Commentary
Find our newspaper columns, blogs, and other commentary pieces in this section. Our research focuses on Advanced Biology, High-Tech Geopolitics, Strategic Studies, Indo-Pacific Studies & Economic Policy
Why farmers are upset about reforms
Three months ago when Parliament was not in session, the Government of India issued three ordinances. Normally ordinances are issued only as an emergency law, and they have to be converted into proper legislation as soon as Parliament reconvenes. These three ordinances were about agriculture and farming. All three were in the spirit of ‘reforms’, i.e. removing shackles from the farmer. Now one of the ordinances has been passed in the Lok Sabha. The other two are in the pipeline. You would imagine that farmers would welcome any reform that gives them more freedom.But this ‘granting of freedom’ has met with a big backlash. Farmers in Punjab and Haryana have come to the streets. The agitation may spread to Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh too. It has spilled on to highways. Opposition parties too are criticising the ordinance, but that is expected. The ruling party in Punjab is opposing the new law, but asking farmers to not blockade traffic. The most awkward thing for the ruling party in Delhi was that the Union food processing industries minister resigned from the cabinet. She resigned in protest because she claimed that the new law is anti-farmer. But in the four-page resignation letter written to the prime minister she did not spell out how, exactly, the new reformist law was anti-farmer. She belongs to Alkali Dal, a coalition partner to BJP.Read More
China is an enemy of freedom of thought. It wants the same from other powerful nations
There is now an abundance of analysis and commentary around the world on how countries should respond to challenges posed by China. East Asian countries are concerned about China’s aggressive military moves in the South China Sea, across the Taiwan Straits and the Sea of Japan. India is concerned about Chinese moves along the Himalayan border, across the subcontinent and in the Indian Ocean. Western Europe is having a difficult time with China-backed counterparts in Central and Eastern Europe.
The United States, for its part, has recognised that China presents a multi-dimensional strategic challenge to its global superpower status — one that manifests itself in global trade, technology, cyber and geography. What is consistent across all these perceptions of the nature of the Chinese challenges is that they are about competing interests. Territorial ambition, economic dominance, technological supremacy and a desire for hegemony are all classic manifestations of realpolitik — clashes arising from a tussle for greater power.
Burden of Bad Loans
The economy shrank by nearly one-fourth during the first three months of this fiscal year. Much of this was due to the harsh lockdown initiated in March. Roughly three-fourths of the economy was practically shut for a month, after which there were a series of renewed lockdowns with partial relaxations. For this quarter, the economy suffered a triple shock, like demand, supply and finance collapsed. Unemployment rose close to 30 per cent in April, rendering nearly 122 million people jobless. In cities, whose workforce consists of 40 per cent migrants on an average, the toll on livelihoods was severe. With the loss of jobs and income, it soon became a food crisis for many urban households, necessitating emergency measures from state governments. The Central government’s initial relief package was to enhance food security by doubling the rations and extending this up to November.The big 20-lakh-crore package announced by the Central government in May consisted largely of liquidity support. For instance, micro, small and medium enterprises are eligible to guaranteed loans up to Rs 3 lakh crore. Of this amount, roughly half has been sanctioned and loans are being disbursed. It is no wonder that the demand for loans is muted since small businesses already hit by zero demand are not keen to take on any additional debt burden. But those small businesses which have a cash management mismatch, i.e., they have pending invoices that have not been paid by their customers, are quite willing to take loan support to tide over their crisis. In effect, such small businesses face a problem of illiquidity; not of insolvency.Read More
It is time India gave its policy on Tibet some strategic coherence
Regulating online pharmacies must be an inclusive exercise
This article was first published in Deccan Chronicle. Views are personal.The most exciting aspect of looking at tech policy is the sheer amount of sectors it intersects with. Given the nature of the pandemic, more of our world has moved online than ever before, and will continue to do so in the coming months. This applies not just to retail, entertainment, and communication, but also for medical needs. Over the past few weeks, we have witnessed a push in the online pharmacy space.Reliance Industries has spent $83.06 million (₹6.2 billion) in cash to acquire a majority stake in Netmeds, an online pharmacy. Amazon has also launched its own online drug service. There are also other competitors in the space such as 1mg, Medlife, and PharmEasy.
