Department of Telecom invites comments on Committee report on net neutrality

Department of Telecom invites comments on Committee report on net neutrality
The Department of Telecommunications constituted a committee chaired by Mr. A. K. Bhargava (member of Telecom Commission) on January 19, 2015 to examine the issue of net neutrality. The Committee submitted its report in May 2015 and has invited comments on it till August 15, 2015.16 Net neutrality relates to equal and non-discriminatory access to the internet, for consumers. Some of the key recommendations of the Committee are:  The core principles of net neutrality should be adhered to. International best practices need to be considered while formulating an India specific net neutrality approach. OTT services enhance consumer welfare and increase productivity. These services should be actively encouraged.  There should be a separation of the application layer (OTT services) from the network layer (Telecom Service Providers or TSPs) as application services are delivered over a licensed framework. Regulatory instruments should not be used to interfere with specific OTT communication services which deal with messaging.  A liberal approach may be adopted regarding international voice-over-internet telephony (VoIP) calling services. However, in case of domestic calls, TSP and OTT communication services may be treated similarly for regulatory purposes. For other OTT services there is no case for prescribing regulatory oversight.  Legitimate traffic management by TSPs should be allowed but tested against the core principles of net neutrality. Applicationagnostic congestion control cannot be considered to be against net neutrality.  The core principles of net neutrality should be made part of license conditions. Tariff will be regulated by TRAI and a cell in the Department of Telecom should be set up to deal with net neutrality related issues. 

Expert Committee on Railways restructuring submits final report

The Committee for Mobilization of Resources for Major Railway Projects and Restructuring of Railway Ministry and Railway Board (Chairperson: Mr. Bibek Debroy) submitted its report in June 2015.13 The Committee was constituted in September 2014 to make recommendations for the mobilization of resources for major railway projects and restructuring of the Railway Ministry and Board.
The Committee had submitted an interim report in March 2015.14 Key recommendations of the Committee include:  The Committee recommends setting up an independent regulator, the Railways Regulatory Authority of India. The authority will regulate tariff, safety, provide for licensing, and set technical standards.  Indian Railways also undertakes other peripheral activities such as running hospitals and schools, manufacturing locomotives, catering, etc. Railways should not conduct these peripheral activities and instead focus on its core function, which is of running trains.
 The Railway divisions must be treated as independent business units. Decision making powers must be decentralised from the level of the general manager down to the division level.
  Railways accounting practices are not in the same band of commercial accounting as followed by other international railway systems. A responsive and transparent accounting system must be established.
  Employee costs including pension constitute the largest component of the railways expenses and hence it must rationalise its manpower. A performance assessment system should be implemented to rationally differentiate between the performance and aptitude of employees

Revised draft Indian Financial Code released ,Black Money Rules, 2015 in relation to one time compliance opportunity notified,RBI constitutes a Committee on Financial Inclusion

Revised draft Indian Financial Code released Vatsal Khullar The Ministry of Finance released the revised draft of the Indian Financial Code (IFC), 2015 on July 23, 2015.5 Comments have been invited on the revised draft by August 8, 2015. An earlier draft Code, along with the report of the Financial Sector Legislative Reforms Commission (FSLRC) was released for comments and suggestions in March 2013. 6 , The draft Code seeks to move away from the current sector-wise regulation to a system where the RBI regulates the banking and payments system and the proposed Financial Agency subsumes the roles of existing regulators like SEBI, IRDA and PFRDA to regulate the rest of the financial sector. It also proposes an appellate tribunal and agencies for consumer protection, resolution of unviable entities, public debt management and ensuring systemic stability. Consequently, it proposes repeal of 19 existing Acts. Table 1 highlights the proposed regulatory framework.
Table 1: IFC's regulatory framework Present Proposed Functions
RBI RBI Monetary policy; regulation of banks and payments system.
SEBI; FMC; IRDA; PFRDA Financial Authority Regulation of nonbank and payments related markets. Securities Appellate Tribunal Financial Sector Appellate Tribunal Hear appeals against RBI, the Financial Authority and FRA. Deposit Insurance and Credit Guarantee Corporation Resolution Corporation Resolution work across the system. Financial Stability Development Council (FSDC) FSDC Statutory agency for systemic risk and development. New entities Public Debt Management Agency Independent debt management agency. Financial Redress Agency (FRA) Consumer Complaints Sources: FSLRC Report; PRS. Other important guidelines outlined in the Code are:  Consumer protection: Establish certain basic rights for all consumers, and create a unified Financial Redress Agency (FRA) to serve aggrieved consumers across the sector.  Prudential regulation: Outline a framework for the regulators to follow, in order to monitor and reduce the failure probability of a financial firm.  Contracts, trading and market abuse: Establish the legal framework for regulating contracts, property and securities, and  Capital controls: Entrust the Central Government and the RBI to formulate rules and regulations, in order to control the capital inflow and outflow from the country. More information about the 2013 draft Code can be found in the PRS Monthly Policy Review for March 2013, here.

