MAT 2006

The National Institute of Oceanography (NIO) in Goa has developed a realtime reporting and Internetaccessible coastal sealevelmonitoring system and it has been operational at Verem jetty in the Mandovi estuary in Goa since September 24, 2005. The gauge uses a cellular modem to put on the Internet realtime sealevel data, which can be accessed by authorised personnel. By using a cellular phone network, coastal sealevel changes are continuously updated on to a webserver. The sealevel gauge website can be made available to television channels to broadcast realtime visualisation of the coastal sea level, particularly during oceanogenic hazards such as storm surges or a tsunami. A network of such gauges along the coast and the islands that lie on either side of the mainland would provide data to disaster management agencies to disseminate warnings to coastal communities and beach tourism centres.

The gauge incorporates a bottom pressure transducer as the sensing element. The sea unit of the gauge, which houses the pressure transducer, is mounted within a cylindrical protective housing, which in turn is rigidly held within a mechanical structure. This structure is secured to a jetty. The gauge is powered by a battery, which is charged by solar panels. Battery, electronics, solar panels, and cellular modems are mounted on the top portion of this structure. The pressure sensor and the logger are continuously powered on, and their electrical current Consumption is 30 mA and 15 mA respectively. The cellular modem consumes 15 mA and 250 mA during standby and data transmission modes, respectively. The pressure sensor located below the lowtide level measures the hydrostatic pressure of the overlying water layer. An indigenously designed and developed microprocessor based data logger interrogates the pressure transducer and acquires the pressure data at the rate of two samples a second. The acquired pressure data is averaged over an interval of five minutes to remove highfrequency windwaves that are superimposed on the lower frequency tidal cycle. This averaged data is recorded in a multimedia card. The measured water pressure is converted to water level using sea water density and acceleration owing to the earth's gravity. The water level so estimated is then referenced to chart datum (CD), which is the internationally accepted reference level below which the sealevel will not, fall. The data received at the Internet server is presented in graphical format together with the predicted sealevel and the residual. The residual sea level (that is, the measured minus the predicted sea level) provides a clear indication of sealevel oscillation and a quantitative estimate of the anomalous behaviour, the driving force for which could be atmospheric forcing (storm) or physical (tsunami).

A network of sealevel gauges along the Indian coastline and islands would also provide useful information to mariners for safe navigation in shallow coastal waters and contribute to various engineering projects associated with coastal zone management, besides dredging operations, port operations and manwater treaties with greater transparency. Among the various communication technologies used for realtime transmission of sealevel data are the wired telephone connections, VHF/UHF transceivers, satellite transmit terminals and cellular connectivity. Wired telephone connections are severely susceptible to loss of connectivity during natural disasters such as storm surges, primarily because of telephone line breakage. Communication via VHF/UHF transceivers is limited by lineofsight distance between transceivers and normally offer only pointtopoint data transfer. Satellite communication via platform transmit terminals (PTTs) has wide coverages and, therefore, allows data reception from offshore platforms. However, data transfer speeds are limited. Further many satellites (for example, GOES, INSAT) permit data transfer only predefined timeslots, thereby inhibiting continuous data access. Technologies of data reporting via satellites have undergone a sea change recently in terms of frequency of reportage, data size, recurring costs and so forth. Broadband technology has been identified as one that can be used optimally for realtime reporting of data because of its inherent advantages such as a continuous twoday connection that allows highspeed data transfer and near realtime data reporting. While satellite communication is expensive, wireless communication infrastructure and the ubiquity of cellular phones have made cellular communication affordable. Low initial and recurring costs are an important advantage of cellular communication. A simple and costeffective methodology for realtime reporting of data is the cellularbased GPRS technology, with has been recently implemented at the NIO for realtime reporting of coastal sea level data.

