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Comments on the Report of the Committee on Digital Payments (December 2016)
http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/comments-on-the-report-of-the-committee-on-digital-payments-dec-2016
<b>The Committee on Digital Payments constituted by the Ministry of Finance and chaired by Ratan P. Watal, Principal Advisor, NITI Aayog, submitted its report on the "Medium Term Recommendations to Strengthen Digital Payments Ecosystem" on December 09, 2016. The report was made public on December 27, and comments were sought from the general public. Here are the comments submitted by the Centre for Internet and Society.</b>
<p> </p>
<h3><strong>1. Preliminary</strong></h3>
<p><strong>1.1.</strong> This submission presents comments by the Centre for Internet and Society (“CIS”) <strong>[1]</strong> in response to the report of the Committee on Digital Payments, chaired by Mr. Ratan P. Watal, Principal Advisor, NITI Aayog, and constituted by the Ministry of Finance, Government of India (“the report”) <strong>[2]</strong>.</p>
<h3><strong>2. The Centre for Internet and Society</strong></h3>
<p><strong>2.1.</strong> The Centre for Internet and Society, CIS, is a non-profit organisation that undertakes interdisciplinary research on internet and digital technologies from policy and academic perspectives. The areas of focus include digital accessibility for persons with diverse abilities, access to knowledge, intellectual property rights, openness (including open data, free and open source software, open standards, and open access), internet governance, telecommunication reform, digital privacy, and cyber-security.</p>
<p><strong>2.2.</strong> CIS is not an expert organisation in the domain of banking in general and payments in particular. Our expertise is in matters of internet and communication governance, data privacy and security, and technology regulation. We deeply appreciate and are most inspired by the Ministry of Finance’s decision to invite entities from both the sectors of finance and information technology. This submission is consistent with CIS’ commitment to safeguarding general public interest, and the interests and rights of various stakeholders involved, especially the citizens and the users. CIS is thankful to the Ministry of Finance for this opportunity to provide a general response on the report.</p>
<h3><strong>3. Comments</strong></h3>
<p><strong>3.1.</strong> CIS observes that the decision by the Government of India to withdraw the legal tender character of the old high denomination banknotes (that is, Rs. 500 Rs. 1,000 notes), declared on November 08, 2016 <strong>[3]</strong>, have generated <strong>unprecedented data about the user base and transaction patterns of digital payments systems in India, when pushed to its extreme use due to the circumstances</strong>. The majority of this data is available with the National Payments Corporation of India and the Reserve Bank of India. CIS requests the authorities concerned to consider <strong>opening up this data for analysis and discussion by public at large and experts in particular, before any specific policy and regulatory decisions are taken</strong> towards advancing digital payments proliferation in India. This is a crucial opportunity for the Ministry of Finance to embrace (open) data-driven regulation and policy-making.</p>
<p><strong>3.2.</strong> While the report makes a reference to the European General Data Protection Directive, it does not make a reference to any substantive provisions in the Directive which may be relevant to digital payments. Aside from the recommendation that privacy protections around the purpose limitation principle be relaxed to ensure that payment service providers be allowed to process data to improve fraud monitoring and anti-money laundering services, the report is silent on significant privacy and data protection concerns posed by digital payments services. <strong>CIS strongly warns that the existing data protection and security regulations under Information Technology (Reasonable security practices and procedures and sensitive personal data or information), Rules are woefully inadequate in their scope and application to effectively deal with potential privacy concerns posed by digital payments applications and services.</strong> Some key privacy issues that must be addressed either under a comprehensive data protection legislation or a sector specific financial regulation are listed below. The process of obtaining consent must be specific, informed and unambiguous and through a clear affirmative action by the data subject based upon a genuine choice provided along with an option to opt out at any stage. The data subjects should have clear and easily enforceable right to access and correct their data. Further, data subjects should have the right to restrict the usage of their data in circumstances such as inaccuracy of data, unlawful purpose and data no longer required in order to fulfill the original purpose.</p>
<p><strong>3.3.</strong> The initial recommendation of the report is to “[m]ake regulation of payments independent from the function of central banking” (page 22). This involves a fundamental transformation of the payment and settlement system in India and its regulation. <strong>We submit that a decision regarding transformation of such scale and implications is taken after a more comprehensive policy discussion, especially involving a wider range of stakeholders</strong>. The report itself notes that “[d]igital payments also have the potential of becoming a gateway to other financial services such as credit facilities for small businesses and low-income households” (page 32). Thus, a clear functional, and hence regulatory, separation between the (digital) payments industry and the lending/borrowing industry may be either effective or desirable. Global experience tells us that digital transactions data, along with other alternative data, are fast becoming the basis of provision of financial and other services, by both banking and non-banking (payments) companies. We appeal to the Ministry of Finance to adopt a comprehensive and concerted approach to regulating, enabling competition, and upholding consumers’ rights in the banking sector at large.</p>
<p><strong>3.4.</strong> The report recognises “banking as an activity is separate from payments, which is more of a technology business” (page 154). Contemporary banking and payment businesses are both are primarily technology businesses where information technology particularly is deployed intimately to extract, process, and drive asset management decisions using financial transaction data. Further, with payment businesses (such as, pre-paid instruments) offering return on deposited money via other means (such as, cashbacks), and potentially competing and/or collaborating with established banks to use financial transaction data to drive lending decisions, including but not limited to micro-loans, it appears unproductive to create a separation between banking as an activity and payments as an activity merely in terms of the respective technology intensity of these sectors. <strong>CIS firmly recommends that regulation of these financial services and activities be undertaken in a technology-agnostic manner, and similar regulatory regimes be deployed on those entities offering similar services irrespective of their technology intensity or choice</strong>.</p>
<p><strong>3.5.</strong> The report highlights two major shortcomings of the current regulatory regime for payments. Firstly “the law does not impose any obligation on the regulator to promote competition and innovation in the payments market” (page 153). It appears to us that the regulator’s role should not be to promote market expansion and innovation but to ensure and oversee competition. <strong>We believe that the current regulator should focus on regulating the existing market, and the work of the expansion of the digital payments market in particular and the digital financial services market in general be carried out by another government agency, as it creates conflict of interest for the regulator otherwise.</strong> Secondly, the report mentions that Payment and Settlement Systems Act does not “focus the regulatory attention on the need for consumer protection in digital payments” and then it notes that a “provision was inserted to protect funds collected from customers” in 2015 (page 153). <strong>This indicates that the regulator already has the responsibility to ensure consumer protection in digital payments. The purview and modalities of how this function of course needs discussion and changes with the growth in digital payments</strong>.</p>
