SCHEME FOR SUBORDINATE DEBT (CGSSD)

 

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced Rs 20,000 crores of subordinated debt benefit for stressed Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs). This was part of the Atma Nirbhar Bharat Abhiyan to provide a stimulus to the economy amidst the Coronavirus outbreak.

 

Subordinated debt is an unsecured loan or bond which ranks below other securities or senior loans with respect to the claims on assets or earnings. Here, the government will provide a contribution of Rs 4,000 crore to Credit Guarantee Trust Fund for Micro and Small Enterprises (CGTMSE).  Further, CGTMSE will provide partial credit guarantee support to the banks. As a result of this, stressed and NPA MSMEs will immediately get benefit. It is an equity support to Stressed MSMEs .

 

Ministry of MSME,Govt of India has introduced Distressed Assets Fund – Subordinated debt for stressed MSMEs.The features of the scheme are as under:

1.       Introduction: Ministry of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises, has framed a Scheme for the purpose of providing guarantees in respect of credit facilities extended by eligible and registered scheduled commercial banks to borrowers in Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs). The scheme will be operationalized through a special window created for this purpose under Credit Guarantee Fund Trust for Micro and Small Enterprises (CGTMSE).

2.       The Purpose of the Scheme is to provide guarantee coverage for the CGSSD to provide Sub-Debt support in respect of restructuring of MSMEs.  90% guarantee coverage would come from scheme/ Trust and remaining 10% from the concerned promoter(s). The objective of the scheme is to provide personal loan through banks to the promoters of stressed MSMEs for infusion as equity / quasi equity in the business eligible for restructuring, as per RBI guidelines for restructuring of stressed MSME advances.

3.       Credit Guarantee Fund Trust for Micro and Small Enterprises set up by Government of India and SIDBI with the purpose of guaranteeing credit facility(ies),  extended by the Member Lending Institution to the eligible borrowers. A fund of Rs 4000 crore created by Government of India for providing guarantee coverage to the loans given/ credit extended to the promoters of the eligible MSME units under the scheme.

4.       Under the scheme, Promoter(s) of the MSME unit will be given credit facility equal to 15% of their stake in the MSME entity ( equity plus debt) or Rs 75 lakhs which ever is lower as per last audited balance sheet.

5.       MSMEs whose account have been standard as on 31.03.2018 and have been in regular operations, either as standard accounts or as NPA Accounts during the financial year 2018-19 and financial year 2019-20 are eligible for equity support under the scheme. The scheme is valid for MSME units which are stressed viz., SMA2 and NPA accounts as on 30.04.2020.

6.       Credit Guarantee Scheme for subordinate debt has been launched by CGTMSE under which guarantee coverage would be provided to scheduled commercial banks for facilitating support to MSMEs. The guarantee coverage for Subordinated debt shall be 90%.The promotes shall bring in 10% of the subordinated debt amount as collateral.

7.       The scheme would be applicable to subordinated debt sanctioned under CGSSD for a maximum period of 10 years from guarantee availment date or March 31, 2021 whichever is earlier or till the amount of Rs 20000 crores of Guarantee amount is approved.

8.        Maximum tenor for repayment will be for 10 years. There will be moratorium of 7 years for payment of Principal. Till the 7th year only interest will be paid. The principal shall be repaid with in maximum period of 3 years after completion of moratorium.

9.       Security: the sub debt facility sanctioned by MLIs will have second charge on the assets financed under existing facilities for the entire tenor of sub debt facility.

10.   Interest and Guarantee fee: Banks are free to decide the spread over the external bench mark rate as per their approved policies. Guarantee fee will be 1.50% per annum on the guaranteed amount on outstanding basis. Guarantee fee shall be borne by the borrowers as per the arrangements between the borrower and the MLIs.

11.   Fraud accounts and wilful defaulters will not be considered under the scheme.MSME Account where the legal / recovery proceedings are underway are eligible under the scheme on the basis of viability of the MSMEs as per RBI guidelines on restructuring.

