The Centre for Internet and Society
http://editors.cis-india.org
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Open Data Hackathons are Great, but Address Privacy and License Concerns
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/open-data-hackathons-are-great-but-address-privacy-and-license-concerns
<b>This is to cross-publish a blog post from DataMeet website regarding a letter shared with the organisers of Urban Hack 2015, Bangalore, in response to a set of privacy and license concerns identified and voiced during the hackathon by DataMeet members. Sumandro Chattapadhyay co-authored and co-signed the letter. The blog post is written by Nisha Thompson.</b>
<p> </p>
<p>Hackathons are a source of confusion and frustration for us. DataMeet actively does not do them unless there is a very specific outcome the community wants like<a href="https://github.com/datameet/maps/tree/master/parliamentary-constituencies"> freeing a whole dataset </a>or introducing <a href="http://datameet.org/2015/05/13/mumbai-meet-6-data-science-hackathon/">open data to a new audience</a>. We feel that they cause burn out, are not productive, and in general don't help create a healthy community of civic tech and open data enthusiasts.</p>
<p>That is not to say we feel others shouldn't do them, they are very good opportunities to spark discussion and introduce new audiences to problems in the social sector. <a href="http://www.datakind.org/chapters/datakind-blr">DataKind</a> and <a href="https://rhokbangalore.wordpress.com/">RHOK</a> and numerous others host hackathons or variations of them regularly to stir the pot, bring new people into civic tech and they can be successful starts to long term connections and experiments. A lot of people in the DataMeet community participate and enjoy hackathons.</p>
<p>However, with great data access comes great responsibility. We always want to make sure that even if no output is achieved when a dataset is opened at least no harm should be done.</p>
<p>Last October an open data hackathon,<a href="https://www.hackerearth.com/sprints/urban-hack/"> Urban Hack</a>, run by Hacker Earth, <a href="http://www.nasscom.in/">NASSCOM</a>, <a href="http://www.xrci.xerox.com/">XEROX</a>, <a href="https://console.ng.bluemix.net/?cm_mmc=EcoDISA-_-Bluemix_day-_-11-15-14::12-31-15-_-UrbanHack">IBM </a>and <a href="http://wri-india.org/">World Resource Institute India</a> wanted to bring out open data and spark innovation in the transport and crime space by making datasets from <a href="http://mybmtc.com/">Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation (BMTC)</a> and the Bangalore City Police available to work with. A DataMeet member (<a href="http://www.lostprogrammer.com/">Srinivas Kodali</a>) was participating, he is a huge transport data enthusiast and wanted to take a look at what is being made available.</p>
<p>In the morning shortly after it started I received a call from him that there is a dataset that was made available that seems to be violating privacy and data security. We contacted the organizers and they took it down, later we realized it was quite a sensitive dataset and a few hundred people had already downloaded it. We were also distressed that they had not clarified ownership of data, license of data, and had linked to sources like <a href="http://openbangalore.org/">Open Bangalore</a> without specifying licensing, which violated the license.</p>
<p>The organizers were quite noted and had been involved with hackathons before so it was a little distressing to see these mistakes being made. We were concerned that the government partners (who had not participated in these types of events before) were also being exposed to poor practices. As smart cities initiatives take over the Indian urban space, we began to realize that this is a mistake that shouldn't happen again.</p>
<p>Along with <a href="http://cis-india.org/">Centre for Internet and Society</a> and Random Hacks of Kindness we sent the organizers, Bangalore City Police and BMTC a letter about the breach in protocol. We wanted to make sure everyone was aware of the issues and that measures were taken to not repeat these mistakes.</p>
<p>You can see the letter here:</p>
<p><iframe src="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2702333-Appropriate-and-Responsible-Practices-for.html" height="500" width="600"></iframe></p>
<p>We are very proud of the DataMeet community and Srinivas for bringing this violation to the attention of the organizers. As people who participate in hackathons and other data events it is imperative that privacy and security are kept in mind at all times. In a space like India where a lot of these concepts are new to institutions, like the Government, it is essential that we are always using opportunities not only to showcase the power of open data but also good practices for protecting privacy and ensuring security.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><em>Originally posted on DataMeet website: <a href="http://datameet.org/2016/02/02/to-hack-or-not-to-hack/">http://datameet.org/2016/02/02/to-hack-or-not-to-hack/</a>.</em></p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/open-data-hackathons-are-great-but-address-privacy-and-license-concerns'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/open-data-hackathons-are-great-but-address-privacy-and-license-concerns</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroPrivacyOpen DataOpen Government DataFeaturedHackathonOpenness2016-02-05T20:37:18ZBlog EntryInternet Researchers' Conference 2016 (IRC16) - Selected Sessions
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc16-selected-sessions
<b>We are proud to announce that the first Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC16), organised around the theme of 'studying internet in India,' will be held on February 26-28, 2016, at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), Delhi. We are deeply grateful to the Centre for Political Studies (CPS) at JNU for hosting the Conference, and to the CSCS Digital Innovation Fund (CDIF) for generously supporting it. Here are the details about the session selection process, the selected sessions, the Conference programme (draft), the pre-Conference discussions, accommodation, and travel grants. The Conference will include a book sprint to produce an open handbook on 'methods and tools for internet research.'</b>
<p> </p>
<h2>Session Selection Process</h2>
<p>We received 23 superb session proposals for the IRC16. All the teams that submitted sessions were invited to vote for their eight favourite session in a double-blind manner - the teams did not know the names of the people who proposed other sessions, and we at CIS did not know which team has voted for which particular set of sessions. After receiving all the votes, we could not help but change the format of the Conference (as planned earlier) to accommodate 15 sessions in total. All Discussion and Workshop sessions of the Conference are double track, except for the three Discussion sessions that received most number of votes.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Selected Sessions</h2>
<ol>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-digitaldesires"><strong>#DigitalDesires</strong></a>: Received 8.15% votes. Proposed by Silpa Mukherjee, Ankita Deb, and Rahul Kumar.</li>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-followthemedium"><strong>#FollowTheMedium</strong></a>: Received 7.60% votes. Proposed by Zeenab Aneez and Neha Mujumdar.</li>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-stsdebates"><strong>#STSDebates</strong></a>: Received 7.60% votes. Proposed by Sumandro Chattapadhyay and Jahnavi Phalkey.</li>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-digitalliteraciesatthemargins"><strong>#DigitalLiteraciesAtTheMargins</strong></a>: Received 7.06% votes. Proposed by Aakash Solanki, Sandeep Mertia, and Rashmi M.</li>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-internetmovements"><strong>#InternetMovements</strong></a>: Received 7.06% votes. Proposed by Becca Savory, Sarah McKeever, and Shaunak Sen.</li>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-futurebazaars"><strong>#FutureBazaars</strong></a>: Received 5.97% votes. Proposed by Maitrayee Deka, Adam Arvidsson, Rohini Lakshané, and Ravi Sundaram.</li>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-minimalcomputing"><strong>#MinimalComputing</strong></a>: Received 5.97% votes. Proposed by Padmini Ray Murray and Sebastian Lütgert.</li>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-webofgenealogies"><strong>#WebOfGenealogies</strong></a>: Received 5.97% votes. Proposed by Ishita Tiwary, Sandeep Mertia, and Siddharth Narrain.</li>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-wikishadows"><strong>#WikiShadows</strong></a>: Received 5.97% votes. Proposed by Tanveer Hasan and Rahmanuddin Shaik.</li>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-literaryspaces"><strong>#LiterarySpaces</strong></a>: Received 5.43% votes. Proposed by P.P. Sneha and Arup Chatterjee.</li>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-archiveanarchy"><strong>#ArchiveAnarchy</strong></a>: Received 4.34% votes. Proposed by Ranjani M Prasad and Farah Yameen.</li>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-afcinema2.0"><strong>#AFCinema2.0</strong></a>: Received 3.80% votes. Proposed by Akriti Rastogi and Ishani Dey.</li>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-manypublicsofinternet"><strong>#ManyPublicsOfInternet</strong></a>: Received 3.80% votes. Proposed by Sailen Routray and Khetrimayum Monish.</li>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-politicsonsocialmedia"><strong>#PoliticsOnSocialMedia</strong></a>: Received 3.80% votes. Proposed by Rinku Lamba and Rajarshi Dasgupta.</li>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-spottingdata"><strong>#SpottingData</strong></a>: Received 3.80% votes. Proposed by Dibyajyoti Ghosh and Purbasha Auddy.</li></ol>
<p> </p>
<h2>Dates and Venue</h2>
<p>The IRC16 will take place during <strong>February 26-28, 2016</strong>, at the <a href="http://jnu.ac.in/"><strong>Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU)</strong></a>, Delhi. We are delighted to announce that the Conference will be hosted by the <a href="http://www.jnu.ac.in/SSS/CPS/"><strong>Centre for Political Studies (CPS)</strong></a> at JNU, and will be generously supported by the <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/cscs-digital-innovation-fund"><strong>CSCS Digital Innovation Fund (CDIF)</strong></a>.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Conference Programme</h2>
<p>Access the draft programme (v.2.1): <a href="https://github.com/cis-india/IRC16/raw/master/IRC16_Programme-v.2.1.pdf">Download</a> (PDF).</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Pre-Conference Conversations</h2>
<p>Please join the researchers@cis-india mailing list to take part in the pre-conference conversations: <a href="https://lists.ghserv.net/mailman/listinfo/researchers">https://lists.ghserv.net/mailman/listinfo/researchers</a>.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Accommodation</h2>
<p>CPS and CIS will provide accommodation to all non-Delhi-based team members of the selected sessions, during the days of the Conference.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Travel Grants</h2>
<p>We will offer 10 travel grants, up to Rs. 10,000 each, for within-India travel. The following non-Delhi-based team members of the selected sessions have been selected for travel grants: Aakash Solanki, Dibyajyoti Ghosh, Neha Mujumdar, Purbasha Auddy, Rahmanuddin Shaik, Rashmi M, Rohini Lakshané, Sailen Routray, P.P. Sneha, and Zeenab Aneez.</p>
<p>The travel grants are made possible by the <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/cscs-digital-innovation-fund">CSCS Digital Innovation Fund (CDIF)</a>.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc16-selected-sessions'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc16-selected-sessions</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroInternet Researcher's ConferenceFeaturedLearningIRC16Researchers at Work2016-01-18T09:23:06ZBlog EntryPre-Budget Consultation 2016 - Submission to the IT Group of the Ministry of Finance
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/pre-budget-consultation-2016-submission-to-the-ministry-of-finance
<b>The Ministry of Finance has recently held pre-budget consultations with different stakeholder groups in connection with the Union Budget 2016-17. We were invited to take part in the consultation for the IT (hardware and software) group organised on January 07, 2016, and submit a suggestion note. We are sharing the note below. It was prepared and presented by Sumandro Chattapadhyay, with contributions from Rohini Lakshané, Anubha Sinha, and other members of CIS.</b>
<p> </p>
<p>It is our distinct honour to be invited to submit this note for consideration by the IT Group of the Ministry of Finance, Government of India, as part of the pre-budget consultation for 2016-17.</p>
<p>The Centre for Internet and Society is (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, open access, open educational resources, and open video), internet governance, telecommunication reform, digital privacy, and cyber-security. We receive financial support from Kusuma Trust, Wikimedia Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, IDRC, and other donors.</p>
<p>We have divided our suggestions into the different topics that our organisation has been researching in the recent years.</p>
<p> </p>
<h3>Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) is the Basis for Digital India</h3>
<p> </p>
<p>We congratulate the policies introduced by the government to promote use of free/libre and open source software and that of open APIs for all e-governance projects and systems. This is not only crucial for the government to avoid vendor lock-in when it comes to critical software systems for governance, but also to ensure that the source code of such systems is available for public scrutiny and do not contain any security flaws.</p>
<p>We request the government to empower the implementation of these policies by making open sharing of source code a necessity for all software vendors hired by government agencies a necessary condition for awarding of tenders. The 2016-17 budget should include special support to make all government agencies aware and capable of implementing these policies, as well as to build and operate agency-level software repositories (with version controlling system) to host the source codes. These repositories may function to manage the development and maintenance of software used in e-governance projects, as well as to seek comments from the public regarding the quality of the software.</p>
<p>Use of FLOSS is not only important from the security or the cost-saving perspectives, it is also crucial to develop a robust industry of software development firms that specialise in FLOSS-based solutions, as opposed to being restricted to doing local implementation of global software vendors. A holistic support for FLOSS, especially with the government functioning as the dominant client, will immensely help creation of domestic jobs in the software industry, as well as encouraging Indian programmers to contribute to development of FLOSS projects.</p>
<p>An effective compliance monitoring and enforcement system needs to be created to ensure that all government agencies are Strong enforcement of the 2011 policy to use open source software in governance, including an enforcement task force that checks whether government departments have complied with this or not.</p>
<p> </p>
<h3>Open Data is a Key Instrument for Transparent Decision Making</h3>
<p> </p>
<p>With a wider set of governance activities being carried out using information systems, the government is increasingly acquiring a substantial amount of data about governance processes and status of projects that needs to be effectively fed back into the decision making process for the same projects. Opening up such data not only allows for public transparency, but also for easier sharing of data across government agencies, which reduces process delays and possibilities of duplication of data collection efforts.</p>
<p>We request the 2016-17 budget to foreground the National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy and the Open Government Data Platform of India as two key enablers of the Digital India agenda, and accordingly budget for modernisation and reconfiguration of data collection and management processes across government agencies, so that those processes are made automatic and open-by-default. Automatic data management processes minimise the possibility of data loss by directly archiving the collected data, which is increasingly becoming digital in nature. Open-by-default processes of data management means that all data collected by an agency, once pre-recognised as shareable data (that is non-sensitive and anonymised), will be proactively disclosed as a rule.</p>
<p>Implementation of the National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy has been hindered, so far, by the lack of preparation of a public inventory of data assets, along with the information of their collection cycles, modes of collection and storage, etc., by each union government agency. Specific budgetary allocation to develop these inventories will be crucial not only for the implementation of the Policy, but also for the government to get an extensive sense of data collected and maintained currently by various government agencies. Decisions to proactively publish, or otherwise, such data can then be taken based on established rules.</p>
<p>Availability of such open data, as mentioned above, creates a wider possibility for the public to know, learn, and understand the activities of the government, and is a cornerstone of transparent governance in the digital era. But making this a reality requires a systemic implementation of open government data practices, and various agencies would require targeted budget to undertake the required capacity development and work process re-engineering. Expenditure of such kind should not be seen as producing government data as a product, but as producing data as an infrastructure, which will be of continuous value for the years to come.</p>
<p>As being discussed globally, open government data has the potential to kickstart a vast market of data derivatives, analytics companies, and data-driven innovation. Encouraging civic innovations, empowered by open government data - from climate data to transport data - can also be one of the unique initiatives of budget 2016-17.</p>
<p>For maximising impact of opened up government data, we request the government to publish data that either has a high demand already (such as, geospatial data, and transport data), or is related to high-net-worth activities of the government (such as, data related to monitoring of major programmes, and budget and expenditure data for union and state governments).</p>
<p> </p>
<h3>Promotion of Start-ups and MSMEs in Electronics and IT Hardware Manufacturing</h3>
<p> </p>
<p>In line with the Make in India and Digital India initiatives, to enable India to be one of the global hubs of design, manufacturing, and exporting of electronics and IT hardware, we request that the budget 2016-17 focus on increasing flow of fund to start-ups and Medium and Small-Scale Manufacturing Enterprises (MSMEs) in the form of research and development grants (ideally connected to government, especially defense-related, spending on IT hardware innovation), seed capital, and venture capital.</p>
<p>Generation of awareness and industry-specific strategies to develop intellectual property regimes and practices favourable for manufacturers of electronics and IT hardware in India is an absolutely crucial part of promotion of the same, especially in the current global scenario. Start-ups and MSMEs must be made thoroughly aware of intellectual property concerns and possibilities, including limitations and exceptions, flexibilities, and alternative models such as open innovation.</p>
<p>We request the budget 2016-17 to give special emphasis to facilitation of technology licensing and transfer, through voluntary mechanisms as well as government intervention, such as compulsory licensing and government enforced patent pools.</p>
<p> </p>
<h3>Applied Mathematics Research is Fundamental for Cybersecurity</h3>
<p> </p>
<p>Recent global reports have revealed that some national governments have been actively involved in sponsoring distortion in applied mathematics research so as to introduce weaknesses in encryption standards used in for online communication. Instead of trying to regulate key-length or mandating pre-registration of devices using encryption, as suggested by the withdrawn National Encryption Policy draft, would not be able to address this core emerging problem of weak cybersecurity standards.</p>
<p>For effective and sustainable cybersecurity strategy, we must develop significant expertise in applied mathematical research, which is the very basis of cybersecurity standards development. We request the budget 2016-17 to give this topic the much-needed focus, especially in the context of the Digital India initiative and the upcoming National Encryption Policy.</p>
<p>Along with developing domestic research capacity, a more immediately important step for the government is to ensure high quality Indian participation in global standard setting organisations, and hence to contribute to global standards making processes. We humbly suggest that categorical support for such participation and contribution is provided through the budget 2016-17, perhaps by partially channeling the revenues obtained from spectrum auctions.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/pre-budget-consultation-2016-submission-to-the-ministry-of-finance'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/pre-budget-consultation-2016-submission-to-the-ministry-of-finance</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroOpen StandardsOpen SourceCybersecurityOpen DataIntellectual Property RightsOpen Government DataFeaturedPatentsOpennessOpen InnovationEncryption Policy2016-01-12T13:34:41ZBlog EntryNational Compendium of Laws, Policies, Programmes for Persons with Disabilities
