It would not do for people to find out all of a sudden that their bank accounts have been cleaned out, or that your BHIM and Aadhaar data are available for sale on the Internet.
Some people are raising questions about Aadhaar and about Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs). It is hard to dismiss them out of hand even if you make allowances for their vested interests. The reason is that, fundamentally, computer and network security in India is in its infancy. As the country is dragged kicking and screaming into a future with electronic money and electronic identity and electronic everything else, it is pertinent to worry about how things can go wrong.
The objectives behind Aadhaar and the EVM are laudable: it makes sense both to have an unalterable identity mechanism and a way of quickly and accurately tabulating election results. Indeed there is a case for even greater introduction of digital mechanisms into daily activities: for instance, we need land records and medical records to be reliable and portable. So the thrust behind Digital India and India Stack is doubtless, sensible. The devil is in the implementation details.
It would be instructive to look at what has happened elsewhere with the introduction of a unique identifier and electronic voting machines, though their situations may not be entirely comparable. They are different countries with different problems, yes, but certainly one can learn from the experiences of other people.
Electronic Voting Machines have been banned in several American states (and in Germany they have been ruled unconstitutional) because it is evident that there are multiple ways of tampering with them, thus denying a citizen the constitutional right to the vote.
As for identity, the social security number (SSN) was introduced in the US quite some time ago as a way of providing a national worker’s pension. But the SSN soon became used for all sorts of other things, and in effect, it is a de facto unique national id now. Other government agencies such as the income tax authorities as well as businesses began to track data using the SSN as the unique id, and even though it was illegal to do so in the first place, but you have a fait accompli now.
The net result today is that it is possible to construct the entire profile of any US resident these days by just using their SSN: you can track their credit card use, their medical history, their ATM use, and so on. There was a film The Net that shows the nightmare scenario if someone were to delete your SSN from the system: you become a non-person. For all practical purposes, you cease to exist.
Separately, with the arrival of the smartphone, not only the US government but also Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon know everything about you: where you have been at any time, who you fraternise with, what your interests are, what topics you search for on the net, what you say to whom on social media or phone calls. Everything.
If you were a bit of a pessimist, you might say that the age of the Panopticon has arrived: that the scary future European philosopher Jeremy Bentham imagined, where Big Brother is really watching you and knows what you think.
For privacy advocates, this is a nightmare: imagine if a government were to be malign, and wanted to round up people based on thought crimes – in fact you can do this today. Witness how every time some terrorist is caught, they say he had been watching propaganda videos on YouTube or learning how to assemble bombs from common household chemicals. You leave your digital footprints everywhere, and it is almost impossible to hide from the eye in the sky.
But what is worse is that it is not only governments, but hackers too who know or can know anything about you.
One popular trick these days is ransomware: your computer is locked up by a remote hacker, who refuses to let you access it unless you pay good money. One way of dealing with this is to keep regular backups of all your data on computers or disks that are never attached to the Internet. But that is hard to do because your computers need the regular software updates pushed by the manufacturers.
Beyond that, there is identity theft. By piecing together data about your activities, and especially based on the SSN, it is possible for thieves to create new identities that mimic you: the data is yours, but someone has control of it. Large numbers of people fall prey to this every year in the US, and billions of dollars are stolen. A crook who clones your identity can with little trouble create a new credit card with your SSN, and charge thousands of dollars to it. You, alas, will get the bill. This is so widespread that there is identify theft insurance available now.
Imagine how identify theft might play out in India. Unscrupulous bank employees have already been caught in scams where they clone credit cards, and arrange for the PIN numbers to be sent to addresses they or their friends control: the banks end up absorbing this kind of loss (unless they can bully the consumer into paying for the fraud). But imagine how this would be a nightmare if clever hackers are let loose on millions of unsuspecting and unprepared, often illiterate and gullible users in India. And all their financial information is centred around their Aadhaar numbers.
