The Quantum Hub

The Digital Personal Data Protection Bill must serve as a basic layer of protection, with sectoral regulators having the ability to build on this.

Author: Sumeysh Srivastava
Published: March 29, 2023 in The Hindu

India’s digital economy is set to reach a whopping $1 trillion by 2026. People are going digital rapidly for everything — from shopping and socialising to education and government services. But, as we embrace convenience, we are also generating massive amounts of personal data. Understanding how this data is handled and protected is fast becoming critical.

The Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Bill 2022, that was proposed recently, comes after five years of discussion and deliberation on a framework to safeguard citizens’ information from misuse and unauthorised access. Even as the Bill outlines citizens’ rights over their personal data and the responsibilities of data collectors, it lacks specificity in certain clauses such as the interaction with sectoral data protection regulations.

On sectoral regulation, global approaches

The current draft of the Bill tries to tackle the issue of conflicting sectoral regulations; in Section 29, it states that the provisions of the Bill will complement and not create exemptions from existing regulations, but in case of conflict, the Bill will take precedence. The first part allows the Bill to fill in any regulatory gaps, but the second part raises concerns about sectoral regulations that may go beyond what the Bill provides.

Data protection and privacy are highly dependent on context, including the type of data collected, how it is collected, the intended use and the associated risks. This makes sectoral expertise crucial to regulate effectively. Sectoral expertise offers a deep understanding of a particular sector, including its market dynamics, technologies, risks and business models. It also enables regulators to engage with stakeholders and industry experts in a well-informed and productive manner.

The global community has adopted two major approaches to regulate privacy and protect data: comprehensive legislation and sector-specific regulations. The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) embodies the comprehensive approach, offering the strongest and most stringent framework to date. Meanwhile, the sectoral approach in the United States, as seen through laws such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) in health care, and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) for financial institutions, is a patchwork of regulations tailored to specific industries.

The GDPR, despite being a comprehensive framework, has specific provisions for certain industries such as health care (Article 9). Additionally, GDPR also permits EU Member States to implement measures which go beyond the provisions given in the GDPR. For example, Germany also has Bundesdatenschutzgesetz (BDSG), which in some cases, has stricter provisions compared to the GDPR. The European Data Protection Board (EDPB), made up of representatives from each EU member state’s data protection authority, provides guidance on the implementation and interpretation of the GDPR, including sector-specific issues.

The American sectoral approach to data protection has been deemed flawed for various reasons, including inconsistent protection, problems in enforcement, overlapping and contradictory provisions, and a lack of federal regulation leaving certain sectors unprotected. This creates confusion and coverage gaps for businesses, and there is no centralised authority to enforce data protection laws, leading to a lack of standardisation. Calls for a federal framework have become increasingly common, even in the United States.

The GDPR model may not work for India as the Data Protection Board is designed as a grievance agency, and not as a regulator. The earlier version of the Bill with a Data Protection Authority of India may have been better suited as an independent regulator such as the EDPB.

Therefore, the current draft of the Bill, while a major step towards ensuring the protection of citizens’ personal data, needs greater clarity and specificity regarding the interaction with sectoral regulations; we need to draw from our experience to find the right balance

Finding the right space for the Bill

In India, for example, we already have sectoral regulations regarding data protection such as the Reserve Bank of India’s directive on storage of payment data and the National Health Authority’s Health Data Management Policy. These are the result of extensive industry consultations and expert input. Neglecting these regulations and establishing a new framework would undermine the considerable effort invested in their creation. Any deviation from existing regulations will further require the industry to readjust their operations again at considerable cost.

The DPDP Bill, therefore, must serve as the minimum layer of protection, with sectoral regulators having the ability to build on these protections. This framework will be especially useful in India where not all regulators may have the same capacity. Data protection is a complex subject and we must create room for sectoral experts to weigh in to safeguard the interests of citizens more effectively. This will ensure a safer, more secure, and dynamic digital landscape in the years to come.

Sumeysh Srivastava is Manager, Public Policy at The Quantum Hub.

An attempt at drawing attention to regions in India with high levels of female child marriage, as well as discussing potential solutions to address the problem.

Authors: Shubham Mudgil and Swathi Ramesh Rao
Published: March 20, 2023 in Ideas for India

Child marriage signals the end of childhood. It is a serious problem with large-scale ramifications, not only for the underage girls married, but also for society at large. Studies show that child marriage restricts girls’ access to education, healthcare, and economic opportunities, and even leads to inter-generational effects like undernutrition in children (Field et al. 2016).

In 1978, the Child Marriage Restraint Act of 1929 was amended to increase the minimum legal age of marriage for females from 15 years; almost 45 years later, the minimum legal age is 18 years, and female child marriage continues to be a pervasive problem in India. Data from the latest National Family Health Survey (NFHS) shows a 23.3% incidence of female child marriage in the country in 2019-21. The magnitude of this figure is especially concerning since India is currently estimated to have around 225 million girls below 19 years of age (National Commission on Population, 2020).

Until now, NFHS data for child marriage has been collected and made available at the district, state, and national level. As a result, elected representatives from parliamentary constituencies (PCs) have had to rely on available district-level data to monitor their constituencies. However, because PC and district boundaries do not overlap, it cannot be assumed that district-level data will provide accurate estimates for PCs. For example, the Kannauj PC, although homonymous with the district of Kannauj, actually intersects three different districts – Kannauj, Auraiya, and Kanpur Dehat. As of 2022, India has 543 Lok Sabha constituencies and 766 districts.

