HIV cases Are On The Steep Rise In India; What Else Is Gautam Adani Taking Over Apart From NDTV; What Are Buy-Now-Pay-Later Schemes?
That and three movie recommendations.
In 2021 alone, nearly 63,000 new persons were reported to have been infected with HIV. Another ~42,000 persons died due to complications arising from the full-blown infection. The virus continues to multiply with over 6,00,000 persons still slipping through the cracks.
India vowes to eliminate HIV by 2030. Good vow but how serious is the Indian government about its promise? It seems it cares scarcely little. Indian government stopped procuring life-saving drugs so much so that people living with HIV had to stage a protest in Delhi. After days of protest, it finally procured supplies via WHO to pacify protesters because the sit-in protest was catching international headlines.
An aside: We spoke about rising HIV cases in an earlier newsletter too.
There's another problem, with domestic drugs whose quality is subpar. Up to 65,000 HIV patients have grown to be drug-resistant and are on more potent drug combinations, according to the latest NACO estimate. This happens when drugs supplied are of not desired quality so the virus grows resistant to the type of drugs since the drug that was to overpower the virus because of its low quality helps the virus grow powerful. It's a race we are letting the virus win and this knee-jerk attitude will have far-reaching implications for all of us. Remember, we cannot predict how a virus will mutate. Another aspect causing drug resistance is the frequent changes in drug regimen since stocks aren't always available of all drugs. ~10% of children in the country stop responding to the first line of treatment in just four to five years. Others continue to respond at least for 8 to 10 years on first-line treatment. Many developed drug resistance after they were treated with a combination of four drugs: Lopinavir, Ritonavir, Atazanavir, and Dolutegravir. “When Lopinavir and Ritonavir stocks were in short supply, NACO, in a knee-jerk reaction, said that children who were already on second-line drugs should now be put on different drugs: Tenofovir, Lamivudine, and Dolutegravir. We wanted doctors to give written guarantees that the change in regimen would not affect children. None of the doctors gave us such an assurance in writing,” said Goswami, a 46-year-old HIV activist from Assam who also manages a government-run orphanage, Kasturi Child Care Home, which houses 28 HIV-infected children.
Source: How India’s HIV programme became a sideshow to its tuberculosis-control efforts -The National AIDS Control Organisation, once applauded for curbing HIV cases in India, is now grappling with a drug-supply crisis. And at a time when the government has shifted the spotlight to tuberculosis, the other disease could rear its head again.
Over the past two years, LIC has invested Rs 78,220 crore in five of the seven listed Adani companies, 4.9 times more than mutual funds. While the mutual fund industry hesitates to invest in the Adani group, LIC has no qualms, giving it the heft to raise more capital.
Other Adani stories:
The Rs 7,700 crore International Deepwater Multipurpose Seaport project is being constructed at Vizhinjam coast in Thiruvananthapuram by Adani Vizhinjam Port Private Ltd (AVPPL), the Special Economic Zone (SEZ) unit of Adani Ports. Construction of this has been halted for some time now due to protests. The protesters, most of them hailing from the community of fishers, are opposing the project because of livelihood concerns and the massive coastal erosion, which they allege is due to port construction activities. According to reports, in the last five years, the area has witnessed massive coastal erosion with 200 m lost in Valiyathura.
Ravish Kumar recently resigned from NDTV. This comes after the resignation of founders Prannoy Roy and Radhika Roy’s resignations from NDTV’s promoter board after the hostile takeover of the network by Adani. The New Delhi Television (NDTV) group of television channels comprised one of India’s last mainstream independent news outlets. Its takeover by Adani deals a further blow to media freedoms in India, which this year fell from number 142 to number 150 out of 180 countries ranked for press freedom by Reporters without Borders.
In this regard, you may enjoy reading this Newslaundry report about the man who enabled or made possible this takeover.In November 2022, Oxfam released a report quantifying the carbon footprints of the investments of the world’s billionaires. Gautam Adani came close to topping the list. Six of his group’s companies were documented as emitting a carbon equivalent total of almost 30 million tonnes per annum. These greenhouse gases are spewed into the Earth’s atmosphere by Adani’s coal-power stations, gas installations and coal mines. Adani’s ports and railways add to this toxic toll by transporting colossal quantities of coal.
When Modi became prime minister in 2014, Adani’s net worth was $7 billion. Today, it is $147 billion, making him India’s richest man. Do you think such growth is possible without mutual help from the government?
And lastly, read this.
