📰 Cabinet gives nod to Bill for setting up DFI
National bank for funding infrastructure and development to be set up
•The Union Cabinet on Tuesday approved a Bill to set up a Development Finance Institution, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced.
•The Minister said the government had mentioned in the Budget that it would be setting up a national bank for funding infrastructure and development activity. As of December 2019, she said, there were over 6,000 brownfield and greenfield projects requiring funding.
•“Even as the Budget session is still on, the Cabinet has already cleared the setting up of a Development Finance Institution,” she said, adding that the Budget provided for an initial amount of Rs. 20,000 crore for the institution.
Warns T.N. Chief Secretary of appropriate action on failure to give information
•The Supreme Court said on Tuesday that the Tamil Nadu Chief Secretary shall be “personally responsible” and “appropriate action” will be taken on failure to give information on the rule curve for Mullaperiyar dam to the Supreme Court-appointed Supervisory Committee.
•Rule curve in a dam decides the fluctuating storage levels in a reservoir. The gate opening schedule of a dam is based on the rule curve. It is part of the “core safety” mechanism in a dam.
•After a nearly day-long hearing, a Bench led by Justice A.M. Khanwilkar directed the Supervisory Committee to issue directions or take steps to address the three core safety issues — the monitoring and performance of the instrumentation of the dam, finalising the rule curve and fixing the gate operating schedule — and submit a compliance report in four weeks.
•“We find that the three core issues are directly concerned with the safety of the dam and will have a cascading effect on persons residing in the nearby areas,” the court noted.
T.N. blames Kerala
•During the high-voltage hearing, the Tamil Nadu government blamed Kerala for delaying the finalisation of the rule curve for the 123-year-old dam.
•“Right from the beginning, Kerala has adopted an obscurantist and obstructive stand... Kerala government is somehow not comfortable with Tamil Nadu operating the dam. Kerala has made consistent efforts to obstruct Tamil Nadu from operating the dam. Kerala is preventing the finalisation of the rule curve. We are not able to access data which is in their terrain. There is no road built, the power supply has not been restored, though we had paid for it... How do we function?” said senior advocate Shekhar Naphade, for Tamil Nadu.
•“First you give the information on rule curve to the Supervisory Committee... Trees and roads do not immediately concern the safety of the dam,” Justice Khanwilkar told the Tamil Nadu side.
“No politics”
•Kerala government, represented by senior advocate Jaideep Gupta, has accused Tamil Nadu of adopting an “obsolete” gate operation schedule dating back to 1939.
•However, the court sharply intervened to stop Kerala from making any politically-coloured statements in court. Justice Khanwilkar said the court was not the place to make political speeches to the masses.
•“Local politics between States should not be played out in the Supreme Court,” Justice Khanwilkar remarked.
Apprehensions
•The court is hearing a petition filed by Dr. Joe Joseph and office-bearers of the Kothamangalam block panchayat in Kerala expressing their apprehensions about the lack of proper supervision of water levels in the dam located along the Periyar tiger reserve.
•The petitioners, represented by senior advocate Gopakumaran, contended that the Supervisory Committee had become “lethargical” about the safety inspection and survey of the dam. It had delegated its duties to a sub-committee of local officials.
•“Meeting are held just for attendance. The instrumentation scheme, safety mechanism, etc, have not been finalised for the past six years. The sub-committee was formed by the Supervisory Committee without informing the Supreme Court... We are seeking a continuous mandamus from the Supreme Court to control and monitor the work of the Supervisory Committee,” Mr. Gopakumaran contended.
📰 More diversity in faculty hires in newer IIMs
•To understand the faculty recruitment process, Dr. Joshi’s RTI queries also asked for a break down of the number of candidates who applied from each category applied, were interviewed, offered jobs, and accepted employment at each IIM between January 2019 and December 2020.
•The response showed that in some cases, hundreds of applicants were listed but none made it through the hiring process.
