When Does a Crisis Become a Policy Opportunity?

Barring the ultra-pessimist, many public policy opinion pieces are likely to advance one narrative over the next few months: The economic and humanitarian crisis unleashed by COVID-19 is also an opportunity to undertake long-pending reforms in <insert one’s favourite research area/sector>.Inherent in this view is a deep-seated belief that it’s only a crisis that can jolt India to resolve its political economy constraints while in normal times such issues aren’t to be touched with a barge pole.Read the full article in Deccan Herald here.

Consumers should get the benefit of falling oil prices

At a time when even deficit hawks are clamouring for an expansive fiscal policy to fight the severe economic consequences of Covid-19, it will be tempting for the government to exploit every opportunity to fund the welfare programmes. When oil prices first dropped to less than $30 per barrel, the Modi government had promptly increased the central excise duty. However, this will not result in increased revenue due to the enforced lockdowns and halting of economic activity.If the objective is to help the economy rebound and bolster government finances, there are better ways than raising petrol taxes. In fact, lowering it will increase the disposable income of consumers, who will go out and spend more on other goods and services. Apart from increasing incomes, it will also help the government collect higher indirect taxes. Many businesses, which are reliant on petrol, such as transport and logistics, will get a much-needed fillip by reduced petrol prices.Since the price of oil has a cascading effect on the general price level in the economy, maintaining petrol and diesel prices at the same level or increasing it can lead to higher inflation and can further dampen their demand. Moreover, additional revenue gained by the government is offset by increased subsidy payments and revenue foregone from sectors dependent on oil. Further, since petrol is outside the purview of GST, states will want their fair share as well and will competitively increase VAT on petrol.The additional amount that can be raised by petrol taxes is about Rs 30,000 crore, which will not make a dent to the Rs 8-10 lakh crore required for the post-pandemic economic revival package. It’s time to pass on the benefit to the consumers.This appeared in The Print's Talkpoint

Use the oil price crash to boost India’s strategic reserves

One area in which India can definitely use the lower oil prices to its advantage is to stock up on the commodity for future use. Like many other countries, India maintains strategic petroleum reserves (SPR), which is an inventory of oil for emergency purposes. To mitigate supply-side risks and cover for vulnerability to external oil shocks, India holds an emergency oil stockpile in underground salt caverns, which can provide around 4.5 days of import cover. There is additional capacity for five days of oil import cover, which must be filled up at this time when oil prices are at historic lows. Indian petroleum refineries hold an additional 65 days of import cover.India has been delaying the start of phase two of its SPR plans, which was to add another 12 days of oil storage capacity. This was to be done in partnership with either ADNOC (Abu Dhabi) or Saudi Arabia’s Aramco. It is probably the right time now to get this off the drawing board.Alternatively, we can also look at options outside India. We could persuade the Sri Lanka government to kick-start the utilisation of oil storage facilities at Trincomalee. This could be done in a mutually beneficial manner. We could also shop around for storage space in Oman (Ras Markaz) or the United Arab Emirates (Fujairah). Right now, we are in a bizarre situation where the storage space is more expensive than the commodity itself, but things will revert, and any investments now will help India in the long run when oil prices rise again.Finally, the private sector should look at this as an opportunity to lock into long-term contracts with oil suppliers based at current prices. The government can help the struggling Indian airline industry, for instance, by providing it lines of credit to enter into or renegotiate oil contracts.Here's the full article 

Let's make the most of dirt cheap oil

In a dramatic and unprecedented turn of events on Monday, crude oil began trading in negative territory for the first time since records began. The price on a futures contract for West Texas crude that was due to expire on 21 April crashed to minus $37.63 a barrel. This is a direct result of the market mayhem caused by covid-19, which has resulted in lockdowns around the world, brought economies to a screeching halt, and crushed demand for transport fuel. Reports say there is so much unused oil in the US that there is no space left to store fresh supplies. Storage costs money. Thus, oil producers had to pay to offload their stock.The sudden fall in oil prices is tied not just to a demand crunch, but also tensions among the world’s major suppliers. The global effort to contain the pandemic, international pressure, oversupply, and still-sluggish demand seem to have struck both Russia and Saudi Arabia hard. Though a production cut has since been agreed to, demand is estimated to have fallen far more than that.The best way to turn this situation to India’s advantage, therefore, is to grab this chance to fill up the country’s strategic petroleum reserves (SPRs). We should move quickly to boost our strategic petroleum reserves and strike long-term supply contracts with global oil suppliers.Read the full article here

