The misleading outrage over 18-hour work days

Congratulations on finishing college! I am writing to you because I want you to be successful. I care for the happiness it will bring you and your family. I also care because the trajectory of your career will determine India’s growth and development. The stakes are high. A couple of recent incidents prompted this letter. Earlier this month, the chief executive officer (CEO) of Bombay Shaving Company was forced to apologize for advising people in their early twenties to put in 18-hour work days for 4-5 years, and work hard. The social media backlash accusing him of promoting a toxic work culture was so strong that he quit that platform entirely.

How India Can Use Technology as a Strategic Tool to Advance Its Interests

In the current Information Age, technology has become a ubiquitous part of every country’s society. Citizens are empowered in a wide range of ways with improved access to technology, states’ economic sectors are transitioning into the digital space, and tech development has been outpacing regulations and governance regularly. This is the era where technology is becoming a strategic tool for the state to drive growth and protect its interests. India, as a fledgling and rising technological power, has the ability to leverage technology for the greater good. The Indian state should now start viewing technology and its adoption from a more strategic lens. But how can India use ‘technology’ to tackle existing problems as well as try to deploy it as a prospective solution in key areas of governance?

After INS Vikrant, India’s next steps should be new carrier, submarines

On 2 September 2022, Prime Minister Narendra Modi presided over the commissioning ceremony of India’s first indigenously built aircraft carrier INS Vikrant. Built by Cochin Shipyard Limited, the event flags a major milestone in India’s journey to the expansion of its maritime power. The achievement is laudable but must not be allowed to mask the point that maritime power is a generic term that encompasses naval, merchant marine capacity and infrastructure assets like ports and inland connectivity. The journey is not only endless but also extremely high in financial outlays. Yet, it is one that has the potential of being offset through economic benefits derived from maritime trade.

Execute Open-Access Mandate for Academia

The United States (US) announced recently that all taxpayer-supported research must be immediately made available to the public at no cost. This will become the norm by the end of 2025. This policy is likely to have worldwide ramifications including India. In the short term, India needs to support its researchers through increased funding and find ways to make Indian publishers globally competitive.

How India Can Use Its G-20 Presidency To Build A Techno-Democratic Alliance

In the year 2023, India will have the opportunity to preside over one of the key international alliances, i.e. G-20. The G-20 remains an elite group of economically and technologically developed nations which control the global economy in the current scenario. India’s presidency next year offers an opportunity for the government to set critical agendas for the group. One of the key areas that India can focus on as part of its presidency can be technology and bringing like-minded states together on the technological front. Considering the primacy of technology in both the economic and foreign policy realm, it is in India’s interest to push for an alliance between techno-democracies to regulate and govern the use of critical technologies in the future.

Xi Jinping’s CCP is daring to go where even Taliban wouldn’t — separate kids from smartphones

The strongest of the four fundamental forces known to modern physics is called, well, the strong force. At the same distance it is 137 times stronger than electromagnetism and 1038 times more powerful than gravity. The strong force keeps sub-atomic particles attached to each other.

Modern physicists who are also modern parents know better. The strongest force in nature is the one that keeps teenagers attached to smartphones.

BrahMos, INS Vikrant have immense capability but also expose India’s short-sightedness

The accidental firing of an unarmed BrahMos missile into Pakistan has resulted in the sacking of three Air Force officers. In all probability, the speed and mode of delivering justice, within five months of the incident, must have been guided by the imperatives of secrecy.

While the accident could not have occurred without the failure of safety systems at multiple levels, human error must have been the prime culprit. Moreover, it was not a combat situation where the psychological impact of danger and uncertainty could have fuelled the error, which was the case in the accidental shooting down of an Mi-17 helicopter in Kashmir, a day after the Balakot air strike, that resulted in the death of six IAF personnel and one civilian. Two IAF officers were punished.

