Read The Hindu Notes of 26th January 2019 for UPSC Civil Service Examination, State Civil Service Examination and other competitive Examination

The Hindu Notes for 26th January 2019
  • Topic Discussed: The Hindu Notes of 26th January 2019

    • Examining farm loan waivers

    The solution lies in better schemes that ensure universal coverage for small, marginal and medium-sized farmers

  • To do or not to do? According to reports, the Central government is discussing a scheme to waive outstanding farm loans in the aftermath of widespread farmers’ protests between March and December 2018 . Till now, at least 11 States have announced schemes to waive outstanding farm loans: Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh, Punjab, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Assam and Rajasthan. The pitch for waivers among States has added to the pressure on the Central government for a nationwide farm loan waiver.

    • Divided opinion

  • Economists and bankers are sharply divided on whether farm loan waivers are desirable. One section of economists and hard-nosed bankers argues that loan waivers represent poor policy for a variety of reasons. First, loan waivers have “reputational consequences”; that is, they adversely affect the repayment discipline of farmers, leading to a rise in defaults in future. Second, earlier debt waiver schemes have not led to increases in investment or productivity in agriculture. Third, after the implementation of debt waiver schemes, a farmer’s access to formal sector lenders declines, leading to a rise in his dependence on informal sector lenders; in other words, waivers lead to the shrinkage of a farmer’s future access to formal sector credit.
  • These arguments need careful and critical assessment. To begin with, there have only been two nationwide loan waiver programmes in India after Independence: in 1990 and 2008. The accompanying image gives data on agricultural non-performing assets (NPAs) of banks before and after the 2008 waiver, and throws up two conclusions.
  • First, farmers are most disciplined in their repayment behaviour. In September 2018, agricultural NPAs (about 8%) were far lower than in industry (about 21%). Furthermore, agricultural NPAs were on a continuous decline between 2001 and 2008. Second, there is no evidence to argue that the 2008 waiver led to a rise in default rates among farmers. The lowest of all NPAs after 2001 was recorded in March 2009 (2.1%), which was just after the implementation of the 2008 scheme. The reason was the government’s cleaning up of the account books of banks. Once this was complete, it was totally expected that NPAs would rise again to settle at a slightly higher level. This was exactly what had happened: agricultural NPAs rose and settled at about 5% by 2011.
  • For two reasons, the rise of agricultural NPAs, from 2% to 5%, is no evidence for indiscipline in farmer repayment behaviour. One, NPAs in agriculture remained stable at around 4 to 5% between 2011 and 2015. This was despite the fact that agricultural growth averaged just 1.5% between 2011 and 2015. Two, D. Subbarao, the former Reserve Bank of India Governor, had pointed out in a 2012 speech that the rise in agricultural NPAs between 2009 and 2011 was due to the “general economic slowdown” after 2009 and the introduction of new norms in the “system-wide identification of NPAs”.
  • Agricultural NPAs began to rise again after 2015. There is enough evidence to suggest that this rise was not the result of any moral hazard; it was real, policy-induced and a direct consequence of acute agrarian distress that spread across rural India after 2015. In particular, the demonetisation of November 2016 aggravated already brewing agrarian distress by sucking cash out of the rural areas, crashing output prices and disrupting supply chains.
  • The second argument — that loan waivers do not promote investment or raise productivity — is a bit absurd because nowhere has investment or productivity figured as the official objectives of these schemes. The third argument — that loan waivers shrink access to formal credit sector for farmers — is only partly true. But the culprits here are banks and not farmers. After every waiver, banks become conservative in issuing fresh loans to beneficiaries, as they are perceived to be less creditworthy. For instance, a Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) report on the waiver in 2008 found that 34.3% of the beneficiaries were not issued debt relief certificates after the waiver, which meant that they could not avail of a fresh loan the following year. As a result, the scheme’s objective of expanding the issue of fresh loans to farmers was not fully achieved. But to cite such opportunistic actions of banks to deny fresh credit to farmers would be perverse policy.
  • For every economic enterprise, it is only natural that when the bottom-line shrinks, a reduction of debt burden becomes inevitable. This is applicable for both (non-agricultural) firms and farms. Firms have always received debt waivers, though they are tactfully termed as “loan restructuring” or “one-time settlements”. Just as for firms, farms also need a reduction of debt burden, followed by fresh infusion of credit, when their economic cycle is on a downturn. The demand for loan waivers in India is absolutely logical when viewed from such a standpoint.
  • On the other hand, to consider loan waivers as a panacea for the agrarian distress would also be wrong. To begin with, access to India’s rural banks is skewed in favour of large farmers. While public banks actively service the credit needs of large farmers, a majority of small and marginal farmers are not proportionately included. The latter are forced to rely on informal sources, particularly moneylenders, for much of their credit needs. As a result, the benefits of loan waivers accrue disproportionately to large farmers while only marginally benefiting the small and marginal farmers.

