Daily Hindu Editorials

With the player auction, the eight IPL squads have taken shape with a few surprises The Indian Premier League player auction is a parallel cricketing universe with a distinct dynamic. Over the weekend at a Bengaluru hotel, the IPL’s top brass congregated with a wish-list that had no space for nostalgia. Lasith Malinga found no takers while Chris Gayle, perhaps the most explosive batsman in the history of Twenty20, was rejected twice before he got third-time lucky when Kings XI Punjab snapped up the opener at his base price of ₹2 crore. There was no respect either for doughty batting performances in Tests. South Africa’s Hashim Amla, who played his part in the recent match at Johannesburg’s Wanderers, was ignored, and Cheteshwar Pujara found no suitors in the IPL. In Twenty20’s roller-coaster ride, the attributes of patience and grit, so mandatory in Tests, have comparatively little value. The accent is on explosive batting, miserly bowling, athletic fieldi...

More structural reforms are needed to maximise the bank recapitalisation effort About ₹1 lakh crore is expected to be pumped into India’s 21 public sector banks by March, which the Centre hopes will enable them to extend fresh credit lines worth over ₹5 lakh crore to spur economic activity. Of the capital injection — the first half of an ambitious ₹2.11-lakh crore recapitalisation programme for ailing public sector banks announced last October — about ₹8,100 crore is from the government’s budgetary resources. Banks are expected to tap the markets for ₹10,300 crore, while recapitalisation bonds worth ₹80,000 crore are to be issued to finance the rest. Leaving aside the market-raising efforts by banks, over half the fresh capital of over ₹52,000 crore is being directed to the 11 public sector banks that the Reserve Bank of India has placed under the prompt corrective action, or PCA, framework. The RBI deploys the PCA to mo...

Indian elections are the world’s biggest exercise in democracy but also among the most expensive. India’s campaign spend is only rivalled by the American presidential race, the world’s most expensive election. Parties and candidates need large sums of money for voter mobilisation, advertising, consulting, transport, propaganda and printing of campaign materials to reach voters in constituencies. Corporate donations constitute the main source of election funding in India which is awash with black money, with business and corporate donations to political parties commonly taking this form. The public disclosure system that exists is limited. Only in 2008, using the provisions of the Right to Information (RTI) Act, the Central Information Commission allowed disclosure of income tax returns of political parties, though it is an open secret that actual expenditure is much, much higher than what is disclosed. 🔷  Best practices elsewhere India’s privately ...

Reports, late last year, on India’s improved ranking in the World Bank’s ‘Ease of Doing Business’ Index (from 130 to 100) have been cause for much celebration. As a follow-up to this, the government announced additional reform measures to further improve the ranking. 🔷  Low green score However, coinciding with this is the news that out of the 180 countries assessed, India ranks low in the Environmental Performance Index (EPI) 2018, slipping from rank 141 in 2016, to 177 in 2018. The EPI is produced jointly by Yale University and Columbia University in collaboration with the World Economic Forum. In comparison, emerging peer economies, Brazil and China, rank 69 and 120, respectively. The EPI ranks countries on 24 performance indicators across 10 issue categories. No index is perfect. But if an improvement in an index for ease of doing business is cause for celebration, then, equally, a drop in an index ranking environmental performance should be cau...

Hearing ‘VR, AR, AI, Bitcoin’ in one sentence is like hearing ‘5GB, 512KB and Pentium’ in the late ’90s. It fires up your inner geek. But to the discerning, VR and AR are so 2017 that they are almost retro. And at the moment, Bitcoin is looking bubblier than a bubble bath. But AI is a different story. The strides that are being made in the areas of machine learning, image processing, and natural language processing are on a scale that resembles the moon landing. And it is permeating into everyday life at several Mbps, aided by the smartphone. If Google Photos is able to positively identify you in photos that you yourself cannot, it is because it has been going through millions of images, pixel by pixel, and learning the patterns. If a Tesla car can apply brakes foreseeing a collision between the two cars in front, it is because it is doing its own calculations. If Google Assistant seems to be able to understand Punjabi English just as well as it does Mala...

Soon after World War II, Americans chose to align their cities not with European ideals but with places that reflected American conditions. That great swathes of cheap land and newer technologies for construction were available meant that the new American city could have denser civic centres, a large component of suburban homes, private cars to access long distances, and a new conception of city life. 🔹Dynamic Indian cities The Indian city of the 21st century is a similarly dynamic entity, with palpable differences from its modern conception after Independence. Chandigarh, under Jawaharlal Nehru, began with a minuscule population of 20,000. This has grown to 1.2 million people today and the city’s construction has no allegiance to its original conception. Similarly, Delhi began its post-Independence life with less than a million inhabitants. Today, on a GPS map, the National Capital Region’s unhindered spread across three States resembles muddy water spreading from...

More and more farmers in Kashmir are switching from paddy to high-yielding apple varieties from Europe. This is boosting the rural economy and creating jobs, but there are also environmental concerns, reports Peerzada Ashiq As the mellow winter sun prepares to set, the lengthening shadows turn hazy from the smoke in Nazeer Ahmad Dar’s paddy fields, some 59 km away from Srinagar. The 52-year-old resident of Anantnag’s Sir Hama village in south Kashmir will soon burn the last of his paddy shoot stocks, spread over the 20 kanals (1.1 hectares) of his farm. Having spent six decades cultivating paddy, the Dars, a family of six, have taken the tough decision to switch crops and await the change in their fortunes. “My neighbour’s son uprooted expensive and well-nursed traditional apple trees and replaced them with high-density, high-yielding, foreign variety apple trees. I can see how things have improved for them in the last four years. I want to replicate their suc...

It can deliver a fatal blow to a relationship, but therapists say couples stand a good chance of overcoming the trauma Marriages fall apart for many different reasons, but one of the most common and most challenging to overcome is the discovery that one partner has “cheated” on the other. I put the word cheated in quotes because the definition of infidelity can vary widely. Though most often it involves explicit sexual acts with someone other than one’s spouse or committed partner, there are also couples torn asunder by a partner’s surreptitious use of pornography, a purely emotional relationship with no sexual contact, virtual affairs, even just ogling or flirting with a non-partner. Infidelity is hardly a new phenomenon. And marriage counsellors report that affairs sometimes occur even in happy relationships. According to the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy, national surveys indicate that 15% of married women and 25% of married men have...