Commentary
Find our newspaper columns, blogs, and other commentary pieces in this section. Our research focuses on Advanced Biology, High-Tech Geopolitics, Strategic Studies, Indo-Pacific Studies & Economic Policy
Digital health cooperation with Israel is in India’s health interest
By Shambhavi Naik and Gedaliah AftermanIndia’s dramatic surge in COVID-19 cases has refocused the local debate on the mismatch between demand and supply of medical services across the country. This discrepancy is aggravated by local lockdowns impeding access to doctors and fear of infection, as people are encouraged to seek medical attention at home. Pleas on social media have demonstrated the need to use digital tools to address issues of information asymmetry and access of health services in non-urban areas.Noticeably, countries have been able to direct their existing digital health solutions to augment their health infrastructure to respond quickly to COVID-19. Israel, which this week removed most COVID-19 related restrictions, is an excellent example of deploying digital health solutions. India can collaborate strategically with Israel to develop capacity in digital health, in preparation for future pandemics.India’s experiments in recent years with adopting digital health have led to mixed responses. Challenges include lack of digital infrastructure in non-urban areas, language barriers, and the absence of basic health services in remote areas. Thus, a blanket one-size-fits-all approach to digital health adoption is unlikely to work in India.Instead, a tiered approach or ground up building of infrastructure is required. Nonetheless, it is important to build to this goal, as digital health tools can help close several current gaps in healthcare. Electronic health records (EHR) maintained in an inter-operable manner, as envisioned under India’s Data Empowerment and Protection Architecture (DEPA), can reduce diagnostic costs and ease access to a patient’s health history for medical professionals. Such records can also form the basis for health information exchange, where EHR from remote areas can be sent to specialist doctors for their opinion.Telemedicine can be used by doctors to patients or consult amongst his peers. COVID-19 has highlighted the importance of developing telemedicine services even in urban centers, so that patients can continue receiving health services without endangering their lives. In addition, diagnostic tools such as wearables can enable real-time monitoring of patient’s health data, leading to more effective decision-making by medical professionals.While these tools cannot replace core medical functions, they can supplement operations and increase medical outreach. The implementation process is however accompanied by concerns about consent mechanisms for data acquisition, storage, and possible cybersecurity threats. Successful implementation of digital health therefore depends on an ecosystem that fosters not only innovation, but also trust and an adequate formulation of appropriate policies to govern digital health.Extending the India-Israel partnershipTo effectively plan and implement digital health policies, governments can learn from each other and work together. Furthermore, only by creating long-lasting cooperative structures and partnerships can they effectively prepare for future crises. Israel and India offer a particular case in point.Israel has actively engaged digital health tools in its public health service and is well placed to share its experience and knowhow with international partners. Under the aegis of Healthcare Israel, it has already provided professional assessments on health care programs in Africa, Asia, and Europe.Israel has successfully deployed digital health tools, but its population and infrastructural challenges are relatively small. On the other hand, India’s adoption of digital tools is still in its infancy, and choosing the right partner can help it expedite this growth. Both stand to benefit from increased cooperation in this field: India can provide an opportunity for Israel to trial technologies at scale in preparation for their international deployment. An effective way to achieve this, while safeguarding rights and health of Indian citizens, would be to create “regulatory sandboxes,” where innovators can trial promising solutions in a controlled environment under a regulator’s supervision. In exchange, Israel’s innovative capabilities make it a highly suitable partner for India.A good starting point for such a collaboration would be to map technologies for preventive healthcare. Point-of-care diagnostics and screening, as just one example, can help in the early detection of cancer and early intervention, which would not only save lives but also reduce the demand for tertiary healthcare and the costs of surgical treatments. Collectively gathered population-level data could inform on developing infectious disease outbreaks, underpinning a health response to prevent further spread. Such preventive strategies would provide relief to strained health resources and allow their effective use, even as India builds up more capacity.Increased investment in health infrastructure, legislation safeguarding the privacy of citizens, and the strengthening of the health regulator are three key actions that are critical for the successful adoption of digital health in both Israel and India. Creating this ecosystem can not only enable government-to-government collaboration, but also facilitate the growth of the domestic and international private sectors providing digital health services. Private sector participation will underline greater outreach of health services, contributing to improved health outcomes.The ongoing COVID-19 outbreak has demonstrated the urgency of increased international cooperation to protect global health interests. No country can be safe from a pandemic unless all countries have adequate, accessible, and affordable healthcare. Therefore, it is a national and global interest for India, Israel, and others to use this opportunity to collaborate and lead the way in creating world-class products and services that can benefit all.Download this article as a pdf.Authors: Shambhavi Naik (PhD) is the Head of Research at the Takshashila Institution Gedaliah Afterman (PhD) is Head of the Asia Policy Program at the Abba Eban Institute for International Diplomacy.