Coronavirus economic crisis squeezes China’s plans to expand its navy as it marks 71st anniversary

China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy marks its 71st anniversary today. It comes amid intensified drills in the near seas and Western Pacific, along with deepening tensions in the South China Sea. The navy has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s military reforms.Driven by great power ambitions, Chinese naval shipbuilders have been churning out warships at a record pace over the past few years. Consequently, the Chinese navy today has the world’s largest deployable fleet of vessels. The irony, however, is that in the post-Covid-19 world, this expansion could prove to be the navy’s Achilles' heel.Read the full article in South China Morning Post

COVID-19 Is a Unique Test of National Decision Making the Modi Govt Can't Afford to Fail

By General Prakash Menon

India enters a new phase in its battle against COVID-19 when it eases its lockdown selectively after 26 days of an extremely stringent lockdown.

Given the enormous uncertainty, national-level decision making on the scope and scale of relaxations and restrictions is best described as dharam sankat.

For a nuclear power, dealing with unimaginable uncertainties where the stakes have to do with your very existence is a scenario that is enacted during national-level war games. There too, it is always a dharam sankat.

Continue reading the article here

Coronavirus lockdown has given us a blank slate. We can write a new world when it lifts

A fact that strikes my public policy students — mostly working professionals from various backgrounds — quite early in their course is that most of India’s problems are hard to solve because they are log-jammed. The status quo is often a sub-optimal equilibrium, but an equilibrium nevertheless. Even if you try to change things, they fall back into the rut.Here’s an example that might appear familiar to you. The traffic junction is congested because of several interconnected reasons: there are too many vehicles, the road alignment is bad, the bus informally stops at the street corner blocking traffic, the auto-rickshaw stand is at a point that prevents vehicles from easily making a U-turn, pedestrians walk on the street because the footpath is blocked by vendors and so on. In the pre-pandemic normal, everyone knew that this was a problem, but were more interested in merely keeping the traffic moving. Some minor repairs here, some police ‘enforcement’ there, used to be all that could be done. While most people were unhappy with the state of affairs, it was rational for all of them to do nothing about it.The coronavirus pandemic has thrown this status quo up in the air. The lockdown offers several weeks wherein urban infrastructure can be put in place because there is little traffic on the streets. Junctions can be realigned. Bus stops and routes can be changed to make public transport more accessible. Motorists can be better regulated and habituated to follow traffic rules. The whole area can be cleaned up and new norms evolved against spitting and public urination. By no means a silver bullet, the pandemic and the resultant lockdown relax some of the acute constraints that previously made reform impossible.Read more

Should You Download Aarogya Setu?