    • The Kerala blueprint

  • But is this a good reason to disallow a loan waiver scheme, as the Prime Minister suggested in a recent interview? No. The solution lies in carefully designing waiver schemes that ensure universal coverage for small, marginal and medium-sized farmers while covering both the formal and informal sources of debt. The Kerala Farmers’ Debt Relief Commission Act, 2006 is an excellent model in this regard. This scheme defines debt as “any sum borrowed by a farmer from the creditor”, with the creditor defined as “any person engaged in money lending, whether under a licence or not”. The commission’s mandate included the right “to fix, in the case of creditors other than institutional creditors, a fair rate of interest and an appropriate level of debt, to be payable…” That is, the commission could waive, reschedule or reduce any debt on a need-basis after a detailed hearing of both the parties. Legislations such as Kerala’s are blueprints to design comprehensive, inclusive and less-leaky loan waiver schemes in other States.
  • Finally, while loan waiver schemes are like a band-aid on a wound, it is the larger agrarian distress that demands urgent policy attention. Unless there are steps ‘to raise productivity, reduce costs of cultivation by providing quality inputs at subsidised rates, provide remunerative prices following the recommendations of the Swaminathan Commission, ensure assured procurement of output, expand access to institutional credit, enhance public investment for infrastructural development, institute effective crop insurance systems and establish affordable scientific storage facilities and agro-processing industries for value addition’, farmers will continue to be bonded to low income equilibrium and repeated debt traps.

    • A failed coup in Venezuela

    The country was once the heartbeat of leftist assertion. But with change in the Americas, matters are now complex

  • The fulcrum of geopolitical tension sits on Caracas, the capital of Venezuela. An attempted coup on January 23 has failed. The U.S. decided to recognise a member of the Opposition, Juan Guaidó, as the President of Venezuela. U.S. officials called upon the military to rise up against the government of President Nicolás Maduro. This was against the charters of the United Nations and of the Organisation of American States (OAS). None of that mattered. The drumbeats sounded from Washington to Caracas. There was a minor drum playing from many Latin American capitals, those whose governments had joined the Lima Group — set up in Peru in 2017 to overthrow the government of Venezuela.
  • There is little respite for the country, where tension sits heavily from one end to another. Thus far, the government of Mr. Maduro remains in power, and the military has pledged its fealty to the re-elected president. It is unlikely that the Venezuelan Opposition — controlled by the old oligarchy — will be able to engineer a coup from within the country. It tried such a political manoeuvre in 2002, which failed. This time it has failed again.
  • Venezuela’s Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza, 45, has been understandably busy on the day after the attempted coup. The U.S. tried to isolate the Maduro government. The OAS met in Washington DC, where the U.S. government tried to get it to unanimously vote against Mr. Maduro. Even that meeting could not go as scripted. A veteran activist from Code Pink, Medea Benjamin, sneaked into the room and chanted slogans against the attempted coup. Many Latin American states, despite intense pressure from the U.S. government, either voted against the OAS motion or abstained. Mr. Arreaza watched these developments and more.
  • When I asked him about the coup, he went back to 2017, the last time that the oligarchy tried to wrest control of the government from the socialists. The socialists, led by Hugo Chávez, came to power in 1999. After the U.S. attempted to overthrow Chávez and the socialists in 2002, things calmed down. Oil prices rose and the U.S. was distracted by events in Iraq and Afghanistan. For a decade, Venezuela was able to lead a regional process of integration on an anti-imperialist foundation. But, when Chávez died in 2013, the experiment began to unravel. Oil prices fell dramatically, and the U.S. had already turned its attention to Latin America. A coup in 2009 overthrew the democratically elected government of Honduras. The gunsights turned toward Venezuela. The oligarchy, backed fully by the U.S., attempted to foment trouble in 2017.
  • Mr. Arreaza recalled one man, Orlando Figuera, 21, who was going through an Opposition stronghold in May 2017. “He was accused of being a government supporter and brutally beaten by masked protesters who then soaked him in gasoline and set him on fire,” Mr. Arreaza told me. He brought up this story to offer an illustration of the character of the Opposition. Mr. Arreaza called this a ‘violent fascist movement’. He wanted to make it clear that the coup attempt was a part of that movement — one that is less interested in democracy and more interested in power and wealth.

