Cambridge Analytica and the hysteria around it

Will you be ware next time?

No matter how intelligent, advanced or evolved humans become, we are all gullible, at some stage. More than being gullible, we as a species are extremely lazy, even when it comes to thinking. We simply do not want to think. We want that job to be done by someone else. Over the past week, an otherwise little known company, Cambridge Analytica (CA) has made headlines across the world. The company, in its marketing and promotion material has claimed to have influenced election results across the world, particularly in getting Trump elected as the president.

The CA wild fire was sure to reach India and it did earlier this week. The whistle blower, Christopher Wylie, claimed that the Congress and the JD(U) had engaged CA to carry out research during elections. Some reports claim that CA thorough its Indian arm was also helping the BJP. After the information started to come in on involvement of Indian political parties with CA and its Indian arm, news rooms have become high pressure volcanoes. Arnab Goswami is trending #CongSmokingGun and Times Now is busy with #DataChorDossier. NDTV reluctantly managed to tweet once on CA leaks in the past six hours. But what exactly are people outraging over?

Broadly there are two aspects of the CA leaks. One, data from Facebook users was illegally harvested and two, the data was used to “influence” voters. This is the case in US. In India CA has been active since 2003. This report mentions its assignments in India from 2003 to 2012.

In 2003 SCL, CA’s India arm carried out a “Psephological study and opinion poll” for a national party to identify swing voters in Madhya Pradesh. In the same year, in Rajasthan, SCL did an internal (party audit) and external survey for a political party to understand voter behaviour.

In 2007 a political party in UP got a party audit and a census of politically active individuals through in-depth interviews. In the same year SCL carried out a research communication campaign for countering Islamist radicalisation in six states.

In 2009 general elections SCL managed the campaigns of many candidates using their “proprietary data collection methodologies” for successful campaigns.

In 2010 they carried out a detailed research programme, in Bihar, targeting 75% of the households to identify caste and its corresponding message.

In 2011 and 2012 SCL carried out research to understand caste and its dynamics to leverage it during elections.

Internal party audits should be least of our worries. What we should look at is the work done by SCL outside the party offices. Primarily it falls into the category of field work. What I think happened was something like this - A kind of caste census was done by SCL to tag a house with a caste. Together with other information like household income, number of family members, etc. campaigns were structured and targeted messaging was done to relate to the voters. I do not think Facebook would have played a major role in identifying caste of people. And such data collection drives are not unique. They are routinely done by almost all major parties, across the country. Most of the data is anyway available in the Census reports.

Why don't you buy a ticket to
Krabi? Or Siem Reap?

The other area where Facebook data was used to “influence” voters in US, is of grave concern. The data of 50 million Facebook users was used to send them targeted ads and posts based on their psychological profile. Now this may seem scary, but we have all, at some point in time witnessed such an attempt. Let me give you an example. I was looking up for flights to Krabi and Siem Reap over the past two days. During my research for this article I came across the page of The Hindu and viola, there was an ad from Yatra, selling me flights to Krabi and Siem Reap. This is exactly what CA did, only the other way around. They profiled people and sent pro Trump ads/posts to swing voters or anti Trump voters. There would never be enough proof to suggest that such campaigns actually work.

Our online presence has always been monitored by the likes of Google, Yahoo, MSN, Facebook, Amazon, Flipkart, Makemytrip, Twitter, etc. Our browsing history, purchase patterns, online reading behaviour is all known to these tech giants. They might not know our names, but they know our IP. What CA did is nothing new. Only they put the data to influence voting decisions by sending them customised campaign ads or posts. Some people might get outraged by this act. But then let us see what the political parties have done traditionally to “influence” voters. Parties have promised laptops, TVs, free internet and electricity, religious trips and so on. The migration from, in your face bribery to more subtle online messaging is perhaps the natural course a political party will take. Especially when the young voters are getting most of their content from internet, rather than from news rooms.

Targeted messaging or posts or content is the backbone of social media. Once you start watching too many Indian folk songs on YouTube, it will start recommending you similar content after a couple of hours. Your home screen will be customised based on your watchlist. Similarly if you start reading or start responding to or start retweeting too many anti Modi tweets, Twitter will start suggesting you anti Modi handles to follow. It will be the same if you start reading anti Congress tweets, only then you will be sent anti Congress handles. What people are getting hysterical about, has been happening for a very long time. CA got into a spot only because they used illegally obtained data, not because they tried to “influence” voters.

We should not feed the hysteria, especially on social media. You never know who might be profiling you. What has to be done is to understand what is happening and demand rules that would protect us from future data thefts. India doesn’t even have a data protection law. Most of the popular social media sites do not have their servers in India and hence are not governed by Indian laws, whatever little there is.

What we also need to do is to be careful when we click on that “quiz” or the cool “game” on Facebook or download that fun “app” next time.  These are usually the way by which data is mined. But then one can never really be very careful with such things. We all have that one stupid friend on our list, who would click on anything that flashes.

No one is interested in farmer welfare

The farmers in Maharashtra are protesting against the BJP government. News reports suggest that there are approximately 30,000 of them on streets in Suburban Mumbai, ready to enter the city by Sunday evening. They are demanding a complete loan waiver, better minimum support price as recommended by the Swaminthan Committee report, no “forceful” acquisition of farm land in name of development and in a few cases transfer of forest land that the farmers have been tilling for many decades now. The news reports can be read here, here and here. In case you want to read a melodramatic, fiction style version of the protest, you can read it on The Wire. Though the protests started much earlier, the media gave it attention only after the protesters landed at the gates of Mumbai.

We gave you a sickle and a hammer for 21st century farming.
What else do you need?