Given that Members of Parliament (MPs) are directly elected by citizens in their respective constituencies, a lack of PC-level data hinders meaningful, constituency-specific policy discourse, and hampers MPs’ engagement with their electorate. In this data story, we explore trends in female child marriage in India using NFHS data mapped specifically to the parliamentary constituency (PC) level.

We aim to highlight the status of this issue and draw attention to regions in India with high levels of female child marriage, as well as discuss potential solutions to address the problem. The continued prevalence of child marriage, despite the enactment of the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act (PCMA), 2006 and the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act (POCSO), 2012, suggests that criminal prosecution alone cannot be a deterrent; neither perhaps can retroactive action on families that allegedly engaged in the practice of child marriage.

Table 1: National prevalence of female child marriage across rounds

NFHS Round	Prevalence of Female Child Marriage
NFHS-1 (1992-93)	54.2%
NFHS-2 (1998-99)	50.0%
NFHS-3 (2005-06)	47.4%
NFHS-4 (2015-16)	26.8%
NFHS-5 (2019-21)	23.3%

Since its first round in 1992, the NFHS has measured female child marriage by surveying women who were first married by age 18. Even though data from the five rounds of NFHS, as presented in table 1, indicate that the practice has been on the decline, child marriage is yet to be eradicated. In fact, in Figure 1, dense clusters of PCs with high levels of female child marriage, highlighted by shades of red, can be observed throughout the country.

In the worst-performing states of Bihar, West Bengal, Jharkhand, and Andhra Pradesh, 1.5 out of every 4 girls in the age bracket surveyed by the NFHS were married when they were underage. Additionally, female child marriage rates vary sharply among PCs, but while PCs in the bottom 10% have rates ranging from 41-61%, and the top 10% range more narrowly from 2.7-8%, India, unfortunately, has no parliamentary constituency where child marriage has ceased to exist.

National female child marriage rates have fallen from 26.8% in NFHS-4 (2015-2016) to 23.3% in NFHS-5 (2019-2021). The progress made over the last five years is notable, with 77% of PCs registering a decline (see Figure 2).

However, in the remaining PCs, child marriage rates have actually increased by 3.3 percentage points on average. Some PCs have even registered an increase of over 10 percentage points.

The PCs of Jhansi (Uttar Pradesh), Salem (Tamil Nadu), and Parbhani (Maharashtra) also present a peculiar case – they regressed significantly while their surrounding PCs improved. These exceptions require immediate attention to identify the causes behind the increase and address them through effective solutions.

The path to progress in bigger states with high levels of child marriage 

Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh are both large Indian states with high levels of female child marriage (see Figure 3). However, between NFHS-4 and NFHS-5, these adjacent states registered tremendous progress: the prevalence of child marriage has decreased from 35.4% to 25.4% in Rajasthan, and from 32.4% to 23.1% in MP (Figure 4).

This encouraging trend is also visible in Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, and Maharashtra. However, the respective state governments should remain unrelenting in their efforts, as most of their PCs still lie in the ‘red’ zone. Additionally, enhanced efforts should be directed towards PCs which have regressed over the same five-year period, such as Bikaner (Rajasthan) and Morena (MP).

Underreporting of child marriages: NCRB vs NFHS

Even though NFHS data suggests that female child marriage is still prevalent in many parts of the country, such marriages are largely underreported under the law. In fact, according to the National Crime Records Bureau’s (NCRB) annual ‘Crime in India’ reports, since 2001 states like Arunachal Pradesh, Mizoram, Nagaland, and Sikkim have reported zero cases under the PCMA. However, NFHS still shows a significant prevalence of child marriage in all four states (see Figure 5).

Between 2001-10, an average of about 80 child marriage cases per year were reported nationally through the NCRB. This figure increased to about 360 during 2011-20. This national average is markedly lower than the numbers estimated by the NFHS, which has consistently reported high national-level child marriage rates –47.4% in the 2005-06 survey, 26.8% in the 2015-16 survey, and 23.3% in 2019-21. While the law has made some difference, it has not been able to eliminate the widespread social acceptance of child marriage as a practice, and the potential reluctance to register complaints against family members.

Alternative solutions

Female child marriage is symptomatic of a larger underlying issue of women’s agency and empowerment. Studies show that a woman’s age at marriage is linked to her education, income, and prevailing socio-cultural norms (Desai 2010). Child marriage is a complex issue, and tackling it calls for a holistic, bottom-up approach, with an enhanced focus on women’s socio-economic elevation rather than a singular focus on criminal punishment.

Several central sector schemes like Beti Bachao Beti Padhao and Sukanya Samridhi Yojana have been implemented to address female child marriage by incentivising girls’ education and ensuring their financial empowerment. Along similar lines, various state governments have enacted schemes and programmes to advance the socio-economic status of girls and women.

The Kanyashree Prakalpa Scheme in West Bengal is an example of a programme that incentivises continued education for girls and their retention in schools. To ensure their financial independence, the scheme provides direct, conditional cash transfers to girls, while simultaneously addressing the norms around marriage in their communities. Along similar lines, the Karnataka Health Promotion Trust launched the Sphoorthi Project in 2015, to improve life outcomes for girls and women in 51 villages. The project sought to both empower adolescent girls, and encourage their parents to serve as role models to positively influence prevailing norms around girls’ education and age at marriage. The success of the project in the district of Koppal (Singh 2018) has prompted its expansion to other districts in the state as well.

