20 Apr 2023 : The Hindu Editorial Analysis

Editorial 1: It is a new assault on India’s liberty

The context

• Recently the Union government introduced a new set of measures with a view to crushing fake news and misinformation on the Internet. These introductions came through an amendment made to the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021, or IT Rules.

Provisions of IT Rules, 2021

• It sought to regulate intermediaries through MeitY and the digital news media, including over-the-top (OTT) media services, such as Netflix and Amazon Prime, through the Union Ministry for Information and Broadcasting.
• Insofar as intermediaries are concerned, the IT Rules imposed a series of onerous obligations, a breach of which could result in a loss of safe harbour.
• The rules required social media platforms, in particular messaging services, to provide technological solutions that would enable them to identify the first originator of any information on their service, where demanded by government, under a set of given circumstances, or where mandated by an order of court.

The consequences of the new amendments:

1. The new rules have been challenged in Supreme Court (SC) as the amendment grants to the Union Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) unbridled power to create a “fact check unit”, which will identify false or misleading online content that concerns the central government’s business in any manner.
2. Social media intermediaries stand to lose their “safe harbour” immunity. In other words, any protection that online platforms might have enjoyed against criminal prosecution will be withdrawn.
3. The Union government gets to decide for itself what information is bogus and gets to exercise wide-ranging powers of censorship by compelling intermediaries to take down posts deemed fake or false.
4. In a democracy, where information is free, and where the right to freedom of speech is constitutionally guaranteed, the new law must strike us as deeply abhorrent.
5. The amendments  bring with them a new assault on our liberty. To be sure, misinformation or fake news — whatever one might want to call it — is rampant on the Internet. Its effects are unquestionably deleterious.

Open-ended and undefined

• In its landmark judgment in Shreya Singhal vs Union of India (2015), the Supreme Court, in striking down Section 66A of the IT Act, held that a law that limits speech can neither be vague nor over-broad.
• The amendment to the IT Rules suffers on both accounts.
• First, the notification fails to define fake news.
• Second, it allows the government’s fact-check unit to make declarations on the veracity of any news “in respect of any business” that involves the state.
• Third, Intermediaries faced with the threat of prosecution will naturally weed out information deemed false by the Fact Check Unit.
• It will only remain for the state to tell us what the truth is. The rights of the press, and indeed of the common person, to question authority, to speak truth to power, will be diminished, and our civil liberties obliterated.

Way forward:

• In the case of the IT Rules, restrictions flow not through legislation, but through executive diktats. And these commands militate against substantive constitutional guarantees.
• Any workable and constitutionally committed campaign against fake news would have looked first towards a comprehensive parliamentary legislation on the matter.
• A legislation emanating out of such a process would have tethered limitations on speech to the grounds stipulated in Article 19(2).
• It would have further ensured that the government cannot act as an arbiter of its own cause.
• A  proper, lawfully enacted statute would have also demanded a decision on whether a directive to remove misinformation is the only solution to fake news, or whether there are other, less restrictive alternatives available.

Conclusion

• Fake  news and misinformation are not grounds on which speech can be limited. The  amendments made to the IT Rules do not caveat the restraints they place in any manner. Instead, they confer on the Fact Check Unit limitless powers to decide what information is false and, in the process, compel social media intermediaries to act based on these findings.

Editorial 2: India-UAE Cooperation to sow regional food security

Introduction

• The United Arab Emirates (UAE), whose food security has been built on imports from global markets, is now focusing on the twin objectives of food access and readiness to confront supply chain crises.

India and Food security

1. India, the world’s second-largest food producer, is an essential partner in the UAE’s ambition to strengthen food security. The India-UAE food security partnership stands to benefit from multiple points of convergence.
2. India has built its status as a global agri-export powerhouse using its vast tracts of arable land, a highly favourable climate, and a large and growing food production and processing sector.
3. India has, in recent years, acted as a humanitarian provider of food to developing countries, demonstrating awareness of its evolving role in advancing regional and global food security.
4. India has also made major budgetary outlays towards setting up massive food parks, with due emphasis on modern supply chain management spanning farm gate to retail outlet. 
5. India runs the Public Distribution System, the world’s largest food subsidy programme, providing nearly 800 million citizens with subsidised grains, with the reassurance of daily, affordable meals.
6. India’s ‘Prime Minister’s Overarching Scheme for Holistic Nutrition (POSHAN) Abhiyaan’, is the world’s largest nutrition programme for children and women.
7. As a part of its G-20 presidency, India is promoting the consumption and farming of millets — nutritious, drought-resistant, sustainable, crops — that demonstrate the resilience focus that India offers to the global food security dialogue.
8. In the realm of food security, India’s G-20 presidency seeks to address the three Cs, of “Covid, Conflict, and Climate”, issues pernicious to food security in India and across the globe.

UAE’s Commitments

• During the I2U2 (India, Israel, the United Arab Emirates and the United States) summit , the UAE committed $2 billion in investment towards constructing food parks in India (in Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat).
• Signing of a food security corridor on the Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA) with logistics partner DP World has taken forward India’s envisioned presence on the global food value chain, beyond the UAE.
• The Dubai Multi Commodities Centre, the UAE’s largest free trade zone, launched Agriota, an agri-trading and commodity platform to link Indian farmers to food companies in the UAE.
• Alongside this initiative, a consortium of UAE-based entities are investing up to $7 billion in mega food parks, contract farming and the sourcing of agro-commodities in India. The initiative will include mega food parks, logistics and warehouse hubs, and fruits and vegetable hubs.

Benefits for India:

1. The corridor on CEPA would potentially commence a route for foods made and processed in India, beginning their outbound journey on the Indian coast of the Arabian Sea, passing through the UAE, and towards major international markets.
2. With its ability to establish high volume trade of foods, the corridor stands to emerge as a world-class template of successful agri-trade for India, while also unlocking greater productivity, efficiency and growth for its millions of workers and employees.
3. Agriota gives millions of Indian farmers the opportunity to directly reach out to the entirety of the UAE’s food ecosystem (processing companies, traders, wholesalers) and stock their products in Emirati stores.
4. Those projects will generate lakhs of non-farm agri-jobs, while enabling farmers to discover better prices for their products.
5. Bolstered by the UAE’s infrastructural capabilities, India’s agricultural products will have more resilient and diversified pathways to the global marketplace.

Way forward:

• There is much that India stands to gain from the UAE’s private sector projects spanning its agricultural and food processing sector.
• India’s G-20 presidency offers an opportune moment for both India and the UAE to showcase viable strategies and frameworks that can forge the basis of food security in the Global South.
• As it sets the global developmental agenda, India can look to leverage and strengthen trade pathways with the UAE to forge a sustainable, inclusive, efficient, and resilient future of food.