http://editors.cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/national-compendium-of-laws-policies-programmes-for-persons-with-disabilities
<b>This compendium was compiled by the Centre for Internet & Society in collaboration with the Office of the Chief Commissioner for Persons with Disabilities, Department of Disability Affairs, Ministry of Social Justice & Empowerment, Government of India. Prasanna Kumar Pincha, Chief Commissioner for Persons with Disabilities, has written the Foreword. </b>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Preface</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">India, one of the longest continuous civilizations in the world is also home to one of the largest populations of persons with disabilities. According to the 2011 census, around 2.21% of its population or around 26.8 million people have disabilities of some form or the other. While the country is developing rapidly, persons with disabilities are often left out of the process. Sometimes they are completely neglected from consideration and measures do not take into account their needs by virtue of being non inclusive. On other occasions, there may be special measures for some disadvantaged groups, but persons with disabilities may not be recognised as a separate group, with distinctive needs. <br /><br />Overall, there is a clichéd understanding about the needs and abilities of persons with disabilities, limiting efforts made towards their progress. Even in cases where some effort has been made, information about these measures is not available to persons with disabilities and their family members, who are consequently unable to avail of them. Additionally, the insensitivity of rules/ schemes/ procedures/ persons makes it difficult for persons with disabilities to benefit from them. However, regardless of the reason, the fact remains that there is a huge gap in the communication of information from policy makers, administrators and law makers to persons with disabilities as well as their family members, organisations and other concerned groups and institutions. <br /><br />It is extremely important to bridge this information gap in order to enable persons with disabilities to participate equally in development. Better access to information will enable them to avail of schemes/provisions for their benefit and will consequently enable governments to assess whether they have made adequate provision in various domains as well as identify gaps which need to be addressed.<br />Finally, accessibility of information will also facilitate the participation of government and persons with disabilities in implementation of measures and increase transparency and accountability<br /><br />With this aim in mind, The Hans Foundation decided to engage with Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) to put together a comprehensive resource on disability related policies across India. It gives us great pleasure to publish this resource and we hope that it be of great help to the community.<br /><br />Ms. Sweta Rawat<br />Chairperson<br />The Hans Foundation</p>
<hr />
<p>Click to download the PDF version of the book <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/national-compendium-book" class="internal-link"><b>here</b></a>. (File size 1.72 Mb approx.)</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/national-compendium-of-laws-policies-programmes-for-persons-with-disabilities'>http://editors.cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/national-compendium-of-laws-policies-programmes-for-persons-with-disabilities</a>
</p>
No publishernirmitaFeaturedAccessibility2016-02-05T02:16:36ZBlog EntryThe Free Basics debate: Trai has a point in imposing temporary ban on net neutrality
http://editors.cis-india.org/telecom/blog/the-free-basics-debate-trai-has-a-point-in-imposing-temporary-ban-on-net-neutrality
<b>The argument against net neutrality in India is simple. Regulation cannot be based on dogma – evidence of harm must be provided before you can advocate for rules for ISPs and telecom operators.</b>
<p>The article was published in <a class="external-link" href="http://www.firstpost.com/india/the-free-basics-debate-trai-has-a-point-in-imposing-temporary-ban-on-net-neutrality-2558884.html"><b>FirstPost</b></a> on December 24, 2015.</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">But net neutrality regardless of your preferred definition is a very complex regulatory question and there is no global or even national consensus on what counts as relevant evidence. To demonstrate the chain of causality between network neutrality violations and a variety of potential harms - expertise in a wide variety of fields such as economics, competition law, telecom policy, spectrum allocation, communications engineering and traffic management is required. Even with a very large research budget and a multidisciplinary team it would be impossible to predict with confidence what the impact of a particular regulatory option will be on the digital divide or innovation. And therefore the advocates of forbearance say that the Indian telecom regulator — Trai — should not regulate unprecedented technical and business model innovations like Facebook's Free Basics since we don't understand them.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Till recently I agreed with this empirical line of argument. But increasingly I am less convinced that scientific experiment and evidence is the only basis for regulation. Perhaps there is a small but necessary role for principles or ideology. Like the subtitle of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's book, we need to ask: How to Live in a World We Don't Understand. Let us take another area of technological regulation – cyber security. Do we really need to build a centralised database containing the passwords of all netizens and perform scientific experiments on it to establish that it can be compromised? A 100 percent centralised system has a single point of failure and therefore from a security perspective centralisation is almost always a bad idea. How are we so sure that such a system will be compromised at some date? To quote Sherlock Holmes: “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.” Decentralisation eliminates the possibility of a single point of failure thereby growing resilience. The Internet is perhaps the most famous example. It is not necessarily true that all decentralized systems are more secure than all centralised system of a decentralized network but it is usually the case. In other words, the principle of decentralisation in cyber security does not require repeated experimental confirmation across<br />markets and technologies.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">To complicate matters, the most optimal solutions developed using economics and engineering may not be acceptable to most stakeholders. Professor Vishal Misra has provided a Shapley Value solution using cooperative game theory in the multi-sided market to determine how surplus should be divided between three types of ISPs [eyeball, transit and content] and Internet companies using transparent paid transit arrangements. But a migration from the current opaque arrangement to the Misra solution may never happen because Internet companies will resist such proposals and are increasingly getting into access provision themselves through projects like Google Fibre and Loom. Walter Brown from South African Communications Forum proposes that billing by minutes for phone calls and billing by message for SMSes should be prohibited because on 4G networks voice and text messages are carried as data and price is the best signal to consumers to ensure optimum use of network resources. This according to Walter Brown will eliminate the incentive for telcos to throttle or block or charge differently for VOIP traffic. Again this solution will not be adopted by any regulator because regulators prefer incremental changes with the least amount of disruption.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">So given that we only have numbers that we can't trust - what should be some of the principles that form the bedrock of our net neutrality policy? To begin with there is the obvious principle of non-discrimination. The premise is simple – anyone who has gate-keeping powers might abuse it. Therefore we need to eliminate the possibility through regulation. Non-exclusivity is the result of non-discrimination and transparency is its precondition. That can also be considered as a principle and now we have three core principles to work with. Maybe that is sufficient since we should keep principles to the bare minimum to keep regulation and compliance with regulation simple. Some net<br />neutrality experts have also identified fairness and proportionality as additional principles. How do we settle this? Through transparent and participatory policy development as has been the case so far. Once we have principles articulated in law - how can we apply them to a specific case such as Facebook's Free Basics? Through the office of the appropriate regulator. As Chris Marsden advocates, net neutrality regulations should ideally be positive and forward looking. Positive in the sense that there should be more positive obligations and incentives than prohibitions and punitive measures. Forward looking in the sense that that the regulations should not retard or block technological and business model innovations. For example zero-rated walled gardens could be regulated by requiring that promoters such as Facebook also provide 50Mb of data per day to all users of Free Basics and also by requiring that Reliance provides the very same free service to other parties that want to compete with Facebook with similar offerings. Alternatively, users of Free Basics should get access to the whole Internet every other hour. All these proposal ensure that Facebook and it business partners have a incentive to innovate but at the same time ensures that resultant harms are mitigated.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Just to be absolutely clear, my defense of principle based regulation does not mean that I see no role for evidence and research. As regulation gets under way – further regulation or forbearance should be informed by evidence. But lack of evidence of harm is not an excuse for regulatory forbearance. India is the last market on the planet where the walled garden can be bigger than the Internet – and Facebook is sure giving it its very best shot. Fortunately for us Trai has acted and acted appropriately by issuing a temporary prohibition till regulation has been finalised. Like the US, coming up with stable regulation may take 10 years and we cannot let Facebook shape the market till then.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/telecom/blog/the-free-basics-debate-trai-has-a-point-in-imposing-temporary-ban-on-net-neutrality'>http://editors.cis-india.org/telecom/blog/the-free-basics-debate-trai-has-a-point-in-imposing-temporary-ban-on-net-neutrality</a>
</p>
No publishersunilTelecomFeaturedNet Neutrality2015-12-25T14:58:30ZBlog EntryFacebook Shares 10 Key Facts about Free Basics. Here's What's Wrong with All 10 of Them.
http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/facebook-shares-10-key-facts-about-free-basics-heres-whats-wrong-with-all-10-of-them
<b>Shweta Sengar of Catch News spoke to Sunil Abraham about the recent advertisement by Facebook titled "What Net Neutrality Activists won't Tell You or, the Top 10 Facts about Free Basics". Sunil argued against the validity of all the 'top 10 facts'.</b>
<p> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Facebook has rebranded internet.org as Free Basics. After suffering from several harsh blows from the net neutrality activists in India, the social media behemoth is positioning a movement in order to capture user attention.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Apart from a mammoth two page advertisement on Free Basics on 23 December in a leading English daily, we spotted a numerous hoardings across the capital.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Unlike Facebook, Wikipedia has a rather upfront approach for raising funds. You must have noticed a pop-up as you open Wikipedia when they are in need of funds. What Facebook has done is branded Free Basics as 'free' as the basic needs of life.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The newspaper advertisement by Facebook was aimed at clearing all the doubts about Free Basics. The 10 facts highlighted a connected India and urging users to take the "first step towards digital equality."</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">In an interview with <em>Catch</em>, Sunil Abraham, Executive Director of Bangalore based research organisation, the Centre for Internet and Society, shared his thoughts on the controversial subject. Abraham countered each of Facebook's ten arguments. Take a look:</p>
<p> </p>
<blockquote><strong>01</strong> Free basics is open to any carriers. Any mobile operator can join us in connecting India.</blockquote>
<p>Sunil Abraham: Free Basics was initially exclusive to only one telecom operator in most markets that it was available in.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The non-exclusivity was introduced only after activists in India complained. But now the arrangement is exclusive to Free Basics as a walled garden provider. But discrimination harms remain until other Internet services can also have what Facebook has from telecom operators ie. free access to their destinations.</p>
<p> </p>
<blockquote><strong>02</strong> We do not charge anyone anything for Free Basics. Period.</blockquote>
<p style="text-align: justify;">SA: As Bruce Schneier says "surveillance is the business model of the Internet". Free basics users are subject to an additional layer of surveillance ie. the data retention by the Facebook proxy server. Just as Facebook cannot say that they are ignoring Data Protection law because Facebook is a free product - they cannot say that Free Basics can violate network neutrality law because it is a free service. For ex. Flipkart should get Flipkart Basic on all Indian ISPs and Telcos.</p>
<p> </p>
<blockquote><strong>03</strong> We do not pay for the data consumed in Free Basics. Operators participate because the program has proven to bring more people online. Free Basics has brought new people onto mobile networks on average over 50% faster since launching the service.</blockquote>
<p>SA: Facebook has been quoting statistics as evidence to influence the policy formulation process. But we need the absolute numbers and we also need them to be independently verifiable. At the very least we need the means to cross verify these numbers with numbers that telcos and ISPs routinely submit to TRAI.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Theoretical harms must be addressed through net neutrality regulation. For example, you don't have to build a single, centralised database of all Indian citizens to know that it can be compromised - from a security design perspective centralisation is always a bad idea. Gatekeeping powers given to any powerful entity will be compromised. While evidence is useful, regulation can already begin based on well established regulatory principles. After scientific evidence has been made available - the regulation can be tweaked.</p>
<p> </p>
<blockquote><strong>04</strong> Any developer or publisher can have their content on Free Basics. There are clear technical specs openly published here ... and we have never rejected an app or publisher who has me these tech specs.</blockquote>
<p style="text-align: justify;">SA: Again this was only done as a retrospective fix after network neutrality activists in India complained about exclusive arrangements. For example, the music streaming service Hungama is not a low-bandwidth destination but since it was included the technical specifications only mentions large images and video files. Many of the other sites are indistinguishable from their web equivalents clearly indicating that this was just an afterthought. At the moment Free Basics has become controversial so most developers and publishers are not approaching them so there is no way for us to verify Facebook's claim.</p>
<p> </p>
<blockquote><strong>05</strong> Nearly 800 developers in India have signed their support for Free Basics.</blockquote>
<p style="text-align: justify;">SA: I guess these are software developers working in the services industry who don't see themselves as potential competition to Facebook or any of the services within Free Basics. Also since Facebook as been completely disingenuous when it comes to soliciting support for their campaigns it is very hard to believe these claims. It has tried to change the meaning of the phrase "net neutrality" and has framed the debate in an inaccurate manner - therefore I could quite confidently say that these developers must have been fooled into supporting Free Basics.</p>
<p> </p>
<blockquote><strong>06</strong> It is not a walled garden: In India, 40% of people who come online through Free Basics are paying for data and accessing the full internet within the first 30 days. In the same time period, 8 times more people are paying versus staying on just</blockquote>
<p style="text-align: justify;">SA: Again, no absolute numbers and also no granularity in the data that makes it impossible for anyone to verify these numbers. Also there is no way to compare these numbers to access options that are respectful of network neutrality such as equal rating. If the numbers are roughly the same for equal rating and zero-rating then there is no strong case to be made for zero-rating.</p>
<p> </p>
<blockquote><strong>07</strong> Free Basics is growing and popular in 36 other countries, which have welcomed the program with open arms and seen the enormous benefits it has brought.</blockquote>
<p style="text-align: justify;">SA: Free Basics was one of the most controversial topics at the last Internet Governance Forum. A gratis service is definitely going to be popular but that does not mean forbearance is the only option for the regulator. In countries with strong civil society and/or a strong regulator, Free Basics has ran into trouble. Facebook has been able to launch Free Basics only in jurisdictions where regulators are still undecided about net neutrality. India and Brazil are the last battle grounds for net neutrality and that is why Facebook is spending advertising dollar and using it's infrastructure to win the global south.</p>
<p> </p>
<blockquote><strong>08</strong> In a recent representative poll, 86% of Indians supported Free Basics by Facebook, and the idea that everyone deserves access to free basic internet services.</blockquote>
<p style="text-align: justify;">SA: This is the poll which was framed in alarmist language where Indian were asked to choose between perpetuating or bridging the digital divide. This is a false choice that Facebook is perpetuating - with forward-looking positive Network Neutrality rules as advocated by Dr. Chris Marsden it should be possible to bridge digital divide without incurring any free speech, competition, innovation and diversity harms.</p>
<p> </p>
<blockquote><strong>09</strong> In the past several days, 3.2 million people have petitioned the TRAI in support of Free Basics.</blockquote>
<p style="text-align: justify;">SA: Obviously - since Free Basics is better than nothing. But the real choice should have been - are you a) against network neutrality ie. would you like to see Facebook play gatekeeper on the Internet OR b) for network neutrality ie. would you like to see Free Basics forced to comply with network neutrality rules and expand access without harms to consumers and innovators.</p>
<p> </p>
<blockquote><strong>10</strong> There are no ads in the version of Facebook on Free Basics. Facebook produces no revenue. We are doing this to connect India, and the benefits to do are clear.</blockquote>
<p style="text-align: justify;">SA: As someone who has watched the Internet economy since the first dot com boom - it is absolutely clear that consumer acquisition is as important as revenues. They are doing it to connect people to Facebook and as a result some people will also connect to the Internet. But India is the last market on the planet where the walled garden can be bigger than the Internet, and therefore Facebook is manipulating the discourse through it's dominance of the networked public sphere.</p>
<p>Bravo to TRAI and network neutrality activists for taking Facebook on.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><em>Originally published by <a href="http://www.catchnews.com/tech-news/should-facebook-become-internet-s-gatekeeper-or-free-basics-must-comply-with-net-neutrality-sunil-abraham-has-some-thoughts-1450954347.html" target="_blank">Catch News</a>, on December 24, 2015.</em></p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/facebook-shares-10-key-facts-about-free-basics-heres-whats-wrong-with-all-10-of-them'>http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/facebook-shares-10-key-facts-about-free-basics-heres-whats-wrong-with-all-10-of-them</a>
</p>
No publishersunilNet NeutralityFeaturedFacebookInternet GovernanceHomepage2015-12-25T14:59:10ZBlog EntrySmart Cities in India: An Overview
http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/smart-cities-in-india-an-overview
