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IMA urges government to withdraw GST on healthcare services

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The Indian Medical Association (IMA) on Saturday requested the Centre to immediately withdraw the imposition of GST on healthcare services.

In a letter to Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, it said that the decision is unfortunate and unfair for people of the country, and without input tax credits, will lead to a rise in healthcare costs.

“The 47th GST Council meeting has recommended that ‘Like CTEPs, common bio-medical waste treatment facilities for treatment or disposal of biomedical waste shall be taxed at 12 per cent so as to allow them ITC’. This is to be effective from 18th of July 2022. This was earlier in GST exempted category,” said the IMA, the largest association of modern medicine doctors, representing more than 4 lakh doctors and their healthcare establishments, said in the letter.

“The GST Council, in its meeting, has also recommended that ‘Room rent, excluding ICU, exceeding Rs 5,000 per day per patient charged by the hospital will also be taxed at 5 per cent, without ITC’. This is to be effective from 18th of July 2022. This was earlier in GST exempted category.

“We, as collective voice of all establishments and doctors of the country express our serious concerns and objections to these new taxes in healthcare sector. This step will add big additional cost to the healthcare of people,” the IMA said in the letter.

Noting that the healthcare system of country is not on track owing to meagre government spending on health, and people are dependent upon the private sector, with high out of pocket expenditures, the IMA said that the decision of adding GST will simply raise the basic bed rates.

“Keeping rates below Rs 5,000 will compel augmentation of other charges for feasibility,” it said.

Similarly, a steep rise of 12 per cent on biomedical waste is unjustified and it will raise the cost of running hospitals and clinics, and further translate into raised charges for the patients. It is not reasonable to burden patients with more charges in these difficult times, it said.

“Application of GST will push healthcare towards business model away from service centric one, and it will not be fair to our citizens already facing many hardships,” the IMA said.

“So, it is our sincere and immediate request to withdraw GST on Room Rent and Biomedical Waste in the larger interest of the public healthcare. We look forward for an urgent meeting on these serious issues and a hold of GST imposition on room rent and Biomedical Waste in the meantime,” said IMA National President Dr Sahajanand Prasad Singh in the letter.

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Why Nvidia chief Jensen Huang is not ready to retire?

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Chapel Hill (North Carolina), Sep 3: Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang says he does not need to keep working.

He simply cannot bear the thought of missing what artificial intelligence (AI) could deliver over the next decade.

“I’ve been working a long time and Surely I don’t have to work, but I don’t want to miss, I’m definitely not going to miss the next 10, 15 years,” Huang said during a fireside chat with US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.

For Huang, the appeal lies not only in the technology but also in the scale of the ambitions it has unleashed.

“The ambition of the industry, the ambition of my colleagues, my own ambition has really been supercharged,” he said.

Huang offered a buoyant vision of an AI-powered future in which work that once took a decade could be completed in a year, while year-long projects could be finished within a month.

“What do I expect in the next five, ten years? Things that take ten years are going to take one. Things that take one will take a month,” he added.

The Nvidia Chief said that artificial intelligence was giving ordinary people, companies and countries the ability to tackle problems on a scale previously considered unimaginable.

“It is now possible for average humans like ourselves to think that we can make an impact on a hundred trillion dollar industry,” Huang added.

He said that innovators were talking about adding between $20 trillion and $50 trillion in economic benefits worldwide.

Such ideas, he added, reflected a new level of ambition made possible by access to AI.

“No time in history have we been able to say things like that,” he said.

Huang encouraged countries to approach the technology with optimism and raise their ambitions rather than allow uncertainty to dominate the public conversation.

“This is the time when you have to feel enlightened, inspired, supercharged, lifted, because you now have this incredible technology behind you,” he said.

He compared the development of AI with earlier technological advances that initially appeared almost magical.

“Electricity once made it possible to turn on a light from far away, while modern cars and aircraft became safer as their technology improved.”

AI, Huang said, would similarly advance through engineering, mathematics, software and responsible development.

He rejected predictions that the technology would simply remove human workers.

AI would automate certain skills and tasks, he said, but people would retain the purpose, context and meaning that define their jobs.

Huang also described AI as a great equaliser because people could now communicate with computers through ordinary human language.

Lutnick picked up that theme, suggesting that the technology could place advanced knowledge within everyone’s reach.

“You now can have… A PhD in everything. That’s right. At your fingertips,” Lutnick said.