When BHIM-Aaadhar is made a major mechanism for financial transactions, it should be assumed that there will be continuous and wilful security breach attempts made by hackers. It would not do for people to find out suddenly that their bank accounts have been cleaned out, or that your BHIM and Aadhaar data are available for sale on the Internet.
That brings us to the crux of the matter. It is true that Aadhaar is a high-tech mechanism using fingerprints and iris scans to precisely identify individuals. It may even be that this is superior to other UID mechanism available elsewhere.
But there are several problems: one is that current processes need to be re-engineered, another is that there needs to be a clear idea of ownership of data, and a third is that the data must be stored in a manner that it is unalterable.
The first problem is the hardest. Many of the processes we use in India unnecessarily reveal too much information, and they can be leaky – just the thing that the friendly neighbourhood hackers are looking for. Every process using Aadhaar for authentication needs to be re-engineered end to end to ensure that only information that is absolutely necessary (“need to know”) is revealed, and that too in a secure manner.
Secondly, it is not clear who owns the information; maybe the Aadhaar Act has clear rules about this. But the working assumption is that all the data belongs to the government (and that it is not merely the custodian of private data). On the contrary, it must be absolutely clear that the data belongs to the individual, and that he/she must be in control of how much of it is revealed. For instance, if one wants to reveal his/her medical or financial history to some corporation, it should be based on informed consent.
The third problem may have a general solution: blockchain. Although there are concerns about the physical security of devices using blockchain, by integrating that technology into the (orthogonal) technology of identity management, it may be possible to create solutions so that important data is guaranteed to be inviolate.
As for Electronic Voting Machines, speaking strictly from a technology perspective, they are not as safe as we may believe. It would be necessary to have full control of the chips and firmware on them to be confident that EVMs are not being messed with. Researchers in 2010 showed how they could be fixed up with radio-aware chips, which could be manipulated with a mobile phone to activate, say, a Trojan Horse programme that deletes itself after use and transfers say 40 per cent of all votes polled to a specific candidate.
Today, EVMs follow a sort of ‘security by obscurity’, and the voter-verified paper audit trail (VVPAT) terminals with printouts are only a partial solution. But they can be made far more secure. In fact, if sufficient safeguards are inserted, including multi-factor authentication, internet voting could be introduced, so that non-residents and expatriates can also exercise their franchise. The belly-aching by certain parties is just an excuse, but the dangers of EVMs may be real.
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Steve Ovett, the famous British middle-distance athlete, won the 800-metres gold medal at the Moscow Olympics of 1980. Just a few days later, he was about to win a 5,000-metres race at London’s Crystal Palace. Known for his burst of acceleration on the home stretch, he had supreme confidence in his ability to out-sprint rivals. With the final 100 metres remaining,
[wptelegram-join-channel link=”https://t.me/s/upsctree” text=”Join @upsctree on Telegram”]Ovett waved to the crowd and raised a hand in triumph. But he had celebrated a bit too early. At the finishing line, Ireland’s John Treacy edged past Ovett. For those few moments, Ovett had lost his sense of reality and ignored the possibility of a negative event.
This analogy works well for the India story and our policy failures , including during the ongoing covid pandemic. While we have never been as well prepared or had significant successes in terms of growth stability as Ovett did in his illustrious running career, we tend to celebrate too early. Indeed, we have done so many times before.
It is as if we’re convinced that India is destined for greater heights, come what may, and so we never run through the finish line. Do we and our policymakers suffer from a collective optimism bias, which, as the Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman once wrote, “may well be the most significant of the cognitive biases”? The optimism bias arises from mistaken beliefs which form expectations that are better than the reality. It makes us underestimate chances of a negative outcome and ignore warnings repeatedly.
The Indian economy had a dream run for five years from 2003-04 to 2007-08, with an average annual growth rate of around 9%. Many believed that India was on its way to clocking consistent double-digit growth and comparisons with China were rife. It was conveniently overlooked that this output expansion had come mainly came from a few sectors: automobiles, telecom and business services.