<b>The Government of India is in the process of developing 100 smart cities in India which it sees as the key to the country's economic and social growth. This blog post gives an overview of the Smart Cities project currently underway in India. The smart cities mission in India is at a nascent stage and an evolving area for research. The Centre for Internet and Society will continue work in this area.</b>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; "><b>Overview of the 100 Smart Cities Mission</b></h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The Government of India announced its flagship programme- the 100 Smart Cities mission in the year 2014 and was launched in June 2015 to achieve urban transformation, drive economic growth and improve the quality of life of people by enabling local area development and harnessing technology. Initially, the Mission aims to cover 100 cities across the countries (which have been shortlisted on the basis of a Smart Cities Proposal prepared by every city) and its duration will be five years (FY 2015-16 to FY 2019-20). The Mission may be continued thereafter in the light of an evaluation to be done by the Ministry of Urban Development (MoUD) and incorporation of the learnings into the Mission. The Mission aims to focus on area-based development in the form of redevelopment of existing spaces, or the development of new areas (Greenfield) to accommodate the growing urban population and ensure comprehensive planning to improve quality of life, create employment and enhance incomes for all - especially the poor and the disadvantaged. <a href="#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1"><sup><sup>[1]</sup></sup></a> On 27th August 2015 the Centre unveiled 98 smart cities across India which were selected for this Project. Across the selected cities, 13 crore population ( 35% of the urban population will be included in the development plans. <a href="#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2"><sup><sup>[2]</sup></sup></a> The mission has been developed for the purpose of achieving urban transformation. The vision is to preserve India's traditional architecture, culture & ethnicity while implementing modern technology to make cities livable, use resources in a sustainable manner and create an inclusive environment. <a href="#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3"><sup><sup>[3]</sup></sup></a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The promises of the Smart City mission include reduction of carbon footprint, adequate water and electricity supply, proper sanitation, including solid waste management, efficient urban mobility and public transport, affordable housing, robust IT connectivity and digitalization, good governance, citizen participation, security of citizens, health and education.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>Questions unanswered</span></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li>Why and How was the Smart Cities project conceptualized in India? What was the need for such a project in India?</li>
<li>What was the role of the public/citizens at the ideation and conceptualization stage of the project?</li>
<li>Which actors from the Government, Private industry and the civil society are involved in this mission? Though the smart cities mission has been initiated by the Government of India under the Ministry of Urban Development, there is no clarity about the involvement of the associated offices and departments of the Ministry.</li>
</ul>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; "><b>How are the Smart Cities being selected?</b></h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The 100 cities were supposed to be selected on the basis of Smart cities challenge<a href="#_ftn4" name="_ftnref4"><sup><sup>[4]</sup></sup></a> involving two stages. Stage I of the challenge involved Intra-State city selection on objective criteria to identify cities to compete in stage-II. In August 2015, The Ministry of Urban Development, Government of India announced 100 smart cities <a href="#_ftn5" name="_ftnref5"><sup><sup>[5]</sup></sup></a> evaluated on parameters such as service levels, financial and institutional capacity, past track record, called as the 'shortlisted cities' for this purpose. The selected cities are now competing for selection in the Second stage of the challenge, which is an All India competition. For this crucial stage, the potential 100 smart cities are required to prepare a Smart City Proposal (SCP) stating the model chosen (retrofitting, redevelopment, Greenfield development or a mix), along with a Pan-City dimension with Smart Solutions. The proposal must also include suggestions collected by way of consultations held with city residents and other stakeholders, along with the proposal for financing of the smart city plan including the revenue model to attract private participation. The country saw wide participation from the citizens to voice their aspirations and concerns regarding the smart city. 15th December 2015 has been declared as the deadline for submission of the SCP, which must be in consonance with evaluation criteria set by The MoUD, set on the basis of professional advice. <a href="#_ftn6" name="_ftnref6"><sup><sup>[6]</sup></sup></a> On the basis of this, 20 cities will be selected for the first year. According to the latest reports, the Centre is planning to fund only 10 cities for the first phase in case the proposals sent by the states do not match the expected quality standards and are unable to submit complete area-development plans by the deadline, i.e. 15th December, 2015. <a href="#_ftn7" name="_ftnref7"><sup><sup>[7]</sup></sup></a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>Questions unanswered</span></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li>Who would be undertaking the task of evaluating and selecting the cities for this project?</li>
<li>What are the criteria for selection of a city to qualify in the first 20 (or 10, depending on the Central Government) for the first phase of implementation?</li>
</ul>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; "><b>How are the smart cities going to be Funded?</b></h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The Smart City Mission will be operated as a Centrally Sponsored Scheme (CSS) and the Central Government proposes to give financial support to the Mission to the extent of Rs. 48,000 crores over five years i.e. on an average Rs. 100 crore per city per year. <a href="#_ftn8" name="_ftnref8"><sup><sup>[8]</sup></sup></a> The additional resources will have to be mobilized by the State/ ULBs from external/internal sources. According to the scheme, once list of shortlisted Smart Cities is finalized, Rs. 2 crore would have been disbursed to each city for proposal preparation.<a href="#_ftn9" name="_ftnref9"><sup><sup>[9]</sup></sup></a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">According to estimates of the Central Government, around Rs 4 lakh crore of funds will be infused mainly through private investments and loans from multilateral institutions among other sources, which accounts to 80% of the total spending on the mission. <a href="#_ftn10" name="_ftnref10"><sup><sup>[10]</sup></sup></a> For this purpose, the Government will approach the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank (ADB) for a loan costing £500 million and £1 billion each for 2015-20. If ADB approves the loan, it would be it will be the bank's highest funding to India's urban sector so far.<a href="#_ftn11" name="_ftnref11"><sup><sup>[11]</sup></sup></a> Foreign Direct Investment regulations have been relaxed to invite foreign capital and help into the Smart City Mission. <a href="#_ftn12" name="_ftnref12"><sup><sup>[12]</sup></sup></a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b><span>Questions unanswered</span></b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li>The Government notes on Financing of the project mentions PPPs for private funding and leveraging of resources from internal and external resources. There is lack of clarity on the external resources the Government has/will approach and the varied PPP agreements the Government is or is planning to enter into for the purpose of private investment in the smart cities.</li>
</ul>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; "><b>How is the scheme being implemented?</b></h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Under this scheme, each city is required to establish a Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) having flexibility regarding planning, implementation, management and operations. The body will be headed by a full-time CEO, with nominees of Central Government, State Government and ULB on its Board. The SPV will be a limited company incorporated under the Companies Act, 2013 at the city-level, in which the State/UT and the Urban Local Body (ULB) will be the promoters having equity shareholding in the ratio 50:50. The private sector or financial institutions could be considered for taking equity stake in the SPV, provided the shareholding pattern of 50:50 of the State/UT and the ULB is maintained and the State/UT and the ULB together have majority shareholding and control of the SPV. Funds provided by the Government of India in the Smart Cities Mission to the SPV will be in the form of tied grant and kept in a separate Grant Fund.<a href="#_ftn13" name="_ftnref13"><sup><sup>[13]</sup></sup></a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">For the purpose of implementation and monitoring of the projects, the MoUD has also established an Apex Committee and National Mission Directorate for National Level Monitoring<a href="#_ftn14" name="_ftnref14"><sup><sup>[14]</sup></sup></a>, a State Level High Powered Steering Committee (HPSC) for State Level Monitoring<a href="#_ftn15" name="_ftnref15"><sup><sup>[15]</sup></sup></a> and a Smart City Advisory Forum at the City Level <a href="#_ftn16" name="_ftnref16"><sup><sup>[16]</sup></sup></a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Also, several consulting firms<a href="#_ftn17" name="_ftnref17"><sup><sup>[17]</sup></sup></a> have been assigned to the 100 cities to help them prepare action plans.<a href="#_ftn18" name="_ftnref18"><sup><sup>[18]</sup></sup></a> Some of them include CRISIL, KPMG, McKinsey, etc. <a href="#_ftn19" name="_ftnref19"><sup><sup>[19]</sup></sup></a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b><span>Questions unanswered</span></b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li>What policies and regulations have been put in place to account for the smart cities, apart from policies looking at issues of security, privacy, etc.?</li>
<li>What international/national standards will be adopted while development of the smart cities? Though the Bureau of Indian Standards is in the process of formulating standardized guidelines for the smart cities in India<a href="#_ftn20" name="_ftnref20"><sup><sup>[20]</sup></sup></a>, yet there is lack of clarity on adoption of these national standards, along with the role of international standards like the ones formulated by ISO.</li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b> </b></p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; "><b>What is the role of Foreign Governments and bodies in the Smart cities mission?</b></h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Ever since the government's ambitious project has been announced and cities have been shortlisted, many countries across the globe have shown keen interest to help specific shortlisted cities in building the smart cities and are willing to invest financially. Countries like Sweden, Malaysia, UAE, USA, etc. have agreed to partner with India for the mission.<a href="#_ftn21" name="_ftnref21"><sup><sup>[21]</sup></sup></a> For example, UK has partnered with the Government to develop three India cities-Pune, Amravati and Indore.<a href="#_ftn22" name="_ftnref22"><sup><sup>[22]</sup></sup></a> Israel's start-up city Tel Aviv also entered into an agreement to help with urban transformation in the Indian cities of Pune, Nagpur and Nashik to foster innovation and share its technical know-how.<a href="#_ftn23" name="_ftnref23"><sup><sup>[23]</sup></sup></a> France has piqued interest for Nagpur and Puducherry, while the United States is interested in Ajmer, Vizag and Allahabad. Also, Spain's Barcelona Regional Agency has expressed interest in exchanging technology with the Delhi. Apart from foreign government, many organizations and multilateral agencies are also keen to partner with the Indian government and have offered financial assistance by way of loans. Some of them include the UK government-owned Department for International Development, German government KfW development bank, Japan International Cooperation Agency, the US Trade and Development Agency, United Nations Industrial Development Organization and United Nations Human Settlements Programme. <a href="#_ftn24" name="_ftnref24"><sup><sup>[24]</sup></sup></a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b><span>Questions unanswered</span></b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li>Do these governments or organization have influence on any other component of the Smart cities?</li>
<li>How much are the foreign governments and multilateral bodies spending on the respective cities?</li>
<li>What kind of technical know-how is being shared with the Indian government and cities?</li>
</ul>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; "><b>What is the way ahead?</b></h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">On the basis of the SCP, the MoUD will evaluate, assess the credibility and select 20 smart cities out of the short-listed ones for execution of the plan in the first phase. The selected city will set up a SPV and receive funding from the Government.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b><span>Questions unanswered</span></b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li>Will the deadline of submission of the Smart Cities Proposal be pushed back?</li>
<li>After the SCP is submitted on the basis of consultation with the citizens and public, will they be further involved in the implementation of the project and what will be their role?</li>
<li>How will the MoUD and other associated organizations as well as actors consider the implementation realities of the project, like consideration of land displacement, rehabilitation of the slum people, etc.</li>
<li>How are ICT based systems going to be utilized to make the cities and the infrastructure "smart"?</li>
<li>How is the MoUD going to respond to the concerns and criticism emerging from various sections of the society, as being reflected in the news items?</li>
<li>How will the smart cities impact and integrate the existing laws, regulations and policies? Does the Government intend to use the existing legislations in entirety, or update and amend the laws for implementation of the Smart Cities Mission?</li>
</ul>
<div style="text-align: justify; "><br clear="all" />
<hr />
<div id="ftn1">
<p><a href="#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1"><sup><sup>[1]</sup></sup></a> Smart Cities, Mission Statement and Guidelines, Ministry of Urban Development, Government of India, June 2015, Available at : http://smartcities.gov.in/writereaddata/SmartCityGuidelines.pdf</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn2">
<p><a href="#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2"><sup><sup>[2]</sup></sup></a> http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2015-08-27/news/65929187_1_jammu-and-kashmir-12-cities-urban-development-venkaiah-naidu</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn3">
<p><a href="#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3"><sup><sup>[3]</sup></sup></a> http://india.gov.in/spotlight/smart-cities-mission-step-towards-smart-india</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn4">
<p><a href="#_ftnref4" name="_ftn4"><sup><sup>[4]</sup></sup></a> http://smartcities.gov.in/writereaddata/Process%20of%20Selection.pdf</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn5">
<p><a href="#_ftnref5" name="_ftn5"><sup><sup>[5]</sup></sup></a> Full list : http://www.scribd.com/doc/276467963/Smart-Cities-Full-List</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn6">
<p><a href="#_ftnref6" name="_ftn6"><sup><sup>[6]</sup></sup></a> http://smartcities.gov.in/writereaddata/Process%20of%20Selection.pdf</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn7">
<p><a href="#_ftnref7" name="_ftn7"><sup><sup>[7]</sup></sup></a> http://www.ibtimes.co.in/modi-govt-select-only-10-cities-under-smart-city-project-this-year-report-658888</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn8">
<p><a href="#_ftnref8" name="_ftn8"><sup><sup>[8]</sup></sup></a> http://smartcities.gov.in/writereaddata/Financing%20of%20Smart%20Cities.pdf</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn9">
<p><a href="#_ftnref9" name="_ftn9"><sup><sup>[9]</sup></sup></a> Smart Cities presentation by MoUD : http://smartcities.gov.in/writereaddata/Presentation%20on%20Smart%20Cities%20Mission.pdf</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn10">
<p><a href="#_ftnref10" name="_ftn10"><sup><sup>[10]</sup></sup></a> http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/smart-cities-projectfrom-france-to-us-a-rush-to-offer-assistance-funds/</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn11">
<p><a href="#_ftnref11" name="_ftn11"><sup><sup>[11]</sup></sup></a> http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/funding-for-smart-cities-key-to-coffer-lies-outside-india/#sthash.5lnW9Jsq.dpuf</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn12">
<p><a href="#_ftnref12" name="_ftn12"><sup><sup>[12]</sup></sup></a> http://india.gov.in/spotlight/smart-cities-mission-step-towards-smart-india</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn13">
<p><a href="#_ftnref13" name="_ftn13"><sup><sup>[13]</sup></sup></a> http://smartcities.gov.in/writereaddata/SPVs.pdf</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn14">
<p><a href="#_ftnref14" name="_ftn14"><sup><sup>[14]</sup></sup></a> http://smartcities.gov.in/writereaddata/National%20Level%20Monitoring.pdf</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn15">
<p><a href="#_ftnref15" name="_ftn15"><sup><sup>[15]</sup></sup></a> http://smartcities.gov.in/writereaddata/State%20Level%20Monitoring.pdf</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn16">
<p><a href="#_ftnref16" name="_ftn16"><sup><sup>[16]</sup></sup></a> http://smartcities.gov.in/writereaddata/City%20Level%20Monitoring.pdf</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn17">
<p><a href="#_ftnref17" name="_ftn17"><sup><sup>[17]</sup></sup></a> http://smartcities.gov.in/writereaddata/List_of_Consulting_Firms.pdf</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn18">
<p><a href="#_ftnref18" name="_ftn18"><sup><sup>[18]</sup></sup></a> http://pib.nic.in/newsite/PrintRelease.aspx?relid=128457</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn19">
<p><a href="#_ftnref19" name="_ftn19"><sup><sup>[19]</sup></sup></a> <a href="http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/49242050.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst"> http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/49242050.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst </a></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn20">
<p><a href="#_ftnref20" name="_ftn20"><sup><sup>[20]</sup></sup></a> http://www.business-standard.com/article/economy-policy/in-a-first-bis-to-come-up-with-standards-for-smart-cities-115060400931_1.html</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn21">
<p><a href="#_ftnref21" name="_ftn21"><sup><sup>[21]</sup></sup></a> http://accommodationtimes.com/foreign-countries-have-keen-interest-in-development-of-smart-cities/</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn22">
<p><a href="#_ftnref22" name="_ftn22"><sup><sup>[22]</sup></sup></a> http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2015-11-20/news/68440402_1_uk-trade-three-smart-cities-british-deputy-high-commissioner</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn23">
<p><a href="#_ftnref23" name="_ftn23"><sup><sup>[23]</sup></sup></a> http://www.jpost.com/Business-and-Innovation/Tech/Tel-Aviv-to-help-India-build-smart-cities-435161?utm_campaign=shareaholic&utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=socialnetwork</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn24">
<p><a href="#_ftnref24" name="_ftn24"><sup><sup>[24]</sup></sup></a> http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/smart-cities-projectfrom-france-to-us-a-rush-to-offer-assistance-funds/#sthash.nCMxEKkc.dpuf</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/smart-cities-in-india-an-overview'>http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/smart-cities-in-india-an-overview</a>
</p>
No publishervanyaFeaturedHomepageInternet Governance2016-01-11T01:30:07ZBlog EntrySeminar on Open Access in Research Area: A Strategic Approach
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/teri-seminar-on-open-access-in-research
<b>The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), Delhi, is organising a seminar on open access in research on Tuesday, December 22, 2015. The seminar will focus on: 1) wider access to scientific publications and research data, 2) access to scientific information, and 3) challenges and opportunities of research data. The Centre for Internet and Society is supporting the event as a Knowledge Partner.</b>
<p> </p>
<h2>Background</h2>
<p>Open Access has become central importance to advancing the interests of researchers, scholars, students, business, and the public as well as librarians. Increasingly, research institutions require researchers to publish articles that report research findings openly accessible in open domain.</p>