What Pegasus says about Cyber Power and our National Security
E-commerce: Don’t let Protectionism Drive Policy
Deniability is Pegasus Scandal’s Strongest Suit. And National Security is the Biggest Price
The storm of the recent Pegasus spyware episode raging in the international and domestic media discourses could have varied consequences for diverse constituencies. The revelations, led by Amnesty International, has India keeping company with Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Morocco, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Togo, and the United Arab Emirates. The list was promptly denied by the NSO Group — the Israeli corporate entity that marketed the spyware. Deniability revealed itself as the strongest suit of Pegasus.
Amnesty’s efforts cannot provide the sinews for legal challenges but they will fan political storms in democracies and India is the only one on the list. This should be a matter of concern. The heart of the issue is the possibility of abusing power in the garb of national security. The abuse lies in the feasibility of illegal deprivation of human rights, especially the right to privacy. Illegal, because snooping is supposedly being done without the due process of law.Read the full article in ThePrint
‘Gray zone’ intrigue may derail Russia-Japan cooperation
Read the Full Text of the Article on Asia Times Rightly or wrongly, Moscow may interpret recent events as ‘war by other means’ waged by US ally JapanRussia and its adversaries are equally obsessed with a full spectrum of “gray zone” activities, including high-tech military, industrial and corporate espionage. While Russia does not see Japan as an adversary, it feels uncomfortable with Japan’s close ties to the US.The contemporary Russia-Japan relationship is complicated, with worrying trends signaling possible derailment of their bilateral ties in some fields.While the direction of great-power relations is rightly gauged from policy moves and summits, the shadowy world of espionage and spies, while overtly aligned with policy and polity, covertly operates to secure national interests, making no concessions, even to allies.Over the past few weeks, a curious case of alleged espionage has been grabbing headlines in Japan. Kazuo Miyasaka, the 70-year-old former owner of a technical research firm, was reportedly apprehended by the police for allegedly passing on high-tech military secrets to a member of the Russian trade representative mission in Japan.Miyasaka is believed to have betrayed secrets related to the US Space Force’s unmanned X-37B spacecraft, among other advanced systems.Read the Full Text of the Article on Asia Times All views are personal and do not reflect the recommendations of the Takshashila Institution
How to Beat China in the High-Tech Race
The near-daily cadence of reports highlighting China's growing technology prowess has set the cat among the pigeons in many democracies. In response, these countries are now offering higher subsidies and fatter incentives to increase the competitiveness of their own technology industries.
The US Senate, for instance, passed a $250 billion Innovation and Competition bill on 8th June aimed at outpacing China. The Indian government, since last year, has launched Product Linked Incentive (PLI) schemes for 13 sectors worth ₹2 trillion, some of them targeted at high-tech industries such as semiconductors, telecom, and networking. Earlier this month, a draft growth strategy of the Japanese government also promised generous financial incentives to attract cutting-edge chip-making facilities. Not to be left behind, the EU, too, has announced a €145 billion plan to upgrade its semiconductor and electronics manufacturing.