Create a Nitipath for the civil service

At the heart of the Indian republic’s inability to deliver basic public services to its citizens is its chronic inability to address the shortfall in administrative capacity. In the past two decades, political leaders and policy analysts have chosen to side-step the complex problem of administrative reform and instead, used innovative methods like privatisation, public-private partnerships and technology to deliver public services. At the same time, philanthropy, corporate social responsibility (CSR) funds and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have stepped in to provide a variety of public services — schooling, healthcare, nutrition, skill development and social security — that the state ought to have provided, but is unable to.

The Chip4 Alliance Might Work on Paper, But Problems Will Persist

U.S. President Joe Biden recently added his signature to the CHIPS and Science Act 2022, officially enacting legislation on emerging technologies, especially semiconductors. Apart from focusing on building the United States’ semiconductor manufacturing capabilities, the legislation makes a note of the U.S. cooperating with like-minded allies to build a robust semiconductor supply chain. One such alliance is speculated to be the Chip4 Alliance, which would comprise the U.S., Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan, a partnership proposed by Washington in March. U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s recent meeting with semiconductor industry leaders in Taiwan has accelerated conversations about this new U.S.-Asian semiconductor partnership.

Lessons from the Past on the Threat of a Nuclear War

As Russian tanks moved into Ukraine on February 24, President Vladimir Putin warned the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) that any attempt to intervene could lead to “consequences they have never seen”. Days later, Russia changed the alert status of its nuclear forces in a symbolic yet ominous move. The Russia-Ukraine war is one symptom of a changing international system, with a public nonchalance toward nuclear weapons. That disregard is in contrast to 40 years ago.

India must look China in the eye at Vostok 2022. Retain presence, but signal distance

India’s participation in multinational military exercises often reflects the imperative for it to walk a tightrope across the global geopolitical divide. However, the deepening and expanding friction points of the global divide are posing greater challenges for India’s ability to maintain a strategic posture that seeks context and issue-based cooperation. For more than two decades, India has carried out bilateral and multilateral military exercises with the US, China, Russia and a long list of nations mainly from Europe and Asia. It is no surprise that as the three-week-long, 13th Indo-US Joint Special Forces Exercise Vajra Prahar 2022 is underway in Himachal Pradesh, there are unconfirmed reports of India’s participation in the Russian-hosted Vostok 2022 slated from 30 August to 5 September.

India@75: How India’s Health Report Since Independence Has Been Creditworthy

We are now in the third decade of the 21st century, seventy-five years after India gained Independence. In these years, the country has progressed in more sectors than one. The improvements across several health indicators are tremendous. These stories have been a result of conscious efforts towards achieving the goal of “Health for all”. As India heads towards becoming a superpower, it is important to look at the advancements we have made in the health sector.

Raising air power violation is China’s mind game. India’s challenge is to call the bluff

Concerns of air power violations in Ladakh entered the doors of military talks between India and China in early August 2022. Both sides blamed each other of violating the 1996 Agreement on Confidence-Building Measures along the Line of Actual Control. The agreement stipulates that combat aircraft, which includes fighter, bomber, reconnaissance, military trainer, armed helicopter and other armed aircraft, shall not fly within 10 km of the LAC. In order to control escalation, establishing a separate hotline or leveraging existing ones is going to be explored as the way forward. However, to expect that a hotline can cope with the speed of fighter aircraft is an illusion. At best, it can serve as a mechanism to exchange information, after the incident.

What a Taiwan Crisis Means for the Global Chip Race

With the Chinese state showcasing aggressive responses to Nancy Pelosi’s recent Taiwan visit, one begins to wonder whether another Taiwan Straits Crisis is on the horizon. A question to address in case of another crisis is the effect it might have on the global semiconductor and electronics supply chain. With the world slowly recovering from a chip shortage and the industry ramping up supply to pre-pandemic levels, can we afford another supply chain shock to the industry? With Taiwan and China being integral aspects of the global semiconductor ecosystem, how will increased cross-strait tensions affect the industry? If there is eventually a military offensive launched, what will the end result look like for the industry?

