Transparency and Politics
http://editors.cis-india.org
daily12013-04-16T03:42:17ZInternet, Politics and Transparency
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/transparency-and-politics/internet-politics-and-transparency-1
<b>On 15th April 2009, the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) hosted a talk by Barun Mitra on “Internet, Transparency and Politics”. Barun Mitra is the Chairperson of Liberty Institute, a think tank based in Delhi. Liberty Institute conducts research and advocacy on policy issues ranging from health, environment and trade to democracy and governance.</b>
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/jace/3451003350/"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3655/3451003350_157d6c16f2_m.jpg" alt="Barun Mitra" height="160" width="240" align="right" /></a>
<p>In 2004, Liberty
Institute developed <a href="http://www.empoweringindia.org/">www.EmpoweringIndia.org</a>
(henceforth to be referred to as EI) to compile information that electoral
candidates provided in the affidavits they filed before elections. These
affidavits contain details of the candidate’s assets and liabilities, education
background, PAN number, income tax records and criminal records, if any. The
purpose of compiling this information was to standardize it and make it
available for the voters in a comprehensive format. This, in turn, would enable
voters to use the information and make informed choices when casting their votes.</p>
<p>EI has undergone several rounds of iterations and is already in the
third generation of its development. The aim has been to build a robust
database that will allow citizens to extract information as per their specific
and nuanced queries and use it during the elections and afterwards, to enforce
accountability on the part of the elected representatives. Barun Mitra began
his talk by emphasizing that EI was more than just a website. In the course of
his initial presentations to different groups, he found that many audiences perceived
EI simply as a website. “I was not interested in merely the information. The larger
question driving my initiative was ‘how do we look a politics’?” EI was developed
to introduce a different paradigm of understanding politics and participating
in it.</p>
<p> The interesting aspect of Barun Mitra’s talk was the question he asked, “What
makes information flow?” He decided to move beyond the passé rhetoric of “information
is power”. There were two experiences which enabled Barun Mitra to understand what
makes information flow. “I had made a presentation to audiences in Kerala about
EI in 2008, trying to solicit their support in disseminating the information on
the site to local groups in the state. However, the audience in Kerala saw EI
only as a website and raised questions accordingly. Following this, I made a
presentation to slum dwellers in Delhi who immediately began to demand
information about the candidates who were going to contest from their
constituencies in the 2008 New Delhi state assembly elections. The slum
dwellers and some of the groups working with them even asked me to provide the
information in Hindi and local languages. I was surprised by the fact that two
vastly diverse audiences responded in such dramatically different ways to EI. That
is when I realized that those who have sustained our democracy, namely the
poor, need this kind of information. There is a demand for it among them and
therefore, we need to supply it. The second experience was from Gujarat. During
the 2007 state assembly elections, we found that a number of local media
collectives and the <em>panchayats</em> had
used the information on EI. This was because the mainstream media was covering
the major politicians and candidates in this election while the local groups
needed information on all kinds of candidates contesting from their
constituencies. I have now come to believe that demand and supply are two
aspects to information and it needs to be provided accordingly where the demand
for it is emanating from.”</p>
<p>Barun Mitra also reiterated that EI is non-judgmental, in that it leaves
it to the audiences to decide how they want to interpret the information. This has
been a significant paradigm shift in transparency initiatives that are being developed
on the belief that providing more information to people enhances engagement between
people and the state. Websites of government departments continue to provide
information which they see as important for the citizenry. For instance, see <a href="http://www.bmrc.co.in/">www.bmrc.co.in</a>, the website of the Bangalore
Metro Rail Corporation which claims to be transparent and provides particular
kinds of information, while concealing other aspects of the project development
and implementation. On the other hand, some non-government organizations are focusing
on organizing large chunks of information concerning particular aspects of
governance, and presenting it to people in a way that allows them to extract that
information which they find relevant.</p>
<p>One of Barun Mitra’s goals for the future is to develop parameters for
judging the performance of elected representatives In the launch of EI in
Bangalore on 16<sup>th</sup> April, he pointed out that while he can provide
information about the attendance records of MPs (Members of Parliament) in the Lok
