📰 Heartening milestone: On India’s overseas shipments record
Beyond stopgap measures such as enabling rupee-rouble trade, India must expedite FTAs
•The Centre’s announcement that India’s merchandise exports have already surpassed the target set for this fiscal year, with overseas shipments crossing a record $400 billion mark by March 21, brings much-needed cheer to an economy still struggling to recover from the bruising impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. The export rebound, coming on the back of last fiscal’s pandemic-induced slump in global demand, is particularly heartening as the key value-added sectors of engineering goods and apparel and garments have done well this year. Engineering goods, in particular, have registered almost 50% year-on-year growth, while ready-made garments logged a more than 30% increase, in the April-February period, as per provisional data from the Commerce Ministry. However, in terms of the sheer scale of increase, petroleum products were the standout performer as the global surge in oil prices lifted the dollar value of overseas shipments of goods produced at India’s refineries by 150% over the first 11 months of the fiscal. The fact that the export growth has been achieved against the backdrop of persistent logistical challenges, including container shortages and port congestion that have pushed up freight rates, is laudable and reflects the concerted effort made by the government in coordination with industry and the country’s overseas missions. Interestingly, Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal made a pointed reference to the role played by India’s embassies and envoys in exploring new opportunities for Indian products, and if the current momentum in exports is to be sustained in the coming years, the diplomatic corps will need to enlarge their role in trade promotion.
•Still, the cheer of attaining the milestone needs to be tempered by the acknowledgment that multiple challenges persist on the trade front. Imports have outpaced exports this year, almost doubling the trade deficit in the April-February period to more than $175 billion. The gap is wider than the pre-pandemic year of 2019-2020 as well and points to the pressing need to step up the pace of export growth if the deficit is to be shrunk meaningfully. While global inflation in commodity prices certainly contributed to enlarging the value of both exports and imports, the fact that project goods were the only item of import, among the 30 broad categories listed by the Ministry that contracted over the 11-month period, is also cause for disquiet. The lack of overseas purchases of capital goods for new projects is a clear indicator that private Indian businesses are still wary of making fresh investments given the lack of momentum in personal consumption. With the war in Ukraine and sanctions on Russia now posing fresh problems for exporters seeking to ship goods to not only these countries but other markets in Europe as well, policymakers must go beyond stopgap measures such as enabling rupee-rouble trade and expedite ongoing negotiations on the raft of free trade agreements so as to at least help lower some of the tariff walls.
The Draft Data Accessibility and Use Policy is silent on the norms, rules, and mechanisms to bring to fruition its vision
•In February 2022, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MEITY) released the Draft India Data Accessibility and Use Policy 2022 (or Draft Policy) for public consultation. The Draft Policy aims at providing a robust scaffolding for harnessing public sector data for informed decision-making, citizen-centric delivery of public services, and economy-wide digital innovation. Specifically, it seeks to maximise access to and use of quality non-personal data (NPD) available with the public sector, overcoming a number of historical bottlenecks: slow progress on the Open Government Data (OGD) platform, fragmentation of data sets into departmental silos, absence of data anonymisation tools, insufficient attention to the development of data stewardship models; and lack of data quality standards, licensing, and valuation frameworks to support data-sharing.
Incomplete norms
•This GovTech 3.0 approach — to unlock the valuable resource of public sector data — does upgrade the OGD vision of the National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy (NDSAP), 2012. It seeks to harness data-based intelligence for governance and economic development. However, the Draft Policy’s silence on the norms, rules, and mechanisms to bring to fruition its vision of data-supported social transformation requires attention.
•Ensuring greater citizen awareness, participation, and engagement with open data is mentioned as a core objective of the Draft Policy. In imagining such openness, the draft confines transparency of public data to non-personal data sets. Any attempt to promote meaningful citizen engagement with data cannot afford to ignore the canons of the Right to Information (RTI), and hence, the need for certain citizen data sets with personal identifiers to be in the public domain, towards making proactive disclosure meaningful. This does pose ethical and procedural dilemmas to balance privacy/risk of data misuse with transparency-accountability considerations. The unfinished task of the NDSAP in bringing coherence between restrictions on the availability of sensitive personal information in the public domain and India’s RTI, therefore, has been lost sight of.