•At IIM Lucknow, for example, there were 888 applicants for faculty positions over the two year period, including 197 from reserved categories. Only seven were shortlisted for interviews, and none were offered jobs. Of the 691 applicants from the general category, 59 were shortlisted and 12 were offered jobs. “The IIMs cannot continue to use the excuse of unavailability of qualified candidates. They need to be intentional, and scout for applicants, as done in affirmative action programmes by the world’s top western universities,” said Anil Wagde, an alumnus of IIM Kolkata. “They also need to ensure that biases are not allowed to play out through the shortlisting and interview process.”
•Since 2019, when Parliament passed the Central Educational Institutions (Reservation in Teachers’ Cadre) Act, the IIMs have been actively lobbying the Education Ministry to exempt them from the law's requirements to reserve faculty positions for SCs, STs, OBCs and Economically Weaker Sections (EWS). They had earlier cited a 50-year old Central government memo which exempted scientific and technical posts from reservations.
•In November that year, the Education Ministry told the Lok Sabha that the 20 IIMs had only 11 faculty from the SC/ST categories. On Monday, it told the Lok Sabha that the IIMs have filled 21 posts reserved for SCs and 5 reserved for STs, along with 36 reserved for OBCs, which is still far below the legally mandated quotas. “There has been some incremental progress, but the IIMs are still not actually implementing the law. The problem is that most are not taking any intentional steps to change the situation, just paying lip service. The older IIMs are acting with impunity,” said Mr. Wagde.
📰 Delhi is the most polluted capital city globally, says report
In 2020, 84% of all monitored countries observed air quality improvements
•Delhi remained the most polluted capital city in the world but India, on the whole, had improved its average annual PM 2.5 (particulate matter) levels higher in 2020 than in 2019, according to a report from IQ Air, a Swiss air quality technology company, specialising in protection against airborne pollutants, and developing air quality monitoring and air cleaning products.
•Delhi’s concentration level, based primarily on data from the Central Pollution Control Board, was 84.1 µg/m³ in 2020, a 15% improvement from the 98.6 µg/m³ recorded in 2019 — a consequence of the lockdown. Average pollution levels were 51.9 µg/m³ in 2020 compared with 58.1 µg/m³ in 2019, making India only the third most polluted country in 2020, unlike in 2019, when its air was the fifth most noxious.
•Bangladesh and Pakistan were the countries in 2020 with worse average PM 2.5 levels than India, says the report. China ranked 11th in the latest report, a deterioration from the 14th in the previous edition of the report. In the 2020 report, 106 countries were evaluated. The pollution levels are weighted averages, meaning that the population of a country influences the pollution values reported.
•In 2020, 84% of all monitored countries observed air quality improvements. Other improvements in major cities over 2019 included a 11% drop in Beijing, a 13% drop in Chicago, a 17% drop in Paris and a 16% drop in London and Seoul.
•However, of the 106 monitored countries, only 24 met the World Health Organization annual guidelines for PM 2.5, the report underlined.
•When ranked by cities, Hotan in China was the most polluted, with an average concentration of 110.2 µg/m³, followed by Ghaziabad in Uttar Pradesh at 106. Of the 14 most polluted cities, 13 were in India.
•In spite of being a pandemic year, 2020 was a particularly severe year for agricultural burning, an illegal but common practice in which farmers set fire to crop residue after a harvest. Farm fires in Punjab increased 46.5% over 2019.
•Air pollution constitutes the world’s biggest environmental health hazard, contributing to as many as 7 million premature deaths globally per year (more than three times higher than deaths associated with COVID-19).
•In 2020, the spread of COVID-19 raised new concerns as exposure to particle pollution was found to increase vulnerability to the virus and its impact on health. Early reports suggest that the proportion of COVID-19 deaths attributed to air pollution exposure ranges from 7% to 33%.
