Daily Hindu Editorials

The bank frauds involving Punjab National Bank (PNB) and the companies associated with businessmen Nirav Modi and Mehul Choksi as well as the Rotomac case couldn’t have come at a worse time. The Indian banking system is already reeling under the pressure of growing NPAs, or non-performing assets (less politely known as loans that are not going to be repaid), which will touch nearly ₹10 lakh crore by March this year. This does not include the ₹6 lakh crore already written-off. This has already caused a slowdown in disbursal of bank credit, in turn affecting productive investment. 🔹Failure at many levels What has been revealed so far could be only the tip of the iceberg. The sheer ease with which fraudulent practices have been carried out and the length of time over which they continued suggest that the rot is much deeper. Other banks could have provided large loans without due diligence, which other companies then received without intent to repay; this means t...

India and Canada need to go back to the drawing board and urgently repair ties The red flags had gone up long before Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau arrived for an eight-day state visit to India. For some time now, New Delhi has been sending messages of protest to Ottawa — especially after his Liberal Party shepherded a resolution in the Ontario provincial legislature calling the 1984 anti-Sikh violence “genocide”; he went on to attend a rally in Toronto organised by Khalistani groups. More recently, Mr. Trudeau’s office and the Ministry of External Affairs differed over the details of the visit. While New Delhi would have preferred a shorter, more business-like itinerary beginning with the official engagement in Delhi, Ottawa opted for a five-city tour, with a bilateral meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the penultimate day. New Delhi would have also liked the delegation to exclude Canadian ministers suspected of sympathising with extremist Sik...

Nagaland and Meghalaya go to the polls at a time of unusual political fluidity Nagaland and Meghalaya go to the polls on Tuesday, nine days after voters in Tripura voted, at a time when there is a change in the nature of political contestation in all three States. If the Tripura campaign was marked by the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party as a force in the reckoning, regional parties, including newly formed ones, are expected to have a greater say in the elections to the other two States. In Nagaland, former Chief Minister Neiphiu Rio, elected unopposed from a constituency in Kohima district, has added a new wrinkle to the contest by resigning from the ruling Naga People’s Front and joining a new party which he had helped found, the Nationalist Democratic Progressive Party. The NDPP has stitched an electoral alliance with the BJP, ceding 20 of the 60 seats, and is now seen as the main competitor to the ruling NPF, even as the Congress has been reduced to a shell of its old organ...

While mutual interests can drive India-Canada ties, there needs to be greater sensitivity shown to India’s core concerns Through his week-long state visit, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tried hard to expand his understanding of India and foster closer India-Canada relations. Controversies about the Khalistan issue and an unusual programme could make it easy to portray this visit as a “disaster”, “fiasco” or “bad trip”. But, doing so is neither fair nor accurate, judging by the immediate outcomes. At age 11, Mr. Trudeau first visited India in 1983, accompanying his father, Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. On his India mission last week, Justin Trudeau received valuable help from his family. From the moment their plane landed in Delhi on February 17, with the Trudeau couple and their three beautiful children giving a perfect ‘Namaste, India’ shot, until their departure, the Indian public saw more of them than any othe...

The U.K. government denies a crisis, but a recent case highlights yet again the systemic failings in the system National Health Service (NHS) doctors Moosa Qureshi, James Haddock, and Chris Day could hardly have expected the level of support they received when they launched an online fundraising campaign to help a trainee paediatrician, Hadiza Bawa-Garba, in the U.K. The campaign sought to launch a legal challenge to the decision by Britain’s General Medical Council to remove Dr. Bawa-Garba permanently from the medical register over her role in the death of a six-year-old, Jack Adcock, in February 2011. Adcock, who had Down’s Syndrome, was admitted to a hospital in Leicester with diarrhoea, breathlessness and vomiting. He died hours later from sepsis. Dr. Bawa-Garba, who was solely in charge of the emergency department that day, was convicted of manslaughter by gross negligence by a high court in late January. Over £350,000 has been raised through the campaign, launch...

Alan Turing speculated in 1950 that around the turn of the century, it would be possible to make computers that matched the capacity of human brains, packing in about a billion neurons. He predicted that if these machines were pitted against a human interrogator in what is now known as the Turing test, they would end up fooling the interrogator into guessing that he or she was playing against a human contestant 70% of the time. It is now nearly 70 years since then, and neither has the Turing test been surpassed by any robot, nor have humans succeeded in creating artificial brains that have this capacity. However, this is not to say that such an event may never come about; rather, the question is, how do we handle that eventuality? More recently, David Hanson, founder of Hanson Robotics that made the humanoid Sophia, when speaking at the World Congress on Information Technology and Nasscom India Leadership Forum in Hyderabad, invoked the possibility that robots will be alive and consci...