Indians were made to believe that we could sprint without high-quality education, healthcare, infrastructure or banking sectors, which form the backbone of any stable economy. The plan was to build them as we went along, but then in the euphoria of short-term success, it got lost.
India’s exports of goods grew from $20 billion in 1990-91 to over $310 billion in 2019-20. Looking at these absolute figures it would seem as if India has arrived on the world stage. However, India’s share of global trade has moved up only marginally. Even now, the country accounts for less than 2% of the world’s goods exports.
More importantly, hidden behind this performance was the role played by one sector that should have never made it to India’s list of exports—refined petroleum. The share of refined petroleum exports in India’s goods exports increased from 1.4% in 1996-97 to over 18% in 2011-12.
An import-intensive sector with low labour intensity, exports of refined petroleum zoomed because of the then policy regime of a retail price ceiling on petroleum products in the domestic market. While we have done well in the export of services, our share is still less than 4% of world exports.
India seemed to emerge from the 2008 global financial crisis relatively unscathed. But, a temporary demand push had played a role in the revival—the incomes of many households, both rural and urban, had shot up. Fiscal stimulus to the rural economy and implementation of the Sixth Pay Commission scales had led to the salaries of around 20% of organized-sector employees jumping up. We celebrated, but once again, neither did we resolve the crisis brewing elsewhere in India’s banking sector, nor did we improve our capacity for healthcare or quality education.
Employment saw little economy-wide growth in our boom years. Manufacturing jobs, if anything, shrank. But we continued to celebrate. Youth flocked to low-productivity service-sector jobs, such as those in hotels and restaurants, security and other services. The dependence on such jobs on one hand and high-skilled services on the other was bound to make Indian society more unequal.
And then, there is agriculture, an elephant in the room. If and when farm-sector reforms get implemented, celebrations would once again be premature. The vast majority of India’s farmers have small plots of land, and though these farms are at least as productive as larger ones, net absolute incomes from small plots can only be meagre.
A further rise in farm productivity and consequent increase in supply, if not matched by a demand rise, especially with access to export markets, would result in downward pressure on market prices for farm produce and a further decline in the net incomes of small farmers.
We should learn from what John Treacy did right. He didn’t give up, and pushed for the finish line like it was his only chance at winning. Treacy had years of long-distance practice. The same goes for our economy. A long grind is required to build up its base before we can win and celebrate. And Ovett did not blame anyone for his loss. We play the blame game. Everyone else, right from China and the US to ‘greedy corporates’, seems to be responsible for our failures.
We have lowered absolute poverty levels and had technology-based successes like Aadhaar and digital access to public services. But there are no short cuts to good quality and adequate healthcare and education services. We must remain optimistic but stay firmly away from the optimism bias.
In the end, it is not about how we start, but how we finish. The disastrous second wave of covid and our inability to manage it is a ghastly reminder of this fact.
On March 31, the World Economic Forum (WEF) released its annual Gender Gap Report 2021. The Global Gender Gap report is an annual report released by the WEF. The gender gap is the difference between women and men as reflected in social, political, intellectual, cultural, or economic attainments or attitudes. The gap between men and women across health, education, politics, and economics widened for the first time since records began in 2006.
[wptelegram-join-channel link=”https://t.me/s/upsctree” text=”Join @upsctree on Telegram”]No need to remember all the data, only pick out few important ones to use in your answers.
The Global gender gap index aims to measure this gap in four key areas : health, education, economics, and politics. It surveys economies to measure gender disparity by collating and analyzing data that fall under four indices : economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, health and survival, and political empowerment.
The 2021 Global Gender Gap Index benchmarks 156 countries on their progress towards gender parity. The index aims to serve as a compass to track progress on relative gaps between women and men in health, education, economy, and politics.
Although no country has achieved full gender parity, the top two countries (Iceland and Finland) have closed at least 85% of their gap, and the remaining seven countries (Lithuania, Namibia, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Rwanda, and Ireland) have closed at least 80% of their gap. Geographically, the global top 10 continues to be dominated by Nordic countries, with —Iceland, Norway, Finland, and Sweden—in the top five.