Black Money Rules, 2015 in relation to one time compliance opportunity notified 

The Black Money (Undisclosed Foreign Income and Assets) and Imposition of Tax Rules, 2015 were notified on July 2, 2015.7 The Rules were notified under the Foreign Income and Assets (Imposition of Tax) Bill, 2015 which was passed by Parliament on May 13, 2015.8
 The Act (i) imposes a 30% tax rate on undisclosed foreign income and assets, and (ii) provides for a one- time compliance opportunity to declare previously undisclosed foreign income. Availing of such one-time compliance opportunity would attract a lower penalty (100% of the value of the asset as opposed to 300%) and no criminal prosecution.
Primarily, the Rules provide for: (i) the manner of determination of the fair market value of an undisclosed foreign asset; and (ii) the time period of the one-time compliance opportunity for declaring previously undisclosed foreign assets.
The procedure to be followed in relation to the one time compliance opportunity is as follows9 :  The Act states that any person would be permitted to make a declaration in relation to previously undisclosed foreign assets (prior to the assessment year beginning April 2016), on or before a date to be notified by the central government. The Rules specify that this date would be September 30, 2015.  The Rules also specify that the Commission of Income Tax is required to inform the declarant of any information related to that asset, currently available to them by October 31, 2015.  The declarant is permitted to submit a revised declaration within 15 days of receiving such information.  The tax and penalty on the value of undisclosed foreign assets declared is required to be paid by December 31, 2015.

RBI constitutes a Committee on Financial Inclusion 

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) constituted a Committee on Financial Inclusion on July 15, 2015.10 The Committee will formulate a five year measurable action plan for financial inclusion. It will be chaired by an executive director of the RBI and will have 13 other members who will include, among others, representatives from the RBI, private and public sector banks, and research institutes. Terms of Reference of the Committee include:  Review the existing policy of financial inclusion and recommendations made by various committees,  Formulate the underlying policy and institutional framework covering consumer protection, financial literacy and delivery mechanism of financial inclusion, especially in rural areas,  Study cross country financial inclusion experiences to identify key learnings, especially in the field of technology-based delivery models, and  Suggest an action plan for financial inclusion whose components can be monitored. These include payments, deposit, credit, social security transfers and pension and insurance. The Committee is expected to submit its report within four months after its first meeting

Modi in the Gulf

Few parts of the world are more important for India than the Gulf. Yet, India’s political engagement with the region has rarely matched its significance. That Narendra Modi’s two-day trip to the UAE this weekend is the first prime ministerial visit since 1981 underlines the story of New Delhi’s neglect of a country and region that is so proximate in all senses of the term. Although the modern political evolution of the Gulf was intimately tied to the rise of the British Raj on the subcontinent, independent India’s approach to the Gulf steadily became less strategic. India’s tendency to see the region through an ideological lens, letting its domestic politics define the strategy and allowing the Pakistan factor to limit the prospects for partnership, have long distorted its relationship with the Gulf. The prime minister now has an opportunity to help India discard its economic mercantilism and political diffidence in the Gulf and replace them with a comprehensive strategy. The factors shaping such a strategy are difficult to miss. The oil-rich Gulf remains the main source of India’s growing hydrocarbon imports. It is home to more than six million Indian expatriate workers. They send remittances worth nearly $50 billion every year. With its large foreign currency reserves, the Gulf kingdoms are also potentially a big source of investment in India’s infrastructure. Within the Gulf, the UAE looms large. It hosts about 2.6 million Indian workers. Bilateral trade with the UAE peaked at $73 billion in 2013 but has since declined to around $60 billion. Even with the lower figure, the UAE is India’s third largest trading partner after the US and China. Like Singapore in the east, Dubai is India’s entrepôt to the west. 

