Data Systems - Posts

Sameet Panda - Data Systems in Welfare: Impact of the JAM Trinity on Pension & PDS in Odisha during COVID-19

Sameet Panda — 2021-02-26T07:36:10Z

This study by Sameet Panda tries to understand the integration of data and digital systems in welfare delivery in Odisha. It brings out the impact of welfare digitalisation on beneficiaries through primary data collected in November 2020. The researcher is thankful to community members for sharing their lived experiences during course of the study. Fieldwork was undertaken in three panchayats of Bhawanipatna block of Kalahandi district, Odisha. Additional research support was provided by Apurv Vivek and Vipul Kumar, and editorial contributions were made by Ambika Tandon (Senior Researcher, CIS). This study was conducted as part of a project on gender, welfare, and surveillance, supported by Privacy International, UK.

Report: Download (PDF)

Extract from the Report

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated flaws in social institutions as never before - threatening food security, public health systems, and livelihood in the informal sector. At the time of writing this report, India is the second-worst affected country in the world with over 9.8 million confirmed cases and more than 1.4 hundred thousand deaths. Unemployment has been increasing at an alarming rate, from 6.67 to 7 percent in October...

Following the national lockdown, many families belonging to low-income groups and daily wage earners found themselves stranded without money, food or credit from their employers. During the strict lockdown of the economy between March to June 2020 lakhs of migrants faced starvation in cities and walked back home. The government responded with some urgent measures, although inadequate. To cope with the food and economic crisis the Government of India and state governments initiated several social protection schemes. In Odisha, The central government provided two kinds of support, cash transfer through Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) MGNREGS, Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana (PMJDY) and Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUJ), advance release of pension in cash to existing beneficiaries and cash support of Rs. 1000. The Odisha government provided cash support of Rs. 1000 to ration card holding families. Beneficiaries of the Public Distribution System also received free-of-cost food grain under the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana...

Over the last couple of years, along with making the Aadhaar mandatory, the government has also been working towards linking mobile numbers and bank accounts of beneficiaries. An increasing number of schemes are shifting to Direct Benefit Transfer from in-kind or cash benefits - 324 schemes under 51 ministries of the Government of India. Such schemes are relying on the linkage of Jan Dhan accounts, the Aadhaar, and mobile numbers (the “JAM trinity”) to facilitate access to Direct Benefit Transfers. The Economic Survey 2015-16 has pointed out that without improving mobile penetration and rural banking infrastructure making the JAM trinity mandatory would continue to lead to exclusions. The issues with each of the components of the JAM trinity worsened during the COVID-19 crisis with restrictions on physical movement, difficulties in topping up mobile phone accounts, and enrolling for the Aadhaar or addressing other technical issues.

This report assesses the role of the data system in welfare delivery. It focuses on the impact of the three components of the JAM trinity - Jan Dhan Account, mobile numbers and the Aadhaar on Direct Benefit Transfer, social security pension and the Public Distribution System. The objective of this study is to understand the challenges faced by beneficiaries in accessing PDS and pension as a result of digitisation processes. This includes failures in Direct Benefit Transfers and exclusions from databases, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study focuses on gender as a key component shaping the impact of digitisation on beneficiaries. The sample includes both men and women beneficiaries in order to identify such gendered differences. It will also identify infrastructural constraints in Odisha that impact the implementation of digital systems in welfare. Also, it will analyse policy frameworks at central and state levels, to compare their discourse with the impact on the ground.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/sameet-panda-jam-trinity-pension-pds-odisha-covid-19

Inputs to the Report on the Non-Personal Data Governance Framework

sumandro — 2020-12-30T09:40:52Z

This submission presents a response by researchers at the Centre for Internet and Society, India (CIS) to the draft Report on Non-Personal Data Governance Framework prepared by the Committee of Experts under the Chairmanship of Shri Kris Gopalakrishnan. The inputs are authored by Aayush Rathi, Aman Nair, Ambika Tandon, Pallavi Bedi, Sapni Krishna, and Shweta Mohandas (in alphabetical order), and reviewed by Sumandro Chattapadhyay.

Text of submitted inputs: Read (PDF)

Report by the Committee of Experts on Non-Personal Data Governance Framework: Read (PDF)

Inputs

Clause 3.7 (v): The role of the Indian government in the operation of data markets

While highlighting the potential for India to be one of the top consumer and data markets of the world, it also sheds light on the concern about the possibility of data monopolies. The clause envisions the role of the Indian government as a regulator and a catalyst for domestic data markets.

In doing so, the clause does not acknowledge that the proactive and dominant roles of the Indian government in generation and reuse of data, based on the existing data collection practices, as well as the provisions that have been given, as under the compulsory sharing provisions in the Report, and would continue to be given by the Personal Data Protection Bill. In reality, the Indian government’s role is not just of a catalyst but also of a key player, potentially with monopolistic market power, in the domestic data market, especially due to the ongoing data marketplace initiatives as detailed in published policy and vision documents. [1]

Clause 3.8 (iv): Introducing collective privacy

The introduction of collective privacy has initiated an overdue discussion at the policy level to arrive at privacy formulations that account for limitations in the contemporary dominant social, legal and ethical paradigms of privacy premised on individual interests and personal harm. The notion of collective privacy has garnered contemporary attention with the rise of data processing technologies and business models that thrive on the collection and processing of aggregate information.

While the Report acknowledges that collective privacy is an evolving concept, it doesn’t attempt to define either collective or what privacy could entail in the context of a collective. The postulation of collective privacy as a legally binding right is bereft with challenges in both domestic and international legal frameworks. [2]

Central to these challenges is the representation of the group of the entity. While the Report illustrates harms that may be incurred by certain collectives that collective privacy could protect against, these illustrated collectives are already recognised in law as rights-holding groups (society members, for example), and/or share pre-determined attributes (sexual orientation, for example).

The Report does not acknowledge that the very technological processes that may have rendered the articulation of collective privacy necessary, also are intended to create ad-hoc and newer sets of individuals or groups with shared attributes. [3] In doing so, the Report furthers an ontology of groups having intuitive, predetermined attributes that exist naturally, or in law, whereas the intervention of data collection and processing technologies can determine shared group attributes afresh. Moreover, the Report also ignores that predetermined attributes are static, and in doing so, ignores a vast existing literature speaking to fluidity of identities and the intersectionality of identities that individuals in groups occupy. [4] We fully appreciate the challenges these pose in the determination of the legal contours of collective privacy. Much of the Report’s recommendations are premised on the idea of a predetermined collective, rendering more granular exploration of these ideas urgent.

Further, the Report also puts forth a limited conception of privacy as a safeguard against data-related harms that may be caused to collectives. In doing so, it dilutes the conceptualisation of individual privacy as articulated in Justice K. S. Puttaswamy (Retd.) and Anr. vs Union Of India And Ors. Notwithstanding this dilution, the illustrations also only indicate harms that may be caused by private actors. Any further recommendations should envision the harms that may also be caused by public data-driven processes, such as those incubated within the state machinery.

Clause 4.1 (iii) and Recommendation 1: Defining Non-Personal Data

The Report proposes the definition of non-personal data to include (i) data that was never related to an identified or identifiable natural person, and (ii) aggregated, anonymised personal data such that individual events are “no longer identifiable”. In doing so, they have attempted to extend protections to categories of data that fall outside the ambit of the Personal Data Protection Bill, 2019 (hereafter “PDP Bill”). The Report is cognizant of the fallible nature of anonymization techniques but fails to indicate how these may be addressed. The test of anonymization in regarding data as non-personal data requires further clarification. Anonymization, in and of itself, is an ambiguous standard. Scholarship has indicated that anonymised data may never be completely anonymous. [5] Despite this, the PDP Bill proposes a high threshold of zero-risk of anonymization in relation to personal data, to mean “such irreversible process of transforming or converting personal data to a form in which a data principal cannot be identified”. From a plain reading, it appears that the Report proposes a lower threshold of the anonymization requirements governing non-personal data. It is unclear how non-personal data would then be different from inferred data as described within the definition of personal data under the PDP Bill. This adds regulatory uncertainty making it imperative for the Committee to articulate bright-line, risk-based principles and rules for the test of anonymization. Such rules should also indicate the factors that ought to be taken into account to determine whether anonymization has occurred and the timescale of reference for anonymization outcomes. [6]

The recommendation also states that the data principal should "also provide consent for anonymisation and usage of this anonymized data while providing consent for collection and usage of his/her personal data". However the framing of this recommendation fails to mention the responsibility of the data fiduciary to provide notice to the data principal about the usage of the anonymized data while seeking the data principal’s consent for anonymization. The notice provided to the data principal should provide clear indication that consent of the data principal is based on their knowledge of the use of the anonymized data.

Clause 4.8 (i), (ii): Function of data custodians

The Report does not make it clear who may perform the role of data custodians. The use of data fiduciary indicates the potential import of the definition of ‘data fiduciary’ as specified under Clause 3.13 of the PDP Bill. However, this needs to be further clarified.

Clause 4.8 (iii): Data custodians’ “duty of care”

As is outlined in the following section on data trustees, it can be difficult for a singular entity to maintain a duty of care and undertake actions with the best interest of a community when that community consists of sub-communities that may be marginalised. Further, ‘duty of care’, ‘best interest’, and ‘absence of harm’ are not sufficient standards for data processing by data custodians. Recommendations to the effect of obligating data custodians to uphold the rights of data principals, including economic and fundamental rights need to be incorporated in the framework.

Clause 4.9: Data trustees

The committee’s suggestion that the “most appropriate representative body” should be the data trustee—that often being either the corresponding government entity or community body— is reasonable at face value. However, in the absence of any clear principles defining what constitutes “most appropriate” there are a number of potential issues that can appear:

Lack of means for selecting a data trustee: The report makes note of the fact that both private and public entities can be selected to be data trustees but offers no principles on how these data trustees can be selected, i.e. whether they are to be directly selected by the members of a community, and if so how. Any selection criteria or process prescribed has to keep in mind the following point regarding the potential lack of representation for marginalised communities that could arise from a direct selection of a data trustee by a group of people.

Issues of having a single data trustee for large scale communities and when dealing with marginalised communities: The report assumes that in instances wherein a community is spread across a geographic region, or consists of multiple sub-communities, then the data trustee will be the closest shared government authority (for example, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Government of India being the data trustee for data regarding diabetes among Indian citizens).

This idea of a singular data trustee assumes that the ‘best interests’ of a community are uniform across that community. This can prove problematic especially when dealing with data obtained from marginalised communities that forms a part of a wider dataset. It is entirely possible to imagine that a smaller disenfranchised community may have interests that are not aligned with the general majority. In such a situation the Report is unclear as to whether the data trustee would have to ensure that the best interests of all groups are maintained, or would they be responsible for ensuring the best interests of the largest number of people within that community. There are power differentials between citizens, government agencies, and other entities described by the Report. This places citizens at risk of abuse of power by government entities in their role as trustees, who are effectively being empowered through this policy framework as opposed to a representative mechanism. It is recommended that data trustees be appointed by relevant communities through clear and representative mechanisms. Additionally, any individual should be able to file complaints regarding the discharge of community trust by data trustees. This is necessary as any subsequent rights vested in the community can only be exercised through the data trustee, and become unenforceable in the lack of an appropriate data trustee.

