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💥Europe’s new data protection regime offers a sound basis for India to craft its own legislation During the throes of India’s independence struggle, an image of Mahatma Gandhi spinning khadi symbolised not only economic and political autonomy but to its critics an insular withdrawal from industrialisation and technology. This tension is gingerly revealed in a letter from Jawaharlal Nehru to Aldous Huxley, as a partial defence of the Mahatma’s position, when he writes, “I believe in the machine and would have it spread in India, but I also believe in the social control of it.” While dialogues of the past do seem distant to the rapid advances in the fields of big data, algorithms and artificial intelligence, they undergird deeper truths and surface visibly in debates over the formation of a privacy and data protection framework. 👉It’s all connected At present India has the second highest number of Internet users in the world, and is an important market for many globa...

👉Repairing ties with the Maldives will test Indian diplomacy The Maldivian government’s decision to lift the state of emergency after 45 days, just ahead of the expiry of its second self-imposed deadline, comes as cold comfort for those concerned about the turn of events in the islands over the past couple of months. In a statement India said the withdrawal of the emergency is but “one step”, and much more must be done to restore democracy in the Maldives. The opposition, mostly in exile and led by former President Mohamad Nasheed, says the emergency was lifted only because President Abdulla Yameen has established total control over the judiciary and parliament since the February 1 court verdict that cancelled the sentencing of 12 opposition leaders and ordered their release. In a dramatic turn of events Mr. Yameen had then ordered the arrest of two judges, as well as hundreds of activists and politicians including former President Abdul Gayoom, and imposed a state of emergency....

💥Far from driving them apart, the Rajya Sabha polls have brought the SP and the BSP closer Elections to the Rajya Sabha would have been dull, predictable affairs if not for stories of intrigue and betrayal. In this round of biennial elections to the Upper House of Parliament, the element of drama was provided by the 10th seat from Uttar Pradesh, eventually won by the Bharatiya Janata Party over the Bahujan Samaj Party through a combination of cross-voting and last-minute switch of loyalties. BSP legislator Anil Kumar Singh was open about his rebellion, and his support for the BJP candidate. Independent member Raghuraj Pratap Singh, who is close to the SP, helped the BJP’s cause too. The battle for the 10th seat, which the BJP could not have won on its own, supposedly held long-term implications for the political churn that U.P. is now witnessing. The BJP saw it as a test of the new bonding between the SP and the BSP, which won for the SP two Lok Sabha by-elections recently. Chie...

👉How science is stepping in to save the northern white rhino from extinction The last male northern white rhinoceros, Sudan, died on March 19 at the age of 45, at Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya, where he spent the last nine years under the watch of a 24-hour armed guard. There was a time when northern white rhinos could be found in southern Chad, the Central African Republic, southwestern Sudan, northwestern Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In 1960, more than 2,000 were remaining, according to a World Wildlife Fund report. The number shrank to 15 in 1984 as they were hunted for their horns, an important ingredient in traditional Vietnamese medicine. Only two northern white rhinos remain now: Sudan’s daughter Najin and granddaughter Fatu, neither of whom will be able to carry a pregnancy to term. Where traditional conservation methods failed to save this subspecies, science is stepping in. From the sperm of four northern white rhino bulls and living...

💥How information on a fire reaches the authorities and the ways in which firefighting can be improved The recent wildfire tragedy in Theni in Tamil Nadu, in which 20 trekkers lost their lives, once again brings into focus forest fires in India. Over the past few years, we have realised that these fires are not spontaneous; human beings set off fires. This tragedy raises several other issues — of approaches in fighting fires and ways of mitigating damage. 👉Relaying information When a fire anywhere in the world is detected by NASA’s MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) and VIIRS (Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite) satellites, the Forest Survey of India (FSI) analyses the data by overlaying the digitised boundaries of forest areas to pinpoint the location to the exact forest compartment. The resolution of these satellites are up to 375m x 375m, which means that such fires can be detected if their extent is above half the pixel, i.e. about seven hec...

💥It is assumed that special courts are a panacea for judicial efficiency, with hardly any evidence to suggest that Last December, the Supreme Court greenlit the Centre’s proposal to set up 12 fast-track courts to adjudicate and speedily dispose of 1,581 cases against Members of Parliament and Legislative Assemblies. Apart from uncertainties about the adequacy of such a measure, a more glaring issue is that the order conflates two distinct judicial features by using them interchangeably: special courts and fast-track courts. Special courts, which have existed in the subordinate judiciary since before Independence, are set up under a statute meant to address specific disputes falling within that statute. Over 25 special courts were set up between 1950 and 2015 through various Central and State legislations. However, despite being an old means of addressing the specificities of certain statutes and judicial backlog, there seems to be little if any evaluation of how this system ...