Daily Hindu Editorials

It needs political will for India to bring down its shamefully high newborn mortality rate A new country-wise ranking of neonatal mortality rates — the number of babies dying in their first month for every thousand live births — gives India cause for both hope and shame. Shame, because the report, produced by the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef), ranks India behind poorer countries such as Bangladesh, Nepal and Rwanda. Hope, because the ranking shows that financial resources are not the biggest constraint in improving this health indicator; political will is. According to the report, titled “Every Child Alive”, while average newborn mortality in low-income nations is nine times that of high-income ones, several countries buck the trend, showing a way forward for India. For example, Sri Lanka and Ukraine, which like India are categorised as lower-middle income economies, had a neonatal mortality of around 5/1000 in 2016. In comparison, the U.S., a high-income economy, did only s

Some glaring concerns in the 2007 tribunal order have been addressed ➡️Yes | S. Raja Rao With an additional allocation of 14.75 thousand million cubic feet (tmc ft) of water to Karnataka, the Supreme Court has given the State reason to rejoice. The order is fair and does not take away anything significant from Tamil Nadu. What it has done is to address some concerns that were present in the 2007 order of the Cauvery Water Disputes Tribunal, such as of drinking water in Bengaluru and the constraints of irrigation in southern Karnataka. There is much to be satisfied with in what has been allotted to Karnataka in the recent order. On many points, the Court validates the objections raised by Karnataka to the 2007 tribunal order. 🔹Allocation for Bengaluru For instance, the court makes it clear that the contentious 1924 agreement had lapsed. It noticed that the State did not have bargaining power at the time of entering the said agreement. Yet, post-Independence, Karnataka chose not to

In October 2017, the Lancet Commission on Pollution and Health, published by the peer-reviewed Lancet medical journals, attributed to air pollution an estimated 6.5 million premature deaths globally, with 1.1 million being from India. Dreadful as these figures were, they were not surprising, considering that back in 2014, the World Health Organisation’s urban air quality database had found four Indian cities to be among the world’s 10 most polluted. The database also placed 10 Indian cities in the 20 worst list. 🔹Big savings There are multiple reasons for India’s deteriorating air quality. In urban India, emissions from motor vehicles are among the prime reasons. Acknowledging the challenge of rising vehicular pollution in Indian cities, Piyush Goyal, then Union Minister for Power, said that from 2030, India would completely shift to using electric vehicles (EVs). The push for electric mobility was backed by the government think-tank, NITI Aayog, which has estimated that the nation

The Maldives imbroglio has become a fable for international politics. Politics, especially international politics, often appears to be an eerie combination of slapstick and farce. One sees an exhibition of egos, of the sheer pomposity of power barely hidden behind sanctimonious words like national interest and security. Whenever Chinese one-upmanship finesses India in the neighbourhood, we fall back on exercises in pedantry, unaware that India cuts a sorry figure in the local political scene. Our obsession with Pakistan and China makes us indifferent to other countries in the neighbourhood. South Asia as place, as a bubbling culture of diversity, gets converted to space or at the most to turf or territory. The future of India as a South Asian imagination becomes dim as India turns hysterical over China’s entry into the Maldives. Yet three things are obvious. We have no sense of the Maldives. We treat their politicians as vassals who have become rebels. We are almost orientalist in our

Blockchain could be the least elucidated among the disruptive technologies rapidly transforming the world around us. It is widely known that some of the most valuable companies of our times, such as Uber and Airbnb, are effective aggregators of resources, including cars and apartments. They are using the Internet to reach out, and match the supply and demand in a global market. Although the architecture of the blockchain is far more complex than these aggregators, the underlying principle is not that different. It can be described as a way for people to share the extra space and computational power in their computers to create a global super-computer that is accessible to everyone. The blockchain lets people who are part of this super-computer perform functions such as verification of transactions and contracts, and the updating and maintenance of these records in the form of trustworthy ledgers, tasks that are normally reserved for established intermediary organisations such as banks