Authored by – Gaurav Aggrawal (2014 IAS Topper)
They say Napoleon couldn’t have happened without the French Revolution. They also say that the rise of Napoleon was inevitable in the aftermath of the French Revolution. People and events are mere cogs in the wheel of history. Once there is a necessity, and the conditions are ripe, the idea takes fruition.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) in governance is an idea whose time has come. The necessity is there – our people are growing ever more exasperated and demanding efficiency in public services delivery while the traditional systems seem to be unable to cater to these changing times.
Also, the conditions are ripe – thanks to the use of IT there is a lot of data in the government today in machine-readable form, and the technologies have reached a level where they can rival any human on a real-time and cost-effective way.All that is needed now is that leap.
AI would fundamentally transform methods of governance in this country. We often hear complaints that the implementation of government schemes remain confined only to papers. Now, what if there is a way to check if things are happening on the ground? Take, for example, the Swacch Bharat Mission (SBM). To make sure that the toilets are built, the government has developed a mobile app where the government functionary will have to go to the toilet site, click a photo of the toilet along with the beneficiary, and then upload it to the central server. Connectivity issues are taken care of by giving offline photo-clicking mode and uploading the photos when the person comes back on a 2G network. This curbs malpractice to a great extent.
However, there are ten crore toilets that are needed to be built and hence ten crore photographs. Is it manually possible to check these photos? Or if the toilet is in use or is stashed with hay? And is the same beneficiary appearing on multiple photos? What if 100 photos have been uploaded from sitting in an office? Clearly no.
The present system relies on people to do random checks to create a deterrence effect but so has the system that we have relied upon for past 70 years and the outcome is for us to see. It does not work because of people either not having enough time or lacking the inclination to do petty things.
Now what if you actually get a way to process each of these 10 crore photos and generate an alert whenever the photograph is not that of an entirely built toilet which is actually in use (not stashed with hay or other stuff) and same beneficiary doesn’t appear in multiple photos or multiple photographs don’t get uploaded sitting in the office? Won’t cheating and malpractices go down by order of magnitude as people realise that each photo would be scrutinised and not just some small sample? Wouldn’t it be awesome to know we have ten crore functional toilets on the ground and not just paper? That, my friends, AI can achieve – and in a very cost efficient manner.
But then the sceptics argue that in rural and remote India, the penetration of internet is very low and as a result, AI will have limited or no applicability there and will create a digital divide. However, contrary to this, the need and applicability for AI are more in the remotest areas of the country than in the heart of the capital. That is because it is in these most secluded areas that the traditional governance systems are entirely broken. Physical infrastructure is inefficient, and the people are poor and unaware.
Generally, no one wants a posting there – most people there would be on punishment postings, and as soon as they come, they would start spending their energies in getting a transfer back to the mainstream areas. As a result, there are problems of severe under-staffing, lack of morale, poor quality in the government workforce and weak monitoring of government schemes and implementation. In Delhi and state capitals, there would be a lot of people to check if toilets are built, we won’t need AI. But who will check in the tribal areas of Rajasthan or Chattisgarh? Imagine if in these regions, the government schemes start functioning as they were supposed to do, AI will bridge the development and digital divide, not accentuate it.
Likewise, again contrary to what the sceptics say, the scope of AI is immense in traditional sectors such as agriculture. For example, take the government run crop insurance scheme; in this crop insurance scheme, if the yield is below a threshold, it would trigger an insurance payout to the farmer. To determine the actual yield, millions of crop cutting experiments would be carried out – much more than what are mandated today. As per the scheme guidelines only, even the ones done today “lack reliability, accuracy and speed”.
So mobile app solutions could be developed where geo-tagged photographs of the crop cutting experiment would be uploaded like SBM. Would it not be amazing if we have a solution to check these millions of photos to see whether an actual crop cutting experiment has been carried out by the same person who was supposed to carry it out or has the crop cutting experiment work been sub-contracted to unskilled individuals who went there and clicked selfies?
Similarly, the government runs Kisan Call Centres which receive lakhs of calls every month. Wouldn’t it be priceless if we can get a timely warning from the call centre data that say in Maharashtra, this year the distress level among farmers is unusually high due to this particular factor? Perhaps then the administrative machinery can be activated timely on a war scale to prevent farmer suicides? Or say based on soil and environmental condition reports from our satellites and based on what crop is sown in a particular area, we can predict that this year vulnerability of this crop to this pest is higher, and perhaps we can supply additional required pesticide there and send targeted SMS / agronometric advisories to the farmers in that region?
All these things have not been taken from some science fiction movie but are very much available, proven and economic technologies. Similarly, there is a Kisan suvidha app – the flagship app of the agriculture department – where among other things, a person can upload three photos of some pest infected crops and our scientists would tell what the problem is and what the remedies are.
However, as with the case with almost anything in our country, the rush is huge, there are thousands of queries and there isn’t enough capacity to answer all the queries manually. As a result, many questions go unanswered, and people’s faith suffers due to which they would stop using it in future. Again, AI can help here. Even if the farmer himself doesn’t have a smartphone, even in remotest areas of the country, today someone will be having a smart-phone and there would be a 2G connectivity nearby if not within the village. So these are solutions which can work given the enormous social capital in our rural society.