While criminal prosecution may continue to be a strategy to tackle child marriage, the relationship between female child marriage and female personal agency must not be overlooked. Strengthening schemes that benefit girls and women will likely have a larger and more permanent impact on reducing (and perhaps eliminating) the prevalence of female child marriage across India

The gaming sector has grown into a whopping $2.6 billion industry in India, with an estimated count of more than half a billion gamers being served by over 900 companies.

Authors: Rohit Kumar and Deepro Guha
Published: March 14, 2023 in Livemint

Video games are bad for you? That’s what they said about rock and roll!” So noted Shigeru Miyamoto, an accomplished video-game designer. It’s a human trait: We take time to warm up to what’s new and unfamiliar. What was once true of rock music may be true of online gaming today.

The gaming sector has grown into a whopping $2.6 billion industry in India, with an estimated count of more than half a billion gamers being served by over 900 companies. But the history of online gaming in India has been riddled with regulatory confusion, with gaming often dismissed as gambling. In their battle for legitimacy, developers have been knocking on multiple doors in the central government and in Indian states, asking for a uniform regulatory framework and a clear definition of what is legal (games of skill) and what’s not (games of chance).

The debate between ‘skill’ and ‘chance’ is still far from settled, but the central government has recently taken a step to offer some form of recognition through a set of draft amendments to the IT Rules. And while there is disagreement over whether this is the right form of legislative intervention, there is also palpable relief within the gaming community to see a regulatory framework finally take shape. From the industry’s point of view, not only will this help mitigate uncertainty, it can also address emerging concerns of financial fraud, money laundering, user addiction and harm, all of which need urgent attention.

The draft rules adopt a light-touch approach to regulation and provide for industry-created Self-Regulatory Bodies (SRBs) that would be responsible for registering online games and developing a framework for user protection. While the proposed self-regulatory structure is promising, ensuring the independence of SRBs would be central to its efficacy and success.

The framework provides for multiple SRBs to be set up, and an entity keen to offer a game must first become a member of an SRB and then register the game before being able to offer it to users. The registration is meant to signal legitimacy to users to help weed out bad actors, including offshore betting and gambling entities. Although thoughtful and geared towards consumer protection, this approach can also backfire.

Requiring all games to be registered and approved by SRBs before launch gives these entities the power to deny market entry on grounds that include several subjective criteria like conformity with interests of sovereignty and integrity of India, security of the state, conformity with gambling and betting laws (which have differing interpretations across states), etc. Not only can this be misused to create entry barriers for young startups and innovative disruptors, it can also lead to variance in decisions across SRBs. Even if an entity were to approach another SRB on denial of registration, an elongated process is likely to increase launch costs and delay speed-to-market, thereby reducing overall competition in the gaming ecosystem.

To ensure independence of SRBs, the registration conditions also call for provisions in the SRB’s Articles of Association to ensure independent functioning that is “at arm’s length from its member online gaming intermediaries”. However, there isn’t a lot of Indian jurisprudence to bank on, especially with respect to the term “arm’s length” in the context of self-regulatory bodies and their members.

Given that the efficacy of the government’s proposal hinges on the robustness of the self-regulatory architecture, it is critical to safeguard against risks associated with regulatory capture by interest groups. Therefore, what powers are delegated to SRBs and how they are designed and structured becomes important.

One way to reduce risk would be to adopt a tiered approach to registration, by requiring initial registration only for the gaming entity (rather than the game) based on a narrow list of predefined objective criteria. This could be done by surveying registration documents, promoter background, tax records and other such data points to check if the entity that is planning to offer the game is legitimate and has been operating with a clean track record, without assessing any specific game that the entity plans to offer.

Post-registration, the gaming entity could be allowed to directly offer its games to customers until a game crosses a specified threshold. Once an online game hits a predefined threshold—defined using metrics like the number of active users, gross transaction value, etc—the SRB could be required to register and approve the game separately. This approach would ensure agility of the overall gaming ecosystem while also protecting consumers.

To ensure the independence of SRBs, the government could also consider publishing guidelines outlining “arm’s length” and prescribing minimum dos and don’ts to establish a common baseline for all SRBs. Finally, to increase accountability, the rules could also provide that all SRB decisions be reasoned and in writing, with a right to appeal to a court of competent jurisdiction.

The proposed industry-led light-touch approach to online gaming regulation is indeed progressive. As the government prepares to revise and notify the draft rules, it’ll be good to bolster the regulatory framework with stronger checks and balances. This would create a more responsive ecosystem that not only caters to the needs of the fast-growing online gaming sector, but also protects consumers and spurs innovation, while expediting India’s journey towards a $1 trillion digital economy.

It is imperative that future digital citizens are equipped to traverse through the internet landscape safely, smartly and with nuance.

Authors: Aparajita Bharti and Himani Chauhan
Published: February 22, 2023 in Hindustan Times

With the slogan ‘Together for a Better Internet’, February 7, 2023 marked the 20th International Safer Internet Day. As the digital world no longer remains isolated from our physical world, conversations around safety on the internet need to move beyond the narrow understanding of protection from the more obvious threats to individuals such as hacking, phishing, identity theft, financial frauds, etc. to more societal threats such as echo chambers, hate speech and misinformation.