<p><strong>3.6.</strong> The report identifies the high cost of cash as a key reason for the government’s policy push towards digital payments. Further, it mentions that a “sample survey conducted in 2014 across urban and rural neighbourhoods in Delhi and Meerut, shows that despite being keenly aware of the costs associated with transacting in cash, most consumers see three main benefits of cash, viz. freedom of negotiations, faster settlements, and ensuring exact payments” (page 30). It further notes that “[d]igital payments have significant dependencies upon power and telecommunications infrastructure. Therefore, the roll out of robust and user friendly digital payments solutions to unelectrified areas/areas without telecommunications network coverage, remains a challenge.” <strong>CIS much appreciates the discussion of the barriers to universal adoption and rollout of digital payments in the report, and appeals to the Ministry of Finance to undertake a more comprehensive study of the key investments required by the Government of India to ensure that digital payments become ubiquitously viable as well as satisfy the demands of a vast range of consumers that India has</strong>. The estimates about investment required to create a robust digital payment infrastructure, cited in the report, provide a great basis for undertaking studies such as these.</p>
<p><strong>3.7.</strong> CIS is very encouraged to see the report highlighting that “[w]ith the rising number of users of digital payment services, it is absolutely necessary to develop consumer confidence on digital payments. Therefore, it is essential to have legislative safeguards to protect such consumers in-built into the primary law.” <strong>We second this recommendation and would like to add further that financial transaction data is governed under a common data protection and privacy regime, without making any differences between data collected by banking and non-banking entities</strong>.</p>
<p><strong>3.8.</strong> We are, however, very discouraged to see the overtly incorrect use of the word “Open Access” in this report in the context of a payment system disallowing service when the client wants to transact money with a specific entity <strong>[4]</strong>. This is not an uncommon anti-competitive measure adopted by various platform players and services providers so as to disallow users from using competing products (such as, not allowing competing apps in the app store controlled by one software company). <strong>The term “Open Access” is not only the appropriate word to describe the negation of such anti-competitive behaviour, its usage in this context undermines its accepted meaning and creates confusion regarding the recommendation being proposed by the report.</strong> The closest analogy to the recommendation of the report would perhaps be with the principle of “network neutrality” that stands for the network provider not discriminating between data packets being processed by them, either in terms of price or speed.</p>
<p><strong>3.9.</strong> A major recommendation by the report involves creation of “a fund from savings generated from cash-less transactions … by the Central Government,” which will use “the trinity of JAM (Jan Dhan, Adhaar, Mobile) [to] link financial inclusion with social protection, contributing to improved Social and Financial Security and Inclusion of vulnerable groups/ communities” (page 160-161). <strong>This amounts to making Aadhaar a mandatory ID for financial inclusion of citizens, especially the marginal and vulnerable ones, and is in direct contradiction to the government’s statements regarding the optional nature of the Aadhaar ID, as well as the orders by the Supreme Court on this topic</strong>.</p>
<p><strong>3.10.</strong> The report recommends that “Aadhaar should be made the primary identification for KYC with the option of using other IDs for people who have not yet obtained Aadhaar” (page 163) and further that “Aadhaar eKYC and eSign should be a replacement for paper based, costly, and shared central KYC registries” (page 162). <strong>Not only these measures would imply making Aadhaar a mandatory ID for undertaking any legal activity in the country, they assume that the UIDAI has verified and audited the personal documents submitted by Aadhaar number holders during enrollment.</strong> A mandate for <em>replacement</em> of the paper-based central KYC agencies will only remove a much needed redundancy in the the identity verification infrastructure of the government.</p>
<p><strong>3.11.</strong> The report suggests that “[t]ransactions which are permitted in cash without KYC should also be permitted on prepaid wallets without KYC” (page 164-165). This seems to negate the reality that physical verification of a person remains one of the most authoritative identity verification process for a natural person, apart from DNA testing perhaps. <strong>Thus, establishing full equivalency of procedure between a presence-less transaction and one involving a physically present person making the payment will only amount to removal of relatively greater security precautions for the former, and will lead to possibilities of fraud</strong>.</p>
<p><strong>3.12.</strong> In continuation with the previous point, the report recommends promotion of “Aadhaar based KYC where PAN has not been obtained” and making of “quoting Aadhaar compulsory in income tax return for natural persons” (page 163). Both these measures imply a replacement of the PAN by Aadhaar in the long term, and a sharp reduction in growth of new PAN holders in the short term. <strong>We appeal for this recommendation to be reconsidered as integration of all functionally separate national critical information infrastructures (such as PAN and Aadhaar) into a single unified and centralised system (such as Aadhaar) engenders massive national and personal security threats</strong>.</p>
<p><strong>3.13.</strong> The report suggest the establishment of “a ranking and reward framework” to recognise and encourage for the best performing state/district/agency in the proliferation of digital payments. <strong>It appears to us that creation of such a framework will only lead to making of an environment of competition among these entities concerned, which apart from its benefits may also have its costs. For example, the incentivisation of quick rollout of digital payment avenues by state government and various government agencies may lead to implementation without sufficient planning, coordination with stakeholders, and precautions regarding data security and privacy</strong>. The provision of central support for digital payments should be carried out in an environment of cooperation and not competition.</p>
<p><strong>3.14.</strong> CIS welcomes the recommendation by the report to generate greater awareness about cost of cash, including by ensuring that “large merchants including government agencies should account and disclose the cost of cash collection and cash payments incurred by them periodically” (page 164). It, however, is not clear to whom such periodic disclosures should be made. <strong>We would like to add here that the awareness building must simultaneously focus on making public how different entities shoulder these costs. Further, for reasons of comparison and evidence-driven policy making, it is necessary that data for equivalent variables are also made open for digital payments - the total and disaggregate cost, and what proportion of these costs are shouldered by which entities</strong>.</p>
<p><strong>3.15.</strong> The report acknowledges that “[t]oday, most merchants do not accept digital payments” and it goes on to recommend “that the Government should seize the initiative and require all government agencies and merchants where contracts are awarded by the government to provide at-least one suitable digital payment option to its consumers and vendors” (page 165). This requirement for offering digital payment option will only introduce an additional economic barrier for merchants bidding for government contracts. <strong>We appeal to the Ministry of Finance to reconsider this approach of raising the costs of non-digital payments to incentivise proliferation of digital payments, and instead lower the existing economic and other barriers to digital payments that keep the merchants away</strong>. The adoption of digital payments must not lead to increasing costs for merchants and end-users, but must decrease the same instead.</p>
<p><strong>3.16.</strong> As the report was submitted on December 09, 2016, and was made public only on December 27, 2016, <strong>it would have been much appreciated if at least a month-long window was provided to study and comment on the report, instead of fifteen days</strong>. This is especially crucial as the recently implemented demonetisation and the subsequent banking and fiscal policy decisions taken by the government have rapidly transformed the state and dynamics of the payments system landscape in India in general, and digital payments in particular.</p>