    • Steeped in trouble

  • Venezuela is in trouble. No one doubts that. Oil prices have fallen to half of what they were at the highpoint of Chávez’s government. Since the treasury of Venezuela is almost entirely replenished by the incomes from oil sales, the collapse of oil prices means the collapse of Venezuela’s public finances. Unable to borrow easily, the country faces serious economic difficulties. Sanctions by the U.S. and the seizure of refining sites in the Caribbean put the country into a situation of great crisis. No wonder that people are leaving the country, fleeing their homeland as it is suffocated for political purposes by the U.S. and its Latin American allies in the Lima Group.
  • Colombia’s Iván Duque and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro are both right-wing politicians who control the governments of Venezuela’s neighbours. They have committed themselves to the overthrow of the Venezuelan government. Mr. Arreaza and others in Venezuela told me that Mr. Duque, Mr. Bolsonaro and U.S. President Donald Trump have overplayed their hands. After the attempted overthrow in 2017, the Venezuelan government tried to deepen public participation by the formation of a Constituent Assembly. It is true that the oligarchy hated this idea and that the western press amplified its views about this being anti-democratic. But, as many Venezuelans say, the Constituent Assembly and the many elections for candidates and referendums that came before 2017 have sharpened their political consciousness. It will be hard to befuddle them with talk of dictatorship.
  • The isolation of Venezuela is remarkable. Not long ago, the country was the heartbeat of the leftist assertion in the hemisphere. Now, with the emergence of right-of-centre governments in Latin America and with an explosive energy for regime change in Washington, matters are more complex. Mr. Arreaza said that Mr. Maduro had invited the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, to visit Venezuela. She has not yet come. Mr. Maduro, he said, wanted the UN to host a dialogue with the Opposition to restore some balance to the politics in the country. No such assistance has been provided. A hand is outstretched from Caracas, Mr. Arreaza said. It is waiting for someone to take hold of it.