This week of the pandemic has focused significantly on around Aarogya Setu and contact tracing. So much so that during his speech extending the lockdown, PM Modi urged people to download the app.The idea is for the Government to use the app to know where you are and who you have been in contact with, enabling contact tracing.The app’s privacy policy has been under fire since its release and has been updated recently with improved protections. Because the app is to be used for contact tracing as well as quarantine enforcement, it will collect huge amounts of personal and sensitive data. For instance, signing up to the app requires you to put in your name, age, gender, phone number, and profession.Once you have registered, the app will begin to use Bluetooth to check who you have been in contact with. In case you test positive, the information might come in handy to notify people who may have also been infected. However, the Bluetooth itself does not give away your location.The way it works is if the Bluetooth on your phone detects another phone in range, the pair will exchange keys and keep a record of the interaction.The app will use the GPS inbuilt on your phone to monitor your location, enabling it to determine whether you are adhering to the quarantine with significant accuracy. The phone will take note of your location every 15 minutes and only share the information with the Government server if you test positive.Normally, you would have found the data collected by the app to be extremely invasive. But then again, these are not normal times. You could make the argument that the measures are necessary and proportional.There are some technical shortcomings and slightly concerning macro trends with the concept. Firstly, the usage of Bluetooth. Bluetooth is fairly trustworthy over 6 ft (the norm for physical distancing). However, the same things that stop coronavirus from spreading do not apply to Bluetooth. As put by Casey Newton, Bluetooth can recognise two devices kept 10 ft and an apartment wall apart while the coronavirus may not transmit through walls.Situations like these are likely to lead to a lot of false positives.  Secondly, the context here matters. India faces different challenges as compared to the developed world. Earlier this month, when Apple and Google came up with the idea to enable contact tracing, it led to plenty of debate around wealth distribution being strongly correlated with OS distribution.The idea is that if you wanted to check where in the world wealth was concentrated, you could look at a map of iOS users around the world. Android, on the other hand, runs on a lot more smartphones than iOS, and not all of them have Bluetooth-LE, which is needed to enable contact tracing. Here, it is the poor who lose out.In India’s case, the poor currently lose out because they own feature phones and not smartphones. While Medianama reports that the Government is working on a feature phone version of the app, the poor will continue to remain at a disadvantage until it is released.Should you download the app? Yes. The updated privacy policy is a marked improvement upon the previous one. Most data collected by the app is stored on the device locally or 30 days, after which it is deleted. Data that is shared with the Government will be deleted after 45 days.However, in case you are unfortunate enough to test positive, the information shared with the Government will be deleted two months after the individual is cured.Broadly speaking, this policy is a step towards better data management practices. While protections could have been made better through open sourcing the app and disclosing the encryption, the current version of the app is reasonable in its approach and mandate.  More importantly, perhaps, in last week’s column, I made the point that the liberties we give up today may end up becoming the norm tomorrow.This very much applies to Aarogya Setu. Even with an updated privacy policy, in regular times, the app would have been considered invasive to personal privacy.The hallmark of a good policy/programme is that it ceases to exist once it has achieved its goal. What the app does need is an end date so that it does not inadvertently set a new normal. This also applies to measures such as facial recognition techniques being used to enforce quarantines as well as any other means that collect, store or process data.The pandemic will hopefully come to an end sometime. Keeping that in mind, so should the technology measures that are used to contain it. In that regard, Aarogya Setu should lead the way. A new, worse normal in privacy is the last thing the world needs. This article was first published in Deccan Chronicle. Views are personal.

A new space race in the offing?

As the world is grappling with the coronavirus pandemic and the United States is ina precarious situation, President Donald Trump has passed an executive orderallowing Americans ‘the right to engage in commercial exploration, recovery, anduse of resources in outer space.’All major spacefaring nations, including the United States of America and India, aresignatories of the Outer Space Treaty 1967. Article II of The Outer Space Treaty,1967, states, ‘Outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, is notsubject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use oroccupation, or by any other means.’ The Moon Agreement 1979, although ratified byonly 18 countries, the US not being one of them, also prohibits the exploration ofthe moon. The order highlights that US doesn’t consider space as ‘global commons’and further states that the US is not a party to the 1979 Moon Agreement anddoesn’t recognise the Agreement to ‘be an effective or necessary instrument toguide nation-states regarding the promotion of commercial participation in thelong-term exploration, scientific discovery, and use of the Moon, Mars, or othercelestial bodies.’While the legal opinion on the legitimacy of exploiting outer space by the USA isdivided, the intent of commercial exploration is not entirely new. Over the pastcouple of years, we are seeing increasing interest in asteroid mining andexploitation of space by nation-states. The US Congress had passed the‘Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act’ in 2015 giving its citizens the rightto ‘possess, own, transport, use, and sell the asteroid resource or space resourceobtained.’ NASA’s Artemis Lunar Exploration programme plans to develop a basecamp at the south pole of the moon and build other infrastructure to facilitatelong-term exploration of the moon. Billionaire explorers like Jeff Bezos and ElonMusk, are also looking to reach Mars and other celestial bodies and take advantageof the resources found.Luxembourg, a small European nation, has implemented an even more liberalregime than the US for asteroid mining and harvesting of other resources fromspace. Trump’s executive order is an endorsement of the growing global sentimentand formal recognition of the property rights of private players from the US.Russia has heavily criticised the US, and Trump for the order, stating, ‘attempts toexpropriate outer space and aggressive plans to actually seize territories of otherplanets hardly set the countries (on course for) fruitful cooperation.’ However, weneed to trust actions, not words when we observe sovereign nation-states in theinternational arena. Russia’s space agency Roscosmos has announced plans for a2024 orbiter, a 2028 sample-return mission, and human flights by 2029-30, Chinahas an ambitious lunar programme with its Chang’e missions. Russia and China arealso planning to build a shared data centre for lunar and deep-sea research. It willbe interesting to see whether all these missions are only towards the pursuit ofscience or are there other strategic and economic interests that the countries willundertake.Setting up bases and exploiting and trading resources found in space is also a wayof asserting power in space. Most states now acknowledge space as a new domainof security, and thus are building capabilities to safeguard their interests andproject power. While building defensive capabilities through specialised defencespace agencies is one way, establishing economic avenues through the exploitationof resources and trade is the other way to gain primacy.The Outer Space Treaty, enacted in 1967, in the wake of the cold war and the heightof the space race, has done well to prevent exploitation of space so far. As spaceexploration and travel is becoming cheaper, and there is increased participationfrom private players, we are likely to see new strains in the international order. Wewould observe an increased interest in property rights in space and countriestrying to enable, if not encourage, their private players to harvest resources inspace.The executive order says that the US is looking to negotiate multilateralagreements with foreign states for sustainable operations for the recovery of spaceresources. India needs to be cognisant of the developments in this new ‘space race’.While the Moon Agreement which India has signed but not ratified may prove to bea thorn, India must take prudent measures to ensure that its citizens can reap theeconomic dividends of space exploration while India can safeguard its strategicinterests.(This article was published in the Deccan Herald. The views are of the author's own.)