📰 U.K. turns to Indo-Pacific in post-Brexit foreign policy
It sets out plan to boost nuclear arsenal, counter Russia, China
•Britain wants to expand its influence among countries in the Indo-Pacific region to try to moderate China’s global dominance, a document laying out post-Brexit foreign and defence policy priorities said on Tuesday.
•The document sets out a planned increase to Britain’s nuclear arsenal to weigh against evolving global security threats, and underlines the importance of strong ties with the U.S. while naming Russia as the top regional threat.
•Britain’s biggest foreign and defence policy review since the end of the Cold War sets out how Prime Minister Boris Johnson wants to be at the forefront of a reinvigorated, rules-based international order based on cooperation and free trade.
•Calling the Indo-Pacific “increasingly the geopolitical centre of the world”, the government highlighted a planned British aircraft carrier deployment to the region.
•“China and the U.K. both benefit from bilateral trade and investment, but China also presents the biggest state-based threat to the U.K.’s economic security,” the report said.
•Britain, the world’s sixth-largest economy, is dwarfed economically and militarily by China, but believes through soft power and strategic alliances it can help persuade Beijing to play by the rules of a new, more dynamic international system.
•Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab acknowledged Britain’s attempts to influence Beijing had been marginal so far, telling Times Radio it was better acting “in concert with clusters of like-minded countries... to have the maximum impact and moderating impact on China”.
📰 Bridging the gap: On deficit in OBC, SC positions vacant at IIMs
Govt. should sponsor preparatory plans to help fill faculty posts in Central institutions
•A severe deficit in the number of OBC, SC, ST candidates recruited as faculty in Central institutes of higher education has been revealed by Union Education Minister Ramesh Pokhriyal in Parliament, drawing attention once again to the pallid state of reservation in some of India’s elite institutions. Some of the striking data show 62% unfilled vacancies for SC in the IIMs and 90% for OBC in the IISc, while vacant positions are on average about 38% to 52%, taking Central Universities, IISERs, IIT (non-faculty), IGNOU, and Sanskrit Central Universities into account. The data confirm that the trend seen earlier in the IIT system extends to many more institutions, highlighting a serious mismatch between the government’s equity-building goals and actual recruitment outcomes. In the case of the IITs, an official committee suggested that the way out would be to exempt these institutions from reservation, as provided for under the Central Educational Institutions (Reservation in Teachers’ Cadre) Act, 2019, or to dereserve lower faculty positions after a year, if suitable candidates from the beneficiary communities are not found. This cannot obviously be a salutary course for official policy, when the reservation system, envisaged as an improvement on western ideals of affirmative action, is widely seen as the shortest path to equality and equity. What could help bridge the gap is a better understanding of the lacunae in the education system, marked by a sea of deprived public schools and colleges, hyper-commercialised private universities and colleges and islands of elite institutions such as the IIMs.
•The failure of the Central higher education institutions to recruit faculty to all the reserved positions is usually attributed to the absence of enough qualified candidates, as the Education Ministry’s committee for IITs did. One of the forward-looking remedial measures suggested by the panel was to start government-sponsored preparatory programmes, which would both equip aspiring faculty, and create a pool of research talent. This has merit in the context of management, science and other disciplines, and in the short term, could help qualified individuals overcome the deficiencies of their preparatory years. Such courses would also make these institutions of higher learning more socially responsive, meeting the goal of addressing historical deprivation of communities based on caste. Yet, there are larger questions that need answers, and which continue to be agitated in courts. One of them is whether there should not be even greater attention devoted to the most marginalised within the reserved categories, such as SC, since trickle down quota benefits for them are scarce. The egalitarian answer would be to continue expanding the pie of opportunity in the public realm, through ever greater funding of quality universal education at all levels and aiding the deprived through affirmative action on the road to equality.
📰 Responsible AI — the need for ethical guard rails
Without adequate safeguards, AI can widen social and economic schisms, leading to discriminatory outcomes
•Since Czech writer Karel Čapek first mentioned robots in a 1920s play, humans have dreamed about intelligent machines. What if robots take over policing? What if nanny-bots look after our children and elderly? What if — and this has been rich fodder for dystopian literature — they became more intelligent than us?