    • Crisis in Caracas

    Venezuela plunges from one catastrophic crisis to another

  • The political crisis in Venezuela took a dangerous turn when Juan Guaidó, the new head of the National Assembly, declared himself “acting President”, challenging the authority of President Nicolás Maduro. Soon after Mr. Guaidó’s announcement, the U.S., Canada, Brazil and a host of other Latin American countries recognised the 35-year-old leader from the Popular Will party as interim President. A furious Mr. Maduro cut diplomatic ties with the U.S. and ordered American diplomats to leave in 72 hours. Venezuela has grappled with an economic and political crisis of its own making for almost two years now. When oil prices started falling from its 2014 highs, it badly hit an economy that was over-reliant on petroleum exports and was borrowing heavily to fund its over-spending on social welfare programmes, which former President Hugo Chávez liked to describe as a “Bolivarian revolution”. Mr. Maduro’s government was clueless when the economy started collapsing. At least 90% of the people now live below the poverty line, inflation is forecast to touch 10 million per cent this year, food and medicine shortages are widespread, and the economic woes have triggered a massive migrant crisis — nearly three million are estimated to have fled the country in recent years.
  • The opposition, whose attempts to overthrow the Socialists, including the 2002 coup against Chávez, had failed in the past, launched protests against Mr. Maduro. The government used brute force to suppress them, while the economic situation deteriorated. This left Venezuela in a constant state of economic hardships and violent street protests over the past two years. The main opposition boycotted last year’s presidential election, which Mr. Maduro won with 67.8% vote. Mr. Guaidó’s claim is that the election was not free and fair and therefore Mr. Maduro is not the legitimate President — a claim that the U.S. and its allies back. While Mr. Maduro shares a lot of the blame for the mismanagement of the economy, forcibly removing him from power with support from foreign nations may destabilise the country further, even leaving aside the legality of such a move. Mr. Guaidó may have hoped that by anointing himself a rebel President with backing from the U.S., he could win the support of sections of the armed forces, without which he cannot unseat Mr. Maduro. But that plan appears to have failed with the military declaring its loyalty to President Maduro. To be sure, the people of Venezuela deserve a better deal from a government that has led them to untold suffering and forced millions to flee the country. Destabilisation by interfering in the political process is not the solution, however. What is required is a coordinated international effort to restore some degree of economic and political normalcy. In the long run, it is up to the people of Venezuela to decide their own political destiny.

    • A friendly fight

    The pre-poll rivalry between the Congress and the TDP will not prevent a post-poll friendship

  • A divorce need not always be an unhappy mess. In Andhra Pradesh, the Congress and the Telugu Desam Party have agreed to go their separate ways, but remain friends. While deciding against any form of an alliance for the Lok Sabha and Assembly elections, they have agreed to work closely in the post-poll scenario at the national level. Going by the disastrous results of their alliance in Telangana, where they lost heavily to the Telangana Rashtra Samithi recently, this arrangement is the best for both. Indeed, the TDP, trying to retain power against a resurgent YSR Congress Party, may do better without the Congress, which is still blamed in Andhra Pradesh for the bifurcation of the State in 2014. The Congress, to the benefit of the TDP, could cut into the vote share of the YSRCP, a breakaway party led by the son of former Congress Chief Minister Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy. Traditionally, the Congress and the TDP have been bitter rivals, but the bifurcation dramatically changed the political equations. The Congress vote bank collapsed in Andhra Pradesh as the Congress-led government at the Centre was seen as the architect of the bifurcation. In Telangana, the TDP, which vacillated on the division, suffered a massive erosion of votes. Thus, for the first time, the Congress and the TDP no longer had geographically overlapping support bases. While the leadership of both parties saw in this an opportunity to work together, the ground beneath had shifted. The vote banks of the Congress and the TDP did not add up in the recent Telangana Assembly election. Voters in the new State saw the alliance between the foes-turned-friends as opportunistic and returned the TRS to power with a bigger majority.
  • Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu, while not keen on an alliance with the Congress, wants the two parties to work together at the national level against the Bharatiya Janata Party. Much of Mr. Naidu’s political campaign is directed against the BJP-led government at the Centre for not granting special category status to Andhra Pradesh. Installing a non-BJP alternative political formation at the Centre is integral to the TDP’s vision for the State. For its part, the Congress, which is in the process of finding new allies in different States to cut into the BJP’s share of the seats, is content with the TDP as a post-poll ally. The tactic of fighting the elections separately need not stop them from forming a government together. In the eyes of the Congress, a post-poll coalition in Andhra Pradesh is just as good as a pre-poll alliance. What matters is the number of seats that parties opposed to the BJP may get in the Lok Sabha. If the disbanding of the alliance makes any difference to that end, it can only be a positive.