Finally a word on another common misconception – that AI will lead to loss of jobs. One bane of our country is systems don’t work here. AI can make them work. It can leapfrog us regarding development to the level of Singapore or Western nations. It can bring immense prosperity to the country. The government today is over-burdened, and there is a lack of capacity to do the multitude of tasks it has taken upon itself.
AI is our answer to capacity building. Human beings are not like horses – that after the mass production of cars, horses were suddenly rendered jobless. When machines started spinning cotton, we started to build machines. Productivity gains always create more and better jobs than the ones which are lost due to them. We are still far away from a Terminator kind of scenario where machines may be able to replace humans. That might happen 50 years from now, not today – and if it has to happen, will happen regardless of whether the government uses AI or not. But the massive productivity gains cannot be ignored.
Apart from the examples mentioned above, there is a huge scope of AI in fields such as grievance redressal, law and order, health, education, etc. Today the West is using driverless cars and flying drones. 300 years ago, the West was similarly inventing and using new technologies like the steam engine and cotton gin. We chose to shut our eyes then, and we all know what happened afterwards. Can we afford to make the same mistake again?
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The United Nations has shaped so much of global co-operation and regulation that we wouldn’t recognise our world today without the UN’s pervasive role in it. So many small details of our lives – such as postage and copyright laws – are subject to international co-operation nurtured by the UN.
In its 75th year, however, the UN is in a difficult moment as the world faces climate crisis, a global pandemic, great power competition, trade wars, economic depression and a wider breakdown in international co-operation.
Still, the UN has faced tough times before – over many decades during the Cold War, the Security Council was crippled by deep tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. The UN is not as sidelined or divided today as it was then. However, as the relationship between China and the US sours, the achievements of global co-operation are being eroded.
The way in which people speak about the UN often implies a level of coherence and bureaucratic independence that the UN rarely possesses. A failure of the UN is normally better understood as a failure of international co-operation.
We see this recently in the UN’s inability to deal with crises from the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, to civil conflict in Syria, and the failure of the Security Council to adopt a COVID-19 resolution calling for ceasefires in conflict zones and a co-operative international response to the pandemic.
The UN administration is not primarily to blame for these failures; rather, the problem is the great powers – in the case of COVID-19, China and the US – refusing to co-operate.
Where states fail to agree, the UN is powerless to act.
Marking the 75th anniversary of the official formation of the UN, when 50 founding nations signed the UN Charter on June 26, 1945, we look at some of its key triumphs and resounding failures.
Five successes
1. Peacekeeping
The United Nations was created with the goal of being a collective security organisation. The UN Charter establishes that the use of force is only lawful either in self-defence or if authorised by the UN Security Council. The Security Council’s five permanent members, being China, US, UK, Russia and France, can veto any such resolution.
The UN’s consistent role in seeking to manage conflict is one of its greatest successes.
A key component of this role is peacekeeping. The UN under its second secretary-general, the Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld – who was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace prize after he died in a suspicious plane crash – created the concept of peacekeeping. Hammarskjöld was responding to the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the US opposed the invasion of Egypt by its allies Israel, France and the UK.
UN peacekeeping missions involve the use of impartial and armed UN forces, drawn from member states, to stabilise fragile situations. “The essence of peacekeeping is the use of soldiers as a catalyst for peace rather than as the instruments of war,” said then UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, when the forces won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize following missions in conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Central America and Europe.
However, peacekeeping also counts among the UN’s major failures.
2. Law of the Sea
Negotiated between 1973 and 1982, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) set up the current international law of the seas. It defines states’ rights and creates concepts such as exclusive economic zones, as well as procedures for the settling of disputes, new arrangements for governing deep sea bed mining, and importantly, new provisions for the protection of marine resources and ocean conservation.
Mostly, countries have abided by the convention. There are various disputes that China has over the East and South China Seas which present a conflict between power and law, in that although UNCLOS creates mechanisms for resolving disputes, a powerful state isn’t necessarily going to submit to those mechanisms.
Secondly, on the conservation front, although UNCLOS is a huge step forward, it has failed to adequately protect oceans that are outside any state’s control. Ocean ecosystems have been dramatically transformed through overfishing. This is an ecological catastrophe that UNCLOS has slowed, but failed to address comprehensively.
3. Decolonisation
The idea of racial equality and of a people’s right to self-determination was discussed in the wake of World War I and rejected. After World War II, however, those principles were endorsed within the UN system, and the Trusteeship Council, which monitored the process of decolonisation, was one of the initial bodies of the UN.
Although many national independence movements only won liberation through bloody conflicts, the UN has overseen a process of decolonisation that has transformed international politics. In 1945, around one third of the world’s population lived under colonial rule. Today, there are less than 2 million people living in colonies.
When it comes to the world’s First Nations, however, the UN generally has done little to address their concerns, aside from the non-binding UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007.
4. Human rights
The Human Rights Declaration of 1948 for the first time set out fundamental human rights to be universally protected, recognising that the “inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.
