Making democracy work with 'active citizenship'

'Dance of democracy’ and ‘festival of democracy’ are some of the catchphrases used for elections in India which are characterised by noisy sloganeering and a festive atmosphere. However, this enthusiasm seems to be restricted to the Parliamentary elections and to a lesser extent to the state Assembly elections. In the last few weeks, Hyderabad saw a high decibel campaign leading up to the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) elections. The campaign was punctuated with mammoth rallies (amidst a pandemic) by several celebrity campaigners, making, among other promises, bizarre statements of ‘rooting out Nizam culture’ and changing the name of Hyderabad to ‘Bhagyanagar’.

Read the full article at Deccan Herald

India Needs a More Transparent Approach To Space Situational Awareness

The recent, barely avoided collision between India’s Cartosat 2F and Russia’s Kanopus V satellites highlights the need for transparent space situational awareness (SSA) in India.Information about the close call only became public after a tweet by Roscosmos – the Russian state space corporation – that went into specifics about the incident. The response of the Indian Space Research Organisation’s chairman K. Sivan makes it clear that India does not publicly discuss such events, and resolves them by coordinating with other space agencies.Read the full article in The Wire

Bharat Bandh — India’s slide into constitutional grey zone where politics decides right or wrong

It is nearly impossible to apply objective constitutional principles to determine rights and wrongs with respect to the ongoing farmers’ protests. And this should concern patriotic Indians.

Ordinarily, coercive public protests and today’s Bharat Bandh cannot be considered constitutional methods and would fall into the category of the “grammar of anarchy” that Dr. B.R. Ambedkar warned us about. But he qualified his disapproval of public protests and satyagraha with the condition that “where constitutional methods are open, there can be no justification for these unconstitutional methods.” Given how the Narendra Modi government pushed through the agricultural reforms in a truncated session of Parliament, and the infinite wisdom and boundless patience of the judges of the Supreme Court, the protesting farmers can reasonably argue that constitutional methods are too unreliable. But then again, how is it justified for farmers — no matter how legitimate their grievances — to block roads and hold up the lives and livelihoods of other people? Shouldn’t the law be enforced to protect the livelihoods and property of innocent people adversely affected by protests and the Bharat Bandh?Read more at ThePrint

A formidable challenge

In the last week of November, the government confirmed that India was officially in a recession, possibly for the first time in modern history. The technical definition of a recession is when the economy contracts for two successive quarters, ie three month periods.Read more at Orissa Post.

Intelligence agencies must track ecological threats and epidemics

After news of an unusual ‘pneumonia’ outbreak was confirmed on 31 December 2019, the Taiwanese government immediately initiated control measures that ensured that the island nation remained relatively unscathed by the covid-19 pandemic. The country of 24 million has suffered a mere 686 cases to date. Public accounts describe Taiwanese authorities as having found out about the Wuhan outbreak on New Year’s Eve from social media platforms that amplified a whistle blown by a mainland Chinese health worker. We should not be surprised, though, if we were to learn that Taiwan’s spooks had already figured out by then that something was afoot in Wuhan, a city that Taipei has intense traffic with. Thanks to the early warning, Taiwan started quarantining passengers starting 1 January 2020 and began investigations that a couple of weeks later uncovered that there was indeed human-to-human transmission of the virus, countering the Chinese government’s claims to the contrary.Read the full article on Live Mint

The union's nose truly in states' tent

When the prime minister announced PM Kisan, which pays Rs 6,000 per farming household per year, it was welcomed by all. It is a direct benefit transfer to those who toil to produce food for us. Where are these farmer households? They are not spread uniformly across the country. So the money from the PM Kisan goes unevenly across different states.Read the full article on Mumbai Mirror 

Novel platform regulation ideas government can adopt

In early November 2020, the Union Government passed a notification stating that news and current affairs content on online platforms would be brought under the jurisdiction and control of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (I&B ministry). This means that the I&B ministry will moderate content on intermediaries, such as social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter), blogging platforms, video hosting platforms (YouTube). At the time, this raised concerns within civil society.This seems like a bad omen for the freedom of speech, expression and the open internet. However, while those concerns may be justified, there has been little talk around the nuts and bolts of what this change might have in store for content on the internet. There is an ambiguous line between regulation and over-regulation in this space, and no policy solution is going to send everyone home happy. Keeping that in mind, it is worth looking at some novel measures the I&B ministry may consider and how they might play out.You can read the full piece in Deccan Herald. Views are personal.This article was written by Nirali Trivedi, student of the GCPP (Tech and Policy) Programme and Rohan Seth, policy analyst, technology. 

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.