While the intent is encouraging, it's interesting to note that all these plans are qualitatively quite similar to China's 'Made in China 2025' — a state-led industrial policy for technology. Released in 2015, it was labelled as a threat to global trade for channelling state subsidies to achieve import substitution. But now, many countries seem to be following a similar approach. Of course, China's subsidies are often discriminatory and place extreme restrictions on foreign investment. Even so, all these policies mirror China's at their core — they are all about using old-style industrial policy instruments such as subsidies and incentives to achieve high-tech self-sufficiency.Read the full article in Times of India. Views are personal
Cyber Threats now sit alongside Nuclear Ones
The US-Russian meeting in Geneva on 15 June signified an attempt by both sides to arrest the pace of a worsening relationship. The US, as the aggrieved party, accused the Russians of cyberattacks. US President Joe Biden handed over a list of 16 ‘critical infrastructure’ entities and warned that if they were attacked, the US will respond in a ‘cyber way’. Russian President Vladimir Putin denied culpability for any attacks and held the US responsible for several malicious cyber campaigns in Russia. Both parties have, however, agreed to the creation of working groups for urgent arms control and cyber issues.
Cyber now sits alongside nuclear threats, and it is definitely a promotion in the value chain of strategic affairs. The US is concerned and there are good reasons for it. India should be too.
What the COVID-19 Second Wave tells us about Twitter
The Covid-19 pandemic has given us several painful images in the last two years. During the first wave, the image that stayed with us was of migrant workers walking inhuman distances in the wake of an arbitrary national lockdown.During the second wave, the enduring image has been that of our social media feeds awash with desperate calls for help. Yet, amidst the shortage of critical medical equipment and the overflowing of cremation grounds, one cannot help but be struck by the great altruism and activism of thousands of regular social media users.Read the full article on Indian Express
Has the world of work changed forever?
This article was first published in Deccan Herald. Views are personal.We are so far into this pandemic that I, along with most people around me, seem to have forgotten what the world looked like before the apocalypse. The Seth household (like a lot of other people) is pretty dependent on Netflix and Amazon Prime for entertainment. Every so often, while binging a TV show, we come across a scene that seems like it belongs in a different reality. Last week, while streaming The Office, I found it hard to imagine working from a common shared space with my colleagues. I have commuted to and from offices for most of my professional life and have sat in more meetings than I can count. Meetings are one thing I do not miss from before the pandemic. When in an office, meetings can stretch for hours on end. Sometimes they serve as a direct proxy to how productive your colleagues perceive you to be. They also required you to be physically present with your expressions visible and did not leave a lot of scope for you to get other work done. I distinctly remember a colleague saying to me in Delhi’s scorching heat, “Hum log office kaam karne ke liye nahi aate, meetings karne ke liye aate hain. Kaam to ghar pe karna hota hai” (We don’t come to the office to work, we come here to attend meetings. You are supposed to get work done on your own time). Enter 2020, and the world was thrust into the largest work from home experiment in the history of civilisation. Commutes became non-existent, and meetings became long conference calls on Zoom and MS Teams. You no longer had to drop everything to attend meetings, no longer had to show your face and expressions to colleagues throughout, could turn cameras and mics off, and perhaps most importantly, work in the background until someone called your name. Working from home during the pandemic, the new meeting culture has given me more control over my schedule. This made me question whether I was the only one going through this transition. Thankfully, research by the Harvard Business Review was able to provide me with some answers. (A slight caveat here; the data used in the study is from 2013 and 2020, but it has not explicitly not focused on India, and while I do not think it undermines its application, we should take it with a pinch of salt). The pandemic seems to be a net positive for knowledge workers. We are spending 12% less time being drawn into meetings and participating in 50% more activities through personal choice. The number of tasks rated as tiresome has also dropped from 27%-12%, meaning we are picking our battles better. This also means that on the flip side, we are finding it harder to start new initiatives or focus on personal development. In short, we have more control over our calendars and the message from knowledge workers here seems to be, “Stop! Stop! It hurts so good”. As with so many things from the pandemic, I hope that we take our learnings from this experience into our future. When I read about the future of work, many people talk in binaries of 0s and 1s on whether we will go back to offices or continue to work from home. I do not claim to know the answer. What I do know, however, is that we seem to prefer the current arrangement of meetings over the previous status quo. And if there is one thing we should take into our post-pandemic future of work, it is that people be given more freedom on how to use their time, starting with meetings.
