World AIDS Day 2020: Despite ambitious global targets, India's progress in AIDS control falls short in a few crucial aspects

This article originally appeared in Firstpost.Since the inception of the National AIDS Control Program in 1992, India has done a commendable job of raising awareness and of bringing down the number of HIV infections. Still, India has a long way to go in terms of achieving her set targets. Today, on World AIDS Day (1 December), is a good time to reflect on the progress India has made in AIDS prevention and control, and the way forward. Read more

Modi govt must sweat in Parliament to avoid bleeding on street. Farmers’ protest shows why

One lesson of civilised, constitutional politics is that the more you sweat in parliament, the less you bleed on the streets (or indeed, the jungles). The Narendra Modi government could have avoided farmer unrest and protests had it adopted a broad-based social consultation process and taken its time to put the farm bills through the parliamentary process. Yes, a number of farmers’ associations, middlemen’s lobbies, and civil society groups would have raised their voices against the changes. Yes, the Congress and other opposition parties would have opposed the bills in Parliament. But the Bharatiya Janata Party is neither short of supporters in the media and the Indian population, nor of seats in Parliament for the Modi government’s reform proposals to fail. Skipping the journey and jumping to the destination merely meant that all stakeholders in the agricultural sector received a shock instead of an explanation, a ready-made decision instead of a hearing, and, in many cases, existential fears instead of positive expectation.Read the full article on ThePrint

Guiding the Strategic Rudder

Political guidance for India’s strategic rudder is being tested by China’s Great Power ambitions. In Ladakh, disengagement and de-escalation remain on ice. An eyeball to eyeball confrontation continues, one that is pregnant with possibilities of sudden eruptions that could dwarf the Galwan incident in terms of force exchange and casualties.The deployment of military forces at the highest state of alert over such extended periods is a recipe for the elements of the accidental, and the inadvertent coalescing in unimaginable ways due to miscommunication, misperception and misjudgement. The deep uncertainty, danger and stress experienced as situational awareness at the individual and collective levels could explode and cause catastrophe in the mountainous terrains of Ladakh. Political rationality on either side may not be able to control escalation that can easily spiral from a minor incident to a major exchange of fire power.Read the full article on the Deccan Herald

Water Cannons Can't Douse Their Anger

In September, the central government passed three laws to give more freedom to farmers. Mind you that agriculture is a state subject and farm policies are best left to individual states, as each state has a different mix of farmer issues and circumstances.Read the full article in the Mumbai Mirror

The wrong way to regulate disinformation

This article originally appeared in Deccan Herald.

When the Kerala Governor signed a controversial Ordinance, now withdrawn, proposing amendments to the Kerala Police Act, there was understandably a significant amount of criticism and ire directed at the state government for a provision that warranted a three-year jail term for intentionally and falsely defaming a person or a group of people. After the backlash, the state’s Chief Minister announced his intention not to implement the fresh amendment.

How not to regulate information disorderFor anyone tracking the information ecosystem and how different levels of state administration are responding to information disorder (misinformation, disinformation and malinformation) this attempted overreach is not surprising. In Kerala alone, over the last few months, we have witnessed accusations from the opposition of ‘Trump-ian’ behaviour on the part of the state administration to decry any unflattering information as ‘fake news’. Even in September, the Chief Minister had to assure people that measures to curb information disorder will not affect media freedom, after pushback against decisions to expand fact-checking initiatives beyond Covid-19 related news. In October, it was reported that over 200 cases were filed for ‘fake news’ in the preceding five months.Of course, this is by no means limited to one state, or a particular part of the political spectrum. Across the country, there have been measures such as banning social media news platforms, notifications/warnings to WhatsApp admins, a PIL seeking Aadhaar linking to social media accounts, as well as recommendations to the Union Home Minister for ‘real-time social media monitoring’. Arrests/FIRs against journalists and private citizens for ‘fake news’ and ‘rumour-mongering’ have taken place in several states.How to regulate information disorder?Before proceeding to ‘the how’, it is important to consider two fundamental questions when it comes to the topic of regulating disinformation. First, should we? Four or five years ago, many people would have said no. Yet, today, many people will probably say yes. What will we say in the four or five years from now? We don’t know. ...For the complete article, go here.