Nation Building Lessons from a Bollywood Song

Perhaps the most inspiring lines celebrating India, as evergreen as they are rousing, are from a Hindi film made just 13 years after Independence. In the title song of Ram Mukherjee’s Hum Hindustani (1960), Usha Khanna, Prem Dhawan and Mukesh earnestly persuade us Indians to forget the tired old matters of the past, and shape a collective new narrative for a new era. “Chhodo kal ki batein, kal ki baat purani/Naye daur mein likhenge, mil kar nayi kahaani, hum Hindustani!".

SMIC’s New 7nm Chip Should Worry West — But There’s A Way Out

There were recent reports that Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC), China’s biggest semiconductor foundry and fabrication facility has developed a chip using a 7nm technology node indigenously. The new chip, a leading-edge node (in terms of the number of transistors fitted on the chip itself) as per the TechInsights report, has been developed by SMIC for MinerVa Semiconductor, a semiconductor design company registered in Canada but with Chinese directors at the helm. The chip has been specifically designed and manufactured for the mining of the cryptocurrency, Bitcoin. The report also suggests that SMIC plans to use the process technology to develop other products at the same node in the future.

SPARSH Will Make Defence Pension Digital, but Problems Won’t Disappear

The management of defence pensions has been taxing the capabilities of the Ministry of Defence for decades. The implementation of the One Rank One Pension or OROP) scheme has turned into a legal and bureaucratic battleground. Some ex-Servicemen have locked horns with the Executive and the Judiciary, but justice remains elusive. Even the refixing of pension every five years that was due in 2019 has not been done. The reasons for the delay are revealing of the awkward consequences brought about by the interplay of multiple actors.

The Ministry of Defence (MoD), it is said, has not refixed the pensions on the due date since the issue was sub-judice. An unrepresentative group of ex-Servicemen had filed a case in the Supreme Court that the MoD was violating the OROP principle by replacing it with ‘One rank multiple pensions’ for persons with the same length of service. On 16 March 2022, the court dismissed the case and directed the re-fixation to be carried out from 1 July 2019 and arrears paid within three months.

In Fight Against Monkeypox, Covid, Indoor Ventilation is a Key Tool in Reducing Risk of Infection

We are facing an ever increasing caseload of Covid-19, which has reached 20,000 new cases every day. There is also an additional threat of monkeypox, which has been detected in India and has been declared a Global Health Emergency. Countries such as India and the UK have even advised airborne precautions pointing towards a risk of easy spread through respiratory droplets. Although, not as easily as Covid-19.

Masks, social distancing and vaccinations are existing tools, which are helping us fight Covid-19 and monkeypox. One important tool that we as a country have not used is indoor ventilation. Indoor ventilation means putting outdoor air inside and removing indoor air to reduce the risk of infection.

The Coming Battle for Taiwan

A very good way to get a handle on the geopolitical developments in the Indo Pacific—and the current Taiwan crisis—is to pay attention to what the Communist Party of China’s leaders have been declaring for decades. They want to reunify the country both to recover from two centuries of humiliation by Western powers and to finish the civil war that started nearly a hundred years ago. China will then retake its rightful place as a global power. Presumably, this will be within an international order where it is the peerless Middle Kingdom surrounded by tributaries whose fortunes depend on Beijing’s goodwill.

For India-US iCET Partnership, China Is One of Many Challenges

Recently, two of the world’s established technological powers, the United States (US) and India, decided to further bolster their positions by enhancing cooperation in the technology domain. US President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s meeting resulted in the announcement of the Initiative on Critical and Emerging Technologies (iCET) to expand the existing partnership between the two states in specific strategic technology sectors. The concept of building tech alliances with the help of like-minded techno-democracies has brought together multiple states in the recent past. The iCET looks like just an extension of the existing bilateral cooperation in the technology sector between the two countries.