Sabha (House of the People) sessions, it would be inaccurate to judge the MP’s
performance on the basis of this criteria. This is because MPs often sign the
attendance register but they may not sit through the Parliament session. He
therefore feels that more robust criteria have to be developed which will
provide a somewhat holistic picture to the people about the performance of
their elected representatives.</p>
<p>Finally, Barun Mitra spoke on the issue of authenticity of the
information filed in the affidavits. “People often ask, ‘how authentic is this
information?’ The election commission does not take it on itself to verify this
information. But I would say that authenticity is a secondary issue. First, we
have to make information available to the people. People will then, of their
own accord, raise questions about the authenticity of the information. For instance,
the Criminal Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has filed cases in the Supreme Court
challenging the authenticity and sources of the assets declared by current
chief minister (CM) of Uttar Pradesh (UP) Mayawati and former CM Mulayam Singh
Yadav.” Specifically, Mayawati’s assets in 2003 which amounted to Rs. 1 crore increased
to 50 crores in 2007. This information came to light through information from
the affidavit which Mayawati had to file before the state assembly elections in
UP in 2007. “Filing such a <a class="external-link" href="http://http://news.outlookindia.com/item.aspx?651599">case </a>was possible only because Mayawati and Mulayam
Singh were compelled to provide information about their assets to the public.”</p>
<p>Barun Mitra’s talk raises an important question for me: how effective
are initiatives like EI in fostering interaction between the state and the
citizens? I will address this question in my next blog post where I examine the
case of the Digital City project in Amsterdam. I examine the concepts and practices
of cyberspace, urban space and citizenship through the Digital City Project and
other projects undertaken to foster transparency. I then try to analyze the initiatives
undertaken during the 2009 general elections in India and make some tentative
remarks on democracy and participation.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/transparency-and-politics/internet-politics-and-transparency-1'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/transparency-and-politics/internet-politics-and-transparency-1</a>
</p>
No publisherzainabTransparency, Politics2011-12-02T09:33:13ZBlog EntryA History of Transparency, Politics and Information Technologies in India
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/transparency-and-politics/transparency-politics-it-in-india
<b>In this blog post, Zainab Bawa reviews the different spectrums of information, transparency and politics.</b>
<p>Politics has always been fashioned by information, a friend<a href="#1">1</a> pointed out when I mentioned to her about this blog post I was writing to summarize my research on the CIS-RAW monograph about the history of Transparency, Politics and Information Technologies in India.</p>
<p>
The question that then arises is what kinds of information and subsequently, what kinds of politics (and vice-versa) are we referring to? I want to begin this blog post by reviewing the different spectrums of information and the contexts within which these different kinds of information become important/unimportant/valuable/invaluable for which groups in our polity? Consequently, how are our own notions of politics informed and how does politics, in terms of ideals such as democracy, equity, access, rights and justice, evolve/perpetuate in practice?</p>
<p>We, as individuals and as part of various groups in society, thrive on information for sustaining and enhancing different aspects of our lives, be they social, political, economic, cultural or historical. The criticality of information, especially information networks, has been revealed to us starkly in recent times by the 3G licensing scam where major corporations were vying for ‘insider’ information that would make it easier for them to obtain the requisite telecom licenses. Clearly, the 3G scam is not the first (and neither will it be the last) instance of the politics of lobbying, aligning with individuals and networks which provide ‘the’ ‘insider’ information and the capitalization of this information. We have known about the politics of ‘insider information’ in the context of stock markets and through Hamish McDonald’s explication of the way corporate giants such as Reliance and then Bombay Dyeing (aka the Wadia clan) have been ‘cultivating’ their ‘insider’ sources in the central government cabinets and ministries. The secrecy and more importantly the exclusiveness that underlies this kind of ‘insider’ information angers a certain strand of public and deepens the cynicism that pervades across a large section of the citizenry. The nature of this secrecy and exclusiveness gets compounded by the fact that there are phenomenally vast sums of money that are involved in this form of ‘insider’ information and the ensuing scams, thereby agitating different people because had there been ‘fair play’ and ‘true competition’, the monies could have benefitted the targeted beneficiaries in a ‘proper’ manner.</p>