<p>Open Access pursues to yield scholarly publishing to spread knowledge and allow that knowledge to be built upon. Price barriers should not stop researchers from getting access to research data. Open Access, and the open availability and search ability of scholarly research that it entails, will have a significant positive impact on everything from education to the research practice in various fields.</p>
<p>To explore why Open Access is so important to a number of groups, TERI Library along with The Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) as Knowledge Partner is organizing a half day seminar on <em>Open Access in Research Areas: a Strategic Approach</em> on December 22, 2015 at TERI Seminar Hall, IHC, Lodhi Road, New Delhi.</p>
<p>The Seminar will focus on:</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p>wider access to scientific publications and research data</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>access to scientific information, and</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>challenges and opportunities of research data.</p>
</li></ul>
<p> </p>
<h2>Schedule</h2>
<p>No registration is required to attend the seminar. Seats are limited, and will be provided on first-come-first-served basis.</p>
<p> </p>
<table>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>13:45 - 14:00</td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><strong>Registration and Networking</strong></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>14:00 - 14:10</td>
<td><br /></td>
<td>Welcome Address - <strong>Mr. Prabir Sengupta</strong>, Distinguished Fellow and Director, Knowledge Management Division, TERI</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>14:10 - 14:20</td>
<td><br /></td>
<td>Special Address - <strong>Sumandro Chattapadhyay</strong>, Research Director, The Centre for Internet and Society</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>14:20 - 14:35</td>
<td><br /></td>
<td>Keynote Address - <strong>Dr. K.R. Murali Mohan</strong>, Advisor, Big Data Initiatives Division, Department of Science and Technology</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>14:35 - 14:50</td>
<td><br /></td>
<td>Inaugural Address - <strong>Dr. Chandrima Shaha</strong>, Director, National Institute of Immunology, New Delhi</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>14:50 - 15:00</td>
<td><br /></td>
<td>Setting the Theme and Vote of Thanks - <strong>Dr. P.K. Bhattacharya</strong>, Fellow and Area Convenor, Knowledge Management Division, TERI</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>15:00 - 15:30</td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><strong>Tea and Refreshments</strong></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>15:30 - 17:15</td>
<td><br /></td>
<td><strong>Plenary Session</strong><br />
Chair: <strong>Dr. Ramesh Sharma</strong>, Director, CEMCA<br />
<ul>
<li><strong>Puneet Kishor</strong>, Researcher and Independent Consultant - "Science, Data, and Creative Commons"</li>
<li><strong>Dr. Beth Sandore Namachchivaya</strong>, Associate Dean of Libraries and Professor University of Illinois - "Developing Services, Infrastructure, and Best Practices to Conserve and Provide Access to Research Data: Challenges and Opportunities"</li>
<li><strong>Dr. Usha Mujoo Munshi</strong>, Librarian, Indian institute of Public Administration</li></ul>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/teri-seminar-on-open-access-in-research'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/teri-seminar-on-open-access-in-research</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroOpen DataFeaturedOpen ResearchOpen AccessOpennessEvent2015-12-22T05:37:44ZEventCIS's Position on Net Neutrality
http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/cis-position-on-net-neutrality
<b>As researchers committed to the principle of pluralism we rarely produce institutional positions. This is also because we tend to update our positions based on research outputs. But the lack of clarity around our position on network neutrality has led some stakeholders to believe that we are advocating for forbearance. Nothing can be farther from the truth. Please see below for the current articulation of our common institutional position.</b>
<p> </p>
<ol style="text-align: justify;">
<li>Net Neutrality violations can potentially have multiple categories of harms —<strong> competition harms, free speech harms, privacy harms, innovation and ‘generativity’ harms, harms to consumer choice and user freedoms, and diversity harms</strong> thanks to unjust discrimination and gatekeeping by Internet service providers.<br /><br /></li>
<li>Net Neutrality violations (including some those forms of zero-rating that violate net neutrality) can also have different kinds benefits — enabling the <strong>right to freedom of expression</strong>, and the <strong>freedom of association</strong>, especially when access to communication and publishing technologies is increased; <strong>increased competition</strong> [by enabling product differentiation, can potentially allow small ISPs compete against market incumbents]; <strong>increased access</strong> [usually to a subset of the Internet] by those without any access because they cannot afford it, increased access [usually to a subset of the Internet] by those who don't see any value in the Internet, <strong>reduced payments</strong> by those who already have access to the Internet especially if their usage is dominated by certain services and destinations.<br /><br /></li>
<li>Given the magnitude and variety of potential harms, <strong>complete forbearance from all regulation is not an option</strong> for regulators nor is self-regulation sufficient to address all the harms emerging from Net Neutrality violations, since incumbent telecom companies cannot be trusted to effectively self-regulate. Therefore, <strong>CIS calls for the immediate formulation of Net Neutrality regulation</strong> by the telecom regulator [TRAI] and the notification thereof by the government [Department of Telecom of the Ministry of Information and Communication Technology]. CIS also calls for the eventual enactment of statutory law on Net Neutrality. All such policy must be developed in a transparent fashion after proper consultation with all relevant stakeholders, and after giving citizens an opportunity to comment on draft regulations.<br /><br /></li>
<li>Even though some of these harms may be large, CIS believes that a government cannot apply the precautionary principle in the case of Net Neutrality violations. <strong>Banning technical innovations and business model innovations is not an appropriate policy option. </strong>The regulation must toe a careful line <strong>to solve the optimization problem: </strong>refraining from over-regulation of ISPs and harming innovation at the carrier level (and benefits of net neutrality violations mentioned above) while preventing ISPs from harming innovation and user choice. ISPs must be regulated to limit harms from unjust discrimination towards consumers as well as to limit harms from unjust discrimination towards the services they carry on their networks.<br /><br /></li>
<li>Based on regulatory theory, we believe that a regulatory framework that is technologically neutral, that factors in differences in technological context, as well as market realities and existing regulation, and which is able to respond to new evidence is what is ideal.<br /><br />This means that we need a framework that has some bright-line rules based, but which allows for flexibility in determining the scope of exceptions and in the application of the rules. Candidate principles to be embodied in the regulation include: <strong>transparency, non-exclusivity, limiting unjust discrimination</strong>.<br /><br /></li>
<li>The <strong>harms emerging from walled gardens can be mitigated in a number of ways</strong>. <strong>On zero-rating the form of regulation must depend on the specific model and the potential harms that result from that model. </strong>Zero-rating can be: paid for by the end consumer or subsidized by ISPs or subsidized by content providers or subsidized by government or a combination of these; deal-based or criteria-based or government-imposed; ISP-imposed or offered by the ISP and chosen by consumers; Transparent and understood by consumers vs. non-transparent; based on content-type or agnostic to content-type; service-specific or service-class/protocol-specific or service-agnostic; available on one ISP or on all ISPs. Zero-rating by a small ISP with 2% penetration will not have the same harms as zero-rating by the largest incumbent ISP. For service-agnostic / content-type agnostic zero-rating, which Mozilla terms ‘<strong>equal rating</strong>’, CIS advocates for<strong> no regulation.</strong><br /><br /></li>
<li>CIS believes that <strong>Net Neutrality regulation for mobile and fixed-line access must be different</strong> recognizing the fundamental differences in technologies.<br /><br /></li>
<li><strong>On specialized services CIS believes that there should be logical separation</strong> and that all details of such specialized services and their impact on the Internet must be made transparent to consumers both individual and institutional, the general public and to the regulator. Further, such services should be available to the user only upon request, and not without their active choice, with the requirement that the service cannot be reasonably provided with ‘best efforts’ delivery guarantee that is available over the Internet, and hence requires discriminatory treatment, or that the discriminatory treatment does not unduly harm the provision of the rest of the Internet to other customers.<br /><br /></li>
<li>On incentives for telecom operators, CIS believes that the government should consider different models such as waiving contribution to the Universal Service Obligation Fund for prepaid consumers, and freeing up additional spectrum for telecom use without royalty using a shared spectrum paradigm, as well as freeing up more spectrum for use without a licence.<br /><br /></li>
<li>On reasonable network management CIS still does not have a common institutional position.<br /><br /></li></ol>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/cis-position-on-net-neutrality'>http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/cis-position-on-net-neutrality</a>
</p>
No publishersunilFeaturedHomepageNet NeutralityInternet Governance2015-12-09T13:06:06ZBlog EntryA Question of Digital Humanities
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/a-question-of-digital-humanities
<b>An extended survey of digital initiatives in arts and humanities practices in India was undertaken during the last year. Provocatively called 'mapping digital humanities in India', this enquiry began with the term 'digital humanities' itself, as a 'found' name for which one needs to excavate some meaning, context, and location in India at the present moment. Instead of importing this term to describe practices taking place in this country - especially when the term itself is relatively unstable and undefined even in the Anglo-American context - what I chose to do was to take a few steps back, and outline a few questions/conflicts that the digital practitioners in arts and humanities disciplines are grappling with. The final report of this study will be published serially. This is the second among seven sections. </b>
<p> </p>
<h2>Sections</h2>
<p>01. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-in-india">Digital Humanities in India?</a></p>
<p>02. <strong>A Question of Digital Humanities</strong></p>
<p>03. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/reading-from-a-distance-data-as-text">Reading from a Distance – Data as Text</a></p>
<p>04. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/the-infrastructure-turn-in-the-humanities">The Infrastructure Turn in the Humanities</a></p>
<p>05. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/living-in-the-archival-moment">Living in the Archival Moment</a></p>
<p>06. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/new-modes-and-sites-of-humanities-practice">New Modes and Sites of Humanities Practice</a></p>
<p>07. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-in-india-concluding-thoughts">Digital Humanities in India – Concluding Thoughts</a></p>
<hr />
<p>The 'digital turn' has been one of the significant changes in interdisciplinary research and scholarship in the last couple of decades. The advent of new digital technologies and growth of networked environments have led to a rethinking of the traditional processes of knowledge gathering and production, across an array of fields and disciplinary areas. DH has emerged as yet another manifestation of what in essence is this changing relationship between technologies and the human being or subject. The nature and processes of information, scholarship and learning, now produced or mediated by digital tools, methods or spaces have formed the crux of the DH discourse as it has emerged in different parts of the world so far. It has been variously called a phenomenon, field, discipline and a set of convergent practices – all of which are located at and/or try to understand the interaction between digital technologies and humanities practice and scholarship. DH in the Anglo-American context has seen several changes – from an early phase of vast archival initiatives and digitisation projects, to now exploring the role of big data and cultural analytics in literary criticism. Some of the early scholarship in the field illustrate the problems with defining and locating it within specific disciplinary formations, as the research objects, methods and locations of DH work cut across everything from the archive to the laboratory and social networking platforms. Largely interpreted as a way to explore the intersection of information technology and humanities, DH is grown to become an interdisciplinary field of research and practice today. However, DH is also clearly being posited as a site of contestation – what is perceived as doing away with or reinventing certain norms of traditional humanities research and scholarship. As a result it has largely been framed within the existing narrative of a crisis in the humanities, highlighting the more prominent role of technology which is now expected to resolve in some way questions of relevance and authority that seem to have become central to the continued existence and practice of the humanities in its conventional forms.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>The Problem of Definition</h2>
<p>The question of what is DH has been asked many times, and in different ways. Most scholars have differentiated between two waves or types of DH – the first is that of using computational tools to do traditional humanities research, while the second looks at the 'digital' itself as integral to humanistic enquiry <strong>[1]</strong>. However as is apparent in the existing discourse, the problem of definition still persists. As a field, method or practice, is it a found term that has now been appropriated in various forms and by various disciplines, or is it helping us reconfigure questions of the humanities by making available, through advancements in technology, a new digital object or a domain of enquiry that previously was unavailable to us? These and others will continue to remain questions <em>for</em> the digital humanities, but it would be important to first examine what would be the question/s <em>of</em> digital humanities. Dave Parry summarises to some extent these different contentions to a definition of the field when he suggests that "what is at stake here is not the object of study or even epistemology, but rather ontology. The digital changes what it means to be human, and by extension what it means to study the humanities." (Parry 2012)</p>
<p>Some speculation on the larger premise of the field, with specific reference to its emergence in India is what I hope to chart out in this report. This is not in itself an attempt at a definition, but sketching out a domain of enquiry by mapping the field with respect to work being done in the Indian context. In doing so these propositions will assume one or the other (if not all three) of these following suggested threads or modes of thought, which will also inform larger concerns of the DH work at CIS:</p>
<ol>
<li>The first is the inherited separation of technology and the humanities and therefore the existing tenuous relationship between the two fields. As is apparent in the nomenclature itself, there seems to be a bringing together of what seem to have been essentially two separate domains of knowledge. However, the humanities and technology have a rather chequered history together, which one could locate with the beginning of print culture. As Adrian Johns points out in the <em>Nature of the book</em>, "any printed book is, as a matter of fact, both the product of one complex set of social and technological processes and the beginning of another" (Johns 1998:3). The larger imagination of humanities as text-based disciplines can be located in a sense in the rise of printing, literacy and textual scholarship. While the book itself seems to have made a comfortable transition into the digital realm, the process of this transition, the channels of circulation and distribution of information as objects of study have been relegated to certain disciplinary concerns, thus obfuscating and making invisible this 'technologised history' of the humanities. Can DH therefore be an attempt to uncover such a history and bridge these knowledge gaps would be a question here?<br />
<br /></li>
<li>The distance between the practice and the subject. How does one identify with DH practice? While many people engage with what seem to be core DH concerns, they are not all 'digital humanists' or do not identify themselves by the term. While at one level the problem is still that of definition and taxonomy – what is or is not DH – at another level it is also about the nature of subjectivity produced in such practice – whether it has one of its own or is still entrenched in other disciplinary formations, as is the case with most DH research today. This is apparent in the emphasis on processes and tools in DH– where the practice or method seems to have emerged before the theoretical or epistemological framework. One may also connect this to the larger discourse on the emergence of the techno-social subject <strong>[2]</strong> as an identity meditated by digital and new media technologies, wherein technology is central to the practices that engender this subjectivity.<br />
<br /></li>
<li>Tying back to the first question is also the notion of a conflict between the humanities and DH. This comes with the perception of DH being a version 2.0 of the traditional humanities, a result of the existing narrative of crisis and the need for the humanities disciplines to reinvent themselves to remain relevant in the present context, and one way to do this is by becoming amenable to the use of computing tools. DH has emerged as one way to mediate between the humanities and the changes that are imminent with digital technologies, but it may not or even need not take up the task of trying to establish a teleological connection between the two. The theoretical pursuits of both may be different but deeply related, and this is one manner of approaching DH as a field or domain of enquiry; the point of intersection or conflict would be where new questions emerge. This narrative is also located within a larger framing of DH in terms of addressing the concerns of the labour market, and the fear of the humanities being displaced or replaced as a result. Parry’s objective of studying DH works with and tries to address this particular formulation of the field.</li></ol>
<p>Locating these concerns in India, where the field of DH is still at an incipient stage comes with a multitude of questions. For one the digital divide still persists to a large extent in India, and is at different levels due to the complexity of linguistic and social conditions of technological advancement. It is difficult locate a field that is so premised on technology in such a varied context. Secondly, the existing discourse on DH still draws upon, to a large extent, the given history of the term which renders it inaccessible to certain groups or classes of people in the global South. Another issue which is not specifically Indian but can be seen more explicitly in this context is the somewhat uncritical way in which technology itself is imagined. In most spaces, technology is still understood as either ‘facilitating’ something, either a specific kind of research enquiry or as a tool - a means to an end, and as being value or culture neutral. However, if we are to imagine the digital as a condition of being as Parry says, then technology too cannot be relegated to being a means to an end. Bruno Latour indicates the same when he says "Technology is everywhere, since the term applies to a regime of enunciation, or, to put it another way, to a mode of existence, a particular form of exploring existence, a particular form of the exploration of being – in the midst of many others." (Latour 2002)</p>
<p>DH then in some sense takes us back to the notion of technology or more specifically the digital realm as being a discursive space, and a technosocial or cultural paradigm that generates new objects and methods of study. This has been the impetus of cyber culture and digital culture studies, but what separates DH from these fields is another way to arrive at some understanding of its ontological status. At a cursory glance, the shift from content to process, from information to data seems to be the key transition here, and the blurring of the boundaries between such absolute categories. More importantly however, does this point towards an epistemic shift; a rupture in the given understanding of certain knowledge formations or systems is also a pertinent question of DH.