A MEGA PROJECT IS UNDERWAY IN INDIA’S SMALLEST STATE. Goa, straddled by the Western Ghats and the Arabian Sea, will soon be a transport hub for coking coal. The fossil will arrive by ships from Canada, South Africa and Australia to the government port at Vasco da Gama. It will be carried by trucks, barges and trains along Goa’s beaches, paddy fields and hillocks and eventually across the majestic Ghats, through its dense forests and waterfalls and into arid northern Karnataka, where the high-grade coal will be used by factories to convert iron ore into steel.
The project involves more than doubling the amount of coal passing along this chain, and so a number of sub-projects are being executed: vast underwater trenches in the seabed to make it deep enough for massive coal-bearing ships, and a widened network of highways and railways on beaches and in forests.
— How the government of India is turning Goa into a coal hub
Those who haven’t lived near mining areas might not realise the effects of this. You might help yourself by reading about cancer cases near Goa’s ports and where coal and other mines are stored. Also about how trees and vegetation sort of wilt down near the roads where mining trucks move releasing fumes and fine dust that cover houses and just everything in its reach.
Oh, notice we didn’t talk about huge protests in Australia against Adani or protests in tribal regions of India.
The Indian Coal Mine That Razed a Village and Shrank a Forest
A company run by Asia’s richest man, Gautam Adani, is strip-mining tribal lands for fossil fuels. Forest dwellers are fighting back.
Buy Now Pay Later - You’ve already heard that, haven’t you?
When Amelia Schmarzo's dad helped set up a credit card for her to use while away at college, he told her it was only for essentials and emergencies. And Amelia barely touched the card ... until she discovered a new kind of payment called "buy now, pay later."
The pitch was simple: get whatever you want now, and pay it back in four, interest-free instalments. Suddenly, Amelia started buying all kinds of things using buy now, pay later. And she failed to notice that her small instalments were quickly piling up. It only took a month before her credit card was maxed out.
Buy now, pay later companies like Klarna, Afterpay and Affirm have taken the country by storm ever since the pandemic fueled an online shopping explosion. But offering customers the option to pay for anything from clothes to oral surgery in interest-free instalments sounds almost too good to be true, right?
Listen to this important NPR podcast for more on this - Buy now, pay dearly?
In India, the above thing is playing out with an extra lever.
Around 2017-2018, when popular card fintech Slice started as a student-only lending platform, it would pay its interns ₹200 for each KYC (know-your-customer) verification, recalls a former Slice official. That involved visiting a potential new customer, getting her signature on documents and even taking a picture. Today, that seems like a quaintly analogue way of doing things, given the boom in digital KYC verification.
Thanks to artificial intelligence and algorithms, KYC startups carry out millions of digital verifications in a month, helping banks and fintech check the credentials of customers and making the process of bringing them on board much faster. Not surprisingly, they are supremely important for many fintech firms.
Globally, most identity frauds happen because personal data is easily available. That’s certainly true of India. “If you give ₹500 to someone on the grey market, they will happily give you hundreds of PAN and Aadhaar numbers. So, it has become extremely easy for someone to get access to this legitimate data and use it to open a bank account and later to avail credit," said Ranjan R Reddy, founder of Bureau Inc, a KYC startup.
Besides buying data, KYC fraud can happen through UPI and wallets. Say, a customer clicks on a malicious link purportedly from Paytm/PhonePe, etc., and a scammer takes control of their phone. If their PAN card is included in the sensitive data, scammers tend to replace the photo on the card with someone else’s photo. That person can now go ahead and open a bank account, pretending to be the owner of the PAN card.
The bank typically doesn’t spot the deceit. Usually, banks validate the textual information of a PAN card with National Securities Depository Limited (NSDL), where only the name and number on the PAN are matched.
In 2018, when Slice was an unregulated fintech, the company used to collect a lot of data from outside sources, said the former Slice official cited earlier. “While there was no partnership with any third-party KYC startup, we relied heavily on Truecaller," he said.
“Privacy of customer data is fundamental to a KYC business," said Arpit Ratan, co-founder of the KYC startup Signzy and a former lawyer. The reality is different, he admits.
An open secret in the industry is that a lot of players end up storing a lot of data and even selling it. Several officials admitted this was rampant and considered “normal". For example, in an e-KYC, startups act as a pipeline between the lender and UIDAI while verifying Aadhaar documents. “Data flows from UIDAI to the regulated entity. But in the case of video KYC and offline Aadhaar-based KYC, the data rests or resides for some time with these startups, which is a problem. They are not supposed to have that data in the first place, forget about keeping it for some time. The customer consent to fetch information is taken in the name of the regulated entity, the lender, and not anyone else," Hyanki explains.