The top 10 is completed by one country from Asia Pacific (New Zealand 4th), two Sub-Saharan countries (Namibia, 6th and Rwanda, 7th, one country from Eastern Europe (the new entrant to the top 10, Lithuania, 8th), and another two Western European countries (Ireland, 9th, and Switzerland, 10th, another country in the top-10 for the first time).There is a relatively equitable distribution of available income, resources, and opportunities for men and women in these countries. The tremendous gender gaps are identified primarily in the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia.
Here, we can discuss the overall global gender gap scores across the index’s four main components : Economic Participation and Opportunity, Educational Attainment, Health and Survival, and Political Empowerment.
The indicators of the four main components are
(1) Economic Participation and Opportunity:
o Labour force participation rate,
o wage equality for similar work,
o estimated earned income,
o Legislators, senior officials, and managers,
o Professional and technical workers.
(2) Educational Attainment:
o Literacy rate (%)
o Enrollment in primary education (%)
o Enrollment in secondary education (%)
o Enrollment in tertiary education (%).
(3) Health and Survival:
o Sex ratio at birth (%)
o Healthy life expectancy (years).
(4) Political Empowerment:
o Women in Parliament (%)
o Women in Ministerial positions (%)
o Years with a female head of State (last 50 years)
o The share of tenure years.
The objective is to shed light on which factors are driving the overall average decline in the global gender gap score. The analysis results show that this year’s decline is mainly caused by a reversal in performance on the Political Empowerment gap.
Global Trends and Outcomes:
– Globally, this year, i.e., 2021, the average distance completed to gender parity gap is 68% (This means that the remaining gender gap to close stands at 32%) a step back compared to 2020 (-0.6 percentage points). These figures are mainly driven by a decline in the performance of large countries. On its current trajectory, it will now take 135.6 years to close the gender gap worldwide.
– The gender gap in Political Empowerment remains the largest of the four gaps tracked, with only 22% closed to date, having further widened since the 2020 edition of the report by 2.4 percentage points. Across the 156 countries covered by the index, women represent only 26.1% of some 35,500 Parliament seats and 22.6% of over 3,400 Ministers worldwide. In 81 countries, there has never been a woman head of State as of January 15, 2021. At the current rate of progress, the World Economic Forum estimates that it will take 145.5 years to attain gender parity in politics.
– The gender gap in Economic Participation and Opportunity remains the second-largest of the four key gaps tracked by the index. According to this year’s index results, 58% of this gap has been closed so far. The gap has seen marginal improvement since the 2020 edition of the report, and as a result, we estimate that it will take another 267.6 years to close.
– Gender gaps in Educational Attainment and Health and Survival are nearly closed. In Educational Attainment, 95% of this gender gap has been closed globally, with 37 countries already attaining gender parity. However, the ‘last mile’ of progress is proceeding slowly. The index estimates that it will take another 14.2 years to close this gap on its current trajectory completely.
In Health and Survival, 96% of this gender gap has been closed, registering a marginal decline since last year (not due to COVID-19), and the time to close this gap remains undefined. For both education and health, while progress is higher than economy and politics in the global data, there are important future implications of disruptions due to the pandemic and continued variations in quality across income, geography, race, and ethnicity.
India-Specific Findings:
India had slipped 28 spots to rank 140 out of the 156 countries covered. The pandemic causing a disproportionate impact on women jeopardizes rolling back the little progress made in the last decades-forcing more women to drop off the workforce and leaving them vulnerable to domestic violence.
India’s poor performance on the Global Gender Gap report card hints at a serious wake-up call and learning lessons from the Nordic region for the Government and policy makers.
