Peer review and scientific publication can make India’s Tiger census a global model:
Relevance: mains: G.S paper III: Biodiversity
If India has increased its population of tigers to an estimated 2,967 individuals in 2018-19, putting behind fiascos such as the Sariska wipeout 15 years ago, it adds to its global standing as a conservation marvel: a populous country that has preserved a lot of its natural heritage even amid fast-paced economic growth. Since the majority of the world’s wild tigers live in India, there is global attention on the counting exercise and the gaps the assessment exposes. The National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) has asserted in its report, ‘Status of Tigers in India 2018’, that 83% of the big cats censused were individually photographed using camera traps, 87% were confirmed through a camera trap-based capture-recapture technique, and other estimation methods were used to establish the total number. Previous estimates for periods between 2006 and 2010 and then up to 2014 indicated a steady increase in tiger abundance. Such numbers, however, are the subject of debate among sections of the scientific community, mainly on methodological grounds, since independent studies of even well-protected reserves showed a lower increase. It is important to put all the latest data, which are no doubt encouraging, through rigorous peer review. Conservation achievements — and some failures — can then be the subject of scientific scrutiny and find a place in scientific literature to aid efforts to save tigers.
There are several aspects to the latest counting operation — a staggering exercise spread over 3,81,400 sq km and 26,838 camera trap locations — that are of international interest, because some tiger range countries are beginning their own census of the cats. Moreover, even developed countries are trying to revive populations of charismatic wild creatures such as wolves and bears through a more accurate outcome measurement. For India’s tigers, not every landscape is welcoming, as the official report makes clear. The less accessible Western Ghats has witnessed a steady increase in numbers from 2006, notably in Karnataka, and Central India has an abundance, but there is a marked drop in Chhattisgarh and Odisha; in Buxa, Dampa and Palamau, which are tiger reserves, no trace of the animal was found. It is imperative for the NTCA to analyse why some landscapes have lost tigers, when the entire programme has been receiving high priority and funding for years now at ₹10 lakh per family that is ready to move out of critical habitat. Ultimately, saving tigers depends most on the health of source populations of the species that are estimated to occupy a mere 10% of the habitat. The conflict in opening up reserves to road-building has to end, and identified movement corridors should be cleared of commercial pressures. Hunting of prey animals, such as deer and pig, needs to stop as they form the base for growth of tiger and other carnivore populations. As some scientists caution, faulty numbers may hide the real story. They may only represent a ‘political population’ of a favoured animal, not quite reflective of reality.
(Source: The Hindu)
- Amendments target the essence of right to information Act:
Relevance: mains: G.S Paper II: Polity:
The Indian RTI Act is one of the best and seeks to codify citizen’s fundamental Right to Information guaranteed under Article 19 (1) (a). It recognizes that in a democracy the government belongs to its citizens who are the rulers. It gives citizens the right to own and access the information in government offices. However, government officials with their feudal attitudes find this difficult to accept. Hence, when designing the RTI Act in 2004-05, it was felt necessary to create an independent and autonomous body which could resolve the issue when citizens were wrongly denied information which they owned.
When officials deny information without the sanction of the law, citizens can approach the Information Commission which is the final appellate authority. Sometimes the Commissions’ order discloses information which unearths corruption or arbitrariness. The first draft of the RTI Act was presented to Parliament in December 2004 which had proposed the creation of Information Commissions as the final adjudicators to safeguard citizens’ right to information. It envisioned that the chief commissioner would be equated with secretary to government and other commissioners be equated with joint secretaries.
Thus, the issue of status and salaries of the information commissioners was discussed extensively by the parliamentary committee which had many members from the BJP, including President Shri Ram Nath Kovind. In its wisdom it realized and recognized that to ensure the independence of the Commission, it was necessary to define its status fairly high and to link it with an established body. It, therefore, pitched for a high status so that their independence could not be affected. The tenure was also fixed at five years. These are the precise provisions the amendment bill is targeting. The salaries, status and tenure of commissioners are sought to be decided by the Centre. No rational explanation has been offered for this, to what was originally a recommendation of a parliamentary committee. The only reason stated in the statement of reasons is that the Election Commission is a constitutional body while the Information Commission is a statutory body. Hence, they cannot be equated. Constitutional positions are those which were envisaged and mentioned in the Constitution and statutory bodies are those which have been created by statute made by the Parliament. The argument is facetious. The National Human Rights Commission, National Green Tribunal and such tribunals are not bodies envisaged in the Constitution, but their heads are given the same status as the central election commissioners. It is also worth noting that this issue has not been raised by anyone in the last 14 years.
Since no reasonable explanation is being offered by the government, citizens are assuming that there are perhaps two agendas. One, to make the Information Commissions adjuncts of government by controlling their tenures and pay; two, to give the message that government can and will change whatever they wish, including weakening the fundamental rights.
Citizens must write to the President asking him not to sign the bill. In case we cannot stop this, we need to continue trying to persuade our government not to pursue this path. It is the duty and the right of citizens if we wish to safeguard our Constitution.
