Supreme Court can’t care for Shaheen Bagh children more than the parents

Unless in the most exceptional cases, children’s involvement in politics is supported, encouraged, managed, or instigated by the adults in their family. There is a long history of children waving flags, dressing up as political leaders, holding ideological banners, or singing songs in support of political causes. Our reaction to these images depends on our politics: we tend to approve of these actions when we support the cause and are horrified when we don’t. We are not horrified if little children celebrate violence or martyrdom, provided they are doing it for the ‘right’ cause. Most of the time, therefore, adults’ opinion on children in politics is unconsciously self-serving.Read more

US investors concerned over India’s economic slowdown, social unrest and Modi’s disinterest

Even if we ignore the fact that the Indian economy is in a severe slowdown, we should not forget even for a moment that India’s per capita GDP is around $2000, it needs to create around 2 crore jobs every year, and needs every little point of economic growth that it can get.So, in terms of the level of income, India is in the same league as Congo, East Timor, Nicaragua, and Nigeria. Two of India’s subcontinental neighbours, the Maldives and Sri Lanka, are far ahead of us. At around $10,000, the average income in China is 400 per cent higher than India’s. Given our tax/GDP ratios, the Indian government’s combined expenditure on everything — including health, education, defence, rural development, and social welfare — is a paltry $300 per year.Read more

Ambedkar said protests were unconstitutional. But what about protests to restore Constitution?

Let’s first parse what Ambedkar had warned against in his final speech to the Constituent Assembly in November 1949: “We must…hold fast to constitutional methods of achieving our social and economic objectives. It means we must abandon the bloody methods of revolution. It means that we must abandon the method of civil disobedience, non-cooperation, and satyagraha. When there was no way left for constitutional methods for achieving economic and social objectives, there was a great deal of justification for unconstitutional methods. But where constitutional methods are open, there can be no justification for these unconstitutional methods. These methods are nothing but the Grammar of Anarchy and the sooner they are abandoned, the better for us.” (Emphasis mine.)The key sentence in this important paragraph is the one where he points out that when there is no way left for constitutional methods, public protests are justified. After the Supreme Court repeatedly failed to uphold basic fundamental rights and balance the Narendra Modi government’s overreach, there is a question mark on whether there is any way left for constitutional methods. The religion-based criteria in the CAA is unconstitutional. When citizens wanted to protest against the bill, many state governments imposed prohibitory orders under Section 144 of the IPC and arrested protesters. Internet access was shut down in many places across the country. In some places, police action was blatantly unconstitutional.Read more

Economic reforms are best done brick by boring brick

The accepted conventional wisdom is that economic reforms in India happen only in a crisis or by stealth. The big example of the former is the 1991 reforms, when the country faced a huge foreign exchange crisis, resulting partly from the fiscal profligacy of the previous decade. Another example is from 1999 when the telecom sector was in near bankruptcy, and that crisis led to the shift away from fixed fee for spectrum to revenue sharing. In both cases, there was considerable opposition to those reforms, but they were pushed through because the crisis left no other choice. Otherwise, more often than not, it has been economic reform by stealth. These are introduced without fanfare, often in the form of an executive decision rather than legislation. For instance, the expansion of the list of items under the Open General Licence for imports, which is a reform of protectionism, or the reduction in the set of industries reserved for small-scale businesses. A more recent example of a contentious reform was the insertion of an electoral bond scheme in the Finance Bill of 2018. There was hardly any debate. Reform by stealth offers the advantage of going in either direction. In 2013, faced with a potential currency crisis, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) quietly retracted the limits on the liberalized remittance scheme (LRS), a reversal of an earlier step towards capital account convertibility, the journey towards which was also characterised by stealth. We might as well accept that India will never have reforms backed by conviction or ideology. Mostly, the moves are reluctantly made and the resistance is from industry or trade unions, not politicians.Read More

Why missed call democracy is a bad idea

The Narendra Modi-led government launched a ‘missed call campaign’ on January 3, 2019, asking people to give a missed call at a number to register their support for the controversial Citizenship (Amendment) Act. Home Minister Amit Shah has claimed that 52,72,000 missed calls have been received from verifiable phone numbers.

