The Next Step for Quad: A Dialogue on High Tech

This article was first published in Hindustan Times. Views are personal.T-12 is the new G-7. We are not talking about your airport boarding gates. T-12, Tech-10, Democracy-10 are some proposed multilateral mechanisms to enable international cooperation in technology governance.Cooperation, however, won’t be easy because there is significant dissonance even amongst democracies on issues such as competition in the digital economy, privacy, and data governance. The European Union (EU) prefers a regulation-heavy approach centred on protecting users’ data; the United States (US) prefers a less-restrictive approach allowing technology companies to gain scale; and India is considering data localisation measures. Such divergent outlooks run the risk of derailing collaboration.

Why India needs two maritime theatres of command, not one

Without doubt, the appointment of a Chief of Defence Staff and the decision to reorganise the armed forces into joint theatre commands are the most significant defence reforms in independent India. The defence ministry and the top military leadership deserve commendation for moving to implement the changes quickly, in the face of multiple challenges: a pandemic, confrontation with China, upsurge in conflict along the western boundaries and a tightening fiscal position. This reorganisation is an extremely rare opportunity to put in place structures, processes and organisational cultures necessary to defend India in the 21st century — for that reason, it is vital to get it all right. As Admiral Arun Prakash, former Chief of Navy Staff and Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee, told me “there will not be a second chance”.Read the full article on ThePrint

Decoding the DC-Brussels-Beijing geopolitical triangle

Joe Biden’s election as the United States (US) president has led to talk of greater coordination between Washington and Brussels over China. In early November, European Union (EU) foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell was quick to call for “a coherent and robust China stance” between the transatlantic allies. Biden, meanwhile, has promised to consult traditional allies to “develop a coherent strategy” on China.Read the full article in Hindustan Times.

V-shaped recovery anticipated, but it's the human capital base of economy that needs care

Macroeconomic winds are blowing favourably as we enter the New Year. Stock markets are at an all-time high. Share price indices are up nearly 60 per cent from their lows of March. The stock market is supposed to be a harbinger of economic times to come, so clearly it is indicating a strong revival. Liquidity in the banking system is more than ample. Interest rates are at multi-decadal lows. The gap between Indian and Western policy rates is the lowest it has been in a long time. Coupled with inflation rates above 6 per cent.Read the full article on Free Press Journal

We must strengthen social trust for truly effective cyber security

Had it not been for over-ambition or arrogance on the part of the hackers—allegedly linked to Russian intelligence agencies—in attacking FireEye, a leading private cyber-security firm, it might have taken the world longer to discover that thousands of government bodies, corporations and even think-tanks around the world had been compromised for months. The culprits had gotten into the target networks by compromising the software update servers of Solarwinds, exploiting the vulnerabilities in the global information technology (IT) supply chain. As the world was dealing with the covid-19 pandemic, the hackers installed back doors, exfiltrated data, and perhaps planted other mischief that we are yet unaware of. The primary targets appear to be in the United States, but systems in several other countries, including India are potentially affected.Read the full piece on Mint

Let 2021 be the Year of Empathy

It has been a helluva year. Full of tragic struggle against a deadly invisible virus. So many loved ones lost, so sudden. Not even being allowed to see the dying patient. Friends and well-wishers reduced to sending heartfelt

condolences by text messages. Of the city’s migrant workers and families walking for a thousand kilometres to their

villages. Because their livelihoods in the city had been shut down.

Read the full article on Mumbai Mirror

China’s Economy May Be ‘Slowing Down’, But Don’t Write Off BRI Yet

Ever since it was launched, there’s been a raging debate about the sustainability of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Conventionally, these conversations take shape depending on where you stand. In other words, depending on one’s ideological and geopolitical prism, BRI is either a grand strategic plan that is reshaping the global political and economic order or an example of Xi Jinping’s hubris, which is leading to overreach, and will eventually collapse under the weight of its own contradictions. A new Financial Times report this week, highlighting a sharp decline in Chinese overseas lending, sparked another such debate.Read the full article in The Quint.

Are Tech Platforms Doing Enough to Combat ‘Super Disinformers’?

This is an excerpt from an op-ed published on TheQuint.

