During the national lockdown, lacks of vulnerable migrant workers are leaving for their hometowns, often in large crowds. For example, thousands of migrants crowding at the Delhi bus station are most certainly going to accelerate the pandemic. However, the situation without a lockdown would be worse. The fear that migrant workers have today is decades in the making. Consider New Delhi. The whole city rests on the low paid labor of the migrants, but many Delhiites look down upon them with derision - as unwanted outsiders. Those who work from paycheck to paycheck have no safety net or savings, no local government support (they do not vote) and their employers have little responsibility towards their health and safety. They are the expendables of society. 
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Many do not appreciate the significance of bank accounts (Jan Dhan Yojana) and promoting cashless transactions (Digital India) in providing safety net to migrant workers. Such schemes have opened a channel of assistance between the central government and migrant workers that did not exist before. Migrant workers have been brought out from the shadows, although the assault of demonetization, mismanaged GST implementation and now COVID-19 has also made their situation more precarious. A major reason why the BJP government is back in power is because it achieved social welfare penetration greater than any government in the past - it pursued "programmatic politics" at least on the economic front. It would be prudent for the government to seriously consider some form of basic income at this time, and to communicate with the vulnerable groups in a targeted manner through their mobile devices. This is also an opportunity to build the social safety net India did not have in the past. 

India is better prepared to manage this lockdown, and protect the vulnerable, than anytime before in the past. So, lets not panic. In an exercise of this scale, there will be setbacks, and these setbacks will get coverage (thanks to a free media), and such coverage will make the government learn and act better. This is how government is supposed to work in such times of the uncertainty and crisis. We act, we learn, and we improve.

The New York Times just wrote an editorial today, requesting Donald Trump to order a national lockdown in the United States, citing India's national shutdown which affects 1.4 billion people.

Mr. Modi's actions during the coronavirus pandemic are exemplary. He has taken timely and balanced actions. The 21 day national lockdown is yet another important and timely step at a time when India's coronavirus cases were at the cliff of explosion. This is exemplary because Mr. Modi has placed the national public health interests above economic interests, something which western governments like the USA and UK have still not been able to come to terms with. The Lt. Governor of Texas went so far to say that he was willing to risk his own life to save the economy, and had urged other Texans to "get back to work".

If Mr. Modi focuses on politics of substance - the everyday common-man issues like healthcare and economy through out his tenure, India would be better prepared for such pandemics. If the pandemic spreads despite this lockdown, we will once again be in a dangerous territory, as India has just not invested in its healthcare, and instead prioritised the divisive cultural issues a lot more than it can afford to. The last few years, and NOW, is a golden opportunity for a healthcare transformation (the Ayushman Bharat is a welcome scheme), but Mr. Modi and his party/government needs to empower the doctors and nurses on the ground - whom we badly need, and not the xenophobic beasts on social media. While the last few years were a lost opportunity, but now the coronavirus pandemic is at India's doorsteps, and Mr. Modi has begun to listen to the experts, and is doing a good job. This shows that Mr. Modi is indeed a good executive, but only if he is willing to listen to the advice of experts, and does not act as a maverick or heeds to the xenophobes that infest India's entire social media ecosystem.

I hope the pandemic ends, and Indians - esp. middle class Indians (who enjoy an amplified voice) change their understanding about the role of a government. Indians must recognize the global goodwill Mr. Modi generated for India and himself, when he followed the Raj Dharma of putting the public interest first, over a divisive cultural agenda. I hope Indians do the same, and when the pandemic ends, I no longer get to see those awful Whatsapp forwards that belittle and demonize other groups, and obsess over their narrow religious identities rather than their collective nationhood. That we do not get distracted by divisive, emotive, angering and hateful propaganda and instead we talk about, and force the government to focus on healthcare, jobs, water, infrastructure, agriculture, law and order, defense, and all such things that really matter for strenthening the nation.

​We need solidarity and common sense in India, not just during these times, but for all the times to come in the future.

The coronavirus pandemic offers an opportunity for countries around the world to invest and expand their healthcare capacity to fit the needs of the modern world. It is a rare opportunity, where the stress test of our healthcare system, help us improve and if needed redesign the system to dramatically expand preventive, hospital and critical care capacity using new technologies.

Can India fight coronavirus, and rapidly scale its health capacity? If you have visited Kumbh at Prayagraj, you will believe yes it can. Kumbh is simply put - astonishing. Beyond the spiritual domain, administratively and in terms of planning and management, Kumbh is an event with no global parallel. A massive city catering to tens of millions a day emerges out of nowhere at the bed of Ganges for a few months, with almost every amenity one could look for. And then it dissolves into the river. India organizes the Kumbh periodically and has learned the ability over time to live in organized chaos. It is a skill that not every country has acquired. Hence, can India deal with coronavirus? Can its health capacity expand drastically to meet the challenging needs ahead? Yes it can. 