What has been happening in the background since the launch of the campaign is a reflection of the state of affairs in the country. Ever since the campaign started, Twitter has been abuzz with misleading tweets asking people to call the number by promising ‘job offers’, ‘free Netflix subscription’, ‘romantic dates with women in the area’, and so forth. Tweets such as ‘Akele ho? Mujhse dosti karoge?’ (Feeling lonely? Want to be friends?) by a Twitter account with 16k followers, Prime Minister Modi being one amongst them, point to a much larger misinformation campaign presumably by the IT-cell of the ruling party. A counter-campaign was also launched soliciting missed calls to demonstrate opposition to CAA and NRC.

Where’s my number?

In the age of surveillance capitalism, any entity, especially the government, running a campaign to garner support using phone numbers opens up private individuals to grave risks. The people who are calling the toll-free number have no information on whether their numbers would be stored in a database, shared with third parties, and/or used for a future campaign by the government. First-principles of privacy dictates that data collected should be proportionate to the legitimate aim and limited purpose that is being pursued. Furthermore, the data principal should provide informed consent to the collection of data.

There seem to be no means for citizens to determine if the government is storing their data, and no process to get their records deleted if they wish to. Repurposing the potential database to micro-target during election campaigns is a severe threat that emerges from this exercise. People who called the number are either staunch supporters of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) or vulnerable youth who fell into the honeytrap while looking for jobs, subscription TV, or romantic partners. Given that the government now potentially has access to members of its core voter base as well as gullible people at the margins, it can push information and opinions that favour its ideology. Alternatively, participants in the counter-campaign can be categorised as anti-establishment voices. This narrative dominance, empowered by personalisation algorithms, can result in the formation of filter bubbles where people are isolated from conflicting viewpoints, reinforcing their existing beliefs.

The design of the missed call campaign itself is flawed. An honestly designed campaign would have provided options to vote either for or against an option. The absence of a way to express an opposing view reduces it to an exercise in confirmation bias. The missed call mechanism is also susceptible to manipulation. It is unclear whether these are features or bugs. While 52 lakh may seem like a sizable number, it is a drop in the ocean in a country of more than 130 crore people. In fact, the number is less than 3 per cent of the total BJP membership of 18 crore people.

Why referendums fail

If this approach to engage with citizens is legitimised, it opens the door to use it every time there is a risk of backlash over a government decision. Even before Brexit became the poster-child for failed referendums, political theorists had advised against them. When asked about the best time to use referendums, Michael Marsh, a political scientist at Trinity College, Dublin was quoted as saying ‘almost never’.

In Democracy for Realists, political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels, lament the idea that the ‘only possible cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy. They cite a body of research that concludes that citizens often do not have the necessary knowledge, nor the inclination to acquire it when it comes to voting on nuanced issues. Decisions are often made on short-term considerations like personal tax saving or reduction in government expenditure without an analysis of anticipated unintended consequences. Additionally, there is a tendency for referendum processes to be captured by certain interest groups and typically decided in favour of whichever has deeper pockets. Low-effort voting methods, such as online voting and missed calls, are likely to be overused. This will result in desensitisation of the public, exacerbating all the shortcomings of referendums.

The use of missed calls to vindicate its stand on contentious issues, by a democratically elected government, is not only ineffectual, but it also exposes unsuspecting individuals to severe risks. Employing systems without basic privacy considerations, clear purpose limitations, and straightforward redressal mechanisms, can lead to misuse in the future and undermine the democratic ethos of the nation.

(Utkarsh Narain and Prateek Waghre are research analysts at The Takshashila Institution)

This article was originally published in Deccan Herald

India is short of educated people and IITs alone won’t help. But Faiz Ahmed Faiz can

Faiz? Faiz who? What has he got to do with improving the grade point average, landing a job at Google, securing funding for a startup, or getting a full scholarship for grad school at a top US university? Since no professor, interviewer, or grad school selection committee member cares much about Faiz (even on the off chance that they know about him), the relevance of Faiz to an engineering student is zero. Since some of these students go on to become faculty, teaching the next generation of students who have the same objective functions, few professors know about Faiz either. Why are we surprised that our engineering colleges are unFaized?