Today, in fact, a safe online space is an indispensable component of a safer world and we need a holistic approach that factors in the internet’s potential to influence people, geopolitics, markets, institutions, and the world as we know it. However, even as governments around the world wrestle with the legal and regulatory structures that can enable a safer internet, an important aspect that is often left out is building the capacity of people to avoid the pitfalls of the internet. An effective way to do this is to catch people young.

The 2022 McAfee report, titled Life Behind the Screens of Parents, Tweens, and Teens has found that children in India attain mobile maturity at an early age of 15-16 years with the smartphone usage of Indian children aged 10-14 being 7% higher than the international average. Data from Annual Status of Education report (ASER) also shows that the proportion of households with smartphones has almost doubled from 36% in 2018 to 74.8% in 2022. Besides accessing educational resources, the digital space has become a platform for self-expression and exploration for young people. The content being consumed is not limited to mere education and entertainment but also includes news, updates, and opinions about world affairs. This is particularly important as algorithms hold the power to shape world views by determining the kind of content one consumes. As the walls of these echo chambers continue to grow thicker, it is imperative that future digital citizens are equipped to traverse through this landscape safely, smartly and with nuance.

School curriculums serve as the primary means of imparting new knowledge, values, and skills to children at scale. While many central and state board curriculums have computer science as a subject for students, the content focuses mainly on hard skills such as using software and coding at an advanced level. However, we also need to include discussions on the softer aspects of the internet in our curriculum. It needs to sufficiently address concerns of cyber well-being and safety for children at the minimum. Further, we also need to alert children about the potential impact of the internet on our ability to think and take decisions critically because of echo chambers and social media algorithms, so that they can become more conscious users of the internet.

We also need to re-look at our civics curriculum to keep up with the changing world. Our identity and engagement on the internet today has become increasingly intertwined with our constitutional rights. For example, citizens’ ability to freely express their views online is a matter of great debate currently and would continue to be so in the foreseeable future. We need our citizens of tomorrow to be equipped to think critically about these issues as most of them would be exercising their rights online in some or the other form. Such an exposure could also go a long way in improving the quality of public discourse and make internet regulation more effective in the future by co-opting citizens into the process of online moderation.

To update these curriculums, a collaborative approach must be adopted. Findings and learning of civil society organisations and other stakeholders actively working in this field can be leveraged and built upon to effectively design digital citizenship education and remodel the current civic education syllabus.

Internet has so far been largely presumed to be a space unsafe for children. However, to build a digitally empowered nation, we require a generation of thoughtful citizens that can work their way around the digital world and make the most of its potential. To make internet (and our world safer), the right education and skills is an important part of the puzzle along with effective laws that regulate the internet.

The Union budget is not the only instrument for creating jobs for women in the economy, but it is certainly a significant one. To realize our ambition of a $10 trillion economy powered by ‘women-led development’, we need gender intentionality built into overall government spending.

Authors: Aparajita Bharti and Sonakshi Chaudhry
Published: February 23, 2023 in Livemint

India’s Republic Day parade this year witnessed a number of colourful tableaux from across the country celebrating ‘nari shakti’, or women’s power. This came close on the heels of the Prime Minister’s articulation of a vision for an ‘Amrit Kaal’, favourable period, powered by “women-led development”. This policy thrust is also reflected in official documents like the Economic Survey 2022-23, which spotlights the leadership of women self-help groups (SHGs) during covid and examines measurement issues in the calculation of India’s low female labour force participation rate (FLFPR).

Despite this attention, however, India’s budgetary outlays for 2023-24 stopped short of committing support to levers that could move the needle on women’s labour-force participation and empowerment. For example, as a percentage of total expenditure, the budget allotment for the ministry of women and child development has fallen from 0.64% in 2022-23 to 0.56% in 2023-24. Further, the budget heads for the ministry’s schemes changed again, making it difficult to capture year-on-year spending trends. The allocation for its Sambal schemes—including Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao, One-Stop Centres, Nari Adalats and Mahila Police—has remained the same at ₹562 crore. While the mandate of the Samarthya schemes has expanded, the budget estimate has declined from ₹2,622 crore to ₹2,581 crore. There has only been a marginal increase in the budget for Saksham Anganwadi and Poshan 2.0 (1.01%).

The Centre’s outlay for the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), which is significant for women’s employment in rural areas (as of December 2022, women accounted for 56% of all person-days generated under it), has reduced from ₹73,000 crore to ₹60,000 crore. The decline is steeper when compared to the 2022-23 revised estimate of ₹89,400 crore. Given that MGNREGA is a demand- driven scheme, these numbers show high demand for livelihood support but a hesitation to spend on it. Similarly, in terms of grassroot women’s leadership through SHGs, the Deendayal Antyodaya Yojana-National Rural Livelihoods Mission (NRLM) programme has only seen a slight increase of about 1.05%. On the urban front, there has been no allocation to the National Urban Livelihood Mission (NULM) and it has not been replaced by any other scheme focusing on SHGs in urban India.

Overall, this year’s gender budget outlay (as per Statement 13 of the Union budget) stands at 4.95% of total expenditure, which is marginally higher than the previous year’s initial budget estimate (4.33%). However, it must be noted that this increase is still lower than the revised estimate for last year (when gender budget accounted for 5.21% of total expenditure) as well as actual expenditure back in 2021-22 (at 5.52%).