COVID-19 and Geo-political Implications

It is perhaps too early to judge the scope and long-term impact of COVID-19 on the geopolitical landscape. What is not in doubt, however, is the certainty that there will be global political and strategic effects. Presently, the dominant emotion that runs across the global population is the ascendant fear that stems from the known and unknown aspects relating to the coronavirus. While it is known how the virus spreads and what its symptoms are, no known cure has been discovered nor is a vaccine likely before 12-18 months, if at all. One of the major challenges in containing its spread though is its ability to transmit, even during the incubation period. Herd immunity1 is said to theoretically provide the best available defence against the virus, but it comes at a major cost in terms of human lives and the infection quantum. You can find the full article here

Omar Sheikh: If Not Daniel Pearl, a Trail With Links to ISI, 9/11 Mastermind and Bin Laden

Was it a coincidence or was it purposely timed for when everyone was too busy worrying about the Covid-19 crisis?Last week, the Sindh High Court overturned, citing a lack of evidence, the conviction of Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh on charges of murdering Daniel Pearl. It, however, found him guilty of a lesser charge of kidnapping and sentenced him to seven years in prison.Omar Sheikh, who has been in custody since 2002, will be released as the sentence for kidnapping will be deemed to have been completed.In India he’s remembered as one of the three terrorists released at Kandahar after the hijacking of IC 814. The other key figure released with him was Maulana Masood Azhar who went on to found the Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM)...Read the full article on The Telegraph India here.

Grain Mountain Amidst Food Insecurity

The official stock of food-grain with the Food Corporation of India stood at 77.7 million tonnes as of March 1. This includes 27.5 million tonnes of wheat and 50.2 million tonnes of rice. The rice estimate includes a significant quantity of unmilled paddy. This mountain of grain is among the highest level that the government has held in its stock. It is far in excess of what is required by the norms defined by the government itself. And this large stock is prior to the coming rabi harvest, which is expected to be bumper, and will add further to the stock. The coexistence of high stocks with the government amidst rising hunger and starvation, is a peculiarly Indian phenomenon, and this is not the first time such an anomaly needs to be highlighted. Food-grain procurement and the public distribution system (PDS) are designed to meet three objectives: food security, food price stability and adequate remuneration to farmers with minimum support prices. There is an inherent inadequacy in using just one instrument to achieve all three objectives. Add to it, the other factors like inefficiency of large bureaucracies, lack of coordination between Central and State agencies, pilferage and wastage, lack of storage capacity, knee jerk policy responses like imports and exports of food, it is no wonder that this elaborate system has failed to address the problems of hunger and nutrition.Read more 

