Soumyarendra Barik is a Principal Correspondent with The Indian Express and reports on the intersection of technology, policy and society. He tweets @imsoumyarendra
In a report titled 'India's Booming Gig and Platform Economy', government think-tank Niti Aayog has made observations on labour force participation of women and persons with disabilities, and made recommendations to companies.
Based on a survey conducted across urban centres of India, NITI Aayog said in a report titled ‘India’s Booming Gig and Platform Economy’ that women are more likely to take up platform jobs after their education and marriage.
Kant, who will leave the government think tank at the end of June, after having led the organisation for over six years, also said in an interview that the government should first assess the success of current production-linked incentive (PLI) schemes before launching the initiative for other sectors.
The auction, to be held on July 26, will be held for spectrum in the frequencies of 600 MHz, 700 MHz, 800 MHz, 900 MHz, 1,800 MHz, 2,100 MHz, 2,300 MHz, 3,300 MHz and 26 GHz bands.
Parameswaran Iyer, a 1981-batch IAS officer of Uttar Pradesh cadre and a well-known sanitation specialist, has been appointed the chief executive officer of Niti Aayog, after Amitabh Kant retires on June 30.
The Department of Telecommunications has extended the production-linked incentive scheme for telecom by one year. What are the incentives under the telecom PLI? How has it fared so far?
The Panama-based company said that due to the logging and storage requirement of the rules, “a VPN company with servers in India may no longer be able to guarantee privacy for its users”.
In a blog post, Blake Lemoine – who has since been placed on administrative leave – termed the AI chatbot LaMDA “a person”. According to a report by The Washington Post, Lemoine started chatting with LaMDA in 2021 on topics including religion, consciousness and robotics and concluded that the chatbot had become “sentient”.
There were over 300 stalls spanning the biotech spectrum -- medical technology, agricultural tech, diagnostics, vaccine technology, biotech incubators etc.
Surfshark is shutting down its servers in the country, becoming the second major virtual private network (VPN) provider to exit India. What's the reason for this? What happens to Indian users of Surfshark?
The Reserve Bank of India has proposed linking credit cards with UPI. What is the significance of the move? What could be the hurdles? What is the big picture?
The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology has floated a fresh draft of amendments to the Information Technology Rules, 2021. What are the proposed amendments? What prompted them? What are the concerns?
Terming the regulations as an "evolving" issue, Minister of State for Electronics and IT Rajeev Chandrashekhar said the government is looking for a way to make social media companies more accountable in handling grievances of users.
Last week, the Ministry had issued a draft with the same proposal, but withdrew it within hours. At the time, a source at the ministry had said that the draft would be reissued with some changes following a formal announcement.
The documents consist of internal conversations between Zhang and several staffers at Facebook between December 2019 and September 2020. The staffers she was speaking to during that time are responsible for monitoring and acting on inauthentic activity on Facebook.
The UIDAI issued the now-withdrawn advisory after an individual, who was allegedly part of an international narcotic drugs racket, was caught using fudged Aadhaar cards to book illegal export cargo of prohibited substances.
What is direct-to-mobile broadcasting, and what is the government doing to facilitate this technology? What could be the consumer and business impact of this? What are the possible challenges to the technology's rollout?
The proposal has triggered concerns about the government overriding social media companies’ content decisions. Incidentally, the draft amendments were uploaded to the MeitY’s website earlier Thursday morning, but were subsequently taken down by afternoon.