Weekly vouchers will boost demand
The economy is in a deep hole, having contracted by one-fourth in the first three months of the lockdown. Hopefully the speed of contraction is slowing, but we will be lucky to see positive growth of the economy before December. So what is to be done? Everyone is crying hoarse for a fiscal stimulus. There are many suggestions. Most of them involve distributing cash from the central treasury. We may need around 5 per cent of the GDP, i.e. nearly Rs 10 lakh crore. But the central government says we don’t have that much to spare. The coffers are running empty, since tax collection has fallen steeply. Why not borrow? The government is already neck deep in debt, and its debt mountain is so huge, that merely paying interest on past debt costs it Rs 6 lakh crore annually. There is such a thing called sustainable debt, beyond which it is simply not affordable.For an average person the debt that you take on depends on how much EMI you can afford. Similar logic applies to government too. But surely they can ask the Reserve Bank of India to print money, and then distribute it to everyone’s Jan Dhan Yojana account? Not quite. Such automatic ‘monetisation’ of government debt has been prohibited by a contract that it signed with the RBI back in 1997. If that prohibition is not in place then it is tempting to all governments who get elected to use this ‘easy’ option of printing money to finance the deficit. Reckless use of monetisation will simply result in hyperinflation.Read More
COVID-19 vaccine deployment in India: Lessons we need to learn from the past
It appears that a vaccine(s) is the only way to stop COVID-19 and return the world to some semblance of normalcy. As the race inches to a close, everybody is waiting for their turn to get the vaccine and go meet their friends for a cup of coffee.However, there are several scientific hurdles that still need to be surpassed: how effective would the vaccine be across demographics? For how long will the vaccine confer immunity? Will the virus mutate, rendering the vaccine ineffective? Even if we get a combination of vaccines that answers these questions, the capacity to produce, distribute and monitor adverse events related to the vaccine are going to limit an effective vaccine rollout. Hence, it is important India identifies the vaccine demand, invests in capacity and communicates with the public to enable a smooth immunisation programme.
Lessons from COVID-19 testing
India’s response to detecting the COVID-19 outbreak was reactive, not proactive. For weeks COVID-19 testing was limited to authorised government laboratories, and available conditional on pre-determined criteria. Instead of scaling up testing capacity and aggressively test and trace, the government took a cautious approach, most likely to protect scarce testing resources. However, a strategy to ramp up both kit manufacture and early inclusion of private laboratories could have helped India’s response in containing the spread of the virus. (Read more)
Understanding China’s LAC deployment capabilities
Broadening of the India-China standoff into multiple theatres will present formidable challenges for Chinese forcesAll eyes are on the meeting between Indian external affairs minister S Jaishankar and his Chinese counterpart on September 10 in Moscow, nevertheless, it has increasingly become clear over the past few weeks that the two countries are preparing for a...The article was originally published in Deccan Herald.
Vaccinating Indians against Covid? We should be talking days, not years
As the Narendra Modi government’s National Expert Committee on Vaccine Administration deliberates on a vaccination strategy against Covid-19, the single biggest thing it should be wary of is status quo-ism packaged as pragmatism. One thing India is not short of are people who can tell you why something cannot be done. We are now being told that a fast, universal national vaccination campaign is not possible because India does not have the infrastructure, administrative capacity and funds to do so.
A couple of weeks ago, a research report by Sanford Bernstein, a financial brokerage firm estimated that it will take as long as three years to vaccinate 60 per cent of the population at a total cost of $6 billion. The government’s share of this will be $2 billion, which will cover 30 per cent of the population. The remaining 30 per cent will purchase the vaccine privately at a cost of $4 billion (because the government will procure the vaccine at $3 per dose, as opposed to $6 in the private market). The analysis might have calculated timelines based on the public health system’s rate of delivering 60-100 million vaccinations per year. I do not have access to the report, but if the media summary is correct, it would seem that the Indian government will pursue Covid-19 vaccination as if it were any other vaccination project. It takes a lot of cynicism to set such low expectations of the government. Worse, if such low expectations get anchored in public discourse, they might creep into public policy, becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Xi’s new approach to Tibet will affect India
Chinese President Xi Jinping’s recent remarks at the seventh Central Symposium on Tibet Work indicate that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is doubling down on its hardline approach in the region, which evolved gradually after the 2008 protests.The strategy for the next few years that Xi outlined entails a mix of persuasion, development, connectivity, indoctrination and coercion. This will not only have serious implications for ordinary Tibetans but will also impinge on the Sino-Indian boundary question, particularly in the context of China’s claims on Arunachal Pradesh.Read the full article in Hindustan Times.