12.    Borrower has existing limits with more than one bank, the CGSSD can be availed through one lender only.

 Declaration from the borrower regarding its banking arrangements and that it has not availed any loan under the scheme from other lenders to be obtained by the lending MLI.

Influence of Vastu on Modern Indian Architecture - By Manohar Bhat

 Influence of Vastu on Modern Indian Architecture

he Tirupati Balaji Temple in Andhra Pradesh, South India, is one of the most revered spiritual centres in the country. Built in 300 AD in the Dravidian style, it strictly adheres to the principles of Vastu Shastra — India’s ancient science of architecture which dictates that all built forms must integrate with nature. It’s the wealthiest temple in the world and receives the largest number of pilgrims — around 40 million people annually. Most temples in India are built according to the principles of vastu shastra, and they stand tall and proud with strong foundations that withstand even the most horrifying catastrophes of nature. In 2013, while entire towns perished as a result of devastating floods, the Kedarnath Temple in the Himalayas was the only structure that survived. It was built in accordance with vastu shastra, and what is built in harmony with nature will survive even the most severe of her wrath.

Kolkata-based vastu consultant and Founder of Anant Vastu, Abhishek Khandelwal, explains that, “Vastu Shastra is a Vedic science that is almost 12,000 years old. Most of India’s ancient structures — not just temples, but even churches or mosques for that matter, follow a certain geometry. In India we call it vastu, in China, it is called Feng Shui, but the fundamentals are the same. It is the divine science of architecture that follows the principles of nature. The universe is made of five elements (air, water fire, earth and ether) and our bodies are also made with these. We practice yoga and use ayurveda to balance these elements within our body so that we operate at optimum efficiency. These practices balance our internal energies. Similarly, if we want to balance the energy of our external surroundings like our homes, temples, offices, etc., we use the principles of vastu shastra, which balances these energies and align our personal spaces with the geometry of the universe.”

The Architecture of Post-Independent India

Owing to a colonial hangover, post independence Indian architects sought to mimic the West and the architectural styles of masters like Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn without considering whether or not those styles were conducive to the Indian landscape.

Academician, author and founder of  Footprints E.A.R.T.H., Architect Yatin Pandya elaborates on the post-independence architecture in India and feels that, “Indian architects were trained overseas and tried to do similar things in India. This lasted for at least 25 years post-independence. In the 70s, we realised that the answers to solving India’s social architectural issues cannot come from outside. We started looking inward and we searched for Indian solutions. Architecture took on a more socialist approach and builders wanted to find solutions to offer homes to the poor and solve social issues that plagued our country. To me, architects like Charles Correa and Laurie Baker are the true pioneers of modern Indian architecture as they built in accordance with the Indian landscape. Their work possessed an Indianness.”

Pandya describes Indianness in architecture as those principles of architecture that respect spatial geometry, the quality of a timeless aesthetic and social-cultural appropriateness. “Traditional Indian architecture has transcended time. For example, the step wells of Gujarat. These structures aren’t in use anymore but still maintain visual interest and engage with people. They have become destinations for sight-seeing, festivals are held there and they are used in worship and ritual.When they were functional in ancient times, they served a purpose (they were reservoirs for water in a dry desert) and a place where women gathered and socialised (social-cultural appropriateness), plus, they were aesthetically stunning. These structures also showcase intelligent performance. They were made at a time when there was no technology. There is no steel or columns used and no technology but these structures remain intact even today. This is high-performing architecture,” explains Pandya.

This form of Indian earth architecture or building in a way that respects nature wasn’t exclusive to public spaces. India is a very large country with varied landscapes and climate conditions. Each region in our country has an architectural vernacular that applies to the conditions of that region. “If you look at all the traditional homes in Ahmedabad, you will observe that the architectural forms are close to people’s lives and true to the roots of how they function. Some of these homes predate electricity, so the built forms were created to harness nature and work with it. Each home displays environmental comfort  and sustainability. For example, most old houses have courtyards and terraces. These courtyards often had underground systems for harvesting rainwater as water was scarce in the region. Traditional Indian homes were self-sufficient because traditional Indian architecture is inherently sustainable.”

