Arvind's Newsletter

At time when India is facing extreme heatwaves there was some relief in the news from IMD that the monsoon had arrived in Kerala, albeit one week late, the onset was delayed by Cyclone 'Biparjoy'. However, there was no relief in North Eastern USA where nearly 100 million Americans were under air quality alerts yesterday as smoke from over 400 Canadian wildfires blanketed the eastern USA.

1.By some measures New York has the worst air quality of any city in the world right now (even New Delhi).
 David Wallace-Wells, writing in The New York Times, said that forest fires have already reversed large amounts of the gains in clean air caused by pollution reduction: “extreme smoke days” have risen 27-fold in a decade, and it’s no longer just the U.S.’s western states that are dealing with it.
“People in the green and leafy Northeast” could see smoke-covered Californian cities, he wrote, “and say, that can’t happen here, thank God. On Tuesday, it did.”
Wildfires will only get worse for the coming years, and more cities will see days like New York’s.Wildfire smoke is “like tobacco smoke without the nicotine,” one expert said. Wildfire smoke is “like tobacco smoke without the nicotine,” one expert said.

2.It is highly likely that remittances by Indians working abroad to families in India will cross $100 billion—the highest ever. In November 2022, the World Bank had projected this. In fact, at the current run-rate of $81.6 billion for the first nine months of the financial year, the actual figure for the full year could be closer to $110 billion.India is already the highest recipient of worker remittances in the world.

However, Indians sending money overseas under Liberalised Remittance Scheme (LRS) hit a record high as well—$27.1 billion.In the past, the actions of Indians as individuals have made the country’s current account more stable, especially during a crisis, when other sources of flows,such as those from foreign investors have dried up. Will this work in future crises as well?

3.India may be the world’s fastest-growing economy, but its struggles to match workers with jobs could make another country in southeast Asia much more attractive to investors: Indonesia. Read more about how Indonesia has made getting people into its workforce little less bureaucratic in Quartz.

4.Google will release artificial intelligence tools that can translate more than 100 Indian languages on Android smartphones. It’s also aiming to make its smartphones cheaper, hoping to dominate the large India market, Bloomberg reported. The AI translation tools will work for speech and text, and should “enable every Indian to use the internet as deeply as English users,” according to the head of Google India. AI translation capabilities have transformed in the last few years, driven by the growth of neural networks. AI systems are faster and far cheaper than human translators, and are now arguably just as good.

5.Listen: Why are so many creators one-hit wonders and so few enduring hit-makers? The Hidden Brain Podcast hosted by Shankar Vedantan offers some answers. Use the links below. Very enjoyable.