Perennial Lockdown Is Not a Remedy. India Must Isolate and Insulate

Since March 25, India has been adopted a lockdown strategy in its ‘war’ on COVID-19 and continues to put its faith in it. This fact was confirmed on April 14, when the prime minister in his third address to the nation announced the decision to extend the national lockdown till May 3.The decision, he claimed, was based on the advice of several chief ministers and public health experts. There is no doubt that the decision was an extremely difficult one especially since it meant the prolongation of economic inactivity that is bound to have severe consequences for all, especially for the unorganised sector which constitutes the bulk of India’s poor.You can find the full article here

To meet world average, India must add at least 10 lakh doctors to healthcare force

India has long been short of doctors, nurses and hospital beds. And a recent working paper by Shruti Rajagopalan and Abishek Choutagunta of George Mason University’s Mercatus Center reminds us of that. Compared to the world average of 150 doctors per 100,000 people, India has only 86 doctors registered for practice. The actual number of doctors available for practice, as Basant Potnuru shows, is even lower: we probably have only around 64 doctors per 100,000 people, well below half the world average. Of course, the national average does not tell the whole story: southern states and urban areas are vastly better served than other parts of India. The picture with regard to nurses is relatively better, but there is still a shortage, regional variation and differences in skill levels.

We could take any indicator of healthcare capacity and find that as a country, we are short of it. Public expenditure on healthcare is low — our Union and state governments together spend around 1.5 per cent of GDP on health — and most of India relies on private, mostly out-of-pocket healthcare. Even as we point fingers at the government for spending too little on health, consider that only 20 per cent of the population has medical insurance. Perhaps it is yatha praja, tatha raja, and we have been collectively casual about our health.

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To open or not to open India up: a dilemma that need not be one

As India decides what next after the 21-day national lockdown ends on 14 April, opinions are divided among those who want a phased lifting and those who want to extend it. This reflects underlying differences between those who believe it is worth taking calculated risks to forestall widespread suffering on account of lost livelihoods, and those who are concerned taking such risks could cause the pandemic to spiral out of control.

Bold as it was, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s decision to impose a lockdown on 24 March was easier compared to what he has on his plate now. At that time, the consequences of the pandemic were clear, whereas those of the lockdown both unknown and in the future. It is almost the opposite now, and the moral dilemma appears far more acute. The prime minister has to weigh the real suffering of hundreds of millions of people caught in the lockdown against the millions who might catch the disease if the lockdown is lifted and the pandemic spreads. It’s not an easy decision, but there are ways to make it less difficult.Read more