<h3><strong>Endnotes</strong></h3>
<p><strong>[1]</strong> See: <a href="http://cis-india.org/">http://cis-india.org/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[2]</strong> See: <a href="http://finmin.nic.in/reports/Note-watal-report.pdf">http://finmin.nic.in/reports/Note-watal-report.pdf</a> and <a href="http://finmin.nic.in/reports/watal_report271216.pdf">http://finmin.nic.in/reports/watal_report271216.pdf</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[3]</strong> See: <a href="http://finmin.nic.in/cancellation_high_denomination_notes.pdf">http://finmin.nic.in/cancellation_high_denomination_notes.pdf</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[4]</strong> Open Access refers to “free and unrestricted online availability” of scientific and non-scientific literature. See: <a href="http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read">http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read</a>.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/comments-on-the-report-of-the-committee-on-digital-payments-dec-2016'>http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/comments-on-the-report-of-the-committee-on-digital-payments-dec-2016</a>
</p>
No publisherSumandro Chattapadhyay and Amber SinhaUIDDigital IDBig DataDigital EconomyDigital AccessPrivacyDigital SecurityData RevolutionDigital PaymentInternet GovernanceDigital IndiaData ProtectionDemonetisationHomepageFeaturedAadhaar2017-01-12T12:32:22ZBlog EntryCIS Seminar Series: Information Disorder
http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/cis-seminar-series-information-disorder
<b>The Centre for Internet and Society is announcing the launch of a seminar series to showcase research around digital rights and technology policy, with a focus on the Global South.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The CIS seminar series will be a venue for researchers to share works-in-progress, exchange ideas, identify avenues for collaboration, and curate research. We also seek to mitigate the impact of Covid-19 on research exchange, and foster collaborations among researchers and academics from diverse geographies. Every quarter we will be hosting a remote seminar with presentations, discussions and debate on a thematic area.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong> </strong></p>
<h3><strong>Seminar format</strong></h3>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong> </strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">We are happy to welcome abstracts for one of two tracks:</p>
<h3>Working paper presentation</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify;"> A working paper presentation would ideally involve a working draft that is presented for about 15 minutes followed by feedback from workshop participants. Abstracts for this track should be 600-800 words in length with clear research questions, methodology, and questions for discussion at the seminar. Ideally, for this track, authors should be able to submit a draft paper two weeks before the conference for circulation to participants.</p>
<h3> Coffee-shop conversations</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify;">In contrast to the formal paper presentation format, the point of the coffee-shop conversations is to enable an informal space for presentation and discussion of ideas. Simply put, it is an opportunity for researchers to “think out loud” and get feedback on future research agendas. Provocations for this should be 100-150 words containing a short description of the idea you want to discuss.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">We will try to accommodate as many abstracts as possible given time constraints. We welcome submissions from students and early career researchers, especially those from under-represented communities.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><em>All discussions will be private and conducted under the Chatham House Rule. Drafts will only be circulated among registered participants.</em></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Please send all abstracts to <a href="mailto:workshops@cis-india.org">workshops@cis-india.org</a>.</p>
<h3>Theme for the first seminar (to be held on an online platform)</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong> </strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The first seminar will be centered around the theme of ‘Information Disorder<strong>: <em>Mis-, Dis- and Malinformation</em>.’</strong> While the issue of information disorder, colloquially termed as ‘fake news’, has been in the political forefront for the last five years, the flawed attempts at countering the ‘infodemic’ brought about by the pandemic proves that there still continues to be substantial gaps in the body-of-knowledge on this issue. This includes research that proposes empirical, replicable methods of understanding the types, forms or nature of information disorder or research that attempts to understand regulatory approaches, the layers of production and the roles played by different agents in the spread of ‘fake news’.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Accordingly, we invite submissions that address these gaps in knowledge, including those that examine the relationship between digital technology and information disorder across a spectrum of fields and disciplines. Areas of interest include but are not limited to:</p>
<ol style="text-align: justify;">
<li>Information disorders during COVID-19</li>
<li>Effects of coordinated campaigns on marginalised communities</li>
<li>Journalism, the State, and the trust in media </li>
<li>Platform responsibility in information disorder </li>
<li>Information disorder in international law/constitutional/human rights law</li>
<li>Information disorder as a geopolitical tool</li>
<li>Sociopolitical and cultural factors in user engagement</li></ol>
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<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Timeline</strong></p>
<ol style="text-align: justify;">
<li>Abstract Submission Deadline: August 25th</li>
<li>Results of Abstract review: September 8th</li>
<li>Full submissions (of draft papers): September 30th</li>
<li>Seminar date: Tentatively October 7th</li></ol>
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<h3><strong>Contact details</strong></h3>
<p style="text-align: justify;">For any queries please contact us at <a href="mailto:workshops@cis-india.org">workshops@cis-india.org</a>.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/cis-seminar-series-information-disorder'>http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/cis-seminar-series-information-disorder</a>
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No publisheramanDigital EconomyDigital AccessInternet GovernanceDigital DisruptionInformation Technology2021-08-11T11:17:57ZPageCelebrating the success of Wikipedia in Wikipedia Summit Pune 2013
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/celebrating-the-success-of-wikipedia-in-wikipedia-summit-pune-2013
<b>Wikipedia Club Pune, a local community based outreach user group in Pune has recently organized Wikipedia Summit Pune 2013 to spread words about “Spoken Wikipedia”, a project to add recorded audio for Indic language Wikipedia articles which will help the disabled to access Wikipedia and “Bridging Editor Gender Gap.”</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">On January 12 and 13, 2013, I was in Pune to participate in the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Summit_Pune">Wikipedia Summit Pune 2013</a>, a two day event organized by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Club_Pune">Wikipedia Club Pune</a> to promote Wikipedia as an effective means of education, to empower and reach out to India, to bring the country under a spotlight through <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Spoken_Wikipedia/Indic_Languages">Spoken Wikipedia</a>, and to bridge the <a href="http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/04/27/nine-out-of-ten-wikipedians-continue-to-be-men/">gender gap</a> of Wikipedia editors. Here is a summary of the activities.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Day 1</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">On the first day, January 12, more than 100 people including students from almost 10 different schools, housewives, working professionals and free and open source activists participated. The opening ceremony began with talks from Abhishek Suryawanshi, founder member of Wikipedia Club Pune, Sudhanwa Jogelkar, President of Wikimedia India Chapter, Rishi Aacharya, Principal, PAI International Learning Solutions, and social activist Ms. Vibha.