But there have also been instances when the consumer ends up giving consent both to the NBFC (non-banking financial company) and its KYC partner – or even to a broader term, “lender".
“The consent is messed up. One customer becomes customer of five companies, without his/her knowing about it. I have seen many such cases," Hyanki said.
Regulated entites are required to comply with KYC directives. But, right now, the way it is implemented is a ‘grey zone’.
For example, most banks keep the data they process in their own server. But many financial institutions, including fintechs, rely on cloud. Say, a fintech lending platform gets the PAN of a customer and passes this information to the KYC partner for verification. “Even if they are not supposed to, some KYC startups will hold on to it. The next time another lender wants a check on the same customer, it won’t have to pay for the cost of fetching the same data. This is purely to protect margins," the fraud prevention official said.
Then, there’s something called ‘system abuse’ in the industry. An unregulated fintech lending platform works with a regulated NBFC in a co-lending arrangement. Then, the NBFC gives one login ID to a KYC partner, using which it could fetch CKYC or NSDL data–even if it is not allowed to do so as per regulation.
Smaller niche startups, which are doing extremely well in terms of revenues, store all the data collected on behalf of their regulated clients and sell it in packages, the fraud prevention official cited above said.
— A booming KYC industry poses data privacy risk
And here are some recommendations:
Definitely watch Jojo Rabbit.
Here’s another fun movie to catch.
And this too.
Oh also this stand-up. Hasan has outsmarted himself.
Caste and BJP
It is a commonly held belief that RSS-BJP thinks caste is dead, and that there is no caste practice in India anymore. Prime Minister Modi and his party constantly allege that the other parties are dividing people based on caste or worse, keeping the caste oppression alive by constantly talking about it. Even their supporters at large think that it is only the BJP that does politics away from caste. In fact, everyone from the media to their supporters has us believe that BJP has largely been winning because of Mr Modi. This of course is far from the truth. Read the following from Caravan Magazine’s April issue.
[…] over the years, the BJP has given more importance to caste equations in Uttar Pradesh than any other party. It has assiduously courted, drawn and consolidated the votes of non-Yadav Other Backward Classes and the non-Jatav Dalits. In a previous piece in The Caravan, I wrote that, despite right-wing analysts attributing the BJP’s victories in 2014 and the 2017 state elections to the “Modi wave,” those results owed more to the decentralisation of the state’s OBCs. The results of the 2022 election confirm my assertion. […] BJP made its caste calculations and stuck to its strategy of ensuring that non-Yadav OBCs and non-Jatav Dalits stay in the saffron fold. As I pointed out in a social-media post in July 2021, the BJP in Uttar Pradesh “even knows the numerical strength of castes that the leaders of other political parties can’t even name or identify; they know the numerical strength of castes which will influence the next election.” This is borne out by the work the party has put in to woo these communities over the past few years, and the BJP intensified this campaign in the past year. For example, between 17 and 31 October 2021, the BJP held 17 separate conventions for individual non-Yadav OBC castes, including the Kumhar, Rajbhar, Nai, Namdev, Nishad, Lodhi, Pal, Saini, Teli and Chaurasia communities. The Yadavs are the state’s dominant OBC caste, and the SP’s core support-base. The Jatavs occupy a similar space in the Dalit community and usually rally behind the Bahujan Samaj Party. Clearly, the objective of organising such events individually for each OBC caste was to establish their separate identities and to prevent their consolidation under any other political party.
What does that tell you? BJP is going into the hinterlands and evoking caste awareness in individual castes by holding separate caste-wise meets. It is showing to each caste member that they care for them, exclusively.
Before we end, one last thing.
While granting bail to Shiv Sena leader Sanjay Raut on November 9, a Mumbai court made scathing remarks about the Enforcement Directorate, accusing the agency of making selective arrests. The court also noted that the ED is quick to arrest and slow to prosecute. It noted that, in the last decade, since the special court was created for the Prevention of Money Laundering Act trials, the agency had not been able to conclude a single trial. Think about this. We have an agency which recently has been on steroids arresting people left and centre (umm yes!). But how do these arrests never conclude in prosecution? What does that mean? That the agency arrests without ample proof and evidence in its hand? Why does it arrest then? This is serious. Think about it.
That’s all for this one. Thanks for reading. Do share with your network and ask your friends to subscribe.