    • Kyasanur’s ticking time bomb

    Reckless human forays into eco-sensitive forest areas and lax public health monitoring have led to a deadly outbreak of Kyasanur Forest Disease, or Monkey Fever, in Karnataka’s Shivamogga district, disrupting normal life and the local plantation economy. Mohit M. Rao reports from Aralagodu, the epicentre of the outbreak

  • A dusty road that snakes through areca nut plantations and forests leads one to Jegala, a hamlet wedged between the Sharavathy hydel reservoir and the hills of the Western Ghats in Karnataka’s Shivamogga district.
  • Late on Christmas eve, Shwetha J.S., 17, a student and resident of the neighbouring town of Sagar, came up this road to spend the holidays with her family. In the morning she was at their plantation, taking photographs with her father, Devaraj, 42, who was a farmer, and the farm help, who shimmied up the slender areca tree trunks to harvest nuts. There was also something more — the faint smell of rotting carcass, but this did not dampen her joy.
  • Shwetha had her examinations coming up in the next few months. She was aware that she could be the first in the family to enrol in an undergraduate course. Her ambition was to get a doctorate degree in agriculture to help her father fight the diseases that often ravaged their plantation.
  • After she left for Sagar on December 27, her family scoured the plantation and the nearby woods for the putrid odour that had by then become unbearable. Their search led to a highly decomposed carcass of a monkey in a ditch nearby. State forest department and health officials then burnt it and doused the area with a strong insecticide. By this time, however, nymphs, or young ticks, that had feasted on the monkey before its death had already spread.
  • On December 28, Shweta was admitted to a hospital in Sagar as she was running a high fever. She was diagnosed with Kyasanur Forest Disease (KFD), a viral haemorrhagic disease endemic to the region. Better known as ‘Monkey Fever’, KFD is primarily transmitted through ticks — in short, a tick-borne zoonotic disease. Doctors treat only the symptoms, for KFD has no known cure.
  • Shwetha’s mother Lata, 37, a tailor and beautician, was trying hard to control her panic. Devraj had been diagnosed with KFD too, and was also suffering from bacterial leptospirosis (rat fever). He was taken to Manipal hospital, 150 km away, while Lata devoted her time tending to Shwetha, who seemed to be recovering.
  • On January 2, Lata arrived in the hospital in the evening, planning to spend the night with her daughter. But, says Lata, choking on her words as she struggles to talk through uncontrollable sobs, “Shwetha looked at me, and said ‘Amma, you’re here’. Then she collapsed.”
  • Shwetha went into a coma. On January 4, she was pronounced dead.

    • A day after Shwetha’s visit to the plantation, the Aralagodu Gram Panchayat, which encompasses multiple hamlets including Jegala, registered its first case of Monkey Fever death. Shwetha was the sixth victim in Aralagodu. The toll has since risen to eight.

    An old menace

    In the current outbreak in the State, at least 65 people have tested positive for KFD, but the number of suspected cases —awaiting confirmation through blood tests — has touched 204. At least 38 monkeys have died in the plantations. Aralagodu is the epicentre of the outbreak, but infected areas are also being reported in villages across four districts of Karnataka (Shivamogga, Udupi, Dakshina Kannada, and Uttara Kannada) – and in Kerala (Wayanad) and Maharashtra (four cases).

  • KFD virus is no stranger to Shivamogga, first reported in Kyasanur village in this district, about 30 km from Jegala, back in 1957. The virus belongs to the Flaviviridae family, whose other members are responsible for causing Yellow Fever, Zika and Dengue. Multiple species of ticks of the genus Haemaphysalis are the principal vectors. Infections peak between November and March, which coincides with the larvae-nymph cycles of ticks.
  • But little else can be said with certainty. Since 1957, it has flared up in sporadic outbreaks Post-2013, it has even expanded its range, with fatal consequences in Maharashtra, Kerala and Goa. According to State data, in the past 15 years, KFD has infected 2,067 people and killed 42. (The International Society for Infectious Disease estimates 3,836 infections and 98 deaths between 1999-2017 through the country.) The horrific spike in the number of deaths in one village/district in Karnataka, in the last one month, has taken the civic administration completely by surprise.
  • As uncertain as KFD’s spread may be, what is increasingly clear is that the outbreak in Aralagodu was aggravated by systemic failures and lax monitoring of a disease that has lurked in Shivamogga’s fragmented forests for over six decades.