•Surrounded as we are by the vestiges of our analogue world, to many of us, these wonderings may seem decades from fruition. But artificial intelligence (AI), the engine of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, is already very much with us.
AI’s exponential growth
•It is embedded in the recommendations we get on our favourite streaming or shopping site; in GPS mapping technology; in the predictive text that completes our sentences when we try to send an email or complete a web search. It promises to be even more transformative than the harnessing of electricity. And the more we use AI, the more data we generate, the smarter it gets. In just the last decade, AI has evolved with unprecedented velocity — from beating human champions at Jeopardy! in 2011, to vanquishing the world’s number one player of Go, to decoding proteins (https://go.nature.com/30N9BQz) last year.
•Automation, big data and algorithms will continue to sweep into new corners of our lives until we no longer remember how things were “before”. Just as electricity allowed us to tame time, enabling us to radically alter virtually every aspect of existence, AI can leapfrog us toward eradicating hunger, poverty and disease — opening up new and hitherto unimaginable pathways for climate change mitigation, education and scientific discovery.
For better or for worse
•Already, AI has helped increase crop yields (https://bit.ly/3cAUv67), raised business productivity, improved access to credit and made cancer detection faster and more precise (https://go.nature.com/3qRmfbO). It could contribute more than $15 trillion to the world economy by 2030 (https://pwc.to/3tvmJq1), adding 14% to global GDP. Google has identified over 2,600 use cases of “AI for good” worldwide (https://bit.ly/3qSmsM2). A study published in Nature (https://go.nature.com/3tlzJyj) reviewing the impact of AI on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) finds that AI may act as an enabler on 134 — or 79% — of all SDG targets. We are on the cusp of unprecedented technological breakthroughs that promise to positively transform our world in ways deeper and more profound than anything that has come before.
•Yet, the study in Nature also finds that AI can actively hinder 59 — or 35% — of SDG targets. For starters, AI requires massive computational capacity, which means more power-hungry data centres — and a big carbon footprint (https://bit.ly/3lmsof4). Then, AI could compound digital exclusion. Robotics and AI companies are building intelligent machines that perform tasks typically carried out by low-income workers: self-service kiosks to replace cashiers, fruit-picking robots to replace field workers, etc.; but the day is not far when many desk jobs will also be edged out by AI, such as accountants, financial traders and middle managers. Without clear policies on reskilling workers, the promise of new opportunities will in fact create serious new inequalities. Investment is likely to shift to countries where AI-related work is already established (https://bit.ly/2NnrMt7), widening gaps among and within countries. Together, Big Tech’s big four — Alphabet/Google, Amazon, Apple and Facebook — are worth a staggering $5 trillion, more than the GDPs of just about every nation on earth. In 2020, when the world was reeling from the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, they added more than $2 trillion to their value.
•The fact is, just as AI has the potential to improve billions of lives, it can also replicate and exacerbate existing problems, and create new ones. Consider, for instance, the documented examples (https://bit.ly/30Ny8VI) of AI facial recognition and surveillance technology discriminating against people of colour and minorities. Or how an AI-enhanced recruitment engine, based on existing workforce profiles, taught itself that male candidates were preferable to female.
Privacy worries
•AI also presents serious data privacy concerns. The algorithm’s never-ending quest for data has led to our digital footprints being harvested and sold without our knowledge or informed consent. We are constantly being profiled in service of customisation, putting us into echo chambers of like-mindedness, diminishing exposure to varied viewpoints and eroding common ground. Today, it is no exaggeration to say that with all the discrete bytes of information floating about us online, the algorithms know us better than we know ourselves. They can nudge our behaviour without our noticing. Our level of addiction to our devices, the inability to resist looking at our phones, and the chilling case of Cambridge Analytica — in which such algorithms and big data were used to alter voting decisions — should serve as a potent warning of the individual and societal concerns resulting from current AI business models.
