SCIENCE & DEVELOPMENT

Digital Monopoly Platforms, the Modi Regime and the Threat to our Democracy

ON April 5, 2019, a joint platform of five civil society organisations released an urgent appeal signed by over two hundred eminent persons including two former chief election commissioners – N Gopalaswami and SY Quraishi – to the Election Commission and political parties. The five civil society organisations are Common Cause, Constitutional Conduct Group, Free Software Movement of India, Association for Democratic Reforms and Internet Freedom Foundation.

India’s Anti-Satellite Missile: Beyond the Euphoria

NOW, that the excitement and self-congratulatory chest-thumping over India’s successful testing of its anti-satellite missile (ASAT) capability on March 27, 2019 has passed, except of course for continuous misuse in political campaigns by PM Modi, it is time to take a step back and look at the event and its strategic implications with a clearer head and a broader perspective.As will be seen, the boast by PM Modi in his telecast that the test was a moment of “utmost pride”, would have impact “for generations to come”, and meant that India was “now a space power”, with Minister, Nitin Gadkari

Air strikes and Defence Preparedness

THE air strikes by India across the Line of Control (LoC) have been accompanied by much chest-thumping by the prime minister, by government and ruling party spokespersons, and camp-follower TV and other media personalities. This despite India’s reluctance or inability to release convincing evidence such as imagery of damage caused to and inside the targeted structures in Jaba Top, or evidence of a Pakistani F-16 fighter brought down during the Pakistani counter-strike. Pakistan has gone to town claiming that only a single crow was killed, and only a few trees were destroyed.

Tech for Democracy in a Brave New Digital World

WITH the elections in the offing, different groups – the Free Software Movement of India, Association for Democratic Reforms, Common Cause, etc – have raised a key issue: how to stop the Indian elections from being distorted by big digital platforms and the enormous influence they exercise over us today. And as “influence” on these platforms can be bought, will Indian elections, already plagued by money power, suffer even further? Added to this, is the enormous ecosystem of fake news, which the BJP, the RSS and its “parivar” has built over the last few years.

The Discontents of the Data Universe

IN 2011, in Davos, the World Economic Forum (WEF) hailed the birth of a new “asset class” – data. Going into raptures, they proclaimed data as the new oil. The WEF love for data has only grown with time. In 2019 it has declared that data is not merely oil, it is “super oil”: unlike the universe of oil, which is bound to the physical world and therefore finite, super oil or the data universe, is unbounded and growing exponentially. As long as machines can produce and consume ever larger amounts of data, the immaterial world of money and data can expand infinitely.

CAG Report: A Poor Defence of the Rafale Deal

 THE long awaited CAG Report on the Rafale and 10 other defence acquisitions begins with two wrong notes. One is the acceptance of the government’s demand to redact the price details of the Medium Multi-Role Combat Aircraft (MMRCA) or the Rafale deal; then its disclosure in the preface that the total cost of the 11 defence acquisitions is Rs 95,000 crore, effectively giving away the Rafale deal price. A simple two minute calculation (see table 1) reveals that the price of the Rafale deal or the BXX in the CAG’s table of prices was Rs 60,576.54 crore. A case of carelessness in redaction?

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