Stating another example of the self-sufficiency of Indian architecture Pandya cites the example of Rajasthan. “Jaipur was planned by Maharaja Jai Singh II, and the city was built using the nine square Sarvatobhadra Mandala. He also built the Jantar Mantar Observatory, which was planned according to sacred geometry. What’s interesting is that he adapted structures to make them relevant to the given context. For example, in this nine square structure, the ninth square (which signifies northwest) was occupied by a hill so that square was moved to the Southwest corner, and the building was adapted to nature so the hill was maintained instead of being destroyed. This is true earth architecture. I believe that there is no such thing as good or bad architecture. There is only appropriate or inappropriate architecture,” states Pandya.

The Present and Future of Indian Architecture

Post 2005-2010, as India became a player in the global scenario, we’ve gained the confidence and the wisdom to return to our ancient roots and found ways to adapt our traditional principles to the modern context. Architecture is returning to its Indianness with more builders and developers looking at the principles of vastu shastra and understanding the importance of using local materials and adhering to a vernacular aesthetic of building that is conducive to the local area. Mumbai-based Karl Irani is the Co-Founder at Palmore Developers, a luxury property development firm that builds holiday homes in Alibaug, Maharashtra, and he noticed this shift towards a more local approach to building. “Vastu shastra is becoming very important to builders and property buyers although it’s a word that many people are throwing around without truly understanding what it means. Vastu is deeply scientific and every principle has a reason and purpose. My father, Navzer Irani, is an architect and spent time with a qualified vastu shastra consultant in Gujarat to study these ancient principles, which he now applies to all his work,” says Irani.

Irani’s interest in the subject inspired him to research and understand how it works and brought him to the realisation that sustainability is at the core of vastu shastra. “When I started to observe how vastu applies to architecture, I began to understand the vernacular styles of building and forms that are indigenous to different parts of India. For example, in places like Maharashtra and Goa, we have South Westerly monsoon so the placement of windows is not ideal in that direction. I understood the purpose of terraces and balconies beyond their aesthetic value and now appreciate them for the purpose they serve. Another example is in places like Rajasthan, where the windows have jaalis or jharokha-style windows —  these look beautiful and they serve a functional purpose. They were ideal for ventilation and provided privacy as well. We strive to use natural materials when we build and use locally-available materials as we realised that these materials will withstand the local climate condition and bring a quality of timelessness to a home. For example, in hot regions, we don’t use glass but rather build with stone as this stone remains cool in the night and keeps the home cool, so we use a lot of Malad stone in Alibaug as that material is conducive to the weather in Maharashtra,” explains Irani.

As people are making sustainable choices in various avenues of their life — food, clothes, homes, etc., Irani feels that the future of Indian architecture is all about borrowing from India’s past and using modern technologies to enhance our traditional principles in terms of aesthetic and building principles. “The homes we create at Palmore are vastu compliant and even the design and style is modern Indian. Our traditional way of life is being appreciated for its scientific value and modern Indians want to live in homes that have a contemporary design language, which at the same time, is rooted in ancient building wisdom,” states Irani.

Yatin Pandya’s personal slogan for architecture is, “Inspire from yesterday, aspire for tomorrow.” He elaborates on this saying that, “We have the accumulated wisdom of 6,500 years and we should customise that to the present. Sustainability has always been a way of life in India and that is why our ancient architectural forms have survived over time. Our buildings were made before the time of air conditioning and artificial lighting but were always well-ventilated and had abundant light because they were built to sustain nature. But, I also believe that these principles should not be followed blindly. They should be adapted to the given context. The West is realising the value of our wisdom but it must be kept in mind that if they borrow from the Indian principle of building, it will work in places that have similar weather and climate conditions. For example, the Kerala or Rajasthan-style of architecture might work in places like Mexico or Africa with similar conditions but an architect should always think locally and build locally for a structure to be truly sustainable,” advises Pandya.

