Newswallah: Long Reads Edition

ReutersA magazine stand on a railway platform in Mumbai.

In Open magazine this week, Gitanjali Chandrasekharan writes about the people who go missing in Mumbai every year â€" 150 each month, on average, she says.  The city also sees a steady influx of children, from places as far away as Bangladesh, Pakistan and Nepal. On some days, the police bring 10 runaways or more to one local shelter.

For the police, sadly, a missing person is often just another name in a growing database.   Ms. Chandrasekharan's piece, available only in print, describes the plight of the families whose loved ones have disappeared â€" putting up posters, waiting for leads, hopi ng for a picture to be shown by Doordarshan, the national broadcaster, on its four-times-weekly program on India's lost and homeless.  But, the writer asks: “Who watches TV for photos of who is missing? Does a face posted at a platform you rush across to catch your train or leave in a hurry to get home, strike anyone?”

Ms. Chandrasekharan argues for a national, centralized database of information on missing people.  “If information on people found without antecedents is uploaded too, matchmaking algorithms could be put to good effect,” she writes.  “In a country so keen on a UID network for a variety of welfare schemes,” she adds, referring to India's plans for a biometric database encompassing all its citizens, “this is one database application that should not be neglected.”

In Frontline, V. Venkatesan argues that increasing controls and clam pdowns on social media are threatening civil liberties in the world's largest democracy.

Mr. Venkatesan writes that while freedom on the Web appears to be secured by Indian law, the reality is otherwise.  Government officials have harassed people for  expressing dissenting views online, and users of social media have reacted by censoring themselves, “muffling their own voices in order to avoid even the remotest possibility of the state even temporarily invading their privacy,” Mr. Venkatesan writes.  “Social media users do not have the resources big media groups enjoy to defend themselves if the government targets them.”

In recent months, the central government has blocked Twitter accounts, URL's and blog posts, and has arrested people  for activities ranging from posting a cartoon or tweeting to “liking” or sharing something on Facebook.  Mr. Venkatesan  writes of a 21-year old woman from Delhi, Shreya Singhal, who filed a public-interest suit with the Supreme Court challenging the constitutionality of Section 66A of the Information Technology Act, which the authorities have invoked to justify such actions.

“The very fact that the machinery of criminal law is set in motion against citizens on frivolous grounds amounts to harassment that is inadequately mitigated by the eventual discharge or acquittal,” Ms. Singhal's petition argues. “The protection of the fundamental right to free speech necessitates the existence of safety walls at the very threshold of setting the criminal law into motion.”

A commentary in Economic & Political Weekly by Kannan Kasturi, an independent researcher on public interest and policy, addresses Indian direct investment abroad, which is on the rise.  According to preliminary figures, it totaled $111.7 billion in the financial year ending March 2012, up from $5.8 billion in 2003.

Mr. Kasturi writ es that while there is “keen debate” in India about foreign direct investment, it is surprising that the flow of capital in the other direction is seldom discussed.  Digging through what he calls a “confusing array of data” from the Reserve Bank of India about money leaving the country, he finds an apparent preference for Singapore, the Netherlands and Mauritius, and for shell companies.

A “liberal policy regime” on outgoing capital, combined with a “weak regulatory environment,”  leaves India vulnerable to “round tripping,” he writes â€"  that is, dodging taxes by “taking the investment out of India and bringing it back under the cloak of foreign investment.”

Mr. Kasturi writes that it is hard to evaluate whether current policy benefits India, “given the absence of even basic data on the end use of investments, leave alone metrics designed to measure the efficacy of policy.  What is clear from the enthusiasm with which India's busin ess conglomerates export capital is that the policy certainly works in their interest.”