Facebook Says It Inadvertently Restricted A Hashtag. Now It Needs To Tell Us Exactly How And Why
This article originally appeared on Medianama. An excerpt is reproduced here:
An explanation
The presence of a political context surrounding these cases also raises the question of how Facebook is responding to the possible weaponisation of its community reporting. We know from Facebook’s August 2020 CIB report that it took against a network engaged in mass reporting. What principles does it use to define thresholds for action? How is such coordinated activity that falls below its self-defined threshold of Coordinated Inauthentic Behaviour handled? Knowledge about the specifics of thresholds become essential when they make the difference between publicly disclosed and internal actions, as the Sophie Zhang – Guardian series demonstrated in the Indian context.Facebook — this applies to other networks too, but Facebook is by far the largest in India — needs to put forward more meaningful explanations in such cases. Ones that amount to more than ‘Oops!’ or ‘Look! We fixed it!’. There are, after all, no secret blocking rules stopping it from explaining its own mistakes. These explanations don’t have to be immediate. Issues can be complex, requiring detailed analysis. Set a definite timeline, and deliver. No doubt, this already happens for internal purposes. And then, actually show progress. Reduce the trust deficit, don’t feed it.This does raise concerns of being drawn into distracted by narrow content-specific conversations or being distracted by ‘transparency theater’, thereby missing the forest for the trees. These are legitimate risks and need to be navigated carefully. The micro-level focus can be about specific types of content or actions on a particular platform. At the macro-level, it is about impact on public discourse and society. They don’t have to be mutually exclusive and what we learn from one level should inform the others, in pursuit of greater accountability. To read more visit: Facebook says it inadvertently restricted a hashtag. Now it needs to tell us exactly how and why | MediaNama
It’s Not Just About 50 Tweets and One Platform
This article originally appeared in TheWire. An excerpt is reproduced here.Transparency and a voluntary actThis latest attempt came to light because Twitter disclosed this action in the Lumen Database, a project that houses voluntary submissions. And while Twitter is being criticised for complying, reports suggest that the company wasn’t the only one that received such a request. It just happened to be the only one that chose to disclose it proactively.Expanding on legal scholar Jack Balkin’s model for speech regulation, there are ‘3C’s’ available (cooperation, cooption and confrontation) for companies in their interaction with state power. Apart from Twitter’s seemingly short-lived dalliance with confrontation in February 2021, technology platforms have mostly chosen the cooperation and cooption options in India (in contrast to their posturing in the west).This is particularly evident in their reaction to the recent Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code. We’ll ask for transparency, but what we’re likely to get is ‘transparency theatre’ – ranging from inscrutable reports, to a deluge of information which, as communications scholar Sun-ha Hong argues, ‘won’t save us’.Reports allege that the most recent Twitter posts were flagged because they were misleading. But, at the time of writing, it isn’t clear exactly which law(s) were allegedly violated. We can demand that social media platforms are more transparent, but the current legal regime dealing with ‘blocking’ (Section 69A of the IT ACT) place no such obligations on the government. On the contrary, as lawyers Gurshabad Grover and Torsha Sorkar point out, it enables them to issue ‘secret blocking’ orders. Civil society groups have advocated against these provisions, but the political class (whether in government or opposition) is yet to make any serious attempts to change the status quo.
How India and Israel can lead the way on 5G collaboration
Despite the evident opportunities, 5G deployment globally hasn’t been without challenges. Superpower competition, costly infrastructure, and slow application development are holding back development. India and Israel can, together, leverage their strengths to collaborate in areas such application development, building networks of trust, and future research and development and unleash the possibilities of 5G for their citizens.Read the full article in Hindustan Times.