Courtesy: Sophia French

Indian sacred texts and the logic of computer ethics - By Manohar Bhat

 Indian sacred texts and the logic of computer ethics

The Indian sacred texts of the Vedas have been studied for millennia. But now, for the first time in history, computer scientists in Vienna analyse them by applying the methods of mathematical logic. This gives Sanskritists new insights and can even settle philosophical disputes which are more than one or two thousand years old. On the other hand, it helps computer scientists to develop reasoning tools to deal with deontic concepts (such as prohibitions and obligations). Such tools are enormously important if we want to implement ethics in artificial intelligence – for instance if a self-driving car has to make ethical decisions in case of an accident.

Applying the Laws of Logic to Ancient Texts

"The Vedas are a large body of ancient Sanskrit texts, some of which contain very clear moral statements – such as 'one should not harm any living being'", says Agata Ciabattoni from the Institute of Logic and Computation at TU Wien. She is leading the research project, in close collaboration with Elisa Freschi, Sanskritist from the Austrian Academy of Science.

There is a philosophical school originated in ancient India in the last centuries BCE, called Mīmāṃsā, which uses a rigorous approach to analyse the obligations and prohibitions mentioned in the Vedas. For many centuries, Mīmāṃsā scholars have formulated rules to draw conclusions from premises and to resolve apparent contradictions. "This is actually closely related with what logicians like us are doing," says Agata Ciabattoni. "We can formalise such rules in a language that can also be understood by computers."

There is, for example, an old dispute about the "Śyena sacrifice," a sacrifice in the Vedas meant to kill one's enemies. How can this be reconciled with the rule not to harm any living being? "For a Hindu, the Vedas are absolutely correct, so there cannot be any contradiction," says Agata Ciabattoni. In the 7th century, Prabhākara, an Indian philosopher in the Mīmāṃsā tradition resolved this problem by applying several rules from the Vedas in a logically rather complicated way. Various scholars did not believe that his reasoning was correct, and this dispute has been going on for centuries.

Agata Ciabattoni and her team closely collaborated with Sanskritists to translate the Mīmāṃsā rules and the Vedic laws into mathematical formulae – and they could prove that Prabhākara had been right all along. Given the prescriptions of the Vedas, Prabhākaras logic was flawless. Mathematical logic settles an old philosophical dispute.

Building a Logic System for Ethics

"For us, this was a first proof of concept that we can really learn something new by combining Indology and formal logic," says Agata Ciabattoni. "But ultimately, we want to achieve much more. We want to understand how to formulate with mathematical precision useful logics dealing with prohibitions and obligations."

Classical logic deals with statements which are either true or false, and it provides rules we can use to combine true statements, creating new statements which are also true. This is how mathematics works: if we start out with something true and follow a certain set of rules, the end result will still be true. But this kind of logic is not useful if we want to deal with ethics. "When we are dealing with prohibitions and obligations, we are not interested in what is true or false, but in what we should or should not do," says Ciabattoni. "Therefore, a completely different kind of logic is required, called deontic logic. Just like classical logic, it can be expressed as mathematical formulae which allow us to unequivocally prove whether or not a certain line of reasoning is correct."

There have been attempts to create such a "deontic logic," but so far the success has been limited. "We are confident that working with the Vedas and the school of Mīmāṃsā will greatly help us to understand how deontic logic can work," says Ciabattoni. "These ancient Sanskrit texts provide us with many arguments, carefully analysed for centuries, on which we can test our mathematical formulae."

The Ethics of Self-Driving Cars

Such a deontic logic could be used to teach ethics to computers. A machine could be given a certain set of obligations and prohibitions, and following certain rules it could then determine automatically, whether or not a certain kind of behaviour is acceptable or not. "Consider a self-driving car during a traffic accident," says Agata Ciabattoni. "Let's assume that a crash is inevitable, and somebody will definitely get hurt – but the car has to decide whom to harm and whom to spare." A general rule such as "do not harm anybody" will not help in this case. Much like in the ancient Vedas, certain rules have to be combined to arrive at the logical solution. And perhaps such machine decisions will even be more ethical and beneficial to us humans as a human decision would be.