On 2 December, Twitter labeled multiple tweets – including one by the head of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s IT Cell Amit Malviya – which included an edited video clip from the ongoing farm law protests under its Synthetic and Manipulated Media policy.At the time many wondered whether this marked the start of a more interventionist role by the platform in the Indian context or if this application was a one and done.Since then, there have been at least two more instances of the application of this policy.

First, a – now deleted – tweet dated 30 August by Vivek Agnihotri was labelled (archive link) for sharing an edited clip of Joe Biden. It can certainly be debated whether this action was made in the Indian context, because of the user, or in the context of the US, because of the topic.Second, since 10 December, a number of tweets, examples of which can be seen here and here, misrepresenting sloganeering from a 2019 gathering in America as being linked to the current protests against the farm laws, have been labelled as well. This group included a tweet by Tarek Fateh. The reactions to these actions by Twitter have themselves been polarised ranging from celebratory, ‘it is about time’, ‘too little too late’ to accusations of interference in Indian politics by a ‘foreign company’.

The Repeat Super-Disinformer

Some of the accounts affected have large follower bases and high interaction rates, giving them the ability to amplify content and narratives, thus becoming ‘superspreaders.’ A Reuters Institute study on COVID-19 misinformation found that while ‘politicians, celebrities and public figures’ made up approximately 20 per cent of the false claims covered by it, these claims accounted for 80 per cent of the interactions.

They are also not first-time offenders, thus making them ‘repeat disinformers.’ It should be noted that these are also not the only accounts which routinely spread disinformation.Such behaviour can be attributed, in varying degrees, to most parts of the political spectrum and therefore it is also helpful to situate such content using the framework of ‘Dangerous Speech.’This combination creates a category of repeat super-disinformers that play an outsized role in vitiating the information ecosystem at many levels.....

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Is India really closer to achieving sanitation goals?

This article was first published in Deccan Herald. Views are personal.While the whole world is grappling with the COVID-19 pandemic, there is another public health issue which needs to be addressed with equal rigour and that is of sanitation. The WHO, in collaboration with UNICEF, released a report in November, on the state of the world’s sanitation and it paints a grim picture. While the global progress towards achieving sanitation-related sustainable development goals has been rather slow, the report states that India is one of the thirty countries that is on its way to meeting the targets. Last year, on 2^ndOctober, India was declared open defecation free.Read more

Indians debate too much democracy. But there’s not a whimper for ‘too little republic’

The debate that Niti Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant unwittingly triggered over the extent of democracy in India was passionate, lively and largely beside the point. What is of utmost and urgent importance at this time is the plummeting level of rule-of-law and rule-by-law in the country. We have ‘too little republic’ amid growing, even competing majoritarianisms among the population and populisms among its leaders. In fact, I would venture that while a large number of adults in India understand and accept democracy as an important political value, the number of people who know what a republic is and ought to be is much smaller. We celebrate Republic Day with a big military parade in New Delhi and patriotic songs in schools and neighbourhoods, with little realisation of why exactly it is different from, say, Independence Day.Read the full article on ThePrint

Don't take the bat home, yet!

This article was first published in Deccan Herald. Views are personal.In a pre-pandemic world, winters in the Seth household used to be filled with gully cricket. Spending cold weekend mornings at a park with your friends was one of life’s small luxuries for as long as I can remember. More often than not, games would not end organically when everyone was tired and wanted to go home. Instead, they would end when the person who owned the bat decided to leave. No wonder those Dream Eleven IPL ads with Hardik Pandya and Rohit Sharma struck a chord with millions of Indians (including me).

The world is changing. India needs to get its priorities right

With Covid-19, the most common phrase in every webinar on geopolitics is the “new world order”. This phrase is used to describe periods of history with dramatic change in balance of power between nation-states. In its most recent avatar, the new world order has been on the anvil since 2007. China’s hostile and rapid rise, the economic aftermath of the global financial crisis, networked politics over the internet, and most recently the pandemic, together are transforming international politics.Read More at Hindustan Times

A firebrand farmer leader

During the current farmers’ agitation there was much scorn heaped on a farmer who had the audacity to speak in polished English to journalists.

Read more at Mumbai Mirror

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.