Editorial 1 : Raising the guardrails
Context: India’s Digital Public Infrastructure: How to ensure healthy competition
Digital public infrastructure (DPI)
- During its G20 presidency, India positioned digital public infrastructure (DPI) as a technology-enabled instrument for inclusive and sustainable development.
- DPI’s distinguishing characteristics of openness, interoperability, and scalability underscore its criticality beyond technology to the larger goals of public and private service delivery.
- DPIs can be broadly grouped into two categories: Foundational and sectoral.
Foundational and Sectoral DPIs
- Foundational DPIs are developed to create robust digital rails and span the domains of digital identity systems and payment infrastructure, and data exchange platforms.
- Example: Aadhaar, UPI, Data Empowerment and Protection Architecture (DEPA)
- Sectoral DPIs provide specialised services tailored to the needs of specific sectors.
- Example: Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission, CoWIN platform
Features of DPI
- DPIs serve a platform-like role i.e. they provide a network or gateway that enables other entities to plug and play by building digital applications or services on these rails.
- They enable rapid innovation and value creation at scale through public-private partnerships.
- DPIs are multi-sided platforms, where the value of the platform on one side increases with the increase in the number of participants on the other side.
DPIs leading to Monopolies
- The inherent network effects of DPIs can lead to winner-takes-all outcomes, resulting in the creation of monopolies or oligopolies.
- Example: UPI payment system has resulted in the creation of a virtual duopoly of service providers.
Other Concerns
- Other significant concerns related to market concentration, data usage, innovation, and indeterminate risk-reward sharing frameworks.
- Concerns regarding the privatisation of public data, data security, and data privacy arise due to the operation of private entities in the absence of a contractual or regulatory framework.
Need to balance innovation and regulation
- India stands at the crossroads of innovation and regulation in the implementation of DPIs.
- Private firms bring innovation and speed of execution due to their autonomy, but they may be operating in a regulatory vacuum.
- A robust framework of checks and balances, which protects public interest without hampering private innovation, is essential.
- This demands an effective techno-legal governance framework through a coordinated effort between technology developers and policymakers.
Way Forward
- DPIs are a recent development and that their full potential has not been realised, so controlling them fully through a rigid legal framework might hamper their growth.
- Soft law instruments which involve guidelines encouraging industry best practices and rely on broad principles rather than prescriptive rules would be better suited.
- Example: Data encryption, access restrictions, and mandating user consent for data usage, can safeguard the interests of the public.
- Segregate the key aspects of DPIs into those that are best governed through statutory or contractual frameworks and those governable through soft law.
Conclusion: A more considered and clearly defined approach to govern the private actors riding on the infrastructure component of DPIs would significantly aid in fully realising their transformative potential without creating disruptive risks to society.
Editorial 2 : Pulling Back from Edge
Context: Suicide prevention
Suicide: A looming public health crisis
- According to data from the most recent National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) report, 1.71 lakh people died by suicide in 2022. At 12.4 per 1,00,000 individuals, it is the highest ever rate recorded in the country.
- According to NCRB data, as many as 154 farmers and daily-wage labourers died by suicide every day in 2022. In the same year, there were over 13,000 student suicides.
Lancet Study: A Public Health Approach to Suicide Prevention
- It backed the view that the widely-prevalent medical model is not sufficient to tackle the worldwide crisis of suicide.
- It calls on policymakers and governments to consider the larger causes that can drive people over the edge.
India’s National Suicide Prevention Strategy
- Unveiled in November 2022, it laid out 3 objectives
- Establishing surveillance mechanisms for suicide
- Setting up psychiatric outpatient departments that will provide suicide prevention services
- Integrating a mental well-being curriculum in all educational institutions
- It fails to account for the role played by social determinants, such as macroeconomic policies, healthcare coverage and social and cultural values, and commercial determinants like the alcohol and firearm industries, in exacerbating tendencies for self-harm.
- The conventional framework for suicide prevention has typically focused on individual risk factors such as family history, mental ill health, drug and alcohol use.
Need a larger, broader approach
- Suicide prevention should be considered on a larger scale, relying not just on targeted interventions
- It should consider how policies, such as those aimed at poverty alleviation or reducing homelessness, might help.
- Example: In USA, one dollar rise in the minimum wage between 2006 and 2016, resulted in 8,000 fewer deaths by suicide per year.
Way Forward: The scale of the suicide epidemic, which affects many sections of the population, calls for creative thinking on the part of the government, and for a wider policy approach that leaves no one behind.