Any legislation that arises on the basis of this report will therefore have to not only provide a means for selecting the data trustee, but also safeguards for ensuring that data collected from marginalised communities are used keeping in mind their specific best interests—with these best interests being informed through consultation with that community.

Clause 4.10 (iii): Data trusts

Section 4.10 (iii) notes that data custodians may voluntarily share data in these data trusts. However it is unclear if such sharing must be done with the express consent of the relevant data trustee.

Clause 4.10 (iv): Mandatory sharing and competition

The fundamental premise of a mandatory data sharing regime seems increasingly distant from its practical impacts. The EU which earlier championed the cause now seems reluctant to further it on the face of studies which skews towards counteractive impacts of such steps. Such steps could apply to huge volumes of first-party data companies collect on their own assets, products and services, even though such data are among the least likely to create barriers to entry or contribute to abuses of dominant positions. [7] This is hence likely to bring in more chilling effect on innovation and investment than a pro-competition environment. The velocity of big data also adds to the futility of such data sharing mandates. [8] It is recommended that a sectoral analysis of this mandate be undertaken instead of an overarching stipulation.

The Report suggests extensive data sharing without addressing the extent of obligation on the private players to submit to these requests and process them. The availability of meta-data about the data collected may be made easily accessible under mandates of transparency. However, the access to the detailed underlying data will be difficult in most cases due to the current structure of entities functioning in cyberspace, evidenced by the lack of compliance to such mandates by Courts of Law in the EU. Such a system can easily eliminate the comparative advantage of smaller players, helping larger players with more money at their disposal enabling their growth and throttling the smaller players. It could have serious implications on data quality and integrity through the sharing of erroneous data. Access to superior quality digital services in India may also have to be compromised. If this regime is furthered without amends to address these concerns, it might end up counter productive.

Clause 5.1 (iv): Grievance redressal against state’s role

This clause acknowledges the vast potential for government authorities and other bodies to abuse their power as data trustee. In addition, it should describe the setting up of impartial and accessible mechanisms for citizens to complain against such abuse of power and appropriate penalties, including the removal of the data trustee.

Chapter 7, Recommendation 5: Purpose of data-sharing

Recommendation 5 leaves scope for “national security” as a sovereign purpose for data sharing. This continues to be in line with the trend of having an overarching national security clause, as in the Personal Data Protection Bill, 2019. There could be provisions made to enable access to data for sovereign purposes without such broad definition, replacing it based on constitutional terms which will limit it to the confines laid down in the Constitution. This will effectively curb any misuse of the provision and strongly embed the proposed regulation of non-personal data on constitutional ethos. This can also prevent future conflicts with the fundamental rights.

Platform companies have leveraged their position in society to take on an ever-greater number of quasi-public functions, exercising new forms of unaccountable, transnational authority. It is not difficult to imagine that this trend can continue to non-platform companies, or even taken forward by these very entities which also have access to a large chunk of non-personal data. A strict division between sovereign purposes and core public interest purposes seems difficult. However, it is imperative to have a clearer definition of core public interest purposes and sovereign purposes. The broad based definition may facilitate reduced accountability. Separating government actions from sovereign purposes could bring forth the power imbalance between the State and its people, while in the case of the non-governmental entities, it will facilitate encroachment of government functions by private players. Both these cases may not consider the best interest of the data generators, or the people at large.

Clause 7.1 (i): Data needs of law enforcement

Clause 7.1 (i) allows for acquisition of data governed by this framework for crime mapping, devising anticipation and preventive measures, and for investigations and law enforcement. While this may be necessary to be granted to law enforcement in certain cases, this should happen only with an express permission of a court of law. Blanket executive access allows higher possibility of misuse by the people involved in law enforcement.

Clause 7.2 (iv): Use of health data as a pilot

The clause suggests the use of health sector data as a pilot use-case. This is highly undesirable due to the inherent nature of high sensitivity of the larger part of data related to the health sector. The high vulnerability of such data to harm the data principals should act as a deterrent in using this as the pilot use-case. Given the mass availability of data related to the health sector due to the pandemic, it creates further points of vulnerabilities which can be illegally monetised and misappropriated. It is recommended that this proposal be scrapped altogether.

Clause 7.2 (iii): Power of government bodies

As per this clause, data trustees or government bodies (who could also be acting as data trustees) can make requests for data sharing and place such data in appropriate data infrastructures or trusts. This presents a conflict of interest, as a data trust or government body can empower itself to be the data trustee. Such cases should be addressed within the scope of the framework.

Clause 8.2 (vii): Level-playing field for all Indian actors

In terms of this clause the “Non-Personal Data Authority (Authority) will ensure a level playing field for all Indian actors to fulfil the objective of maximising Indian data’s value to the Indian economy”. The emphasis on ensuring a level playing field for only Indian actors instead of non-discriminatory platform for all concerned actors irrespective of the country/nationality of the actor has the potential of violating India’s trade obligations under the WTO. Member states of the WTO are essentially restricted from discriminating between products and services coming from different WTO Members, and between foreign and domestic products and services unless they can avail of exceptions. There is also no clarity on what constitutes ‘Indian Actors’, would a Multi-National Corporation with its headquarters in a foreign State, but its subsidiaries in India also come within its ambit.

Clause 8.2 (x): Composition of the Authority

Clause 8.2 (x) states that the Authority will have some members with relevant industry experience. However, apart from this clause, the report is silent on the composition of the Authority. The report recognises that Authority will need individuals/organisations with specialised knowledge, i.e. data governance, technology, latest research and innovation in the field of non-personal data), however, it does not mention or refer to the role of civil society organisations and the need for representation from such organisations in the Authority.

The report frequently alludes to non-personal data being used for the best interest of the data principal and therefore, it is essential that the composition of the Authority reflect the inherent asymmetry of power between the data principal and the State. Considering that the Authority will also be responsible for sharing of community data and with determining the code of conduct for sharing of such data, it is important that the Authority also has adequate representation from civil society organisations along with groups or individuals having the necessary technological and legal skills.

Clause 8.2 (iii) and (vi): Roles and Responsibility of the Authority

A majority of the datasets in the country comprise of ‘mixed datasets’, i.e. it consists of both personal and non-personal data. However, there is lack of clarity about the coordination between the Data Protection Authority constituted under the PDP Bill and the Non-Personal Data Authority with regard to the regulation of such datasets. The Report refers to the European Union which provides that the Non-Personal Data Regulation applies to the Non-Personal Data of mixed datasets; if the Non-Personal Data part and the personal data parts are ‘inextricably linked’, the General Data Protection Regulation apply to the whole mixed dataset. However, it is unclear whether the Report also proposes the same mechanism for the regulation of mixed datasets.

Further, the contours of the enforcement role of the Committee should be specified and clearly laid down. Will the Committee also have penal powers as prescribed for the Data Protection Authority under the PDP Bill? Also, will the privacy concerns emanating from the risk of re-anonymisation of data be addressed by the NPD Committee or by the DPA under the PDP Bill. Ideally, it should be specified that any such privacy concerns will fall within the domain of the DPA as the data is then converted into personal data and the DPA will be empowered to deal with such issues.

Endnotes

[1] See Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. (2020). National Digital Health Blueprint. Government of India. https://main.mohfw.gov.in/sites/default/files/Final%20NDHB%20report_0.pdf; Tandon, A. (2019). Big Data and Reproductive Health in India: A Case Study of the Mother and Child Tracking System. https://cis-india.org/raw/big-data-reproductive-health-india-mcts

[2] Taylor, L., Floridi, L., van der Sloot, B. eds. (2017) Group Privacy: new challenges of data technologies. Dordrecht: Springer.

[3] Mittelstadt, B. (2017). From Individual to Group Privacy in Big Data Analytics. Philos. Technol. 30, 475–494.

[4] See Taylor, L., Floridi, L., van der Sloot, B. eds. (2017) Group Privacy: new challenges of data technologies. Dordrecht: Springer; Tisne, M. (n.d). The Data Delusion: Protecting Individual Data Isn't Enough When The Harm is Collective. Stanford Cyber Policy Centre. https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/publication/data-delusion

[5] Rocher, L., Hendrickx, J.M. & de Montjoye, Y. (2019). Estimating the success of re-identifications in incomplete datasets using generative models. Nat Commun 10, 3069 . https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-10933-3

[6] Finck, M. & Pallas, F. (2020). They who must not be identified—distinguishing personal from non-personal data under the GDPR. International Data Privacy Law, 10 (1), 11–36. https://doi.org/10.1093/idpl/ipz026

[7] European Commission (2020). Communication From The Commission To The European Parliament, The Council, The European Economic And Social Committee And The Committee Of The Regions: A European strategy for data. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?qid=1593073685620&uri=CELEX:52020DC0066

[8] Modrall, Jay. (2019). Antitrust risks and Big Data. Norton Rose Fullbright. https://www.nortonrosefulbright.com/en-in/knowledge/publications/64c13505/antitrust-risks-and-big-data

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/inputs-to-report-on-non-personal-data-governance-framework

Gender, Health, & Surveillance in India - A Panel Discussion

Aayush Rathi and Ambika Tandon — 2020-12-23T14:03:13Z

Women and LGBTHIAQ-identifying persons face intensive and varied forms of surveillance as they access reproductive health systems. Increasingly, these systems are also undergoing rapid digitisation. The panel was set-up to discuss the discursive, experiential and policy implications of these data-intensive developments on access to public health and welfare systems by women and LGBTHIAQ-identifying persons in India. The panelists presented studies undertaken as part of two projects at CIS, one of which is supported by Privacy International, UK, and the other by Big Data for Development network established by International Development Research Centre, Canada.

Event note and agenda: Read (PDF)

Recording of the discussion: Watch (YouTube)

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/gender-health-surveillance-in-india-panel-discussion

Social Entitlements for the Transgender Community

Deepa Krishnappa and Tasneem Mewa — 2020-07-14T06:27:44Z

This report has been authored by Deepa Krishnappa and Tasneem Mewa, and edited by Ambika Tandon, Gurshabad Grover and Rajesh Srinivas.

This report is part one of a two-part series studying the impact of data systems and digital technology on the lives of sexual minorities and sex workers. This project has been jointly conducted by CIS and Sangama.