    • Back after 12 years

  • Visitors to Aralagodu village are greeted by posters that warn them about Monkey Fever. A habitation of barely 3,000 people, located a few kilometres from the Jog falls, it has been hit hard by the disease. Ambulances ferry those with persistent fevers every day to hospitals 150 km away. Government vans zip around, reaching out to villagers in remote hamlets to identify and test fevers that could potentially be KFD.
  • Such is the fear that between January 5 and 15, none of the 49 school-going children showed up at the government primary school here. Says Devendra Naik, the school headmaster and who travels to work from a nearby town, “We tried to convince the parents that the school was safe. But how can we convince them when we ourselves are scared to come to the village?” When classes resumed from January 16, nine children showed up.
  • All the activity in the village is centred around the two-room primary health centres (PHC) which are perched on a hill. The telephone rings every few minutes and a steady stream of villagers make their way to meet Nitin Patel, the resident doctor, with complaints of fever and body pain.
  • The 24-year-old doctor was posted here six months ago as part of the year-long rural stint which is mandated at the end of an MBBS course.
  • Initially, things were a bit dull for him, with most villagers relying on an array of medicinal herbs to treat ailments. But early in November, Padmavathi, 35, from Nellimakki hamlet, came down with a fever that refused to subside. A few days later, her husband Komraju, 38, too developed similar symptoms. They live on the fringes of the forest on the outskirts of the village. Says Padmavathi, a scrawny areca nut farmer, “None of the medicines given at the PHC worked. It was a fever unlike anything I had experienced.”
  • A bewildered Patel sent her to a hospital in Sagar for further tests. On November 24, it was confirmed to be a case of KFD, a disease which had not been detected in Aralagudu for 12 years.
  • Says Patel, “It’s been a scramble since,” recollecting that his medical college textbooks had just a single paragraph about KFD. A small group of officials now help him oversee the stream of patients. Says Patel, “The outbreak is difficult to contain as forest patches and a large number of monkeys create a conducive atmosphere for ticks to breed.”
  • Though a vaccination programme began on November 30, it was too late for Aralagodu. The first dose hardly provides protection, while the efficiency of the second dose (administered after a month) is only of 63% efficacy. Of the seven dead, two persons had received their first dose, while one had been administered the second dose. The demographic group most vulnerable to KFD are people more than 40 years old. But three out of the seven dead are between 17 and 31 years, suggesting an incredibly high viral load.
  • A State Health Department official sums up the situation bluntly: “After the fire has broken out, we’re now searching for water to douse it.” Interviews with villagers, experts and government officials reveal that the inflammable cinders of this ‘fire’ were sighted nearly a year ago.