•In a world where the algorithm is king, it behoves us to remember that it is still humans — with all our biases and prejudices, conscious and unconscious — who are responsible for it. We shape the algorithms and it is our data they operate on. Remember that in 2016, it took less than a day for Microsoft’s Twitter chatbot, christened “Tay”, to start spewing egregious racist content, based on the material it encountered.
Ensuring our humane future
•How then do we ensure that AI applications are as unbiased, equitable, transparent, civil and inclusive as possible? How do we ensure that potential harm is mitigated, particularly for the most vulnerable, including for children? Without ethical guard rails, AI will widen social and economic schisms, amplifying any innate biases at an irreversible scale and rate and lead to discriminatory outcomes.
•It is neither enough nor is it fair to expect AI tech companies to solve all these challenges through self-regulation. First, they are not alone in developing and deploying AI; governments also do so. Second, only a “whole of society” approach to AI governance will enable us to develop broad-based ethical principles, cultures and codes of conduct, to ensure the needed harm-mitigating measures, reviews and audits during design, development and deployment phases, and to inculcate the transparency, accountability, inclusion and societal trust for AI to flourish and bring about the extraordinary breakthroughs it promises.
•Given the global reach of AI, such a “whole of society” approach must rest on a “whole of world” approach. The UN Secretary-General’s Roadmap on Digital Cooperation (https://bit.ly/3cDBrV2) is a good starting point: it lays out the need for multi-stakeholder efforts on global cooperation so AI is used in a manner that is “trustworthy, human rights-based, safe and sustainable, and promotes peace”. And UNESCO has developed a global, comprehensive standard-setting draft Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence to Member States (https://bit.ly/3cC4pEH) for deliberation and adoption.
•Many countries, including India, are cognisant of the opportunities and the risks, and are striving to strike the right balance between AI promotion and AI governance — both for the greater public good. NITI Aayog’s Responsible AI for All strategy (https://bit.ly/30LMXIv), the culmination of a year-long consultative process, is a case in point. It recognises that our digital future cannot be optimised for good without multi-stakeholder governance structures that ensure the dividends are fair, inclusive, and just.
•Agreeing on common guiding principles is an important first step, but it is not the most challenging part. It is in the application of the principles that the rubber hits the road. It is where principles meet reality that the ethical issues and conundrums arise in practice, and for which we must be prepared for deep, difficult, multi-stakeholder ethical reflection, analyses and resolve. Only then will AI provide humanity its full promise. Until then, AI (and the humans who created it) will embody the myth of Prometheus: the Titan who shared the fire of the gods with mortals, and the trickster whose defiance of Zeus led to Pandora opening her box.
📰 We need to urgently invest in public health
Only a robust public health system, and not healthcare alone, can lead to disease prevention and control
•The worst pandemic in a hundred years has demonstrated the importance of healthcare and public health in times of a health crisis. The efforts of healthcare personnel, from ASHA workers with only basic training, to highly specialised intensive care physicians, have saved countless lives and made India proud.
•That healthcare is science-based was convincingly demonstrated. Lab diagnosis, clinical assessments, triage and management ranging from home quarantine to intensive care, clinical trials discriminating between useful and useless therapeutic modalities all gave society a glimpse of how modern medicine works. We learned that outcomes of well-designed clinical trials with their statistically significant differences between treatment modalities are sacrosanct for evidence — not unreliable personal anecdotes.
•Healthcare personnel worked tirelessly, with single-minded devotion to duty, putting the best interests of others who were in need over their own personal priorities. This made a mark in public perception. Now we realise why good grounding in theory, long years in basics and specialisation, and apprenticing to gain experience in ethical, evidence-based medical practice are essential for the making of caring medical and nursing professionals. Both the science base and the discipline belong to the allopathic system of medicine. This was brought to India just over a century ago and successfully adopted by us as our own.