Abstract

This report discusses access to social entitlements and sex reassignment surgery (SRS) among the transgender community in Kolar, Karnataka. We discuss the barriers to accessing gender-affirmative documentation, which in turn poses challenges to welfare entitlements and public healthcare. The data collection for the report was undertaken by union leaders affiliated with Sangama in the months of June to August 2018. The report seeks to demonstrate both the resilience of and discrimination against transgender peoples by individuals (family and friends) and access to health, legal, and social services. We conclude that the inability to exercise one’s rights is demonstrative of circuitous and exclusionary social systems.

The full report can be accessed here.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/social-entitlements-for-the-transgender-community

Brindaalakshmi.K - Gendering of Development Data in India: Beyond the Binary

Brindaalakshmi.K — 2020-06-30T10:26:40Z

This report by Brindaalakshmi.K seeks to understand the gendering of development data in India: collection of data and issuance of government (foundational and functional) identity documents to persons identifying outside the cis/binary genders of female and male, and the data misrepresentations, barriers to accessing public and private services, and informational exclusions that still remain. Sumandro Chattapadhyay edited the report and Puthiya Purayil Sneha offered additional editorial support. This work was undertaken as part of the Big Data for Development network supported by International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Canada.

Part 1 - Introduction, Research Method, and Summary of Findings: Download (PDF)

Part 2 - Legal Rights and Enumeration Process: Download (PDF)

Part 3 - Identity Documents and Access to Welfare: Download (PDF)

Part 4 - Digital Services and Data Challenges: Download (PDF)

India has been under a national lockdown due to the global outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic since late March 2020. Although transgender persons or individuals who do not identify with the gender of their assigned sex at birth, fall into the eligibility category for the relief measures announced by the State, the implementation of the relief measures has seen to be inefficient in different states [1] of the country [2]. Many transgender persons still do not have proper identification documents in their preferred name and gender that can help them with claiming any welfare that is available [3].

Historically, the situation of transgender persons in India has been so, even prior to the present pandemic. A qualitative research study titled Gendering of Development Data in India: Beyond the Binary was undertaken during October 2018 - December 2019, to understand the gendering of development data in India, collection of data and issuance of government (foundational and functional) identity documents to persons identifying outside the cis/binary genders of female and male, and the data misrepresentations, barriers to accessing public and private services, and informational exclusions that still remain.

The interviews for this study were conducted in late 2018 and this report was completed in the beginning of 2020, after India went through an extended national debate on and finally enactment of the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act during 2019. Three key observations from this study are presented in this blog post. Although these observations were made prior to the release of the draft rules of the new law, it is important to note that the law along with the draft rules in its present version will likely aggrevate the data and social exclusions faced by the transgender community in India.

Observation 1: The need for data has sidestepped the state’s responsibility to address the human rights of its people

The present global development agenda is to leave no one behind [4]. The effort to leave no one behind has shifted the focus of the state towards collecting data on different population groups. The design of and access to welfare programmes relies heavily on the availability of data. The impact of these programmes are again measured and understood as reflected by data. This shift in focus to data has led to further exclusion of already disenfranchised groups including the transgender community [5]. The problem with this lies in the framing of the development discourse as one that demands data as the prerequisite to access welfare benefits.

However, there are significant issues with the data on transgender persons that has been fed into different national and state-level databases, beginning with the census of 2011. For the first time, census of 2011 attempted to enumerate transgender persons. However, the enumeration of transgender persons for the census of 2011 has been severely criticised by the transgender community due to lack of

Clear distinction between sex and gender in the census data collection process,
Community consultation in designing the enumeration process, and
Inclusion of all transgender identities, among others.

However, this flawed data set is being used as the primary data for fund allocation across different states for transgender people’s inclusion, note respondents. Further, any person identifying outside the gender of their assigned sex at birth faces the additional burden of proving their gender identity to access any welfare benefit. However, cisgendered men or women are never asked to prove their gender identity. The need for data from a marginalised population group without addressing the structural problems has only led to further exclusion of this already invisible group of individuals, note respondents. Further, the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019 was passed despite the severe criticisms from the transgender community, human rights activist groups [6] and even opposition political parties [7] in India for several reasons [8].

Observation 2: Replication of existing offline challenges by digital systems in multiple data sources, continues to keep transgender persons excluded

Digitisation was supposed to remove existing offline challenges and enable more people centric systems [9]. However, digital systems seem to have replicated the existing offline challenges. In several cases, digitisation has added to the complexities involved.

The replication of challenges begins with the assumption that digital processes are the best way to collect data on transgender persons. Both level of literacy and digital literacy are low among transgender persons in India. According to a report by the National Human Rights Commission [10], nearly 50% of transgender persons have studied less than Class X. This has a significant effect on their access to different rights.

Access to mobile phones is assumed to bridge this access gap to online systems and services. However, observations from different respondents suggest otherwise. Additionally, due to their gender identity, transgender individuals face different set of challenges in procuring valid identification documents required to enter data systems, note respondents. This includes but not limited to:

Lack of standardised online or offline processes to aid in changing their documents and vary within each state in different documents.
Procuring any identification document in preferred name and gender requires existing identification documents in given name and assigned gender, in both online and offline processes. However, due to the stigma with their gender identity, transgender persons often run away from home with no identification document in their assigned name and gender.
With or without an existing ID document, individuals have to go through a tedious offline legal process to change their name and gender on different documents.
Information on such processes, digital or otherwise are usually available only to individuals who are educated or associated with a non-profit organisation working with the community. The challenges are higher for individuals with neither.

Observation 3: Private big data is not good enough as an alternative source of evidence for designing welfare services for transgender persons

Globally, public private partnerships for big data are being pushed through different initiatives like Data Collaboratives [11] and UN Global Pulse [12], among others. These private partnerships are being seen as key to using big data for official statistics, which can then aid in making welfare decisions [13]. However, the respondents note that the different private big data sources are not good enough to make welfare decisions for various reasons including but not limited to:

Dependency on government documents: Access to any private service system like banking, healthcare, housing or education by any individual requires verification using some proof of identity. The discrimination and challenges in procuring government issued identification documents impacts the ability of transgender persons to enter private data systems. This in turn impacts their access to services.
Misrepresentation in data: The dependency of private services on government issued documents / government recorded data, and hierarchy among such documents/data and the continued misrepresentation of transgender people, impacts the big data generated by private service providers. Due to the stigma faced, many transgender persons avoid using public healthcare systems for other medical conditions. The heavy dependency on private health care and lower usage of public health systems, results in insufficient big data on transgender persons, created by both public and private medical care and hence cannot be used to design health related welfare services.
Social media data issues: Different websites and apps also use social media login as the ID verification mechanism. Since not all transgender persons are out to their family and friends about their gender identity, they often tend to have multiple social media accounts with different names and gender to protect their identity. When open about their gender identity, harassment and bullying of transgender persons with violent threats or sexually lucid remarks are quite common on social media platforms. Online privacy therefore continues to be a serious concern for them. Disclosing their transgender status also enables the system to predict user patterns of a vulnerable group with potential for abuse, note respondents.

In conclusion, the present global pandemic has further amplified the inherent flaws in the present data-driven welfare system in the country and its impacts on a marginalised population group like transgender persons in the country. Globally, gender in development data is seen in binary genders of male and female, leaving behind transgender individuals or those who do not identify with the gender of their assigned sex at birth. So the dominant binary gender data conversation is in fact leaving people behind. With the regressive Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act of 2019 and its rules, this inadequacy in the global development agenda related to gender equality is felt at an amplified scale.

Building on the work of Dr. Usha Ramanathan, a renowned human rights activist, I say that data collection and monitoring systems that tag, track, and profile transgender persons placing them under surveillance, have consequences beyond the denial of services, and enter into the arena of criminalising for being beyond the binary [14]. The vulnerabilities of their gender identity exacerbates the threat to freedom. With their freedom threatened, expecting people to be forthcoming about self-identifying themselves in their preferred name and gender, so as to ensure that they are counted in data-driven development interventions and can thus access their constitutionally guaranteed rights, goes against the very idea of sustainable development and human rights.

References

[1] Kumar. V (2020, May 13). In Jharkhand, a Mockery of 'Right to Food' as Lockdown Relief Measures Fail to Deliver. The Wire. Retrieved from: https://thewire.in/food/lockdown-jharkhand-hunger-deaths-corruption-food

[2] Manoj. C.K. (2020, April 24). COVID-19: Thousands pushed to starvation due to faulty biometric system in Bihar. DownToEarth. Retrieved from: https://www.downtoearth.org.in/news/food/covid-19-thousands-pushed-to-starvation-due-to-faulty-biometric-system-in-bihar-70681

[3] G. Ram Mohan. (2020, May 01). Eviction Fear Heightens as Lockdown Signals Loss of Livelihood for Transgender People. The Wire. Retrieved from: https://thewire.in/rights/transgender-people-lockdown-coronavirus

[4] UN Statistics (2016). The Sustainable Development Goals Report 2016. United Nations Statistics. Retrieved from: https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/report/2016/leaving-no-one-behind

[5] Chakrabarti. A (2020, April 25). Visibly Invisible: The Plight Of Transgender Community Due To India's COVID-19 Lockdown. Outlook. Retrieved from: https://www.outlookindia.com/website/story/opinion-visibly-invisible-the-plight-of-transgender-community-due-to-indias-covid-19-lockdown/351468

[6] Knight Kyle. (2019, December 05). India’s Transgender Rights Law Isn’t Worth Celebrating. Human Rights Watch. Retrieved from: https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/12/06/indias-transgender-rights-law-isnt-worth-celebrating

[7] Dharmadhikari Sanyukta. (2019). Trans Bill 2019 passed in Lok Sabha: Why the trans community in India is rejecting it. The News Minute. August 05. Retrieved from: https://www.thenewsminute.com/article/trans-bill-2019-passed-lok-sabha-why-trans-community-india-rejecting-it-106695

[8] Editorial. (2018, December 20). Rights, revised: on the Transgender Persons Bill, 2018. The Hindu. Retrieved from: https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/editorial/rights-revised/article25783926.ece

[9] Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, Government of India. (2018). National e-Governance Plan. Retrieved from: https://meity.gov.in/divisions/national-e-governance-plan

[10] Kerala Development Society. (2017, February). Study on Human Rights of Transgender as a Third Gender. Retrieved from: https://nhrc.nic.in/sites/default/files/Study_HR_transgender_03082018.pdf

[11] Verhulst, S. G., Young, A., Winowatan, M., & Zahuranec, A. J. (2019, October). Leveraging Private Data for Public Good: A Descriptive Analysis and Typology of Existing Practices. GovLab, Tandon School of Engineering, New York University. Retrieved from: https://datacollaboratives.org/static/files/existing-practices-report.pdf

[12] Kirkpatrick, R., & Vacarelu, F. (2018, December). A Decade of Leveraging Big Data for Sustainable Development. UN Chronicle, Vol. LV, Nos. 3 & 4. Retrieved from: https://unchronicle.un.org/article/decade-leveraging-big-data-sustainable-development

[13] See [11].

