09 Oct 2020: UPSC Exam Comprehensive News Analysis

B. GS 2 Related

Category: POLITY AND GOVERNANCE

1. Republic TV, 2 others in TRP racket: police

Context:

• Mumbai Police Commissioner has said that the Crime Branch has busted a racket involving Republic TV, Box Cinema and Fakt Marathi that manipulated Television Rating Points (TRPs).
• It has been found that a company that is a part of the Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC) misused confidential data, which had been entrusted to them.
• It has apparently been done for wrongful gains of various TV channels, which resulted in a wrongful loss to various advertisers and their agencies.

What is TRP?

• The Target Rating Point (TRP) or Television Rating Point is the metric used by the marketing and advertising agencies to evaluate the viewership.
• Anyone who watches television for more than a minute is considered a viewer.

How is TRP recorded?

• In India, the TRP is recorded by the Broadcast Audience Research Council using Bar-O-Meters that are installed on televisions in selected households.
• The Broadcast Audience Research Council is an organisation that functions under the Information and Broadcasting Ministry and the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI).
• BARC has installed these meters in 44,000 households across the country, so far.
• Audio watermarks are embedded in video content prior to broadcast. These watermarks are not audible to the human ear, but can easily be detected and decoded using dedicated hardware and software.
• Viewing details and watermarks are recorded by the Bar-O-Meters.

How are the households selected?

• The selection of households is a two-stage process.
• The first step is the establishment survey.
  • A large-scale face-to-face survey of a sample of approximately 3 lakh households from the target population is done annually.
  • Out of these, the households which will have Bar-O-Meters are randomly selected.
  • The fieldwork to recruit households is not done directly by the BARC.
  • On its website, it has said that the viewing behaviour of panel homes is reported to BARC India daily.
  • Coincidental checks either physically or telephonically are done regularly.
• BARC India also involves a separate vigilance agency to check on outliers that it considers highly suspicious.
  • As per the guidelines of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, these households rotate every year.
  • This rotation is in such a manner that older panel homes are removed first while maintaining the representativeness of the panel. The rotation is conducted in a staggered manner every month.
  • The Ministry guidelines call for maintenance of secrecy and privacy of the panel homes.
  • BARC is directed to follow a voluntary code of conduct.

What are the loopholes in the process?

• Public broadcaster Doordarshan has time and again said that TRP did not reflect the actual viewership.
  • As per reports, about 70% of the revenue for television channels comes from advertising and only 30% from the subscription.
• Several doubts have been raised on many previous occasions about the working of the TRP.
• The Mumbai police alleged that households are being paid to manipulate the TRP.
• Information and Broadcasting Minister has said that the TRP process needs a rethink and criticized what he called “TRP journalism”.

E. Editorials

Category: ECONOMY

1. Should Indian startups take on global Internet giants?

Context:

• Online payments company Paytm recently announced that it was building a ‘Mini App Store’ to reduce Indian app developers’ reliance on tech giants like Google. Paytm believes that this move would help empower Indian developers.

Dominance of the tech giants:

• The Play Store is the key app store for Google’s Android operating system, which runs over 90% of smartphones in India.
• Google has a near 100% dominance in the app marketplace in India.

Concerns:

• There could be some serious implications of tech giants having inordinate dominance in the Indian market.

Arbitrary policies:

• Paytm and several other Indian Internet start-ups allege that Google is using its market dominance to arbitrarily enforce policies on the local players and target competitors.
• Google has announced that it would consider enforcing a 30% commission on all payments made for digital services in apps from its Play Store. Though the implementation of this plan has been postponed, it has caused much resentment in the Indian start-up environment.
• Domestic players would be required to pay up to access their own users by giving a 30% cut to Google when you are selling a service or a product through an app on the Google App Store. These companies also have to advertise via Google to reach their customer base. In effect, a large chunk of all the money that these companies make goes to Google and Facebook.

Misuse of dominant position:

• There is also discontent against tech giants in their home country as well, with game developers in the U.S alleging unfair treatment from Apple. The U.S. government is believed to be readying an anti-trust lawsuit against Google.

For more information on this issue, refer to:

CNA dated Dec 15, 2019: Tech titans under watch

CNA dated Oct 8, 2020: Google set to face antitrust case in India

Modus operandi:

• Unlike the startup companies which create value by being innovative, the modus operandi of bigger companies like Google and Facebook is different.
• These tech giants utilize their vast resources and reach to build barriers for other players. One of the tools they use is to buy all competition to ensure that they stay in the market and create shareholder value.

