Go Easy on Amazon and Flipkart

The FDI in e-commerce policy clarifications made by the DIPP was done in order to help the small retailers from getting exploited at the hands of the big e-commerce players. While it may help them in the short run, an atmosphere that is not conducive to investment in this sector is bound to hurt them in the long run.Both Amazon and Flipkart have planned to approach the government together to reconsider these provisions. If they fail to convince the government, they will shrink the size of their future investments. This can have a significant negative effect on the entire e-commerce sector and can lead to job losses due to the closing of their private labels. Not to mention the loss of the number of jobs they would have created by their extension plans. Cities in the US are fighting with each other to provide incentives and attract Amazon’s second headquarters, while the Indian government is driving away from the investment.Finally, the decision is bound to hurt the Indian consumers. By limiting the number of discounts given by the private labels, the consumers will have to pay a higher price for their purchases. It will also reduce the variety of goods that are available to the consumers for online purchases.Vertical integration can have anti-competitive practices but can be dealt with in a far more efficient manner than outright bans on such operations. Antitrust authorities across the world have tools to recognise and prevent practices that can hurt consumers and small retailers. The competition commission can be given the mandate to develop these tools and implement them instead of killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.Finally, this would also be the right time to revisit the policy of not allowing FDI in multi-brand retail. The parochial fears of potential harm to small retailers are overplayed in the public discourse. All of the small retailers in question have benefited massively from the presence of these platforms. They are now able to reach an unimaginable number of customers because of the platform. Similarly, multi-brand retail can have a massive positive effect on economic growth and job creation.Read More

We Live in Multiple Neighbourhoods

2018 was the year when India looked beyond Pakistan and South Asia. Let 2019 be the year when India reimagines itself as an important node in several neighbourhoods.Read the full article on Pragati here.

China and the Kerch Strait

The UN Security Council held an emergency meeting on Monday to discuss escalating tensions between Russia and Ukraine following Sunday’s incident in the Kerch Strait. According to the Ukrainian Navy, Russian forces fired upon its vessels, injuring at least three sailors. Russian forces then reportedly captured three Ukrainian vessels along with 23 crew members. Moscow claims the vessels had entered Russian waters, failed to follow laid down protocols, and engaged in “provocative” actions.During Monday’s meeting in New York, Nikki Haley, the US’s UN representative, described the incident as a case of “reckless Russian escalation” and “aggression.” European Council President Donald Tusk has assured that the EU stands united behind Ukraine. In contrast, China’s deputy permanent representative to the UN Wu Haitao called for “restraint” and emphasised the Chinese approach of “objectivity and impartiality” in relation to Russia-Ukraine tensions. Wu further added that “China respects the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all countries including Ukraine.” Wu’s remarks underscore the delicate balance that Beijing is seeking to strike in terms of deepening its ties with Russia while distancing itself from Putin’s foreign policy adventurism. In this context, Sunday’s incident presents Beijing with a set of pitfalls and opportunities.Read More

The Xinjiang Playbook

To blunt criticism about its policies in the Xinjiang region, the Chinese Communist Party has adopted a set of measures ranging from denial to opinion management.

A cursory scan through Chinese State media talks about the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region as a place that’s becoming more secure, where tourism is booming, infrastructure is getting upgraded and poverty is reducing. That’s the Xinjiang that Beijing wants the world to talk about. Unfortunately for the Chinese leadership, that hasn’t been the case over the past few months.In mid-August, experts from the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination questioned the policies adopted by the Chinese Party-state with regard to the Uighur population in Xinjiang. Members of the committee argued that there had been credible reports that, “upwards of a million people were being held in so-called counter-extremism centres and another two million had been forced into so-called ‘re-education camps’ for political and cultural indoctrination.” All this, of course, is being done in the name of stability and combating extremism and terrorism.Situated in northwestern China bordering the stans to the west, Xinjiang is home to over 11.3 million ethnic Uighurs. These are largely Muslims of Turkic origin, who have their own language and culture. The region is also home to roughly one-third of China’s natural gas and oil reserves, along with key mineral deposits. In addition, Xinjiang is the Belt and Road Initiative’s gateway to the West. Given this, stability and integration i.e. policing and sinicisation, have been key planks of the Communist Party’s policies in Xinjiang. These assumed greater significance as the security situation in the region deteriorated early in President Xi Jinping’s first term and in the backdrop of the escalating conflict in Syria.Read more here>

Empowerment and Fragility

Zeynep Tufecki’s book, Twitter and Tear Gas, is an insightful analysis of the impact of social media on protests and social movements in today’s radically networked societies.