•Similarly, with respect to government-to-government data sharing for citizen-centric service delivery, the Draft Policy highlights that approved data inventories will be federated into a government-wide, searchable database. Given that citizen data sets generated during service delivery contain personal identifiers, the assumption here seems to be that adherence to anonymisation standards is sufficient safeguard against privacy risks. But even in the case of anonymised citizen data sets (that is no longer personal data), downstream processing can pose serious risks to group privacy. Considering that India has no personal data protection law, the convergent data processing proposed through the Draft Policy becomes especially problematic.
•The Draft Policy adheres to the NDSAP paradigm of treating government agencies as ‘owners’ of the data sets they have collected and compiled instead of shifting to the trusteeship paradigm recommended by the 2020 Report of the MEITY Committee of Experts on non-personal data governance. When government agencies are cast as owners of public sector data sets, it means they have a carte blanche with respect to determining how to classify their data holdings into “open, restricted or non-shareable” sans any mechanisms for public consultation and citizen accountability. The lack of a data trusteeship framework gives government agencies unilateral privileges to determine the terms of data licensing. As such, predecessor policies ignore obligations for regular updation of public data sets. Taking on board a trusteeship-based approach, the proposed Draft Policy must pay attention to data quality, and ensure that licensing frameworks and any associated costs do not pose an impediment to data accessibility for non-commercial purposes, while also protecting public sector data from being captured by large firms, especially transnational Big Tech, for economic innovation.
•In the current context, where the most valuable data resources are held by the private sector, it is increasingly evident to policymakers that socioeconomic innovation depends on the state’s ability to catalyse wide-ranging data-sharing from both public and private sector actors across various sectors. The European Union, for instance, has focused on the creation of common, interoperable data spaces to encourage voluntary data-sharing in specific domains such as health, energy and agriculture. These common data spaces provide the governance framework for secure and trust-based access and use, in full compliance with personal data protection, and updated consumer protection and competition laws.
•Creating the right conditions for voluntary data-sharing is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for democratising data innovation. Competition law regulation has proven to be inadequate in the platform economy where first-movers entrench themselves owing to their intelligence advantage. And mandatory public access in exceptional cases such as public emergencies, suggested in the EU’s proposed Data Act (2022), cannot unlock the data enclosed by lead firms for public value creation, in general.
•In this regard, the data stewardship model for high-value data sets proposed by the MEITY’s Committee of Experts in their Report on Non-Personal Data Governance (2020) is instructive. In this model, a government/not-for-profit organisation may request the Non-Personal Data Authority or NPDA (an independent institutional mechanism) for the creation of a high-value data set (only non-personal data) in a particular sector, demonstrating the specific public interest purpose for which such data is being sought as well as community buy-in on the basis of an appropriate public consultation process. Once such a request is approved by the NPDA, the data trustee has the right to request data-sharing from all major custodians of data sets corresponding to the high-value data set category in question – both public and private. Private sector custodians have a mandatory duty to comply with such requests for specific raw data fields. They can only claim trade secret protection in inferred data. In the case of refusal of a data trustee’s request by a data custodian, the NPDA has the final say in terms of resolving the dispute.
•While the detailed checks and balances for such mandatory data-sharing arrangements are yet to evolve, the radical idea of high-value data sets as a social knowledge commons over which private data collectors have no de facto claim is vital to balance public use and private innovation.
What we need
•What we need is a new social contract for data whereby: a) the social commons of data are governed as an inappropriable commons that belong to all citizens; b) the government is the custodian or trustee with fiduciary responsibility to promote data use for public good; and c) democratisation of data value is ensured through accountable institutional mechanisms for data governance. The Draft Policy needs to be revisited from this perspective, in order to seize the data opportunity before it is too late.
📰 India’s complex position on Islamophobia
India’s assertion criticising the OIC Resolution on Islamophobia was valid, but could have made a reference to Indian Muslims
•Last week, the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) adopted a consensus Resolution declaring March 15 annually as the ‘International Day to Combat Islamophobia’. Introducing the draft document on behalf of its main sponsor, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), the Permanent Representative of Pakistan to the UN, Munir Akram, said that the OIC had “extensively” discussed the proposal with interested delegations for a year and the same process continued once a draft text was introduced in February this year. There is little doubt that India and the European Union (EU), which had major difficulties with the very basis of the proposal, would have discussed it with the OIC, but obviously could not persuade it to their viewpoints.
