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Daily News Analysis

7th December 2022
Topics To be Covered:
 Bharatnet Project
 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) of the United States
 ChatGPT- Latest Artificial Intelligence Tool
 Calling Name Presentation (CNAP) feature by TRAI
 World Bank’s Projections on India’s Growth
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Topics
Bharatnet Project
Context:
 Recently, the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) has
proposed not to monetise rural broadband network
infrastructure built under the Bharatnet project.
 It plans to replace it with alternative assets to achieve the target
fixed under the National Monetisation Pipeline.

About Bharatnet Project:

 It is the world’s largest rural broadband connectivity
programme using Optical fibre.
 It is implemented by Bharat Broadband Network Ltd.
(BBNL) which is a Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) set up by
the Government of India under the Companies Act, 1956 with
an authorised capital of Rs 1000 crore.
 National Optical Fibre Network (NOFN) which was launched in 2011 was renamed as Bharat Net Project
in 2015.
 NOFN was envisaged as an information superhighway through the creation of a robust middle-mile
infrastructure for reaching broadband connectivity to Gram Panchayats.
 Bharatnet is a highly scalable network infrastructure accessible on a non-discriminatory basis, to provide
on demand, affordable broadband connectivity of 2 Mbps to 20 Mbps for all households and on demand
capacity to all institutions, to realise the vision of Digital India, in partnership with States and the private sector
and to facilitate the delivery of e-governance, e-health, e-education, e-banking, Internet and other services to
rural India.
 The entire project is being funded by Universal service Obligation Fund (USOF), which was set up for
improving telecom services in rural and remote areas of the country.
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About National Monetisation Pipeline:

 NMP is envisaged to serve as a medium-term roadmap for identifying potential monetisation- ready
projects, across various infrastructure sectors.
 The strategic objective of the programme is to unlock the value of investments in brownfield public sector
assets by tapping institutional and long-term patient capital, which can thereafter be leveraged for further
public investments.
 The pipeline has been developed by NITI Aayog, in consultation with infrastructure line ministries, based on
the mandate for ‘Asset Monetisation’ under Union Budget 2021-22.
 NMP estimates aggregate monetisation potential of Rs 6.0 lakh crores through core assets of the Central
Government, over a four-year period, from FY 2022 to FY 2025.
 The NMP is aimed at creating a systematic and transparent mechanism for public authorities to monitor
the performance of the initiative and for investors to plan their future activities.

News Source: The Hindu, pib.gov.in

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Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) of the United States

Context:
Recently, French President Emmanuel Macron questioned Joe Biden
about clean energy subsidies in the new Inflation Reduction Act
(IRA), which European countries believe are discriminatory to non-
American companies.

What is the U.S. IRA?

 The IRA is a $430 billion package of federal spending, tax
breaks, credits, and levies, aimed at fighting climate change,
reducing healthcare costs, and making large corporations pay
their “fair share” in taxes.
 The Act is a scaled down version of Mr. Biden’s ambitious Build Back Better plan.
 Besides its goal of bringing down inflation, the Act is the biggest climate action package in U.S. history —
earmarking $370 billion for climate focused funding and investments aimed at cutting emissions by around
40% below 2005 levels by 2030.
 The IRA combines climate action goals with industrial policy, aiming to transition to clean energy by
incentivising local manufacturing of renewable energy components.
 It also seeks to reduce American reliance on China for materials and components for the clean energy
industry.

What are Europe’s Concerns?

 The EU fears that the IRA tax credits and subsidies to EVs and other green product makers put European
companies at a disadvantage and may push these companies to move critical parts of their supply chains to
America.
 The EU’s own new green plan ‘Fit for 55’ is targeting to cut CO2 emissions from cars by 55% and vans by
50% by 2030 and all emissions from cars by 2035. For this, it will need to significantly increase its uptake of
EVs.
 Several automakers, battery makers and energy companies have already made announcements or shown
interest in setting up shop in America.

News Source: The Hindu

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ChatGPT- Latest Artificial Intelligence Tool

Context:
A tool called ChatGPT was released on the internet recently. It created
quite a stir especially among the artificial intelligence (AI) crowd because
this tool ‘knew’ every topic under the Sun.

