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 hi...

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, Ka...

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 es...

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...

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...

The massive air raids that Israel carried out in Syria earlier this month against “Iranian targets” and the subsequent downing of an Israeli jet by Syrian fire showed how deeply and dangerously Israel is involved in the civil war in its neighbouring country. On the face of it, the whole story appears to be strange. In Syria, the civil war is complex. On the one hand, there is the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, backed by Hezbollah, Iran and Russia. On the other, a wide range of militias, from al-Qaeda and Islamic State jihadists to Free Syrian Army rebels, is fighting the regime. What has Israel got to do with a civil war between a hostile regime and a group of unpredictable dangerous militia groups? In the initial years of the civil war, Israel’s policy choices seemed to have been driven by the same calculation. The Assad regime and Israel have never been friendly. In the 1967 war, Israel captured the Golan Heights from Syria and continues to occupy the region. ...

The Syrian regime’s offensive in Eastern Ghouta keeps up the brutality of the civil war Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has demonstrated once again that his regime cares little about the lives of its own people. The barbaric campaign of airstrikes and bombardments launched by government forces in rebel-held Eastern Ghouta, on the outskirts of Damascus, have killed at least 270 people in three days. Eastern Ghouta, with an estimated population of 400,000, is one of the last significant areas held by militants fighting the regime. It fell into the hands of the rebels in the early stages of the seven-year-long civil war, and repeated government attempts to overrun it were foiled. It was here that chemical weapons were used in 2013, killing hundreds of people. When most other rebel-held parts of Syria, including Aleppo, were recaptured by government troops, militants have moved to Eastern Ghouta and Idlib. Now both areas are under attack. In the use of heavy firepower, the assault r...

After the global financial crisis in 2008, the world has begun looking to developing nations to show the way to high economic growth and development. Emerging economies, India and China for example, have become increasingly involved in influencing global economic policies and voicing their development concerns and priorities in various multilateral fora. These economies have benefited from increasing globalisation and the growing movement of goods and people between countries. Consequently, they are among the largest recipients of global remittances. Twenty-three countries, led by India and followed by China, the Philippines, Mexico, Pakistan and Nigeria, receive over 80% of global remittances. However, as a share of gross domestic product (GDP), the top five recipients are smaller nations: Haiti, the Kyrgyz Republic, Liberia, Nepal and Tajikistan. In these low- and middle-income countries, remittances have helped lift millions out of poverty and unemployment and enhanced their standa...