Should India have its own social media content moderation rules?
This article was first published in Deccan Chronicle. Views are personal.Earlier this week, Economic Times (ET) broke the story that top officials had begun preliminary discussions on whether India should have its own guidelines on content moderation. What always strikes me when I read news around this subject is that consensus around platform moderation is always negative. No one ever is happy with the current amount of content moderation that platforms are undertaking. Some people think it is too little, while others think it is too much.
Evolving India's Military Strategy
The ongoing situation on the Sino-Indian border offers a unique opportunity for the military leadership. They could impel the political leadership to facilitate the formulation of a military strategy despite the lack of an overarching National Security Strategy. Militarily, let there now be no doubt that countering China should be the primary focus of our military power. Pakistan is the lesser threat. Rebalancing military power towards China from its greater inclination towards Pakistan in the continental and maritime domain will undoubtedly be the prime challenge.The full article can be read here.
The mental health cost of Covid-19
The GDP numbers are out. These refer to the three months from April to June, which were mostly about a harsh lockdown. More than three-fourths of the economy was shut down at least for a month, and hence output, income, jobs were lost. The contraction in India’s GDP was the most acute among the top 20 countries of the world, i.e. the G20 group.One of the G20 members is called EU, which is actually a collection of 27 countries of Europe. During that same quarter, China’s GDP went up by 12 per cent. China’s GDP contraction happened in the previous quarter, i.e. from January to March, which also included the Chinese New Year, when almost the entire country is on holiday for two weeks. The remarkable thing is that in just one quarter the Chinese economy has bounced back and is in strongly positive territory. India’s July to September quarter numbers will not be known until after Diwali, and it is unlikely that we will see as smart a bounce back as China. We will be lucky to see mildly positive growth from October, and then sharply higher from January. Much of this will depend on fiscal stimulus 2.0, which is aimed at urban folk (unlike 1.0, which was aimed mainly at rural folk and agriculture), and also the return of consumer and business confidence. Let’s not forget that much of the revival in GDP has to be led by the private sector. The central and state governments can only play an enabling role, and the fiscal stimulus of say 5 or 6 per cent of GDP is a lever which uses the fulcrum of “feel good” factor and business optimism to pole vault the economy into higher and positive growth trajectory.Read More
Drilling Into Indian Twitter's Interest in Sweden's Violent Riots
This article appeared in TheWire.Over last weekend, hashtags such as SwedenRiots, NorwayRiots and WeAreWithSweden were trending on Twitter in India.This may have seemed surprising, but if anyone spent a few minutes looking at the content that was being shared, it became painfully obvious why this was happening.A cursory Twitter search showed that many accounts which typically share India-centric majoritarian content were actively participating in the conversation, with plenty of local references to recent violence in Delhi and Bengaluru.A more extensive examination using a combination of tools like Hoaxy, Twitter’s Advanced Search feature and APIs allowed us to dig in a little bit further.
In parallel, let’s also keep in mind the framework of Dangerous Speech, which can be defined as ‘any form of expression (e.g. speech, text, or images) that can increase the risk that its audience will condone or commit violence against members of another group.’
First, using Hoaxy, I attempted to get a sense of network clusters for these hashtags. Now, Hoaxy samples tweets, so its results should be considered indicative.
The size of the circles and density of clusters around it represent the amount of engagement (retweets, mentions, quote) an account receives.The names that the visualisations throw up help corroborate, to an extent, what the Twitter search suggested – that a lot of the activity on these hashtags was being driven by accounts that associate themselves with pro-Hindutva narratives.Where did they come from?Next, I used Twitter’s API to capture around 60,000 tweets across these 3 hashtags on August 29 and 30. Approximately 30,000 unique accounts shared content using at least one of these 3 hashtags. It is not uncommon for accounts not to include location data. For these hashtags, typically 40% did not (For context: I’ve typically seen this number vary between 45 and 60%).In the doughnut charts below – which plot the number of tweets by location for the remaining accounts – the predominance of Indian locations is visible.