There are several questions therefore for DH - in terms of what it means and what it could do for our understanding of the humanities and technology. However the questions of DH still need to be made explicit. This mapping exercise will attempt to explore some of the above thoughts a little further. Through discussions with scholars and practitioners across diverse fields, we will attempt to map and generate different meanings of the ‘digital’ and DH. While one can expect this to definitely produce more questions, we also hope the process of thinking though these questions will lead to an understanding of the larger field as well.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>The Problem of the Discipline</h2>
<p>Much has been said and written about DH as an emergent field or domain of enquiry; the plethora of departments being set up all across the world, well mostly the developed world is testimony to the claimed innovative and generative potential of the field. However as outlined in the introduction the problem of definition still persists and poses much difficulty in any attempts to engage with the field. While the predominant narrative seems to be in terms of defining what DH or to take it a step back, what the ‘digital’ allows you to do, with respect to enabling or facilitating certain kinds of research and pedagogy, a pertinent question still is that of what it allows you to ‘be’. DH has been alternatively called a method, practice and field of enquiry, but scholars and practitioners in many instances have stopped short of fully embracing it as a discipline. This is an interesting development given the rapid pace of its institutionalisation - from being located in existing Humanities or Computational Sciences and Media Studies departments it has now claimed functional institutional spaces of its own, with not just interdisciplinary research and teaching but also other creative and innovative knowledge-making practices. The field is slowly gaining credence in India as well, with several institutions pursuing research around core questions within the fold of DH.</p>
<p>So is the disciplinary lens inadequate to understand this phenomenon, or is it too early for a field still considered in some ways rather incipient. The growth of the academic discipline itself is something of a fraught endeavour; as debates around the scientific revolution and Enlightenment thought have established. To put it in a very simple manner, the story of academic disciplines is that of training in reason <strong>[3]</strong>. Andrew Cutrofello says "In academia, a discipline is defined by its methodological rigor and the clear boundaries of its field of inquiry. Methods or fields are criticized as being 'fuzzy' when they are suspected of lacking a discipline. In a more straightforwardly Foucauldian sense, the disciplinary power of academic disciplines can be located in their methods for producing docile bodies of different sorts" (Cutrofello 1994). The problem with defining DH may lie in it not conforming to precisely this notion of the academic discipline, and changing ideas of the function of critique when mediated by the digital, which is of primary concern for the humanities. DH has in many spaces also emerged as a manifestation of increasing interdisciplinarity and the blurring of boundaries between traditional disciplinary concerns.</p>
<p>However a prevalent mode of understanding DH has been in terms of the disciplinary concerns it raises for the humanities themselves; this works with the assumption that it is in fact a newer, improved version or extension of the humanities. The present mapping exercise too began with the disciplinary lens, but instead of enquiring about what DH is, it tried to explore what the ‘digital’ has brought to, changed or appropriated in terms of existing disciplinary concerns within the humanities and more broadly spaces and process of knowledge-making and dissemination. This thought stems from the premise that if we have to posit the digital itself as a state of being or existence, then we need to understand this new techno-social paradigm much better. Prof. Amlan Dasgupta, at the School of Cultural Texts and Records at Jadavpur University in Kolkata sees this as useful way of going about the problem of trying to arrive at a definition of the field – one is to understand the history of the term, from its inherited definition in the Anglo-American context, and distinguish it from what he calls the current state of ‘digitality’ – where all cultural objects are being now being conceived of as ‘digital’ objects. In the Indian context, the question of digitality also becomes important from the perspective of technological obsolescence - where there is a great resistance to discontinuing or phasing out the use of certain kinds of technology; either for lack of access to better ones or simply because one finds other uses for it. Prof. Dasgupta interestingly terms this a ‘culture of reuse’, one example of this being the typewriter which for all practical purposes has been displaced by the computer, but still finds favour with several people in their everyday lives. The question of livelihood is still connected to some of these technologies, so much so that they are very much a part of channels of cultural production and circulation, and even when they cease to become useful they have value as cultural artefacts. We therefore inhabit at the same time, different worlds, that of the analogue and digital, or as he calls it 'a multi-layered technological sphere'. The notion of the 'digital' is also multi-layered, with some objects being 'weakly digital', and others being so in a more pronounced manner. The variedness of this space, and the complexities or ‘degrees of use’ of certain technologies or technological objects is what further determines the nature of this space and makes it all the more difficult to define. DH itself has seen several phases in the West, but has seen no such movement or gradual evolution in India, where these phases exist simultaneously.</p>
<p>This is also true of most technology in underdeveloped world. This further complicates the questions of access to technology or the 'digital divide' which have been and still are some of the primary approaches concerning the pervasiveness of technology, particularly in the Global South. The need of the hour therefore is to be able to distinguish between this current state of digitality that we are in, and what is meant by the ‘Digital Humanities’. It may after all be a set of methodologies rather than a subject or discipline in itself– the question is how it would help us understand the ‘digital’ itself much better, and more critically, and the new kinds of enquiries it may then facilitate about this space we now inhabit. This, Prof. Dasgupta feels would go a long way in arriving at some definition of the field.</p>
<p>One of the important points of departure, from the traditional humanities and later humanities computing as mentioned earlier, has been the blurring of boundaries between content, method and object/s of enquiry. The ‘process’ has become important, as illustrated by the iterative nature of most DH projects and the discourse itself which emphasises the 'making' and 'doing' aspects of the research as much as the content itself. Tool-building as a critical activity rather than as mere facilitation is an important part of the knowledge-making process in the field (Ramsay 2010). In conjunction with this, Dr. Moinak Biswas, at the Department of Film Studies at Jadavpur University, thinks that the biggest changes have been in terms of the collaborative nature of knowledge production, based on voluntarily sharing or creating new content through digital platforms and archives, and crucially the possibility of now imagining creative and analytical work as not separate practices, but located within a single space and time. He cites an example from film, where now with digital platforms and processes ‘image’ making and critical practice can both be combined on one platform, like the online archive Indiancine.ma <strong>[4]</strong> or the Vectors journal <strong>[5]</strong> for example, to produce new layers of meaning around existing texts. The aspect of critique is important here, given that the consistent criticism about the field has been the ambiguity of its social undertaking; its critical or political standpoint or challenge to existing theoretical paradigms. Most of the interest around the term has been in very instrumental terms, as a facilitator or enabler of certain kinds of digital practice. While the move away from computational analysis as a technique to facilitate humanities research is apparent, the disciplinary concerns here still seem to be latched onto those of the traditional humanities. Questions about the epistemological concerns of DH itself therefore remain unanswered.</p>
<p>While reiterating some of these core questions within DH, Dr. Souvik Mukherjee at the Department of English, Presidency University and Dr. Padmini Ray Murray, at the Centre for Public History, Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology, speak of the problem of locating the field in India, where work is presently only being done in a few small pockets. The lack of a precise definition, or location within an established disciplinary context are some reasons why a lot of work that could come within the ambit of DH is not being acknowledged as such; conversely it also leads to the problem of projects on digitisation or studies of digital cultures/cyber cultures being easily conflated with DH . Related to this is the absence of self-claimed ‘digital humanists’, which makes it all the more difficult to identify the boundaries of their research and practice. More importantly, the lack of an indigenous framework to theorise around questions of the digital is also an obstacle to understanding what the field entails and the many possibilities it may offer in the Indian context. This they feel is a problem not just of DH, but in general for modes of knowledge production in the social sciences and humanities that have adopted Western theoretical constructs. One could also locate in some sense the present crisis in disciplines within this problem. Sundar Sarukkai and Gopal Guru explicate this issue when they talk about the absence of 'experience as an important category of the act of theorising' because of the privileging of ideas in Western constructs of experience (Guru and Sarukkai 2012). This is also reflective of the bifurcation between theory and praxis in traditional social sciences or humanities epistemological frameworks which borrow heavily from the West. DH while still to arrive at a core disciplinary concern seems to point towards the problem of this very demarcation by addressing the aspect of practice as a very focal point of its discourse.</p>
<p>Dr. Indira Chowdhury, oral historian and director of the Centre for Public History, who is also a faculty member at the Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore sees this as a favourable way of understanding how the field as such has emerged and what its various possibilities could be in terms of different disciplinary perspectives. She is uncertain that of its emergence as a response to a ‘crisis’ in the humanities as such. She recalls an instance of one of her students who went on to work on hypertext in Canada, several years ago, which for her seemed to be the first instance of something close to DH. The IT revolution in the early 2000s was a significant change, and there were several things that it enabled people to do, in terms of concordance, cross-referencing and getting around texts in certain ways. However, whether key questions in the humanities really changed, whether they were taken any further, is something yet to be explored because it is still such a new field, and one can only be speculative about it, she feels. It perhaps pushes for a new level of interdisciplinarity, and a different kind of collaborative space that the digital enables. What is significant and exciting for her as a historian, however, is that if history has to survive as a discipline, in schools but in terms of public spaces and discourse, it should actively engage with the digital. This not only presents significant challenges, in terms how to represent the past in the digital space, (in short problems with method) but also opens up new possibilities, for example with oral history and the advent of digital sound. The definition of the field will also evolve, as people define it from different spaces of practice and research, which Dr. Chowdhury feels is crucial to keeping it open and accessible by all.</p>
<p>Even from diverse disciplinary perspectives, at present the understanding of DH is that it facilitates new modes of humanistic enquiry, or enables one to ask questions that could not be asked earlier. As Prof. Dasgupta reiterates, it is no longer possible to imagine humanities scholarship outside of the ‘digital’ as such, as that is the world we inhabit. However, while some of the key conceptual questions for the humanities may remain the same, it is the mode of questioning that has undergone a change – we need to re-learn questioning or question-making within this new digital sphere, which is in some sense also a critical and disciplinary challenge. While this does not resolve the problem of definition, it does provide a useful route into thinking of what would be questions of DH, particularly in the Indian context.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Notes</h2>
<p><strong>[1]</strong> For a more detailed overview of the different phases of DH, see Patrik Svensson in 'Landscape of Digital Humanities,' <em>Digital Humanities Quarterly</em>, Volume 4 Number 1, 2010, <a href="http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/4/1/000080/000080.html">http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/4/1/000080/000080.html</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[2]</strong> For more on the nature of the technosocial subject, see Nishant Shah, <em>The Technosocial Subject: Cities, Cyborgs and Cyberspace</em>, Manipal University, 2013. Indian ETD Repository @ INFLIBNET, <a href="http://hdl.handle.net/10603/8558">http://hdl.handle.net/10603/8558</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[3]</strong> This is rather simple abstraction of ideas about discipline and reason as they have stemmed from Enlightenment thought. For a more elaborate understanding see <em>Conflict of the Faculties</em> (1798) by Immanuel Kant and <em>Discipline and Punish</em> (1975) by Michel Foucault.</p>
<p><strong>[4]</strong> See: <a href="http://indiancine.ma/">http://indiancine.ma/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[5]</strong> See: <a href="http://vectors.usc.edu/journal/index.php">http://vectors.usc.edu/journal/index.php</a>.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>References</h2>
<p>Cutrofello, Andrew, <em>Discipline and Critique: Kant, Poststructuralism and the Problem of Resistance</em>, State University of New York Press, 1994.</p>
<p>Guru, Gopal, and Sundar Sarukkai, <em>The Cracked Mirror: An Indian Debate on Experience and Theory</em>, New Delhi: Oxford University Press India, 2012.</p>
<p>Johns, Adrian, <em>The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making</em>, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.</p>
<p>Latour, Bruno, 'Morality and Technology: The End of the Means,' Trans. Couze Venn, <em>Theory Culture Society</em>, 247-260, 2002.</p>
<p>Parry, Dave, 'The Digital Humanities or a Digital Humanism', <em>Debates in the Digital Humanities</em>, ed. Mathew K. Gold, University of Minnesota Press, 2012, <a href="http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/24">http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/24</a>.</p>
<p>Ramsay, Stephen, 'On Building,' 2010, <a href="http://lenz.unl.edu/papers/2011/01/11/on-building.html">http://lenz.unl.edu/papers/2011/01/11/on-building.html</a>.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/a-question-of-digital-humanities'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/a-question-of-digital-humanities</a>
</p>
No publishersneha-ppDigital KnowledgeMapping Digital Humanities in IndiaResearchFeaturedDigital HumanitiesResearchers at Work2016-06-30T05:06:46ZBlog EntryDigital Humanities in India?
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-in-india
<b>An extended survey of digital initiatives in arts and humanities practices in India was undertaken during the last year. Provocatively called 'mapping digital humanities in India', this enquiry began with the term 'digital humanities' itself, as a 'found' name for which one needs to excavate some meaning, context, and location in India at the present moment. Instead of importing this term to describe practices taking place in this country - especially when the term itself is relatively unstable and undefined even in the Anglo-American context - what I chose to do was to take a few steps back, and outline a few questions/conflicts that the digital practitioners in arts and humanities disciplines are grappling with. The final report of this study will be published serially. This is the first among seven sections.</b>
<p> </p>
<h2>Sections</h2>
<p>01. <strong>Digital Humanities in India?</strong></p>
<p>02. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/a-question-of-digital-humanities">A Question of Digital Humanities</a></p>
<p>03. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/reading-from-a-distance-data-as-text">Reading from a Distance – Data as Text</a></p>
<p>04. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/the-infrastructure-turn-in-the-humanities">The Infrastructure Turn in the Humanities</a></p>
<p>05. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/living-in-the-archival-moment">Living in the Archival Moment</a></p>
<p>06. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/new-modes-and-sites-of-humanities-practice">New Modes and Sites of Humanities Practice</a></p>
<p>07. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-in-india-concluding-thoughts">Digital Humanities in India – Concluding Thoughts</a></p>
<hr />
<h2>Background</h2>
<p>It has only been a couple of years since I began hearing the term Digital Humanities (henceforth, DH) being uttered quite prominently, though mostly in academic circles. For the uninitiated, it almost sounds like an oxymoron. After all, for most practical purposes the digital and humanities have always been seen almost as contradictory terms, existing in distinct silos. A couple of workshops and conferences, one national-level consultation, three new centres, and two academic courses later the term still needs a definition in India, if not also in other parts of the world. But what was by then, and even now, is interesting is the emergence of pockets of work in India either claiming to be DH or even remotely related to it, and the interest in the term, either as one full of a seemingly diverse, innovative, and generative potential for interdisciplinary work in academia and practice, or as something that is just a reinvention of old questions that have been the focus of humanistic enquiry for several decades now.</p>
<p>The enquiry for this mapping began with the term itself, as a 'found' name for which I needed to excavate some meaning, context and location in India at the present moment. A consultation on Digital Humanities for Indian Higher Education organised in Bangalore in July 2013 <strong>[1]</strong> and a proposed short course in ‘Digital Humanities and Cultural Informatics’ <strong>[2]</strong> at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, were some of the early prominent instances of the use of the term. I later learnt from one of the people interviewed for this study that DH was already discussed in academic workshops as early as 2010 <strong>[3]</strong>. The general interest in the term has steadily picked up in the last couple of years however, albeit in specific pockets of the country, and it would be safe to say that it has been approached in markedly different ways by several institutions.</p>
<p>The source of the term itself is the history and body of literature around humanities computing in the UK and US, which essentially explores the use of computational methods in humanities research and practice. Roberto A. Busa (2010) describes it as “… precisely the automation of every possible analysis of human expression (therefore, it is exquisitely a "humanistic" activity), in the widest sense of the word, from music to the theater, from design and painting to phonetics, but whose nucleus remains the discourse of written texts”. However, locating such a history in India seems not only to be a difficult project, but largely a futile one. It seemed irrelevant to import a concept or discourse that in itself was (and still is to some extent) relatively unstable and undefined even in the Anglo-American context, and then try to locate it here. Instead, what I chose to do was to take a few steps back - firstly to outline a couple of questions/conflicts that seemed to be troubling about this concept to begin with:</p>
<ol>
<li>Are ‘digital’ and ‘humanities’ really two contradictory terms that are being bridged together? Is this a reiteration of the ‘two cultures’ (Snow 1990) debate?<br /><br /></li>
<li>What are the changes in the object(s) of enquiry in humanities disciplines due to the advent of the internet and digital technologies?<br /><br /></li>
<li>What methods are to be used to study and work with digital objects? How are these affecting the traditional methods of the humanities?<br /><br /></li>
<li>Is DH a fringe academic phenomena, and can it be related to academic disciplines only? With several groups of practitioners engaging with questions and methods akin to DH outside universities, how do we define its institutional boundaries?<br /><br /></li>
<li>What are the new skills and tools emerging with, and in turn defining, DH practices in India?</li></ol>
<p> </p>
<h2>Context</h2>
<p>An immediate context for the growth of DH has been the steady debate around a ‘crisis’ of the disciplines, the humanities in particular, and how DH in a strange paradox, seemed to be both the phenomenon posing this question and offering an answer to it. Particularly in the Anglo-American context, while there has been a sustained decline in funding for the arts, especially post the global recession in the late 1990s, the Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) and other disciplines in natural sciences still seem to be on a steady footing. The ‘crisis’ here exists here at several levels - budgetary cuts across universities for liberal arts and humanities programmes, a steep fall in gainful employment for graduates (whose numbers are much more than the jobs available in the market, the adjunct system that has become popular in the US, which has resulted in reduced full-time employment and poor compensation for faculty, and in general a lack of opportunities and resources for research in the arts and humanities. The problem however, of which these are only the symptoms, lies much deeper, at the heart of what is seen as the lack of interest due to the diminishing practical value of the humanities, which further makes them seem most dispensable in a moment of economic crisis. Martha Nussbaum calls this a ‘silent crisis’, spurred by the growth of a profit-driven model of education, which has led to an increased focus on science and technology programmes, and emphasized the fostering of certain specific skills in these domains much to the detriment of arts and humanities programmes at every level of formal education, thus also doing away with “cultivated capacities of critical thinking and reflection, which are crucial in keeping democracies alive and wide awake.”</p>
<p>Gary Gutting on the other hand sees this definition of crisis in terms of numbers itself as misleading, but proposes that this decline also as a result of a cultural and economic system that is inhospitable to the humanities in general, and the ‘cultural middle class’ in particular. He writes:</p>
<blockquote>Our economic system works well for those who find meaning in economic competition and the material rewards it brings. To a lesser but still significant extent, our system provides meaningful work in service professions (like health and social work) for those fulfilled by helping people in great need. But for those with humanistic and artistic life interests, our economic system has almost nothing to offer. Or rather, it has a great deal to offer but only for a privileged elite (the cultural parallel to our economic upper class) who have had the ability and luck to reach the highest levels of humanistic achievement. If you have (in Pierre Bourdieu’s useful term) the “cultural capital” to gain a tenured professorship at a university, play regularly in a major symphony orchestra or write mega bestsellers, you can earn an excellent living doing what you love. Short of that, you must pursue your passion on the side. (Gutting 2013)</blockquote>
<p>Paul Jay and Gerald Graff locate the problem within the notion of the humanities as being inherently averse to a market-driven, utilitarian form of education, which emphasises only credentials, thus rendering the field esoteric and lacking when it comes to solving problems in the ‘real world’. Instead they favour the approach of humanities students developing diverse skill sets, in addition to traditional skills of their disciplines, and being open to engage with opportunities in the larger marketplace outside of academy as well. As the essay states:</p>
<blockquote>We believe it is time to stop the ritualized lamentation over the crisis in the humanities and get on with the task of making them relevant in the 21st century. Such lamentation only reveals the inability of many humanists to break free of a 19th-century vision of education that sees the humanities as an escape from the world of business and science. As Cathy Davidson has forcefully argued in her new book, Now You See It, this outmoded way of thinking about the humanities as a realm of high-minded cultivation and pleasure in which students contemplate the meaning of life is a relic of the industrial revolution with its crude dualism of lofty spiritual art vs. mechanized smoking factories, a way of thinking that will serve students poorly in meeting the challenges of the 21st century. (Jay and Duff 2002)</blockquote>
<p>While many of the traditional humanities scholars may still look at this as the result of a certain techno capitalistic impulse - wherein a new research regime based on knowledge creation to fulfil corporate interests emerges – it is prudent to examine how and why fields like the digital humanities have now emerged around the time of such a crisis, as they seemingly fit well within this nebulous space, and what are their implications for the humanities, education and research at large.</p>
<p>In the India, the context is a rather chequered one – with most conversations around the internet and digital technologies located within the domain of the development of Information and Communication technologies for Development (ICT4D), in sectors ranging from education to governance. The introduction to the digital has been in multifarious ways for countries in the global south, largely through rhetoric about its potential to address and even resolve social and economic problems, so much so that, as several of the people interviewed in this study also mentioned, now anything digital automatically translates to ‘good’ and ‘beneficial’. Addressing the digital divide has been a mandate of all stakeholders, whether the state and policy-makers, private organisations, NGOs or academia. With around 300 million internet users and counting, India has the second largest internet user base in the world. However, the conditions and quality of access to the internet and other digital technologies, and who is using these and for what purposes continue to remain a bone of contention. The ambitious Digital India initiative of the current government is the latest in a slew of measures undertaken to address some of these concerns in the last several years, and it proposes to do so by tackling three key areas – digital infrastructure, governance and services on demand, and empowerment of citizens through increased digital literacy <strong>[4]</strong>. As such it seeks to resolve some of the challenges of last mile connectivity that have forever been an issue with many ICT4D initiatives, particularly with countries in the Global South. The advent of a techno-democracy or a model of governance that successfully integrates technology within a framework of rights and social development seems to be larger vision of these proposed initiatives.</p>
<p>The ICT-fication of education has been a major objective and challenge within this larger vision, specifically with respect to the problem of access, and more importantly quality of access which stands out as pertinent, again a problem attributed to the lack of last mile connectivity. In 2009, the MHRD launched the ambitious National Mission in Education and Information and Communication Technologies (NMEICT) programme <strong>[5]</strong>, which along with the National Commission for Higher Education and Research (NCHER) Bill <strong>[6]</strong> and the recommendations of the Yashpal Committee report <strong>[7]</strong>, was expected to address some long-standing concerns in making higher education more accessible and hospitable to students, particularly those from underprivileged backgrounds. Ashish Rajadhyaksha (2011) argues that the last-mile problem is a more of a conceptual or cultural problem than merely a technological one. This is illustrated in the manner of implementation of several projects under the NMEICT, particularly in the imagination, as Rajadhyaksha says, of technology as neutral and therefore capable of addressing issues of democratisation within higher education.</p>
<p>Following the NMEICT, several initiatives such as the National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL) <strong>[8]</strong> programme, and the use of low-cost devices such as the Aakash tablets <strong>[9]</strong> were also field tested to get a better understanding of how digital technologies could be integrated seamlessly into classroom instruction. The Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) <strong>[10]</strong> and Information and Library Network (INFLIBNET) <strong>[11]</strong>, and more recently the National Knowledge Network (NKN) <strong>[12]</strong> are some of the more established efforts in distance education and open courseware. Digitisation initiatives were also launched on a large scale in the last decade, some notable ones being National Mission for Manuscripts <strong>[13]</strong>, Digital Library of India <strong>[14]</strong>, and National Library of India <strong>[15]</strong>, among many others. There is also a growing number of closed/commercial archives, some examples being the South Asia Archive <strong>[16]</strong> and Asia Art Archive <strong>[17]</strong>. Digitisation, while being taken up in the interest of preservation and record, also brought with it a number of challenges, particularly with respect to the manner in which the projects were implemented. Whether with regard to preservation of the original material, problems with copyright or defining metadata standards, digitisation has never been an easy process. The Google Books library project is an example of this, where many books were damaged and had to be discarded in the process of digitisation, and the project itself came under criticism for several copyright violations, errors produced due to conversion of scanned texts using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software and incorrect or unavailable metadata.</p>
<p>The move towards digitisation also provided the much needed impetus for archival practice to make a transition to the digital space, this has been an inevitable but rather fraught endeavour to begin with, as some of the observations made in the later chapters will illustrate. The emergence of independent, private online archives, often seen as a fallout of the hegemony of state-funded archives is an important development of this time. An influx of funding from government and private donors, has led to a lot of work in media and communication technologies getting concentrated in so-called ‘alternative’ spaces outside the university. The growth of these in between spaces has been an interesting phenomenon, particularly with respect to the possibilities offered for different kinds of research and other creative practices that are often unable to find a space within the confines of a university or other large, established knowledge institutions.</p>
<p>In the last decade or so, DH seems to have become one of the most highly funded areas in humanities research and practice. While this has seemingly helped to either save and/or reinvent some the humanities programmes, a lot of traditional humanists also view the field and the term with scepticism – as a threat to more traditional forms of humanities pedagogy and practice. Whether such a context exists in India and is still a matter of question, and hinges largely on how we understand the digital itself - as an object, concept or space. For that seems to be where the questions about the field, its emergence and its epistemological concerns lie.</p>
<p>This report, therefore, takes a slightly broader look, somewhat like a scoping exercise to see what some present concerns are and what could be the possibilities of DH in India. The areas of focus are few – the notion of crisis, and disciplines, the archive and so forth which form the crux of the debate in India. It also looks at changes that have come about, and are imminent with the ‘digital turn’, from the perspective of selected disciplines, and practices of knowledge-making. More importantly, it tries to extrapolate, from the common issues and conflicts traced across several conversations, larger questions of a conflict of authority that disciplines in the humanities have come to undergo, and whether the digital has amplified of tried to resolve the same. The conflict is tied to questions of ownership/authorship and authenticity that emerge with new collaborative modes of knowledge production, and the politics of circulation. It is reflected in the shift from more traditional spaces of knowledge-making to newer methods, objects, figures and processes in the online world, which seem to at one level replace older ones. This perceived threat of irrelevance or obsolescence is one of the manifestations of this conflict of authority. The Wikipedia is one example of this conflict, wherein the authenticity and authority of its content and recognition as scholarship has been intensely debated owing to, among other things, the fact that it cannot be attributed to any single author. In the ways in which the digital now mediates such activities, what has become the space and understanding of the digital in our lives, in the ways we consume and produce information and knowledge, and increasingly become uneven stakeholders in a dynamic knowledge economy, are some of the questions explored therein.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Methodology</h2>
<p>With few 'digital humanists' (a term many DH scholars in India have consciously chosen to stay away from) and DH centres around, and the discourse being far from stable in India, the best way to explore this supposedly new phenomenon then seemed to be to understand some of the immediate problems and questions with the notion of the ‘digital’ itself. This approach was not just the result of constraints of the immediate context, but also turned out to be a productive methodological gesture, as it widened the scope of this mapping exercise to include several proto/perhaps-DH initiatives that have come up around the same time, or been in existence for a while and have been trying to work around similar questions. The mapping did not begin with an assumption of a field called DH as being extant in India, and therefore as an examination of its challenges and possibilities, but rather to understand how DH-like practices have evolved and converged at the moment under what appears to be like a place-holder term, and the implications of this for research and learning. Being located in India, it also provided a good vantage point to reflect on some of the literature and discourse around the term being produced in the Anglo-American context.