(Source: LiveMint)
- The making of digital Kleptocracy:
Relevance: mains: G.S paper III: Science and technology.
When data is monetised, as the Economic Survey advocates, it becomes toxic and harms public interest
Last year, I was denied information requested under the Right to Information Act (RTI) 2005. I had sought the names of agencies empanelled by the Unique Identification Authority of India for an “image makeover” and the expenditure on it. It was denied by invoking the exemption clauses of Sections 8(d) and 8(j), respectively, i.e. the ‘commercial confidence, trade secrets or intellectual property’ and ‘unwarranted invasion of the privacy of the individual’. Apart from the recent RTI Amendment Bill, 2019, there are many ways in which the RTI is being undermined.
In 2017, my co-author and I wanted to check what proportion of beneficiaries receive their pensions or rations using data provided through government portals, for example the National Food Security Act and State social security pensions. We found data without dictionaries, abbreviations that were not spelt out anywhere, figures that were inconsistent across different pages of the same website, and missing or broken links. It took us months to decipher public data. With several caveats about interpreting the results.
More recently, there has been public furore over the delay in the release of data, for example farmer suicides, suppression of data such as on employment, bungled migration data in the Census, and controversy over the methodology used to calculate GDP growth rates. These data are the backbone of policy making in India.
These three — information obtained through the RTI Act, administrative data and data collected by the statistical machinery of government — are examples of “data as a public good”. But these are scarcely mentioned in a chapter so-titled in this year’s Economic Survey. Instead, its focus is on the expanding digital footprint of people, falling costs of data generation and storage and the growing data mining industry. The thrust is on how to monetise these data, for example by selling data that we share with the government in trust. Another worrying suggestion is consolidation of our data across various ministries.
Under watch
The view in the Economic Survey is data utopic. In this data-fairyland, (near) real-time data collection can be a sufficient condition for remedying gaps. If only the officers-in-charge could receive a weekly report about school toilets that do not function, “they can take the required action”.
The day after I read this chapter of the Survey, a local Gujarati paper carried news of an e-memo being sent (thrice) to the owner of a scooter for a traffic offence; the scooter had been stolen 10 months ago. The police had spotted the scooter on a CCTV in various localities of the city but were unable to catch the culprits and return the scooter. This anecdote is at odds with the data-fairyland conjured up in the Survey. In the real world, remedial action on non-functional toilets is more likely to be hampered by a lack of funds, of accountability or an officer, rather than lack of data. Having data/information can only take us that far.
Each time you click on a link, or even hover your mouse over one, your behaviour is being tracked and analysed to understand your preferences and needs and being sold to companies to enable “targeted” advertising. The fact that it is often not very well targeted is something its proponents prefer to ignore. As a single person I regularly receive SMSes which offer a solution to this problem: “kya aapke pati aapki baat nahi maante? (does your husband not listen to you?”) Mistargeting is not always accidental. “Predatory lending” thrives on it. For instance, ICICI functionaries sold insurance policies to unsuspecting customers such as poor Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme workers and Kisan Credit card holders whose premiums it was clear they would not be able to pay. The Survey’s data utopia is misplaced.
Data can easily become toxic. The Survey does not tell us this. Ever wondered why you get SMSes offering you companionship (“aao meethi meethi baat karen”), cures for baldness (“ganjapan door karen”) or strategies for losing weight (“vajan ghatayen”). Somewhere along the line, your mobile number and/or email ID got sold in the data market. Even as most of us delete these, others get trapped. A former Chief Justice of India was duped of ₹1 lakh recently as a result of a fraudulent email. In Mumbai, identity fraud was perpetrated by accessing personal data (address, phone number and Aadhaar). In phishing attacks in Rourkela, Odisha, fraudsters called bank customers asking for Aadhaar details to update their account, but used it to siphon off money. The Survey treats personal data (such as date of birth, mobile numbers and addresses) the same way as data on rainfall, temperatures and road networks.
In the examples above, the fraudsters had to get access to people’s data. The Survey is proposing that these be sold for a price. This has already started. In early July, the Union Minister of Road Transport and Highways, Nitin Gadkari, informed Parliament that the department had earned ₹65 crore from the sale of vehicle registration and licence data. Imagine the consequences of your health data being sold to private health insurance companies; or your data on your earnings being sold, or data being used in the way Cambridge Analytica did.
The many faultlines
If data can be toxic, centralising and consolidating it, as advocated by the Survey, increases its toxicity exponentially. Contrary to the widely advocated principle of decentralised/disaggregated data silos as a first line of defence by data security experts, the Survey portrays decentralisation as an obstacle. With decentralised data, data mining companies employ sophisticated tools to combine distinct data silos to create profiles of individuals. Consolidating it, for example if a unique number such as Aadhaar links them, reduces the company costs for profiling and targeting. Centralising it (in one data silo) means that a single data breach can compromise all aspects of your life.
There are two other toxic aspects of the personal data economy. Often they are collected and shared without our consent or knowledge, for example CCTVs or web browsing histories. When our data are used by opaque algorithms to make crucial decisions about our lives, such as shortlisting for jobs, getting health insurance or whether you were speeding, we cannot question them.
