16 hindustantimes
S ATURDAY, APRIL 28 , 2018
e sta b l i s h e d i n 1 9 24
§
Tennis still has a citysmart
SWATI RAMANATHAN
long way to go Why the industrial food chain
As the Open Era turns 50, the
gender pay gap must be bridged
need not be India’s destiny
I
t was 50 years ago this week that tennis became the sport
we know and love today. The small town of Bournemouth
in England hosted the first-ever tournament of the Open The farm revolution won’t be one big­bang
Era, erasing the distinctions between ‘professional’ and
moment, but hundreds of small victories
I
‘amateur’ players. The British Hard Court Champion-
ships of 1968 at the West Hants Club paved the way for n my first piece about the debate
between industrial food chain and
today’s exciting tennis circuit, allowing top players to make a liv- peasant food web, I had listed the four
components for a grassroots food web
ing from the sport. Until then, professional players were prohib-
revolution to take place: No use of
ited from competing in tournaments
including the Grand Slams by the Inter-
ourtake chemical fertilisers and pesticides;
diversity in seed banks; small landholdings
by farmers and growers; and proximity to
national Lawn Tennis Federation. This historic first tournament end consumer markets (urban centres).
If we examine these factors, we can see
laid the groundwork for broadening the player base and the set- why India could be an epicentre for this food
ting up of legendary rivalries such as the ones between Roger Fed- revolution. Let me start with the third and
fourth factors. Farmers today barely get
erer and Rafael Nadal or Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert. 25-30% of the consumer price, especially for
Many professional women players, including Billie Jean King, horticultural products like fruits and vegeta-
bles. Shortening the supply chain and bring-
however, did not participate in that championship, not least ing farmers closer to customers mean that
the end markets are closer to production.
because of the glaring disparity in prize money between the men
Another advantage of proximity is greater
and women. The first prize in the singles was 1,000 pounds for men understanding of seasonal consumer
demand, and flexibility in production for the
and 300 for women. Tennis has come a long way since then, both farmers. This is also related to farm size, a
in terms of the amount of money involved (the top prize at the US counter-intuitive idea, compared to current
received wisdom that we need to increase
Open 2018 was $3.7 million) and the fact that at least at all Grand farm holdings. Smaller holdings that are
Slam events, men and women get equal prize money. closer to urban centres can result in signifi-
cant benefits for farmers, but only if they are
There is, however, a long way to go. Tennis is one of the more part of a complete new food system.
egalitarian sports, in which the women’s game gets as much Our farmer landholdings are small.
According to the Agriculture Census 2010-11,
attention as the men’s. But an analysis of the money earned by the the total number of operational holdings in
India numbered 138.35 million with an aver-
top players in 2015 found women earned less than their male
age size of 1.15 hectares. Of the total holdings,
counterparts. The top three ranks that year — Novak Djokovic, 85% are in marginal and small farm catego-
ries of less than 2 hectares.
Andy Murray and Roger Federer each earned between 104% and NASA’s nightsky shots of the earth are
111% more than their female counterparts, Serena Williams, revealing. They show us how evenly distrib-
uted India’s urbanisation is, compared to
Simona Halep and Garbine Muguruza, respectively. The explana- that of any other country in the world. We
tion often offered for this is that women play a maximum of three have a little over 700 districts, each of which
has at least 10 urban centres of differing sizes
sets in a match, while men play five. This is a poor excuse, because — and this when we are still at the early sta-
it is only in Grand Slams that the number of sets is different — and ges of our urbanisation story. Compare this
to the US, China, Russia or Brazil, all of
only because of tight scheduling and the fact that organisers are which have lopsided urban massing, concen-
trated in thin ribbons of their geography.
loath to give women more time on the court, because of the mis-
As to the first two factors, we still haven’t
guided notion that men’s matches are more popular. become victim to the chemical scourge –
India’s use of chemical fertiliser is lowest
As the Open Era of tennis turns 50, along with celebrating the among most countries in the world. And we
distinctions this sport has managed to erase, it is also time to look
ahead at how many more remain. Perhaps by the time the 75th
anniversary comes around, the pay gap would have been bridged D ATA G A M E
Facebook knows it can’t
as well.