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Before the formal opening Abhishek spoke for a while about the Spoken Wikipedia project which is one main agenda of the two days event. He explained about the need of spoken wikipedia, especially for people with disabilities and how effective it would be when it spreads in 20 Indic languages. In the past wikipedians in Pune gathered and recorded articles in various Indian and international languages.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Sudhanwa Jogelkar, President, Wikimedia India Chapter introduced the chapter's role for Wikimedia movement to the audience. He spoke about the chapters' in few of the national events/projects like Wiki Loves Monument, GLAM project in Crafts Museum, Delhi and many other outreach events. There were few announcements about the chapter on the MoU to be signed from the chapter with district collector of Kanyakumari, the India Chapter being partner to Springfest, IIT, Kharagpur, Commons day celebration in February and GNUnify 2013, Pune.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Vibha, a social activist based in Delhi spoke about gender discrimination in many aspects of our social and professional life. Access to knowledge for free could bridge this and Wikipedia, being so known universally and accessed by millions of people every day could be the best platform for this.' says Vibha.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Rishi Aacharya, Principal of PAI International brought the vedic saying "Ya vidya sa vimuktaye" to explain the real meaning of knowledge which is free of its existence in an Indian context. He spoke about open source movement and Wikipedia's part in it.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">After the formal opening there was a Q&A session for the participants to clarify various questions they had about Wikipedia. Then they were explained about the three parallel sessions: An Open Discussion about Gender Gap, Workshop for Indic Languages, and Spoken Wikipedia. The session on gender gap was attended by many school students. Vibha and some activists coordinated this event. In the Workshop for Indic languages and Spoken Wikipedia, wikipedians helped participants for the workshop with basic editing and the participants edited Marathi and Hindi Wikipedia. Articles from various medical subjects of common interest were chosen. There were three medical professionals to support with the medical terminologies for editors contributing to Marathi and Hindi Wikipedia.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">At the end of the day there were separate wrap up tracks to summarize the learning of whole session. All of the participants gathered together to educate each other about the work they have done. Many of the participants spoke about their experience and learnings. Plans for the next day was announced. Wikipedians gathered for a group photo and socialized after the closing talks.</p>
<h3>Day 2</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The second day, January 13, of the Wikipedia Summit in Pune was a sequel of the activities which happened on the first day. More than 40 students took part in this session. Vibha, Srishti and team were coordinating the gender gap track. Many topics related to Gender Gap, gender based discrimination, Role of gender gap in occupation, Gender gap in Wikipedia, Participation of Woman editors on Wikipedia were discussed.</p>
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<p><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/IMG_4124.jpg/@@images/31ee6a90-3009-45fa-8166-6a30bbf5d590.jpeg" style="float: left; " title="A participant records his voice for an article on Marathi Wikipedia" class="image-inline" alt="A participant records his voice for an article on Marathi Wikipedia" /></p>
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<p>One of the participating Wikipedians recording his voice for a Marathi article</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">Spoken Wikipedia is a project to bring out editors who are willing to contribute to Wikipedia by reading the Wikipedia articles, recording them and the uploading them to <a class="external-link" href="http://commons.wikimedia.org">WikiCommons</a>. These recorded audio could be used for articles on various Indic Wikipedias and would be really useful for users with disabilities. The first workshop was aimed for contribution for articles related to common diseases.</p>
<br />"Those who are blind and unable to read can listen to the articles and get information. This will be beneficial to a lot of people", says Atharva, a school student who has contributed to an article about Rabies on <a class="external-link" href="http://mr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%A4%B0%E0%A5%87%E0%A4%AC%E0%A5%80%E0%A4%9C">Marathi Wikipedia.</a>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">Participants of the Spoken Wikipedia session worked on the articles on Hindi and Marathi Wikipedia and moved them from sandboxes to article namespaces. After all of the articles were created they recorded them. They formed groups of 3-4 members and worked together. One of them would search information mainly from the English Wikipedia articles and some of the available Marathi (or Hindi), some others would translate and the other member would record it using a mobile phone. That was a great team effort.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Over 25 voluntary organizers joined hands for making this a success. There were about 120 participants. At the end of the day participants from both the sessions gathered. Many of the participants and organizers shared their experiences and learnings. The program was concluded with socializing, taking group pictures, promises to stay in touch and taking active part in more Wikipedia activities.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">This event was co-hosted by Centre for Internet and Society with a financial support of ₹ 21,600 granted by Kusuma Foundation.</p>
<h3>Also see:</h3>
<ul>
<li>Wikipedia Summit Pune: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Summit_Pune">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Summit_Pune</a></li>
<li>Wikipedia Club Pune: <a class="external-link" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Club_Pune">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Club_Pune</a></li>
<li>Pictures: <a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_Summit_Pune">http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_Summit_Pune</a></li>
<li>Spoken Wikipedia Project: <a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Spoken_Wikipedia_-_India">http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Spoken_Wikipedia_-_India</a></li>
<li>Pune Club facebook page: <a href="https://www.facebook.com/groups/WikipediaClubPune">https://www.facebook.com/groups/WikipediaClubPune</a></li>
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<h3>Video</h3>
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<param name="src" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/uGlU94o-388&feature"><embed height="371" width="450" src="http://www.youtube.com/v/uGlU94o-388&feature" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"> </embed>
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<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/celebrating-the-success-of-wikipedia-in-wikipedia-summit-pune-2013'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/celebrating-the-success-of-wikipedia-in-wikipedia-summit-pune-2013</a>
</p>
No publishersubhaDigital ActivismAccess to KnowledgeDigital AccessWikimediaWikipediaYouthVideoOpen AccessOpennessEvent2013-04-16T12:48:40ZBlog EntryBeyond Access as Inclusion
http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/beyond-access-as-inclusion
<b>On 13 September, the day before the fifth Internet Governance Forum opens, CIS is coorganising in Vilnius a meeting on Internet governance and human rights. One of the main aims of this meeting is to call attention to the crucial, yet in Internet governance often neglected, indivisibility of rights. In this blog post, Anja Kovacs uses this lens to illustrate how it can broaden as well reinvigorate our understanding of what remains one of the most pressing issues in Internet governance in developing countries to this day: that of access to the Internet.</b>
<p align="JUSTIFY">One of the most attractive characteristics of the
Internet – and perhaps also one of the most debated ones – is its
