In this page, we show the aspect coverage of various ICTD policies, and the coverage and sentiment slant of various highly covered entities in mass media, related to coverage given to Cashless Economy.
Aspects are subtopics of discussion within a given policy. We use topic modelling methods to uncover the aspects discussed in the mass media about each of the policies being investigated. We compute the mean relative aspect coverage across all of the seven news-sources that we consider. This helps us see what kind of aspects the mass media prefers to highlight or ignore.
For Cashless Economy, the aspect [Ruling and opposition parties’ debates on Demonetization] gets the highest mean relative coverage in mass media. This is followed by aspects like [Cashless banking, mobile banking, and Internet banking]; [Developments on UPI, mobile wallets, and payment gateways]; and [Discussion on hardships due to Demonetization]. These aspects mostly represent discussions on the advanced technologies and applications implemented for the policy, and the troubles that common people emphasize, but nearly ignores issues faced by the poor. In fact, apart from [Discussion on hardships due to Demonetization], there is no coverage provided to any aspect, which is directly connected to the problems of the poor (for example, problems faced by the poor in using digital wallets, low level of digital literacy among the poor, problems with network infrastructure in rural areas, etc.). Thus, similar to the other three policy issues, in Cashless Economy too, there is deficiency in detailed discussion on issues of the poor. It must also be noted that even if such a discussion does happen, it happends by way of politicization of the issue as seen for Demonetization.
By ‘entities’, we refer to people like politicians, business persons (directors or managers of companies), judiciary members, IAS officers, social activists, etc. that are covered by mass media with respect to a policy. Two of the important aspects of understanding the political economy around policies are: (a) which entities are the most vocal on policy issues in mass media, and (b) how do these entities speak on the policies. We try to answer these two research questions in this page.
The above figure shows the coverage provided to the top 20 highest covered entities in mass media. The policy push towards Cashless Payments shows the presence of business-persons like Mukesh Ambani and Vijay Shekhar Sharma, judiciary members like Bhim Sen Sehgal, and economic advisors like Urjit Patel and Nandan Nilekani because it is an economic policy issue. It is noteworthy that Vijay Shekhar Sharma is the founder of PayTM, which gained immediate leverage in the wake of Cashless Economy.
Overall, we can see that the same trend follows for Cashless Economy: most of the top covered entities are politicians, followed by businesspersons, and there is a clear lack of representation of academicians, policy experts, and civil society members.
Thus, even for Cashless economy, we see that the mass media provides maximum coverage to the politicians. We also find that the media coverage is corporate aligned, with prominent business-persons and their statements being covered frequently. In some cases, this trend is representative of the corporate interests that the involvement of big corporations is supposed to fulfil. On the other hand, feedback from policy experts and social activists that actually might focus on the technical nuances of the policy do not see a significant coverage.
Cashless Economy was initiated by the current ruling party BJP, and saw the opposition having more negative comments, which is an exception to their otherwise mostly positive coverage. Some judiciary members, opposition party politicians, and bureaucrats do have a slightly negative slant, but since the coverage given to them is much less than that given to politicians, these views are hardly able to become mainstream. Among business persons, Mukesh Ambani is seen to speak positively on Cashless Payments, which is again an example of a businessperson following the government’s stance on policies.
An example of a statement with positive sentiment: “The government is willing to strengthen laws to plug security holes in digital payment systems, and will soon invite ideas from users on how to protect consumer interests, union minister Ravishankar Prasad said on friday.”
An example of a statement with negative sentiment: “We are not against a cashless economy but we don’t want it to be forced on the poor by the government," the 46-year- old Congress MP said."