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 For the citizen to be confident, the state has to first believe that it can enforce the rule of law In Mumbai (and this may be true in many other cities in India), many traffic signals start blinking the yellow lights after around 10 pm. These traffic signals are not tucked away in the low density residential areas; they are a common sight on key arterial roads and dense junctions. The blinking yellow lights are supposed to signal to the traffic that they are on their own—the drivers and the pedestrians need to look out for their own selves: the state or the law will have been considered to have done its bit by warning them to slow down. The scenes at many such junctions left to fend for themselves suggest that the state abandoning its responsibility creates a low equilibrium for all its citizens. The traffic slows down, gridlocks emerge which take patience or fights to sort out, loud honking and road rage add a dash of rough music to the brew and pedestria...