Not the time for RBI to be adventurous. If bank ownership isn’t broken, don’t try to fix it

The Reserve Bank of India’s Internal Working Group startled everyone last week when it recommended that “large corporate/industrial houses may be allowed as promoters of banks only after necessary amendments to the Banking Regulation Act, 1949 (to prevent connected lending and exposures between the banks and other financial and non-financial group entities); and strengthening of the supervisory mechanism for large conglomerates, including consolidated supervision.” In fact, so startling are the words “large corporate/industrial houses may be allowed as promoters of banks…” that you can read the rest of the sentence and the report later.Read the full article in ThePrint

What we don't talk about when we talk about 'Big Tech'

While the world speculates what a Biden administration is likely to look like, those in the technology space, including journalists and researchers, seem to agree that the severe scrutiny of ‘Big Tech’ companies, Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook, is likely to continue. As veteran Silicon Valley journalist Casey Newton asserts on the Ezra Klein Show, a heavy-handed approach to regulating Big Tech, through severe antitrust enforcement, enjoys bipartisan support in the US.Read the full article in Deccan Herald

Don't micromanage

This article was published originally in the Orissa Post. You can read the full article here.

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Nokia was once the world leader in mobile phone handsets. Its largest manufacturing plant was located in Sriperumbudur in India as part of a Special Economic Zone. In a six-year period, it produced more than 500 million handsets, much of them exported. Nokia employed a workforce of 30,000 including employment, and it had a big share of women employees. Nokia was indeed the rockstar example of what it means to make India a manufacturing hub of the world.Read More

China wants a reset with Biden, but won’t change its approach

There has been much debate about why China was slow to acknowledge Joe Biden’s election victory. It took nearly a week after Biden’s victory speech for China’s foreign ministry to issue formal congratulations. Xi Jinping is among the few world leaders who still hasn’t spoken to Biden. Despite that, Beijing has been watching the unfolding political drama in the United States (US) with a sense of cautious optimism.Read the full article in the Hindustan Times.

Nations are hurting themselves in their big fight with Big Tech

This article was originally published in Live Mint. Views are Personal.

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In a recent interview with The Atlantic magazine, Barack Obama described social media as “the single biggest threat to our democracy", arguing that these platforms had destroyed the common narrative necessary for democracy to function. He held tech companies partly responsible, contending that, “The degree to which these companies are insisting that they are more like a phone company than they are like The Atlantic, I do not think is tenable." In the ongoing debate on whether social media companies are platforms or publications, the former US president holds that these companies “are making editorial choices, whether they’ve buried them in algorithms or not" and they can’t cite free speech “to provide a platform for any view that is out there". In his opinion, tackling this challenge to democracy would require both government regulation and changes in the way these companies operate.Read More

Atmanirbharta may come at a price

This article was originally published in Mumbai Mirror. You can read the full piece here.

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Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL), which was formed 20 years ago, has more than 12 crore customers - 10 percent of all the telecom subscribers in the country. In landline connections, it has nearly half of the two crore landline customers in India. Telecom may be lucrative business, but as a company BSNL has been bleeding.Read more

Bursting firecrackers on Diwali isn’t the problem. Making it a national and moral issue is

As I write this, there is a continuous stream of firecrackers outside the window of my Bengaluru apartment: relatively subdued in my immediate vicinity compared to previous years, but nevertheless quite vigorous. It is just as well that the Karnataka government under B.S. Yediyurappa reversed its decision to ban firecrackers — albeit permitting only “green” ones — because it is unlikely that people would have refrained from celebrating Diwali the usual way, and the already overworked police force would have the unhappy task of enforcing a very unpopular rule.Read More

Can the professor be stopped in India?

This article was first published in Deccan Herald. Views are personal.If you binge-watch one show this year, let it be Money Heist. I started (and finished) the crime drama last week and have to say my favourite bits were the phone calls between the Professor and the Spanish law enforcement. In case you don’t know what I am talking about, there is a gang of thieves inside the Spanish Mint with hostages. Their leader (a man called ‘The Professor’) is on the outside, strategising and coordinating things and has to talk to the police ever so often. 

China’s Semiconductor Gold Rush: A Reality Check

The semiconductor industry has become a major front in the US-China tech war. Given that this is a weak link in China’s otherwise impressive technology stack, the US has imposed export controls restricting Chinese semiconductor companies from accessing key equipment, software, and intellectual property.This article was first published in the South China Morning Post. Views are personal. Read more here.