Courtesy: Vienna University of Technology

Ghatika Yantra – The Ancient Indian Water Clock - By Manohar Bhat

 In Ancient India religious practices and beliefs often lead to particular discoveries or inventions. In all the religions that took their birth in India, use to follow some particular times of the day to perform their religious rituals at particular times of the day. But they had no reliable way of telling the time.

A simple stick in the ground can be used to create a sun dial, but what do you do when there is no sun, such as on a cloudy day. Ancient Indians devised a different type of clock, one that is based on water, called as Ghatika Yantra.

Indians had divided day and night into 60 parts, each of which is called a ghari. Moreover the night and day are each divided into four parts each of which is called pahar.

In all important towns, a group of men called ghariyalis were appointed to measure time. To measure time a vessel with a hole at the bottom was place over another big vessel containing water. When the vessel with the hole was filled with water, they used to strike the ghariyal, a thick brass disc hung at a high place with a mallet. This indicated a certain period of time.

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Water clocks, along with sundials, are likely to be the oldest time-measuring instruments. Where and when they were first invented is not known, and given their great antiquity it may never be. The bowl-shaped outflow is the simplest form of a water clock and is known to have existed in India, China, Babylon and in Egypt thousands of years ago.

Historians suggest that pots excavated from Mohenjo daro might have been used as water clocks; they are tapered at the bottom, have a hole on the side. The use of the water clock in ancient India is also mentioned in the Atharvaveda from the 2nd millennium BCE.

The Chinese traveler who visited India during the 7th century A.D had given an account of how this water clock worked at Nalanda, a Buddhist university. At Nalanda four hours a day and four hours at night were measured by a water clock, which consisted of a copper bowl holding two large floats in a larger bowl filled with water. The bowl was filled with water from a small hole at its bottom; it sank when completely filled and was marked by the beating of a drum at daytime. The amount of water added varied with the seasons and this clock was operated by the students of the university.

The description of a water clock in astrologer Varahimira’s Pancasiddhantika adds further detail to the account given in the Suryasiddhanta. The description given by mathematician Brahmagupta in his work Brahmasphutasiddhanta matches with that given in the Suryasiddhanta.    

- Courtecy: themysteriousindia

India is capable to soften the pandemic’s impact on the economy and revive growth

After a COVID-19 induced lockdown of over two months leading to a contraction in the current financial year, the Indian economy is expected to rebound with a sharp growth rate of 9.5 per cent next year, says the Fitch Ratings. Citing the report of Fitch Ratings, Vice-Chairman of NITI Aayog Rajiv Kumar took to Twitter to apprise on the same. It is important to note here that 9.5% will come against a lower base given the Covid crisis in the ongoing fiscal.

India can stage a relatively rapid recovery despite a floundering global economy:

The government’s stimulus package, at Rs 20 lakh Crore, is substantial enough in size. This can  address not just immediate relief for the lockdown- and pandemic-stricken economy but also reversal of the slowdown that had preceded Covid-19. It is possible for India to offer relief to the nearly 6.4 crore production units, of which only about one crore are registered under the goods and services tax (GST).

 
India runs a current account deficit and growth does not depend critically on exports. Energy, other commodities, machine goods, planes, ships, entire companies and technology can be fished out cheap from a world in a slump.

Capital will be cheap, too, if India can minimise the risk that accompanies its deployment in India.

The above is possibile  into material reality if bold political decisions are taken. The economics is straightforward enough. Without political courage, the stimulus would be a wasteful exercise. The basis of prosperity is to strictly avoid  sectarian politics for social cohesion.

Revival:

 

Indian business have to make money primarily from efficient running of their business, rather than from setting up new projects and making over-valued acquisitions. It would improve the integrity of accounting and corporate governance.