Most of the commentary about the role of social media in creating political communities either glorifies these media platforms (think Arab Spring) or vilifies them for their propensity to spread fake news and to create echo chambers (think Trump’s election campaign). Zeynep Tufecki’s book, Twitter and Tear Gas, however, provides a much-needed nuanced analysis on how digital platforms have altered the way in which a social movement’s dynamics play out. With the aim of understanding the challenges and strengths of digital activism, Tufecki tells a fascinating story of how social media empowers protests while simultaneously also exacerbating the fragilities of these movements.It is well known by now that the primary strength of networked public protests is the speed with which a large number of people and resources can be mobilised. This is because social media makes it easy to find people who share your political viewpoints even across geographical boundaries. What is not obvious, however, is that the speed and ease of participation also become a weakness of the networked movements. This is because ad hoc planning doesn’t allow for building capacities among protesters, which is needed to sustain a movement in the long-term. Often this results in the networked movements facing a tactical freeze in the face of changing circumstances.Read more here>

C is for Cyber

Susan Landau’s Listening In is an encyclopedia of cyber security, but misses out on the opportunity to set the stage for policy dialogue.

After the San Bernadino terrorist shootings of 2015, the FBI recovered an iPhone belonging to one of the attackers. FBI and Apple Inc came to loggerheads when Apple declined the FBI’s request to create software that would unlock the security protection on the iPhone. FBI wanted “exceptional access” to be built into the encryption systems on Apple’s iPhone, using the pretext of national security. However, Apple argued that in an age of cyber attacks, weakening of security should be the last thing to do, even if that means that the data of terrorists and criminals remain hidden from law enforcement. The basis of Apple’s argument was that security loopholes would be eventually found and exploited by hackers, presumably causing more harm to national security.Using the above case as the background for her book Listening In Cyber Security in an Insecure Age, Susan Landau, a cryptography and cybersecurity expert, studies the clash between the individual’s need for privacy and the law enforcement agencies’ need for access to information. Landau unequivocally bats for not weakening security standards, even if that makes government investigations difficult. She sets the stage for her argument for stronger encryption standards by narrating one example after another of cyber espionage, exploits and attacks, and how these have been getting more sophisticated over time. She traces the first cyber espionage to 1986. With the involvement of the CIA, KGB, and a student in Germany hacking into systems at an energy research lab at Berkeley, this story makes for a fascinating read.Read more here>

Get Criminals Out Of Politics

To break the nexus of crime and politics in India, we should not wait until the conviction of accused candidates. Other solutions exist.

With less than 24 hours to go for the assembly elections in the state of Karnataka, the topic of the criminal backgrounds of various candidates is back in focus. A recent report by the Association of Democratic Reforms (ADR) reveals that 391 of the 2655 candidates face criminal charges, and 254 of these face charges of a serious nature. All three major parties, namely BJP, Congress, and JDS, have such candidates on their party tickets.Of course, a criminal complaint is not proof of guilt. The Representation of the Peoples Act (RPA), 1951 states that a person cannot be debarred from contesting elections nor expelled from the parliament or legislative assembly unless s/he is convicted with a jail term of two years or more. However, there are multiple stages between the filing of a criminal complaint and a court judgment that merit consideration.After a criminal complaint is filed, usually in the form of an FIR with the police, there are at least three stages before a court of law begins the hearings. First comes the investigation conducted by the police or other competent authorities, during which they evaluate the merits of the complaints and collect evidence. Next, the investigating authority files a charge sheet with the court. Third, the court studies the charge sheet and appropriately frames charges against the accused. It is only then that the prosecution and defence lawyers begin arguing the case before a judge.Read more here>

Unpacking China’s Social Credit System

The Chinese social credit system has to contend with many challenges and has implications far beyond social control.