empowering, democratising potential. In expositions in favour of
access to the Internet for all, this potential certainly often plays
a central role: as the Internet can help us to make our societies
more open, more inclusive, and more democratic, everybody should be
able to reap the fruits of this technology, it is argued. In other
words, in debates on access to the Internet, most of us take as our
<em>starting point</em> the desirability of such access, for the above
reasons. But how justified is such a stance? Is an Internet-induced
democratic transformation of our societies what is actually happening
on the ground?</p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">I would like to move away, in this blog post, from
the more traditional approaches to the issue of access, where debates
mostly veer towards issues of infrastructure (spectrum, backbones,
last mile connectivity, …) or, under the banner of “diversity”,
towards the needs of specific, disadvantaged communities (especially
linguistic minorities and the disabled). To remind us more sharply of
the issues at stake and of the wide range of human rights that need
our active attention to make our dreams a reality, I would like to
take a step back and to ask two fundamental questions regarding
access: why might access be important? And what do we actually have
access to?</p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">Let me start, then, by exploring the first question:
why, actually, is Internet access important? In his canonical work on
the information age, and especially in the first volume on the rise
of the network society, Manuel Castells (2000) has perhaps provided
the most elaborate and erudite description of the ways in which new
technologies are restructuring our societies and our lives. We are
all all too familiar with the many and deep-seated ways in which the
Internet changes the manner in which we learn, play, court, pay, do
business, maintain relationships, dream, campaign. And yet, the exact
nature of the divide created by the unequal distribution of technical
infrastructure and access, despite being so very real, receives
relatively little attention: this divide is not simply one of
opportunities, it is crucially one of power. If in traditional
Marxist analysis the problem was that the oppressed did not have
access to the means of production, today, one could well argue, the
problem is that they do not have access to the means of communication
and information.</p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">Indeed, the Internet is not something that is simply
happening to us: there are people who are responsible for these new
evolutions. And so it becomes important to ask: who is shaping the
Internet? Who is creating this new world? Let us, by way of example,
consider some figures relating to Internet use in India. So often
hailed as the emerging IT superpower of the world, there are, by the
end of 2009, according to official government figures, in this
country of 1 billion 250 million people slightly more than 15 million
Internet connections. Of these, only slightly more than half, or
almost 8 million, are broadband connections – the rest are still
dial-up ones (TRAI 2010). The number of Internet users is of course
higher – one survey estimates that there are between 52 million and
71 million Internet users in urban areas, where the bulk of users is
still located (IAMAI 2010). But while this is a considerable number,
it remains a fraction of the population in a country so big. What
these figures put in stark relief, then, is that the poor and
marginalised are not so much excluded from the information society
(in fact, many have to bear the consequences of new evolutions made
possible by it in rather excruciating fashion), but rather, that they
are fundamentally excluded from shaping the critical ways in which
our societies are being transformed.</p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">To have at least the possibility to access the
Internet is, then, of central significance in this context for the
possibility of participation it signals in the restructuring of our
societies at the community, national and global level, and this in
two ways: in the creation of visions of where our societies should be
going, and in the actual shaping of the architecture of our societies
in the information age.</p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">If we agree that access attains great significance
in this sense, then a second question poses itself, and that is: in
practice, what exactly are we getting access to? This query should be
of concern to all of us. With the increasing corporatisation of the
Internet and the seemingly growing urges of governments on all
continents to survey and control their citizens, new challenges are
thrown up of how to nurture the growth of open, inclusive, democratic
societies, that all of us are required to take an interest in.</p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">Yet it is in the case of poor and marginalised
people that the challenges are most pronounced. Efforts to
include them in the information society are disproportionately
legitimised on the basis of the contribution these can make to
improving their livelihoods. Initiatives, often using mobile
technology, that allow farmers to get immediate information about the
market prices of the produce they are intending to sell, are perhaps
the most well-known and oft-cited examples in this category. Other
efforts aim to improve the information flow from the government to
citizens: India has set up an ambitious network of Common Service
Centres, for example, that aim to greatly facilitate the access of
citizens to particular government services, such as obtaining birth
or caste certificates – and going by first indications, this also
seems to be succeeding in practice. Only rarely, however, do
initiatives to “include” the poor in the information society
address them as holistic beings who do not only have economic lives,
but political, emotional, creative and intellectual existences as
well. This is not to say that economic issues are not of
importance. But by highlighting only this aspect of poor people's
lives, we promote a highly impoverished understanding of their
existences.</p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">The focus on a limited aspect of the poor's identity
- important as that aspect may be - has a function, however: it makes
it possible to hide from view the extremely restrictive terms on
which poor people are currently being integrated into the information
society. Even initiatives such as the Common Service Centres are in
fact based on a public-private-partnership model that explicitly aims
to “align [..] social and commercial goals” (DIT 2006: 1), and in
effect subordinates government service design to the requirements of
the CSC business model (Singh 2008). The point is not simply that we
need strong privacy and data protection policies in such a context –
although we clearly do. There is a larger issue here, which is that
efforts to include the poor in the information society, in the
present circumstances, really seem to simply integrate them more
closely into a capitalist system over which they have little control,
or to submit them to ever greater levels of government and corporate
surveillance. Their own capacity to give shape to the system in which
they are “included”, despite the oft-heralded capacities of the
Internet to allow greater democratic participation and to turn
everybody into a producer and distributor, as well as a consumer,
remains extremely limited.</p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">Such tendencies have not gone unnoticed. For
example, unlike in many other parts of the world, social movements in
India fighting against dams, special economic zones or mining
operations in forest areas - all initiatives that lead to large-scale
displacement – have not embraced technology as enthusiastically as
one might have expected. There are various reasons for this. Within
Indian nationalism, there have always been strands deeply critical of
technology, with Gandhi perhaps their most illustrious proponent. But
for many activists, technology often also already comes with an
ideological baggage: an application such as Twitter, for example, in
so many of its aspects is clearly manufactured by others, for others,
drawing on value sets that activists often in many ways are reluctant
to embrace. And such connotations only gain greater validity because
of the intimate connections that exist in India between the IT boom
and neoliberalism: technology has great responsibility for many of
the trends and practices these activists are fighting against. While
the Internet might have made possible many new publics, most