The need for a more direct stimulus

The finance minister announced a stimulus package called Atmanirbhar 3.0, so-called because it was the third in a series. The total rupee value of this stimulus for the economy is 2.65 trillion. A stimulus is supposed to put money in the pocket of the citizen so that he or she can start spending. That is, start buying things like essential goods, clothes, medicines or pay rent.

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Managing India’s Defence Expenditure Requires a Whole-of-Government Approach

"We must do something.This is something.Therefore, we must do this."This logical fallacy, derisively labelled as the politician's syllogism, accurately explains recent developments to contain defence expenditure in the wake of COVID-19. Balancing between development and defence priorities is a tough act even in the best of times. But the unprecedented economic aftermath of COVID-19 has meant that a range of solutions — symbolic, radical, and ill-advised — are all now on the table.Read the full article in ThePrint.

Flawed regulation can undermine the digital payment ecosystem

Anupam Manur writes in Hindustan Times on why the limits placed on Unified Payments Interface (UPI) transactions for third-party apps by NPCI is flawed.Systemic risks are automatically lower when consumers, merchants, and third-party app developers are all multi-homing, meaning they simultaneously use more than one app for the same purpose. The UPI ecosystem is radically substitutable. In the case of failure, consumers and merchants can switch from one app to another without the slightest friction. Though two apps, PhonePe and GPay, dominate the UPI market (with roughly 80% of UPI transactions), consumers are not without choice — there are at least 52 UPI service providers, 189 issuers and around 21 third-party apps. Third-party app developers also can and do have tie-ups with multiple banks simultaneously, such that the YES bank-PhonePe fiasco will not be repeated.Beyond being unnecessary, the rule is also improper, incomplete, and inconsistent. If the aim is to mitigate the systemic risk of failure of one big market player, the rule change should apply to all apps providing UPI services, and not just third-party apps. Is the systemic risk different when the app of a scheduled commercial bank fails as against a third-party app?The entire article can be accessed here

Economy to Decide Ties

Kamala Harris will become the first-ever Vice President of America to have Indian ancestry. Senator Harris' mother Shyamala Gopalan arrived in the United States at the age of 19 to do her PhD in nutrition and endocrinology at the University of California in Berkeley. Harris has maintained her links with her maternal grandparents and other Indian relatives.Read More

EC should allow Biharis in Bengaluru to vote for state polls. US showed every vote matters

Many of those who followed the drama of the US presidential election last week were struck by the seemingly patchy and disorganised manner in which the votes were counted. This also led to the impression that Joe Biden “caught up” with Donald Trump in the four battleground states that ultimately swung the election in favour of the Democrats. A number of Indian commentators took the opportunity to pat themselves on the back by comparing India’s own voting system favourably with that of the United States. As much as these conclusions are right at a superficial level, a deeper look suggests both direct comparisons are misleading and that democracies can learn things from each other.

The US president is not directly elected by the majority of people by design. Indeed, in many recent elections — including in 2016 — the winner of the electoral college has received fewer popular votes than the challenger. It might startle a lot of people — even in the United States — to know that it is a part of their constitutional system. Now it is fairly well known that the founders of the United States paid a lot of attention to prevent accumulation of power in the hands of one person. We have them to thank for the doctrine of separation of powers between the executive, legislature and judiciary. What is less well known is that they also engineered the system in such a way that raw democracy — in terms of majority votes — does not override individual liberties, and does not wreck the federal structure of the United States.

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India should create bubbles of trust with its geopolitical allies

A few months ago, this column had argued that the tech war between the United States and China is being fought across a flexible, porous bamboo curtain, and India’s interests lie in staying out of the Sinosphere while creating circles or bubbles of trust “with the US, Japan, Taiwan, Australia, Singapore and South Korea that will help Indian companies, professionals and consumers find themselves in circles of opportunity." Even if political changes around the world rekindle interest in multilateral approaches to world trade, technology and climate change, New Delhi must prioritise deepening relationships with its geopolitical allies (there, I said the word). Like air bubbles for international travel during the pandemic, first create bubbles of trust bilaterally with strategic partners and then explore whether these can coalesce into larger bubbles that include more countries.Read More