Now that we know what the farmers want, we should also know who is organising the protest march. The farming community in India is too fragmented and diversified to have same concerns and hence is not unified. The present movement is being organised under the umbrella of the Akhil Bhartiya Kisan Sabhi (ABKS), the peasant front of the Communist Party of India (Marxist). The same CPI(M), which was handed a resounding defeat in Tripura last week. The protesting farmers can be seen with the CPI(M) flags and caps, marching ahead towards Mumbai. The CPI(M) and its extended arms in trade unions have all the right to protest, take out processions and give speeches. We thankfully, live in a democracy and not some Communist dictatorship.

If there are genuine concerns about the agrarian situation in India and a union is using democratic means to highlight the concerns, then no one should have the problem. But then there are problems. What the protesters are demanding is nothing new. A blanket waiver of farm loans has been demanded and handed over in the past. The UPA government in 2008, did that. It awarded a loan waiver of ₹60,000 crore to small and marginal farmers. But guess what, within a few years the farmers were demanding yet another loan waiver and the governments started handing them out. The loan waiver had clearly not helped the farmers much.

The problem of farmers is not loans or their waiver by the government. Their problem can be summed up in just one word, “inefficiency”. And no one is willing to talk about it. Neither the union or state governments nor the self-appointed saviour of farmers, the CPI(M). The inefficiency that is pulling the farmers and the country down can be measured by comparing the agricultural sectors of India and China. Despite having less arable land, China produced far more per unit of land than India does. Irrigation, transportation, storage, pricing, etc. are all making farming an unviable occupation. If the system is kept inefficient the farmers will keep protesting and the governments will keep waiving the loans off.  

The agrarian distress has become a political tool to create hysteria. The CPI(M) and others of their strip use it to highlight how Capitalism is killing the farmers and hence generate support among the poor and the so called intellectuals. The others use it to either pull the opposition down or to appear magnanimous by announcing ruinous loan waivers. Not a single political party has ever come up with a comprehensive plan to improve the farm sector in India. And surprisingly the things that can fix the problems do not require out of this world innovation.

Here are a few things that can bring efficiency in the farming sector and relieve the farmers from their economic stress.

Irrigation is the most crucial aspect of farming. Farmers spend money on sinking tube wells and then on pumping water out of it. A vast majority of the farmers depend on ground water and monsoon for irrigation. Both are unreliable. The water table on one hand is depleting at alarming levels and the Monsoon is not getting stronger. The alternate is finding frugal solutions. For millennia, the Indians have been using water harvesting to meet their domestic and agricultural needs. Revive the ponds, lakes, tanks, reservoirs that were used to store rain water and to recharge the ground water.

Cooperatives – India has witnessed success stories in cooperative movement. Amul being a highly successful model. Since the vast majority of farmers are marginal farmers with small land holdings, their produce can easily be pooled into a cooperative and they can be paid the right price without having to travel to the mandis with their meagre crop and non-existent bargaining power.

Middlemen – Remove them. Too many fruit and vegetable markets in India are controlled by middlemen who decide on prices and what to be bought. The eye watering prices of onions are not a result of a poor crop, but that of hoarding by the middlemen. The farmers should be given direct access to the markets where they can openly sell their products, to whoever they want to.

Logistics – The concept of farm logistics is non-existent in India. The Food Corporation of India does a shoddy job at storing and distributing its stock of food grains. It is time that it is privatised with a clear tariff structure. Thousands of tonnes of grains is wasted every year thanks to the lack of infrastructure.

Minimum Support Price (MP) – Phase it out. There is no point incentivising farmers to produce a certain type of crop. The market forces are strong enough to create the demand. Many farmers grow certain crops in hope of getting the MSP. The government ends up with a huge stock, which eventually gets wasted. On top of that not all farmers get to sell their crops to the government. Once the MSP is phased out, the farmers will grow what they think will fetch them the right price.

Information – This point is linked to the cooperative framework, where farmers will be given information on what the different crops can fetch them. For example, growing celery or lettuce might be a better proposition, in some geographies, than growing tomatoes.

Value addition – The farming communities can be trained to add value to their products by processing them. Tomatoes can be sundried, squashed, pulped or turned into ketchup. Processing fruits and vegetable not only increases their shelf life but also fetches more money per unit. And one doesn’t really need capital intensive manufacturing plants for such jobs.

Land acquisition – This is probably the toughest part to handle. Various governments have tried many different approaches to handle this monster of a task. Nothing seems to have pleased everyone. Nothing probably will. The most common grievance of farmers, whose land gets acquired, is that what do they do with the money when their livelihood is being taken away. This is true. The unskilled farmers do not have an option to seek employment in the organised sector. The compensation, no matter how large, eventually runs out and they end up working on other peoples’ farms. A way to ensure regular income to the farmers can be to put part of their compensation into an annuity scheme. This will ensure a regular monthly income and leave them with some cash to use.

Skill them – We have to be honest with ourselves. Farming is no longer a sector people want to be in. It is far too labour intensive in India and gives pathetic returns. The time has come when children of farmers should be given the option of training in other trades where they can seek employment if they so wish to.

There are many other ways that can drastically change the way Indian farmers live and earn their livelihood. Sadly no one is willing to push for those changes. The CPI(M) is happy mobilising 30,000 farmers to Mumbai for a loan waiver but will never ever seek technological changes for the farmers. For if the farmers cease to be poor their politics of poverty will become irrelevant. The others are not interested in improving the lives of the farmers because they are too fragmented on caste lines to be counted as a voting block.

Unless the government has a vision to improve the lives of farmers by using technology and market access, the farmers will be used by both the CPI(M) and the others as political tools. Their lives will not improve, food wastage will continue and they will keep protesting.