[14] Ramanathan. U. (2014, May 02). Biometrics Use for Social Protection Programmes in India Risk Violating Human Rights of the Poor. UNRISD. Retrieved from: http://www.unrisd.org/sp-hr-ramanathan

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/brindaalakshmi-k-gendering-development-data-india

The Mother and Child Tracking System - understanding data trail in the Indian healthcare systems

ambika — 2019-12-30T17:18:05Z

This article was first published by Privacy International, on October 17, 2019

Case study of MCTS: Read

On October 17th 2019, the UN Special Rapporteur (UNSR) on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, Philip Alston, released his thematic report on digital technology, social protection and human rights. Understanding the impact of technology on the provision of social protection – and, by extent, its impact on people in vulnerable situations – has been part of the work the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) and Privacy International (PI) have been doing.

Earlier this year, PI responded to the UNSR's consultation on this topic. We highlighted what we perceived as some of the most pressing issues we had observed around the world when it comes to the use of technology for the delivery of social protection and its impact on the right to privacy and dignity of benefit claimants.

Among them, automation and the increasing reliance on AI is a topic of particular concern - countries including Australia, India, the UK and the US have already started to adopt these technologies in digital welfare programmes. This adoption raises significant concerns about a quickly approaching future, in which computers decide whether or not we get access to the services that allow us to survive. There's an even more pressing problem. More than a few stories have emerged revealing the extent of the bias in many AI systems, biases that create serious issues for people in vulnerable situations, who are already exposed to discrimination, and made worse by increasing reliance on automation.

Beyond the issue of AI, we think it is important to look at welfare and automation with a wider lens. In order for an AI to function it needs to be trained on a dataset, so that it can understand what it is looking for. That requires the collection large quantities of data. That data would then be used to train and AI to recognise what fraudulent use of public benefits would look like. That means we need to think about every data point being collected as one that, in the long run, will likely be used for automation purposes.

These systems incentivise the mass collection of people's data, across a huge range of government services, from welfare to health - where women and gender-diverse people are uniquely impacted. CIS have been looking specifically at reproductive health programmes in India, work which offers a unique insight into the ways in which mass data collection in systems like these can enable abuse.

Reproductive health programmes in India have been digitising extensive data about pregnant women for over a decade, as part of multiple health information systems. These can be seen as precursors to current conceptions of big data systems within health informatics. India’s health programme instituted such an information system in 2009, the Mother and Child Tracking System (MCTS), which is aimed at collecting data on maternal and child health. The Centre for Internet and Society, India, undertook a case study of the MCTS as an example of public data-driven initiatives in reproductive health. The case study was supported by the Big Data for Development network supported by the International Development Research Centre, Canada. The objective of the case study was to focus on the data flows and architecture of the system, and identify areas of concern as newer systems of health informatics are introduced on top of existing ones. The case study is also relevant from the perspective of Sustainable Development Goals, which aim to rectify the tendency of global development initiatives to ignore national HIS and create purpose-specific monitoring systems.

After being launched in 2011, 120 million (12 crore) pregnant women and 111 million (11 crore) children have been registered on the MCTS as of 2018. The central database collects data on each visit of the woman from conception to 42 days postpartum, including details of direct benefit transfer of maternity benefit schemes. While data-driven monitoring is a critical exercise to improve health care provision, publicly available documents on the MCTS reflect the complete absence of robust data protection measures. The risk associated with data leaks are amplified due to the stigma associated with abortion, especially for unmarried women or survivors of rape.

The historical landscape of reproductive healthcare provision and family planning in India has been dominated by a target-based approach. Geared at population control, this approach sought to maximise family planning targets without protecting decisional autonomy and bodily privacy for women. At the policy level, this approach was shifted in favour of a rights-based approach to family planning in 1994. However, targets continue to be set for women’s sterilisation on the ground. Surveillance practices in reproductive healthcare are then used to monitor under-performing regions and meet sterilisation targets for women, this continues to be the primary mode of contraception offered by public family planning initiatives.

More recently, this database - among others collecting data about reproductive health - is adding biometric information through linkage with the Aadhaar infrastructure. This data adds to the sensitive information being collected and stored without adhering to any publicly available data protection practices. Biometric linkage is aimed to fulfill multiple functions - primarily authentication of welfare beneficiaries of the national maternal benefits scheme. Making Aadhaar details mandatory could directly contribute to the denial of service to legitimate patients and beneficiaries - as has already been seen in some cases.

The added layer of biometric surveillance also has the potential to enable other forms of abuse of privacy for pregnant women. In 2016, the union minister for Women and Child Development under the previous government suggested the use of strict biometric-based monitoring to discourage gender-biased sex selection. Activists critiqued the policy for its paternalistic approach to reduce the rampant practice of gender-biased sex selection, rather than addressing the root causes of gender inequality in the country.

There is an urgent need to rethink the objectives and practices of data collection in public reproductive health provision in India. Rather than continued focus on meeting high-level targets, monitoring systems should enable local usage and protect the decisional autonomy of patients. In addition, the data protection legislation in India - expected to be tabled in the next session in parliament - should place free and informed consent, and informational privacy at the centre of data-driven practices in reproductive health provision.

This is why the systematic mass collection of data in health services is all the more worrying. When the collection of our data becomes a condition for accessing health services, it is not only a threat to our right to health that should not be conditional on data sharing but also it raises questions as to how this data will be used in the age of automation.

This is why understanding what data is collected and how it is collected in the context of health and social protection programmes is so important.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/privacy-international-ambika-tandon-october-17-2019-mother-and-child-tracking-system-understanding-data-trail-indian-healthcare

Big Data and Reproductive Health in India: A Case Study of the Mother and Child Tracking System

ambika — 2019-12-06T04:57:55Z

In this case study undertaken as part of the Big Data for Development (BD4D) network, Ambika Tandon evaluates the Mother and Child Tracking System (MCTS) as data-driven initiative in reproductive health at the national level in India. The study also assesses the potential of MCTS to contribute towards the big data landscape on reproductive health in the country, as the Indian state’s imagination of health informatics moves towards big data.

Case study: Download (PDF)

Introduction

The reproductive health information ecosystem in India comprises of a range of different databases across state and national levels. These collect data through a combination of manual and digital tools. Two national-level databases have been launched by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare - the Health Management Information System (HMIS) in 2008, and the MCTS in 2009. 4 The MCTS focuses on collecting data on maternal and child health. It was instituted due to reported gaps in the HMIS, which records monthly data across health programmes including reproductive health. There are several other state-level initiatives on reproductive health data that have either been subsumed into, or run in parallel with, the MCTS.

With this case study, we aim to evaluate the MCTS as data-driven initiative in reproductive health at the national level. It will also assess its potential to contribute towards the big data landscape on reproductive health in the country, as the Indian state’s imagination of health informatics moves towards big data. The methodology for the case study involved a desk-based review of existing literature on the use of health information systems globally, as well as analysis of government reports, journal articles, media coverage, policy documents, and other material on the MCTS.

The first section of this report details the theoretical framing of the case study, drawing on the feminist critique of reproductive data systems. The second section maps the current landscape of reproductive health data produced by the state in India, with a focus on data flows, and barriers to data collection and analysis at the local and national level. The case of abortion data is used to further the argument of flawed data collection systems at the national level. Section three briefly discusses the state’s imagination of reproductive health policy and the role of data systems through a discussion on the National Health Policy, 2017 and the National Health Stack, 2018. Finally, we make some policy recommendations and identify directions for future research, taking into account the ongoing shift towards big data globally to democratise reproductive healthcare.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/big-data-reproductive-health-india-mcts

Can data ever know who we really are?

sumandro — 2019-12-06T05:02:53Z

This is an excerpt from an essay by Zara Rahman, written for and published as part of the Bodies of Evidence collection of Deep Dives. The Bodies of Evidence collection, edited by Bishakha Datta and Richa Kaul Padte, is a collaboration between Point of View and the Centre for Internet and Society, undertaken as part of the Big Data for Development Network supported by International Development Research Centre, Canada.

Please read the full essay on Deep Dives: Can data ever know who we really are?

Zara Rahman: The Engine Room, Website, and Twitter

If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.
– Audre Lorde

The proliferation of digital data and the technologies that allow us to gather that data can be used in another way too — to allow us to define for ourselves who we are, and what we are.

Amidst a growing political climate of fear, mistrust and competition for resources, activists and advocates working in areas that are stigmatised within their societies often need data to ‘prove’ that what they are working on matters. One way of doing this is by gathering data through crowdsourcing. Crowdsourced data isn’t ‘representative’, as statisticians say, but gathering data through unofficial means can be a valuable asset for advocates. For example, data collating the experiences of women who have reported incidents of sexual violence to the police in India, can then be used to advocate for better police responses, and to inform women of their rights. Deservedly or not, quantifiable data takes precedence over personal histories and lived experience in getting the much-desired currency of attention.

And used right, quantifiable data — whether it’s crowdsourced or not — can also be a powerful tool for advocates. Now, we can use quantifiable data to prove beyond a question of a doubt that disabled people, queer people, people from lower castes, face intersecting discrimination, prejudice, and systemic injustices in their lives. It’s an unnecessary repetition in a way, because anybody from those communities could have told reams upon reams of stories about discrimination — all without any need for counting.

Regardless, to play within this increasingly digitised system, we need to repeat what we’ve been saying in a new, digitally-legible way. And to do that, we need to collect data from people who have often only ever been de-humanised as data subjects.

Artist and educator Mimi Onuoha writes about the challenges that arise while collecting such data, from acknowledging the humans behind that collection to understanding that missing data points might tell just as much of a story as the data that has been collected. She outlines how digital data means that we have to (intentionally or not) make certain choices about what we value. And the collection of this data means making human choices solid, and often (though not always) making these choices illegible to others.

We speak of black boxes when it comes to the mystery choices that algorithms make, but the same could be said of the many human decisions that are made in categorising data too, whether that be choosing to limit the gender drop-down field to just ‘male/female’ as with Fitbits, or a variety of apps incorrectly assuming that all people who menstruate also want to know about their ‘fertile window’. In large systems with many humans and machines at work, we have no way of interrogating why a category was merged or not, of understanding why certain anomalies were ignored rather than incorporated, or of questioning why certain assumptions were made.

The only thing we can do is to acknowledge these limitations, and try to use those very systems to our advantage, building our own alternatives or workarounds, collecting our own data, and using the data that is out there to tell the stories that matter to us.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/zara-rahman-can-data-ever-know-who-we-really-are

Data Infrastructures and Inequities: Why Does Reproductive Health Surveillance in India Need Our Urgent Attention?

