Crypto exchanges bet on NFTs amid regulatory concerns

Crypto exchanges bet on NFTs amid regulatory concerns

Mumbai: Indian cryptocurrency exchanges seem to have taken a shine to Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs). At least half a dozen crypto platforms are foraying into the NFT space, assuming that it would not be outlawed as NFTs hold an underlying asset that is traded in digital form.In fact, cryptocurrency exchanges that offer NFTs have grown 40-50% month on month, albeit on a smaller base.NFTs are a unique and noninterchangeable digital representation of art photo, video, text – that exist on a blockchain.The global market for NFTs hit $22 billion in 2021, according to DappRadar, a global app store for decentralised applications. In March last year, a digital collage created by artist Mike Winkelmann, known professionally as Beeple, was sold for $69. 3 million.Indian creators sold NFTs worth Rs 2. 4 crore on the WazirX NFT marketplace till December 20, according to a newsletter by cryptocurrency exchange WazirX.“The (NFT) space is evolving every day, with categories ranging from art, music, sports/ games, utility, brands, influencers, literary, movie/entertainment, among other things,” said Vishakha Singh, co-founder of the WazirX NFT marketplace. “We have1,076 creators and 923 collectors on our platform. ”Other crypto exchanges are also rushing in to offer NFTs.This is also a way to hedge their bets in case the government decides to ban cryptocurrencies “We have seen a 30% month-on-month growth in numbers,” said Edul Patel, cofounder and chief executive of Mudrex , a cryptocurrency exchange.Patel said people started investing the minimum amount required and significantly increased that once they realised the potential of NFTs.The minimum investment amount is about ?750 and the number of investors on the platform exceeds1,700, he added. “We have plans to launch an NFT Marketplace in 2022,” said Charles Tan, head of marketing at Coinstore. “NFTs will drive more usage of cryptocur rencies and give crypto a tangible value when used at its full potential. ”Crypto exchange CrossTower is already in the process of launching its own NFT platform. “The platform is targeted for launch by the end of the first quarter of 2022,” said Vikas Ahuja, CEO, CrossTower India.Many new players in the space are experimenting with real estate, hospitality, and travel NFTs, apart from the usual ones such as paintings, dialogues, and videos. Global platform LynKey, for instance, is planning to tokenize and offer NFT solutions for travel and tourism using smart contracts.

Pandemic effect: Education is being democratised

Education is being democratised where irrespective of the age one can get deeper into a particular skill.

By Vishakha Singh

The pandemic has done wonders for the education sector by ushering in a rapid acceptance for distance education, increasing manifold its reach across demographic segments and also multiplying its acceptance as valid education amongst employers.

We saw various trends emerge across the education system with the outbreak of the pandemic in 2020. Some schools are opening up now after close to two years, which necessitates SEL (social and emotional learning) support. Students have adopted different ways of learning in today’s unprecedented times. It is essential that we make learning in a school environment convivial for the students to reskill and rebuild their confidence as learners.

Education is being democratised where irrespective of the age one can get deeper into a particular skill. Today’s schoolchildren are even assembling an ECG machine that earlier only engineers did in colleges. This paradigm shift in democratisation of knowledge opens a new way of skilling across all age categories.

Soft skills are now needed more than ever. Data and digital-related knowledge and leadership skills like empathy and critical thinking are what corporates need, and will continue to do so in 2022 and times to come.

The author is founder & creator, SHIFT (Simple Habits and Ideas for Forward Thinking)

Counting gifts for children

For Vishakha (name changed), a 15-year-old girl in Varanasi, 2021 had started on a cautiously optimistic note. By then the first wave of the novel COVID-19 pandemic had tapered down and the entire country was desperately hoping that COVID-19 had finally taken leave.

But then, it struck back, and the delta variant wreaked havoc for the next few months, bringing the healthcare system to its knees.

Almost simultaneously, came the faint ray of hope — vaccinations. Vishakha was quick to realise that this was the only way forward. If the potency of the deadly virus was to be blunted, it would have to be with vaccines. She wasted no time in spreading the word among the adult residents in her slum.

Change began at home, as she influenced her naana and naani (grandparents), both above 70, to go to the nearest vaccination centre and receive their first jab. And she didn’t stop at that.

She was one among the firsts who came forward to spread the message around, with the field workers of Shambhunath Singh Research Foundation (SRF), a local non-profit partnered with CRY, visiting her slum with the #VaccineMitra campaign.

Vishakha’s is just one of the countless tales of positivity, hope and proactive participation that children have shown this year. It’s been tough on them — away from school and friends, locked down at home for close to two consecutive years, surviving bereavement as many lost their parents — and the list goes on and on.

Schools reopened, but…

The biggest moment of joy for children in 2021, perhaps, came in September when schools reopened, though partially, under strict adherence to COVID-19 protocols. It was as if the doors of happiness had finally opened.