Overcorrection at the cost of privacy during coronavirus is problematic

This article was first published in Deccan Chronicle. Views are personal. There are three pillars of crisis management, according to NYU professor Scott Galloway. First, the top guy/girl takes responsibility. Second, acknowledging the issue. Third, overcorrect. When you read it out loud, it seems reasonably straightforward but is a process that should not be taken for granted.It has taken governments and leaders around the world multiple attempts to take responsibility and acknowledge the issue. Finally, time has come to overcorrect. Six months from now when things are back to relatively normal, measures taken now may look drastic, but that is the point.However, it is not going to be easy to overcorrect. Even governments have to follow social distancing and may already have limited capacity to deal with a pandemic of this size. Given the pervasive nature of modern technology, it is no wonder that government administrations around the world are going to try and use digital methods to aid their efforts.China has been ahead of the curve on this. The government has begun using the Alipay app to assign citizens with QR codes based on their risk of exposure to regulate citizen movement. A green QR code means that you are free to move around. A yellow code means a one week quarantine while a red QR code refers to a two week quarantine. In Tamil Nadu, the Police is now using facial recognition to track people in quarantine. At a larger scale, the Union Government of India is using the Aarogya Setu app to help connect Indian citizens to health services.To most people, it might not make sense to talk about privacy in such times. And on one level, they would be right. It is hard to overstate the seriousness of the situation and dealing with the pandemic comes first. In such emergencies, concerns about privacy come second. Moreover, as a fundamental right in India, privacy exists with reasonable restrictions. Erosions of privacy must be necessary, legal, and proportional. Instead of being suspended, this standard should be upheld. Because as the Union Government (and the larger international community) use facial recognition, or apps such as the one deployed in China, it is crucial to keep in mind that such techniques have the potential to set a new normal by resetting our expectations on personal privacy.Rahul Matthan has an excellent analysis backed by observations regarding this. Before 26/11, hotels in India would let you drive to the entrance and hand over your keys to the valet. Post the Mumbai attacks, vehicles are mandatorily screened, as are people and the contents of their baggage. As a practice, it seemed important and urgent at the time, and has now become routine.More than a decade from now, doing so has become the expectation, and it is probably for the best. However, that was 2008, and the difference between now and then is that the liberties yielded today will be a lot more invasive than just vehicle checking at hotels.For instance, in case of CoBuddy (the app bring used in Tamil Nadu to track people), the app has constant access to the phone’s GPS and continuously checks the location of the phone. The app automatically sends an alert to the Police as soon as the person moves out of the geofence. The Police also sends users prompts 2-3 times a day to verify their faces.Not all data is created equal. While both facial data and location data are personal and sensitive, the former tends to be more invasive. This is because facial information is permanent and cannot be easily changed. While constant access to people’s location can help determine where they live and their movement patterns, it is easier to change where you go compared to how you look.The Aarogya Setu app, while admittedly better than (now discontinued) Corona Cavach when it comes to privacy, still collects your name, phone number, age, sex, profession, countries visited in the last 30 days and whether or not you are a smoker (apart from constant access to your location). Compare this with the Singapore government’s app, Trace Together, that only stores your mobile number and a randomly generated ID. Not only are we being subject to invasive apps, lists of infected people with their names and addresses have been made publicly available without their consent.Given the nature of the crisis and the tech response we have seen, it is evident that two things are happening here. Firstly, there is little regard to data minimization. Governments in India and across the world are collecting more data and accessing increased data points to get a better sense of people’s movements during the crisis. Once your name, age, facial data is shared with the government, it is unlikely to change. Instead, once this crisis is over, the data can be used for purposes it wasn’t collected for.Secondly, violations of personal privacy are becoming the norm and not the exception. It is now somehow okay to post lists of infected people on WhatsApp groups and to provide facial data to the police 2-3 times a day. Much like the vehicle checks at hotels post the 26/11 attacks, our expectations of privacy are being reset. Only this time, it is being done at scale.It is fair to say that we live in unprecedented times. But just because we do, does not mean that the necessity and proportionality standards for eroding personal privacy should be suspended. If anything, they should instead be upheld. Because the liberties we give up today, may end up becoming the norm tomorrow.

Dealing with adverse impact of COVID-19 on India's Military planning

Author: Lt Gen (Dr) Prakash Menon, PVSM, AVSM, VSM (Retd)India’s military planning will be severely challenged by the inevitable and adverse economic impact of COVID 19. It also exacerbates the long term and unresolved problem of competing demands for military modernisation being overwhelmed by inadequacies of financial resources. The silver lining in the situation is the recent creation of the CDS and the Department of Military Affairs (DMA). This is so because there is now greater institutional singularity in the form of the CDS being both a head of department in the MoD and the Permanent Chairman Chiefs of Staff Committee (PC-COSC).Continue reading the article here.

Learn to be positive in coronavirus pandemic from this Vietnam war US navy pilot

During the Vietnam War, James Stockdale, a US navy pilot, was taken prisoner-of-war (POW) in 1965 and imprisoned in the infamous Hanoi Hilton for eight years, much of it in solitary confinement. As the author Jim Collins tells it in Good to Great, Stockdale was tortured “over 20 times…and lived out the war without any prisoner’s rights, no set release date, and no certainty as to whether he would even survive to see his family again. He shouldered the burden of command, doing everything he could to create conditions that would increase the number of prisoners who would survive unbroken, while fighting an internal war against his captors and their attempts to use the prisoners for propaganda.”Writing in 1999-2000, Collins knew that Stockdale survived the ordeal, was awarded the Medal of Honor in 1976, led the Naval War College and was Ross Perot’s running mate in the 1992 US presidential election. But he was struck by “how on earth did (Stockdale) deal with it when he was actually there and did not know the end of the story?(emphasis in the original)”