The UAE airlines move India’s mobile millions to far corners of the world. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh did indeed make plans to visit the country but could not make it. In any case, the Middle East was not at the top of Singh’s travel plans. He barely showed India’s flag in the region. Of the few trips he made, two were to attend non-aligned summits — Iran (2012) and Egypt (2009). He visited Saudi Arabia, Oman and Qatar once. If the UPA government seemed to neglect the Gulf, there has been some concern that the NDA might do the same. Neither the Gulf nor the larger Middle East figured on Modi’s itinerary during his first year in office. Worse still, the NDA government’s enthusiasm for strengthening ties with Israel was widely interpreted in Delhi as coming at the expense of its historic ties to the Arabs. That the debate was being framed in these terms suggested how out of touch the Indian political class is with the new geopolitics of the Middle East. 

No major power, whether it is the US, China or Russia, views ties to the region as a zero-sum game between the Arabs and Israel. No one in the Middle East is asking India to choose between multiple rivals in the region. All want India to show more political interest and greater economic purpose. Second, the divide between Israel and the Arabs has long ceased to be the primary contradiction in the region. Ever since the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979, the Gulf countries have been deeply troubled by the ideology and policies of the new republic in Tehran. Those Arab-Persian and Shia-Sunni contradictions have become so sharp in recent years that many observers now talk of a de facto alliance between some Arab states and Israel to counter the growing power and influence of Iran in the region. The Gulf Arabs, who have long looked at the US as their main security provider since the British retrenched their historic role east of the Suez in the late 1960s, are now deeply troubled by the nuclear deal between Washington and Tehran and its political consequences. 

Meanwhile, the rise of violent religious extremism threatens all the states in the region, republics and monarchies as well as the Sunni and Shia. The dramatic rise of the Islamic State is compelling the consideration of utterly unexpected alliances. These developments demand that Delhi take a fresh strategic look at the Gulf. If the PM is ready to inject some strategic content to its engagement with the Gulf, the UAE is a good place to start. While the large diaspora, energy security, trade and investments are all of great importance to Modi’s foreign policy agenda, it is the arena of strategic cooperation that demands serious attention from the PM. This would include not only counter-terrorism, intelligence exchanges, military exercises, and maritime security, but also a close and sustained consultation on the construction of a stable balance of power system in the Gulf and preventing the destabilisation of Afghanistan. The writer is a consulting editor on foreign affairs for ‘The Indian Express’ and a distinguished fellow at the Observer Research Foundation, Delhi. 

A pseudo peace

The signing of the agreement between the Nationalist Socialist Council of Nagaland (Isak-Muivah), or the NSCN-IM, and the Central government had all the drama of a reconciliation ceremony. But the details remain shrouded in secrecy. There appears to be much less to it than meets the eye. The ceremony had the telltale signs of a pseudo-event. Pseudo-events are occurrences designed to generate press coverage. Their relationship to reality is uncertain. But it is their inherent ambiguity that explains public interest in them. Ambiguity has marked all official pronouncements about the ceremony. The Press Information Bureau headlined it as the prime minister having witnessed the signing of a “historic peace accord.” However, it referred to it later as a “framework agreement”. The news took key stakeholders by surprise. Chief Minister Okram Ibobi Singh of Manipur said that he did not know what the agreement says and reiterated his government’s position that it will not accept any accord that disturbs Manipur’s territorial integrity. The demand for the integration of all contiguous Naga-inhabited areas has been a highly contentious subject, nowhere more so than in Manipur. But the protracted Assam-Nagaland border dispute is also part of the same faultline. 

The structural flaws in the design of the Naga peace process have been obvious for a while. The format — bilateral and secret meetings between NSCN-IM leaders and the government’s interlocutor — leaves out critical stakeholders. It is unlikely to produce a durable settlement. NSCN-IM leaders have said from time to time that they are not asking for greater or smaller Nagaland, but only for the integration of areas where Nagas live. The formulation is clever, but it does not resolve the fundamental contradiction. The Central government is expected to make territorial concessions that evoke intense emotions in neighbouring states over the heads of popularly elected state governments. However, there has been significant movement in this area in the course of the negotiations. Public statements that both parties recognise each other’s “compulsions” and talk of a solution that accepts “contemporary realities” point in that direction. But the structural flaw of the peace process becomes painfully apparent in what an unnamed official source told The Hindu about the procedures that will be followed. Apparently, the interlocutor to the Naga talks will prepare a draft note for the home ministry. The views of relevant Central government ministries and state governments will be elicited. Following that exercise, a draft bill will be presented to the Central cabinet. Once the cabinet approves it, the bill will be submitted to Parliament. Whatever the merits of these procedures, they raise serious questions about the meaning of the ceremony. Of course, the design of the process is not of this government’s own making. Key elements have been in place for a long time. Negotiating with leaders of particular insurgent groups and marginalising their rivals has been a key element of the Indian approach to conflict management in the region. It is difficult to alter the design of any peace process once it is set on a particular course. It becomes path-dependent — past decisions constrain options. It may have been obvious that negotiations that leave out neighbouring states carry significant risks. 