Aayush Rathi and Ambika Tandon — 2019-12-30T16:44:32Z

In order to bring out certain conceptual and procedural problems with health monitoring in the Indian context, this article by Aayush Rathi and Ambika Tandon posits health monitoring as surveillance and not merely as a “data problem.” Casting a critical feminist lens, the historicity of surveillance practices unveils the gendered power differentials wedded into taken-for-granted “benign” monitoring processes. The unpacking of the Mother and Child Tracking System and the National Health Stack reveals the neo-liberal aspirations of the Indian state.

The article was first published by EPW Engage, Vol. 54, Issue No. 6, on 9 February 2019.

Framing Reproductive Health as a Surveillance Question

The approach of the postcolonial Indian state to healthcare has been Malthusian, with the prioritisation of family planning and birth control (Hodges 2004). Supported by the notion of socio-economic development arising out of a “modernisation” paradigm, the target-based approach to achieving reduced fertility rates has shaped India’s reproductive and child health (RCH) programme (Simon-Kumar 2006).

This is also the context in which India’s abortion law, the Medical Termination of Pregnancy (MTP) Act, was framed in 1971, placing the decisional privacy of women seeking abortions in the hands of registered medical practitioners. The framing of the MTP act invisibilises females seeking abortions for non-medical reasons within the legal framework. The exclusionary provisions only exacerbated existing gaps in health provisioning, as access to safe and legal abortions had already been curtailed by severe geographic inequalities in funding, infrastructure, and human resources. The state has concomitantly been unable to meet contraceptive needs of married couples or reduce maternal and infant mortality rates in large parts of the country, mediating access along the lines of class, social status, education, and age (Sanneving et al 2013).

While the official narrative around the RCH programme transitioned to focus on universal access to healthcare in the 1990s, the target-based approach continues to shape the reality on the ground. The provision of reproductive healthcare has been deeply unequal and, in some cases, in hospitals. These targets have been known to be met through the practice of forced, and often unsafe, sterilisation, in conditions of absence of adequate provisions or trained professionals, pre-sterilisation counselling, or alternative forms of contraception (Sama and PLD 2018). Further, patients have regularly been provided cash incentives, foreclosing the notion of free consent, especially given that the target population of these camps has been women from marginalised economic classes in rural India.

Placing surveillance studies within a feminist praxis allows us to frame the reproductive health landscape as more than just an ill-conceived, benign monitoring structure. The critical lens becomes useful for highlighting that taken-for-granted structures of monitoring are wedded with power differentials: genetic screening in fertility clinics, identification documents such as birth certificates, and full-body screeners are just some of the manifestations of this (Adrejevic 2015). Emerging conversations around feminist surveillance studies highlight that these data systems are neither benign nor free of gendered implications (Andrejevic 2015). In continual remaking of the social, corporeal body as a data actor in society, such practices render some bodies normative and obfuscate others, based on categorisations put in place by the surveiller.

In fact, the history of surveillance can be traced back to the colonial state where it took the form of systematic sexual and gendered violence enacted upon indigenous populations in order to render them compliant (Rifkin 2011; Morgensen 2011). Surveillance, then, manifests as a “scientific” rationalisation of complex social hieroglyphs (such as reproductive health) into formats enabling administrative interventions by the modern state. Lyon (2001) has also emphasised how the body emerged as the site of surveillance in order for the disciplining of the “irrational, sensual body”—essential to the functioning of the modern nation-state—to effectively happen.

Questioning the Information and Communications Technology for Development (ICT4D) and Big Data for Development (BD4D) Rhetoric

Information and Communications Technology (ICT) and data-driven approaches to the development of a robust health information system, and by extension, welfare, have been offered as solutions to these inequities and exclusions in access to maternal and reproductive healthcare in the country.

The move towards data-driven development in the country commenced with the introduction of the Health Management Information System in Andhra Pradesh in 2008, and the Mother and Child Tracking System (MCTS) nationally in 2011. These are reproductive health information systems (HIS) that collect granular data about each pregnancy from the antenatal to the post-natal period, at the level of each sub-centre as well as primary and community health centre. The introduction of HIS comprised cross-sectoral digitisation measures that were a part of the larger national push towards e-governance; along with health, thirty other distinct areas of governance, from land records to banking to employment, were identified for this move towards the digitalised provisioning of services (MeitY 2015).

The HIS have been seen as playing a critical role in the ecosystem of health service provision globally. HIS-based interventions in reproductive health programming have been envisioned as a means of: (i) improving access to services in the context of a healthcare system ridden with inequalities; (ii) improving the quality of services provided, and (iii) producing better quality data to facilitate the objectives of India’s RCH programme, including family planning and population control. Accordingly, starting 2018, the MCTS is being replaced by the RCH portal in a phased manner. The RCH portal, in areas where the ANMOL (ANM Online) application has been introduced, captures data real-time through tablets provided to health workers (MoHFW 2015).

A proposal to mandatorily link the Aadhaar with data on pregnancies and abortions through the MCTS/RCH has been made by the union minister for Women and Child Development as a deterrent to gender-biased sex selection (Tembhekar 2016). The proposal stems from the prohibition of gender-biased sex selection provided under the Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostics Techniques (PCPNDT) Act, 1994. The approach taken so far under the PCPNDT Act, 2014 has been to regulate the use of technologies involved in sex determination. However, the steady decline in the national sex ratio since the passage of the PCPNDT Act provides a clear indication that the regulation of such technology has been largely ineffective. A national policy linking Aadhaar with abortions would be aimed at discouraging gender-biased sex selection through state surveillance, in direct violation of a female’s right to decisional privacy with regards to their own body.

Linking Aadhaar would also be used as a mechanism to enable direct benefit transfer (DBT) to the beneficiaries of the national maternal benefits scheme. Linking reproductive health services to the Aadhaar ecosystem has been critiqued because it is exclusionary towards women with legitimate claims towards abortions and other reproductive services and benefits, and it heightens the risk of data breaches in a cultural fabric that already stigmatises abortions. The bodies on which this stigma is disproportionately placed, unmarried or disabled females, for instance, experience the harms of visibility through centralised surveillance mechanisms more acutely than others by being penalised for their deviance from cultural expectations. This is in accordance with the theory of "data extremes,” wherein marginalised communities are seen as living on the extremes of data capture, leading to a data regime that either refuses to recognise them as legitimate entities or subjects them to overpolicing in order to discipline deviance (Arora 2016). In both developed and developing contexts, the broader purpose of identity management has largely been to demarcate legitimate and illegitimate actors within a population, either within the framework of security or welfare.

Potential Harms of the Data Model of Reproductive Health Provisioning

Informational privacy and decisional privacy are critically shaped by data flows and security within the MCTS/RCH. No standards for data sharing and storage, or anonymisation and encryption of data have been implemented despite role-based authentication (NHSRC and Taurus Glocal 2011). The risks of this architectural design are further amplified in the context of the RCH/ANMOL where data is captured real-time. In the absence of adequate safeguards against data leaks, real-time data capture risks the publicising of reproductive health choices in an already stigmatised environment. This opens up avenues for further dilution of autonomy in making future reproductive health choices.

Several core principles of informational privacy, such as limitations regarding data collection and usage, or informed consent, also need to be reworked within this context.^[1] For instance, the centrality of the requirement of “free, informed consent” by an individual would need to be replaced by other models, especially in the context of reproductive health of rape survivors who are vulnerable and therefore unable to exercise full agency. The ability to make a free and informed choice, already dismantled in the context of contemporary data regimes, gets further precluded in such contexts. The constraints on privacy in decisions regarding the body are then replicated in the domain of reproductive data collection.

What is uniform across these digitisation initiatives is their treatment of maternal and reproductive health as solely a medical event, framed as a data scarcity problem. In doing so, they tend to amplify the understanding of reproductive health through measurable indicators that ignore social determinants of health. For instance, several studies conducted in the rural Indian context have shown that the degree of women’s autonomy influences the degree of usage of pregnancy care, and that the uptake of pregnancy care was associated with village-level indicators such as economic development, provisioning of basic infrastructure and social cohesion. These contextual factors get overridden in pervasive surveillance systems that treat reproductive healthcare as comprising only of measurable indicators and behaviours, that are dependent on individual behaviour of practitioners and women themselves, rather than structural gaps within the system.

While traditionally associated with state governance, the contemporary surveillance regime is experienced as distinct from its earlier forms due to its reliance on a nexus between surveillance by the state and private institutions and actors, with both legal frameworks and material apparatuses for data collection and sharing (Shepherd 2017). As with historical forms of surveillance, the harms of contemporary data regimes accrue disproportionately among already marginalised and dissenting communities and individuals. Data-driven surveillance has been critiqued for its excesses in multiple contexts globally, including in the domains of predictive policing, health management, and targeted advertising (Mason 2015). In the attempts to achieve these objectives, surveillance systems have been criticised for their reliance on replicating past patterns, reifying proximity to a hetero-patriarchal norm (Haggerty and Ericson 2000). Under data-driven surveillance systems, this proximity informs the preexisting boxes of identity for which algorithmic representations of the individual are formed. The boxes are defined contingent on the distinct objectives of the particular surveillance project, collating disparate pieces of data flows and resulting in the recasting of the singular offline self into various 'data doubles' (Haggerty and Ericson 2000). Refractive, rather than reflective, the data doubles have implications for the physical, embodied life of individual with an increasing number of service provisioning relying on the data doubles (Lyon 2001). Consider, for instance, apps on menstruation, fertility, and health, and wearables such as fitness trackers and pacers, that support corporate agendas around what a woman’s healthy body should look, be or behave like (Lupton 2014). Once viewed through the lens of power relations, the fetishised, apolitical notion of the data “revolution” gives way to what we may better understand as “dataveillance.”

Towards a Networked State and a Neo-liberal Citizen

Following in this tradition of ICT being treated as the solution to problems plaguing India’s public health information system, a larger, all-pervasive healthcare ecosystem is now being proposed by the Indian state (NITI Aayog 2018). Termed the National Health Stack, it seeks to create a centralised electronic repository of health records of Indian citizens with the aim of capturing every instance of healthcare service usage. Among other functions, it also envisions a platform for the provisioning of health and wellness-based services that may be dispensed by public or private actors in an attempt to achieve universal health coverage. By allowing private parties to utilise the data collected through pullable open application program interfaces (APIs), it also fits within the larger framework of the National Health Policy 2017 that envisions the private sector playing a significant role in the provision of healthcare in India. It also then fits within the state–private sector nexus that characterises dataveillance. This, in turn, follows broader trends towards market-driven solutions and private financing of health sector reform measures that have already had profound consequences on the political economy of healthcare worldwide (Joe et al 2018).