movements do not – as movements – recognise these publics as
their own (Kovacs, forthcoming).</p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">To some extent, these are of course questions of the
extent of access that people are granted. But they also raise the
important issue of the value structure of the Internet. Efforts at
inclusion always take for granted a standard that is already set. But
what if the needs and desires of the many billions that still need to
be included are not served by the Internet <em>as it exists</em>? What
if, for it to really work for them, they need to be able to make the
Internet a different place than the one we know today? While it is
obvious that different people will give different answers in
different parts of the world, such debates are complicated
tremendously by the fact that it is no longer sufficient to reach a
national consensus on the issues under discussion, as was the case in
earlier eras. The global nature of the Internet's infrastructure
requires that the possibility of differing opinions, too, needs to be
facilitated at the global level. What are the consequences of this
for the development of democracy?</p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">For access to the Internet to be substantively
meaningful from a human rights perspective in the information age, it
is crucial, then, that at a minimum, the openness of the Internet is
ensured at all levels. Of course, openness can be considered a value
in itself. But perhaps more importantly, at the moment, it is the
only way in which the possibility of a variety of answers to the
pressing question of what shape our societies should take in the
information age can emerge. Open standards and the portability of
data, for example, are crucial if societies are to continue to decide
on the role corporations should play in their public life, rather
than having corporations <em>de facto</em> rule the roost. Similarly,
under no circumstances should anyone be cut off from the Internet, if
people are to participate in the public life of the societies of
which they are members. And these are not just concerns for
developing countries: if recent incidents from France to Australia
are anything to go by, new possibilities facilitated by the Internet
have, at least at the level of governments, formed the impetus for a
clear shift to the right of the political spectrum in many developed
countries. In the developed world, too, the questions of access and
what it allows for are thus issues that should concern all. In the
information age, human rights will only be respected if such respect
is already inscribed in the very architecture of its central
infrastructure itself.<br /><br /></p>
<p align="JUSTIFY"><strong>List of References</strong></p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">Castells, Manuel (2000). <em>The Rise of the Network
Society, 2<sup>nd</sup> edition</em>. Oxford: Blackwell.</p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">Department of Information Technology (DIT) (2006).
<em>Guidelines for the Implementation of Common Services Centers
(CSCs) Scheme in States</em>. New Delhi: Department of Information
Technology, Government of India.</p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI)
(2010). <em>I-Cube 2009-2010: Internet in India</em>. Mumbai: Internet
and Mobile Association of India.</p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">Kovacs, Anja (forthcoming). <em>Inquilab 2.0?
Reflections on Online Activism in India</em> (working title).
Bangalore: Centre for Internet and Society.</p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">Singh, Parminder Jeet (2008). <em>Recommendations for a
Meaningful and Successful e-Governance in India</em>. IT for Change Policy
Brief, IT for Change, Bangalore.</p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">Telecom Regulatory Auhority of India (TRAI) (2010).
<em>The Indian Telecom Services Performance Indicators,
October-December 2009</em>. New Delhi: Telecom Regulatory Auhority of
India.</p>
<p align="JUSTIFY"> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/beyond-access-as-inclusion'>http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/beyond-access-as-inclusion</a>
</p>
No publisheranjaDevelopmentDigital AccessInternet Governancehuman rights2011-08-02T07:29:03ZBlog EntryArchive and Access: The Delhi State Archives
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-cyborgs/the-delhi-state-archives
<b>In this, the fifth entry in a series on the CIS-RAW Archive and Access project, Aparna Balachandran reports on two state archives located in Delhi, the National Archives of India, and the Delhi Archives. </b>
<p>Less visible than the National Archives of India is Delhi’s other state archive, the Delhi Archives. Unlike the NAI, which is located in Janpath at the heart of Lutyen’s Delhi, the Delhi Archives share a dilapidated building with the Delhi Institute of Heritage Research and Management, in a corner of the Qutub Institutional Area. The Delhi Archives were set up in 1972 to house documents and other material pertaining to the city of Delhi from as early as 1785, consisting mainly of the records of the Delhi Resident, and post 1857, the Commissioners’ Office. The collection is certainly not vast, but includes gems like the Mutiny Papers, the 600 page document on the trial of Bahadur Shah Zafar, papers on the post-rebellion demolition of Chandi Chowk and records on the setting up of Imperial Delhi.</p>
<p>Like the NAI, the Delhi archives are presently suffering from a lack of both funds and staff; the library, for instance, is in a state of complete disrepair. But we were assured by Sanjay Garg, who is in charge of the research room, that the archive itself is in good functioning order. The process of cataloguing its scattered Persian and Urdu records is underway, as are efforts to digitise the entire collection, about which I shall presently say more. From the very beginning, one of the important mandates for the setting up of the Delhi Archives was the acquisition of material “of interest” to Delhi (although the grounds for adjudgement seem fairly unclear) from other archival collections. We were told that records are regularly acquired from the Haryana and Punjab State Archives, and from the NAI; in addition, when funds allow, a historian is dispatched to the British Library to decide on what should be acquired from there. The Acquisitions Department also sends out a call in the papers at intervals for information about personal and family collections; sadly, we could not glean more information about this process because the person in charge was away on vacation.</p>
<p>In 2006, the Delhi archives launched an ambitious and much heralded project to digitise its entire collection; the process was still underway in early 2009. Documents, maps and photographs are being scanned and the visitor can access these on the two or three computers that are available for the purpose. Unfortunately, the computers are equipped with a search engine that is both difficult and cumbersome to use as well as being excruciatingly slow. This technology was developed by and borrowed from the NAI, where the online index is so ridden with misleading spellings as to make it practically unusable. Our brief use of the search engine at the Delhi Archives did not seem to throw up any glaring mistakes here at least – or perhaps we were dazzled by the visual materials now available online. Maps, the earliest going back to 1803; photographs including those of nationalist leaders; landscapes, cityscapes and monuments shot by colonial photographers; and hilariously, photos of the archive staff posing in the library stacks and offices are now all there to view with a mere click of the mouse. For a hundred rupees apiece moreover, the user can go home with the images of her choice on a pen-drive or a CD. </p>