 

Stop patronising power theft and power giveaways, which bankrupt the power sector, denying it 30-40% of potential revenue, create bad loans on bank books and deprive rural areas of daytime supply of stable power supply, without which an agro-processing industry cannot take shape.

Replace inflated support prices for specific crops and subsidised inputs with investment in infrastructure, including irrigation, land consolidation and logistical linkage to markets, remove restrictions on farmers’ marketing freedom and give them income support.

This will end piling up of grain with the Food Corporation, shift sugarcane from arid Maharashtra to the floodplains of Bihar. Horticulture would bloom, to feed a new crop of agro-processing industry in rural areas, generating new income for farmers and structural change in the rural economy.

How can micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) that have had zero revenue for more than six weeks but have had to pay interest, rent and wage costs, tide over the crisis? They need liquidity to stay afloat. Bankers have to be encouraged / forced to unlock the liquidity to the MSME sector very liberally - with out fear of terrifying accountability to the decision makers in the bank - by way of easy and cheap & adequqte additional loans with comfortable repayment options.

Begin with the money they are due. Large entities, including the government and public sector units, to whom MSMEs make supplies, do not release payment for months on end.

Fixing this is the first step. All companies have been mandated to list on the factoring platform, Trade Receivables Discounting System, where suppliers, buyers and financiers are registered, suppliers list their invoices raised on the large firms, the large firms authenticate these invoices and financiers take over the receivables, pay the suppliers their invoice amount, less a discount that reflects the credit risk of the large buyer.

Vibrant Bond Market :

Large companies can borrow from banks, or issue bonds. India must create a vibrant bond market, kicked off by RBI or by a special purpose vehicle (or several SPVs) whose bond issuance is mopped up by RBI.

Let the SPV subscribe to bonds issued by companies and NBFCs that fund MSMEs. NBFCs can, in turn, offer loans to MSMEs or pick up their bond offerings and trade in them.

Drop regulatory restrictions against trade in subprime bonds. Let the mutual funds, banks and other investors trade in all kinds of bonds, across the risk-reward spectrum, aided by derivatives to mitigate risk. SIDBI’s venture arm could offer equity.

Will industry find demand for its output? It would, in completion of stalled projects worth lakhs of crores and huge fresh investment in healthcare and physical infrastructure, including new, planned, dense towns that urbanising India desperately needs.

Where will the Rs 20 lakh crore come from? The state can borrow from the domestic market and RBI, without fretting about fiscal deficits. Deflation, not inflation, is the worry now.

An SPV can raise sovereign-guaranteed debt, besides equity, from global capital markets in desperate search of positive returns. If the capital is spent so as to raise relative productivity, the rupee would appreciate, derisking servicing the capital.

There is also good news from one more international rating agency Standard & Poor ( S & P) that India’s sovereign credit rating is retained at BBB(minus) with a stable look for the 13^th year in a row. It also pointed out that ongoing economic reforms, if executed well, should keep the country’s growth rate ahead of peers.

We're Getting Closer to the Quantum Internet, But What Is It? - By Manohar Bhat

 Back in February 2020, scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago revealed that they had achieved a quantum entanglement — in which the behavior of a pair two tiny particles becomes linked, so that their states are identical — over a 52-mile (83.7 kilometer) quantum-loop network in the Chicago suburbs.

You may be wondering what all the fuss is about, if you're not a scientist familiar with quantum mechanics — that is, the behavior of matter and energy at the smallest scale of reality, which is peculiarly different from the world we can see around us.

But the researchers' feat could be an important step in the development of a new, vastly more powerful version of the internet in the next few decades. Instead of the bits that today's network uses, which can only express a value of either 0 or 1, the future quantum internet would utilize qubits of quantum information, which can take on an infinite number of values. (A quibit is the unit of information for a quantum computer; it's like a bit in an ordinary computer).

That would give the quantum internet way more bandwidth, which would make it possible to connect super-powerful quantum computers and other devices and run massive applications that simply aren't possible with the internet we have now.