Healthcare and public health
•While the health-care capability in India ranks among the world’s best, it is a different story when it comes to public health. We need to distinguish between the two. Healthcare refers to the transaction between one caregiver and one sick person at a time – hence the client is the sick person and therapy is the mainstay. For public health, the client is the community at large and the goal is disease prevention and control. Disease control is the deliberate, intervention-based and quantified reduction of disease burden. It has to be data-driven. Data are required on baseline disease burden and real-time monitoring to track the control trajectory of all the highly prevalent infectious diseases. Reliable data must be collected from all sources including every healthcare provider, for monitoring disease burden by diagnosis and outcomes; for this exercise, the total population is the denominator.
•Data collection for HIV control is sample-based, under the unique Indian design of sentinel surveillance, established in 1986 and still continuing. It shows only the time trend of declining infection prevalence. Counting of acute flaccid paralysis (AFP) and laboratory tests for polioviruses (including molecular methods distinguishing wild from vaccine viruses) were crucial for polio elimination in India. The commonality between HIV/AIDS and polio programmes is the availability of denominator-based data. The denominator for polio elimination is the national total under-five population. So, we knew the total disease burden. And when it reached zero, we knew polio was eliminated.
•Our health management does not have a way of prospectively collecting data on all diseases and deaths by diagnosis. That is precisely the task of public health. In its absence, we have only the numerator data on various diseases, including COVID-19, but not the denominator — in short we do not have a comprehensive and quantified profile of any disease in the entire population, including those under vertical programmes — tuberculosis, malaria, leprosy, AIDS.
•For COVID-19, computerised medical records informed us about how many were tested for SARS-CoV-2 infection — and among them, how many were positive, hospitalised, survived or died. All statistics are available in the public domain. Everyone knows that the numbers cover only a fraction of the total, but what proportion of the total, will remain unknown forever.
Social vaccination
•To get an insight into the totality of infections in the whole population, we rely on the shape of the COVID-19 epidemic curve that peaked in September and steadily declined to the present — with less than 20,000 daily new infections since January 7 until recently. That informs the proportion already infected — most probably 50%-60%, for 700 million to 800 million people. But the detected numbers are over 11 million. Where does the truth lie: nearer to 11 million or to 700 million? We will not know without a public health surveillance system. The sero-surveys on random samples, an attempt to derive the totality of infections, reported widely disparate figures and failed to give us a reasonably reliable picture.
•For COVID-19, there are non-pharmacological preventive interventions — face masks, hand hygiene, physical distancing — and pharmacological prevention by vaccination. Where we fell short is timely and comprehensive public education with authoritative and authentic information communicated effectively to the public for self-motivated behaviour modification. In other words, a ‘social vaccine’. Social vaccination is another function of public health.
•In the absence of public health infrastructure, India’s AIDS Task Force designed and successfully applied ‘social vaccine’ during the HIV/AIDS epidemic and this was continued by the National AIDS Control Organization (NACO). Sadly, there was no crosstalk between the COVID-19 programme and NACO; hence principles of social vaccine, so effectively deployed in AIDS prevention, were not adopted for COVID-19 prevention. Now, during the COVID-19 vaccine roll-out, authentic health education regarding vaccination is conspicuously lacking, leading to considerable vaccine hesitancy among even healthcare staff. Post-vaccination surveillance, vital for assessing vaccine efficacy and safety, is not being conducted, again a lacuna in public health. We sorely miss public health.
•COVID-19 has strong social determinants of infection transmission — overcrowding, lack of cough/sneeze etiquette, and urban-rural divide in health awareness and education. These factors are common for influenza and TB too. Typhoid, cholera, leptospirosis, scrub typhus, malaria, rabies, etc. have environmental determinants. In countries where public health is given equal status with healthcare, public health addresses both social and environmental determinants and controls these diseases. Public health personnel have jurisdiction over people in their homes and workplaces, food and water distribution chains, and over ecosystems — ranging from densities of arthropod vectors, rodent and canine populations, to flight ranges of fruit-eating bats.