The World Trade Organisation (WTO) Ministerial Conference, which commenced in Hong Kong on December 13, 2005 adopted a declaration on December 18, 2005 after six days of acrimonious negotiations between developed and developing countries. Although initially there was a show of unity among developing countries especially on the issue of agriculture, which was reflected in the formation of the G110, the final outcome of the Ministerial Declaration has been thoroughly antidevelopment. The Ministerial Declaration has not only failed to address substantially the concerns of developing countries but has actually paved the way for an eventual trade deal by the end of 2006, which is going to be severely detrimental to their interests. It is clear by now that the socalled "Development Round" launched in Doha in 2001 has been manipulated by developed countries, especially the United States and the members of the European Union, to push for further trade liberalisation in developing countries while they continue to protect their economies through high subsidies and nontariff barriers. Far from redressing the asymmetries of the global trading system, the Doha round seems to be heading for another catastrophe for the developing world. The EU stuck to its intransigent position on the deadline of 2013 for the elimination of export subsidies and developing countries gave up their demand for an earlier end date despite the initial collective efforts of the G110. The gross inadequacy of this socalled "concession" can be understood from the fact that export subsidies comprise less than 2 per cent of the total farm subsidies in the developed world. There has been no concrete commitment on the reduction of domestic support other than export subsidies. The EU can continue to subsidise agriculture to the tune of 55 billion euros a year. The EU budget adopted recently ensures that nothing can be touched in the agriculture budget till at least 2013. The US budget reconciliation process and the final vote in the Congress are set to extend domestic support to agriculture and countercyclical support to commodities up to around 2011. Even in the case of cotton, the agreement to eliminate subsidies by 2006 is restricted to export subsidies only and does not include other forms of domestic support. The US refused to give dutyfree access to exports from LeastDeveloped Countries (LDCs) for 99.9 per cent of product lines and the final agreement was on 97 per cent of them, which would enable the US and Japan to deny market access to LDCs in product lines such as rice and textiles. Much of the Aid for Trade for LDCs, which is being showcased by developed countries as a "development package", is disguised in conditional loan packages that are contingent upon further opening up of their markets. India's prime interest in agriculture was to ensure the protection of its small and marginal farmers from the onslaught of artificially lowpriced imports or threats thereof. The proposals for agricultural tariff cuts, which are already on the table, are quite ambitious and the G20 has already committed itself to undertake cuts to the extent of twothirds of the level applicable to developed countries. Moreover, India has 100 per cent tariff lines bound in agriculture with the difference in the applied level and the bound level not very marked in many lines. In this context, the systemic problem face by India's small and marginal farmers practising subsistence agriculture will only get aggravated as a result of the impending tariff cuts that have been agreed upon. The government claims that the right to designate a number of agricultural product lines as special products based upon the consideration of food and livelihood security and to establish a special safeguard mechanism based on import quantity and price triggers, which have been mentioned in the Ministerial Text, adequately addresses the concerns of Indian farmers. The claim is questionable since the nature as well as the extent of protection under the category of special products remains restricted and the special safeguard mechanism, admittedly, is a measure to deal with an emergency and is of "a temporary nature". Therefore, seen in the light of the insignificant reductions in domestic farm subsidies by developed countries, tariff reduction commitments by developing countries seem to be totally unjustifiable. Developing countries have also agreed on the Swiss formula for tariff cuts under NonAgricultural Market Access (NAMA). Although the coefficients will be negotiated later, it is unlikely that developed countries will agree upon sufficiently large coefficients for the formula that would ensure adequate policy space for developing countries in future to facilitate development of different sectors of their industries. The Ministerial Text's ritual references to "less than full reciprocity" and "special and differential treatment" fails to conceal the fact that the flexibilities provided by the July framework regarding the nature of the tariff reduction formula, product coverage, the extent of binding and the depth of cuts have been done away with. Moreover, no concrete commitment has been obtained in the Ministerial Text for the removal of the NonTariff barriers by developed countries, which is their principal mode of protection, despite developing countries making such major concessions on industrial tariff cuts. The fact of the matter is that developing countries have committed themselves to cuts in both agricultural and industrial tariffs, without getting anything substantial in return from developed countries. And India has facilitated the adoption of this bad deal in the backdrop of an acute crisis faced by Indian agriculture. Unfortunately, developing countries have lost the opportunity to rework fundamentally the iniquitous Agreement on Agriculture and protect the domestic policy space visàvis industrial protection by developing countries, which could have been achieved by galvanising the unity of the G110.

It is easy to accept Freud as an applied scientist, and, indeed he is widely regarded as the twentieth century's master clinician. However, in viewing Marx as an applied social scientist, the stance needed is that of a Machiavellian operationalism. The objective is neither to bury nor to praise him. The assumption is simply that he is better understood for being understood as an applied sociologist. This is in part the clear implication of Marx's Theses on Feurbach, which culminate in the resounding 11th thesis: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world in different ways; the point, however, is to change it". This would seem to be the tacit creed of applied scientists everywhere. Marx was no Faustian, concerned solely with understanding society, but a Promethean who sought to understand it well enough to influence and to change it. He was centrally concerned with the social problems of a lay group, the proletariat, and there can be little doubt that his work is motivated by an effort to reduce, their suffering, as he saw it. His diagnosis was that their increasing misery and alienation engendered endemic class struggle; his prognosis claimed that this would culminate in revolution; his therapeutic prescription was class consciousness and active struggle. Here, as in assessing Durkheim or Freud, the issue is not whether this analysis is empirically correct or scientifically adequate. Furthermore, whether or not this formulation seems to eviscerate Marx's revolutionary core, as critics on the left may charge, or whether the formulation provides Marx with a new veneer of academic respectability, as critics on the right may allege, is entirely irrelevant from the present standpoint. Insofar as Marx's or any other social scientist's work conforms to a generalised model of applied social science, insofar as it is professionally oriented to the values and social problems of laymen in his society, he may be treated as an applied social scientist. Despite Durkheim's intellectualistic proclivities and rationalistic pathos, he was too much the product of European turbulence to turn his back on the travail of his culture. "Why strive for knowledge of reality, if this knowledge cannot aid us in life", he asked. "Social science", he said, "can provide us with rules of action for the future". Durkheim, like Marx, conceived of science as an agency of social action, and like him was professionally oriented to the values and problems of laymen in his society. Unless one sees that Durkheim was in some part an applied social scientist, it is impossible to understand why he concludes his monumental study of Suicide with a chapter on "Practical Consequences", and why, in the Division of Labour, he proposes a specific remedy for anomie. Durkheim is today widely regarded as a model of theoretic and methodologic sophistication, and is thus usually seen only in his capacity as a pure social scientist. Surely this is an incomplete view of the man who regarded the practical effectiveness of a science as its principal justification. To be more fully understood, Durkheim also needs to be seen as an applied sociologist. His interest in religious beliefs and organisation, in crime and penology, in educational methods and organisation, in suicide and anomie, are not casually chosen problem areas. Nor did he select them only because they provided occasions for the development of his theoretical orientation. These areas were in his time, as they are today, problems of indigenous interest to applied sociologist in Western Society, precisely because of their practical significance.