Long term harm v/s short term benefits:

• One argument against dominance by the tech giants has been on the basis of consumer benefit.
• While in the short term, the consumers will benefit because as the bigger companies assimilate innovations, these innovations become stronger and the bigger companies can use their infrastructure to make them available to a larger number of people. However, in the long term, as the consumers get used to the availing of services, it is possible that the price of these services starts rising and consumers end up paying more because there is not enough competition in the market.

Are Indian firms capable of competing with the tech giants?

• With reports of the Internet start-ups in India banding together to take on the likes of Google and Facebook, the article evaluates whether the Indian start-up ecosystem is ready to take on the tech giants of Silicon Valley.

No:

Lack of infrastructure:

• Most of the Indian start-ups are dependent for crucial infrastructure on these tech giants. Neither does India have the infrastructure that is required to build and scale start-ups nor are there large infrastructure players who can work towards building such infrastructure in limited time frames.
  • A lot of start-ups are launched on Amazon Web Services, or Google Cloud, or on Microsoft Azure.
  • India has limited strength in the hardware sector, with practically no real manufacturing or chipmaking.

Limited investment:

• Despite the impressive growth in the inflow of venture capital in India, the figures are very less compared to what is witnessed in countries like the US and China.

Challenges:

• A major challenge is that India as a market itself is poor, in the sense that it doesn’t have enough spending capacity.
• For digital services to take off and be profitable and viable, one of the thumb rules that several companies talk about is that the GDP per capita should be above $4,000. India’s per capita GDP is still at about $2,000 to $2,500. So, the potential to monetise such users is very low.

Yes:

• The Indian start-up environment has witnessed considerable growth over the years. The market has grown exponentially with the growth of smartphone users. There is an active ecosystem with a large number of consumers and service providers.
• India has been slowly but surely building expertise in infrastructure in some sectors like the payment gateways.

Way forward:

• In order to enable the Indian firms to compete effectively with the likes of Google and Facebook, the following measures may be necessary.

Building a base:

• India should work towards building domestic capacity first before it can challenge the might of tech giants. This could also involve cooperation with the tech giants.
• India should compete only when it makes sense, on a level playing field. A too confrontational approach would harm India’s interest in the current context.

Government support:

• There has to be a conscious strategy to help the growth of domestic firms.
• China offers a successful model that can be considered for implementation in India. Specific technologies and companies with potential can be chosen and there must be unwavering support from the government to such entities such as giving such domestic start-ups favourable access to the market, giving them an opportunity to grow and to stabilise their offerings.
• There should be a conscious strategy to develop a giant that can compete with global leaders.

Balanced regulation:

• Institutions like the Competition Commission of India and others must ensure that the monopoly position is not abused by companies through measures that can ensure that the companies don’t overcharge or policies that mandate that the companies are split into different smaller entities.
• Regulation must be a fine balancing act to ensure that such measures and policies would aid both competition as well as the consumers’ benefit.
  • India cannot afford too much of reactive policymaking against the tech giants as it doesn’t signal well for attracting foreign investors. A very strict policy environment that encourages only local Indian innovation and tries to bar foreign competition might not be the best possible approach from the consumer’s aspect.
  • The policy must both be able to attract foreign investments from these larger companies and also encourage Indian companies.
• If there are any antitrust actions globally on the tech giants, India must join such efforts or provide overt support to ensure that dominant positions are not misused.

For related information, refer to:

CNA dated May 28, 2020: Google faces antitrust case in India

Category: SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

1. Scissoring the DNA

This topic has been covered in the following article:

CNA dated Oct 8, 2020: Makers of Gene ‘Scissors’ win Chemistry Nobel

Q1. Consider the following statements:

Q2. Consider the following statements with respect to the Comptroller and Auditor 
General (CAG) of India:

Q3. Which of the following committee/s or commission/s are associated with 
“Scheduled Tribes”?

Q4. Consider the following pairs with respect to Nagaland’s borders:

I. UPSC Mains Practice Questions

1. Discuss why the inordinate dominance of global tech giants is a cause of concern and suggest what measures are required in this direction. (15 marks, 250 words)(GS Paper 3/economy)
2. Evaluate the potential of CRISPR technology and also analyze the need to regulate the use of this technology. (10 marks, 150 words)(GS Paper 3/Science and Technology)

Read the previous CNA here.