Within the 156 countries covered, women hold only 26 percent of Parliamentary seats and 22 percent of Ministerial positions. India, in some ways, reflects this widening gap, where the number of Ministers declined from 23.1 percent in 2019 to 9.1 percent in 2021. The number of women in Parliament stands low at 14.4 percent. In India, the gender gap has widened to 62.5 %, down from 66.8% the previous year.
It is mainly due to women’s inadequate representation in politics, technical and leadership roles, a decrease in women’s labor force participation rate, poor healthcare, lagging female to male literacy ratio, and income inequality.
The gap is the widest on the political empowerment dimension, with economic participation and opportunity being next in line. However, the gap on educational attainment and health and survival has been practically bridged.
India is the third-worst performer among South Asian countries, with Pakistan and Afghanistan trailing and Bangladesh being at the top. The report states that the country fared the worst in political empowerment, regressing from 23.9% to 9.1%.
Its ranking on the health and survival dimension is among the five worst performers. The economic participation and opportunity gap saw a decline of 3% compared to 2020, while India’s educational attainment front is in the 114th position.
India has deteriorated to 51st place from 18th place in 2020 on political empowerment. Still, it has slipped to 155th position from 150th position in 2020 on health and survival, 151st place in economic participation and opportunity from 149th place, and 114th place for educational attainment from 112th.
In 2020 reports, among the 153 countries studied, India is the only country where the economic gender gap of 64.6% is larger than the political gender gap of 58.9%. In 2021 report, among the 156 countries, the economic gender gap of India is 67.4%, 3.8% gender gap in education, 6.3% gap in health and survival, and 72.4% gender gap in political empowerment. In health and survival, the gender gap of the sex ratio at birth is above 9.1%, and healthy life expectancy is almost the same.
Discrimination against women has also been reflected in Health and Survival subindex statistics. With 93.7% of this gap closed to date, India ranks among the bottom five countries in this subindex. The wide sex ratio at birth gaps is due to the high incidence of gender-based sex-selective practices. Besides, more than one in four women has faced intimate violence in her lifetime.The gender gap in the literacy rate is above 20.1%.
Yet, gender gaps persist in literacy : one-third of women are illiterate (34.2%) than 17.6% of men. In political empowerment, globally, women in Parliament is at 128th position and gender gap of 83.2%, and 90% gap in a Ministerial position. The gap in wages equality for similar work is above 51.8%. On health and survival, four large countries Pakistan, India, Vietnam, and China, fare poorly, with millions of women there not getting the same access to health as men.
The pandemic has only slowed down in its tracks the progress India was making towards achieving gender parity. The country urgently needs to focus on “health and survival,” which points towards a skewed sex ratio because of the high incidence of gender-based sex-selective practices and women’s economic participation. Women’s labour force participation rate and the share of women in technical roles declined in 2020, reducing the estimated earned income of women, one-fifth of men.
Learning from the Nordic region, noteworthy participation of women in politics, institutions, and public life is the catalyst for transformational change. Women need to be equal participants in the labour force to pioneer the societal changes the world needs in this integral period of transition.
Every effort must be directed towards achieving gender parallelism by facilitating women in leadership and decision-making positions. Social protection programmes should be gender-responsive and account for the differential needs of women and girls. Research and scientific literature also provide unequivocal evidence that countries led by women are dealing with the pandemic more effectively than many others.
Gendered inequality, thereby, is a global concern. India should focus on targeted policies and earmarked public and private investments in care and equalized access. Women are not ready to wait for another century for equality. It’s time India accelerates its efforts and fight for an inclusive, equal, global recovery.
India will not fully develop unless both women and men are equally supported to reach their full potential. There are risks, violations, and vulnerabilities women face just because they are women. Most of these risks are directly linked to women’s economic, political, social, and cultural disadvantages in their daily lives. It becomes acute during crises and disasters.
With the prevalence of gender discrimination, and social norms and practices, women become exposed to the possibility of child marriage, teenage pregnancy, child domestic work, poor education and health, sexual abuse, exploitation, and violence. Many of these manifestations will not change unless women are valued more.