research Council head Partho Dasgupta.

Referring to the purported chats widely reported in media which mentioned that Goswami was privy to the Balakot airstrikes, NCP chief spokesperson Mahesh Tapase said, “It is extremely shocking and disturbing to know how issues related to national security have been used to gain TRPs.”

Tapase said he will meet Maharashtra Home Minister Anil Deshmukh on Tuesday on the issue and seek clarification from Union Home Minister Amit Shah on the ‘chatgate’.

“The question also arises how Arnab was privy to such sensitive information. The Ministry of Home Affairs has to identify the source and immediately take action,” he said.

Goswami has been at the forefront in maligning the image of the Mumbai police and also the Maha Vikas Aghadi government in the state, Tapase claimed.

“In his TV debates, he tried to give a communal angle to the Palghar incident. The Sushant Singh Rajput death case was blown out of proportion and a false narrative was set. All this was done with the sole intention to destabilise the MVA government,” Tapase said.

The BJP should clarify its position on Arnab Goswami, he said.

Dasgupta, who was arrested in the fake Television Rating Point (TRP) case, is now in the ICU of state-run JJ hospital in central Mumbai.

A diabetic, he was rushed to the hospital from the Taloja Central Prison in Navi Mumbai on Saturday after his blood sugar levels went up on Friday midnight.

The Mumbai police had earlier told the court that Goswami had allegedly bribed Dasgupta with lakhs of rupees to ramp up Republic TV’s viewership. PTI

 New Delhi, January 18

Twenty-one ‘bike ambulances’ developed by the DRDO were on Monday inducted into the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) for casualty evacuation tasks in remote Naxal violence and insurgency-affected areas.

The customised ‘Rakshita’ ambulances have been created on 350cc Royal Enfield Classic bikes by the Institute of Nuclear Medicine and Allied Sciences (INMAS), a scientific research body under the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO).

CRPF chief A P Maheshwari said the bikes will be used in operational areas like the Left Wing Extremism-affected states and insurgency-hit areas for evacuating sick or injured troops of the paramilitary force.

He added that these ambulances will be “gainfully utilised” to also help the locals of the area where the force is deployed.

The bike’s pillion has been customised as a casualty evacuation seat with recline and has a hand immobiliser and harness jacket, a CRPF spokesperson said.

He added that a physiological parameter measuring equipment with monitoring capability and auto-warning system has been provided to the driver along with a dashboard-mounted LCD for measuring vital parameters of the casualty.

The ambulance also has an air splint medical and oxygen kit, can provide saline and oxygen on the move, adjustable footrest, and hand and foot strap for safety among others, the spokesperson said.

The force has sanctioned an initial fund of more than Rs 35.49 lakh for this project, he said.

The CRPF, the lead force for anti-Naxal operations and internal security in the country, first toyed with the bike ambulance idea in February 2018 when the troops of its 85th battalion deployed in Chhattisgarh’s Bijapur district used their patrolling bikes to evacuate casualties from remote areas under its jurisdiction.

Following this, the force approached the INMAS to develop a fully capable and equipment-supported bike ambulance.

“The INMAS promptly put up a team of scientists and experts to make the idea a reality. The team developed a prototype and improved it with the feedback from CRPF personnel deployed in disturbed areas,” the spokesperson said.

Distinguished scientist and director general (life sciences) at the DRDO A K Singh was also present during the handing over of the bike ambulances event held at the CRPF headquarters on Lodhi Road here. — PT

Chandigarh, January 18

The Samyukt Kisan Morcha, a joint forum of farmer organisations spearheading the ongoing protest against farm laws, on Monday disassociated itself from a meeting its constituent Gurnam Singh Chaduni had attended with some opposition leaders, and reiterated that the movement “will not have any direct engagement with any political party”.

A controversy erupted after Bhartiya Kisan Union-Haryana president Chaduni attended the meeting along with the opposition leaders in Delhi on Sunday and supported a call for convening a ‘Jan Sansad’ (People’s Parliament) on the farmers’ issue on January 22-23.

In a statement, the Samyukt Kisan Morcha (SKM) said its coordination committee “inquired into the controversial matter of Chaduni’s meeting with several political parties”.

“Chaduni, clarifying his stand to the committee, stated in writing that yesterday’s meeting was organised by him in his personal capacity. SKM is not associated with this activity in any way. Realising this, he assured the committee that in future, while the ongoing farmers’ agitation is underway, he will not attend any political party meeting,” it said, adding that the committee “welcomed his statement and decided to end the controversy here”.

However, the SKM had said earlier in the day that it “has formed a committee that will inquire into the matter and give its report in three days’ time. SKM will take further steps thereafter”.

In the late-evening statement, the morcha said, “The juncture at which this current unprecedented farmers’ movement is, unity and discipline are of highest priority…. Any organisation and party is free to extend its support; however, the Samyukt Kisan Morcha and the movement will not have any direct engagement with any political party.”

On his meeting with opposition leaders, Chaduni told reporters near Delhi’s Singhu border on Monday that he wanted to let the country know where all these parties “stand on farm laws—whether they are against these or in favour”.

At the same time, he added that he will abide by whatever the morcha decides.

Replying to a question, he also said that his organisation had never invited any politician to share stage or address the people during the ongoing agitation against the Centre’s new farm laws.

Thousands of farmers, mainly from Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh, have been protesting at various border points of Delhi for over 50 days now demanding repeal of the three laws—the Farmers’ Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Act, the Essential Commodities (Amendment) Act, and the Farmers (Empowerment and Protection) Agreement on Price Assurance and Farm Services Act.

Enacted in September 2020, the Central government has presented these laws as major farm reforms aimed at increasing farmers’ income, but the protesting farmers have raised concerns that these legislations would weaken the minimum support price (MSP) and “mandi” systems and leave them at the mercy of big corporations.

The government has maintained that these apprehensions are misplaced and has ruled out a repeal of the laws.

Multiple rounds of talks between the government and the protesting unions have failed to resolve the impasse on the matter. — PTI