📰 Air pollution now biggest health risk in India, says report
Long-term exposure contributed to over 1.67 million deaths in 2019; 1.16 lakh infants died in first month
•Long-term exposure to outdoor and household air pollution contributed to over 1.67 million annual deaths from stroke, heart attack, diabetes, lung cancer, chronic lung diseases and neonatal diseases in India in 2019, according to the State of Global Air 2020 by the U.S.-based Health Effects Institute. Overall, air pollution was now the largest risk factor for death among all health risks, the report noted.
•Outdoor and household particulate matter pollution also contributed to the deaths of more than 1,16,000 Indian infants in their first month of life last year. More than half of these deaths were associated with outdoor PM2.5 and others were linked to use of solid fuels such as charcoal, wood, and animal dung for cooking.
•For the youngest infants, most deaths were related to complications from low birth weight and preterm birth.
•India faced the highest per capita pollution exposure — or 83.2 μg/cubic metre — in the world, followed by Nepal at 83.1 μg/cubic metre and Niger at 80.1, according to the report which sources its data from publicly available sources. Countries with the least population exposure are below 8 micrograms (μg) per cubic metre.
Marginal decline
•The government has claimed that average pollution levels in India are declining over the past three years but these have been marginal, particularly in the Indo-Gangetic plains which see extremely high particulate matter pollution especially during winter.
•After a decline in pollution due to the nationwide lockdown in late March and the months-long process of reopening, pollution levels are again rising and air quality has dipped to ‘very poor’ category in several cities.
•COVID-19, a disease for which people with heart and lung disease are particularly at risk of infection and death, has claimed more than 1,10,000 lives in India. Although the full links between air pollution and COVID-19 are not yet known, there is clear evidence linking air pollution and increased heart and lung disease, creating a growing concern that exposures to high levels of air pollution during winter months in South Asian countries and East Asia could worsen the effects of COVID-19.
•“This newest evidence suggests an especially high risk for infants born in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa,” said HEI president Dan Greenbaum in a statement. “Although there has been slow and steady reduction in household reliance on poor-quality fuels, the air pollution from these fuels continues to be a key factor in the deaths of these youngest infants.”
‘Lenders raising capital to ensure credit for businesses upon revival of economy’
•India’s economy is ‘almost at the doorstep of revival’, Reserve Bank of India Governor Shaktikanta Das asserted on Wednesday, adding that banks and non-banking financial companies (NBFCs) had raised, or were in the process of raising, capital to ensure adequate credit availability for businesses once the revival took hold.
•The RBI’s monetary policy and the government’s fiscal policy were working in symmetry with an expansionary focus and an accommodative as well as counter-cyclical stance, Mr. Das said. The government would have to revisit its fiscal roadmap once the worst effects of the pandemic had been contained, he added.
•Stressing the need for urgent governance reforms in both public and private sector banks and NBFCs, Mr. Das said this had been a lingering concern since the 2008 global financial crisis and needed attention.
•“At this juncture, reforms in governance of banks and non-banking finance companies, especially in India, are very important. People mostly mix up banking reforms with ownership reforms,” he noted.
•“Banks with robust governance practices, internal control systems, risk assessment and who do not undertake smart accounting, if I can put it that way, are the ones that are never overleveraged and not only survive, but grow in every crisis,” he said, adding that this was an ownership-agnostic issue.
•Mr. Das was speaking at an event to release Portraits of Power, an autobiography of N.K. Singh, Chairman of the 15th Finance Commission .
•“Post COVID-19, once the pandemic is contained, the government will certainly have to spell out a fiscal roadmap to adhere to the [60%] debt-to-GDP target that Mr. Singh and his committee [to review the Fiscal Responsibility and Budget Management law] had set out,” Mr. Das said, pointing out that the general government [Centre and States’] deficit was already exceeding the targets for this year.
•“India is at the doorstep of revival process after the effects of the pandemic. And it’s very important that financial entities have adequate capital. Many of them have already raised capital, others in public and private sector are planning and would certainly do so in the coming months,” he said.
•The RBI had asked all banks and NBFCs to build capital buffers so that credit is available to support growth when the economy’s revival phase begins, the central bank chief added.
📰 A crucial season
Public health messaging must convince people that festivals can be celebrated safely
•Faced with a potential reversal of gains that India has made in slowing the spread of COVID-19, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has appealed against weakening the fight during the annual season of festivals. Over the past six months, numerous individual events have enabled the infection to explode and spread. These have ranged from the opening of wholesale markets and political gatherings to big funerals; many were infected when places of worship were allowed to be thronged. Mr. Modi’s appeal, which comes during the Navratri celebrations, and ahead of Dussehra, Deepavali and other festivals, is to be welcomed, although the opportunity to caution the public was not grasped early enough. Also, in spite of the call to “mask up” on October 8, as part of a communication campaign he launched, its visibility has remained low. Moreover, virus estimations remain a mosaic of data, without a standardised system for testing, tracing and isolation across States. Only broad-brush statistics are available, even as the economy has reopened. The Union Health Ministry’s data point to a rising trend in daily cases in Bihar, Delhi, Maharashtra, Manipur, and West Bengal, while Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, with their high levels of incidence earlier, have started showing a decline in test positivity rates, a more reliable metric than absolute cases. Kerala has experienced a wave blamed on lax behaviour during Onam.