It’s not just the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs). It’s not only our engineering colleges. Medical, science, business, and commerce colleges likely suffer from the same Faiz ignorance. Sure there might be the odd physiotherapist here or an unnecessarily better-read physics student there, but, by and large, we should not be surprised if students and faculties at our top colleges do not know about Faiz. To be fair, students at professional colleges are not totally disinterested in arts and culture. Many watch Bollywood and Netflix shows. They follow cricket and football. They also read, as the sales figures of books of Chetan Bhagat and Amish Tripathi attest.Read more

The government ought to take a more re conciliatory approach

The Modi government has perhaps calculated that its majority in Parliament, its dominance of public discourse, its control of the law-enforcement machinery, and the popularity of its agenda among large sections of the people will allow it to prevail over the protesting citizens. After all, how long can disparate, politically unorganised groups of students, young people, urban middle classes, and members of the Muslim community afford to protest? Yet, so far, attempts to deter protesters with prohibitory orders, detentions, and police actions have triggered more protests. As more news trickles out of Uttar Pradesh, the world would probably recoil in horror at the manner in which the BJP government there appears to have used disproportionate force in quelling protests by Muslims in the state. In the coming days and weeks, at least, more consciences are likely to be pricked. The protests will grow and spread.Read more

How to start your own country: All you need is ‘friends’

Nityananda's Kailaasa, located off the coast of Ecuador, has its own flag, recognised a set of official languages and even set up a department for homeland security and defence. To all appearances, it seems like a legitimate country and may inspire more to establish their own. But creating a new country is not as easy as you would think.Continue reading here

Bengaluru needs more high-tech companies, not fewer

The Karnataka government is set to release a new industrial policy next month with the goal of encouraging investment in tier-II cities. As it has been in the past, this goal is likely to be framed in zero-sum terms i.e. achieved by pushing IT companies to move away from Bengaluru and in other cities instead.We will limit this article’s focus on what such a policy direction would mean in high-tech sectors such as biotech, aerospace, and IT. , this push towards creating an alternative of centre gravity for the high-tech industry seems to be an intuitive answer for achieving balanced regional growth. And yet, this view is wrong because it doesn’t square with the empirical experience of high-tech clusters elsewhere in the world.Read more at: https://www.deccanherald.com/opinion/bengaluru-needs-more-high-tech-companies-not-fewer-780314.html

Why we must be vigilant about mass facial surveillance

The recent revelations about NSO group’s Pegasus being used to target an estimated two dozen Indian lawyers and activists using the vulnerabilities in Whatsapp have once again brought the issue of targeted surveillance of citizens into focus. As the saying goes, no good crisis should go to waste. This is an opportunity to raise public awareness about trends in mass surveillance involving Facial Recognition systems and CCTV cameras that impact every citizen irrespective of whether or not they have a digital presence today.

The Panoptican, conceptualised by philosopher Jeremy Bentham, was a prison designed in a way that prisoners could be observed by a central tower, except they wouldn’t know when they were being watched, forcing them to self-regulate their behaviour. Michel Foucault later extended this idea stating that modern states could no longer resort to violent and public forms of discipline and needed a more sophisticated form of control using observation and surveillance as a deterrent.

Live Facial Recognition combined with an ever expanding constellation of CCTV cameras has the potential to make this even more powerful. Therefore, it suits governments around the world, irrespective of ideology, to expand their mass surveillance programs with stated objectives like national security, identification of missing persons etc. and in the worst cases, continue maximizing these capabilities to enable the establishment of an Orwellian state.

Global trends
China’s use of such systems is well documented. As per a study by the Journal of Democracy, there will be almost 626 million CCTV cameras deployed around the country by the end of 2020. It was widely reported in May that its Facial recognition database includes nearly all citizens. Facial recognition systems are used in public spaces for purposes ranging from access to services (hotels/flights/public transport etc) to public shaming of individuals for transgressions such as jaywalking by displaying their faces and identification information on large screens installed at various traffic intersections and even monitoring whether students are paying attention in class or not.