These numbers establish that the political salience of ‘nari shakti’ has not translated to commensurate budget allocations. This is perhaps explained by the overall approach to job creation adopted in this Union budget, where the government is banking on the multiplier effect of capital expenditure on job creation and consumer demand. However, we believe there is a need to do more.

First, while it is certainly relevant, it will take time for jobs to materialize from public capital expenditure—such as the building of roads and railways, where government spending could incentivize private investment. For tendering processes to be finalized, MoUs for such projects to be signed and works to begin in earnest, the time taken could be long. To illustrate, as of August 2022, according to data from the ministry of statistics and programme implementation on infrastructure projects above ₹150 crore, 647 projects were delayed, and the reasons for time overruns reported included delays in land acquisition, obtaining forest and environment clearances, and lack of infrastructure support and linkages. In the short-term, therefore, schemes that create paid employment for women are crucial to address immediate needs.

Second, once jobs from capital expenditure are created, for women to benefit from these opportunities, quality jobs that match aspirations, skills and desired geographies will be needed. The record shows that work created in and around the vicinity, such as localized projects, are likely to be better suited to women’s circumstances. So, while capital expenditure can create jobs in general, it may create fewer of these for women than men. A recent report shows that only 12% of the workforce in the Indian construction sector is female. Therefore, an over-reliance on capital expenditure would run the risk of being a gender-blind approach to job creation. Third, capital expenditure itself could perhaps be directed towards creating more gender-responsive public infrastructure that would make it easier and safer for women to work, such as public creches, public toilets, etc, but this budget seems to have missed this opportunity.

While the Union budget is not the only instrument for creating jobs for women in the economy, it is certainly a significant one. To realize our ambition of a $10 trillion economy powered by ‘women-led development’, we need gender intentionality built into overall government spending. Why women drop out of the workforce is a complex social problem that cannot be solved just by increasing the overall supply of jobs. We need to create jobs that can be easily accessed by women and create enabling conditions like care support and other infrastructure that could help Indian women manifest their ‘shakti’.

Aparajita Bharti & Sonakshi Chaudhry are, respectively, founding partner and manager, strategic partnerships and communications, at TQH Consulting.

The principles of the ‘best interests of children’ and ‘more responsibility on platforms’ should inform India’s approach to data protection for minors.

Authors: Aparajita Bharti and Nikhil Iyer
Published: January 24, 2023 in The Hindu

How freely should Indian teenagers access the internet and what responsibilities do platforms have towards their minor users? These are important questions to answer correctly for achieving India’s digital ambitions.

The draft Digital Personal Data Protection Bill, 2022 currently provides for mandatory parental consent for all data processing activities for their children, defined as any person aged under 18 years. This approach however misses the mark on two fronts.

First, instead of incentivizing online platforms to proactively build safer and better services for minors, the Bill relies on parents to consent on behalf of the child in all cases. In a country with low digital literacy, where parents in fact often rely on their children (who are digital natives) to help them navigate the internet, this is an ineffective approach to keep children safe online.

Second, it does not take into account the “best interests of the child”, a standard originating in the Convention on Rights of the Child, 1989, to which India is a signatory. India has upheld this standard in laws such as the Commission for Protection of Child Rights, 2005, the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education, 2009, and the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences, 2012. However, it has not been applied to the issue of data protection.

The Bill does not factor in how teenagers use various internet platforms for self-expression and personal development and how central it is to the experience of adolescents these days. From taking music lessons to preparing for exams to forming communities with people of similar worldviews – the internet is a window to the world. While the Bill does allow the Government to provide exemptions in the future from strict parental consent requirements, profiling, tracking prohibitions, etc., this whitelisting process does not acknowledge the blurring lines between what a platform can be used for. For example, Instagram is, strictly speaking, a social media platform, but is regularly used as an educational and professional development tool by millions of artists around the world.

Another issue in the current draft of the DPDP Bill is that each platform will have to obtain ‘verifiable parental consent’ in case of minors. This provision, if enforced strictly, can change the nature of the internet as we know it. Since it is not possible to tell if the user is a minor without confirming their age, platforms will have to verify the age of every user. The Government will prescribe later whether verifiability will be based on ID-proof, or facial recognition, or reference-based verification, or some other means. Whatever form verifiability takes, all platforms will have to now manage significantly more personal data than before, and citizens will be at greater risk of harms like data breaches, identity thefts, etc.

We thus need to shift our approach with respect to children’s data before this Bill is brought to the Parliament. To avoid the folly of treating unequals equally and blocking off access to the internet for teenagers, first, we should move from a blanket ban on tracking, monitoring, etc. and adopt a risk-based approach to platform obligations. Platforms should be mandated to undertake a risk assessment for minors and not only perform age-verification related corresponding obligations but also design services with default settings and features that protect children from harm. This approach will bring in an element of co-regulation, by creating incentives for platforms to design better products for children.

Second, we need to relax the age of mandatory parental consent for all services to 13 in line with many other jurisdictions around the world. By relaxing consent requirements, we will minimize data collection, which is one of the principles that the Bill is built on. This relaxation in age of consent in tandem with the risk mitigation approach elucidated above will achieve protection for children online while allowing them access.

This solution draws on the experience and deliberations in United Kingdom, California, New York, etc. where Age Appropriate Design Codes have been introduced. To tailor this solution to the Indian context, the government should also conduct large scale surveys of both children and parents, to find out more about their online habits, digital literacy, preferences and attitudes.