But it has been hard even to think of these states as stakeholders. What then justifies the optimism displayed by the NSCN-IM leaders and the government? The government seems to be counting on potential shifts in the public mood in Manipur and Assam as a result of a number of major decisions it is considering, not all of them directly connected to the Naga issue. In Assam, conceding to the longstanding demand of six communities for ST status would mean a radical increase in the number of reserved seats in the state assembly. It would impact Assam’s parliamentary representation as well. But it will have an adverse impact on significant communities. The process of updating the National Register of Citizens is also likely to satisfy key constituencies. Significantly, these two issues now feature in the dialogue between the Centre and the pro-talks faction of the United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA). However, it is too soon to say whether all of this would make the potential effects of the agreed terms of the Naga settlement on the disputed Assam-Nagaland border more acceptable in Assam. Some version of an alternative arrangement for the Nagas of Manipur — perhaps the creation of autonomous councils — is clearly under consideration. 

But the crucial issue is the umbrella under which it gets linked to the Nagas of Nagaland. Even if it is only a symbolic gesture, it is far from obvious that it would be acceptable to Manipuris — Nagas and non-Nagas alike. However, what happens to the issue of the Inner Line Permit in Manipur will be very significant. Even a partial acceptance of this demand would mean that, for the first time since the late 19th century, a colonial-era institution would be extended to a new region. It would undoubtedly soothe Manipuri public opinion. But will it really prepare the ground for the acceptance of an otherwise unpopular Naga accord? Acceptance of the agreement by the Naga public in general is also far from certain. The NSCN-IM leaders sitting as equals with India’s PM and the country’s top political leadership was an important symbolic gesture. So were some of the PM’s words. But are the agreement’s provisions substantive enough for the Nagas to justify the sacrifices they made during their long struggle for independence? These are significant hurdles yet to be crossed. What then accounts for the timing of the signing ceremony? Many rumours are making their rounds. However, one piece of speculation seems most plausible. The poor health of Isak Chisi Swu — one of the two Naga leaders negotiating with the government — may have prompted the decision to hold the ceremony. It is feared that if Swu does not survive, rumours that he may not have been a party to the agreement would fatally undermine it. But was this a good reason for the PM to tell the world that “a historic peace accord” has already been signed? - 

A blueprint for higher education

The problems that confront higher education in India today are low rates of enrolment, unequal access, poor quality of infrastructure and lack of relevance. With new moves being planned on the policy front, it is necessary to find concrete solutions and build on earlier efforts.

The National Policy on Education (NPE) that was adopted by Parliament in May 1986 and Programme of Action (POA), 1986, as updated in 1992, are perhaps the last government policy statements on higher education and which have guided actions since the mid-1980s. Now that there are new moves on the policy front, it is necessary to identify the key issues, build on the earlier efforts (especially initiated after studies by the University Grants Commission) and then take a step ahead. The last major initiative on the development of higher education was during the 11th Plan (2007-12).

The problems that confront education today are low rates of enrolment, unequal access, poor quality of infrastructure and lack of relevance. The goals remain the same — expansion with inclusion and ensuring quality and relevant education. In this article, I discuss some of these issues and offer suggestions.

Sukhadeo Thorat

Expansion and disparities

The first challenge to be overcome is to increase the present rate of enrolment of 20 per cent. During the 11th Plan, a two-fold strategy that was in place helped ensure this to an extent — there was an increase in the number of new institutions, and in the intake capacity of existing institutions. But despite this, our institutional capacity is still low. We have only 722 universities, as against the National Knowledge Commission recommendation of 1,500. The aim should be to arrive at a proper estimate of universities and undergraduate institutions in order to plan a strategy for the next 20 years or so.

There are also related issues to grapple with. Given the low rate of enrolment, we need more quality teaching institutions at the undergraduate level. The influence of academicians on policies and the obsession with a flawed notion of excellence in terms of it being only about research have undermined the focus of having good teaching institutions. Nobody denies the utility of research in teaching, but it should not be forgotten that imparting knowledge is equally important.