Some believe that a data protection and privacy law can, even will, take care of these concerns. Indeed, the Survey merrily assumes such laws to be in place. Given the government’s track record on Aadhaar, these laws are unlikely to protect citizen’s rights adequately. Further, privacy and data protection laws will face unique implementation challenges in India. This is on account of low levels of tech-digital and legal literacy combined with pre-existing social inequalities which directly bear upon power relations between us (as citizens/consumers) and them (government/corporations).
Jumping on the bandwagon
Even where such laws have been put in place, those societies/economies are grappling with the fallout of corporations whose practices can best be described as “digital kleptocracy”. To understand this, take the example of lending and credit scores. The literature documents unscrupulous use of algorithms to identify vulnerable targets such as search histories of single African American mothers in the United States that are used to sell them home or education loans which it is clear they are unlikely to be able to repay. Thus, digital kleptocracy is a means by which rich tech companies mine poor people’s data,in fact, steal; in most cases the person is unaware of their data being harvested and used for profit. What the Economic Survey advocates is not only for the government to facilitate such practices but also climb aboard this bandwagon of digital kleptocrats.
(Source The Hindu)
- The slump that threatens to hold the economy to ransome:
Relevance: mains: G.S paper III: Economy
Early development economists made three important arguments about the trajectory of developing countries. First, economic growth is held back by low domestic savings in these countries. Second, the inability to export means that there is not enough foreign exchange to fund the import of capital goods needed for rapid industrialization. Third, countries facing these two structural constraints will need to absorb foreign savings to keep their economic engines running.
There is a faint whiff of these themes in some of our recent economic debates about the decline in the domestic savings rate, new-age export pessimism and the quest to float a sovereign bond in the international market to fund the fiscal deficit.
The Indian savings rate has declined by nearly seven percentage points since the North Atlantic financial crisis of 2008. The decline has been particularly sharp in recent years. The financial savings of households has also fallen as a percentage of gross domestic product, and the combined borrowing of the Union government, state governments and public sector entities such as the Food Corporation of India is already absorbing almost the entire flow of household financial savings. Given the domestic savings constraint, the proposed sovereign bond is a risky gambit to fund the fiscal deficit from foreign savings.
Meanwhile an overvalued exchange rate, stagnation in global trade and rising protectionism have stopped Indian exports in their tracks. The Indian balance of payments is susceptible to external shocks in these circumstances. The two swaps done by the Reserve Bank of India for $10 billion were as much about building a buffer as they were about expanding the central bank’s balance sheet to create more domestic liquidity.
A lot of Indian economic policy thinking in the 1950s was induced by a sense of export pessimism—till economists such as Manmohan Singh questioned these beliefs in the next decade. A more modern variant of export pessimism is now taking root.
India is right now in the midst of a sharp cyclical slowdown. Economic growth in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2019 was at its lowest in five years. The numbers for the first three months of the current fiscal year seem unlikely to be any better, especially if one goes by recent high-frequency data. The immediate problems associated with the cyclical slowdown—from low indirect tax collections to job losses—tend to overshadow the bigger problem of a structural slowdown in the Indian economy.
The country’s declining savings rate is a key risk here. There is no doubt that part of this is explained by the slowdown itself. Government as well as corporate savings tend to be pro-cyclical. Governments save more during episodes of rapid economic expansion because robust tax collections bring down the revenue deficit. Companies tend to save more during booms because of strong free cash flows. So it is quite likely that the overall savings rate will rise from current levels once the economy gets back onto the fast track.
However, household savings continue to be a mystery. As with almost every bit of Indian economic data, part of the decline may be explained by the savings of unincorporated enterprises that have formalized their operations having been reassigned from the household to the corporate sector. But that is unlikely to be the entire story.
The household savings rate is sensitive to demographics. The savings rate of a country tends to bulge when its working age population is at its peak. As reported in TheEconomic Times on 22 July, India moved into a demographic sweet spot in 2018. The working age population is now more than the dependent population. The newspaper added that this bulge in the country’s working age population will last till 2055, or for 37 years.
The fall in the Indian savings rate even as its demographic profile improves is puzzling. The most immediate explanation, as mentioned earlier, could be that lower savings are a result of slower economic growth. Families could also be saving less to maintain consumption levels, especially given the recent policy-induced shocks to the economy. But is that all?
There are several other potential explanations for the lower savings rate, ranging from a decline in inequality (which is unlikely) to a change in cultural attitudes to consumer debt (which is more likely). There is not enough research work done right now on the decline in the Indian savings rate. The government should be worried, because this is the old domestic savings constraint making a reappearance. In case the savings rate does not recover, then the next uptick in the investment cycle will quickly lead to current account pressures.
As this column had argued in August 2017, India has some similarities with East Asia and some with Latin America. The former model is clearly the more sustainable one. Which path India follows in the coming years will profoundly depend on its savings behaviour. The next instalment of this column will deal with this issue in more detail.
(Source: Livemint)