<p><span class="Apple-style-span">There is another kind of ‘insider’ information which exists on this spectrum of ‘insider’ information in particular and information in general, which I want to bring to your attention here. In 2008, I was researching the practices and reach of microfinance in Mumbai <span class="Apple-style-span"><a href="#2">2</a>My research led me, for the first time, to the resettlement and rehabilitation (R&R) housing colonies of Mumbai. </span></span></p>
<p><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span">These R & R colonies had been built to rehabilitate slum dwellers and squatters (occupying lands owned by different government agencies and private individuals/parties) whose possessions (claims over land and built structures were coming in the way of widening roads and railway tracks and building flyovers and rail over bridges under two mega infrastructure projects in Mumbai city then. Policies were formulated to compensate and rehabilitate persons and households who would be affected by these mega projects (PAPs and PAHs). I interviewed some of the PAPs and PAHs in an effort to understand the R&R process and the impact that the process had had on their lives and their relationship with the city and its governance. </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span"><br /></span></span></span>During many of these interviews, the issue of ‘insider information’ repeatedly came up. PAPs and PAHs explained to me that as part of the R&R policies, surveys had been conducted to identify persons and households who would be eligible for compensation and resettlement. During the surveys, surveyors tried to determine since when the individuals and households had been residing in their houses/on the land, whether they owned the lands/built structures, and whether the structure was to be enumerated as a single unit or more and accordingly what should be the corresponding compensation awarded to the affected person/household. One form of ‘insider information’ in this context pertained to the knowledge of when the surveys would be carried out in the different settlements/squatted spaces so that people would make arrangements accordingly to claim entitlements under the R&R policies. For instance, in many cases, more than one family resided in the same built structure and consequently, only one house would be allotted in lieu of that structure irrespective of the number of families residing in it. Prior knowledge of the surveys, which was usually just a day or two before, would enable these families/households to determine how they would articulate their claim for more than one housing unit, either through appeal to the surveyor’s moral rationalities, or through graft and subversive strategies such as putting up makeshift structures, etc. <br /> <br />A second aspect of ‘insider’ information pertained to the number of units that would be allotted to different households/individuals i.e., those groups, leaders, NGOs (non-government organizations), CBOs (community based organizations), individuals and actors who were directly responsible for the allotment of housing and shops units under the R&R policies allotted more than the ‘fair’ share of entitlements to their favoured constituencies/households. Such actors even traded i.e., sold, the housing unit allotments to persons who were eager to buy these ‘low-income’ units, thus, giving rise to a form of property market around R&R policies and this kind of state intervention. Also, those who had direct/indirect access to actors making such allotments used their influence to obtain at least the compensation that should have accrued to them or more and, as mentioned above, persons interested in purchasing housing units despite not being from the settlement or even the same economic and social milieu influenced the ‘decision-makers’ in this case. An interesting outcome of this kind of ‘insider information’ was that those who had struggled to receive their due R&R compensations perceived these ‘extra legal’ (in this context) allotments as kabza (capture) of the resources (and space which is a premium in Mumbai city) offered under government policies. This notion of ‘kabza’ has now become part of the vocabulary of parties aggrieved by the allotment process and is being mobilized for fulfilling certain kinds of claims advanced before planning agencies in Mumbai, municipalities and the Maharashtra state government.<br /> <br />A third highly interesting form of ‘insider information’ in this R&R process was the prior knowledge that R&R would take place in due course of time, surveys would be conducted and there would be compensations awarded in the form of housing units and commercial spaces. This prior knowledge fuelled an atmosphere of intense speculation in some settlements where many individuals and households began to sell their possessions, built structures, shop spaces, etc., to newcomers (who would then be entitled to compensation under R&R) and the sellers moved out of the settlement to other areas, probably those that would not be marked for R&R or to neighbouring areas. Property values rose in such cases because newcomers were eager to be enumerated for a ‘secure’ entitlement, in this case a house/shop. Apart from the speculation which ensued from this form of ‘insider information’, ambiguity was also created, mainly related to