Centre for Internet and Society

Big Data for Development Network

sumandro — 2019-05-22T11:04:26Z

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/bd4d

Big Data

sumandro — 2016-09-22T07:20:29Z

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/big-data

Arindrajit Basu

sumandro — 2018-08-21T14:08:04Z

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/Members/arindrajit_basu.jpg

APU Grant Proposal 2015 - Isochrene

sumandro — 2015-10-01T05:54:42Z

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/CISRAW_Isochrene.png

APU Grant Proposal 2015 - Isochrene

sumandro — 2015-10-01T05:53:20Z

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/apu-grant-proposal-2015-isochrene

Approaching Open Research via Open Data - Presentation at TERI, December 22, 2015

sumandro — 2016-01-12T14:37:38Z

The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), Delhi, organised a seminar on 'Open Access in Research Area: A Strategic Approach' on December 22, 2015. We supported the seminar as a knowledge partner. Sumandro Chattapadhyay was invited to deliver a special address. Here are the notes and slides from the presentation.

The brief presentation foregrounded open data as a crucial part of open research, and also as an instrument of opening up research for public consumption, discussion, and scrutiny.

The presentation started with reference to the Open Access Dialogues organised by The African Commons Project and the Centre for Internet and Society during November 2012 to March 2013 that explored the global open access agenda from a developing world perspective.

I noted that one of the key findings from the Indian participants of the online consultations organised as part of the Open Access Dialogues was the need for a broader vision of open access. Open research data is a key component of this broader vision of open access and open research.

There was a brief discussion of how to start doing and thinking about open data as an approach to open research. I highlighted the need to get started on 1) getting government to open up data relevant to research, 2) opening up academic research data, and 3) sectoral conversations on data standards (technical and semantic); as well as the need to think about 1) open data as bridge across disciplinary communities, 2) quantification of life and the widening sphere of research data, and 3) academic research and public life.

In next slides, I quickly mentioned the international processes going on in the open data landscape - the conversation on open data and Sustainable Development Data, the possibility of using big (social and telecom) data for purposes of development monitoring, and the International Open Data Charter as a set of global principles for open data.

More about the seminar: http://cis-india.org/openness/teri-seminar-on-open-access-in-research.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/approaching-open-research-via-open-data-2015

Announcing Silicon Plateau #01

sumandro — 2015-10-05T15:00:59Z

We are very pleased to announce that the RAW programme is supporting a new collaborative publishing project led by T.A.J. Residency / SKE Projects and or-bits.com. The first volume of the series titled 'Silicon Plateau' will feature contributions by a group of artists, researchers, and writers, including IOCOSE, Tara Kelton, Anil Menon, Sunita Prasad, Achal Prabhala and Sreshta Rit Premnath, along with contextual writing and documentation material. Here is an excerpt from the editorial note written by Marialaura Ghidini, the co-editor of the volume.

The scope of the series is to explore the contemporary interaction between the arts and technology as informed by experiences of Bangalore (the ‘Silicon Valley’ of India). Such exploration will be guided by the perspectives of contemporary artists, writers and thinkers, national and international, who have either spent a period of time in the city or crossed paths with its communities whose work and interests — from the creative industry to law and historical research — lie at the intersection between the arts and technology. The approach we have adopted to explore how technology informs the arts and the socio-cultural environment, and how the latter affects usages and understandings of technological tools, is multidisciplinary and hybrid, and uses the city of Bangalore as the starting point for broader reflections and actions.

Advocating for the importance of thinking about digital and web technologies in their specificity rather than their universality, the series will propose across-disciplines narratives about the encounters — fortuitous, anticipated or even inconvenient — that artists, writers, technologists, lawyers, economists and more have had with the city. The nickname of Bangalore, Silicon Plateau, which derives from its geographical location on the Deccan Plateau in the state of Karnataka, has been used as the title of the series because we think it metaphorically highlights the contradictions inherent to our exploration. Adopting the term plateau, which indicates the reaching of a state of little change, to refer to a city that has transformed at rapid speed over the last few decades results in a linguistic combination that reflects the complexities inherent to discussing arts and technology in relation to local histories and occurrences rather than global narratives and popular beliefs.

This fist edition of Silicon Plateau #01 will focus on the way in which the city is represented in the public realm, from public spaces to those manufactured by the real estate industry. It will look at representations of Bangalore as a set of phenomena triggered by the ways in which the IT industry is reflected in the city, such as its market-driven narratives, and how passers-by and short term residents encounter them in the everyday. The contributors have been invited to reflect on how these modes of presenting and representing often lead to the creation of metaphors and cultural signs that might tell us more about discussing the interaction between the arts and technology.

Silicon Plateau #01 will be about that which lies behind first ‘impressions’ and constructed representations as determined by uses and understanding of technology, the tools and its infrastructures, existing, imagined, or projected.”

Silicon Plateau #01 will be released, in print and online, in May 2015 and launched soon after.