These initiatives are, in many ways, emblematic of the growing adoption of network governance reform by the Indian state (Newman 2001). This is a stark shift from its traditional posturing as the hegemonic sovereign nation state. This shift entails the delayering from large, hierarchical and unitary government systems to horizontally arranged, more flexible, relatively dispersed systems.^[2] The former govern through the power of rules and law, while the latter take the shape of self-regulating networks such as public–private contractual arrangements (Snellen 2005). ICTs have been posited as an effective tool in enabling the transition to network governance by enhancing local governance and interactive policymaking enabling the co-production of knowledge (Ferlie et al 2011). The development of these capabilities is also critical to addressing “wicked problems” such as healthcare (Rittel and Webber 1973).^[3] The application of the techno-deterministic, data-driven model to reproductive healthcare provision, then, resembles a fetishised approach to technological change. The NHSRC describes this as the collection of data without an objective, leading to a disproportional burden on data collection over use (NHSRC and Taurus Glocal 2011).

The blurring of the functions of state and private actors is reflective of the neo-liberal ethic, which produces new practices of governmentality. Within the neo-liberal framework of reproductive healthcare, the citizen is constructed as an individual actor, with agency over and responsibility for their own health and well-being (Maturo et al 2016).

“Quantified Self” of the Neo-liberal Citizen

Nowhere can the manifestation of this neo-liberal citizen can be seen as clearly as in the “quantified self” movement. The quantified self movement refers to the emergence of a whole range of apps that enable the user to track bodily functions and record data to achieve wellness and health goals, including menstruation, fertility, pregnancies, and health indicators in the mother and baby. Lupton (2015) labels this as the emergence of the “digitised reproductive citizen,” who is expected to be attentive to her fertility and sexual behaviour to achieve better reproductive health goals. The practice of collecting data around reproductive health is not new to the individual or the state, as has been demonstrated by the discussion above. What is new in this regime of datafication under the self-tracking movement is the monetisation of reproductive health data by private actors, the labour for which is performed by the user. Focusing on embodiment draws attention to different kinds of exploitation engendered by reproductive health apps. Not only is data about the body collected and sold, the unpaid labour for collection is extracted from the user. The reproductive body can then be understood as a cyborg, or a woman-machine hybrid, systematically digitising its bodily functions for profit-making within the capitalist (re)production machine (Fotoloulou 2016). Accordingly, all major reproductive health tracking apps have a business model that relies on selling information about users for direct marketing of products around reproductive health and well-being (Felizi and Varon nd).

As has been pointed out in the case of big data more broadly, reproductive health applications (apps) facilitate the visibility of the female reproductive body in the public domain. Supplying anonymised data sets to medical researchers and universities fills some of the historical gaps in research around the female body and reproductive health. Reproductive and sexual health tracking apps globally provide their users a platform to engage with biomedical information around sexual and reproductive health. Through group chats on the platform, they are also able to engage with experiential knowledge of sexual and reproductive health. This could also help form transnational networks of solidarity around the body and health (Fotopoulou 2016).

This radical potential of network-building around reproductive and sexual health is, however, tempered to a large extent by the reconfiguration of gendered stereotypes through these apps. In a study on reproductive health apps on Google Play Store, Lupton (2014) finds that products targeted towards female users are marketed through the discourse of risk and vulnerability, while those targeted towards male users are framed within that of virility. Apart from reiterating gendered stereotypes around the male and female body, such a discourse assumes that the entire labour of family planning is performed by females. This same is the case with the MCTS/RCH.

Technological interventions such as reproductive health apps as well as HIS are based on the assumption that females have perfect control over decisions regarding their own bodies and reproductive health, despite this being disproved in India. The Guttmacher Institute (2014) has found that 60% of women in India report not having control over decisions regarding their own healthcare. The failure to account for the husband or the family as stakeholder in decision-making around reproductive health has been a historical failure of the family planning programme in India, and is now being replicated in other modalities. This notion of an autonomous citizen who is able to take responsibility of their own reproductive health and well-being does not hold true in the Indian context. It can even be seen as marginalising females who have already been excluded from the reproductive health system, as they are held responsible for their own inability to access healthcare.

Concluding Remarks

The interplay that emerges between reproductive health surveillance and data infrastructures is a complex one. It requires the careful positioning of the political nature of data collection and processing as well as its hetero-patriarchal and colonial legacies, within the need for effective utilisation of data for achieving developmental goals. Assessing this discourse through a feminist lens identifies the web of power relations in data regimes. This problematises narratives of technological solutions for welfare provision.

The reproductive healthcare framework in India then offers up a useful case study to assess these concerns. The growing adoption of ICT-based surveillance tools to equalise access to healthcare needs to be understood in the socio-economic, legal, and cultural context where these tools are being implemented. Increased surveillance has historically been associated with causing the structural gendered violence that it is now being offered as a solution to. This is a function of normative standards being constructed for reproductive behaviour that necessarily leave out broader definitions of reproductive health and welfare when viewed through a feminist lens. Within the larger context of health policymaking in India, moves towards privatisation then demonstrate the peculiarity of dataveillance as it functions through an unaccountable and pervasive overlapping of state and private surveillance practises. It remains to be seen how these trends in ICT-driven health policies affect access to reproductive rights and decisional privacy for millions of females in India and other parts of the global South.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/data-infrastructures-inequities-reproductive-health-surveillance-india

Exploring Big Data for Development: An Electricity Sector Case Study from India

sumandro — 2019-03-16T04:33:15Z

This working paper by Ritam Sengupta, Dr. Richard Heeks, Sumandro Chattapadhyay, and Dr. Christopher Foster draws from the field study undertaken by Ritam Sengupta, and is published by the Global Development Institute, University of Manchester. The field study was commissioned by the CIS, with support from the University of Manchester and the University of Sheffield.

Download the working paper: PDF

Abstract

This paper presents exploratory research into “data-intensive development” that seeks to inductively identify issues and conceptual frameworks of relevance to big data in developing countries. It presents a case study of big data innovations in “Stelcorp”; a state electricity corporation in India. In an attempt to address losses in electricity distribution, Stelcorp has introduced new digital meters throughout the distribution network to capture big data, and organisation-wide information systems that store and process and disseminate big data.

Emergent issues are identified across three domains: implementation, value and outcome. Implementation of big data has worked relatively well but technical and human challenges remain. The advent of big data has enabled some – albeit constrained – value addition in all areas of organisational operation: customer billing, fault and loss detection, performance measurement, and planning. Yet US$ tens of millions of investment in big data has brought no aggregate improvement in distribution losses or revenue collection. This can be explained by the wider outcome, with big data faltering in the face of external politics; in this case the electoral politics of electrification. Alongside this reproduction of power, the paper also reflects on the way in which big data has enabled shifts in the locus of power: from public to private sector; from labour to management; and from lower to higher levels of management.

A number of conceptual frameworks emerge as having analytical power in studying big data and global development. The information value chain model helps track both implementation and value-creation of big data projects. The design-reality gap model can be used to analyse the nature and extent of barriers facing big data projects in developing countries. And models of power – resource dependency, epistemic models, and wider frameworks – are all shown as helping understand the politics of big data.

Cross-posted from University of Manchester.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/exploring-big-data-for-development-an-electricity-sector-case-study-from-india

Workshop Report - UIDAI and Welfare Services: Exclusion and Countermeasures

vanya — 2019-03-16T04:34:11Z

This report presents summarised notes from a workshop organised by the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) on Saturday, August 27, 2016, to discuss, raise awareness of, and devise countermeasures to exclusion due to implementation of UID-based verification for and distribution of welfare services.

Introduction

The Centre for Internet and Society organised a workshop on "UIDAI and Welfare Services: Exclusion and Countermeasures" at the Institution of Agricultural on Technologists on August 27 in Bangalore to discuss, raise awareness of, and devise countermeasures to exclusion due to implementation of UID-based verification for and distribution of welfare services [1]. This was a follow-up to the workshop held in Delhi on “Understanding Aadhaar and its New Challenges” at the Centre for Studies in Science Policy, JNU on May 26th and 27th 2016 [2]. In this report we summarise the key concerns raised and the case studies presented by the participants at the workshop held on August 27, 2016.

Implementation of the UID Project

Question of Consent: The Aadhaar Act [3] states that the consent of the individual must be taken at the time of enrollment and authentication and it must be informed to him/her the purpose for which the data would be used. However, the Act does not provide for an opt-out mechanism and an individual is compelled to give consent to continue with the enrollment process or to complete an authentication.

Lack of Adherence to Court Orders: Despite of several orders by Supreme Court stating that use of Aadhaar cannot be made mandatory for the purpose of availing benefits and services, multiple state governments and departments have made it mandatory for a wide range of purposes like booking railway tickets [4], linking below the poverty line ration cards with Aadhaar [5], school examinations [6], food security, pension and scholarship [7], to name a few.

Misleading Advertisements: A concern was raised that individuals are being mislead in the necessity and purpose for enrollment into the project. For example, people have been asked to enrol by telling them that they might get excluded from the system and cannot get services like passports, banks, NREGA, salaries for government employees, denial of vaccinations, etc. Furthermore, the Supreme Court has ordered Aadhaar not be mandatory, yet people are being told that documentation or record keeping cannot be done without UID number.

Hybrid Governance: The participants pointed out that with the Aadhaar (Targeted delivery of financial and other subsidies, benefits and services) Act, 2016 (hereinafter referred to as Aadhaar Act, 2016 ) being partially enforced, multiple examples of exclusion as reported in the news are demonstrating how the Aadhaar project is creating a case of hybrid governance i.e private corporations playing a significant role in Governance. This can be seen in case of Aadhaar where we see many entities from private sector being involved in its implementation, as well as many software and hardware companies.

Lack of Transparency around Sharing of Biometric Data: The fact how and why the Government is relying on biometrics for welfare schemes is unclear and not known. Also, there is no information on how biometric data that is collected through the project is being used and its ability as an authenticating device. Along with that, there is very little information on companies that have been enlisted to hold and manage data and perform authentication.

Possibility of Surveillance: Multiple petitions and ongoing cases have raised concerns regarding the possibility of surveillance, tracking, profiling, convergence of data, and the opaque involvement of private companies involved in the project.

Denial of Information: In an RTI filed by one of the participant requesting to share the key contract for the project, it was refused on the grounds under section 8(1) (d) of the RTI Act, 2005. However, it was claimed that the provision would not be applicable since the contract was already awarded and any information disclosed to the Parliament should be disclosed to the citizens. The Central Information Commission issued a letter stating that the contractual obligation is over and a copy of the said agreement can be duly shared. However, it was discovered by the said participant that certain pages of the same were missing , which contained confidential information. When this issue went before appeal before the Information Commissioner, the IC gave an order to the IC in Delhi to comply with the previous order. However, it was communicated that limited financial information may be given, but not missing pages. Also, it was revealed that the UIDAI was supposed to share biometric data with NPR (by way of a MoU), but it has refused to give information since the intention was to discontinue NPR and wanted only UIDAI to collect data.