determining who were the ‘original’ inhabitants and who were the ‘fake/newcomers’. There were no easy answers to resolving this ambiguity and interestingly, this ambiguity now resides (and may be legitimated in due course of time) in the survey records of the NGOs which were responsible for conducting the surveys, in the government’s entitlements’ records and now, in the property registries of the planning department and municipality that are being created as part of legalization of ownership of the R&R housing and commercial units. <br /> <br />What I have tried to explain through the examples of the 3G scam and the R&R process in Mumbai is that there is a spectrum of contexts and situations across which information gets created, circulated/percolated and transmitted in particular forms and through exclusive networks and circuits. The spectrum of information gets created through this variety of contexts and the spectrum gets defined and redefined, time and again, in terms of the value and the criticality attributed to different kinds of information and therefore, the implications that are perceived to stem from hiding such information(s) and excluding different groups of people from accessing it. Assessing the implications of transparency, opacity and secrecy of information in different contexts becomes more complex when we understand how and why different actors and institutions within the state, in between the state-civil society complex, and a variety of other actors advocate for transparency and the vocabulary and manner in which they articulate claims and projects for transparency.<br /> <br />There is also the issue of <strong>scale of exposure</strong> of a particular scam or some other act of secrecy/‘insider’ information which leads us to assess transparency or the lack of it in highly normative and morally laden ways. For instance, the 3G scam acquired the issue of national importance because of the involvement of the national government in Delhi and a handful of corporations who gained vast sums of money in direct and indirect ways; the fact that the scam appeared as an act of cheating to several cell phone users in India and especially to the tax-paying publics who have already been articulating complaints about their entitlements with respect to poor quality or complete lack of government and municipal resources; the manner in which this scam was interpreted, analyzed and then communicated to the public through different media (newspapers, television, blogs, protests, etc). Whereas, the lack of transparency in the housing allotment process under the R&R policies’ implementation does not get the same kind of reactions and outcry by the same set of tax payers and citizenry base because of the scale of the issue and therefore, the exposure (something to think about), the disdain that exists among tax payers and citizens against slum dwellers, squatters and such ‘illegal’ groups and the widespread cynicism that resettled or rehabilitated squatters and slum dwellers will eventually go back to squatting and occupying public lands because this is their ‘inherent’ nature. The other, more important question, is whether the different kinds of ‘insider’ information(s) involved in the R&R implementation process should be made public because if these were made public, would the unfairness and ‘corruption’ in the process and the ambiguities that have emerged from the implementation be reversed? Even more importantly, do government agencies have the resources and the grasp to deal with reversing the survey and allotment process given that information concerning land is not only fuzzy but by nature is both incomplete and contested? And, following from the question of correcting wrongs and setting right the rights, does it imply that my analyses of the lack of transparency and the forms of ‘insider’ information in the R&R process actually legitimizes the corruption and inequities involved in allotments? (I deal with this question in a more detailed manner in the monograph.)<br /> <br />The other question that is connected with both the 3G scam and the problems with the R&R policy implementation process (and also the recent WikiLeaks and cablegate controversy surrounding the buying of elected representatives for the vote of confidence) is who are the people controlling information and what resources do they have at their disposal to hide or reveal some things to which publics? This question is not simply a matter of the BJP (Bhartiya Janata Party) having the financial and other resources at its disposal to engineer a plot for destabilizing the UPA (United Progressive Alliance) government. It is also a matter of say a licensing department in a municipality or a land and estates department in an urban governance set-up which is mired, by both default and design[<a href="#3">3</a>], in histories and presents of information inadequacies, information controls, claims (made by claimants from among citizens and state) and the corresponding access and/or lack of it to government resources and land/space. How do we evaluate/assess these departments’ acts of transparency and the lack of it as well as their strategies of information percolation, control and dissemination given their institutional and political context as well as the histories and the very kinds and nature of information that define and redefine their functioning?</p>