    • Protocols that failed

  • In April 2018, one person tested positive for KFD, in Bidarur village. As in established protocol, everyone within a 5 km radius needed to be vaccinated. However, officials drove down 5 km from the infected spot, which, in the undulating landscape, led to the identification of just 500 people. Bidarur was fortified against the outbreak, but Aralagodu, on the other side of the hillock, was left unprotected against a ticking time bomb.
  • Despite the threat of KFD looming over the district for decades, official responses have been purely reactive. The KFD field station was set up in Sagar to monitor monkey deaths and to randomly test ticks. Started by the Rockfeller Foundation and researchers of the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), immediately on discovery of the disease, it transitioned from a research station to a surveillance station in the years since. But three posts in this field station have been lying vacant for nearly a year. The post of ‘District Epidemiologist’, who tracks diseases in populations, is being filled only now. Instead, junior officers — unvaccinated and untrained — have been pressed to the front lines.
  • While vaccines provide only a certain level of protection, they are an important preventive measure. The KFD vaccine, which causes acute pain and is not very efficient, has not been improved upon since the 1990s. Its only manufacturer is the Institute of Animal Health and Veterinary Biologicals in Bengaluru, which otherwise specialises in livestock vaccines. Until September, only 35,000 vials had been procured by the district administration. Junior officials assumed that Bidarur’s infection had been dealt with. Now, containing the outbreak is the responsibility of Kiran S.K., a Taluk Health Officer in neighbouring Thirthahalli, who was recently put in charge of the KFD field station in Sagar. His mobile phone rings incessantly as local leaders who are clearly panicky, demand that their villages be vaccinated on priority. “We don’t have enough vaccines to do this,” says the soft-spoken officer.
  • Last year, when Thirthahalli was the focus of a minor outbreak, about 23,000 vials that are needed for a booster dose (it bumps up immunity to 82%) were procured. But the KFD spectre at Bidarur was lost in paperwork.
  • Now, the demand is for 70,000 vials. But officials have only 16,000 vials at hand, with monkey deaths and new infection areas being reported daily. Says Kiran, “We just can’t vaccinate a 5 km radius any more. We are instead focussing on a core area of 2 km radius to prevent further outbreaks.”
  • It was only in January that nearly one lakh vials were procured from the Bengaluru institute. Now they are being tested for potency at the Virus Diagnostic Laboratory in Shivamogga. The hope and prayer is that the worst is over, as these vaccines will be available only in February.

    • The genesis

  • Barely 30 km as the crow flies from Aralagodu, a clump of houses separated by a road marks where Kyasanur is, which is well aware of its association with KFD. As it happens, the village is not much older than the disease itself. Huchappa, 77, was a boy of 10 when his father carved out a small piece of land from the Kyasanur forests to set up a house and a paddy field. Says Huchappa, “Our previous village had become crowded and my father’s generation had no land to till. We had to find a new home.” Eventually, the hamlet grew in size as the forests receded, giving way to paddy fields and plantations, and the deer scampered away. The monkeys, however, stayed. But by 1957, they were dying in the hordes.
  • American and Indian scientists thronged the village, believing that these could be the first cases of yellow fever in India. When vaccinated researchers started contracting heamorrhagic fevers, it soon became clear that the affliction was something else. KFD was discovered, and by 1958, 681 persons were confirmed to have been infected. Studies estimate that between 1957-2017, 9,594 persons were infected in 16 districts along the Western Ghats in five States.
  • Huchappa was infected in the early outbreaks and spent more than a month in the hospital. He says, “I had high fever, I was bleeding, I lost weight. I thought I was going to die.” For reasons unknown, the disease vanished from the hamlet three decades ago and found pastures elsewhere. He adds, And yet, people think this is the village that started this scourge.”
  • Until 2013, the disease was largely confined to Shivamogga and its neighbourhood. Since then, it has broken out in Wayanad (Kerala), North Goa, and Sindhudurg in Maharashtra. While the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ remain unclear, can the future be predicted?