Concerns Arising from the Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) on Implementation of PAHAL (DBTL) Scheme

A presentation on the CAG compliance audit report of PAHAL on LPG [8] revealed how the society was made to believe that UID will help deal with the issue of duplication and collection as well as use of biometric data will help. The report also revealed that multiple LPG connections have the same Aadhaar number or same bank account number in the consumer database maintained by the OMCs, the bank account number of consumers were also not accurately recorded, scrutiny of the database revealed improper capture of Aadhaar numbers, and there was incorrect seeding of IFSC codes in consumer database. The participants felt that this was an example of how schemes that are being introduced for social welfare do not necessarily benefit the society, and on the contrary, has led to exclusion by design. For example, in the year 2011, by was of the The Liquefied Petroleum Gas (Regulation of Supply and Distribution) Amendment Order, 2011 [9], the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas made the Unique Identification Number (UID) under the Aadhaar project a must for availing LPG refills. This received a lot of public pushback, which led to non-implementation of the order. In October 2012, despite the UIDAI stating that the number was voluntary, a number of services began requiring the provision of an Aadhaar number for accessing benefits. In September 2013, when the first order on Aadhaar was passed by court [10], oil marketing companies and UIDAI approached the Supreme Court to change the same and allow them to make it mandatory, which was refused by the Court. Later in the year 2014, use of Aadhaar for subsidies was made mandatory. The participants further criticised the CAG report for revealing the manner in which linking Aadhaar with welfare schemes has allowed duplication and led to ghost beneficiaries where there is no information about who these people are who are receiving the benefits of the subsidies. For example, in Rajasthan, people are being denied their pension as they are being declared dead due to absence of information from the Aadhaar database.

It was said that the statistics of duplication mentioned in the report show how UIDAI (as it claims to ensure de-duplication of beneficiaries) is not required for this purpose and can be done without Aadhaar as well. Also, due to incorrect seeding of Aadhaar number many are being denied subsidy where there is no information regarding the number of people who have been denied the subsidy because of this. Considering these important facts from the audit report, the discussants concluded how the statistics reflect inflated claims by UIDAI and how the problems which are said to be addressed by using Aadhaar can be dealt without it. In this context, it is important to understand how the data in the aadhaar database maybe wrong and in case of e-governance the citizens suffer. Also, the fact that loss of subsidy-not in cash, but in use of LPG cylinder - only for cooking, is ignored. In addition to that, there is no data or way to check if the cylinder is being used for commercial purposes or not as RTI from oil companies says that no ghost identities have been detected.

UID-linked Welfare Delivery in Rajasthan

One speaker presented findings on people's experiences with UID-linked welfare services in Rajasthan, collected through a 100 days trip organised to speak to people across the state on problems related to welfare governance. This visit revealed that people who need the benefits and access to subsidies most are often excluded from actual services. It was highlighted that the paperless system is proving to be highly dangerous. Some of the cases discussed included that of a disabled labourer, who was asked to get an aadhaar card, but during enrollment asked the person standing next to him to put all his 5 fingers for biometric data collection. Due to this incorrect data, he is devoid of all subsidies since the authentication fails every time he goes to avail it. He stopped receiving his entitlements. Though problems were anticipated, the misery of the people revealed the extent of the problems arising from the project. In another case, an elderly woman living alone, since she could not go for Aadhaar authentication, had not been receiving the ration she is entitled to receive for the past 8 months. When the ration shop was approached to represent her case, the dealers said that they cannot provide her ration since they would require her thumb print for authentication. Later, they found out that on persuading the dealer to provide her with ration since Aadhaar is not mandatory, they found out that in their records they had actually mentioned that she was being given the ration, which was not the case. So the lack of awareness and the fact that people are entitled to receive the benefits irrespective of Aadhaar is something that is being misused by dealers. This shows how this system has become a barrier for the people, where they are also unaware about the grievance redressal mechanism.

Aadhaar and e-KYC

In this session, the use of Aadhaar for e-KYC verification was discussed The UID strategy document describes how the idea is to link UIDAI with money enabled Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) to the beneficiaries without any reason or justification for the same. It was highlighted by one of the participants how the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) believed that making Aadhaar compulsory for e-KYC and several other banking services was a violation of the Money Laundering Act as well as its own rules and standards, however, later relaxed the rules to link Aadhaar with bank accounts and accepted its for e-KyC with great reluctance as the Department of Revenue thought otherwise. It was mentioned how allowing opening of bank accounts remotely using Aadhaar, without physically being present, was touted as a dangerous idea. However, the restrictions placed by RBI were suddenly done away with and opening bank accounts remotely was enabled via e-KYC.

A speaker emphasised that with emerging FinTech services in India being tied with Aadhaar via India Stack, the following concerns are becoming critical:

With RBI enabling creation of bank accounts remotely, it becomes difficult to to track who did e-KYC and which bank did it and hold the same accountable.
The Aadhaar Act 2016 states that UIDAI will not track the queries made and will only keep a record of Yes/No for authentication. For example, the e-KYC to open a bank account can now be done with the help of an Aadhaar number and biometric authentication. However, this request does not get recorded and at the time of authentication, an individual is simply told whether the request has been matched or not by way of a Yes/No [11]. Though UIDAI will maintain the authentication record, this may act as an obstacle since in case the information from the aadhaar database does not match, the person would not be able to open a bank account and would only receive a yes/no as a response to the request.
Further, there is a concern that the Aadhaar Enabled Payment System being implemented by the National Payment Corporation of India (NCPI) would allow effectively hiding of source and destination of money flow, leading to money laundering and cases of bribery. This possible as NCPI maintains a mapper where each bank account is linked (only the latest one). However, Aadhaar number can be linked with multiple bank accounts of an individual. So when a transaction is made, the mapper records the transaction only from that 1 account. But if another transaction takes place with another bank account, that record is not maintained by the mapper at NCPI since it records only transactions of the latest account seeded in that. This makes money laundering easy as the money moves from aadhaar number to aadhaar number now rather than bank account to bank account.

Endnotes

[1] See: http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/events/uidai-and-welfare-services-exclusion-and-countermeasures-aug-27.

[2] See: http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/report-on-understanding-aadhaar-and-its-new-challenges.

[3] See: https://uidai.gov.in/beta/images/the_aadhaar_act_2016.pdf.

[4] See: http://scroll.in/latest/816343/aadhaar-numbers-may-soon-be-compulsory-to-book-railway-tickets.

[5] See: http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/karnataka/linking-bpl-ration-card-with-aadhaar-made-mandatory/article9094935.ece.

[6] See: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/After-scam-Bihar-to-link-exams-to-Aadhaar/articleshow/54000108.cms.

[7] See: http://www.dailypioneer.com/state-editions/cs-calls-for-early-steps-to-link-aadhaar-to-ac.html.

[8] See: http://www.cag.gov.in/sites/default/files/audit_report_files/Union_Commercial_Compliance_Full_Report_25_2016_English.pdf.

[9] See: http://petroleum.nic.in/docs/lpg/LPG%20Control%20Order%20GSR%20718%20dated%2026.09.2011.pdf.

[10] See: http://judis.nic.in/temp/494201232392013p.txt.

[11] Section 8(4) of the Aadhaar Act, 2016 states that "The Authority shall respond to an authentication query with a positive, negative or any other appropriate response sharing such identity information excluding any core biometric information."

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/workshop-report-uidai-and-welfare-services-august-27-2016

CFI-ACCION - Panel Discussion on 'Big Data: Challenge or Opportunity?' (Delhi, December 06)

sumandro — 2019-03-16T04:41:52Z

The Centre for Financial Inclusion of ACCION International is organising a panel discussion on "Big Data: Challenge or Opportunity?" as an associated event of the Inclusive Finance India Summit 2016, Hotel Ashok, Delhi, December 05-06. The discussion will be held at 12:30 on Tuesday, December 06. It will be moderated by Amy Jensen Mowl, CFI Fellow at IFMR, and M.S. Sriram, Distinguished Fellow at the Institute for Development of Research in Banking Technology. Sumandro Chattapadhyay will participate as a panelist.

Inclusive Finance India Summit: http://inclusivefinanceindia.org/.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/cfi-accion-panel-discussion-on-big-data-delhi-dec-06

Workshop on 'Privacy after Big Data' (Delhi, November 12)

sumandro — 2016-11-12T10:14:52Z

The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) and the Sarai programme, CSDS, invite you to a workshop on 'Privacy after Big Data: What Changes? What should Change?' on Saturday, November 12. This workshop aims to build a dialogue around some of the key government-led big data initiatives in India and elsewhere that are contributing significant new challenges and concerns to the ongoing debates on the right to privacy. It is an open event. Please register to participate.

Invitation note and agenda: Download (PDF)

Venue and RSVP

Venue: Centre for the Study of Developing Societies 29, Rajpur Road, Civil Lines, Delhi 110054.

Location on Google Maps: https://www.google.com/maps/place/CSDS/@28.677775,77.2162523,17z/.

Registration: Complete this form.

Concept Note

In this age of big data, discussions about privacy are intertwined with the use of technology and the data deluge. Though big data possesses enormous value for driving innovation and contributing to productivity and efficiency, privacy concerns have gained significance in the dialogue around regulated use of data and the means by which individual privacy might be compromised through means such as surveillance, or protected. The tremendous opportunities big data creates in varied sectors ranges from financial technology, governance, education, health, welfare schemes, smart cities to name a few.

With the UID (“Aadhaar”) project re-animating the Right to Privacy debate in India, and the financial technology ecosystem growing rapidly, striking a balance between benefits of big data and privacy concerns is a critical policy question that demands public dialogue and research to inform an evidence based decision.

Also, with the advent of potential big data initiatives like the ambitious Smart Cities Mission under the Digital India Scheme, which would rely on harvesting large data sets and the use of analytics in city subsystems to make public utilities and services efficient, the tasks of ensuring data security on one hand and protecting individual privacy on the other become harder.

As key privacy principles are at loggerheads with big data activities, it is important to consider privacy as an embedded component in the processes, systems and projects, rather than being considered as an afterthought. These examples highlight the current state of discourse around data protection and privacy in India and the shapes they are likely to take in near future.

This workshop aims to build a dialogue around some of the key government-led big data initiatives in India and elsewhere that are contributing significant new challenges and concerns to the ongoing debates on the right to privacy.

Agenda

09:00-09:30 Tea and Coffee

09:30-10:00 Introduction

Mr. Amber Sinha and Mr. Sandeep Mertia
This session will introduce the topic of the workshop in the context of the ongoing works at CIS and Sarai.

10:00-11:00 From Privacy Bill(s) to ‘Habeas Data’

Dr. Usha Ramanathan and Mr. Vipul Kharbanda
This session will present a brief history of the privacy bill(s) in India and end with reflections on ‘habeas data’ as a lens for thinking and actualising privacy after big data.

11:00-11:30 Tea and Coffee

11:30-12:30 Digital ID, Data Protection, and Exclusion

Ms. Amelia Andersdotter and Mr. Srikanth Lakshmanan
This session will discuss national centralised digital ID systems, often operating at a cross-functional scale, and highlight its implications for discussions on data protection, welfare governance, and exclusion from public and private services.