<p> Clearly then, we are talking about power – power relations and equations – here, and in this respect one would wonder what more does this monograph do other than discuss these power dynamics. But the monograph really does more than this. It tries to read these power dynamics in the context of how they inform and shape our understandings of information per se i.e., what constitutes information and how certain forms of information are made legitimate or illegitimate. The monograph also tries to analyze the notions and practices of authentication and certification of information that have come into being either directly or indirectly through mobilizations around access to information, use of information and rights of citizens, and how these efforts of authentication and certification shape the very nature of information and the politics around its production and transmission in different contexts. I must add here, therefore, that the monograph uses the term information technologies in a very broad sense even when it is covering a history of information technologies, mainly digital ICTs (Information and Communication Technologies) such as databases, websites and e-governance. The monograph also looks at how these digital technologies get embedded within the existing and emerging technologies and institutions of governance and information production, circulation and percolation. Such an approach, I argue in the monograph, broadens the manner in which we view and evaluate digital technologies and their power as well as its appropriations (a term and practice discussed in much greater detail in the monograph) by different actors within the state and among the public.</p>
<p>There are two questions that I have to address before I close down this blog post. The first question is how I understand and define transparency and second is how I conceive politics. Transparency resides within the domain of information – the way in which information is produced (materially and symbolically), accessed, used, circulated, reproduced, appropriated, subverted and transmitted through various channels and mediums. I do not work with a single definition of transparency because as much as transparency is a desired norm, it is also a double-edged sword where the act of making something transparent has various kinds of repercussions, direct and indirect, on different strands of society. What I bring through this monograph is an urge to review transparency in more critical and thicker ways. This does not mean that we have to abandon the project of transparency altogether. Rather, we need to critically examine the emerging relationship between transparency, information and data and the increasing emphasis on ‘rational’ and ‘scientific data sets’ (such as budgetary analyses, certified information under the Right to Information (RTI) act, etc.) as the means of enforcing transparency and therefore, accountability – would not such transparency come with certain political costs for our society and who bears these costs and at what expense? This monograph therefore, examines transparency as a practice that has to be abstracted from the different contexts in which it is being applied, advocated and the manner in which claims for transparency are being advocated.</p>
<p>Politics – phew! Shall we get started on this? Of course! I will try and keep this brief. I started with explaining how there is a spectrum across which information exists. Politics also exists on a spectrum, and that spectrum is beyond one of ‘from petty corruption to high corruption’, from extortion of bribes by cops to 2G and 3G scams. At the moment, not only states within India and its central government, all parts of the globe are mired in various kinds of scandals and scams that are increasingly moving our thinking and even our faith into revolutions and radical overthrow of governments. At another end of the spectrum of our thinking and conception of politics is a strand of thinkers who have forced us to think about “quiet” (Bayat, 1997) and “insurgent” (Holston, 2008) politics, one that is articulated through very complex claims that arise and diminish in different contexts (Chatterjee, 2004; Benjamin, 1996, 2005, 2008). My task in this monograph is to explain this spectrum of politics, especially how it plays out in the context of transparency and information technologies. I will discuss the complexities of claims, autonomy, institutional politics and norms/ideals. The challenge of this monograph is to convince different stakeholders and the public to interrogate our notions of politics, and to instill a sense of optimism in a time which is an one interesting one for all of our lives and aspirations.</p>
<p> </p>
<div>
<h3>Notes</h3>
<p class="discreet"><a name="1">1Mythri Prasad, Ph.D. Scholar, Centre for Development Studies (CDS), Trivandrum.</a></p>
</div>
<p class="discreet"><a name="2">2Research conducted under the aegis of Delphi Research Services, Bangalore, and for the purposes of my doctoral dissertation.</a></p>
<p class="discreet"><a name="2"></a><span class="Apple-style-span"><a name="2">3 <span class="Apple-style-span">I am grateful to Narayana Gatty, faculty at Azim Premji University, for raising this issue of ‘default and design’ in the context of his research on e-governance and its impact on citizens and state agents.</span></a></span></p>