The children of higher classes started going to school, and the students of elementary and primary classes became hopeful that they too would be able to follow in their footsteps soon. But with the new threat posed by the omicron variant, we are yet to know how early we can have our children – all of them – back at school.

Experiences from the ground have shown how the prolonged lack of socialisation hugely impacted children’s mental health and psycho-social well-being. Much has also been said about the fact that home is ideally the safest place for a child, but the lockdown months have underscored how many of them suffered from abuse and violence at home.

There have been other pain points, too. From the very beginning of COVID-19 and the closure of schools, we had fears that children would be going to bear the brunt of it. True, that the child population was not among the biggest victims of the pandemic in terms of contracting the disease, but its impacts on children were manifold.

They were majorly hit by the closure of schools, disruption of health and nutrition services and the bigger worry was that the losses incurred would have long-term consequences for the collective wellness of the society at large.

We came across many stories of school drop-outs, especially among the marginal and underserved sections. Many parents had obviously realised the importance of an ‘extra pair of hands’ for family chores and decided to keep their children out of school. There were many cases of child marriages too, where their parents had decided to spare themselves of ‘one extra mouth’ to feed.

Also, prolonged school closure and disruption of midday meals left a huge section of children in the lurch – losing out on acquiring knowledge and missing the nutritional benefits. As these children slowly get back into structured learning now, it’s time to ensure that they don’t lag behind further and get enough motivation and support to make up for what they have lost, for no fault of theirs.

Apart from schools, many other child-centred services witnessed major disruptions during the past two years, including Anganwadi and immunisation programmes. Evidence from previous crises suggest that such services suffer a lot during difficult times, and experiences in the COVID times were no different.

Why are child-centred services the first to get snapped off? How, as a society, can we ensure that disasters and crisis situations don’t claim these services? These questions need to be sorted out quickly, if, as a country, we want to reach the last-mile child and script an inclusive journey to prosperity.

No more ‘COVID-19 orphans’, please…

The pandemic took away from many children those they loved the most — their parents — without any forewarning. More than one lakh children have lost one or both parents to the pandemic so far, according to data on the National Commission for the Protection of Child Rights' Bal Swaraj portal.

Let us not forget that this is much more than just a number. This is about losing as many unfulfilled dreams as well. And yes, let us stop echoing the insensitive hashtag culture while naming them #COVIDOrphans. Let us remember that children who have lost their parents to COVID-19 will have to carry this cruel identity throughout their lives.

Living on hope

Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that children within 15 to 18 will be the next batch of recipients of the COVID-19 vaccines. Nothing could have been more welcome. But the younger kids of the country need to be vaccinated as well.

Let’s hope the New Year rings in positive news related to the beginning of vaccination for all children, across all age groups, and let Vishaka and others like her spearhead the campaign to remove even the tiniest of doubt and the last shred of hesitancy from the minds of parents, if there is any.

What’s over is done with, let us hope 2022 bears well for India’s children, ensuring that they can enjoy a happy, healthy and safe childhood. Let us not forget that much of the progress in terms of child development that India made in the past couple of decades have taken a hit. It’s time for all to come forward and join hands as India builds back better.

It’s said that it takes a village to raise a child. What else could be a better slogan for all of us for the next year that knocks at the door? DTE

Views expressed are personal

Remembering Anil Agarwal — Forget Malthus: upside of population growth

Increasing population density can also lead to better community management of common property resources, if community property rights are adequately defined

To commemorate the 19th death anniversary of Down To Earth founder editor Anil Agarwal, we reproduce this piece of his from DTE’s December 3, 1992 print edition.

Once again population growth is being discussed worldwide as a major factor behind environmental destruction. But watching Indian villages trying to survive in their degraded environment, we have an interesting question to ask: Could this be an optimum level of demographic pressure to promote community-based environmental management?

Few social scientists have tried to understand what societal responses are emerging at the grassroots to growing population and increasing pressures on natural resources. In India, for instance, population densities have nearly doubled in 40 years. This is unprecedented in India’s history. Should we assume that people are not going to respond rationally but just breed themselves to a mass societal death? Surely not.

The 1980s saw, in India, numerous micro-experiments to organise communities to manage their natural resources. Some of these experiments have had dramatic success in ecological regeneration and have led to equally dramatic improvement in the local economy.

Can we simply dismiss all this work as the result of a few dedicated social activists or is this a sign of a nascent societal response?

It is easy to accept the first argument if we remain blinkered by what is called in social science research the ‘project bias,’ that is, if we fail to look at the social change taking place outside the project framework. In several projects, there is no doubt that certain individuals have played a major part. But it would be wrong to treat all of these cases as ‘projects.’