12:30-13:30 Digital Money and Financial Inclusion

Dr. Anupam Saraph and Ms. Astha Kapoor
This session will focus on the rise of digital banking and online payments as core instruments of financial inclusion in India, especially in the context of the Jan Dhan Yojana and UPI, and reflect on the concerns around privacy and financial data.

13:30-14:30 Lunch

14:30-15:30 Big Data and Mass Surveillance

Dr. Anja Kovacs and Mr. Matthew Rice
This session will reflect on the rise of mass communication surveillance across the world, and the evolving challenges of regulating il/legal surveillance by government agencies.

15:30-16:15 Privacy is (a) Right

Mr. Apar Gupta and Ms. Kritika Bhardwaj
This brief session is to share initial ideas and strategies for articulating and actualising a constitutional right to privacy in India.

16:15-16:30 Tea and Coffee

16:30-17:30 Round Table

An open discussion session to conclude the workshop.

Speakers

Mr. Amber Sinha

Amber works on issues surrounding privacy, big data, and cyber security. He is interested in the impact of emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and learning algorithms on existing legal frameworks, and how they need to evolve in response. Amber studied humanities and law at National Law School of India University, Bangalore.

E-mail: amber at cis-india dot org.

Twitter: @ambersinha07.

Ms. Amelia Andersdotter

Amelia Andersdotter has been a Member of the European Parliament. She works on practical implications of data protection laws and consumer information security in Sweden, and digital rights in the Europe in general. Presently she is residing in Bangalore, where she is a visiting scholar with Centre for Internet and Society. She holds a BSc in Mathematics.

URL: https://dataskydd.net.

Twitter: @teirdes.

Dr. Anja Kovacs

Dr. Anja Kovacs directs the Internet Democracy Project in Delhi, India, which works for an Internet that supports free speech, democracy and social justice in India and beyond. Anja’s research and advocacy focuses especially on questions regarding freedom of expression, cybersecurity and the architecture of Internet governance. She has been a member of the of the Investment Committee of the Digital Defenders Partnership and of the Steering Committee of Best Bits, a global network of civil society members. She has also worked as an international consultant on Internet issues, including for the Independent Commission on Multilateralism, the United Nations Development Programme Asia Pacific and the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression, Mr. Frank La Rue, as well as having been a Fellow at the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore, India.

Internet Democracy Project: https://internetdemocracy.in.

Twitter: @anjakovacs.

Dr. Anupam Saraph

Anupam Saraph has extensively researched India's UID number that has been widely regarded as the game changer in development programs. It has come to be linked with both public and private databases and become the requirement for access to entitlements, benefits, services and rights. Dr. Saraph, who has the design of at least two identification programs to his credit has researched the UID’s functional creep since its inception.

He has been dissecting the myths of what the UID is or is not. He has also tracked the consequences of its linkages on databases that protect national security, sovereignty, democratic status and the entire banking and money system in India. He has also highlighted the implications of its use for targeted delivery of cash subsidies from the Consolidated Fund of India. He has written and lectured widely about the devastating impact of the UID number on development programs, national security and the governability of India.

As a Professor of Systems, Governance and Decision Sciences, Environmental Systems and Business he mentors students and teaches systems, information systems, environmental systems and sustainable development at universities in Europe, Asia and the Americas. He has worked with the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Rijksuniversitiet Groningen, RIVM, University of Edinburgh, Resource Use Institute, Systems Research Institute among others. Dr. Saraph has had the unique distinction of being India’s only person who has held the only office of a City CIO in India, in a PPP arrangement with government, industry and himself. He has also been the first e-governance Advisor to a State government. Dr. Saraph has held CxO and ministerial level positions and serves as an independent director on the boards of Public and Private Sector companies and NGOs. He is also the President of the Nagrik Chetna Manch, an NGO charged with the mission to bring accountability in governance.

Dr. Saraph is also actively engaged in civil society where he participates in several environmental, resource and nature conservation initiatives, has authored draft legislations for river and natural resource conservation, right to good governance and has contributed to governance, election and democratic reforms. Dr. Saraph is a regular columnist in newspapers and writes on issues of governance, future design, technology and education from a systems perspective.

As a future designer and recognized as a global expert on complex systems he helps individuals and organisations understand and design the future of their worlds. Together they address the toughest challenges, accomplish missions and achieve business goals. He also supports building capacity to address the challenges of today as well as to build future designs through teams and effective leadership. Since the eighties Dr. Saraph has modeled complex systems of cities, countries, regions and even the planet. His models have been awarded internationally and even placed in 10-year permanent exhibitions.

Dr Saraph works with business and government executives, civil society leaders, politicians, generals, civil servants, police, trade unionists, community activists, United Nations and ASEAN officials, judges, writers, media, architects, designers, technologists, scientists, entrepreneurs, board members and business leaders of small, mid and large single and trans-national companies, religious leaders and artists across a dozen countries and various industry sectors to help them and their organisations succeed in their missions. He advises the World Economic Forum through its Global Agenda Council for Complex Systems and the Club of Rome, Indian National Association as a founder life member.

Dr Saraph holds a PhD in designing sustainable systems from the faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences of the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, the Netherlands.

Website: http://anupam.saraph.in.

Twitter: @anupamsaraph.

Mr. Apar Gupta

Apar Gupta practices law in Delhi. He is also one of the co-founders of the Internet Freedom Foundation. His work and writing on public interest issues can be accessed at his personal website www.apargupta.com.

Twitter: @aparatbar.

Ms. Astha Kapoor

Astha Kapoor is a public policy strategy consultant working on financial inclusion and digital payments. Currently, she is working with MicroSave. Her tasks involve a focus on government to people (G2P) payments - and her work spans strategy, advisory and evaluation with the DBT Mission, Office of the Chief Economic Advisor, NITI Aayog and ministries pertaining to food, fuel and fertilizer. She recently designed a pilot to digitize uptake of fertilizers in Krishna district, and evaluated the newly introduced coupon system in the Public Distribution System in Bengaluru.

Twitter: @kapoorastha.

Ms. Kritika Bhardwaj

Kritika Bhardwaj works as a Programme Officer at the Centre for Communication Governance (CCG), National Law University, Delhi. Her main areas of research are privacy and data protection. At CCG, she has written about the privacy implications of several contemporary issues such as Aadhaar (India's unique identification project), cloud computing and the right to be forgotten. A lawyer by training, Kritika has a keen interest in information law and human rights law.

Centre for Communication Governance, NLU Delhi: http://ccgdelhi.org.

Twitter: @Kritika12.

Mr. Matthew Rice

Matthew Rice is an Advocacy Officer at Privacy International working across the organisation engaging with international partners and strengthening their capacity on communications surveillance issues. He has previously worked at Privacy International as a consultant building the Surveillance Industry Index, the largest publicly available database on the private surveillance sector ever assembled. Matthew graduated from University of Aberdeen with an LLB (Hons.) and also has an MA in Human Rights from University College London.

Privacy International: https://privacyinternational.org.

Twitter: @mattr3.

Mr. Sandeep Mertia

Sandeep Mertia is a Research Associate at The Sarai Programme, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi. He is an ICT engineer by training with research interests in Science & Technology Studies, Software Studies and Anthropology. He is conducting an ethnographic study of emerging modes of data-driven knowledge production in the social sector.

Sarai: http://sarai.net.

Twitter: @SandeepMertia.

Academia: https://daiict.academia.edu/SandeepMertia.

Mr. Srikanth Lakshmanan

Srikanth is a software professional with interests in Internet, follower of Internet policy discussions, volunteers for multiple online campaigns related to Internet. He is also fascinated by FOSS, opendata, localization, Wikipedia, maps, public transit, civic tech and occasionally contributes to them.

Site: http://www.srik.me.

Twitter: @logic.

Mr. Vipul Kharbanda

Vipul Kharbanda is a consultant with the Center for Internet and Society, Bangalore. After finishing his BA.LLB.(Hons.) from National Law School of India University in Bangalore, he worked for India’s largest corporate law firm for two and a half years in their Mumbai office for two years working primarily on the financing of various infrastructure projects such as Power Plants, Roads, Airports, etc. Since quitting his corporate law job, Vipul has been working as the Associate Editor in a legal publishing house which has been publishing legal books and journals for the last 90 years in India. He has also been involved with the Center for Internet and Society as a Consultant working primarily on issues related to privacy and surveillance.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/events/privacy-after-big-data-delhi-nov-12-2016

CISxScholars Delhi - William F. Stafford (Nov 03, 6:30 pm)

sumandro — 2019-03-13T00:30:39Z

We are delighted to have William F. Stafford, PhD candidate in UC Berkeley, present on "Public Measurements, Private Measurements, and the Convergence of Units" at the CIS office in Delhi on Thursday, Nov 03, at 6:30 pm. Please RSVP if you are joining us: .

CISxScholars are informal events organised by CIS for presentation, discussion, and exchange of academic research and policy analysis.

Public Measurements, Private Measurements and the Convergence of Units

In this discussion I will focus on a comparison between the standard government prescribed meters for autorickshaws and taxis and the role of ridesharing apps as instruments which take measurements, as the basis for the calculation of fares, and the more general questions which arise for commerce, technology and their regulation. I will organise the paper around the observations of a paratransit operations engineer on the distinction between public and private instruments, and explore the possible implications of new forms of commercialisation of location and proximity and reactions to such developments for understanding questions of fairness and corruption.

William F. Stafford

William F. Stafford, Jr., is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology, UC Berkeley. William's research focuses on the auto-rickshaw meter in New Delhi, as a way to engage with classical questions concerning the relationship between measurement, quantification and delimitations of domains of labour. William's general interests concern the analytics of labour and the reconfiguration of what are often taken as its axiomatic aspects. Before joining Berkeley, he studied Sociology at Jawaharlal Nehru University and the Delhi School of Economics.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/cisxscholars-delhi-william-f-stafford-thursday-nov-03

Right to Food Campaign, Ranchi Convention, 2016

sumandro — 2019-03-16T04:40:52Z

The Right to Food Campaign held its 2016 Convention in Ranchi during September 23-25, 2016. While three years have elapsed since the passage of the National Food Security Act, despite improvements in the Public Distribution System (PDS), large implementation gaps remain. This is what the Convention focused on, and gathered researchers and campaigners from across the country to share experiences and case studies on effectiveness and exclusions from the PDS. Sumandro Chattapadhyay took part in a session of the Convention to discuss how UID-linked welfare delivery is being rolled out across key programmes like provision of pension and rationed distribution of essential commodities, and their impact on people's right to welfare services.

Right to Food Campaign: Website.

Right to Food Campaign: Cash Transfers and UID: Our Main Demands.

Ranchi Convention, 2016: Programme.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/right-to-food-campaign-ranchi-convention-2016