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2023 promises to be a landmark year for technology and digitisation in India. The Union Budget indicates growing prioritisation of these areas.
For instance, the Digital India programmehas been allottedRs 4,795.24 crore, the allocation to the Ministry of Electronics and IT has nearly doubled, and there is a 1,000 per cent increase in the funding for the Artificial Intelligence and Digital Intelligence Unit. But something crucial is amiss.
Digitisation entails ever-expanding data collection, storage and sharing. This includes personal information such as biometrics and financial and health data.
Many of the initiatives announced with the budget reinforce the deep discord between the pace of digitisation efforts, and the implementation of effective legal frameworks to strengthen privacy and cybersecurity.
Let’s look at a few examples that will aggravate the existing privacy deficit in India, and amplify the scope for surveillance, unless meaningful, and urgent progress is made on a privacy-focused legislation.
A new National Data Governance Policy is going to be introduced to enable access to anonymised data. Anonymised data includes data that does not contain Personally Identifiable Information (PII) like name, age, phone number, address, etc, or data from which PII has been removed.
However, several studies have demonstrated the ease with which anonymised data can be reverse-engineered to identify individuals.
For instance, a study in 2019 was able to accurately reidentify 99.98 per cent of Americans in an anonymised dataset, including information held by the US government on more than 11 million people.
Ideas Page
The real Tipu Sultan (Page no. 11)
(GS Paper 1, Personalities)
Writing in September 1785 to his envoys in Pune — the seat of the rival Maratha state — Tipu Sultan of Mysore was a man annoyed.
There had been a dispute between local Muslims and Hindus, and Tipu’s agents had publicly sided with the former, pressing the Maratha authorities to resolve the matter.
This was, the sultan warned, stupid: Instead of posing as champions of Islam, he wished his men to take a pragmatic view.
For any “fire of discord” between Maratha subjects — Muslim and Hindu both — would breed internal infirmities, weakening that enemy power from within.
In fact, he added, if at all his ambassadors wished to participate, they should have covertly fanned the flames, instead of trying to advertise “zeal”.
Realpolitik, it appears, then, triumphed over faith for Tipu Sultan — at least in this instance.
Nearly 250 years later, Tipu and his motivations continue to animate debate in India. There is, of course, the tedious seasonal controversy on whether or not his birth anniversary should be celebrated as a public event.
And as elections approach, Tipu is habitually resurrected as a proxy for all Muslims and their supposedly perfidious tendencies.
As declared in a speech by the Karnataka BJP chief Nalin Kumar Kateel recently, the 2023 Karnataka assembly election is not just a regular democratic exercise.
It is, on the contrary, a civilisational war between the “offspring of Tipu” and those who sing “bhajans of Ram”. The irony is that the sultan might have chuckled at this: Our esteemed politician too, after all, is seeking political advantage in exploiting communal cleavages.
Our languages our self (Page no. 11)
(Miscellaneous)
In November 1999, UNESCO declared February 21 as International Mother Language Day in response to the declining state of many languages all over the world.
This year’s theme, “Multilingual education — a necessity to transform education,” underscores the importance of using multiple languages in framing an impactful system of education. As UNESCO states, a monolingual system of education which relies on “providing education in only one language that is not necessarily shared by all learners may impact negatively learning performance, and the development of socio-emotional and foundational literacy skills.”
India is an ancient repository of hundreds of languages and thousands of dialects with rich linguistic and cultural diversity.
It is in our mother tongue that we express, with authenticity, our deepest thoughts, feelings, values and ideals, as also our literary endeavours.
Our languages, which are an integral part of our ancient culture, give us a sense of identity. The former UNESCO Director-General, KoichiroMatsura, highlighted the irreplaceable significance of one’s mother tongue when he observed that “the languages we learn from our mothers are the homeland of our innermost thoughts.
The International Mother Language Day has added significance in the Indian context because of the threat westernisation poses to the survival of as many as 42 of our dialects and languages which have fewer than 10,000 users.
The situation is equally grim all over the world with 40 per cent of the speakers of 6,700 languages not having access to education in their mother tongue.
It is appropriate, therefore, that revitalising languages that are disappearing or are threatened with extinction is one of the themes of Mother Language Day this year.
Explained
Millions in India,Pak at risk from glacial lake floods,says study (Page no. 15)
(GS Paper 3, Environment)
Around 15 million people across the world face the risk of sudden and deadly flooding from glacial lakes, which are expanding and rising in numbers due to global warming, according to a new study. More than half of those who could be impacted live in four countries: India, Pakistan, Peru and China.
Published in the journal Nature, the study, ‘Glacial lake outburst floods threaten millions globally’ has been conducted by Caroline Taylor, Rachel Carr and Stuart Dunning of Newcastle University (UK), Tom Robinson of the University of Canterbury (New Zealand), and Matthew Westoby of Northumbria University (UK).