We must design a policy in India that balances safety and agency of children online. We should not put the onus of keeping our young safe only on parents, but instead it should make it a society-wide obligation. We have to get this part of the data protection framework right as India’s ‘techade’ cannot be realised without its young.

Aparajita Bharti is a Founding Partner and Nikhil Iyer is a Senior Analyst at TQH, a public policy consulting firm in Delhi.

‘Work-near-home’ centres being developed by the government must at the very least address infrastructure related challenges.

Authors: Shreya Ghosh and Suhani Pandey
Published: December 25, 2022 in The Times of India

Hon’ble Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi recently evoked his vision of a flexible work ecosystem for women to improve the Female Labour Force Participation Rate (FLFPR). At a National Labour Conference organised by the Ministry of Labour & Employment, he said, “The country’s labour ministry is preparing its vision for the year 2047 in Amrit Kaal. Flexible workplaces, work from home ecosystem and flexi work hours is the need of the future. We can use systems like flexible workplaces as opportunities for women labour force participation.”

There is no doubt that the pandemic has made work more flexible and this is especially relevant for a country like India, which has a massive services sector and a focused attention on building digital capabilities. A new normal is evident, with hybrid work arrangements continuing even as COVID-19 infection rates are seemingly receding.

In 2021, the Microsoft Work Trend Index predicted that hybrid work was “here to stay”. According to a BCG and Nasscom survey, approximately 65% of IT sector employees want to relocate outside of major cities to bring offices closer to the hometowns of some of their employees. However, many commentators in India complained that not everyone has the right infrastructure at home to work remotely.

Perhaps, to solve this conundrum and to encourage young people to work from relatively smaller cities, many states across India have recently announced policies and projects to build dynamic and flexible spaces of work. The Kerala government is piloting Work Near Home centres which focus on providing working professionals with IT-based shared work centres that attract both locals and the international Malayali diaspora.

In Goa, the IT Department is turning beaches into co-working spaces hoping to promote the culture of #WorkationGoa. For fostering entrepreneurship, states such as Jharkhand and Telangana have created co-working spaces at incubation centres. More states are likely to follow suit, as this trend presents an opportunity for broad based growth across regions, instead of concentrating jobs in megacities. However, we need to incorporate a gender lens into these projects from the very beginning to realise the Prime Minister’s vision and enhance opportunities for women’s participation in the labourforce.

There are many barriers to women’s labour force participation including social norms, time spent on child and elderly care, distance, lack of safety in mobility, limited mentorship, pay gap, mismatch of skills and aspirations, etc. ‘Work-near-home’ centres being developed by the government must at the very least address infrastructure related challenges. These spaces should incorporate gender-responsive design including provision of quality creches, last mile connectivity, safe public transport and adequate sanitation facilities. This might require speeding up the notification of Rules under the Maternity Benefit Act, 2017 and revisiting urban plans from a gender perspective. These centres must also be accessible to the disabled, since they often find it challenging to migrate to other cities away from their families.

Aligning with provisions of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016 is critical in this regard. Complementing inclusive infrastructure, other features of the work environment should also be gender intentional. For example, compliance with the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition, and Redressal) Act may become complicated at shared work spaces. Clarificatory guidelines from the government might be helpful for the formation and functioning of Internal Committees at such ‘work near home centres’ to ensure workplace safety.

Additionally, women who choose these centres as their workplace must also have access to networking and mentorship opportunities to enable their career advancement and strengthen the local ecosystem of professionals. These government-run facilities can work with the private sector to co-create such programs.

Further, to encourage inclusion from the perspective of gender as well as for people with disabilities in privately-built infrastructure, state governments can consider devising an accreditation model which rates and certifies workplace infrastructure according to its gender intentionality and accessibility features. This model would incentivise building of inclusive infrastructure, but also enhance the quality of these facilities over time as companies will prefer better rated facilities for their employees’ satisfaction.

Today, female labour force participation in India is around 25% according to the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS 2021) data. We need to work on many levers in tandem to move the needle on this disappointing number. Flexible work is one of the opportunities that the large IT-enabled/BPO service sector in India can tap into to bring in and retain more women in the workforce. As states seek to take advantage of this trend to catalyse local development, a gender responsive and social inclusion approach may also provide a much needed fillip to women’s participation in the IT/ITes and India’s growing information economy.

Authors: Shreya Ghosh is senior policy & advocacy manager at IWWAGE and Suhani Pandey is public policy associate at TQH Consulting

Overall, it seems as if a tussle is brewing between India’s monetary and fiscal authorities. However, to objectively evaluate this debate on charges for P2M transactions, it is important to understand incentives and dynamics at play in the payments ecosystem.

Authors: Rohit Kumar and Aishwarya Viswanathan
Published: November 11, 2022 in The Economic Times

From debit and credit cards to e-wallets, India’s payments landscape has seen many waves of innovation and regulation over the years. Today, India’s latest home-grown innovation, the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), currently free of charge, is the subject of a fiery debate on whether levying charges will slow the adoption of digitisation or, worse, undo its gains and hasten a reversal to cash transactions.

In August 2022, the Reserve Bank of India released a discussion paper (bit.ly/3G7BHf6) to elicit feedback on charges in the payments system. The paper approximated that, collectively, the various players enabling a UPI peer-to-merchant (P2M) transaction with an average value of ₹800 incur a charge of ₹2. A few days later, the finance ministry tweeted that UPI will continue to remain free of charge and cost concerns of service providers will have to be met through other means.