<a name="2">
</a>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/transparency-and-politics/transparency-politics-it-in-india'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/transparency-and-politics/transparency-politics-it-in-india</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaResearch2011-08-03T09:59:15ZBlog EntryOf the State and the Governments - The Abstract, the Concrete and the Responsive
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/transparency-and-politics/of-the-state-and-the-governments-the-abstract-the-concrete-and-the-responsive
<b>This post examines the concepts of state and government to lay the ground for understanding responsiveness enforced through transparency discourses and the deployment of ICTs, the Internet and e-governance programmes. It also lays the context for understanding why and how ICTs. Internet and e-governance have been deployed in India for improving government-citizen interfaces, eliminating middlemen, delivering services electronically and for introducing a range of similar reforms to institute transparency and a responsive state.</b>
<p></p>
<p>In the <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/transparency-and-politics/the-responsive-state-introduction-to-the-series" class="external-link">introductory post</a>, I had suggested that we needed
to examine the notion of the ‘responsive state’, particularly in the context of
discourses around transparency and the use of information and communication
technologies (ICTs) and the Internet to institute transparency and thereby create
a responsive state. I argued that interrogating the notion of the ‘responsive
state’ is necessary to understand how responsiveness and even statehood actually
translate on the ground for different citizen groups when ICTs and the Internet
are deployed to provide information to citizens, to deliver services
electronically, to eliminate middlemen, to re-engineer processes in government
departments and state institutions, and to make the state more visible and
(therefore, supposedly) more accessible and responsive to its people.</p>
<p>In this post, I want to open up the concepts of the state
and the government in a more fundamental way to begin our explorations
regarding ‘responsiveness’ and the ‘responsive state’. Attending to the idea
and the practice of the state and the government in everyday life will open up
the meanings that ‘responsiveness’ and transparency, ICTs and the Internet are
attributed within different contexts and in the range of relationships that
exist between the state and its citizens, governments and citizens, and across
state and government institutions. It is necessary to understand how relationships
between citizens and governments and across the range of government and state
institutions get shaped by the contexts within which governance is carried out,
and the “fields”<a name="_ednref" href="#_edn1"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[i]</span></a> within which
we locate and study governments, governance, transparency and technology. This will
enable us to nuance the notion and the translation of responsiveness in its
online, offline, transparent, secretive, overt and/or surreptitious avatars.</p>
<p>I will begin this post by explaining the similarities and
differences between the concepts (and ground realities) of state and the
government as well as the relationships that exist between these entities. This
conceptual clarification will set the context for understanding the genesis and
application of responsiveness and transparency and the deployment of ICTs and
the Internet to usher responsiveness and transparency in India in subsequent
blog posts.</p>
<p><strong>The
State – Abstract-Concrete, Composite-Fragmented, Homogeneous-Heterogeneous: </strong>The
state is an abstract idea which has its concrete basis in a physical territory.
The state is also reified through an organizational structure that is referred
to as the bureaucracy. We, as citizens, give legitimacy and authority to the idea
of the state and statehood by conferring powers on certain representatives,
institutions and systems to make decisions on our behalf and to exercise power
for maintenance of law and order. The notion of the state (more concretely the
institutions representing and exercising powers on behalf of the state) also derives
legitimacy and authority from the Constitution and the laws of the land. The image
of the state, as has been passed down to us by particular narratives of history
and certain strands of political philosophy as well as through the print and
electronic media is that the state is a composite, compact structure which has
absolute - and in certain contexts unlimited powers. The “state idea” (Abrams, 1988) remains a powerful organizing concept
in the lives of citizens as well as the employees and representatives of the
state. This is because the concept of the state provides a sense of structure
and coherence in our lives which in turn creates a sense of belongingness to a
territory (physical space) and/or an institution (such as public services,
public sector institutions, municipality, government departments, etc). This
sense of structure, coherence and order is further reinforced by the following
beliefs:</p>
<p> 1.
