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Context

India is pioneering the concept of digital public goods, with it, there is an opportunity for India to embark on digital diplomacy.

Digital public goods in India

• Built on the foundation of Aadhaar and India Stack, modular applications, big and small, are transforming the way we make payments, withdraw our PF, get our passport and driving licence and check land records, to name just a few activities.
• There is an opportunity for India to embark on digital diplomacy — to take its made-in-India digital public goods to hundreds of emerging economies across the world.

How Digital Diplomacy can help India?

• This could be a strategic and effective counter to China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
• Enhancing the productivity of emerging economies: Emerging economies are characterised by gross inefficiencies in the delivery of government services and a consequent trust deficit.
• Digital public goods spread speed, transparency, ease and productivity across the individual-government-market ecosystem and enhance inclusivity, equity and development at scale.
• Acceptance in emerging economies: India’s digital diplomacy will be beneficial to and welcomed by, all emerging economies from Peru to Polynesia, from Uruguay to Uganda, and from Kenya to Kazakhstan.
• Goodwill: It will enable quick, visible and compounding benefits for India’s partner countries and earn India immense goodwill.

Benefits of Digital diplomacy

• Reusability: The code is highly reusable
• Low cost: The cost of setting up an open source-based high school online educational infrastructure, to supplement the physical infrastructure, for an entire country is less than laying two kilometres of high-quality road.
• No debt trap: The investments required for transporting digital public goods are minuscule in comparison and there is no chance of a debt trap.
• Short gestation period: Unlike physical infrastructures such as ports and roads, digital public goods have short gestation periods and immediate, and visible impact and benefits.
• It plugs leaks: Digital infrastructure plugs leaks.
• It eliminates ghost beneficiaries of government services, removes touts collecting rent, creates an audit trail, makes the individual-government-market interface transparent and provides efficiencies that help recoup the investments quickly.
• Processes get streamlined and wait times for any service come down dramatically.
• Increases productivity: Productivity goes up and services can be scaled quickly.
• Benefits can be rapidly extended to cover a much larger portion of the population.
• Compounding instead of depreciation: Above all, the digital public goods infrastructure compounds while physical infrastructure depreciates.

Three ways in which digital public goods infrastructure compound

• Compounding happens for three reasons.
• [1] Growth of technologyy: Chips keep becoming faster, engines more powerful, and gene-editing technology keeps improving.
• [2] Network effect: As more and more people use the same technology, the number of “transactions” using that technology increase exponentially — be it Facebook posts or UPI transactions.
• [3] Rapid creation of new layers of technology: For example, the hypertext protocol created the worldwide web.
• Then the browser was built on top of it, which made the worldwide web easier to navigate and more popular.
• Thousands of new layers were added to make it what it is today.
• Growth of UPI in India: To give an example, consider the surge in UPI-based payments in India.
• This kind of growth doesn’t happen with a few entitled and privileged people using UPI more and more; it happens with more and more people using UPI more and more.
• Use of Diksha: The use of Diksha, the school education platform built on the open-source platform Sunbird, has followed the same trajectory — today close to 500 million schoolchildren are using it.

Conclusion

Made in India digital tools can help other emerging economies deal with economic, governance challenges.

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Context

The arrest of 68 Indian fishermen by the Sri Lankan authorities between December 18 and 20 and the impounding of 10 boats for “poaching” in the territorial waters of Sri Lanka has flared up the conflict between the two countries.

About Palk Bay

• Palk Bay is home to diverse resources including 580 species of fish, extends from Point Calimere of Nagapattinam district to Mandapam-Dhanushkodi of Ramanathapuram district over about 250 km.
• Source of dispute: It is an important marine zone between south-eastern India and northern Sri Lanka, has been a source of dispute for long.

About the conflict

• Negotiations: The genesis of the dispute can be traced to the October 1921 negotiations between representatives of the Governments of Madras and Ceylon, on the need for the delimitation of the Palk Strait and the Gulf of Mannar.
• Delimitation: It was in the mid-1970s that two agreements were signed by India and Sri Lanka, under which the International Maritime Boundary Line (IMBL) came into being.
• Instead of settling the issues, the pacts gave way to new problems, including the recurring incidents of Tamil Nadu fishermen crossing the IMBL and getting caught by the Sri Lankan authorities.

Cause of the problem

• Different fishing practices: The asymmetric nature of fishing practices in Tamil Nadu and the Northern Province of Sri Lanka is said to be the cause of the problem.
• While Tamil Nadu’s fishing community uses mechanised bottom trawlers, its counterpart uses conventional forms of fishing, as trawling is banned in Sri Lanka.
• Difference in resources: The fishermen of Tamil Nadu continue to cross the IMBL, as the Sri Lankan side of the Bay is considered to have more fishery resources than the Indian side.

Way forward

• Weak away fishermen from trawling: The deep-sea fishing project,  to wean away the fishermen of Tamil Nadu from bottom trawling, launched in July 2017, has not yielded the desired results.
• Relaxation of norms of the project is under the consideration of the Union Government, to draw greater response from the fishermen.
• Motivation for deep-sea fishing: Given the fact that deep sea fishing takes longer duration and has a higher recurring cost per voyage than what the fishing community experiences currently, the need for providing continuous motivation to the fisherfolk assumes critical importance.
• Other strategies: Various strategies, including the promotion of seaweed cultivation, open sea cage cultivation, seaweed cultivation and processing, and sea/ocean ranching should be adopted.
• Forming FPOs: There is a view that if the community is encouraged to form fish farmer producer organisations, it may take to sustainable fishing practices.
• Institution of stakeholders: A section of specialists favours the creation of an international institution of stakeholders for regulating the fishing sector in the Bay.

Consider the question “What leads to the dispute between India and Sri Lanka over the Palk Bay? Suggest the way forward for fishermen in Tamil Nadu.”

Conclusion

For all this to happen, sustained public pressure and political will are a must.

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Back2Basics: What is bottom trawling?

• A bottom trawl consists of a large tapered net with a wide mouth and a small enclosed end.
• The mouth of a trawl net has two weighted doors that serve not only to keep the net open, but also to keep the net on the ocean floor.
• These doors can weigh several tons.
• In addition to the heavy doors, the bottom of the net is a thick metal cable (footrope) studded with heavy steel balls or rubber bobbins that effectively crush everything in their path.
• As the net drags along the seafloor, living habitat in its path is crushed, ripped up, or smothered as the seabed is turned over.