The former was highlighted by an almost comedic case in September, where a young woman found that her access to payment gateways, ability to check in to hotels/trains etc. was affected after she underwent plastic surgery. In addition, there is also a fear that Facial Recognition technology is being used to surveil and target minorities in Xinjiang province.

In Russia, Moscow mayor Sergei Sobyanin has claimed that the city had nearly 200,000 surveillance cameras. There have also been reports that the city plans to build AI-based Facial Recognition into this large network with an eye on the growing number of demonstrations against the Putin government.

Even more concerning is the shift by countries that have a ‘democratic ethos’ to deploying and expanding their usage of such systems. Australia was recently in the news for advocating face scans to be able to access adult content. Some schools in the country are also running a trial of the technology to track attendance. France is testing a Facial Recognition based National ID system. In the UK, the High Court dismissed an application for judicial review of automated facial recognition. The challenge itself was a response to pilot programs run by the police, or installation of such systems by various councils, as per petitioners, without the consent of citizens and a legal basis.

There was also heavy criticism of Facial Recognition being used at football games and music concerts. Its use in personal spaces, too, continues to expand as companies explore potential uses to measure employee productivity or candidate suitability by analysing facial expressions.

There are opposing currents as well – multiple cities in the US have banned/are contemplating preventing law enforcement/government agencies from deploying the technology. Sweden’s Data Protection Authority fined a municipality after a school conducted a pilot to track attendance on the grounds that it violated EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Advocacy groups like the Ada Lovelace Institute have called for a moratorium on all use of the technology until society can come to terms with its potential impact. Concerns have been raised on grounds that the accuracy of such systems is currently low, thus severely increasing the risk of misidentification when used by law enforcement agencies. Secondly, since the technology will learn from existing databases (e.g. a criminal database), any bias reflected in such a database such as disproportionate representation of minorities will creep into the system.

Also, there is limited information in many cases where and how such systems are being used. Protestors in Hong Kong and, recently, Chile, have shown the awareness to counter law enforcement’s use of Facial Recognition by targeting cameras. The means have varied from the use of face-masks/clothing imprinted with multiple faces to pointing numerous lasers at the cameras, and even physically removing visible cameras.

India’s direction
In mid-2019, the National Crime Records Bureau of India put out a tender inviting bids for an Automated Facial Recognition System (AFRS) without any prior public consultation. Meeting minutes of a pre-bid seminar accessed by the Internet Freedom Foundation indicated that there were 80 vendor representatives present. 

Convenience is touted as the main benefit of various pilot programs to use ‘faces’ as boarding cards at airports in New Delhi, Bengaluru and Hyderabad as part of the Civil Aviation Ministry’s Digi Yatra program. Officials have sought to allay privacy concerns stating that no information is stored. City police in New Delhi and Chennai have run trials in the past. Hyderabad police has until recently, routinely updated their Twitter accounts with photos of officers scanning people’s faces with cameras. Many of these posts were deleted after independent researcher Srinivas Kodali repeatedly questioned the legality of such actions.

Many of the afore mentioned trials reported low single figure accuracy rates for Facial Recognition. The State of Policing in India (2019) report by Lokniti and Common Cause indicated that roughly 50 per cent of personnel believe that minorities and migrants and ‘very likely’ and ‘somewhat’ naturally prone to committing crimes. These aspects are concerning when considering capability/capacity and potential for misuse of the technology. False-positives as result of a low accuracy rate, combined with potentially biased law enforcement and a lack of transparency, could make it a tool for harassment of citizens.

Schools have attempted to use them to track attendance. Gated communites/offices already deploy a large number of CCTV cameras. A transition to live Facial Recognition is an obvious next step. However, given that trust in tech companies is at a low, and the existence of Facial Recognition training datasets such as Megaface (a large dataset utilised to train Facial Recognition algorithms using images uploaded on the Internet as far back as the mid 2000s without consent) – privacy advocates are concerned.

Opposition and future considerations for society
Necessary and Proportionate, a coalition of civil society organisations, privacy advocates around the world, proposes thirteen principles on application of human rights to communication surveillance, many of which are applicable here as well. To state some of them – legality, necessary and legitimate aims, proportionality, due process along with judicial and public oversight, prevention of misuse and a right to appeal. Indeed, most opposition from civil society groups and activists against government use of mass surveillance is on the basis of these principles. When looked at from the lenses of intent (stated or otherwise), capacity and potential for misuse – these are valid grounds to question mass surveillance by the governments.