Since 1948, 10 human rights treaties have been adopted – including conventions on the rights of children and migrant workers, and against torture and discrimination based on gender and race – each monitored by its own committee of independent experts.
The language of human rights has created a new framework for thinking about the relationship between the individual, the state and the international system. Although some people would prefer that political movements focus on ‘liberation’ rather than ‘rights’, the idea of human rights has made the individual person a focus of national and international attention.
5. Free trade
Depending on your politics, you might view the World Trade Organisation as a huge success, or a huge failure.
The WTO creates a near-binding system of international trade law with a clear and efficient dispute resolution process.
The majority Australian consensus is that the WTO is a success because it has been good for Australian famers especially, through its winding back of subsidies and tariffs.
However, the WTO enabled an era of globalisation which is now politically controversial.
Recently, the US has sought to disrupt the system. In addition to the trade war with China, the Trump Administration has also refused to appoint tribunal members to the WTO’s Appellate Body, so it has crippled the dispute resolution process. Of course, the Trump Administration is not the first to take issue with China’s trade strategies, which include subsidises for ‘State Owned Enterprises’ and demands that foreign firms transfer intellectual property in exchange for market access.
The existence of the UN has created a forum where nations can discuss new problems, and climate change is one of them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess climate science and provide policymakers with assessments and options. In 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change created a permanent forum for negotiations.
However, despite an international scientific body in the IPCC, and 165 signatory nations to the climate treaty, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase.
Under the Paris Agreement, even if every country meets its greenhouse gas emission targets we are still on track for ‘dangerous warming’. Yet, no major country is even on track to meet its targets; while emissions will probably decline this year as a result of COVID-19, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will still increase.
This illustrates a core conundrum of the UN in that it opens the possibility of global cooperation, but is unable to constrain states from pursuing their narrowly conceived self-interests. Deep co-operation remains challenging.
Five failures of the UN
1. Peacekeeping
During the Bosnian War, Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed in the town of Srebrenica, declared a ‘safe area’ by the UN in 1993, failed in 1995 to stop the massacre of more than 8000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces. This is one of the most widely discussed examples of the failures of international peacekeeping operations.
On the massacre’s 10th anniversary, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote that the UN had “made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality”, contributing to a mass murder that would “haunt our history forever”.
If you look at some of the other infamous failures of peacekeeping missions – in places such as Rwanda, Somalia and Angola – it is the limited powers given to peacekeeping operations that have resulted in those failures.
2. The invasion of Iraq
The invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003, which was unlawful and without Security Council authorisation, reflects the fact that the UN is has very limited capacity to constrain the actions of great powers.
The Security Council designers created the veto power so that any of the five permanent members could reject a Council resolution, so in that way it is programmed to fail when a great power really wants to do something that the international community generally condemns.
In the case of the Iraq invasion, the US didn’t veto a resolution, but rather sought authorisation that it did not get. The UN, if you go by the idea of collective security, should have responded by defending Iraq against this unlawful use of force.
The invasion proved a humanitarian disaster with the loss of more than 400,000 lives, and many believe that it led to the emergence of the terrorist Islamic State.
3. Refugee crises
The UN brokered the 1951 Refugee Convention to address the plight of people displaced in Europe due to World War II; years later, the 1967 Protocol removed time and geographical restrictions so that the Convention can now apply universally (although many countries in Asia have refused to sign it, owing in part to its Eurocentric origins).
Despite these treaties, and the work of the UN High Commission for Refugees, there is somewhere between 30 and 40 million refugees, many of them, such as many Palestinians, living for decades outside their homelands. This is in addition to more than 40 million people displaced within their own countries.
While for a long time refugee numbers were reducing, in recent years, particularly driven by the Syrian conflict, there have been increases in the number of people being displaced.
During the COVID-19 crisis, boatloads of Rohingya refugees were turned away by port after port. This tragedy has echoes of pre-World War II when ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were refused entry by multiple countries.
And as a catastrophe of a different kind looms, there is no international framework in place for responding to people who will be displaced by rising seas and other effects of climate change.
4. Conflicts without end
Across the world, there is a shopping list of unresolved civil conflicts and disputed territories.
Palestine and Kashmir are two of the longest-running failures of the UN to resolve disputed lands. More recent, ongoing conflicts include the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
The common denominator of unresolved conflicts is either division among the great powers, or a lack of international interest due to the geopolitical stakes not being sufficiently high. For instance, the inaction during the Rwandan civil war in the 1990s was not due to a division among great powers, but rather a lack of political will to engage.
In Syria, by contrast, Russia and the US have opposing interests and back opposing sides: Russia backs the government of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whereas the US does not.
5. Acting like it’s 1945
The UN is increasingly out of step with the reality of geopolitics today.
The permanent members of the Security Council reflect the division of power internationally at the end of World War II. The continuing exclusion of Germany, Japan, and rising powers such as India and Indonesia, reflects the failure to reflect the changing balance of power.
Also, bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank, which are part of the UN system, continue to be dominated by the West. In response, China has created potential rival institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Western domination of UN institutions undermines their credibility. However, a more fundamental problem is that institutions designed in 1945 are a poor fit with the systemic global challenges – of which climate change is foremost – that we face today.