What is ChatGPT?
 ChatGPT is called a Language Model, rather than a chat bot.
 A language model is a software that prints out a sequence of
words as output that are related to some words given as input
with appropriate semantic relation.
 It can perform tasks like answering questions and carrying on a conversation with humans.
 It is developed by OpenAI, which is a research institute and company that focuses on developing artificial
intelligence technology in a responsible and safe way.
 It can write a program or even a simple software application.
 It can also do creative tasks such as writing a story.
 It can explain scientific concepts and answer any question that needs factual answers.
 It is also a neural network which is a large network of computers that can fine tune its output of words based
on the feedback given to it during stages of training. This training process and the technology together are
called Reinforcement Learning.
 It can accurately “understand” the context of a sentence or a paragraph. This “comprehension” can be used for
multiple purposes like answering a question, summarising a paragraph or an article, translating documents.

How to measure accuracy of ChatGPT?

 The accuracy of ChatGPT or any language model can be measured using standard techniques like “Recall
­Oriented Understudy for Gisting Evaluation” or the ROUGE metric which compares ChatGPT’s output
of content against a standard expected content and measures the overlap as success percentage.

What Is Artificial Intelligence (AI)?

 Artificial intelligence (AI) refers to the simulation of human intelligence in machines that are programmed
to think like humans and mimic their actions.
 The term may also be applied to any machine that exhibits traits associated with a human mind such as learning
and problem-solving.
 The ideal characteristic of artificial intelligence is its ability to rationalise and take actions that have the best
chance of achieving a specific goal.
 Machine Learning: A subset of artificial intelligence is machine learning (ML), which refers to the concept
that computer programs can automatically learn from and adapt to new data without being assisted by humans.
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India's Initiatives for Developing AI:

 NITI Aayog has come with the ‘National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence’ Discussion Paper that focuses
on establishing ICTAI in the country through private sector collaboration.
 NITI Aayog, Intel, and Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) are collaborating to set up a Model
International Center for Transformative Artificial Intelligence (ICTAI) towards developing and
deploying AI-led application-based research projects.
 NITI Aayog is to set up India’s first AI-specific cloud computing infrastructure called AIRAWAT.
AIRAWAT will also provide an indigenous alternative to present AI cloud platform leaders such as Microsoft
Azure and Amazon Web Services.

News Source: The Hindu, www.pib.gov.in

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Calling Name Presentation (CNAP) feature by TRAI

Context:
Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) floated a consultation
paper seeking comments about the potential introduction of a Calling
Name Presentation (CNAP) feature.

What is a Calling Name Presentation (CNAP)?

 It is the feature that would provide an individual with information
about the calling party (similar to ‘Truecaller’ and ‘Bharat Caller
ID & Anti­Spam’).
 The idea is to ensure that telephone subscribers are able to make
an informed choice about incoming calls and curb harassment by unknown or spam callers.

Purpose behind CNAP:

 There have been rising concerns about robocalls (calls made automatically using IT enabled systems with a
pre-recorded voice), spam calls and fraudulent calls.
 Smartphone users, at present, rely on in­built features or third-party calls. However, as per the regulator, their
reliance on crowd sourced data may not be reliable. apps to mark and tackle spam.

Concerns About Privacy:

 It is not particularly clear how the CNAP mechanism would balance the caller’s right to remain
anonymous, an essential component of the right to privacy.
 It is not parallel with The Digital Personal Data Protection Bill (2022) which has a clause on deemed
consent, thus lacking adequate safeguards including sharing of data with third parties.

Measures Needed:
 A framework asking for the consent of an individual caller should be developed as few individuals may opt to
remain anonymous for multiple reasons, for example, whistle blowers or employees being harassed.
 The government must also invest in digital literacy, skilling citizens to navigate and use the tech better,
ensuring they do not share their data indiscriminately and are informed about dangers such as financial frauds
and spoofing.

News Source: The Hindu

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World Bank’s Projections on India’s Growth

Context:
World Bank in its latest India Development Report titled ‘Navigating the
Storm' lauded strong macroeconomic fundamentals of India while raising
India’s growth projection to 6.9%.

Findings of the Report:

 India’s economy has been remarkably resilient to the deteriorating
external environment, and strong macroeconomic fundamentals have
placed it in good stead compared to other emerging market economies.
 India is better placed to manage the external shocks.
 A well-crafted and prudent policy response to global spill overs is helping India navigate global and domestic
challenges.
 India's growth is affected by slower growth in major economies but impact on India is relatively less compared
to other emerging economies.
 One percentage point decline in growth in the United States is associated with a 0.4 percentage point decline
in India’s growth.

News Source: The Hindu

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