Below the line

Be it cricket or military might, for us, Indians, the day is not complete unless we compare ourselves with Pakistan. While India comes on top more often than not, there is of course something where our neighbour has been pipping us to the post: The Happiness Index.

Pakistan has been many notches above India in this annual reckoning of national happiness — brought out by the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network — ever since its inception in 2012.

And in fact, while India has been finding a new nadir every year, Pakistan has been steadily improving its record. In 2019, while we plunged to a lowly rank of 140 (out of 156 countries in total), Pakistan moved up to 67.

The average national happiness in India slipped in the previous years from 118 (2016) to 122 (2017) to 133 (2018), while our neighbour’s improved from 92 (2016) to 80 (2017) to 75 (2018).

The report measures the happiness in a country on six parameters that support well-being: income, freedom, trust, healthy life expectancy, social support and generosity.

The Commerce Ministry is tying itself in knots over whether India should finally impose retaliatory import duties on US goods in April, in response to penal duties levied “unfairly” by Washington on Indian steel and aluminium last year.

A section of officials feel that the government should postpone the levy of retaliatory duties, that are to come into play in April, to May to time it with Washington’s plans to withdraw the popular duty-free GSP (Generalised System of Preferences) scheme for Indian imports.

Another section believes that since the retaliatory duties have nothing to do with the GSP scheme, there should be no further postponement.

Since the final decision on the matter is likely to be taken by the Prime Minister’s Office, the officials might just as well take a break.

Is the Health Minister listening?

Last month, when Union Health Minister JP Nadda was speaking about how Ayushman Bharat is seamless with interoperable information technology-enabled platforms, to lead the patient from primary health centres where they are screened for cancers and other diseases to tertiary hospitals where they can seek care, his confidence seemed impressive.

However, few weeks after that it was revealed that two arms of the health ministry — National Health Authority, which gives insurance-based care, and National Health Mission, which screens patients — do not see eye to eye, and that the latter has refused to share data with the former about patients that need cancer treatment. Wonder what the Health Minister has to say about that.

The Vice-President of India, M Venkaiah Naidu, wants the media to present a report card on the performance of parties in an objective manner to enable people make an informed choice during elections. Delivering the first ‘Atal Bihari Vajpayee Memorial Lecture’, organised by Indian Institute of Mass Communication, the Vice-President said that the media should act as a mirror that reflects the reality, neither magnifying nor diminishing, neither distorting nor mystifying facts.

Expressing his concern over the “evil of paid news”, Venkaiah Naidu advised the media to “shun this tendency lest ‘money power’ is used to influence voters through ‘manufactured’ views and opinions of paid news”.

Referring to the efforts of the Election Commission to combat fake news, he said that the media’s role was extremely important during elections as the chances of people propagating fake-news increases. “It is the responsibility of the media to act like myth-busters in such sensitive times, and report the absolute, undiluted truth,” he added.

Our Delhi Bureau

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