Image Credit: Sreshta Rit Premnath, Projections (1964/2014), photocopies on corrugated plastic and chroma key paints.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/announcing-silicon-plateau-01

Announcing Selected Researchers: Welfare, Gender, and Surveillance

sumandro — 2020-02-13T15:04:24Z

We published a Call for Researchers on January 10, 2020, to invite applications from researchers interested in writing a narrative essay that interrogates the modes of surveillance that people of LGBTHIAQ+ and gender non-conforming identities and sexual orientations are put under as they seek sexual and reproductive health (SRH) services in India. We received 29 applications from over 10 locations in India in response to the call, and are truly overwhelmed by and grateful for this interest and support. We eventually selected applications by 3 researchers that we felt aligned best with the specific objectives of the project. Please find below brief profile notes of the selected researchers.

Call for Researchers: URL

Kaushal Bodwal

Kaushal is persuing his MPhil in Sociology at Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi. He completed his Master's in Sociology at Centre for the Study of Social Systems, Jawaharlal Nehru University after getting a BSc honors degree in Biomedical Sciences from Delhi University. He is one of the founding members of Hasratein: a queer collective, New Delhi. He has been an active spokesperson for Queer and Trans Rights in India and have been on a number of panel discussion on Trans Act 2019 in various campuses. He has also delivered a lecture series on Colonialism and Medicine in Ambedkar University, Kashmiri Gate, Delhi. His areas of interest are Sociology of medicine, gender and medicine, sexuality, religion and biomedical science, intersex studies.

Queerness as disease – a continuing narrative in 21st century India, Kafila, 27 August 2019

What it means to be queer under a regime bent on remaking India on its own ideological terms, Firstpost, 17 January 2020

Rosamma Thomas

Rosamma has worked both as a reporter and as an editor of news reports with newspapers. She currently writes reports for NGOs while also undertaking freelance reporting assignments. She is based in Pune.

India's mining state steps up fight to rein in killer silicosis, The Times of India, 29 June 2016

Doctor may have found early marker for silicosis, but who will fund him?, Newsclick, 18 July 2019

Asbestos poisoning: Raghunath Manwar’s fight for safer work conditions, Newsclick, 9 January 2020

Shreya Ila Anasuya

Shreya is a writer, editor, journalist and performance artist currently based in Calcutta. Her fiction explores the places where myth, memory, history and the performing arts meet. As a journalist, her work explores gender, sexuality, politics, culture and history. She has been published in The Wire, Caravan, Scroll, Mint Lounge, Deep Dives, GenderIT, Helter Skelter, and many more. She is the editor of the digital publication Skin Stories, housed at the non-profit Point of View. She is the writer and narrator of ‘Gul - a story in text, song and dance’ which has been performed in several cities in India. She was a Felix Scholar at SOAS, University of London, from where she has an MA in Anthropology. For a full portfolio, please click here or visit her website.

This project is led by Ambika Tandon, Aayush Rathi, and Sumandro Chattapadhyay at the Centre for Internet and Society, and is supported by a grant from Privacy International.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/announcing-selected-researchers-welfare-gender-and-surveillance

Ananth Subray

sumandro — 2018-08-21T06:25:34Z

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/Members/ananth_subray.jpg

An Urgent Need for the Right to Privacy

sumandro — 2016-03-17T07:40:12Z

Along with a group of individuals and organisations from academia and civil society, we have drafted and are signatories to an open letter addressed to the Union government and urging the same to "urgently take steps to uphold the constitutional basis to the right to privacy and fulfil it’s constitutional and international obligations." Here we publish the text of the open letter. Please follow the link below to support it by joining the signatories.

Read and sign the open letter.

Text of the Open Letter

As our everyday lives are conducted increasingly through electronic communications the necessity for privacy protections has also increased. While several countries across the globe have recognised this by furthering the right to privacy of their citizens the Union Government has adopted a regressive attitude towards this core civil liberty. We urge the Union Government to take urgent measures to safeguard the right to privacy in India.

Our concerns are based on a continuing pattern of disregard for the right to privacy by several governments in the past. This trend has increased as can be plainly viewed from the following developments.

In 2015, the Attorney General in the case of *K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India*, argued before the Hon’ble Supreme Court that there is no right to privacy under the Constitution of India. The Hon'ble Court was persuaded to re-examine the basis of the right to privacy upsetting 45 years of judicial precedent. This has thrown the constitutional right to privacy in doubt and the several judgements that have been given under it. This includes the 1997 PUCL Telephone Tapping judgement as well. We urge the Union Government to take whatever steps are necessary and urge the Supreme Court to hold that a right to privacy exists under the Constitution of India.

Recently Mr. Arun Jaitley, Minister for Finance introduced the Aadhaar (Targeted Delivery of Financial and Other Subsidies, Benefits and Services) Bill, 2016. This bill was passed on March 11, 2016 in the middle of budget discussion on a short notice as a money bill in the Lok Sabha when only 73 of 545 members were present. Its timing and introduction as a money bill prevents necessary scrutiny given the large privacy risks that arise under it. This version of the bill was never put up for public consultation and is being rushed through without adequate discussion. Even substantively it fails to give accountable privacy safeguards while making Aadhaar mandatory for availing any government subsidy, benefit, or service.

