Raghuram Rajan on branding people as ‘anti-national at Universities
Mumbai: Former RBI governor Raghuram Rajan today said universities need to be "safe spaces" where debates takes place and no one is shouted down after being branded an "anti-national".
Every stream of thought needs to be encouraged in a varsity, he said, citing instances like one of his colleagues at the University of Chicago inviting President Donald Trump's former chief strategist Steve Banon to speak, despite not agreeing with his views.
"We need to learn to respect universities as places where ideas are debated and you don't shout down the other side and say that no no you don't have the right to speak like this or you are anti-national," he told reporters here.
"We have to, as a society, create safe spaces where debates and discussions take place, where people using freedom, not licence, can express their views which can take the society forward," Mr Rajan said.
He was speaking on the sidelines of announcing the launch of Krea University, which will be devoted to liberal arts and humanities apart from science.
"Any university will court controversy but the point is that controversy should be protected. Part of the point is to debate. Sometimes ideas that are unappealing come forward and are shot down.
"I think the process is good and over time these ideas become mainstream. For instance women's rights is something that was debated in the 19th century which overtime we have come to accept," he said.
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More than 50 lakh large farmland trees vanished between 2018 and 2022 in India: Study
New Delhi (PTI): More than 50 lakh large farmland trees vanished between 2018 and 2022 in India, partly due to altered cultivation practices, revealing a "concerning trajectory," new research published in the journal Nature Sustainability has found.
Researchers said that "an observable trend was emerging" wherein agroforestry systems are being replaced with paddy rice fields, even as a certain loss rate could be found to be natural.
Large and mature trees within these agroforestry fields are removed, and trees are now being cultivated within separate block plantations typically with lower ecological value, they said.
Block plantations, usually involving fewer species of trees, were found to have increased in numbers which some villagers from Telangana, Haryana, Maharashtra and other states confirmed via interviews.
The team, including researchers from the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, explained that the decision to remove trees is often driven by perceived low benefits of the trees, coupled with concerns that their shading effect, including that of Neem trees, may adversely affect crop yields.
Boosting crop yields also contributed to the expansion of paddy rice fields, further facilitated by water supply which was augmented by the establishment of new boreholes, the authors said.
"This finding is particularly unsettling given the current emphasis on agroforestry as an essential natural climate solution, playing a crucial role in both climate change adaptation and mitigation strategies, as well as for livelihoods and biodiversity," the authors wrote.
Agroforestry trees are a vital part of India's landscapes as they generate socio-ecological benefits, along with being a natural climate solution owing to their ability to absorb carbon dioxide from the air.
However, despite their importance, the lack of robust monitoring mechanisms has contributed to an insufficient grasp of their distribution in relation to management practices, as well as their vulnerability to climate change and diseases, the researchers said.
For the study, the team used AI-based deep learning models for detecting individual non-forest trees for each year. By tracking the tree crown over the years, they then analysed the changes. Crowns of multiple trees together form a canopy.
The researchers mapped about 60 crore farmland trees, excluding block plantations, and tracked them over the past decade.
They found that around 11 percent of the large trees, each having a crown size of 96 square metres and mapped in 2010/2011, had disappeared by 2018.
"Moreover, during the period 2018–2022, more than 5 million large farmland trees (about 67 square metres crown size) have vanished, due partly to altered cultivation practices, where trees within fields are perceived as detrimental to crop yields," the authors wrote.
The researchers clarified that while the findings may appear to contradict official reports and studies showing that tree cover has increased in recent years, they reported only gross losses and did not look at tree gains as a separate class.