The consultation on Digital Humanities for Indian Higher Education held in July 2013 was helpful in bringing together a number of people and key questions of what was then understood as something of a field. It is largely from the discussions at this consultation that this report approaches the term and what it may offer for humanities and related interdisciplinary research in India; somewhere it also hopes to serve as a point of departure. A major concern then was the lack of a proper definition of the field, and its instability, which continued to be a recurrent topic in my discussions with people as part of this exercise. However, the merits of embarking upon an exercise to ‘define DH in India’ were highly contentious, so the mapping took a more descriptive route, and did a discursive analysis of work in DH and allied fields and what people were saying about it in India. What I found were a range of views, some informed by practice and scholarship, others based on conjecture and some purely non-committal. As one of the people interviewed for this mapping pointed out, there is something provisional about which, if I may add, also inhibits us from saying anything definitive about it, just yet.</p>
<p>Given that the lack of a definition of the field remained one of the main issues, I went into conducting the mapping with a working definition/assumption that DH ‘is an interdisciplinary area of research, practice and pedagogy that looks at the interaction of digital tools, methods and spaces with core concerns of humanistic enquiry’. This definition was developed based on a review of existing literature in the Anglo-American context on DH, and deliberately made expansive enough to include within its fold, the different kinds of practices that had already chosen to adopt the term, and others which seemed to be inclined towards similar theoretical and practical concerns. Another useful definition, from the Digital Humanities Quarterly useful was the following:</p>
<blockquote>Digital humanities is a diverse and still emerging field that encompasses the practice of humanities research in and through information technology, and the exploration of how the humanities may evolve through their engagement with technology, media, and computational methods. (Digital Humanities Quarterly 2010)</blockquote>
<p>Deliberating on the interaction between humanities and technology, Susan Schreibman, in one the earliest books on DH describes the 'field' as follows:</p>
<blockquote>The digital humanities, then, and their interdisciplinary core found in the field of humanities computing, have a long and dynamic history best illustrated by examination of the locations at which specific disciplinary practices intersect with computation. (Schreibman et al 2004)</blockquote>
<p>One of the popular and most quoted definitions, however, is an early one that appeared in the Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0 (Institute for the Future of the Book 2009). This describes DH as <em>an array of convergent practices</em>, and is also reproduced in the book <em>Digital Humanities</em> (Burdick et al 2012):</p>
<blockquote>Digital Humanities refers to new modes of scholarship and institutional units for collaborative, transdisciplinary, and computationally engaged research, teaching, and publication. Digital Humanities is less a unified field than an array of convergent practices that explore a universe in which print is no longer the primary medium in which knowledge is produced and disseminated. (Ibid., 122)</blockquote>
<p>The notion that DH is a “less a unified field than an array of convergent practices” seems to be the most useful way to describe the observations and more so the conditions that led to this mapping exercise, which also seeks to outline some kind of a trajectory of practices that converge at this contemporary moment to engender new meanings of and around the digital, rather than produce a conceptual history of the term in the Indian context or even imagine an extant field of some sort. This notion of a convergence, as stated in the last definition, although not apparent or expressed by anyone in India, seems to be the best possible way to describe the manner in which certain practices and a discourse has grown around the intersection of humanities and digital technologies in India. This rather organic growth of DH projects, practices and coursework in the absence of a meta-theory that would drive its epistemological concerns is an important conceptual question for the field itself, and a challenge for the study. Thus while the broader conversation around DH spans everything from instructional technology, new media and art practices, integrated science education to cultural analytics, the core concerns often remain the same, that of the intersection of previously separate domains of knowledge that are now coming together, and the crucial role played by the internet and digital technologies in bringing them together.</p>
<p>Further, three immediate experiences in engaging with digital technologies and questions of knowledge production in India shaped the intellectual concerns of this study. The first of these is the series of monographs produced as part of the ‘Histories of Internets in India’ project at the Researchers at Work (RAW) programme in CIS, during 2008-2011. A key point foregrounded in these monographs was the critical need to approach the internet, as a plural technology, available in and actualised through different forms, practices, and experiences. The second one was the collaborative project on the quality of access to higher education in undergraduate educational institutions at the Higher Education Innovation and Research Applications programme at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore.The project was conducted in nine undergraduate institutions across three states in India, and included interaction with students and teachers through workshops and campus projects.The experience of working with students – who ranged from those who could barely use a computer to students proficient with the latest software, multimedia tools and internet applications – led to many insightful learnings about the teaching-learning environment, and prevalence of digital technologies and the internet in these spaces. The third one, of course, is the consultation on DH held in Bangalore, which provided an immediate set of questions and a network of people to begin the mapping with.</p>
<p>In this study, the fieldwork consisted of in-depth and semi-structured interviews with key people involved in the DH-like initiatives in India, and allied areas such as media, archives, art, and higher education. The sample size being small, the conversations were by no means exhaustive, but they were insightful in terms of the present nature of practice and the questions that they further pointed towards. The interviews were largely open-ended conversations focussing on, where possible, questions about DH: its emergence, theory, practice and pedagogy, but emphasising the notion of the ‘digital’ and is diverse perception and formulations. With respondents who were not from an academic space or not involved with DH directly, the questions were more related to the nature of changes that the digital has brought about in their practice, specifically the shifts in content and method. The crisis of disciplines and the move away from more traditional concerns of humanistic enquiry were also discussed. Issues of access, exclusivity and the move towards collaborative spaces of knowledge production and the democratic potential of the internet and digital technologies also came up quite prominently as points of discussion.</p>
<p>The fieldwork tried to cover not just a range of people from different disciplines and areas of practice, but also institutions: Prof. Amlan Dasgupta, Prof. Sukanta Chaudhuri and Purbasha Auddy, (School of Cultural Texts and Records and Dept. of English), Dr. Moinak Biswas and Dr. Madhuja Mukherjee (Media lab and Dept. of Film Studies); Dr. Abhijit Roy (School of Communication and Culture) at Jadavpur University, Kolkata; Dr. Souvik Mukherjee (Dept. of English) and Dr. Milinda Banerjee (Dept. of History) at Presidency University, Kolkata; Abhijit Bhattacharya (Media Archives) at Centre for the Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata; Dr. Ravi Sundaram (the Sarai Programme) at Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi; Dr. Indira Chowdhury and Dr. Padmini Ray-Murray (Centre for Public History) at Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore; Dr. C. S Lakshmi at the Sound and Picture Archives for Research on Women, Mumbai; Shaina Anand, Namita Malhotra, Lawrence Liang, Jan Gerber, Sebastian Lutgert and Ashish Rajadhyaksha, who have all worked with CAMP, Mumbai and are part of the team behind Indiancine.ma and Pad.ma; Vikram Vincent at the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai and S.V. Srinivas, Azim Premji University, who was previously associated with the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society. The individuals and institutions mentioned here have been engaged with these concerns within their respective fields of research and practice. Three institutions - Jadavpur University, Presidency University and the Centre for Public History – have actively adopted the term DH for some of the work they have been doing, whereas the remaining have been working with digital technologies as part of research, pedagogy, and practice. The report presents some part of these conversations and in doing so provides a snapshot of the operational context of the term ‘DH’ in India as well. The attempt was to understand the nature of existing and possible institutional investment in the term, as well as digital technologies (beyond tools, platforms and processes) and their stake in taking these questions further.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Notes</h2>
<p><strong>[1]</strong> This one-day event was organized by the Higher Education Innovation and Research Applications (HEIRA) programme at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, in collaboration with the Access to Knowledge (A2K) Programme at the Centre for Internet and Society, and other institutions. See: <a href="http://cis-india.org/digital-natives/digital-humanities-for-indian-higher-education" target="_blank">http://cis-india.org/digital-natives/digital-humanities-for-indian-higher-education</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[2]</strong> See: <a href="https://sctrdhci.wordpress.com/">https://sctrdhci.wordpress.com/</a></p>
<p><strong>[3]</strong> See: <a href="http://www.tezu.ernet.in/notices/ResearchMethodology.pdf">http://www.tezu.ernet.in/notices/ResearchMethodology.pdf</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[4]</strong> See: <a href="http://www.digitalindia.gov.in/">http://www.digitalindia.gov.in/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[5]</strong> See: <a href="http://www.nmeict.ac.in/">http://www.nmeict.ac.in/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[6]</strong> See <a href="http://www.prsindia.org/uploads/media/Higher%20education/Legislative%20Brief%20-%20Higher%20Education%20and%20Research%20Bill.pdf">http://www.prsindia.org/uploads/media/Higher%20education/Legislative%20Brief%20-%20Higher%20Education%20and%20Research%20Bill.pdf</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[7]</strong> See: <a href="http://mhrd.gov.in/sites/upload_files/mhrd/files/document-reports/YPC-Report.pdf">http://mhrd.gov.in/sites/upload_files/mhrd/files/document-reports/YPC-Report.pdf</a></p>
<p><strong>[8]</strong> See: <a href="http://nptel.ac.in/">http://nptel.ac.in/</a></p>
<p><strong>[9]</strong> See: <a href="http://gadgets.ndtv.com/tablets/news/government-for-providing-aakash-tablet-at-rs-1500-329578">http://gadgets.ndtv.com/tablets/news/government-for-providing-aakash-tablet-at-rs-1500-329578</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[10]</strong> See: <a href="http://www.ignou.ac.in/">http://www.ignou.ac.in/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[11]</strong> See: <a href="http://www.inflibnet.ac.in/">http://www.inflibnet.ac.in/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[12]</strong> See: <a href="http://nkn.in/">http://nkn.in/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[13]</strong> See: <a href="http://www.namami.org/">http://www.namami.org/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[14]</strong> See: <a href="http://www.dli.ernet.in/">http://www.dli.ernet.in/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[15]</strong> See: <a href="http://www.nationallibrary.gov.in/">http://www.nationallibrary.gov.in/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[16]</strong> See: <a href="http://www.southasiaarchive.com/">http://www.southasiaarchive.com/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[17]</strong> See: <a href="http://www.aaa.org.hk/">http://www.aaa.org.hk/</a>.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>References</h2>
<p>Burdick, Anne, Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunefeld, Todd Presner, and Jeffrey Schnapp, Digital_Humanities, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2012, <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/digitalhumanities">https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/digitalhumanities</a>.</p>
<p>Digital Humanities Quarterly, "About DHQ," 2010, <a href="http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/about/about.html">http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/about/about.html</a></p>
<p>Gutting, Gary. "The Real Humanities Crisis," The New York Times, November 30, 2013, accessed July 14, 2015. <a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/30/the-real-humanities-crisis/
">http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/30/the-real-humanities-crisis/</a>.</p>
<p>Institute for the Future of the Book, "The Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0," 2009, <a href="http://manifesto.humanities.ucla.edu/2009/05/29/the-digital-humanities-manifesto-20/">http://manifesto.humanities.ucla.edu/2009/05/29/the-digital-humanities-manifesto-20/</a></p>
<p>Jay, Paul, and Gerald Duff, "The Fear of Being Useful," Inside Higher Ed. January 5. 2012. Accessed September 22, 2015. <a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2012/01/05/essay-new-approach-defend-value-humanities">https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2012/01/05/essay-new-approach-defend-value-humanities</a>.</p>
<p>Schreibman, Susan, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth, "The Digital Humanities and Humanities Computing: An Introduction," A Companion to Digital Humanities, Oxford: Blackwell, 2004, <a href="http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/">http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/</a>.</p>
<p>Snow, C.P. "The Two Cultures," Leonardo, Vol. 23, No. 2/3, New Foundations: Classroom Lessons in Art/Science/Technology for the 1990s. 1990. Pp. 169-173.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-in-india'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-in-india</a>
</p>
No publishersneha-ppDigital KnowledgeMapping Digital Humanities in IndiaResearchFeaturedDigital HumanitiesResearchers at Work2016-06-30T05:05:29ZBlog EntryCrowdsourcing Incidents of Communication Privacy Violation in India
http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/crowdsourcing-incidents-of-communication-privacy-violation-in-india
<b>In the context of several ongoing threads of debates and policy discussions, we are initiating this effort to crowdsource incidents of violation of digital/online/telephonic privacy of persons and organisations in India. The full list of submitted incidents is publicly shared, under Creative Commons Attributions-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. Please contribute and share with your friends and colleagues.</b>
<p> </p>
<h3>Report an incident: <a href="http://goo.gl/forms/8Xcf0zcWZW">http://goo.gl/forms/8Xcf0zcWZW</a></h3>
<h3>Collected incidents: <a href="http://bit.ly/privacy-violation-india">http://bit.ly/privacy-violation-india</a> (CC BY-SA 4.0)</h3>
<p> </p>
<p>You are welcome to cross-post this to your website or other online forum. Please provide attribution, and link back to this page. For any clarification, write to Sumandro Chattapadhyay, Research Director, CIS, at sumandro[at]cis-india[dot]org.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/crowdsourcing-incidents-of-communication-privacy-violation-in-india'>http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/crowdsourcing-incidents-of-communication-privacy-violation-in-india</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroFeaturedHomepagePrivacy2015-10-16T10:49:17ZBlog EntryInternet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 - Studying Internet in India: Call for Sessions (Extended to Nov 22)
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc16-call
<b>With great excitement, we are announcing the beginning of an annual conference series titled Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC), the first edition of which is to take place in Delhi during February 25-27, 2016 (yet to be confirmed). This first conference will focus on the theme of 'Studying Internet in India.' The word 'study' here is a shorthand for a range of tasks, from documentation and theory-building, to measurement and representation. We invite you to propose sessions for the conference by Sunday, November 22, 2015. Final sessions will be selected during December and announced by December 31, 2015. Below are the details about the conference series, as well instructions for proposing a session for the conference.</b>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>Call for Sessions document: <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/internet-researchers-conference-irc-2016-studying-internet-in-india-call-for-sessions/at_download/file">Download (PDF)</a></strong></p>
<p><strong>Call for Sessions poster: <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/internet-researchers-conference-irc-2016-studying-internet-in-india-call-for-sessions-poster/at_download/file">Download (PNG)</a></strong></p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Internet Researchers’ Conference</h2>
<p>The last decades have seen a growing entanglement of our daily lives with the internet, not only as modes of communication but also as shared socio-politico-cultural spaces, and as objects of study. The emergence of new artifacts, conditions, and sites of power/knowledge with the prevalence of digital modes of communication, consumptions, production, distribution, and appropriation have expectedly attracted academic and non-academic explorers across disciplines, professions, and interests. Researchers across the domains of arts, humanities, and social sciences have attempted to understand life on the internet, or life after the internet, and the way digital technologies mediate various aspects of our being today. These attempts have in turn raised new questions around understanding of digital objects, online lives, and virtual networks, and have contributed to complicating disciplinary assumptions, methods, and boundaries.</p>