<p>It is notable that the users that the Delhi State Archives and the NAI get are extremely different, a fact that impacts the way the two places function, particularly in terms of access. We were told at the research room at the NAI that the variety of users it gets has increased both in numbers and in diversity, so much so that a few years ago, archive officials decided that the category of “bonafide” user had to be expanded to include the non-academic user. Previously, access to the NAI was largely restricted to scholars armed with documentation proving their credentials; now, any citizen with some form of state identification is allowed access. While the bulk of users are still most certainly academics, the archive, or the idea of the archive, looms large in the public imagination. There are for instance, many novelists and film-makers who use the NAI. Not all are happy with their experience; some leave disappointed because the dry colonial records do not reveal, or immediately reveal the stories and detail they seek. The launching of state schemes - like the extension of martyrs pensions - that require written evidence from the archive also triggers off an increase in users. As more people and events are defined as part of, and co-opted into the National Movement, claimants to familial connections soar. We were told for example, that there was an influx of enquirers from certain villages in Haryana after a few families were able to substantiate their claims of being descendents of INA soldiers. Last year, the government agreed to grant the status of freedom fighters to the victims of the Jalliawala Bagh massacre in 1919 resulting in the arrival of those claiming to be descendents seeking evidence for the same (a complicated situation because of the vast discrepancies between the reported numbers of those killed in the British and Indian lists).</p>
<p>Interestingly, one case had a direct impact on the archival policy on access to documents. In the 1990s, with the increase in the number of heritage hotels in areas that included the former Princely States, claimants to land soared, with the NAI and the Home Ministry being dragged to court in several cases. As a result, the Accession Papers of the Princely States were made unviewable (a mystery was thereby solved when I repeated this information to a historian friend, frustrated that she was not allowed access to Dewas records from the '50s for some unknown reason). Interestingly, the largest category of new users consist of descendents of indentured labourers who left India in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to places like Mauritius, Jamaica, British Guiana, Trinidad and Fiji who want to trace their family histories. This is no easy task – these migrants appear in the lists that the colonial state kept of passages, medical examinations, births, deaths and marriages but were referred to by their first names only. </p>
<p> </p>
<p><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-cyborgs/uploads/BOOKPARTII14.jpg/image_preview" alt="border map delhi archives" class="image-inline image-inline" title="border map delhi archives" /><br /><br />The profile of users at the Delhi Archives is quite different; most are non-academic and the number of scholars there could be as small as one or two a month. The non-academic user is also of a particular kind. Employees from various Delhi government departments are occasionally dispatched to the archive to refer to old files. But more importantly, the Delhi Archives are home to Delhi’s muncipal land records. A fifty to a hundred people a day arrive to look at, and make photo-copies of land records in order to settle disputes, make claims etc. The process is simple and routine and perhaps it is the fact of its being an everyday legal office that makes the Delhi Archives far simpler to access than a scholarly archive like the NAI. Entry to the NAI for instance, involves an arduous process of registration and verification; there is no such scrutiny at the Delhi Archives. Materials like border maps that are deemed as posing a threat to national security cannot be accessed at the NAI. Browsing through the maps at the Delhi Archives, we came across several border maps, a few of which we bought copies of that we can now presumably reproduce, disseminate or enlarge to hang on a wall.</p>
<p> <img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-cyborgs/uploads/MEMORANDA_2.jpg/image_preview" alt="border map two delhi archives" class="image-inline image-inline" title="border map two delhi archives" /></p>
<p>We asked Sanjay Garg whether there was a policy at the Delhi to disallow the viewing of any of its records. Yes, he said, if the material was a threat to the nation’s safety. Had such a restriction ever been imposed? No, he answered.<br /><br /><br /></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-cyborgs/the-delhi-state-archives'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-cyborgs/the-delhi-state-archives</a>
</p>
No publisheraparnaDigital AccessArchives2011-08-23T04:43:39ZBlog EntryArchive and Access: Documents in the Time of Democracy
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-cyborgs/documents-in-the-time-of-democracy
<b>This is the seventh in a series of blog posts documenting Aparna Balachandran, Rochelle Pinto, and Abhijeet Bhattacharya's CIS-RAW project, Archive and Access. In this entry, Rochelle Pinto introduces a sub-set of posts that will look at the political significance of public access to official documents on the internet. </b>
<p></p>
<p>Contemporary conflict over land brings
together issues of land ownership, legal documents and technology in ways that
make us examine the circulation and political significance of documents and
information. If we assess the relevance of documents as evidence or as
verifiers of truth in the midst of political battles over land, we are led to
doubt the apparently inherent democratic promise of digital technology. Even
where internet technology is accessible, for instance in the modernised
villages of Goa, our belief that public access to official documents through
the internet is a democratic gesture can be questioned. It would appear that
this form of circulation or display need not have great political significance
for contemporary movements, let alone the question of whether it has the potential to function as a politically liberating force. This implies that while there is a fulfilment of
democracy in a technical sense, the political significance of a particular
document and of the public domain in which it circulates can only be gauged
from the way in which a dispute over land or over ownership of property, or
about membership within a village, foregrounds one kind of document over
another and constructs different kinds of public. In the case of current
disputes in Goa around land that is, or was held by village level communidades
or gaunkarias, there is not even a stable or singular legal meaning attached to
the range of documents that circulate among the competing authorities and
parties to these disputes. In fact, tracing the life and path of the different
legal documents that are necessary to argue a case involving communidade land
involves a tangle of authorities, repositories and disputing groups. The sense
of publicness that is raised by internet technology requires us to question the
kind of politics that endows the document and its publicness with political
meaning.</p>
<p> In a national and possibly international
situation where anti-state claims on land are often non-legal (whether in the
form of ethical arguments or armed rebellion) the current conflicts over land in Goa are
local in the sense of having specific attributes. Special Economic Zones (as
also other prior forms of transnational economic flows) propagate a delinking of life, labour, and capital from
any fixed political entity, in as far as they claim immunity from national
laws. Against this, the diverse claims on land in Goa (whether as familial disputes,
environmental conflicts, livelihood arguments, belongingness and historical
claims of being indigenous), raise overlapping claims and arguments
about the relation between legality and politics, the use of internet
technology within resistance movements and rights over land that are outside the
domain of private property. All of these resonate with similar conflicts
ongoing in other parts of the country, with some differences in the kinds of
opposition generated. </p>
<p style="text-align: left;">The overall thrust of the argument made here is that
movements that are pitted against the state or the multinational entities it
supports straddle various forms of state power. Currently, we tend to see these
divided into the formal exercise of power through law, regulation, and systematization,
and the exercise of power through non-legal and non-state entities and means.
The widely perceived illegitimacy of the state requires it to engage in two
forms of political representation – the one consolidating its use of
governmentality through law, the other effecting its sovereignty through a
substantive exercise and demonstration of power. The appearance of legality and
the lacing through of all political processes with due procedure and due
documents is important to sustain some measure of governmentality, while the
domain of substantive politics requires that rule be maintained through overt
coercion and expropriation. The two domains are not disconnected. The ability
to amend laws by an act of government, without due discussion or consensus
gives the state infinite licence to bolster its acts of violence with legality.