"A quantum internet will be the platform of a quantum ecosystem, where computers, networks, and sensors exchange information in a fundamentally new manner where sensing, communication, and computing literally work together as one entity, " explains David Awschalom via email. He's a spintronics and quantum information professor in the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago and a senior scientist at Argonne, who led the quantum-loop project.
Explaining the Quantum Internet

So why do we need this and what does it do? For starters, the quantum internet is not a replacement of the regular internet we now have. Rather it would be a complement to it or a branch of it. It would be able to take care of some of the problems that plague the current internet. For instance, a quantum internet would offer much greater protection from hackers and cybercriminals. Right now, if Alice in New York sends a message to Bob in California over the internet, that message travels in more or less a straight line from one coast to the other. Along the way, the signals that transmit the message degrade; repeaters read the signals, amplify and correct the errors. But this process allows hackers to "break in" and intercept the message.

However, a quantum message wouldn't have that problem. Quantum networks use particles of light photons to send messages which are not vulnerable to cyberattacks. Instead of encrypting a message using mathematical complexity, says Ray Newell, a researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory, we would rely upon the peculiar rules of quantum physics. With quantum information, "you can't copy it or cut it in half, and you can't even look at it without changing it." In fact, just trying to intercept a message destroys the message, as Wired magazine noted. That would enable encryption that would be vastly more secure than anything available today.

"The easiest way to understand the concept of the quantum internet is through the concept of quantum teleportation," Sumeet Khatri, a researcher at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, says in an email. He and colleagues have written a paper about the feasibility of a space-based quantum internet, in which satellites would continually broadcast entangled photons down to Earth's surface, as this Technology Review article describes.

"Quantum teleportation is unlike what a non-scientist's mind might conjure up in terms of what they see in sci-fi movies, " Khatri says. "In quantum teleportation, two people who want to communicate share a pair of quantum particles that are entangled. Then, through a sequence of operations, the sender can send any quantum information to the receiver (although it can't be done faster than light speed, a common misconception). This collection of shared entanglement between pairs of people all over the world essentially constitutes the quantum internet. The central research question is how best to distribute these entangled pairs to people distributed all over the world. "

Once it's possible to do that on a large scale, the quantum internet would be so astonishingly fast that far-flung clocks could be synchronized about a thousand times more precisely than the best atomic clocks available today, as Cosmos magazine details. That would make GPS navigation vastly more precise than it is today, and map Earth's gravitational field in such detail that scientists could spot the ripple of gravitational waves. It also could make it possible to teleport photons from distant visible-light telescopes all over Earth and link them into a giant virtual observatory.

"You could potentially see planets around other stars, " says Nicholas Peters, group leader of the Quantum Information Science Group at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
It also would be possible for networks of super-powerful quantum computers across the globe to work together and create incredibly complex simulations. That might enable researchers to better understand the behavior of molecules and proteins, for example, and to develop and test new medications.

It also might help physicists to solve some of the longstanding mysteries of reality. "We don't have a complete picture of how the universe works," says Newell. "We have a very good understanding of how quantum mechanics works, but not a very clear picture of the implications. The picture is blurry where quantum mechanics intersects with our lived experience."
Challenges of Building the Quantum Internet

But before any of that can happen, researchers have to figure out how to build a quantum internet, and given the weirdness of quantum mechanics, that's not going to be easy. "In the classical world you can encode information and save it and it doesn't decay, " Peters says. "In the quantum world, you encode information and it starts to decay almost immediately. "

Another problem is that because the amount of energy that corresponds to quantum information is really low, it's difficult to keep it from interacting with the outside world. Today, "in many cases, quantum systems only work at very low temperatures," Newell says. "Another alternative is to work in a vacuum and pump all the air out. "

In order to make a quantum internet function, Newell says, we'll need all sorts of hardware that hasn't been developed yet. So it's hard to say at this point exactly when a quantum internet would be up and running, though one Chinese scientist has envisioned that it could happen as soon as 2030.


Source: Iternet, Courtecy: Patrick J. Kiger