Frontline's Latest in AI, Space & Everything In Between - Frontline

In Bengaluru, an AI-powered traffic camera reportedly mistook a guitar strapped to a rider’s back for a pillion passenger without a helmet and issued a Rs.500 fine.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

When the machine gets it wrong, who pays?

Incidents in Australia, Singapore, and Bengaluru show how AI errors reach the public, and why India needs auditable systems with a way to appeal.

Saikiran Kannan

DIGITAL SOVEREIGNTY

The oligarchs’ quarrel over India’s digital future

Elon Musk calls Mukesh Ambani a monopolist; Ambani’s Jio warns of foreign control. Meanwhile, 12,347 villages continue to be unconnected, and rural internet penetration lags far behind cities.

Aejaz Ahmad Wani

DIGITAL MOBILISATION

‘Digital India’ needs an upgrade

The state is using technology to tighten its grip. Citizens who want to hold it to account should digitise faster.

Binit Agrawal,Prannv Dhawan,Shikhar Aggarwal

ECONOMIC PERSPECTIVES

The sudden rise of AI alarmism

The doomsday scenario painted by some AI industry insiders cannot be brushed off. But is it also a ploy by the tech behemoths to shut the door on smaller players, secure profits, and establish dominance?

C.P. Chandrasekhar

The paper by Animesh Jain and Kunal Thakur argues that mandating local storage and processing of data can limit access to diverse datasets. This image is representational.

Can India share data across borders without giving up control?

A discussion paper from the Principal Scientific Adviser proposes a middle path for AI data flows: keep strategic data in India, while allowing other data to cross borders under safeguards tailored to its sensitivity and identifiability.

NOBEL PRIZE 2026

Nobel committee honours man who listened to the universe and two who got molecules to pick a side

Francis Halzen turned Antarctic ice into a neutrino telescope and finally traced cosmic rays to their sources; Henri Kagan and Kenso Soai figured out why life prefers left-handed molecules, and how to make chemistry do the same.

Frontline News Desk

NOBEL PRIZE 2026

Nobel Prize in Medicine awarded for breakthrough in controlling nerve cells with light

Peter Hegemann, Georg Nagel, and Karl Deisseroth’s work on optogenetics has given scientists a precise way to activate selected neurons and study their role in memory, behaviour, and neurological disorders.

Frontline News Desk

More stories from Science & Technology

Meta’s direct reporting of child-safety concerns to India’s cybercrime portal could shorten the route from detection to police action.

Meta’s faster child-safety reports won’t matter if police can’t act on them

Direct reporting to the cybercrime portal could speed up urgent cases, but its impact will depend on the quality of the information, investigators’ capacity and safeguards for users’ privacy.

N.V. Geetha,V.Venkatesan

According to a Eurobarometer survey, adolescents aged 13-18 in Europe spend an average of 4.5 hours online; on weekends, the figure rises to 6.1 hours. This image is representational.

Europe’s proposed KIDS Act and what India can learn

The European Commission proposes a minimum age of 15 for autonomous social media accounts and wants platforms to redesign features that encourage compulsive use. India has lessons to draw.

Mridula Vijayarangakumar

If we evolved AI super-intelligence and asked it to solve India’s problems, how would it do so?

Would AI run India’s elections better?

With the country’s election machinery already raising questions about human judgment, perhaps we should see what happens when we hand the job to a machine.

An aerial view of an area devastated by the recent flood, near Trishuli river in Betrawati Bazaar of Nepal’s Rasuwa district on August 30.

India can see the danger in the Himalaya. Can it manage the risk?

The devastating floods in Nepal showed how quickly glacier collapse, unstable slopes and water can combine into a disaster. India is getting better at seeing these hazards from space. The harder task is turning that intelligence into action.

Lift-off of ISRO Launch Vehicle Mark-3 (LVM3) heavy-lift rocket at the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, on December 24, 2025.

Is ISRO losing what it needs to lead?

The government is asking ISRO to focus on its hardest missions while allowing the infrastructure and expertise needed for those missions to move out of its control.

Nature is difficult to digitise as a single parcel of land can carry multiple valid descriptions through revenue records, satellite imagery, and how its human inhabitants choose to use it.

India needs a digital infrastructure for nature

The country’s environmental data is scattered across land records, satellite maps, and various government schemes. A shared digital system could connect these records, improve accountability, and protect community rights.

Farmers cleaning their solar panels in Gujarat’s Kheda district. The PM-KUSUM scheme was meant to connect the transition to solar energy to agricultural livelihoods.

Sunny side up, unevenly shared

PM-KUSUM has turned solar power into a possible new income stream for farmers. But the scheme’s most ambitious component favours those who already have land, capital, and collateral.

Anusreeta Dutta

Meta’s platforms reach hundreds of millions of Indians, and, through their moderation systems, can control what they see or do not see—without an explanation. This photo is representational.

What Meta won’t explain about content moderation

Meta’s apology for wrongly restricting Modi’s video leaves the real problem untouched: its opaque moderation system gives users no way to know why content was restricted, who made the decision, or whether it was automated, human, or state-directed.

N.V. Geetha,V.Venkatesan

At a protest by Wake Up Thanekar against the proposed AWS data centre in Thane on July 19, 2026.

Not in our backyard

The Maharashtra government’s plans to set up hyperscale data centres are facing stiff resistance from activists concerned about their environmental impact and the diversion of essential resources such as water and electricity.

India possesses a vast mass of knowledge workers with the potential to achieve reamarkable innovation. This photo is representational.

How to build a scientific India

Academic freedom, evidence-based policymaking, social inclusion, and transparent governance are the foundations of a scientific nation. India has neglected each of them.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg arrives for a landmark trial over whether social media platforms deliberately addict and harm children, on February 18, 2026, in Los Angeles, US.

Why tech platforms should be regulated like high-risk industries

They should be audited and safety-tested in advance, judged by their worst possible failure rather than average accuracy, and not investigated only after a notice like the one the government just sent Meta.

Pink bollworm infestations in the approved Bt cotton are pushing farmers towards unapproved hybrids said to resist it—and herbicide. This image is representational.

A tale of two gene-editing rules

Europe has relaxed its gene-editing rules after years of debate but kept strict checks on herbicide-tolerant crops. India eased its rules too but dropped an early warning about the trait, even as illegal seeds spread across cotton-growing States.

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