•Our government errs when it thinks that healthcare for people’s felt need alone will suffice, without mitigating disease determinants through public health. India’s style of mounting ad hoc responses only when there is a pandemic is no longer tenable. Currently our healthcare institutions are cluttered with too many infectious diseases that are amenable to control if only we had public health. Imagine how much wealth is going down the drain for want of public health. Investment in public health will result in health, wealth and prosperity.
📰 A robust economic relationship
From an industry perspective, U.S.-India collaborations in certain areas will bring many gains
•Under the new U.S. administration, the economic relationship with India can be expected to be on the radar as India has enjoyed bipartisan support in the U.S. A closer economic partnership would bring gains to both sides in terms of GDP, employment, and productivity, given the complementary natures of their economies.
•From the industry perspective, a robust collaborative agenda would rest on a comprehensive set of actions which can take bilateral trade in goods and services to the desired goal of $500 billion. In the five years to 2019, bilateral trade grew at a CAGR of 7.7% per year to $146 billion. If we assume the same rate of growth, the $500 billion target will be achieved by 2036. To ensure this, the CAGR would need to be set at 11.9%. This is doable if the right policy actions are taken. CII has outlined key areas for collaboration.
Areas for collaboration
•One, a collaborative response to the pandemic would contribute to global containment of the virus. Business partnerships are already taking place in the supply chain to ensure coordinated shipping, distribution, and last-mile connectivity. As India becomes the hub of global vaccine distribution, building confidence in the Indian IPR regime, reviving the U.S.-India Health Dialogue, and mutually recognising standards and approvals will help drive healthcare exchanges.
•Two, the macro trade architecture can be strengthened with a broad trade agreement focusing on resolving the low-hanging fruit. The U.S.-India Trade Policy Forum meetings can be revived along with a cross-sector track-2 group to look at convergence on issues such as market access. There is potential for flexibility from both sides for restoring the Generalised System of Preferences which would help lower duties for certain Indian products. The two countries should consider initiating discussions on a free trade agreement.
•Three, mobility of professional labour would aid trade in services. Recent regulations in the U.S. have impacted labour mobility which can be addressed through immigration reforms for employment-based visa backlogs and smooth and timely processes. The MoU on labour cooperation signed in 2011 could be updated in line with India’s recent labour regulatory changes. This may also be a good time to reconsider a totalisation agreement pertaining to social security, given that both have already entered into such agreements with many of the same partner countries.
•Four, defence industry ties can be stepped up in coordination with industry, as both sides benefit from U.S. technology and Indian manufacturing in this sector. A defence dialogue including the private sectors of both sides could help in co-production and co-development in the defence and aerospace sectors.
•Five, engagement of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) can be stepped up. Smaller U.S. companies can find significant new opportunities for investments in India and sourcing from India. A U.S.-India SME CEOs Forum can be set up to catalyse such partnerships.
•Six, clean energy and climate change, high priorities of the U.S. administration, are also areas where India has made rapid strides. The U.S.-India Strategic Energy Partnership should be geared towards joint investments in industrial decarbonisation, carbon dioxide removal and green hydrogen. The programmes of Partnership to Advance Clean Energy Research, Partnership to Advance Clean Energy Deployment and Promoting Energy Access through Clean Energy must be relaunched.
•Seven, a digital economy partnership is critical. India has proved its mettle in this space with new opportunities opening up in robotics, space, AI and electric vehicles. It is also important to disseminate information on India’s IPR regime improvements and work towards taking India off the U.S. Trade Representative IPR priority watchlist.
•Other opportunities in the bilateral economic relationship include education, innovation and R&D, and agricultural trade and technology. Industry is confident that the relevant dialogue mechanisms will be instituted at the earliest.