I was member of a IIMB based study that studied the 2019 Kumbh at Prayagraj. Kumbh is a floating city serving 3-5 crore visitors on its peak day. The Kumbh was incidence free and deployed a temporary sanitation system, healthcare infrastructure, transport and housing facilities for millions of visitors. How could such high levels of effectiveness be achieved at scale, when otherwise India's state capacity is considered weak? Some features of Kumbh governance model are worth emulating for the rest of India.

• Clear Accountability: The government established a Mela Pradhikari Model who was empowered and fully accountable for Kumbh. This enabled long-term planning and effective leadership at Kumbh. The administration worked tirelessly with a sense of mission, and similarly, India's coronavirus response requires war-time leadership, with significant autonomy and associated accountability for the administrator who understands the underlying science on matters related to epidemic control.
• Mission Based: Kumbh had clear performance guidelines: Safety, Cleanliness and Sanitation. Such clarity over non-negotiable performance parameters led to the entire local machinery putting its full attention on these key performance parameters, which had a clear deadline. What is the core objective (minimising deaths, minimising spread  maximising herd immunity?)? In the case of coronavirus response, the central mission needs to be clearly stated both to the administrative staff and the public, with focus on both preventive and curative steps. Taiwan has done a good job with disease prevention, where proactive centralised leadership and a data-based social isolation and quarantine system has led to very few cases. Germany, anticipating a large outbreak has started to expand its healthcare capacity ordering large numbers of ventilators.
• Focused Attention: The government publicly committed to a divya, bhavya and swachha Kumbh, with scrutiny from the international media. This created a do or die performance pressure for national, state and most importantly the local administration. In case of coronavirus pandemic, such attention is inevitable, but nonetheless media attention can go a long way in ensuring accountability of all stakeholders.  
• Decentralized Governance: The local Kumbh administration utilized diverse governance models for different days and districts in cooperation with stakeholders like Akhadas and locals, which led to effective delegation and distribution of responsibilities and quick feedback. While central leadership matters, both the free media and local stakeholders play an inalienable role in scaling up, as providers of timely information and accountability, and as the hands that reach out to the remotest corners of the society. A central leadership will be overwhelmed if it tried to do every thing by itself. In startup language, it needs to outsource activities that are not core to its job. Local stakeholders need to be empowered, and put on the decision making table, to coordinate an effective response at scale.

Each of these factors helped the government achieve scale in a manner that is uniquely suited for a diverse multistakeholder democracy like India's. 

“Faith sees best in the dark.”

I often wonder what values our children and the young are imbibing when they look at the current stock of world leaders - who may have many qualities, but are bereft of moral courage. The Bhagwat Gita says: 

यद्यदाचरति श्रेष्ठस्तत्तदेवेतरो जन: |
स यत्प्रमाणं कुरुते लोकस्तदनुवर्तते || 21||
Whatever actions great persons perform, common people follow.
Whatever standards they set, all the world pursues.

When leaders sacrifice human dignity at the altar of power, and when every action is acceptable to achieve certain factional goals, then the social order collapses.  Without the acknowledgement of human dignity, every person is a means to an end and in such a transactional world chaos is inevitable. Hence, we need decent leaders. Leaders who lead with moral courage, by which I mean, those who have the grace to see dignity in other human beings, even in the most adverse of circumstances, even when making the most difficult decisions. Today, we need leaders who are decent, and who have passed through fire and have still come out with grace.

Former US Vice President, Joe Biden has lived an extraordinary life. Generally, with public personalities we talk about their public accomplishments and platforms. But Joe’s life, in all its fullness, has been one with many highs and lows. Amidst all of it, Joe has maintained his grace. So much so, that I have turned to Joe Biden’s many personal interviews to seek guidance in times of struggle. When Joe says, “faith sees best in the dark” he is not repeating a catchy quote; he is sharing his lived experience of coping with love and loss. That tells me, that Joe is a man of faith, faith as it should be - patient, kind, and one that sees the dignity of others. He is a leader, who has through his lived experience, found grace and steadiness in life, and is capable of leading by example. This makes me believe that Joe Biden will be a good President of the USA.

After pondering for several months, I have decided to leave Twitter. 

Twitter has been a very productive companion for me. It helped me interact with academics and researchers from around the world, and kept me updated with their work. I may still sneak into the public Twitter pages of my favourite academics to learn what's up with them and their connections.

I am leaving Twitter because of its very flawed design that enables hate in the public with real world consequences. Along with WhatsApp (about which I wrote last year in ProMarket), Twitter is the favoured platform for spreading misinformation, disinformation and xenophobic call-for-action in India. In the US, there is a significant discourse on the role of Facebook and YouTube in spreading visceral and false information (see the Stigler Center report (blog here) on digital platforms). However, the negative impact of platforms like WhatsApp and Twitter on our public conversation has been ignored. Both these platforms are wild and anarchic. I like this aspect of these platforms. Twitter is a massive list of billions of 280 character messages that millions of people are posting from around the world. I appreciated this anarchic nature of Twitter. It was raw and hence vibrant. But, the "trending" column of Twitter - although meant to be an organic reflection of public sentiment - has been hijacked by coordinated and strategic coalitions dedicated to the spread of propaganda. 