Concessions by OIC
•Islamophobia connotes fear of and prejudice, discrimination and hate speech against Islam. Muslims worldwide complain about negative stereotyping of their faith which has got exacerbated since the al Qaeda’s 9/11 terrorist attacks and other instances of terrorist violence undertaken by Islamist groups. They assert that these acts are not in keeping with Islam. They also emphasise, as Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan did during his address to the UNGA in 2019, that “…that there is no such thing as radical Islam (and) there are radical fringes in every society”. Mr. Khan also regretted that “suicide attacks are equated with Islam” and the marginalisation of Muslims in European countries. He admitted, though, that the Western world does not “look at religion the way that we do”.
•It is obvious that the OIC made many concessions till the last moment in order to achieve consensus. It stuck to its desire to get a resolution on combating Islamophobia, but in the process, had to place it in within the framework of previous resolutions of a general nature which seek to promote tolerance and religious freedoms and combat discrimination and violence flowing from a variety of reasons. In the Resolution’s operative part, the OIC had to agree to a call for a dialogue for peace based on “respect for human rights and diversity of religions and beliefs”. And significantly, while submitting the Resolution, the OIC had to withdraw its call for “high-visibility events” by member states, for curbing Islamophobia. It now only wants the observation of March 15 in “an appropriate manner”.
India’s stand
•Immediately after the Resolution’s adoption, India’s Permanent Representative T.S. Tirumuti exercised his right to explain India’s stand. His statement criticising the Resolution has attracted media attention. The fact that by not breaking the consensus India, at least formally, accepted the Resolution, has become somewhat obscured. India’s basic contention was encapsulated in these words “It is time that we acknowledged the prevalence of religiophobia, rather than single out just one”. This was an entirely valid assertion. So was the contention that ‘phobias’ are just not against Abrahamic faiths but also against non-Abrahamic religions. Discriminatory, prejudicial and violent acts have taken place, as mentioned by Mr. Tirumurti, against Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhists. Non-Abrahamic faiths, though, perhaps do not evoke the same degree of fear and negativity worldwide but especially in the West as does Islam.
•Mr. Tirumurti also mentioned India’s historical track record of giving refuge to the prosecuted members of different faiths. He specifically mentioned Zoroastrians, Jews and Buddhists. The reference to Buddhists was a not-so-subtle one to the Dalai Lama and his followers. While all this was fine, what was absent from Mr. Tirumurti’s intervention was any reference to Indian Muslims. This would not go without notice, especially as the Indian Muslim community is the second or third largest in the world.
•Mr. Tirumurti did “condemn” Islamophobia along with all other religiophobia, but at that point he could have specifically added that India cannot but be concerned with Islamophobia because Muslims form a substantial part of the country’s plural society. Such a reference would have been appropriate for two other reasons too: one, the complaint that despite India’s desire, the word “pluralism” does not find any mention in the Resolution; and, two, that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s vision of India’s polity and society and the path of progress he aspires to lies in “sabka saath, sabka vikas, sabka vishwas and sabka prayas”. That necessarily includes Indian Muslims as the ruling dispensation itself stresses to ward off allegations of anti-minorities bias. And a reference to Indian Muslims would not have detracted from Mr. Tirumurti’s basic warning that a focus on a single religion may lead to divisiveness when it is imperative that the UN is not divided into “religious camps”. India’s views in international fora have to be promoted with finesse and grace.
•Like India, the EU’s opposition to the Resolution stemmed from “singling out a particular confession”, but its philosophical underpinnings were different. The EU placed its focus on individual rights and freedoms and not on protection of religions per se. Thus, its emphasis was on the rights of non-believers. The gulf between the EU and the OIC on the ambit of the freedom of expression is long standing and will not be easily bridged for, as Mr. Khan noted, the West does not see religion as “we do”. The EU’s views on an individual’s right to change religion may also not coincide with the view of traditional Islam which does not accept apostasy.
China’s position
•The politics surrounding the Resolution was best illustrated by the late entry of China as among its sponsors. China’s abysmal record of treatment of its Muslims, especially the Uighurs, is well known. Yet, the OIC has always adopted a soft approach towards China. It has essentially overlooked the persecution of its Muslim minorities, particularly of the Uighurs who have been ‘re-educated’ in large camps. Thus, China’s approach to the Resolution was brazen. Perhaps as a quid pro quo, the OIC once again gave China a free pass during its Foreign Minister’s meeting in Islamabad on March 22-23; the Chinese mistreatment of its Muslims does not find any mention in the Islamabad declaration. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi was invited as a special guest at this meeting. In this context it is useful to recall Pakistan’s great opposition to the UAE inviting the then External Affairs Minister the late Sushma Swaraj in 2019 as guest of honour to the Abu Dhabi OIC Foreign Minister’s meeting.