We are in a similar situation today. ...Read more

Lockdown Stopped Two Thirds Of World Economy

Despite bitter political bickering, the United States passed its highest ever relief package to support the economy. It is valued at 2.2 trillion dollars, and another one trillion is coming, if not more. That would make it nearly 15 percent of the US GDP, as against 0.8 percent announced by India’s Finance Minister last week. And even that meagre announcement of India had items which had already been budgeted for, and hence were not part of the new relief spending. Keep in mind that the political bickering in the US Senate and Congress was not about the size of the package, but its composition. The Democrats claimed that the earlier proposal was too generous to corporations and too stingy to workers. Hence the revised proposal had a provision for a direct cash payment to every adult in America, barring a small minority earning a very high income. There were also tax breaks and loan incentives to companies to not retrench workers, and keep them on the payroll.Read More 

Zoom fiasco highlights need for data protection law

This article was first published in Deccan Chronicle.None of the protections afforded by a privacy law are in place yet, which leaves our data open to exploitation by tech companies.There has been a lot going on at Zoom. The video conference app has been a major beneficiary from the lockdowns imposed due to the coronavirus, as humanity participates in its largest-ever work from home experiment. As a result, Zoom’s shares have doubled in value in less than six months. All is not well though, the company has been fraught with privacy issues recently. For instance, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) pointed out that hosts of Zoom meetings can see if the participants are paying attention based on whether or not the Zoom window is active on their screens.Zoom would likely make the argument that the ability to be able to check whether people are active on a team call is a feature, not an instrument meant to cause harm. Which is one way to look at things. But at the same time, that is not the only slip up in terms of privacy the company has been embroiled in this past month. VICE reported that Zoom’s iOS app sends user data to Facebook even if you do not have a Facebook account. Zoom notifies Facebook when the user opens the app, shares details about the user’s device, such as the model, time zone, city, phone carrier, and the unique advertiser identifier (a unique number created by user devices which are then used to target ads).Zoom’s privacy policy is not explicit about this data collection and there is a blame game to be played here. Facebook can make the argument that it requires developers (like Zoom) using Facebook’s SDKs and Pixels to be transparent about the data they are collecting, using and sharing. Zoom can and has argued that Facebook was collecting unnecessary device data. We need to talk about all of this because apps like Zoom and Houseparty are not going anywhere.Instead, this incident is an excellent teacher for how policy and protections work in the data protection space. Firstly, it highlights the need and urgency for India (and other countries) to have a data protection law. These are exactly the kind of offenses a data protection law is supposed to penalise. In an ideal world, had there been a data protection law in place here, Zoom likely would have had to adhere to a standard of explicit consent. This way, the user would have been aware of what data was being shared. Had Zoom not adhered to the guidelines of consent, it would have had to pay a penalty. The data being shared with Facebook would have come under ambits of personal data, personal sensitive data and non-personal data, requiring different levels of protection and liability.The fact that none of the protections afforded by a privacy law are in place yet means the only protections users have are those given to them by companies whose objective is to maximise shareholder value. More often than not maximising shareholder value comes at a cost of trampling on user rights. Most companies will be more than happy to make this trade-off and would ideally want to do it when there isn’t a data protection law in place.At this point, it is hard to state whether or not a data protection regulation is going to be a definitive solution to incidents like these. Broadly because there isn’t a lot of precedence to learn from yet. Arguably the most significant existing legislation in this space is the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the EU. The law was enforced in May 2018 and an assessment of how its implementation has fared is due by the Commission sometime this year.There is every chance that the Personal Data Protection regulation that India ends up adopting is not going to fix everything when it comes to abuses of power that come with a vacuum in the data protection space. It is going to be hard to implement clauses and penalties on every website on the internet and to track data flow at scale.  However, as any policy analyst worth their salt will tell you, change happens at the margins.In the larger picture, Zoom sharing data with Facebook without explicit notice is a sign that is reflective of a deeper problem of accountability within the data protection space. There are no laws, and when laws do exist, they are near impossible to impose and monitor. This should serve as a high-profile warning sign of practices that currently exist and are going to continue until regulation exists.The writer is a technology policy analyst at The Takshashila Institution. Views are personal.