Over the lasts few years, thanks to a barrage of xenophobic public misinformation on Twitter and WhatsApp, I have seen dehumanising language become the new normal in private conversations. A significant fraction of people are today convinced of conspiracy theories about inter-civilisational conflict. The world has become more hysterical. Such "clash of the civilisations" narrative has turned normal people into active belligerents, and people are viewed as soldiers on "their" side of the fight, or of the "others". Such a narrative - of a state of perpetual war - helps autocrats gain and maintain power, but it only fools people. The only way to stop such a narrative that dehumanises the "other" is to improve the systems of public conversation such as Twitter. I have a very simple request: Twitter, please remove your "trending" column, which is being used today to promote outright Nazi propaganda. This call is not new. Last year The Verge also wrote an article on the same. 

My trigger for leaving Twitter came during the recent deadly Delhi riots, Twitter began to nationally trend a call to economically boycott Muslims. Both the riots and such a call for economic boycott were orchestrated, and Twitter was a willing amplifier of it. I find it rather odd that a company with such technical expertise is incapable of identifying organic trends from inorganic/orchestrated/coordinated ones. I would not protest as much, if such controversial sentiments were organic. I support unfettered free speech. But it is irresponsible for Twitter to amplify orchestrated hate campaigns through its "trending" column that remind of the 1933 Nazi Germany.

As I see it, Twitter may be a useful tool for me as an academic - to network, share and connect. But at a broader societal scale, Twitter has become an enabler of visceral hatred and falsehoods, which has left scores of people dead in Delhi's streets. This is inexcusable, and I can not be a part of such a hate machine.

I hope Twitter fixes its problems, and removes its "trending' column. I support uncensored free speech, including the ones that are controversial, blasphemous or offensive, but I can not support the muzzling of the original voice of the people by orchestrated hateful and false propaganda, that platforms like Twitter amplify. Once Twitter becomes a more dignified place for public discourse, I will be happy to be back on Twitter again.

With economic slowdown, India's ability to spend on the military is also eroding. As India Today reported yesterday Indian government has less money today than last year, which means lesser spending on government schemes for development and welfare, and lesser capacity to spend of the military.

India finds itself in a precarious situation where the power gap between its neighbor China and India has increased. Uttar Pradesh - India's most critical state for development- needs to seriously invest in skill development programs that can help the large unemployed youth.

India is not investing in future technologies. Our government is living in the past, with beliefs such as Astrology is a topmost science, and talking computers - whatever it means - could be developed only by employing Sanskrit. China, in contrast, today is a world leader in future technology - from quantum computing, to Artificial Intelligence, to solar technology. For 5000 crore (cost of large scale cultural projects), India could fund 500 high tech laboratories with a seed grand of more than 1 million dollars. 

All of this is disappointing, because it is like watching a kid with a great future ahead, take drugs, and squander their future, not aware how grim and dark the future will be if they do not take the right action today. The whole country should wake up from its disinformation induced slumber.

How are digital platforms like Facebook or Google influencing the state of news media, and journalism? Chicago Booth's Stigler Center just released a major report, on "Protecting journalism in the age of digital platforms", that I was a contributor to.

Key points: Journalism is an expensive and risky activity, which is essential for democracy. Traditional journalism was supported by advertising, and it bundled different types of stories to reach a broad readership. 

The internet has given rise to several blogs and news websites, but such organizations lack the journalistic capacity to produce quality content, that can hold power to account. Internet disrupted the advertising model of newsmedia, and digital platform monopolies have concentrated much of the digital advertising revenue. Moreover, the bundled nature of traditional news - which gave readers a variety of information -has been replaced by atomized news, which now gets filtered and bundled by algorithmic filters that prioritize sensational content. Additionally, digital platforms are legally considered as carriers (Section 230 of the US Communications Decency Act), which means they lack the accountability for the content they bundle through their algorithms (e.g. fake news), unlike traditional newsmedia which is legally accountable for every word it prints. 

The above factors: advertising, atomization, and accountability crisis has created a crisis in journalism, especially local journalism (see Figure). The report proposes solutions to end this crisis by rethinking journalism, especially investigative journalism, as an essential public good sustained by public funding. Just as basic science is funded through public funding, the report proposes providing private media vouchers to citizens so that they can buy newspapers of their liking, and boost a diverse and dynamic newsmedia industry. Other suggestions include ways to reduce concentration in media, and increasing accountability and transparency of digital platforms.