Another challenge that confronts India is in the disparities in access to education, especially in terms of economic class, gender, caste and ethnic and religious belonging. In 2008, as against an all-India enrolment rate of 17 per cent, the break-up for these categories was 7 per cent for Scheduled Tribes (ST), 11 per cent for Scheduled Castes (SC), 28 per cent for Other Backward Classes (OBC) and 47 per cent for higher castes. In addition, it was 9 per cent for Muslims, 18 per cent for Hindus and 30 per cent for Christians. In a comparison of disparities between the poor and the affluent and in terms of income levels, it was 6 per cent for the bottom 20 per cent of society as against 37 per cent for the top 20 per cent. The expansion of the private, self-financing education sector, with its aim of commercial intent, has been another reason for the propagation of disparities.

Between 1996 and 2008, private institutions expanded every year at the rate of 10 per cent. The corresponding decline in government and private-aided institutions, by 1.65 per cent yearly, resulted in the share of students in the private, self-financing sector increasing from about 7 per cent in 1996 to about 25 per cent in 2008. For 2013, data from the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) put the share of private undergraduate colleges and students at 59 per cent and 37 per cent respectively.

In the case of universities, out of the 712 universities, about 360 are of private, state and of deemed status. The high cost of private education has affected access by the poor to education. In 2012, of the total share of students in private institutions, the top 20 per cent (in terms of consumption expenditure) cornered more than half the number of seats. The bottom 20 per cent got only 4 per cent. The share of ST and SC students accounted only 4 and 10 per cent respectively as against 45 per cent by OBCs and 41 by Others.

In contrast to the situation in India, education has been a great leveller in Europe. Unfortunately, here in India, unequal opportunities have developed unequal human capabilities and converted education into an instrument to further economic inequalities. This is a new and the next challenge. There are two ways to deal with it. First, public and private aided institutions must be strengthened and expanded and the expansion of self-financing private institutions restricted to a reasonable level. However, given the political economy of private institutions, the chances of this happening are slim. The alternative would be to extend ‘poor-friendly’ financial assistance by setting up a government finance organisation, based on the models in Australia and Canada. The present method, of extending educational loans from banks with interest subsidy by the MHRD, does not help the poor.

Issues of quality and faculty

The quality of higher education is an equally serious problem. In this area, the 11th Plan recognised three areas for interventions — physical infrastructure, academic reform and ensuring adequate faculty. Infrastructure can be improved with an increase in financial allocation. Academic reform — which includes semester and credit systems, courses by choice, and examination reform — is a process which should be advanced only after the pre-requisites are met. In the case of faculty, which is an issue that has assumed serious proportions, several steps were effected in the 11th Plan. However, it still persists. A solution demands joint efforts being put in by the Centre and States. One way, and as a one-time effort, is to enforce the University Grant Commission’s (UGC) teacher-student ratio for each State, and ensure that the financial requirement of additional faculty is shared by the Centre and States.

Ensuring quality textbooks is another point. Now that teaching in most undergraduate and State universities is in the regional languages, good textbooks and quality translations from the original English books are a must if a student is to make progress. The three-language formula needs to be adhered to. Teaching in the regional languages would make understanding relatively easy while minimal language competence in English should facilitate student access to English books. An example that can be cited is in Japan where translations have enabled greater educational access for the student.

Global collaboration

Apart from these, there is the issue of ensuring the access of Indian education to global frontiers. In this, a popular view is to allow global universities to set up campuses in India. However, this is countered by some who argue that the presence of a few quality institutions is hardly the solution as far as the majority of rural and poor students are concerned. The alternative is to allow foreign educational institutions to enter into collaborations with Indian institutions on a large scale. In turn, this will help in enhancing capabilities as far as curricular and pedagogical practices, and student-faculty exchanges go.

For quality institutions, autonomy as far as academic and administrative aspects are involved is a must. This would also involve the appointment of heads of institutional and executive bodies. It must be remembered that a UGC committee had once suggested the independence of institutions from the government as the bottom line for autonomy.

For an education of relevance

Enabling an education that is relevant to the economy and society is another challenge. The development of human resources for the economy has been translated into action through vocational and professional education. The last government took the initiative by setting up a National Skill Development Corporation (it brought the government and corporate sector together to frame a demand based curriculum), which the present government has taken to greater heights by creating a Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship. But similar efforts are lacking in social education. The 1986 policy required that: “In our culturally plural society, education should foster universal and eternal values, oriented towards the unity and integration of our people. Such value education should eliminate obscurantism, religious fanaticism, violence, superstition and fatalism.” This requires youth and children to be sensitised about the problem of inequities, poverty, undemocratic practices and reiterating commitment to upholding equality, justice, freedom and fraternity. The American educationist, Professor, James A. Banks, said: “the role of education in the 21st Century is to prepare students to know, to care and to act in ways that will develop and foster knowledge and skill needed to participate in effective action.”