Location of accounts for SwedenRiots
Location of accounts for WeAreWithSweden
Yes, every generation must debate secularism. School textbooks aren’t enough
Many people were upset last week that NDTV 24×7— even NDTV — decided that secularism ought to be a topic of debate. Amid the prevailing climate of deep political polarisation, prejudice and suspicion, some saw this debate segment, which asked panelists whether “Secularism Is Essential To Democracy”,as a sign that this media house, too, was caving in to the Bharatiya Janata Party’s line of thinking. Others were outraged that there should be a debate on the topic at all — for isn’t the need for secularism self-evident? Isn’t the principle non-negotiable, being part of the basic structure of the Indian republic? It is understandable that the beleaguered advocates of secularism should feel this way. But you don’t have to be a BJP supporter or religious Right-winger to argue that a debate on secularism is not only a good thing, and not only necessary at this time, but something that needs to take place regularly.Read More
Passing GST Buck
The past week has been dominated by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s remark alluding to an “act of God”. She was referring to the Covid-19 pandemic which is now seen as the main cause of the unprecedented recession in India and the world. Never mind that the slowing of GDP growth, or investment ratio or the stagnation of exports, or the rise in the bad loan ratio in banking, preceded the pandemic. Naturally the fiscal stress was rising, and the pressure of the inadequacy of tax collection was tangible even before the full fury of the pandemic.The FM referred to “an act of God” as a Force Majeure clause in a commercial contract. The “contract” in this case is actually an Act of Parliament of 2017 which guarantees compensation to the states from the Centre, in case of a shortfall in tax collection from the Goods and Services Tax. The compensation clause says that any revenue growth falling below 14 per cent annual growth from year to year will be compensated from the Central treasury fund for a period of five years – i.e., till 2022. Meeting this legal obligation was becoming difficult, thanks to the slowing GDPgrowth even prior to the pandemic.Read More
The US-China tech war is being fought across a bamboo curtain
Amazon and Flipkart make lockdowns effective
This article was first published in Deccan Chronicle.One of the most important features of tech policy is the sheer number of disciplines it intersects with. With the pandemic getting worse, in India, we have gone back and forth on locking down areas to stop the spread of the virus. Over the past few weeks, we have seen lockdowns happen in Jharkhand and West Bengal. As you hear how and where lockdowns are being imposed try to keep in mind the role e-commerce plays in making sure such measures are effective.It has also been fascinating to witness how the government’s thinking has evolved in this regard. There has been renewed importance placed on the sector. And that’s not just because of reports of a new draft e-commerce policy, but because of how e-commerce has been seen as a mitigating instrument to manage lockdowns.
Pandemic and exam stress
Sometimes it feels as if the Supreme Court is running the country. Otherwise why does everything escalate all the way? The SC’s main job is to examine constitutional issues, but it is often and increasingly embroiled in commercial disputes. For instance, an engineering company in Chennai had registered the trademark ‘Coronil’ back in 1993, as an industrial cleaning product. When Patanjali started using the same name for its Covid-19 product, the Chennai firm said you are infringing on my trademark.Patanjali subsequently toned down its claim, and said it was an immunity boosting product. But this infringement case went all the way to the Supreme Court wherein it ruled the commercial dispute in favour of Patanjali. “In these pandemic times it would be terrible if we restrict the use of the word Coronil,” said the court. Technically the apex court has asked the parties to abide by the decision of the Madras High Court, which is in favour of Patanjali. Of course, there was another issue of the misleading claim in the earlier advertisements of Coronil being a ‘cure’. That too was looked into by the apex court.Read More
India must treat the oil spill near Mauritius as SoS. Lockdown has left seafarers exhausted
he Indian Ocean island nation of Mauritius is facing one of its most serious crises in its modern history. On 21 July, around a week into its voyage from Singapore to the Brazilian port of Tubarao, the MV Wakashio, a 300-metre long bulk carrier, owned and operated by Japanese companies, deviated from its course and headed towards Mauritius instead of the regular shipping lanes several nautical miles south of it. A few days later, it struck a reef just over a kilometre from the shore, ran aground, spilled around a 1,000 tons of oil into the sea, before splitting into two. A major portion of the front part of the massive ship (or the “bow”) has been towed some distance to the south where it has been allowed to sink. The remaining parts lie on the reef, as weather and sea conditions do not permit its disposal. The ship’s 20-member crew has been arrested by the Mauritius authorities, and its captain, Sunil Kumar Nandeshwar, an Indian national, has been charged with endangering safe navigation.
Even without accounting for the Covid-19 pandemic, Mauritius is under-equipped to deal with environmental and economic disasters the marine accident has brought upon the nation. Over the past month, French and Indian marine disaster management personnel have joined their local counterparts in containing the damage, and Japanese and other international experts are to follow in the coming days.