The Chipko movement is more of a people’s movement. The work of the gramdan villages of Seed and Hariyakheda and their legally empowered system of self-determination is, again, more the result of people’s aspirations than project planning. The project element is restricted to the fact that initial investments — in several cases not very large — have come from sources external to the community. And there is no doubt that without this seed capital most of these efforts could not have taken off.

The question to ask is: Why did all this begin to happen so much more in the 1980s? We heard so little about such experiments in the 1960s and 1970s. Surely, even then, there were many Gandhians who wanted to promote community management of natural resources?

It is our belief that increasing population density is, in fact, creating objective social conditions which are laying the foundation for the success of enlightened community-oriented leadership. The pressure on natural resources that exists today is unprecedented. In India, people seem to be keen to respond to the situation, but the country’s system of governance and its legal framework are lagging behind.

Laws governing natural resources like land, water and forests remain the same as they had been conceived by the British colonisers over a hundred years ago. And post-independence governments have consistently pushed individual, beneficiary-oriented programmes, aided and supported by external agencies like the World Bank.

Rarely have community-oriented resource management programmes been formulated. Yet, when social activists come up with such programmes, people seem to respond enthusiastically.

Our belief is further strengthened by the fact that things have started happening in certain rural communities even where no external agents are working. In the Singhbhum region, for instance, district magistrate Amarjit Sinha recorded numerous tribal villages where people have begun to manage the forests neighbouring their settlements. They have done this entirely on their own.

In the Uttar Pradesh Himalaya, administrator Neeru Nanda found many villages that are protecting forests, including government-owned reserved forests. But these are usually forests on which the community has clear legal or traditional usage rights. Those forests over which there are disputes between neighbouring settlements do not get managed; instead they are steadily being destroyed.

Official efforts to involve village communities in forest villages are now protecting sub-Himalayan watersheds near Chandigarh in an official effort to replicate the Sukhomajri model. West Bengal’s Arabari model of forest regeneration, under which villagers are assured timber, grass and other rights to forest produce if they protect the forests jointly, has been successful. There are now 1,684 village-level forest protection committees in West Bengal.

Experience shows that the conditions in which natural resource management by villagers is most to succeed are:

Where common resources are substantial and, therefore, the benefits of ecological regeneration can be substantial as compared to existing needs; Where commons can regenerate rapidly; and Where communities are more homogeneous and not highly stratified.

In India we have found that there is a correlation between conditions (a) and (c). Areas with substantial common resources are usually hill and mountain regions, and unirrigated arid and semi-arid areas. Most of the land in the humid plains and irrigated arid and semi-arid plains tends to be privatised. In the former areas, settlements tend to be small and less stratified. In the latter areas, land is taken over by the rich and powerful, and settlements tend to be larger, and relatively inequitous.

Increasing population density in such areas will lead to a steady disappearance of common resources, including wetlands, which will be brought under agriculture. The poor will depend heavily on the rich for their survival, and their desperate social and economic conditions can force them to suffer considerable violence and oppression.

But in areas where natural resources are relatively less privatised, which incidentally are also the more ecologically fragile and relatively poverty-stricken regions, increasing population density can lead to overuse of common resources, especially if community rights are not properly defined.

Increasing population density can also lead to better community management of common property resources, if community property rights are adequately defined. A situation of a free-for-all in land use engenders indiscipline in its use. Many Indian villages have reasonably large common lands which are lying in an extremely degraded condition though they are inherently very productive.

Biomass regeneration rates can be high and rapid. For instance, within a few months grass production can increase and double or treble over time through good management. In such conditions, instituting adequate community rights and mobilising communities for action can bring substantial economic benefits within a few years. The harvested water can irrigate a large portion of the crop-lands and the increased grass can meet a large part of the fodder demand.

Community management of natural resources will immediately invoke the concept of a village republic. Each community will insist that its neighbours do not make unauthorised use of its managed and protected commons. We have repeatedly seen inter-settlement tensions over common resources wherever they have been protected because these areas were earlier open to all for use.

Each community should have legal rights over a definite area, and then each community will take care of its own commons. It will, first, keep people of other settlements out of its own commons, and then, soon enough, because of internal needs, it will begin to set appropriate rules for caring for and sharing those commons.

This can also become an important way of making people accept the fact that population growth cannot be unlimited. As long as there are open, free-access commons (that is, government land), people will prefer big families to exploit these resources. But community-managed commons will push people towards better management and increased productivity on a sustained basis. It is not surprising that in Sukhomajri people have not increased their livestock because of greater fodder availability. They have, in fact, reduced their goat populations.

Of course, if population growth increases without any check and local biomass demand goes beyond the capacity of the environment to meet it, community management systems will again begin to break down. But if community management systems can be instituted now, the environment regenerated, women’s work burden reduced, and female literacy increased rapidly, it should be possible to see rapid downturns in population growth rates in these areas.

It is not always necessary to deride increasing population. It can be seen as an opportunity for moving towards real solutions, including an end to excessive population growth.