Current Affair 1:

Government Data Roundup

 

Report 1: Monthly Progress and Achievement Report- UIDAI

Brief about the data

Every month, the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) releases data on the monthly Aadhar adoption, and transactions done using Aadhar such as Aadhar-enabled Payment Systems (AePS), e-KYC, Aadhar Authentication, etc. through a press release. This data is significant since Aadhar is increasingly being used for the implementation of various schemes by State and Union governments.

Key findings

1. Over 175.44 crore authentication transactions were carried out via Aadhaar in October 2022.
2. 23.56 crore e-KYC transactions were executed using Aadhaar in October 2022, and the cumulative number of e-KYC transactions via Aadhaar has now gone up to 1321.49 crores by the end of October 2022.
3. October 2022 also recorded 23.64 crores of AePS transactions across India, up by 12.4% when compared with September 2022. Cumulatively, 1573.48 crores of last-mile banking transactions have been made possible via the use of AePS and the network of micro-ATMs so far, by the end of October 2022.

Report 2: Indian Telecom Services Performance Indicator Report

Brief about the report

The report provides a broad perspective of the Telecom Services in India and presents the key parameters and growth trends of the Telecom Services as well as Cable TV, DTH & Radio Broadcasting services in India for the period covering the quarter from April to June 2022. It has been compiled mainly on the basis of information furnished by the Service Providers.

Key findings

1. The number of telephone subscribers in India increased from 1,166.93 million at the end of March 2022 to 1,172.96 million at the end of June 2022, registering a growth rate of 0.52% over the previous quarter.
2. The overall Tele-density in India increased from 84.88% in the quarter ending March 2022 to 85.13% in the Quarter ending June 2022.
3. Telephone subscribers in Urban areas increased from 647.11 million at the end of March 2022 to 649.09 million at the end of June 2022. But the Urban Tele-density decreased from 134.94% to 134.72% during the same period.
4. Rural telephone subscribers increased from 519.82 million at the end of March 2022 to 523.27 million at the end of June 2022 and Rural Tele-density also increased from 58.07% to 58.46% during the same period.
5. The performance of Cellular Mobile service providers in terms of Quality-of-Service performance in all the parameters remains same. There has been neither improvement nor deterioration in the performance in this quarter, as compared to the previous quarter.

Report 3:

Brief about the paper

Noting the decline of India’s rankings on several global indices, specifically in opinion-based indices that deal with subjective issues such as democracy, press freedom, etc., the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister (EAC-PM) has come up with this working paper to study the reasons behind it.

 

Three indices- Freedom in the World Index, Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) Democracy Index and V-DEM indices have been studied in the report which are almost entirely based on perceptions.

Reasons highlighted in the paper

There are serious problems with the methodology used in these perception-based indices which affect the results according to the paper. These are listed below.

1. The indices are primarily based on the opinions of a tiny group of unknown “experts”. The institutions do not provide any transparency on how the experts are chosen or their expertise.
2. The questions that are used are subjective and structured in a way that is impossible to answer objectively even for a country, let alone compare across countries. Hence, simply providing the same set of questions to everyone does not necessarily lead to comparable scores across countries.
3. There are questions that should be asked but are excluded such as “Is the head of state democratically elected?”. Such an inclusion would sharply reduce scores for countries such as Sweden, Norway, the UK, Denmark, Belgium, and the Netherlands which are constitutional monarchies. Not only is such a question pertinent to a measure of democracy, but it can also be answered objectively.
4. Certain questions used by these indices are not an appropriate measure of democracy across all countries.

 

Current Affair 2:

Fifth India-Australia Cyber Policy Dialogue

 

India and Australia convened their fifth Bilateral Cyber Policy Dialogue on 17 November 2022 in New Delhi.

The Cyber Policy Dialogue was held under the auspices of the India-Australia Framework Arrangement on Cyber and Cyber-Enabled Critical Technology Cooperation and Plan of Action 2020-2025 for a comprehensive and deeper cyber cooperation.

The Cyber Policy Dialogue provides a bilateral platform to discuss a range of high-profile issues of mutual interest. Discussions at this Dialogue included strategic priorities, cyber threat assessment, next generation telecommunications (including 5G technology) capacity building and cooperation in the Indo-Pacific region, and the latest developments in cyber at the United Nations.

The sixth India-Australia Cyber Policy Dialogue will be held in 2023.

 

 

 

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