UGC reform

Another issue relates to reform in the UGC. While attempts have been made in the past, I feel the UGC should have a dual structure — a governing body and a general body. As more than 65 per cent of our universities and about 90 per cent of colleges are in the States, their involvement in policy making at the Centre is a must.

The framing of successful policies requires reliable data, and on multiple aspects. We are faced with a situation where we not only do not have reliable data, but also have had no review of higher education for the last 50 years, the last one having been the D.S. Kothari Commission in 1965. Far-reaching changes have taken place in higher education in the last 50 years. We desperately need a review. We need to emulate the model in the United Kingdom which has an institute for education statistics, as policy making with reliable data has a high propensity towards success.

(Sukhadeo Thorat is Professor Emeritus, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and former Chairman, UGC.)

The rise and rise of Sundar Pichai

The rise and rise of Sundar Pichai
Super excited about his progress and dedication to the company," says Google co-founder Larry Page.

Google’s announcement on Monday that it would be subsumed within a new parent company called Alphabet had a bonus for people of Indian-origin world over: the company’s head of Products and Engineering, Chennai-born Pichai Sundararajan, was anointed the CEO of the new, “slimmed down” Google.

Underscoring his confidence in the man known as Sundar Pichai (43), Google boss Larry Page said of the restructuring in the company he co-founded with Sergey Brin, “A key part of this is Sundar Pichai.”

Mr. Pichai, who is a graduate of IIT Kharagpur and Stanford University, had “really stepped up since October of last year, when he took on product and engineering responsibility for our Internet businesses,” Mr. Page said in a blog post, adding that he and Mr. Brin were “super excited about his progress and dedication to the company.”

They may well have reason to feel fortunate that Mr. Pichai is the man to head their $66-billion revenue, $16-billion profit, company– by most accounts he combines a deep passion for engineering excellence with a rare managerial quality of attracting the best talent into the teams he works with.

Mr. Pichai started at Google in 2004, where he was known as a “low-key manager” who worked on the Google toolbar and then led the launch of the market-beating Chrome browser in 2008.

Following this his rise through the ranks of Google took on an increasingly meteoric tenor, and soon he became Vice President, then Senior Vice President, and ultimately was charged with supervising all Google apps including Gmail and Google Drive and finally given control of Android itself.

His promotion to Product Chief in October 2014 literally made him Mr. Page’s second-in-command with oversight of day-to-day operations for all of Google's major products including maps, search, and advertising.

Some of Mr. Pichai’s colleagues describe him in the media as a skilled diplomat, including Caesar Sengupta, a Google Vice President who has worked with Mr. Pichai for eight years, and said to Bloomberg News, “I would challenge you to find anyone at Google who doesn’t like Sundar or who thinks Sundar is a jerk.”

Nowhere was Mr. Pichai’s easy blending of techno-diplomatic competence evident than in early 2014, when the fracas between Samsung and Google was reaching fever pitch, at the time over Samsung’s Magazine UX interface for its tablets, which Google felt may have been deliberately underselling Google services such as its Play apps store.

According to reports “Defusing the situation fell to Sundar Pichai, the tactful, tactical new chief of Google’s Android division. Pichai set up a series of meetings with J.K. Shin, CEO of Samsung Mobile Communications, [where] they held ‘frank conversations’ about the companies’ intertwined fates [and a] fragile peace was forged.”

Since then, Samsung has apparently agreed to scale back Magazine UX, and the two corporations have announced a broad patent cross-licensing arrangement to implement which they “now work together more closely on user experience than we ever have before,” according to Mr. Pichai.

Another apparent talent of Google’s new CEO – his thinking seems to be ahead of the curve. Although Mr. Pichai trained in metallurgy and materials science at IIT Kharagpur, and Stanford and did an MBA at Wharton, he was already deeply immersed in the world of electronics.

According to one of his college professors Mr. Pichai “was doing work in the field of electronics at a time when no separate course on electronics existed in our curriculum.”

The Google founders no doubt recognised that Mr. Pichai was a man on an evangelical-type mission for pushing the boundaries of technology.

Mr. Pichai most eloquently outlined this mission when he said, “For me, it matters that we drive technology as an equalising force, as an enabler for everyone around the world. Which is why I do want Google to see, push, and invest more in making sure computing is more accessible, connectivity is more accessible.”