<p>The Researchers at Work (RAW) programme at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) is very excited to invite you to take part in the first of a series of annual conferences for researchers (academic or otherwise) studying internet in India. These conferences will be called the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC), with the abbreviation reminding us of an early protocol for text-based communication over internet. The first edition will be organised around the theme of ‘studying internet in India.’ The word study here is a shorthand for a range of tasks, from documentation and theory-building, to measurement and representation.</p>
<p>This conference series is founded on the following interests:</p>
<ul><li>Creating discussion spaces for researchers studying internet in India and in other comparable regions.</li>
<li>Foregrounding the multiplicity, hierarchies, tensions, and urgencies of the digital sites and users in India.</li>
<li>Accounting for the various layers, conceptual and material, of experiences and usages of internet and networked digital media in India.</li>
<li>Exploring and practicing new modes of research and documentation necessitated by new (digital) forms of objects of power/knowledge.</li></ul>
<p> </p>
<h2>Studying Internet in India</h2>
<p>The inaugural conference will be held in Delhi (<strong>to be confirmed</strong>) on February 25-27, 2015. It will comprise of discussion and workshop sessions taking place during the first two days, and a writing sprint and a final round table taking place during the third day.</p>
<p>The conference will specifically focus on the following questions:</p>
<ul><li>How do we conceptualise, as an intellectual and political task, the mediation and transformation of social, cultural, political, and economic processes, forces, and sites through internet and digital media technologies in contemporary India?</li>
<li>How do we frame and explore the experiences and usages of internet and digital media technologies in India within its specific historical-material contexts shaped by traditional hierarchies of knowledge, colonial systems of communication, post-independence initiatives in nation-wide technologies of governance, a rapidly growing telecommunication market, and informal circuits of media production and consumption, among others?</li>
<li>What tools and methods are made available by arts, humanities, social science, and technical disciplines to study internet in India; how and where do they fail to meet the purpose; what revisions and fresh tool building are becoming necessary; and how should the usage of such tools and methods be taught?</li>
<li>Given the global techno-economic contours of the internet, and the starkly hierarchical and segmented experiences and usages of the same in India, how do we begin to use the internet as a space for academic and creative practice and intervention?</li></ul>
<p> </p>
<h2>Sessions</h2>
<p>The conference will not be organised around papers but sessions. Each session will be one and half hour long. Potential participants may propose sessions that largely engage with one of the questions listed above.</p>
<p>Each proposed session must have at least two, and preferably three, co-leaders, who will drive the session, and prepare a session document after the conference. The proposed session can either involve a discussion, or a workshop.</p>
<p>In a discussion session, the co-leaders may present their works (not necessarily of the academic kind), or invite others to present their works, on a specific theme, which will be followed by a discussion, as structured by the co-leaders.</p>
<p>In a workshop session, the co-leaders will engage the participants to undertake individual or collaborative work in response to a series of questions, challenges, or provocations offered by the co-leaders at the beginning of the session. The proposed work may involve writing, searching, copying, building, etc., but <strong>not</strong> speaking.</p>
<p>Both the kinds of sessions are open to presentations and collaborations in the textual format or in other formats, including but not limited to code-based works and multimedia installations.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Writing Sprint</h2>
<p>At the writing sprint, on the third day morning, all the participants will collaboratively put together the first draft of a handbook on tools and methods of studying Internet in India. It will be created as an online, open access, multilingual, and editable (wiki-like) book, and will be meant for extensive usage and augmentation by students, researchers, and others.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Final Round Table</h2>
<p>This will take place after the lunch on the third day to wrap-up the conversations (and propose new initiatives, hopefully) emerging during the previous days of the conference, to make plans for follow-up works (including the first IRC Reader), and to speculate about the shape of the next year’s conference.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>IRC Reader</h2>
<p>The IRC Reader will be produced as documentation of the conversations and activities at the conference. The Reader, obviously, will have the same theme as the conference, and will largely comprise of the session documentation (not necessarily textual) prepared by the co-leaders of the session concerned. Once all the session documentation is shared by the co-leaders and is temporarily published online, all the participants will be invited to share their comments, which will all be part of the final Reader of the conference.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Proposing a Session</h2>
<p>To propose a session, each team of two/three co-leaders will have to submit the following documents:</p>
<ul><li>The name of the session: It should be created as a <strong>hashtag</strong>, as in #BlackLivesMatter, or #RefugeesWelcome.</li>
<li>A plan of the proposed session that should clarify its context, the key questions/challenges/provocations for the session, and how they connect to any one of the four questions listed above. Write no more than one page.</li>
<li>If it is a discussion session: Mention what will be presented at the session, and who will present it. Share the abstracts of the papers to be presented (if any). Each abstract should not be longer than 300 words.</li>
<li>If it is a workshop session: Mention what you expect the participants to do during the session, and how the co-leaders will support them through the work. Write no more than one page.</li>
<li>Three readings, or objects, or software that you expect the participants to know about before taking part in the session.</li>
<li>CVs of all the co-leaders of the session.</li></ul>
<p>We understand that finding co-leaders for a session you have in mind might be difficult in certain cases. One possible way for you to find co-leaders is by sharing your session idea on the <a href="https://lists.ghserv.net/mailman/listinfo/researchers" target="_blank">researchers@cis-india.org</a> mailing list. Alternatively, you may keep an eye on the list to see what potential topics are being discussed. If you are facing any difficulty subscribing to the mailing list, please write to <a href="mailto:raw@cis-india.org">raw@cis-india.org</a>.</p>
<p>All session proposals must be submitted by <strong>Sunday, November 22</strong> (extended), 2015, via email sent to <a href="mailto:raw@cis-india.org">raw@cis-india.org</a>.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Selection of Sessions</h2>
<p>All proposed sessions, along with related documents, will be published online by <strong>November 30</strong>. All co-leaders of proposed sessions will be invited to vote for 8 sessions before <strong>December 15</strong>. The sessions with maximum votes will be selected for the conference, and the list of such sessions will be published on <strong>December 31</strong>, 2015.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Venue, Accommodation, and Travel</h2>
<p>The conference is most likely to take place in Delhi on <strong>February 25-27, 2016</strong>. The place, dates, and venue will be confirmed by <strong>December 31</strong>, 2015.</p>
<p>The conference organiser(s) will cover all costs related to accommodation and hospitality during the conference.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, we are not sure if we will be able to pay for travel expenses of the participants. We will confirm this by <strong>December 31</strong>, 2015.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc16-call'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc16-call</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroInternet Researcher's ConferenceFeaturedLearningIRC16Researchers at Work2015-11-15T07:48:17ZBlog EntryComments on the DoT Panel Report via MyGov
http://editors.cis-india.org/telecom/blog/comments-on-dot-panel-report-via-mygov
<b>On behalf of the Centre for Internet and Society, I must commend the Department of Telecom Panel on its report. Overall, it displays a far better understanding of the underlying issues than the TRAI consultation paper did, and is overall a good effort at balancing the different sides. However, some of its most important recommendations are completely off-mark and would be disastrous if accepted by the government.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">It is praiseworthy that the panel emphasizes the separation in regulatory terms between the network layer and the service layer. This also means that telecom carriers should be regulated differently from OTT services.</p>
<h3>Licensing of Communication OTT Services</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The proposal by the DoT panel of a licensing regime for communication OTT services is a terrible idea. It would presumptively hold all licence non-holders to be unlawful, and that should not be the case; as the panel itself notes, apps that lower the cost of communication are a welcome development and should be encouraged by the government and not made presumptively unlawful.<br /><br />While it is in India's national interest to want to hold VoIP services to account if they do not follow legitimate regulations, it is far better to do this through ex-post regulations rather than an ex-ante licensing scheme. <br /><br />A licensing scheme would benefit Indian VoIP companies (including services like Hike, which Airtel has invested in) over foreign companies like Viber, or free/open source technologies like WebRTC. The Universal Licence is designed for a world where all the licencees have an operational presence in India. This is not true of communications OTT services. Therefore a licensing regime would unjustly favour some services over others.<br /><br />Further, VoIP services need not be provided by a company: a person can choose to run XMPP, SIP, or Mumble — all of which are protocol that support VoIP — on their own computers. Will a licensing regime force such individuals' many of whom may not be Indian nationals — to become licence-holders if they facilitate domestic communications within India? The DoT panel report doesn't say. This would also result in a licensing regime unjustly favouring some services over others.<br /><br />The report also doesn't say how one would distinguish between OTT communication services and OTT application services, when many apps such as personal assistance apps like HelpChat, are centred around communications. It also does not mention what regulatory distinction exists between text communication services and video/voice communication services, or between purely domestic and international video/voice communications. Stating that certain telecom companies are currently earning most of their revenue from domestic voice traffic will not suffice as a regulatory, just as it did not suffice to say that VSNL's international telephony monopoly earned it a lot of money. Regulatory fairness is the important issue and not protecting specific business models. Thus, there is no rational distinction to be drawn. Even if the panel has some regulatory distinction that it has not stated, this is an impossibility to enforce. Much domestic IP traffic is 'round-tripped', with traffic leaving India and coming back in. How would the regulator propose to regulate that?<br /><br />Will there be a revenue-sharing mechanism, as is currently the case under the Unified Licence? If so, how will it be calculated in case of services like WhatsApp? These questions too find no answer in the report.<br /><br />Given these numerous objections and unanswered questions, the government would be well-advised not seek to license OTT communications services. Instead, it would be useful for the government to hold public consultations about:<br /><br /> 1. What Universal Licence conditions makes sense in the world of IP-based services, and international services?<br /> 2. How can we frame ex-post regulations that address legitimate concerns? Is there overlap with provisions of the IT Act such as s.69, s.69B, s.79, and others?<br /> 3. How can we ensure that the regulatory burden for telecom players with respect to their being able to provide IP-based services that are equivalent to OTT communication services?</p>
<h3>Net neutrality</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">While the DoT panel reiterates a number of times that the core principles of Net neutrality should be adhered to, it nowhere defines what these core tenets are. We suggest the following definition:</p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "> net neutrality is the principle that we should regulate gatekeepers to ensure they do not use their power to unjustly discriminate between similarly situated persons, content or traffic.</li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The above definition applies to the way the ISPs treat consumers, treat interconnecting networks, as well as the way they treat traffic internally.<br />We agree with the panel that in that while Net neutrality should find place in a new law, for the time being Net neutrality principles can be enforced through the licence agreement between the DoT and telecom providers.</p>
<h3>Traffic Management</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">It is unclear what precisely the DoT panel means by "application-agnostic" and "application-specific" network management. Different scholars on this issue — such as Barbara van Schewick and Christopher Yoo — mean different things when they use the word "application". Without a definition, it is difficult to say whether the panel's recommendation on that front are sound.<br />Instead, we suggest the following tests:<br />Discrimination between classes of traffic for the sake of network management should only be permissible if:</p>
<ul>
<li>there is an intelligible differentia between the classes which are to be treated differently, and</li>
<li>there is a rational nexus between the differential treatment and the aim of such differentiation, and </li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">the aim sought to be furthered is legitimate, and is related to the security, stability, or efficient functioning of the network, or is a technical limitation outside the control of the ISP, and </li>
<li>the network management practice is the least harmful manner in which to achieve the aim.</li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">As for the provision of enterprise and managed services, which we more broadly term "specialized services", we would recommend:</p>
<ul>
<li> Provision of specialized services is permitted if and only if it is shown that</li>
<li>The service is available to the user only upon request, and not without their active choice, and</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">The service cannot be reasonably provided with "best efforts" delivery guarantee that is available over the Internet, and hence requires discriminatory treatment, or</li>
<li>The discriminatory treatment does not unduly harm the provision of the rest of the Internet to other customers.</li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Lastly, we would recommend that the above regulatory guidlines only be applied against ISPs, and not against public providers of Internet connectivity, such as a library, a school, an airport, a hotel, etc.</p>
<h3>Zero-rating</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">On the contentious issue of zero-rating, a process that involves both ex-ante and ex-post regulation is envisaged to prevent harmful zero-rating, while allowing beneficial zero-rating. Further, the report notes that the supposed altruistic or "public interest" motives of the zero-rating scheme do not matter if they result in harm to competition, distort consumer markets, violate the core tenets of Net neutrality, or unduly benefit an Internet "gatekeeper".<br /><br />Much of the discussion around zero-rating has been happening around an assumption of common understanding of the phrase. Unfortunately, that is not true. There is no consensus as to whether a "special Facebok pack of 200MB for Rs.20" offered by a telecom company constitutes zero-rating or not. Without a working definition of zero-rating, not much progress can be made.<br /><br />We propose the following as a definition:</p>
<ul>
<li> Zero-rating is the practice of not counting (aka "zero-rating") certain traffic towards a subscriber's regular Internet usage. </li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><br />The zero-rated traffic could be zero-priced or fixed-price; capped or uncapped; subscriber-paid, Internet service-paid, paid for by both, or unpaid; content- or source/destination-based, or agnostic to content or source/destination; automatically provided by the ISP or chosen by the customer.<br /><br />We believe that zero-rating can be non-discriminatory in nature, and such zero-rating should not be prohibited. Having a system with both ex-ante and ex-post checks is rather heavy-handed regulation, but since the issue is very contentious in India, we believe it might be merited.<br /><br />We thank you for giving us this opportunity to comment.<br />Pranesh Prakash, Policy Director at the Centre for Internet and Society</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/telecom/blog/comments-on-dot-panel-report-via-mygov'>http://editors.cis-india.org/telecom/blog/comments-on-dot-panel-report-via-mygov</a>
</p>
No publisherpraneshTelecomFeatured2015-09-26T10:16:44ZBlog EntryOpen Letter to PM Modi on Intellectual Property Rights issues on His Visit to the United States of America in September, 2015
http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/open-letter-on-intellectual-property-rights-issues-during-your-visit-to-the-united-states-of-america-in-september-2015
<b>This is an open letter by CIS to the Prime Minister, Shri Narendra Modi in light of his impending visit to the USA. This letter asks the Prime Minister to urge the USA to ratify the Marrakesh Treaty; and asks that India not be a party to TPP negotiations, in light of recent reports on a study encouraging India to join the TPP.