    • Tapping the virus reservoir

  • The first rays of the day penetrate the dense canopy of forests that surround Kudige village, a hamlet close to Thirthahalli town. The ‘rodent team’ sets out on the chilly morning along a forest path where metal boxes laced with sweets serve as bait-and-cage. The village has 60 such traps spread across plantations, harvested paddy fields, and around homes.
  • Says Abhijit Kumar, a research assistant with the Bengaluru-based Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE), “Monkeys are a good reservoir for the virus. But rodents could be the maintenance hosts, ensuring that the virus remains in the ecosystem through the year.”
  • Five white-bellied rats and shrews are trapped. An anaesthetic knocks out the rodents providing the team a two-minute window to tabulate physical attributes, draw blood, and collect ticks.
  • Kudige village, categorised by the team as ‘severe’ (which denotes more than 10 cases of KFD in five years) for its recent trysts with KFD, is among the 42 sites to be sampled in the region under the Indo-UK MonkeyFeverRisk project. This collaborative initiative of 10 private and government research institutes and the State Health Department seeks to optimise forest benefits while minimising the impact of KFD. Microbiologists, entomologists, epidemiologists, animal health specialists, and social scientists are working together for a better understanding of KFD.
  • Says S.L. Hoti, Director, ICMR-National Institute of Traditional Medicine, Belagavi, and Principal Investigator of the project, “Different angles are being looked at: from the effect of rodents and ticks on livestock to human behaviour in forests. It is a complex disease and needs a multi-disciplinary effort.”
  • The ‘tick team’ had first carried out a ‘drag-and-flag’ operation in Kudige. This involves research associates dragging white sheets of cloth over leaf litter and shrubs. Every 10 metres, they peer into the dirt-covered sheets to check for ticks, which are then collected. They also collect data on temperature, humidity, habitat type, and the presence of invasive plant species known to host ticks in large numbers.
  • K.S. Manjappa, 55 looks on at the process with some curiosity. A decade ago he cleared out a half-acre of forests for his acre plantations, while the forests themselves remains part of his daily routine. Like most villagers, his plantation is technically considered forest land. He says, “We’ve applied to regularise the land. We’ve been given assurances from politicians, but nothing has happened so far.”

    • Praying for the rain

  • At the heart of the Monkey Fever story is a cautionary tale of repeated human incursions into eco-sensitive, ecologically-rich areas. Says Bethan Purse, Principal Investigator and scientist at the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, Wallingford, U.K., “KFD emerged when the forests were cut down for roads, mines and plantations. This brought people into closer contact with the virus that was cycling naturally between wild animals and ticks in the forest.”
  • Nearly every study on the disease so far has highlighted the role of forest degradation in the spread of KFD. Kiran, who has helmed multiple research papers on KFD, says that villagers living near highly-fragmented forests are more susceptible to the disease. He says, “Tick densities remain high in these forests, and with the presence of monkeys, peacocks, rodents and other reservoirs, there is always a chance of the disease spilling over to the village. This risk factor is not given its due in the health response to KFD.”
  • Shivamogga district has a dismal record when it comes to forest degradation. About 156 sq km of forests were lost here between 2003 and 2017, according to the Forest Survey of India. The district accounts for 70% of Karnataka’s denotified forest land and a third of the regularisation applications seeking the reclassification of forest land as agricultural land. Mass approval of such applications is a politically lucrative move that has made the careers of many a politician.
  • The scope of the MonkeyFeverRisk project is ambitious: over 15,000 ticks are to be sampled and tested, data from hundreds of rodents collected, hundreds of pages of social surveys, and creation of land-use maps, micro-climate data to be worked on, and so on, with each element contributing a piece in the complex jigsaw puzzle.
  • A preliminary risk map — a map of the region where the risk of a KFD outbreak is shaded differently depending on the various risk factors — has been prepared and is being verified. As data pour in, Purse hopes that they can determine which communities are at risk when, where and why.
  • For now, each day presents a new challenge for those in charge of containing the 2018 outbreak. At Aralagodu, villagers are advised to liberally apply insect repellent oil on their bodies before venturing out. There is a ₹500 reward for anyone offering information on monkey deaths.
  • But anger is rising and protests for compensation erupt each day. The State government has formed an expert committee to investigate lapses and officials have been suspended. Village leaders have submitted petitions demanding the culling of monkeys.
  • Agriculture, their mainstay, has come to a halt and vast swathes of plantations remain unharvested. Says Mahabala Giri, 58, “People are scared to enter plantations, and we do not want to take the risk either,” He estimates that he stands to lose about ₹3 lakh on account of the unharvested areca nut on his 5 acre farm. He does not know why KFD has taken Aralagodu hostage this year. But he knows when it will end. “We will pray for early rains. If it pours, the ticks go away.”