AI models for public good; Mapping India’s online abuse crisis

Hello,

This year, global climate action is set to come full circle. 

This week, the UN climate conference will see hundreds of dignitaries and stakeholders fly into the Brazilian rainforest city of Belem.

Brazil had hosted the Rio Earth Summit, where the UNFCCC treaty was signed 33 years ago. This year, the country insisted the event would return to its roots in acknowledging the world’s most vulnerable, including indigenous groups, some of whom will join the talks.

The focus will also be on fulfilling past promises rather than making new ones, including one of the key promises the summit failed to achieve—preventing global warming from exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos-backed Blue Origin is set to join the big leagues. The space company is slated to launch its New Glenn rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on Sunday, a crucial test in the startup’s quest to challenge SpaceX.

The rocket will carry two spacecraft toward Mars to study how solar winds interact with the planet’s atmosphere. The mission, called Escapade (short for “Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers”) is New Glenn’s first for NASA.

In today’s newsletter, we will talk about 

• AI models for public good
• Mapping India’s online abuse crisis

Here’s your trivia for today: Whose painting entitled "Impression: Sunrise" gave the name to the Impressionist movement? 

TechSparks

AI models for public good

India has the opportunity to build artificial intelligence (AI) models for the public good and leverage data that are culturally suited for the country, experts opined at the ongoing TechSparks 2025 summit in Bengaluru on Saturday.

At a panel discussion on the topic “Aatmanirbhar AI: Building an independent intelligence economy”, industry experts discussed how this approach could unlock nation-scale benefits in sectors like healthcare, education, and legal systems, among others.

Domestic impact:

• Nakul Kundra, Co-founder, Devnagri AI, said the AI models developed in Silicon Valley can be used in India, but they are not for the country. He further noted that Indian datasets are culturally rich, and these models need to understand this information before they can create an impact.
• This also brings forth the question of how India can develop a sovereign model of AI. Vivek Raghavan, Co-founder, Sarvam AI, said the sovereign model will be one in which one can actually inspect the data that was used for training.
• Given the current environment, the country's R&D spending has been low compared to China or the United States, and the panellists hoped that there would be a pickup in this front, both from the government and large corporations.

Insight 

Mapping India’s online abuse crisis 

A new study by Breakthrough India, a Delhi-based NGO, and Equality Now, a global feminist legal advocacy organisation, was released on November 4, documenting how online abuse in India reflects and reinforces existing inequalities of caste, class, gender, and sexuality.

Titled ‘Experiencing Technology-Facilitated Gender-Based Violence in India’, the report notes that women, Dalit women, and LGBTQIA+ people are disproportionately targeted, with harms compounded by the permanence of the abusive content online, its virality, and “recidivism”.

Survivor-centred justice:

• Equality Now/Breakthrough have also highlighted slow takedowns and inconsistent responses following online crimes; independent policy reviews echo that India lacks deepfake-specific provisions, leaving enforcement to a patchwork of the IT Act and IPC sections.
• The Breakthrough India report urged survivor-centred justice (swift removal and evidence preservation), platform accountability tailored to Indian languages/contexts, capacity-building for police, judiciary and lawyers on digital evidence, and intersectional data to track harms across caste, class and sexuality.
• The study emphasised that training frontline responders—police, lawyers, and judges—on gendered and caste-aware digital harm is key to preventing secondary victimisation during reporting. It also called for the intersectional data collection on online abuse, disaggregated by gender, caste, class, region, and sexuality.

News & updates

• Settlement: Visa and Mastercard are nearing a settlement with merchants that aims to end a 20-year-old legal dispute by lowering fees stores pay and giving them more power to reject certain credit cards. 
• Export crackdown: The Chinese government said that it would suspend export controls for a year on five critical minerals that are needed to manufacture certain semiconductors as well as explosives, armour-piercing ammunition, batteries and nuclear reactors.

What you should watch out for

• IPO listings: There are going to be some new entrants on D-Street, with PhysicsWallah, Emmvee Photovoltaic Power, Tenneco Clean Air India IPOs opening for subscription. Meanwhile, Groww-parent Billionbrains Garage Ventures Ltd., Lenskart Solutions Ltd., and Pine Labs Ltd. listings will take place this week.
• US shutdown: Investors have been on the lookout for developments from the ongoing US government shutdown, now in its 39th day, which has resulted in delays to the publication of key economic data, including the monthly Consumer Price Index and Producer Price Index figures.

Whose painting entitled "Impression: Sunrise" gave the name to the Impressionist movement?

Answer: Monet.

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