offer more privacy
lineofsight JAYACHANDRAN
The social media giant has not created a paid tier, which
means the firm probably thinks it would be a money­loser
SCOTT
KOMINERS
H
ow much is your privacy on Face-
book worth? This question has seen
renewedattentionfollowingtherev-
elation that political analysis firm
CambridgeAnalyticagainedaccesstothepri-
vate information of more than 50 million
users. One of the possible responses that’s
generatedsomediscussionisthecreationofa
paid tier that’s free of ads and data sharing.
Suchanoptionwouldlikelybesociallybenefi-
cialandhaveconsiderablepublicappeal.But
myguessisthatitwouldbeprettyexpensive,
jayachandran.n@livemint.com too.Let’sstartwithsomeroughcalculations.
The State is investing billions in the sec-
americanjalebi tor. As the book notes, the city of Tianjin,
the eighth-largest there, plans a $5 billion
ANIRUDH BHATTACHARYYA
AI industry fund, an allocation of resources
greater than “all of Canada”. Another
advantage is that of data access.
India could be the data
Without the privacyprotectionsofNorth
America, Europe or other democracies,
companies are using facial recognition
databases, for instance, to authorise pay-
hub for the AI arrival
ments, authenticate rail passengers or
drivers for ride-share services or even
transferring money. Even as the latest
Facebook kerfuffle makes privacy issues
I
that much more sensitive in much of the
t was an unusual turnout at the Desau- with the Creative Destruction Lab, which world beyond China, the authors posit an
tels Hall, an auditorium at the Univer- provides a launchpad for startups, many of interesting dilemma: “Users want better
sity of Toronto’s Rotman School of them in the AI space. products trained using personal data, but
Management. Nerds and geeks packed AI is a little like pixie dust, as one of the they prefer that data be collected from
the place for a book launch, a work of non- authors said. Sprinkle it around and it other people, not them.”
fiction from a trio of management profes- seems to have properties of transforming IT majors like Amazon could transform
sors. Published by Harvard Business the most mundane into the magical, like the shopping dynamic. And Google has
Review Press, the book, Prediction automatically transcribing notes from a shifted from a “mobile-first” outlook to “an
Machines: The Simple Economics of Artifi- meeting (yeah, there’s an app for that). AI AI-first world”, even as CEO Sundar Pichai
cial Intelligence, was just the sort of topic is hardly a fairy tale, but among those look- has moved its AI team on to the same floor
that would attract such a crowd. And, of ing for a happy ending is the Chinese he occupies.
course, a couple of the authors are involved regime. The curious aspect of this book is that
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MANAGING EDITOR: SOUMYA BHATTACHARYA
comment
still have a rich heritage of seed and plant
diversity, albeit under increasing threat.
India’s beneficial landscape is not the
result of deliberate policy positions, but
rather an accidental outcome of oversight or
ineptitude, sometimes both. Notwithstand-
ing the reasons, we find ourselves in this
unexpectedly favourable situation. If we har-
ness this opportunity, India could well wit-
ness an agricultural leapfrog, vaulting us
into the world of the food web, without going
through the industrial food chain phase, akin
to the telecom revolution, where we leap-
frogged from no coverage to mobile net-
works. Just as in that case, where India’s
weakness became an unexpected factor in
enabling the viral spread of a new network,
the food revolution could also see a similar
outcome. We have to remember that the
industrial food chain system is barely 60-70
years old, primarily built after the Second
World War. It need not be our destiny.