</b>
<p> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Shri Narendra Damodardas Modi<br />Hon’ble Prime Minister of India<br />152, South Block, Raisina Hill<br />New Delhi-110011</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">22 September, 2015</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Dear Sir,</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">We write on behalf of the Centre for Internet and Society, India <a name="_ftnref1" href="#_ftn1">[1]</a>, a Bangalore and New Delhi based not-for-profit organization engaging in research on among others, accessibility for persons with disabilities, intellectual property rights, openness and access to knowledge. Over the past fifteen months, we have welcomed and support certain initiatives of our government as being in line with some of our research interests, specifically, the "Make in India" and "Digital India" initiatives, and your vision of a digitally empowered India, as we have noted in an earlier open letter to you. <a name="_ftnref2" href="#_ftn2">[2]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">This letter is in light of your visit to the United States of America (“USA”) this month, to articulate a two-fold request:<em> first, </em>that during the course of your visit you request the government of the USA to ratify the Marrakesh Treaty for visually impaired persons (“Marrakesh Treaty”); <a name="_ftnref3" href="#_ftn3">[3]</a> and <em>second, </em>that the Indian government not enter into any negotiations around the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement (“the TPP”).</p>
<h3>On the Marrakesh Treaty</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify;">According to figures by the World Blind Union, approximately 90% of all published material is not accessible to blind or print disabled people. <a name="_ftnref4" href="#_ftn4">[4]</a> The severity of the ‘book famine’ experienced by the world’s estimated 300 million blind or otherwise print or visually disabled people (of which an estimated 63 million are in India) was highlighted by India in its Closing Statement at the Diplomatic Conference convened to conclude the Marrakesh Treaty. <a name="_ftnref5" href="#_ftn5">[5]</a> India has historically been a strong advocate of the spirit of the Marrakesh Treaty, becoming the first country to ratify it in June, 2014. <a name="_ftnref6" href="#_ftn6">[6]</a> Amendments in 2012 to India’s copyright law predated the signature to the Marrakesh Treaty. These amendments created disability and works neutral exceptions to our copyright law, well beyond the mandate of the Marrakesh Treaty.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The true realization of the promise of the Marrakesh Treaty however will remain a distant dream until the treaty comes into effect (three months) after 20 Member States have ratified it or acceded to it. <a name="_ftnref7" href="#_ftn7">[7]</a> According to information available from the World Intellectual Property Organization <a name="_ftnref8" href="#_ftn8">[8]</a>, this number is currently only 9, and the USA is not one of the countries to have done so. The USA is home <a name="_ftnref9" href="#_ftn9">[9]</a> to some of the largest publishers of both academic and other/leisure material including Penguin Random House, Harper Collins, John Wiley & Sons, the RELX Group, McGraw-Hill Education, Scholastic and Cengage Learning to name a few. It accounts for a large volume of the world’s book and other print material export. The active participation of the USA through the ratification of the Marrakesh treaty is critical if the treaty is to be truly effective.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">During your visit, we urge you request the government of the United States of America to ratify the Marrakesh Treaty at the earliest. This will bring us one important step closer to eradicating the book famine.</p>
<h3>On the TPP</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify;">We are concerned after reports <a name="_ftnref10" href="#_ftn10">[10]</a> of a recent study authored by C Fred Bergsten that encourages India to join the TPP. On this front, we are in complete agreement with the reported statement of the Hon’ble Ambassador Shri Arun K. Singh, where he disagrees with some of the findings and analysis of this recent report. <a name="_ftnref11" href="#_ftn11">[11]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The TPP has come into severe criticism <a name="_ftnref12" href="#_ftn12">[12]</a> over the years <a name="_ftnref13" href="#_ftn13">[13]</a> from a vast multitude <a name="_ftnref14" href="#_ftn14">[14]</a> of sources <a name="_ftnref15" href="#_ftn15">[15]</a> (including a group of 30 law professors in 2012) <a name="_ftnref16" href="#_ftn16">[16]</a> across the various countries that are a party to the negotiations. Among others and most relevant to us as an organization is the criticism around the secrecy of negotiations <a name="_ftnref17" href="#_ftn17">[17]</a> as well as the content of the chapter on intellectual property in the TPP. It is our belief that eventually, India stands to lose as a result of the TPP <a name="_ftnref18" href="#_ftn18">[18]</a> with its possible adverse impact on our economy. <a name="_ftnref19" href="#_ftn19">[19]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The rigid intellectual property protections (including criminal penalties for unintentional copying) <a name="_ftnref20" href="#_ftn20">[20]</a> sought to be enforced through the TPP would benefit only US pharmaceutical and entertainment industries. <a name="_ftnref21" href="#_ftn21">[21]</a> These provisions (among others) mandate the inclusion of TRIPS plus provisions in national laws, envisage possible extensions in term of protection on patents, restrict copyright exceptions and limitations, extend copyright protection terms and impose a higher liability on intermediaries; <a name="_ftnref22" href="#_ftn22">[22]</a>all of which would be disastrous for an emerging economy such as India’s, which is a heavy user of intellectual property and not a heavy producer of the same.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Historically, India has been a supporter of a transparent, multilateral decision making process, a commitment to which was also reiterated recently by the Hon’ble Minister of State for Commerce and Industry, Smt. Nirmala Sitharaman. <a name="_ftnref23" href="#_ftn23">[23]</a>India has also raised many of its concerns (on the secrecy of the negotiations as well as substantive provisions themselves) around the TPP and its close cousin, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (“ACTA”) in 2011 <a name="_ftnref24" href="#_ftn24">[24]</a> and 2012 <a name="_ftnref25" href="#_ftn25">[25]</a> at the World Trade Organization (“WTO”) TRIPS Council and on the ACTA in 2010, also at the WTO Trips Council. <a name="_ftnref26" href="#_ftn26">[26]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">In light of the above, we strongly urge the Indian government to not engage in negotiations on the TPP. At a minimum, we would request that any engagement in TPP negotiations be preceded by national consultations on the same, soliciting input from various stakeholders with diverging interests, including academia, civil society, industry associations, large Indian corporations, small and medium enterprises and multi- national corporations, rights holders associations and other interest groups.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">We thank you for the opportunity to present these views to you. We do hope that you will consider these suggestions favourably, in the interests of India’s economic and social development. We welcome any opportunity to assist you with any queries you may have with regard to these submissions.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Thank you.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Yours truly</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">(For the Centre for Internet and Society, India)</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Pranesh Prakash, Policy Director<br />Nehaa Chaudhari, Programme Officer</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Copies to:</p>
<ol style="text-align: justify;" type="1">
<li>Smt. Smriti Zubin Irani, Minister for Human Resource Development, Government of India.</li>
<li>Prof. (Dr.) Ram Shankar Katheria, Minister of State for Human Resource Development (Higher Education), Government of India.</li>
<li>Smt. Nirmala Sitharaman, Minister of State for Commerce and Industry, Government of India.</li>
<li>Shri Vinay Sheel Oberoi, Secretary (Department of Higher Education), Ministry of Human Resources Development, Government of India, Government of India.</li>
<li>Shri Amitabh Kant, Secretary (Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion), Ministry of Commerce and Industry, Government of India.</li></ol>
<p> <br /><br />(Edit - 25 September, 2015) - The following people have reached out to us in support of this letter and have expressed a desire to have their signatures placed on record as support. We wish to acknowledge the same. </p>
<ol><li>Prof. Dinesh Abrol - Convenor, National Working Group on Patent Laws and WTO<br /></li><li>Dr. B. Ekbal - President, Democratic Alliance for Knowledge Freedom, Kerala</li><li>T.C. James - President, NIPO</li><li>Dr. Suman Sahai - Chairperson, Gene Campaign</li><li>Dr. Biswajit Dhar - Professor, Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University</li></ol>
<div> </div>
<p> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn1" href="#_ftnref1">[1]</a>See generally <a href="http://cis-india.org/">http://cis-india.org/</a> (last accessed 22 September, 2015).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn2" href="#_ftnref2">[2]</a>Rohini Lakshane, Open Letter to Prime Minister Modi, available at <a href="http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/open-letter-to-prime-minister-modi">http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/open-letter-to-prime-minister-modi</a> (last accessed 22 September, 2015); Centre for Internet and Society/Rohini Lakshane, Digital India & Make in India : Form a patent pool of critical mobile technologies – CIS India, available at <a href="http://www.medianama.com/2015/03/223-digital-india-make-in-india-form-a-patent-pool-of-critical-mobile-technologies-cis-india/" rel="noreferrer">http://www.medianama.com/2015/03/223-digital-india-make-in-india-form-a-patent-pool-of-critical-mobile-technologies-cis-india/</a> (last accessed 22 September, 2015).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn3" href="#_ftnref3">[3]</a>The Marrakesh Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works by Visually Impaired Persons and Persons with Print Disabilities adopted on June 27, 2013. Treaty text and other official documentation available at <a href="http://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/ip/marrakesh/" rel="noreferrer">http://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/ip/marrakesh/</a> (last accessed 22 September, 2015).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn4" href="#_ftnref4">[4]</a>World Blind Union, Marrakesh Treaty – Right to Read Campaign, available at <a href="http://www.worldblindunion.org/English/our-work/our-priorities/Pages/right-2-read-campaign.aspx" rel="noreferrer">http://www.worldblindunion.org/English/our-work/our-priorities/Pages/right-2-read-campaign.aspx</a> (last accessed 22 September, 2015).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn5" href="#_ftnref5">[5]</a>Pranesh Prakash, India’s Closing Statement at Marrakesh on the Treaty for the Blind, available at <a href="http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/india-closing-statement-marrakesh-treaty-for-the-blind">http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/india-closing-statement-marrakesh-treaty-for-the-blind</a> (last accessed 22 September, 2015).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn6" href="#_ftnref6">[6]</a>Nehaa Chaudhari, India’s Ratification of the Marrakesh Treaty Celebrated; Accessible Books Consortium Launched, available at <a href="http://cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/indias-ratification-of-marrakesh-treaty-celebrated">http://cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/indias-ratification-of-marrakesh-treaty-celebrated</a> (last accessed 22 September, 2015).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn7" href="#_ftnref7">[7]</a>Article 18 of the Marrakesh Treaty.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn8" href="#_ftnref8">[8]</a>World Intellectual Property Organization, WIPO Administered Treaties: Contracting Parties > Marrakesh VIP Treaty (Treaty not yet in force), available at <a href="http://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/ShowResults.jsp?lang=en&treaty_id=843" rel="noreferrer">http://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/ShowResults.jsp?lang=en&treaty_id=843</a> (last accessed 22 September, 2015).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn9" href="#_ftnref9">[9]</a>Publishers Weekly, The World’s 57 Largest Book Publishers, 2015, available at <a href="http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/international/international-book-news/article/67224-the-world-s-57-largest-book-publishers-2015.html" rel="noreferrer">http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/international/international-book-news/article/67224-the-world-s-57-largest-book-publishers-2015.html</a> (last accessed 22 September, 2015).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn10" href="#_ftnref10">[10]</a>S Rajagopalan, US Report Pushes India to Join the Trans-Pacific Partnership, available at <a href="http://www.dailypioneer.com/world/us-report-pushes-india-to-join-trans-pacific-partnership.html" rel="noreferrer">http://www.dailypioneer.com/world/us-report-pushes-india-to-join-trans-pacific-partnership.html</a> (last accessed 22 September, 2015); Indo-Asian News Service on NDTV, India Can Boost Exports by $500 Billion with Trade Liberalization: Study, available at <a href="http://www.ndtv.com/india-news/india-can-boost-exports-by-500-billion-with-trade-liberalization-study-1218887" rel="noreferrer">http://www.ndtv.com/india-news/india-can-boost-exports-by-500-billion-with-trade-liberalization-study-1218887</a> (last accessed 22 September, 2015); Raghavendra M., India can boost exports by $500 billion with trade liberalization: study, available at <a href="http://www.americanbazaaronline.com/2015/09/18/india-can-boost-exports-by-500-billion-with-trade-liberalization-study/" rel="noreferrer">http://www.americanbazaaronline.com/2015/09/18/india-can-boost-exports-by-500-billion-with-trade-liberalization-study/</a> (last accessed 22 September, 2015); Press Trust of India in the Business Standard, India can boost exports by USD 500 bn by joining the TPP: report, available at <a href="http://www.business-standard.com/article/pti-stories/india-can-boost-exports-by-usd-500-bn-by-joining-tpp-report-115091701149_1.html" rel="noreferrer">http://www.business-standard.com/article/pti-stories/india-can-boost-exports-by-usd-500-bn-by-joining-tpp-report-115091701149_1.html</a> (last accessed 22 September, 2015); Seema Sirohi, India must expand its trade before it gets left behind in the race, available at <a href="http://blogs.economictimes.indiatimes.com/letterfromwashington/india-must-expand-its-trade-before-it-gets-left-behind-in-the-race/" rel="noreferrer">http://blogs.economictimes.indiatimes.com/letterfromwashington/india-must-expand-its-trade-before-it-gets-left-behind-in-the-race/</a> (last accessed 22 September, 2015).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn11" href="#_ftnref11">[11]</a>S Rajagopalan, US Report Pushes India to Join the Trans-Pacific Partnership, available at <a href="http://www.dailypioneer.com/world/us-report-pushes-india-to-join-trans-pacific-partnership.html" rel="noreferrer">http://www.dailypioneer.com/world/us-report-pushes-india-to-join-trans-pacific-partnership.html</a> (last accessed 22 September, 2015)</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn12" href="#_ftnref12">[12]</a>Natasha Lennard, Noam Chomsky: Trans-Pacific Partnership is a “neoliberal assault”, available at <a href="http://www.salon.com/2014/01/13/chomsky_tpp_is_a_neoliberal_assault/" rel="noreferrer">http://www.salon.com/2014/01/13/chomsky_tpp_is_a_neoliberal_assault/</a> (last accessed 22 September, 2015); Zach Carter and Ryan Grim, Noam Chomsky: Obama Trade Deal a ‘Neoliberal Assault’ to ‘Further Corporate Domination’, available at <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/13/noam-chomsky-obama-trans-pacific-partnership_n_4577495.html?ir=India&adsSiteOverride=in" rel="noreferrer">http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/13/noam-chomsky-obama-trans-pacific-partnership_n_4577495.html?ir=India&adsSiteOverride=in</a> (last accessed 22 September, 2015); Sean Flynn;, Margot E Kaminski, Brook K Baker and Jimmy H Koo., "Public Interest Analysis of the US TPP Proposal for an IP Chapter" (2011). PIJIP Research Paper Series. Paper 21. <a href="http://digitalcommons.wcl.american.edu/research/21" rel="noreferrer">http://digitalcommons.wcl.american.edu/research/21</a> (last accessed 22 September, 2015).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn13" href="#_ftnref13">[13]</a>BBC News, TPP: What is it and why does it matter?, available at <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/business-21782080" rel="noreferrer">http://www.bbc.com/news/business-21782080</a> (last accessed 22 September, 2015);</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn14" href="#_ftnref14">[14]</a>For a compilation on writing on the TPP <em>see</em> James Love, Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP also known as the TPPA), available at <a href="http://keionline.org/tpp" rel="noreferrer">http://keionline.org/tpp</a> (last accessed 22 September, 2015); <em>see also </em>American University Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property, Trans-Pacific Partnership, available at <a href="http://infojustice.org/tpp" rel="noreferrer">http://infojustice.org/tpp</a> (last accessed 22 September, 2015).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn15" href="#_ftnref15">[15]</a>Zach Carter, Alan Grayson on Trans-Pacific Partnership: Obama Secrecy Hides ‘Assault on Democratic Government’, available at <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/18/alan-grayson-trans-pacific-partnership_n_3456167.html?ir=India&adsSiteOverride=in" rel="noreferrer">http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/18/alan-grayson-trans-pacific-partnership_n_3456167.html?ir=India&adsSiteOverride=in</a> (last accessed 22 September, 2015); James Love, KEI analysis of Wikileaks leak of TPP IPR text, from August 30, 2013, available at <a href="http://keionline.org/node/1825" rel="noreferrer">http://keionline.org/node/1825</a> (last accessed 22 September, 2015); Ian Verrender, The TPP has the potential for real harm, available at <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-03-16/verrender-the-tpp-has-the-potential-for-real-harm/6321538" rel="noreferrer">http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-03-16/verrender-the-tpp-has-the-potential-for-real-harm/6321538</a> (last accessed 22 September, 2015).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn16" href="#_ftnref16">[16]</a>Sean Flynn, Law Professors Call for Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Transparency, available at <a href="http://infojustice.org/archives/21137" rel="noreferrer">http://infojustice.org/archives/21137</a> (last accessed 22 September, 2015).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn17" href="#_ftnref17">[17]</a>Sachie Mizohata, "The Trans-Pacific Partnership and Its Critics: An introduction and a petition," The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 11, Issue 36, No. 3, available at <a href="http://japanfocus.org/-Sachie-MIZOHATA/3996/article.html" rel="noreferrer">http://japanfocus.org/-Sachie-MIZOHATA/3996/article.html</a> (last accessed 22 September, 2015).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn18" href="#_ftnref18">[18]</a>Vijay Rajamohan, Trans-Pacific Partnership – Should India Join this Mega Trade Deal?, available at <a href="http://swarajyamag.com/world/trans-pacific-partnership-should-india-join-this-mega-trade-deal/" rel="noreferrer">http://swarajyamag.com/world/trans-pacific-partnership-should-india-join-this-mega-trade-deal/</a> (last accessed 22 September, 2015).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn19" href="#_ftnref19">[19]</a>Sylvia Mishra, How will the Trans-Pacific Partnership affect India?, available at <a href="http://www.observerindia.com/cms/sites/orfonline/modules/analysis/AnalysisDetail.html?cmaid=85684&mmacmaid=85685" rel="noreferrer">http://www.observerindia.com/cms/sites/orfonline/modules/analysis/AnalysisDetail.html?cmaid=85684&mmacmaid=85685</a> (last accessed 22 September, 2015).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn20" href="#_ftnref20">[20]</a>Gabrielle Chan, Trans-Pacific Partnership: a guide to the most contentious issues, available at <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/10/trans-pacific-partnership-a-guide-to-the-most-contentious-issues" rel="noreferrer">http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/10/trans-pacific-partnership-a-guide-to-the-most-contentious-issues</a> (last accessed 22 September, 2015).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn21" href="#_ftnref21">[21]</a>James Love, New leak of TPP consolidated text on intellectual property provides details of pandering to drug companies and publishers, available at <a href="http://www.keionline.org/node/2108" rel="noreferrer">http://www.keionline.org/node/2108</a> (last accessed 22 September, 2015); Vijay Rajamohan, Trans-Pacific Partnership – Should India Join this Mega Trade Deal?, available at <a href="http://swarajyamag.com/world/trans-pacific-partnership-should-india-join-this-mega-trade-deal/" rel="noreferrer">http://swarajyamag.com/world/trans-pacific-partnership-should-india-join-this-mega-trade-deal/</a> (last accessed 22 September, 2015) referencing Paul Krugman.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn22" href="#_ftnref22">[22]</a>William New, Leaked TPP Draft Reveals Extreme Rights Holder Position Of US, Japan, Outraged Observers Say, available at <a href="http://www.ip-watch.org/2014/10/17/leaked-tpp-draft-reveals-extreme-rights-holder-position-of-us-japan-outraged-observers-say/" rel="noreferrer">http://www.ip-watch.org/2014/10/17/leaked-tpp-draft-reveals-extreme-rights-holder-position-of-us-japan-outraged-observers-say/</a> (last accessed 22 September, 2015).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn23" href="#_ftnref23">[23]</a>Lalit K Jha, India not being left out of global trade pacts: Minister, available at <a href="http://www.thestatesman.com/news/business/india-not-being-left-out-of-global-trade-pacts-minister/91679.html" rel="noreferrer">http://www.thestatesman.com/news/business/india-not-being-left-out-of-global-trade-pacts-minister/91679.html</a> (last accessed 22 September, 2015).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn24" href="#_ftnref24">[24]</a>Thirukumaran Balasubramaniam, WTO TRIPS Council: India raises concerns on ACTA and TPPA on discussion of “Trends in the Enforcement of IPRs”, available at <a href="https://donttradeourlivesaway.wordpress.com/2011/10/29/wto-trips-council-india-raises-concerns-on-acta-and-tppa-on-discussion-of-trends-in-the-enforcement-of-iprs/" rel="noreferrer">https://donttradeourlivesaway.wordpress.com/2011/10/29/wto-trips-council-india-raises-concerns-on-acta-and-tppa-on-discussion-of-trends-in-the-enforcement-of-iprs/</a> (last accessed 22 September, 2015).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn25" href="#_ftnref25">[25]</a>Thirukumaran Balasubramaniam, 28 Feb 2012: Intervention delivered by India at WTO TRIPS Council on IP Enforcement Trends noting concerns with ACTA and TPPA, available at <a href="http://keionline.org/node/1376" rel="noreferrer">http://keionline.org/node/1376</a> (last accessed 22 September, 2015).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn26" href="#_ftnref26">[26]</a>Kanaga Raja, ACTA comes in for criticism at the TRIPS council, available at <a href="http://www.twn.my/title2/wto.info/2010/twninfo100606.htm" rel="noreferrer">http://www.twn.my/title2/wto.info/2010/twninfo100606.htm</a> (last accessed 22 September, 2015).</p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/open-letter-on-intellectual-property-rights-issues-during-your-visit-to-the-united-states-of-america-in-september-2015'>http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/open-letter-on-intellectual-property-rights-issues-during-your-visit-to-the-united-states-of-america-in-september-2015</a>
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No publisherPranesh Prakash and Nehaa ChaudhariAccess to KnowledgeIntellectual Property RightsAccessibilityFeaturedHomepage2015-09-25T06:43:12ZBlog Entry