Overall, it seems as if a tussle is brewing between India’s monetary and fiscal authorities. However, to objectively evaluate this debate on charges for P2M transactions, it is important to understand incentives and dynamics at play in the payments ecosystem.

The ability to ensure frictionless and secure real-time payments via UPI is heavily dependent on banks and third-party app providers that perform a range of functions, including the acquisition of merchants, provision of infrastructure, fund transfers, and, as such, bear significant fixed and operating costs for facilitating transactions. While the finance ministry has already allocated two rounds of subsidies of ₹1,500 crore and ₹1,300 crore to boost digital transactions, continued subsidising of costs is likely going to be fiscally unsustainable.

And even if subsidies are an option, they can be an impractical offering that can lead to coordination difficulties with respect to allocation between payment players. For instance, in June, several payment companies wrote to the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) complaining that a large chunk of the money granted in the budget is being retained by banks, with very little flowing their way.

Here, it is important to note that much of UPI’s capture of India’s payments landscape has been enabled by payment companies operating third-party apps, who have invested heavily in designing user-friendly interfaces and instituting attractive cash back offers to drive adoption. But without adequate fiscal support, they are being incentivised to pursue other means of monetising their business.

What goes UPI, stays up

While some apps have chosen to directly pass on costs to consumers in the form of platform fees on services such as prepaid phone and direct-to-home (DTH) recharges, others are making up for lost revenue through cross-selling. A few others are indirectly imposing costs on users through data monetisation. In the absence of a comprehensive data protection legislation, the repercussions of some of these practices can be worrisome.

While the zero-charge framework for UPI transactions has certainly played a role in providing a fillip to the payments ecosystem, its role in incentivising adoption may be overestimated. In the digital payments space, the acquisition and maintenance of UPI’s QR (quick response) code infrastructure continues to be among the lowest for merchants. While it took over a decade to increase the number of point-of-sale (PoS) terminals from 5 lakh to 50 lakh, there are already over 10 crore QR code terminals in the country. By the time UPI completes a decade in existence, the number of QR codes is set to reach 170 crore.

Apart from the asset-light infrastructure, a steady proliferation of use-cases has been critical to merchant uptake. From recurring payments to FASTag recharges and ever-increasing acceptance of cross-border payments, continued innovation and development of UPI’s mandate promises to preserve UPI’s ubiquity and the expansion of its merchant base.

Against this background, instituting a merchant discount rate (MDR) may represent an important avenue of cost recovery for intermediaries. Rather than denting merchant acquisition or retention, MDR may help maintain uptake by making the system more resilient and sustainable, factor also critical in driving more users towards UPI. Also, the fact that UPI currently accounts for almost 50% of digital financial fraud and lacks a robust real-time dispute-resolution mechanism, also reflects the urgent need to create adequate financial incentives to enable robust systems for trust-building and longevity.

Since merchants have an option to choose between different service providers that offer the best rates, the market for merchant acquisition is generally competitive. So, ideally, the regulator should let MDR be market-determined. However, to ensure that the optics of levying MDR does not taint public perception or adversely impact acceptance of UPI, the regulator can consider instituting a tiered system of charges. UPI can be kept free of charge for low-value transactions, with higher-value transactions being charged a market-determined MDR. The threshold above which payments get charged can be decided by the regulator based on the funds required for sustainability as well as consumer price sensitivity.

Separate wheat from cost

For this, understanding the elasticity of demand to UPI transaction charges will be useful. Such research will help ascertain how usage of UPI is likely to be reduced if costs were to increase and, consequently, assist in identifying the threshold that balances costs and returns effectively.

This exercise can particularly help India’s monetary authorities proceed with a degree of certainty and assuage the concerns of the fiscal administration – which is actually pursuing the same objective: a safe and secure digital payments landscape.

Image: Shutterstock

Looking beyond the ‘tech’ aspects of digital public infrastructure to how it interacts with users as individuals, as collectives, and in societies.

Authors: Kriti Mittal, Varad Pande and Aishwarya Viswanathan
Published: October 26, 2022 in ORF

The COVID-19 pandemic revealed that despite the vast difference in our geographical, cultural, social, and political contexts, one thing that countries all over the world urgently need is digital public infrastructure (DPI).

DPI comprises foundational population-scale technology systems on which the digital economy operates, such as identity systems, payment systems, data exchanges, and social registries.

Some countries, such as India, were able to leverage existing DPI to provide targeted social protection assistance to their citizens amidst the pandemic; on recognising the benefits of ‘digital-delivery’, others such as Togo and Sri Lanka undertook efforts to rapidly build their own. The demand for DPI among countries has grown significantly since then, with the World Bank’s Identification for Development initiative alone currently supporting 49 countries to implement digital IDs.

Conservative estimates suggest that Estonia’s X-Road—an open-source government data exchange system that facilitates the provision of over 99 percent of all government services digitally—saves Estonians an estimated 820 years of working time every year and approximately 2 percent of GDP.