Central to this future will be our cities, and
how we harness their potential to not only be
the commercial flywheels for this new food
web, but also to encourage urban agriculture
both within cities as well in the urban periph-
eries. As one example, how we deal with
municipal solid waste is closely connected to
this larger vision of the food web. Today, we
see the burgeoning garbage production as a
crisis. But if we saw this in the food web con-
text, our garbage becomes an integral part of
the complex system that can be positively
harnessed. In India, unlike other countries,
we generate about 50% wet waste, which is
ideally suited for composting. Close to 15% of
this waste can be converted into organic com-
post. At a 0.5 kg/person/day, we generate
about 200 thousand tonnes per day of waste
across urban India; this translates roughly
into about 15,000 tonnes of compost every
day, or 5.5 MMT (million metric tons) in a
year. Our chemical fertiliser demand is
about 30 MMT a year, so municipal waste
generated organic compost can be 20% of the
chemical fertiliser production. Given our
rapid urbanisation, the share of organiccom-
post can only grow.
Harnessing this potential will require the
Facebook’s annual adrevenue wasabout $40
billionin2017,with2.13billionmonthlyactive
users. That means the average user is worth
roughly $20 in ads to Facebook a year. That’s
probablyalreadyalotmorethanmanyusers
would pay for privacy on the social network.
But the price also depends on who would
choose to pay for greater privacy. And it’s
likely that many of the users who would opt
formoreprotectioncouldbeworthmorethan
$20eachtothecompany.Why’sthat?First,the
value of keeping your data private increases
with the amount of data you provide on the
platform; by the same token, the more data
yougiveFacebook,thebetteritcanadvertise
to you.
Thepeoplewhocanaffordapaidtierareon
averagewealthier;thattoomakesthemmore
valuable to advertisers. And some of them
alreadyhavebrowseradblockers,soit’shard
to reach them via other channels.
To make up for those sorts of customers
India figures nowhere in it, even though
one of its authors, Ajay Agrawal, also
CDL’s founder, is of Indian origin. Like his
co-authors Joshua Gans and Avi Goldfarb,
he’s a professor at Rotman.
But India may have the advantage of vol-
ume. India could be the data hub for the AI
arrival. After all, the sheer population of
the country helps generate a quantum of
data for training AI systems that demo-
graphically challenged countries of the
West cannot match. For instance, Canada
may have a wealth of AI engineering talent,
but the entire nation’s numbers are lower
than that of the National Capital Region.
That could be re-enacting the IT and
Internet revolutions, with India as the
global back office. Of course, there’s always
the opportunity of moving up the chain,
insteadof being servicehacks, with policies
in government and the corporate sector, to
drive an industry of the decade ahead.
It doesn’t take much intelligence, artifi-
cial or otherwise, to plot that potential.
Anirudh Bhattacharyya is a Toronto­based com­
mentator on American affairs
The views expressed are personal
H INDUSTAN TIMES , NEW D EL HI
n Farmers today barely get 25­30% of the consumer price. Shortening the supply chain and
bringing farmers closer to customers mean that the end markets are closer to production HT
integration of many policy elements. For
example, to harness municipal waste-to-
compost at scale, we will need to create align-
ment between fertilisersubsidies and munic-
ipal waste treatment subsidies. Other ways
to encourage an accelerated adoption of a
sustainable food web system can be to have
these integrated into newly announced gov-
ernment agricultural and farming policies
like Operation Greens; incentivising Farmer
Producer Companiestogrow organic;invest-
ing in high quality infrastructure at fruit and
vegetable markets, and linking these with
transportation hubs; having enlightened
zoning with incentives to enable ‘urban agri-
culture’ in and around cities, so that the land
use of ‘green zone’ isn’t a death knell for land-
owners who only see the opportunity cost of
not monetising their land for development
purposes, and so on. All this will take time
and serious, committedleadership from vari-
ous levels of government.
Meanwhile, champions on the ground are
not waiting. Thousands of Indians across vil-
lages and cities have begun experimenting
n Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at a
gathering in New Delhi HINDUSTAN TIMES
opting out of data sharing, Facebook would
have to charge a lot more than the average of
$20justtobreakeven.Aback-of-the-envelope
estimatebasedontheParetoprinciple—80%
oftheadrevenuecomingfrom20%ofusers—
suggests that if mostly high-value users pur-
chase privacy, then Facebook would need to
charge closer to $80 a year.