“You are that person now. Right? Everybody is that person now,” Huang responded.

Lutnick praised Huang’s optimistic assessment and called him “an American treasure”, saying Nvidia was leading the United States towards a future once confined largely to science fiction.

“Your company is leading us in a path that none of us, when we were young, ever dreamed possible,” the US Commerce Secretary said.

Huang co-founded Nvidia in 1993 and has served as its President and Chief Executive since its inception.

The company began as a specialist in graphics technology before its processors became vital to the development and operation of modern artificial intelligence systems.

Born in Taiwan, Huang moved to the United States as a child and studied electrical engineering at Oregon State University and Stanford University.

Under his leadership, Nvidia has grown into one of the world’s most valuable technology companies.

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Indian markets open higher amid positive global cues, easing US yields

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Mumbai, Sep 3: Indian equity benchmarks opened higher on Thursday tracking positive global cues and gains in Asian markets.

Sensex opened 154.60 points or 0.20 per cent higher at 76,724.95, while Nifty gained 83.50 points or 0.35 per cent to 23,997.95.

In early trade, banking and realty stocks led sectoral gains as Nifty PSU Bank and Nifty Realty gained up to 1 per cent.

Meanwhile, Nifty Private Bank climbed 0.83 per cent and Nifty MidSmall Financial Services index advanced 0.82 per cent.

On the other hand, Nifty IT fell 0.8 per cent, while Nifty FMCG dropped 0.44 per cent and Nifty Healthcare, Nifty Pharma and Nifty500 Healthcare were also marginally lower.

According to market experts, sentiment was likely to improve following a slight easing in US bond yields.

They said the mobilisation of $136 billion under a concessional swap facility, including $127 billion through the FCNR(B) scheme could support the rupee and improve foreign investor confidence.

The large FCNR(B) mobilisation by banks could also help improve net interest margins, providing support to banking stocks, they said.

They noted that Wednesday’s 141-point decline in Nifty came despite institutional buying of about Rs 9,500 crore comprising Rs 6,688 crore from foreign institutional investors and Rs 2,812 crore from domestic institutional investors.

“This suggested that selling pressure had largely come from retail investors, proprietary traders and bears,” according to the experts.

Technical analysts said the rebound from around 23,800 had strengthened expectations of a move higher, although they remained cautious about chasing prices. A break above the 24,150-24,215 zone would signal further strength, while 23,860 was seen as an important downside marker.

Additionally, Asian equities broadly mirrored gains on Wall Street. In addition, crude oil prices edged lower after US President Donald Trump downplayed the likelihood of an extended conflict with Iran.

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Meta launches ‘Muse Voice Transcribe’ with native support for five Indian languages

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New Delhi, Sep 2: US-based technology giant Meta has introduced its first real‑time audio‑perception model — Muse Voice Transcribe — which offers native support for five major Indian languages and advanced streaming features.

Muse Voice Transcribe — developed by Meta Superintelligence Labs — delivers streaming transcription, speaker separation across over 20 voices in hour‑plus recordings, native code‑switching and diarisation from a single model with no post‑processing step, the company said in a statement.

Muse Voice Transcribe is trained across over 70 languages spoken in multiple countries with 25 validated at launch.

“It ranks first on the Artificial Analysis streaming speech-to-text leaderboard as of September 1, 2026,” the statement added.

Available via the Meta Model API and already running dictation in Meta AI for Mac and Muse Code, Muse Voice Transcribe delivers real‑time automatic speech recognition, diarisation with over 20 speakers and endpointing.

It is multilingual with seamless code-switching and improves accuracy with language, keyword, and context biasing.

“The longer the model waits to predict, the more accurate the transcript, but the higher the latency. Muse Voice Transcribe has “adaptive delay,” dynamically changing delay for each word based on difficulty,” the statement noted.

This is enabled with reinforcement learning (RL), where word error rate (WER) reward and a delay reward are combined multiplicatively.

“Muse Voice Transcribe is an autoregressive multimodal model from the Muse Spark family,” Meta said.

It explained that the audio is processed in 80 ms chunks (12.5 Hz), each of which is transformed into a single soft token. At each audio chunk, the model decides to either continue listening to the next audio chunk or emit a text token.

With adaptive delay, Muse Voice Transcribe achieves the Pareto front on speed-accuracy trade-off measured by time to final transcription, the company said.

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