•Health messaging on the dangers of another wave of infections can be effective if it is not drowned by repeated emphasis of massive recoveries. States, anxious to present a picture of near-normality to boost economic activity, highlight recoveries over risk, and people are lowering their guard. Mr. Modi has suggested that the fight must not weaken until there is a vaccine, and experts and WHO want countries to learn to live with an endemic virus. In India, the reality is that even as of October 21, the official death toll in a day stood at 717, a not so inconsequential number, and there were 7.4 lakh active cases. The emphasis, therefore, has to be on preparing for the new normal, adopting acknowledged defences such as masking, distancing norms and hand hygiene. In parallel, the Centre should launch policy reform to transform a predominantly commercialised health system into one providing universal coverage. COVID-19 has meant double jeopardy — a loss of income on the one hand and a steep rise in health insurance premiums on the other, after insurers were asked to provide cover for more conditions. Under such circumstances, the cheapest protection against disease and financial loss is prevention, now and into the future. The Centre says it has a communication strategy centred around the theme of safety until March next year. Its efficacy will be tested immediately, by the festival season.
📰 Back to basics in algorithms
The NEP 2020 must take a larger view of computational thinking and move beyond just data science and AI
•It is heartening to note that the National Education Policy 2020 (NEP) envisages putting greater emphasis on mathematical and computational thinking throughout the school years, starting right from the foundational stage of the learning process. Indeed, algorithmics — the abstract process of arriving at a post-condition through a sequential process of state changes — is among the earliest human intellectual endeavours that has become imperative for almost all organised thinking. However, the framing in the NEP appears to put it at the same level of distinction as the more instrumental ‘coding’, and almost as a mere tool towards the utilitarian goals of artificial intelligence (AI) and data science. We think this is misplaced.
•The notions of computation and algorithms are as old as mathematics and date back to the early stages of representing numbers and geometrical figures and manipulating them for various uses. Their origins can be traced back almost to the beginning of the Mesolithic stone age, when the notions of counting and addition began to take form. All early learning of counting and arithmetic is method-based, and hence algorithmic in nature, and all calculations involve computational processes encoded in algorithms.
Form of expressions
•Modern algorithms, almost in the same form as we know them today, began to appear around 300 BC. Some of the earliest examples are procedures to compute the greatest common divisor of a pair of numbers, or the factorial, which appeared in Euclid’s books of Elements, and the descriptions of fast exponentiation and the Fibonacci sequence which appeared around 200 BC in the treatise of Chandah-Sutra by Acharya Pingala. The core algorithmic ideas of modern AI and machine learning are based on some seminal algorithmic ideas of Newton and Gauss, which date back a few hundred years. Though the form of expressions of algorithms — the coding — have been different, the fundamental principles of classical algorithm design have remained invariant.
•In the modern world, the use of algorithmic ideas is not limited only to computations with numbers, or even to digitisation, communication or AI and data science. They play a crucial role in modelling and expressing ideas in diverse areas of human thinking, including the basic sciences of biology, physics and chemistry, all branches of engineering, in understanding disease spread, in modelling social interactions and social graphs, in transportation networks, supply chains, commerce, banking and other business processes, and even in economic and political strategies and design of social processes. Hence, learning algorithmic thinking early in the education process is indeed crucial.
•Coding, however, is merely the act of encoding an algorithmic method in a particular programming language, which provides an interface such that the computational process can be invoked in a modern digital computer. Thus, it is less fundamental, and indeed great algorithms have been designed through the ages even without this facility. While coding certainly can provide excellent opportunities for experimentation with algorithmic ideas, they are not central or indispensable to algorithmic thinking. After all, coding is merely one vehicle to achieve experiential learning of a computational process.
Learning the fundamentals
•Rather than the intricacies of specific programming languages, it is more important at an early stage of education to develop an understanding of the basic algorithmic processes behind manipulating geometric figures, computing with numbers, solving systems of equations, modelling road networks and social graphs, and applying algorithmic ideas to everyday problems. In fact, an overemphasis on learning the nitty-gritty of specific programming languages prematurely — even from middle school — may distract from focusing on the development of algorithmic creativity. Indeed, this is a common outcome of the overly utilitarian skills training-based approaches evidenced throughout the country.
•The devil lies in the details, and, while the NEP guideline of introducing algorithmic thinking early is a welcome step, it must be ensured that it does not degenerate and get bogged down with mundane coding tricks at a budding stage in the education process.