It is also important for society to ask and seek to answer some of the following questions: Is the state the only entity that can misuse this technology? What kind of norms should society work towards when it comes to private surveillance? Is it likely that the state will act to limit its own power especially if there is a propensity to both accept and conduct indiscriminate surveillance of private spaces, as is the case today? What will be the unseen effects of normalising mass public and private surveillance on future generations and how can they be empowered to make a choice?

This article was first published in Deccan Herald on 11th November, 2019. 

Hold government accountable for Delhi air pollution but also punish selfish behaviour

If you are among the millions personally suffering from the acute air pollution in Delhi and many other parts of north India, now is not an appropriate time for a deeper reflection on the underlying causes of this human disaster. This is not to absolve the state and union governments involved. Nor is it to absolve businesses, industries and markets. They too have acted irresponsibly, even when they’ve complied with the law. But in the heat and passion of the public discourse, we forget to also point fingers at ourselves.Read more

Unless Lok Sabha elections get shorter, parties like BJP will keep winning

Central to the drama of 2019 is the Election Commission, an institution that India used to be proud of but which, in my view, no longer deserves the praise. I am referring to neither the allegations of tampered Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs), nor the Election Commission’s weak-kneed approach towards insisting that the BJP follow the Model Code of Conduct (MCC). The Election Commission’s biggest failing is the exceedingly long duration of the election.Read more

A tale of two global rankings

Two global rankings were announced recently. One was the 2019 "Doing Business" report published by the World Bank, which was earlier called the "Ease of Doing Business" (EODB) India jumped to 63 from 77 last year. The improvement is dramatic, and in just five years India has improved its global position from 142 to 63. It is in line with Prime Minister Modi's goal of being among the top 50 countries of the world by next year.Read more

What the Congress party needs is a palace coup

While the government of Narendra Modi and Amit Shah has received severe criticism for its policies, the Congress has largely been excused for its failure to effectively hold the end of opposition. The BJP has turned many parts of the Congress legacy into a debilitating political liability. My indictment of the Congress is threefold: most of its leaders do not know what they stand for, its organisation is hopelessly out of date, and it lacks the quality of top leadership that the situation demands.Read more

Stronger fiscal federalism

Former prime minister Manmohan Singh recently urged the Centre to do more to enhance the spirit of cooperative federalism. His comments were in the context of the changes made to the terms of reference to the 15th Finance Commission (15FC). These changes were made in July, quite late in the tenure of the 15FC, and especially when the final report was expected by the end of October.Read more 

The Puzzling Ban of E-Cigarettes in India

The Indian government’s own disastrous experience with bans of various substances and services in the past should categorically advise it against such a move in the future. Yet, it is planning to go down the same route again with the case of “e-cigarettes” also known as Electronic Nicotine delivery systems (ENDS). A ban on ENDS, however well-intentioned, will put several former smokers at a greater risk of limiting their access to no-tar alternatives and will end up defeating the larger public health objectives.

In a landmark 200-page report titled “Nicotine without smoke: tobacco harm reduction”, the Royal College of Physicians in the UK concludes that e-cigarettes are not a gateway to smoking, nor do they result in the normalisation of smoking. They find that the available evidence indicates that “e-cigarettes are being used almost exclusively as safer alternatives to smoked tobacco, by confirmed smokers who are trying to reduce harm to themselves or others from smoking or to quit smoking completely”. Importantly, they further categorically find that the long-term harm caused by e-cigarettes is less than 5 percent compared to other tobacco products.

By allowing ENDS to operate in India legally, the government and regulatory bodies can have a lot more control over the product. This includes levying appropriate taxes, issuing public use guidelines, providing information about the product, enforcing a minimum age for sales, and individual product restrictions surrounding flavour choices and nicotine concentration in tobacco or e-cigarette products. In fact, regulators could go further to ensure product standardisation, labelling requirements to indicate the level of nicotine (something which is not in practice today for normal cigarettes), and technological developments in the field to further reduce the harm caused by the products.