Glacial lakes result from shrinking glaciers. Once the water is released from them, it could cause flooding in the downstream areas.
This is known as glacial lake outburst floods or GLOF. Although GLOFs have been taking place since the ice age, the risk has increased multifold due to climate change, researchers of the latest study said.
GLOFs can prove to be catastrophic as they mostly arrive with little warning and result in large-scale destruction of property, infrastructure, and agricultural land. They can also lead to the death of hundreds of people.
Speaking to The Indian Express, Tom Robinson, the co-author of the paper, said, “As the climate continues to warm, glacier retreat will form larger and more numerous lakes.
At the same time, lakes are likely to become more exposed to GLOF ‘triggers’, such as a large landslide or ice avalanche entering the lake, displacing water, and causing the natural dam that impounds the lake to fail.”
“So, lakes that perhaps aren’t a concern at present may become a concern in the future, and entirely new and potentially dangerous lakes may form.”
According to a 2020 study, the number and total area of glacial lakes worldwide have increased by about 50 per cent since 1990, The Washington Post reported.
Economy
Banks, NBFCs stop lending to apps under loan default guarantee model (Page no. 17)
(GS Paper 3, Economy)
Banks and non-banking financial companies (NBFCs) have almost paused tie-ups with fintech players, or digital lending apps, under the first loan default guarantee (FLDG) structure for lending in the absence of clarity on contractual agreement from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI).
Broadly, lenders have taken the approach that FLDG cannot be done with non-regulated entities (fintech players that do not come under the RBI’s ambit).
Under FLDG, a credit-risk sharing agreement, a third party guarantees to compensate up to a certain percentage of default in a loan portfolio of the regulated entities – banks and NBFCs. Banks cannot lend directly to lending apps which have recently come under the scrutiny of the RBI and the government for unfair lending practices.
However, many experts feel that the RBI’s reservation on FLDG is justified as it may lead to systemic risk, as many lending apps are outside the RBI rules on lending.
The regulator’s argument is that this (FLDG) is leading to renting of licenses, which the regulated entities have. This arrangement could result in higher NPA.
There is a possibility of a bigger risk ballooning that might impact all the regulated entities,” said an expert.
The RBI recently gave a list of lending apps working with non-bank lenders registered with the central bank to the government. The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology later banned 94 loan apps based on this list.
NITI Aayog appoints BVR Subrahmanyam as new executive chief (Page no. 17)
(GS Paper 2, Polity and Governance)
The government approved the appointment of BVR Subrahmanyam as the CEO of NITI Aayog.Subrahmanyam will succeed Parameswaranlyer, who will move to the United States after being appointed as executive director of the World Bank for a period of two years.
Subrahmanyam, who previously served as the chief secretary of Jammu and Kashmir, was considered to be among the few officers who were kept in the loop ahead of the Centre’s decision to abrogate Jammu and Kashmir’s special status and bifurcate the state into two Union Territories.
A 1987-batch IAS officer of the Chhattisgarh cadre, Subrahmanyam is an expert on internal security. He was Additional Chief Secretary (Home) in Chhattisgarh before he was deputed to J&K after Governor’s rule was imposed in the state in June 2018 following the break-up of the PDP-BJP coalition government in the state.
The 56-year-old officer served as private secretary to then prime minister Manmohan Singh from 2004 to 2008. After a stint with the World Bank, he again joined the Prime Minister’s Office in 2012.
He continued in the Narendra Modi PMO for close to a year before moving back to his cadre state — until he was called to lead the bureaucracy in J&K.
Remittances for overseas studies fall 42% in first 9 months of FY23 (Page no. 17)
(GS Paper 3, Economy)
Funds sent abroad by students under the Reserve Bank of India’s Liberalised Remittance Scheme (LRS) declined by over 42 per cent to $2.57 billion during the nine months ended December 2022 of the current fiscal (2022-23) as against $ 4.4 billion in the same period of 2021.
Under the LRS, a resident can take out foreign exchange up to $250,000 annually for various purposes like travel, gift, studies abroad, maintenance of relatives, purchase of property, medical treatment and donations.
However, overall remittances by resident individuals under LRS have shot up by 40 per cent to $19.35 billion during the nine months ended December 2022 from $13.79 billion a year ago. Remittances in 2022-23 are expected to exceed $19.61 billion registered in fiscal 2021-22.
According to experts, the fall in outward student remittances is due to difficulty getting visas and uncertainty over job scenarios amid the slowdown in major developed economies triggered by rising inflation and interest rates.
The fall (in remittances by students) is due to a couple of factors – one, there is a delay in getting Visas as normally students go to the US. Second, the willingness to go abroad also depends on the overall employment situation.
There is an impression now that if I go out for studies, there is no assurance of a job I can continue with. This could be keeping a few people away from going for higher studies in the US.