Ever since it was formally announced in 2014, China’s proposed Social Credit System (SCS) has attracted much media attention. Reports have frequently ranged from painting it as an Orwellian nightmare to a dystopian fantasy, with most commentaries viewing the policy purely from the prism of social control.While the SCS can indeed be located as an initiative in the tradition of Chinese government efforts at maintaining social order and ensuring public compliance of policies, reducing it to merely a surveillance tool doesn’t do justice to the ambitious scope of this initiative.The SCS is about much more than surveillance and loyalty. It is, in fact, fundamentally linked to the Chinese economy and its transformation to being more market driven. So while nudging persons to adopt desirable behaviour and actions and enhancing social control are all part of the story, there are larger drivers of this policy. Moreover, the implications of the SCS are not just limited to Chinese citizens or within China’s territorial boundaries.Read more here>

No, The World Isn’t Heading Towards a Cold War

The Cold War construct is neither sufficient nor instructive in understanding the changes that are afoot in the international order.

Walking into the foreign ministry press conference on December 19th last year, Hua Chunying was her stoic self. As she stood before the crowd of reporters, with the blue and white map of the world depicting China at its center behind her, she spelt out Beijing’s position on the US administration’s new National Security Strategy. The document had identified China, along with Russia, as a “competitor,” “rival” and “revisionist power.” This marked a significant shift in Washington’s strategic posture as it pertains to Beijing. In response, America, Hua said, must “abandon outdated notions such as a Cold War mentality.”Alas, the Cold War is in vogue these days. A quick internet search will lead to a plethora of pieces, from alarmist to analytical, discussing the contours of an emerging Cold War between China and the US.^[1]The meat of such analyses is the understanding that China’s rapid rise coupled with the relative decline of the West is leading to tectonic changes in the world order.This is manifesting in China becoming more authoritarian internally and assertive globally, via growing business and investment ties, deepening socio-political linkages across countries, expanding hard power capacity and projecting its system as an alternative governance model vis-a-vis liberal democracy. All of this is occurring at a time when the West is still struggling economically while suffering from a crisis of faith, with fundamental values, such as free trade, respect for human rights, international cooperation and commitment to multiculturalism under pressure from conservative and right wing forces.Read more here>

Where is the Nudge Unit?

The government had promised to use the insights of behavioural economics to shape public policy. This budget revealed no signs of it.

As some of us might remember, in September 2016, it was announced with much fanfare that the government think tank NITI Aayog was going to set up a “Nudge Unit” on the lines of the Behavioural Insights Team in the UK. It was reported that NITI Aayog had tied up with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) to go about changing behaviours of people. The policies that were supposedly going to benefit from this nudge unit were the flagship programmes of the current government — Swachh Bharat Mission, Jan Dhan Yojana, Digital India, etc.In delivering his Union Budget speech today, the Finance Minister has laid out the priorities of the Union Government for the next year. However, Mr Jaitley did not mention anywhere that this Government will spend any money and effort on incorporating behavioural insights into public policy.It’s impossible to know whether NITI Aayog’s Nudge Unit has been set up and what it is working on. Neither the NITI Aayog website nor the BMGF website has any information that hints at setting up of such a unit. What is more, in February 2017, the Government had cut its ties with BMGF on a health mission due to an apparent conflict of interest. We do not know how that incident affected BMGF’s promise to fund the nudge unit.Read more here>

On Sale: Your Vote

Our data, taken without our consent, can be used for informational warfare that harms our democracy.

The Cambridge Analytica (CA) controversy has captured international mindspace over the last two days. In an interview with the Guardian, Christopher Wylie, the whistleblower at CA, laid bare the facts of how the company, under the influence of Steve Bannon (Donald Trump’s former chief strategist and former executive chairman of Breitbart) and Robert Mercer (an AI billionaire and Republican donor) used data from social media for “information warfare”. Wylie claims that over 50 million Facebook user profiles were harvested under false pretences, and then used for ballot box gains in the 2016 US presidential elections.People not only share and like things on social media, but often participate in “free” quizzes and personality tests that let these social media companies gather data on their personal and ideological preferences. The analysed data can  then used for commercial purposes, by either directly displaying ads and news tailored to particular demographic groups, or by further passing this data (knowingly or otherwise) to analytics companies like CA. The data analytics firms combine data from multiple sources and, using highly advanced algorithms, can generate sophisticated psychological profiles at group and individual levels. They can sell these to anyone who stands to profit from exploiting this data. These profiles are powerful tools, and can be used for tactical and strategic purposes against one’s opponent, or for spreading propaganda and fake news to influence  susceptible people. Thus ensues “information warfare”.Read more here>