Through the Looking Glass

Financial Express The onus falls on business to continue to engender society’s and regulators’ trust in the usefulness of technology. New technologies bring with them challenges of regulation. The key challenges facing regulators in the context of drones are privacy, safety and security. Drones have captured headlines this week. The spectacular drone attack on Saudi Arabian oil facilities knocked out ~5% of daily oil supply. The Maharashtra government announced that it signed up with a global private firm to “use a logistics network of autonomous delivery drones to help transform emergency medicine and critical care”. The Economist, on its latest cover, highlighted that ‘flying taxis take off’ even as earlier this year, the Gatwick airport closed for a day and a half over “drone sighting”. Drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or remotely piloted aircraft systems (RPAS), have become common in a wide variety of more beneficial, mundane and practical applications in agricultu...

The Financial Express Large digital databases like the GST Network can give granular insight, create predictive models; this can lead to more grounded interventions A lot has been said about the current economic slowdown. Econometricians have opined on whether the fall in growth rate is structural or cyclical; economists have wondered whether the response has to be from the supply side or whether demand needs a boost; politicians have traded barbs on whether the issue is the mismanagement of the local economy or the impact of the global trade wars and suchlike; industry and stock market participants have loudly called for succour, fiscal prudence be damned, as their profits and positions suffer even as bureaucrats and government think-tanks continue to talk of India becoming a $5 trillion economy. Since the macro-economy affects all participants, it is natural for all of them to have an opinion and voice it out clearly. As they perceive the current slowdown from their own vanta...