Killing the Slow Brain
This article was originally published in OPEN magazine.The proliferation of social media presents a clear danger to liberal democracy, free markets, political order and, indeed, to human civilisation. The threat is greater and more urgent than that presented by climate change, Artificial Intelligence, nuclear war, pandemics and terrorism. While we recognise many of the latter as constituting global threats and are aware of how to address them (even if we find it difficult to do so in practice), public opinion around the world is yet to fully recognise that not only is social media a threat to society, but also that the threat is existential in nature.To be sure, the rose-tinted view of the internet and social media that we entertained in the mid-2000s has given way to greater skepticism as the downsides of global interpersonal connectivity have come to fore. Techno-pessimism has grown as societies deal with diverse problems ranging from cyberbullying to surveillance capitalism, from internet-enabled terrorism to foreign interference in electoral politics. If the threat from social media and transnational technology platforms over which they run were limited to problems such as these, it would have been relatively easier for the world’s governments and societies to manage. The problem, unfortunately, is of a vastly different nature.For now, let us set aside the economic challenges, such as taxing digital transactions in a multi-crossborder setting and controversial business models employed by global tech platforms. Let us focus on the sociopolitical ones as they are more important.We confront these challenges at three levels. First, while popular attention is mostly focused on controversies around free speech and privacy, these are actually superficial in nature. More serious is the underlying second level, involving political power that technology platforms have come to wield through their ability to shape international and national narratives, to micro-target and influence human behaviour. But most serious of all is the third, deepest level concerning the effect of social media on how we process information, how we think and how we make judgements.Today, we are intensely caught up at the first level, amid passionate debates concerning online free speech. The debate here is about who should govern what is expressed on the platform; private corporations, national governments or civil societies. In the US, this debate centres around whether social media companies are publications that exercise editorial choice or platforms that do not. The companies have long enjoyed the protections of the latter and escaped legal responsibility for the content that is expressed on their networks. After all, unlike newspapers or television companies, they do not have editors deciding what gets published or broadcast. Yet, their claims to being mere platforms are questionable because even if they do not have human editors making decisions, they do employ computer algorithms that determine what users see. What you see on a Google search, Facebook feed or Twitter stream is neither random nor reverse-chronological. It is algorithmic. So if lawmakers in the US want to review the statute that treats them as platforms, they have a case. Meanwhile, Europe has long had rules prohibiting hate speech, which it seeks to impose more strongly on big tech companies that conveniently happen to be mostly American. In India, governments have long taken an elastic view of the constitutional restrictions on free speech, succumbing either to competitive intolerance or political partisanship. Indeed, one of the grounds for demanding that content be taken down under the Information Technology Act, 2000 is the bewildering offence of ‘blasphemy’ which is absurd in a secular state and ought to be unconstitutional. Yet, it remains on the books. In other words, whether it is in the US, Europe or India, governments are attempting to seize greater control over gatekeeping content from technology platforms. This is a battle that governments will eventually win. They will also win the battle over privacy norms.The world’s more deliberative political systems are paying greater attention to the second level issue: how to deal with the political power that tech platforms have come to acquire. Even if their ability to make or break political careers is overestimated, their extraordinary ability to shape the public narrative is no longer in doubt. The world’s nation-states, shaped as they were by the Industrial Age, lack effective mechanisms to deal with this new power centre. The old formula of separating legislative, judiciary, executive, monetary and religious authorities, and ensuring that the media is free and there is competition in the economy, does not work satisfactorily in the Information Age. Lacking suitable instruments, the world’s lawmakers are using what they have—anti-trust laws—to literally cut big technology firms down to size. A far more effective way would be to curb the narrative dominance of tech companies by compelling them to open up their platforms to competing algorithm providers. Even so, the broader task of accommodating information power centres and rebalancing power among social institutions is a task that all countries face.IT IS AT the third and deepest level that we confront the most serious threat from social media, because it hijacks our ability to think. Addictive and relentless, social media interferes with our ability to use the reflective, rational part of the mind—what psychologist Daniel Kahneman calls the ‘slow brain’—and instead makes us leap from one instinctive reaction to the other. Instead of making our own judgements, we rely on social proof, ‘what others say’, even if it contradicts our own lived experience. We do not reflect. Indeed, we cannot reflect because the feed has refreshed and we must respond quickly. There is no time to reason. Yet, liberal democracy and free markets are based on the human capacity for reason. Take that away and the edifice of society stands on much weaker legs. It is not a coincidence that liberal democracies around the world have seen a weakening of liberal norms, the rise of demagogues and ceaseless moral panics over the past decade. The Right is currently not too concerned about this—and often celebrates it—as it is reaping the political benefits of the phenomenon. This is myopic. Nationalists, conservatives and traditionalists must be concerned too, for the whirlwind of unreason will not spare any political or social order. Liberal democratic order is merely the first victim. Social media undermines order itself and will not distinguish one form from the other. It is rapidly eating away at the cognitive machinery of humankind, at our capacity to think and use our better judgement. This is a path that leads to anarchy, authoritarianism or both. So even authoritarians cannot rest easy.We have no idea how to stop this slide. The world is getting more connected, data is getting cheaper, video is replacing text and literacy is no longer a hurdle. But we do not know how to get off the smartphone, nor, indeed, how to get our kids off it.The world’s governments will find that it is easier to sort out who gets to control free speech on the internet, and even to accommodate tech platforms into democratic power structures, than it is to unlock the stranglehold social media has over the human mind. As individuals, we can start acting now.