The gap between these two domains provides an element of unpredictability and
turbulence that generates the frisson of excitement for viewers (as against the
sufferers) of Indian state politics. For, the sheer existence of forms of
governmentality implies that those equipped to do so will demand the fulfillment of the liberal project
that the state claims to be bound by. The Right to Information movement and the
innumerable human rights reports and people’s courts are instances of the state
being called to order within its own terms. If these calls threaten to
jeopardise interests beyond a certain threshold, then substantive violence is
enacted, more often than not exceeding the bounds of legality. Those who oppose
the state but whose opposition is articulated within the terms of
governmentality find themselves condemned to demanding justice or the restitution of truth
over decades. The success of the state
however lies in its ability to negotiate both these forms of power, allowing it
to insert itself into dominant global currents in politics and economy, while
keeping its house in order at home. This gap and its bridging is made visible
through a range of events, patterns and pronouncements. The unstable status of the
document as the locus of truth and evidence, in the context of legal and political conflicts
reveals this gap. Differing forms of punishment and justice are not the only markers of ill-fitting forms of power. Ethically admissible claims that are not based on rights, made by non-state entities that have no legal recognition are also caught on the side of all that lies outside the domain of modern statecraft. Internet technologies that work to make what was hitherto hidden or inaccessible more 'public' are necessarily inscribed within this network of quasi-legal, legitimate, illegal and illegitimate entities and practices.The working of technology then has
to be understood through the idea of governmentality as a language of control and
subversion. This is further qualified by the fact that the discourse around
writing and regulation has always been viewed with suspicion by those who stand
outside its circle of power.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-cyborgs/documents-in-the-time-of-democracy'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-cyborgs/documents-in-the-time-of-democracy</a>
</p>
No publisherrochelleDigital AccessArchives2011-08-02T05:45:44ZBlog EntryArchive and Access: Digitisation and Private Records--The Case of the Regional Archive
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-cyborgs/tamil-nadu-archives
<b>This is the first in a series of posts by CIS-RAW researcher Aparna Balachandran on the Tamil Nadu Archives (TNA), looking at different aspects of their functioning in order to think about the issue of access in relation to regional archives in the country. More specifically, these posts will engage with the relationship of the TNA with the ways in which history is thought and written about in the Tamil region, both within the academy and outside. These posts are part of the CIS-RAW project 'Archive and Access'.</b>
<p></p>
<p>One of the less known functions of state archives in India is the periodic acquisition of records from the general public at regular intervals. These are in the form of voluntary contributions that are solicited through advertisements for particular kinds of private collections, depending on the nature of the archive and what its administrators think is a useful and appropriate addition to it. On our visit to the Delhi Archives we were explicitly informed that this was a place for collections or documents pertinent to the interests of the Delhi Archives, but the Delhi Archives were emphatically not interested in what was of 'national significance'. Materials of the latter kind, we were told, were to be given to the National Archives of India. Unfortunately since the person in charge of the acquisition of manuscripts was away, we were not be able to obtain more information about how contributions are determined to be of importance to the Delhi archive or not and the process by which they are obtained, or see a list of what in fact had been obtained in this way over the years.</p>
<p>The Delhi Archives appear to function quite autonomously as far as the acquisition of records of this kind is concerned; the TNA on the other hand works through one of the Regional Committees for the Survey of Historical Records. These Committees, whose members include the Assistant Commissioners and Collectors of District Record Offices in different parts of the country, are the decision makers as far as private records are concerned; a registry of these records is maintained at the National Archives. According to the Citizen’s Charter of the TNA, the Committee’s aim is to 'to survey and collect the rare records of historical administrative, legal and fiscal value in the hands of private persons to strengthen the history of India and to bring to light such records… to preserve them for posterity'. These records have to specifically pertain to the period before 1947; examples of contributions that would be welcome include 'palm leaves, copper plates, letters of high dignitaries, deeds, correspondence volumes, books, journals, etc., relating to the freedom movement, photos, any assignment of lands to the East India Company, or the British, religious customs, endowment of property to any charitable purpose, deed of Zamins, Polygars, Newabs, Samasthanams, Rajas, any notable events in the British Rule, etc'.</p>
<p>The acquisition of materials of this kind at the TNA ceased at least twenty years ago. The TNA does keep a list of these materials, and after some pleading, I was able to take a look at it (although the names of many of the contributors are now missing). They include for instance, the Pudukottai Residency records; various zamindari records including for instance, Sengampatti and Ramnad; Portuguese documents (Regimento Auditorio; Ecclesiastico de Archbispado Primacial de Goa Eda Sua Relocao Anno 1810); a collection of papers relating to the late Chief Minister and film actor MG Ramachandran (MGR); autographs and photos of nationalist leaders as well as sundry Hindi and Persian documents. The person in charge of these records explained that the criterion for accepting contributions was above all, their age. He mentioned the fact that many a contributor was turned away when they had collections pertaining to the post Independence period (the MGR papers being, of course, an exception to this rule). The issue of regional relevance that was emphasised in the Delhi Archives was not brought up here at all. It is interesting that after the linguistic re-organisation of South India, there was an attempt, following an assumed political and linguistic logic, to separate and distribute the holdings of the TNA to Kerala, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Orissa. This logic does not extend to the private holdings which are required to be of national rather than regional significance.</p>
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One problem that clearly surfaced in the course of my looking at the acquisition of private records by the TNA is the lack of any sort of formal legal arrangement between the families that possess collections and the institutions who wish to acquire them. This is particularly important because these collections often possess sentimental or other kinds of value for the families, which have to be acknowledged and respected even as they become part of public repository. The issue of digitisation also throws up various points. At a very basic level is the issue of conservation. While the TNA is digitising its holdings, private records are left untouched. It is unclear why this is the case; in all likelihood, it is because they are not considered a part of the TNA’s holdings. The archive is merely their guardian (this for instance is also true of land records which do not fall under the digitisation scheme because the TNA is merely “housing” these documents for the government). Given the eclectic nature and often geographically and linguistically diverse range of the private records at the TNA (and other regional archives), there is no doubt that users of archives would benefit greatly from online catalogues of these collections. And finally, while the official British themselves occupy little space in the public imagination of Madras, the range of private records the TNA possesses might well attract new users, both scholarly and lay, to the colonial archive.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-cyborgs/tamil-nadu-archives'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-cyborgs/tamil-nadu-archives</a>
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No publishersachiaDigital AccessArchives2011-08-23T04:32:07ZBlog Entry