Today, DPI is increasingly being built using open-source and modular technologies that enable ‘interoperability’, which facilitates the exchange of information between different arms of the public and private sector, thereby, vastly improving the speed and scale of service delivery. This represents a paradigm shift from older end-to-end siloed systems, wherein governments provided end-to-end services through monolithic tech systems, to building minimal digital infrastructure that allows multiple actors to build solutions on top. DPI designed in this way can mean significant time and cost savings. For instance, conservative estimates suggest that Estonia’s X-Road—an open-source government data exchange system that facilitates the provision of over 99 percent of all government services digitally—saves Estonians an estimated 820 years of working time every year and approximately 2 percent of GDP.

Another DPI success story is India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI), which facilitates the largest number of daily transactions of any tech platform in the world, and is estimated to have resulted in savings of US $12.6 billion in 2021. Moreover, since its launch in 2017, India has been improving financial inclusion at a compound annual growth rate of over 5 percent, a significant expansion of India’s formal financial system.

‘Good’ DPI is more than just the tech

Given such unprecedented population-scale impact, there is now a growing consensus around the necessity of DPI. However, there is much debate about what constitutes ‘good DPI’. As countries embark on the journey of building, maintaining, and scaling their DPI, it is imperative to understand that the technology, no matter how powerful and essential, does not exist in isolation and cannot solve all problems by itself. To maximise the benefits of DPI for the provision of citizen-centric services, and minimise risks and potential harms, the ‘non-tech’ layers of institutions, legal and regulatory frameworks, and communities are equally, if not more, important than robust technology solutions.In this regard, the ‘open digital ecosystems’ (ODE) approach offers a useful framework and set of guiding principles, with a strong emphasis on strengthening DPI through citizen-centric design and safeguards, sustained community engagement, institutional capacity building, and robust governance.

We discuss lessons from a research study undertaken for the Lancet Citizen’s Commission on Reimagining India’s Health Systems. The study highlights how healthcare came to be seen as a politically viable and electorally rewarding issue in some, but not nearly enough, States.

Author: Nikhil Iyer
Published: August 11, 2022 in The Hindu Business Line

Ask any politician at random if they think healthcare needs to be prioritised in India, and they are likely to say yes. Yet, there seems to be a sense of reluctance in making healthcare a political priority.

As India turns 75, we discuss lessons from a research study undertaken for the Lancet Citizen’s Commission on Reimagining India’s Health Systems. The study highlights how healthcare came to be seen as a politically viable and electorally rewarding issue in some, but not nearly enough, States.

Early 2022, Tamil Nadu and Rajasthan indicated they would legislate a Right to Health for their citizens. An emphatic political expression by the respective Chief Ministers, these bills signify a culture where politicians feel incentivised to deliver better healthcare as their competitors try to one up them.

Take Tamil Nadu’s case. The Right to Health Bill’s antecedents include a maternity benefits scheme for women’s nutritional security (1987), procurement and distribution of free medicines (1994), health insurance (2009), and so on. Over decades, motivated by the Dravidian ideology, leaders like K Karunanidhi, MG Ramachandran and J Jayalalithaa pursued initiatives which have embedded an expectation of health among voters. Present-day politicians, who seek to sustain their legacies, thus have an incentive to continue reforms.

Competitive political issue

In Rajasthan, health has become a thriving, competitive political issue in the past decade. In 2011, then Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot introduced the free medicines and diagnostics schemes, which went on to become so popular even his successor Vasundhara Raje had to continue it, despite murmurs about watering it down. Later in 2013, as CM, Raje introduced a health insurance scheme, and set up ‘Model PHCs’. On returning as CM in 2018, Gehlot first expanded the coverage and eligibility under the insurance scheme, and has now introduced the Right to Health Bill.

There have been few more instances where Chief Ministers decided to bet big on health, in turn affecting voter expectations of other politicians in the State. A relevant example is the legacy of YS Rajasekhara Reddy in Andhra Pradesh, which is claimed by his son Jaganmohan Reddy today. YSR introduced the Rajiv Aarogyashri Scheme, the first State-wide health insurance scheme for families below the poverty line in India, in 2007, seeking to create a pro-welfare, rural-centric image for himself.

The insurance scheme’s ensuing popularity ensured that even when the opposition led by Chandrababu Naidu came to office, they could not roll it back, due to pressure from both citizens as well as hospital associations who benefited from the scheme. Jaganmohan Reddy, as the incumbent CM, has expanded the list of procedures and benefits under the scheme.

These examples indicate a much warranted shift. We can observe a virtuous loop of political action and voter demand — as most apparently has happened in Rajasthan. What started off as a free medicines and diagnostics scheme has today snowballed into a political plank for both major parties in Rajasthan. Good service delivery arguably leads to loss aversion among the voters, which builds pressure on competitor politicians to continue the scheme, and build on it. Even smaller reforms, such as guaranteeing delivery of medicines, may begin to change the political culture, and eventually lay the path for the State to pursue systemic reform.

Healthcare is by no means an easy issue to fix. Even after 75 years, our health system pushes more than 50 million people into poverty each year, with out-of-pocket-expenditure as high as 70 per cent in some States. The Covid-19 pandemic further uncovered the deficiencies of the Indian public health system.

One might expect politicians would have adequate incentives to care for this issue that virtually affects every voter. Yet, there is a marked absence of mainstream political discourse around health financing, outcomes, human resources in health, etc. This must change, and maybe our politicians, inspired by the examples above, will be incentivised to surprise the voters with a new political agenda involving healthcare.

Author: Nikhil Iyer is Senior Public Policy Analyst at The Quantum Hub Consulting