Why in News
Extent of the world’s dependence on information technologies shed a light on July 19, when supermarkets, banks, hospitals, airports, and many other services in between suffered a simultaneous blackout after a common software solution they used glitched
Need for resilient infrastructure
Technological advancements are inevitable and desirable, but the concurrent responsibility to set up failsafes and emergency protocols is often less glamorous.
These gaps are exacerbated in societies where the adoption of new technologies is concentrated in sectors competing in the global market and in piecemeal fashion vis-à-vis services provided in local markets.
Thus, for example, the glitch may have caused an airline operator to suffer greater monetary losses but it would have been more debilitating for cardiac facilities at a tertiary care centre, or a computer trying to access a thermal power facility during peak demand
The focus must instead be on the network interconnections that allow these technologies to be useful and the implementation of life-saving redundancies.
Unfortunately, unlike most other technological enterprises, information technologies are yet to develop a mature self-awareness of their pansocial character and the impetus to adjust for this rudiment lies with the state.
This requires a ‘Digital India’ push that is cognisant of software solutions’ relationship with digital privacy and data sovereignty, layered over the challenges that income inequality and political marginalisation impose on communities navigating more socially interconnected settings.
The July 19 outage offers an opportunity to rejig the software that public sector institutions need to provide their essential services and to incorporate redundancies, including moving away from single-vendor policies, that preserve the links between these institutions and people engaged in informal economies in the event of a network-level outage.
The state was previously duty-bound to develop democratic digital infrastructure.
It is also duty-bound to ensure that this infrastructure is shock-proof.
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