That’s much more than even high esti-
mates of the value most people attach to hav-
ingaccesstoFacebook.Andit’sstillasubstan-
tialunderestimateofthelikelyprice.Accord-
ing to Facebook’s annual report, the
company’s239millionNorthAmericanusers
areresponsibleforaboutfour-fifthsofadreve-
nue; applying the Pareto principle to them
If our thoughts are pure, they will
automatically lead to noble actions
innervoice
Vijai Pant
To make our life a meaningful one, we
need to mind our thoughts and give a cor-
rect direction to it. Our thoughts are the
foundation, the inspiration and the moti-
vation behind our deeds. We create our
entire world by the way we think. Our cir-
cumstances and conditions are not dic-
tated by the outside world, but the world
inside us and what we make of it. More-
over, our thoughts are even more
dynamic. Even when inactive on the bod-
ily plane, we are all the time, active on the
on growing food sustainably and are sharing
their experiences on YouTube channels,
going viral with the same gusto as the latest
Bollywood songs. The large numbers of
viewsindicate the latent demand for food sys-
tems that improve health, are ecologically
sustainable, equitable, and just. The activity
on social media also suggest that beyond
thinking of food as just another commodity
to be consumed, it is becoming something
more fundamental to us as human beings, to
beconnected to nature in a deepand personal
manner.
The food revolution isn’t going to have one
big-bang moment of victory, but rather hun-
dreds of small victories bubbling up in local
communities across the country. Indeed, this
is the best way to ensure its eventual success.
Policy makers would do well to listen care-
fully to what is happening at the grassroots,
because the revolution is already afoot.
Swati Ramanathan is chairperson, Jana Urban Space
Foundation, and co­founder of Jana Group.
The views expressed are personal
would suggest annual privacy prices in the
range of $500 a person.
If price alonewerethe question,Facebook
might indeed want to charge huge amounts
forenhancedprivacy.Theuserswhobuyout
won’t all be the most valuable users, and it
would be pretty lucrative if the company
could sustainably charge some customers
much more for privacy than the annual ad
revenuetheygenerate.Butthat’sunlikely to
work out in the long run.
Puttingahighpriceonprivacywouldmake
itclearjusthowmuchFacebook’suserdatais
worth. We’d probably see increased calls to
share that value by giving users a portion of
revenues. The consumer-led drive for
increased privacy would likely accelerate,
too, prompting a growing number of users to
leavetheplatform(assumingtheycan’tafford
or are unwilling to pay for greater privacy).
A user exodus plus enhanced scrutiny of
data practices would quickly eat away at the
profitsfromofferingthepaidtier,makingthe
whole thing a losing proposition.
Facebook must have run the numbers on
this already, using much better information
thanwehavehere.Theideaofapaidtierisn’t
new; if Facebook hasn’t offered such an
option,thecompanyprobablythinksitwould
be a money-loser. So if we want Facebook
users to have control over how their data is
shared, we may need outside pressure. The
company isn’t likely to provide the option on
its own.
Bloomberg View
The views expressed are personal
thought plane. If our thoughts are pure,
these will automatically lead to noble
actions. However, if our thoughts are
filled with jealousy, hatred and greed so
will be our actions, leaving us with an agi-
tated state of mind. Even Lord Buddha
had said, “Those who are free of resentful
thoughts surely find peace.”
Karmically our thoughts have more
far reaching consequences than the
actual deeds. One may perform a charita-
ble act, but if it is done with some motive
rather than selflessly, then the thoughts
would determine the result. We alone
have the choice to instill ourselves with
loving and positive thoughts, so that the
same get reflected in our actions.
Inner Voice comprises contributions from our
readers.
The views expressed are personal
n Innervoice@hindustantimes.com