The race to map the ocean deep
India is falling behind efforts to map the undersea environment of the Indo-Pacific regionMajor powers are investing time and money deploying UUVs in these waters because of the valuable oceanographic and hydrographic data they provide. Oceanography is the study of the physical and biological aspects of the oceans. Hydrography is the process by which the ocean bed is surveyed and navigation aids and charts are produced, providing ships the maritime equivalent of roadmaps and road signs.Oceanography and hydrography have clear civilian applications: scientific research into climate and marine ecology, surveying the ocean floors to ensure safer navigation of merchant vessels, and collecting information for oil and gas or other seabed mining activities.However, there are also equally clear naval applications: Hydrographic data ease the movement of naval surface ships. More important, they provide crucial information for submarines and for those tasked with hunting them. Over the coming years, the study of the oceans and the seabed is likely to become a source of power and influence in the Indo-Pacific region.Read the full article on Asia Times
What we must regulate when we regulate social media platforms
The global debate over how to govern Big Tech has intensified after Twitter, Facebook, Alphabet and Amazon de-platformed former US President Donald Trump and some of his supporters in the wake of the mob raid on the US Capitol on 6 January. Clearly, transnational technology platforms not only influence politics and markets through actions of users they don’t control, but directly wield political power themselves. Human society has yet to completely adjust to these new power centres of the Information Age, and all states—from autocracies to liberal democracies—are in their own ways contending with the challenges of how to limit, constrain, regulate and harness them.Read the full article in The Mint
Signalling a Race against Time
This article was first published in Deccan Herald. Views are personal.As a child of the nineties, I have had the privilege of watching the internet evolve over the ages. I remember rushing back from school and throwing away my bag to switch on the computer and the internet. Back in the day, you had to fire up the internet through a landline connection. And while you were online, if someone wanted to use the landline, the internet connection would be disrupted. But boy was all of it worth it. I would have gone anywhere on the internet (but mostly stayed at Orkut) to chat with my friends.‘Network effects’ made Orkut the place for me, just as they make social media apps like WhatsApp popular today. The basic idea behind network effects is that you are on WhatsApp because your friends are on it, and your friends are on it because their friends (and you) are on it. It’s a simple principle and one that is likely going to be the downfall of Signal.
Decoding the Signals Surrounding Signal’s Success
The defining feature of 21st-century innovation has been the reduction of friction.The most successful companies of our times – Google, Facebook, Uber, and so on – follow what economists David S. Evans and Richard Schmalensee call the “Matchmaker” business model. These companies make their money by making it easier for one group of people to connect with another group of people almost effortlessly. Uber, for instance, makes it easy for cab drivers and cab riders to find each other, a job that has historically caused great frustration, as anyone who has attempted to hail an auto in Bengaluru in the old-fashioned, “wave-your-hands-frantically-as-if-you-are-drowning” way can attest.Read the full article in The Wire
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
Amazon, Facebook, Google and the question of trust
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.