We urge the Union Government to urgently take steps to uphold the constitutional basis to the right to privacy and fulfil it’s constitutional and international obligations. We encourage the Government to have extensive public discussions on the Aadhaar Bill before notifying it. We further call upon them to constitute a drafting committee with members of civil society to draft a comprehensive statute as suggested by the Justice A.P. Shah Committee Report of 2012.

Signatories:

Amber Sinha, the Centre for Internet and Society
Japreet Grewal, the Centre for Internet and Society
Joshita Pai, Centre for Communication Governance, National Law University
Raman Jit Singh Chima, Access Now
Sarvjeet Singh, Centre for Communication Governance, National Law University
Sumandro Chattapadhyay, the Centre for Internet and Society
Sunil Abraham, the Centre for Internet and Society
Vanya Rakesh, the Centre for Internet and Society

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/an-urgent-need-for-the-right-to-privacy

Amutha Arunachalam - Stand Shielded of Digital Rights (Delhi, May 05, 4 pm)

sumandro — 2017-05-03T13:30:32Z

We are proud to announce that Amutha Arunachalam will be the speaker at the May #FirstFriday event at the CIS Delhi office. Amutha is Principal Technical Officer in the Council Of Scientific and Industrial Research. The talk will be on digital signatures, traceability of time-stamps, and setting up an Indian Standard (Digital) Time. If you are joining us, please RSVP at the soonest as we have only limited space in our office.

Amutha Arunachalam

Principal Technical Officer, Council of Scientific and Industrial Research

Amutha Arunachalam entered the Indian Government service as an Intelligence Officer in Ministry of Home Affairs in 1988 after working at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras in Fibre Optic communication Laboratory. She later moved to the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research in the field of Information Technology. She managed the IT infrastructure of the CSIR lab (Central Road Research Institute) till 2006 and moved to CSIR Head Quarters and contributed in the ICT refurbishment drive, mainly in the IT with a major contribution in establishing DATA Centre, implementing network security, linking CSIR HQ to the National Knowledge Network facility extended by National Information Centre(NIC) before joining UIDAI.

In UIDAI (National Identity Project) she managed the Data Center operations that includes critical CIDR (Central Identification Repository) and was responsible for setting up Infrastructure to roll out Disaster recovery centre, Aadhaar Enrolment Service, Benchmarking of UIDAI Enrolment , Authentication Applications and setting up of Backend infrastructure of the Authentication Service for Roll out to citizens. After the five year Deputation at UIDAI (Feb 2016), she is currently posted in the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research working in the Area of Policy in Cyber Security for CSIR, Enhancing Research with collaborative, networking and Building unified CSIR Ecosystem with Enterprise platform.

RSVP

Location

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/events/firstfridayatcis-amutha-arunachalam-stand-shielded-of-digital-rights-may-05

Amutha Arunachalam

sumandro — 2017-05-03T12:37:36Z

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/files/amutha-arunachalam

Amber Sinha - The Fundamental Right to Privacy: Part I - Sources

sumandro — 2017-09-28T08:45:11Z

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/files/amber-sinha-the-fundamental-right-to-privacy-i-sources-pdf

Amber Sinha - The Fundamental Right to Privacy: Part II - Structure

sumandro — 2017-09-28T08:37:26Z

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/files/amber-sinha-the-fundamental-right-to-privacy-ii-structure-pdf

Akash Sheshadri

sumandro — 2020-02-21T09:29:26Z

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/about/people/CIS_AkashSheshadri.png

Centre for Internet and Society

Big Data for Development Network

Big Data

Arindrajit Basu

APU Grant Proposal 2015 - Isochrene

APU Grant Proposal 2015 - Isochrene

Approaching Open Research via Open Data - Presentation at TERI, December 22, 2015

Announcing Silicon Plateau #01

Announcing Selected Researchers: Welfare, Gender, and Surveillance

Call for Researchers: URL

Kaushal Bodwal

Rosamma Thomas

Shreya Ila Anasuya

Ananth Subray

An Urgent Need for the Right to Privacy

Read and sign the open letter.

Text of the Open Letter

Amutha Arunachalam - Stand Shielded of Digital Rights (Delhi, May 05, 4 pm)

Amutha Arunachalam

Principal Technical Officer, Council of Scientific and Industrial Research

RSVP

Location

Amutha Arunachalam

Amber Sinha - The​ Fundamental​ Right​ to​ Privacy:​ Part​ I - Sources

Amber Sinha - The​ ​Fundamental​ ​Right​ ​to​ ​Privacy:​ ​Part​ ​II - Structure

Akash Sheshadri

Amber Sinha - The Fundamental Right to Privacy: Part I - Sources

Amber Sinha - The Fundamental Right to Privacy: Part II - Structure