Read the full article here

Slow economic growth is both immoral and anti-national. Don’t ignore falling GDP rate

Having convinced ourselves that the Narendra Modi government’s policies cannot be at fault, we are now debating whether the economic slowdown that began in 2017 is cyclical or structural. More than three million people emerge out of poverty for every percentage rise in GDP. The Indian economy will have to grow at over 10 per cent per annum every year to become a five-trillion-dollar economy by 2024. The RBI now projects a growth rate of 6.9 per cent for the next year.Read more

The Evolution of Synthetic Thought

Download the Essay in PDFThe world has never been enough. At least for us, humans. The endeavour to become more than what we are lies at the heart of human civilisation. We have overcome challenges of nature, obstacles of time, physical and mental impediments. Perhaps nothing reflects the culmination of this collective zeal to surpass our capabilities as much as Transhumanism.Transhumanism is a belief that human beings can transcend the limits of physical and mental limitations through technology. For some, a Transhumanist is an ideal to strive towards, and for others, it is both a source and an answer to all of humanity’s problems.Borne out of a belief system that humankind should reach the pinnacle of its capabilities and beyond, Transhumanism comprises augmentations to overcome limitations. While technological augmentations may be a recent endeavour, primitive humans have utilised tools to augment their capabilities. From the wooden spears, they used to hunt, the prosthetic wooden and iron legs to augment walking, all the way to lances in warfare, humans have employed augmentations throughout history. Eyeglasses, clothing, and ploughs signalled a rise in using tools to augment our capabilities.The rise in medical technology, genetic science, and electronics from the 1990s, has opened new frontiers in human capabilities. We don’t merely use technology as enablers but have started adopting it from within in the form of cybernetics. Armbands, deep-brain stimulators, physical and neural augmentations, mechanical and cybernetic implants, and potentially gene editing are technologies that humans can use to enhance themselves and achieve capabilities previously unheard of.On one hand, science is driving innovation in augmentation, and on the other, Transhumanism has given rise to a significant amount of philosophical thought. Notions of challenging what it means to be human, virtues and vices of post-humanism, and the dangers of uncontrolled immortality provoke deep questions that do not have answers but encourage much debate and discourse. There is also an entire section of humanity that believes that the very notion of Transhumanism is irrelevant, for any such technological advancements are several decades away.Transhumanism has generated fear and enthusiasm in equal measures. While proponents extol the virtues of embracing technology to enhance our lives, detractors fear what this will mean to be human at all. The widespread availability of Transhumanist technologies could result in radical life extension, overall well-being and improper perpetuation could create class divides, encourage oppression and even alter geopolitical landscapes.For the first time in human history, we can radically alter our minds and bodies and take shortcuts to the various destinations of natural evolution. This essay looks at Transhumanism from an emerging technological paradigm and attempts to provide an objective view of where Transhumanism is headed and what it means to the rest of the world.[pdf-embedder url="https://takshashila.org.in/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/TE-Evolution-of-Synthetic-Thought-CRG-2019-01.pdf"]Download the Essay in PDF

If India is in crisis, it is because good guys like ex-IAS Kannan Gopinathan rather quit

Ex-IAS Kannan Gopinathan’s resignation would have captured public attention even if it had not been in protest against the Narendra Modi-Amit Shah government’s clampdown in Jammu & Kashmir. In his ethical calculus, the benefit of fighting from the inside was lower than the costs of suppressing the voice of his conscience. So, he rightly quit. Yet, a different person in his shoes could have done the right thing by staying in service. Consider.Read more

From AFSPA to street protests, Modi govt needs new thinking in J&K with Article 370 gone

While the constitutionality of the government’s actions, with respect to scrapping Article 370, has been challenged in the Supreme Court, we should not expect the judiciary to overrule the decision entirely. What ought to be of utmost concern now is: Where do we go from here? How do we try to make India — including Jammu and Kashmir, and Ladakh — a better place than it was before 5 August 2019? What are the necessary policies that the Modi government must adopt to prevent the situation from deteriorating further?

Read more