DCGI’s Covaxin ‘approval’ is political jumla. It reinforces idea of Modi’s Atmanirbhar Bharat

Other than to the highly credulous, it is pretty obvious that the Drugs Controller General of India’s ‘approval’ for Bharat Biotech’s indigenous vaccine candidate, Covaxin, was announced for extra-scientific reasons. It has neither completed Phase 3 clinical trials, nor has the safety and efficacy data been published. In fact, the drug regulator has not so much approved the vaccine for general public use, but rather granted permission for “restricted use in emergency situation in public interest as an abundant precaution, in clinical trial mode…”.

Again, other than to the highly credulous, it is pretty obvious that such an ‘approval’ was announced alongside that of the Serum Institute’s Covishield for political reasons. The Narendra Modi government did not want to lose the opportunity to score political points: that India has produced an indigenous vaccine under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

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No matter what Bharat Biotech says, Covaxin is just not ready for approvals

Bharat Biotech got an approval for its COVID-19 vaccine and along with it came a lot of flak from critics who believe that the process was rushed for no valid reason. Dr Krishna Ella, the founder and chairman of Bharat Biotech, retaliated blaming everyone from the media to rival vaccine makers, except that his arguments hold no water.The drug regulator's approval for any new drug or vaccine is based on the understanding that the drug or vaccine's benefits outweigh its risks. However, considering that he admitted that Phase-III trials are still underway, there is no final estimate of Covaxin’s efficacy, and without that number, the approval should not have been granted.Benefits like how effective the vaccine is in preventing disease, and risks such as high mortality rate if the vaccine is not given or vaccine side-effects, are critical data that inform the approval. (Read more)

Having survived 2020 is in itself a cause for celebration

The welcome to the new year was wishfully cheerful, riding more on hope than on evidence. The economic data that is coming out is still mixed, yet hopeful. But to have survived 2020 is itself a cause for celebration. Disease, death, economic destruction and yet resilience, fortitude and determination is how most people experienced the last year. Most of the country, for much of 2020, was in lockdown mode, which was progressively diluted.The lockdown is still operative in many States. It has affected jobs, income and livelihoods, especially in the informal sector. The plight of the urban migrant workers in the country is now well known, and was even mentioned by the Prime Minister in his radio address. The rural economy turned out to be their saviour. The adverse economic impact on small and medium businesses has been severe. The exact detailed economic picture of India’s vast informal sector becomes clear only with a lag.Read the full article in the Free Press Journal

The big convergence challenge that we face in this new decade

We enter the third decade of this millennium amid rising doubts, risks and worries about technology, markets, nationalism, democracy and the world order. The unqualified enthusiasm for them that we saw in the past two decades has given way to concerns about what their right dosage is, and what, if any, are the antidotes should we have willy-nilly overdosed on any of them. This is good. Societies that try to answer them truthfully and thoughtfully can expect to emerge stronger and more successful in 2030. For public policy, as for investors and value creators, the opportunities and risks lie at the intersection of technology, health, society and geopolitics.Read the full article in The Mint

India, China and the Proverbial 13-year gap that is widening

Two years ago, the Chinese people celebrated 40 years of the launch of their economic reforms. The achievement of this period is breath-taking.

Read the full article on Times of India

Why blocking Sci-Hub will actually hurt national interest

Earlier this month, three foreign academic publishers sued two foreign websites for copyright infringement in a case before the Delhi High Court. Elsevier, Wiley, and American Chemical Society, among the world’s largest publishers of academic papers, wanted the court to block Sci-Hub and LibGen, the largest providers of ‘free downloads’ of their content in India. This case is important because it can have a significant impact on the broader research, academic and education environment in India.Read More on ThePrint

Amazon, Facebook, Google and the question of trust

In the season of Secret Santa, and last-minute Christmas shopping or new year’s gifts, the option of shopping with e-commerce is a godsend.

Read the full article on Mumbai Mirror

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

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

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.

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

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

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).

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