That the state, organized and reified through its
bureaucratic machinery, functions in a rational, orderly manner. This is the
classic idea of the state promoted by Max Weber;</p>
<p>2.
That the state is the source as well as the
guardian of laws. These laws will protect and preserve the integrity of the
territory and in turn, the integrity (and compositeness) of the state (where
the notion of the state and its notional boundaries are based on an actual,
physical territory);</p>
<p>3.
That laws are supreme and everyone is equal before
the law;</p>
<p>4.
That laws will enforce order and provide relief,
redressal, entitlements and access to welfare to one and all.</p>
<p> The state is thus imagined as a benign authority, a
benefactor, which must protect its people, provide them with welfare and at the
same time, safeguard order and integrity of the territory (and therefore, order
and integrity of the state structure/organization). The state also remains the
last resort that people have for articulating their claims and getting them
fulfilled. There is therefore, a tenuous relationship with the state where as
much as certain ideological groups/belief systems/world views and various
citizen groups desire the state’s role and intervention in the individual’s
life to be minimized, they still continue to view the state i.e., the law
courts and the common judicial system<a name="_ednref" href="#_edn2"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[ii]</span></a>, to be the
ultimate source of law and the final arbiter of disputes. To cite an example,
even though the private property rights framework gives precedence to the
individual over the state, advocates of private property invariably assume or necessitate
the existence of an overarching/central legal system to which individuals can
take their disputes and grievances. This kind of advocacy automatically creates
a paradox for individual freedom because a centralized legal system functions
on the basis of uniform laws that may not consider the particularities and the
uniqueness of each dispute over private property. Moreover, such a centralized
legal system has the capacity to impinge on the individuals’ and groups’
freedoms especially when individuals’ and groups’ practices of ownership and
usufruct (which can be social, historical, cultural and negotiated over time)
do not comply with corresponding legalistic notions and practices.</p>
<p>The concept of the state is also associated with the
notion of power where the state holds and wields power. The relationship
between the state and its citizens is defined by this power equation. The
notion of democracy is hinged on the idea that since people confer powers upon
the state and they elect representative governments by voting at elections,
citizens should also be able to contain the powers of the state and prevent the
state from becoming an absolute, authoritarian entity. Deliberations, debate
and discussion over the state’s policies and decisions (and a free press) are
viewed as tools through which the state’s actions can be questioned, criticized
and when necessary, contained. It is for the purposes of deliberations, debate
and discussion that publishing of information about state policies as well as
the processes through which decisions are made is deemed as quintessential in
certain frameworks (and corresponding policies) of the ‘responsive state’.</p>
<p>The notion of the state remains a powerful idea in
people’s imaginations and actions. The belief in the existence of a state
system/organization enables people to make claims on what they see as state
institutions or employees of the state. At the same time, as researchers and
theorists excavating the “everyday state” argue, what also matters is how
people ‘encounter’ the state when they make claims and/or seek resources, who
they ‘mark’ as the state in these encounters, and what their ‘experience’ of
the state is – a monolith, a bureaucratic mess, a sloth, a responsive entity and/or
apathetic (Corbridge, Srivastava, et al, 2005; Fuller and Benei, 2000;
Elyachar, 2005; Tarlo, 2003). The nature of the encounters with ‘the state’ and
consequently the perceptions of power and authority vary depending on the
institutions/personnel that different people approach. This implies that the
institutions within the state system are different from each other and they
function in diverse ways and contexts. These institutions are also not equally
and cordially aligned with the idea of the state and the state system.
Moreover, the resources that they variously control have different kinds of
significance and meanings for both, the officials in charge of the respective
institutions as well as the people vying for those resources. In short, not all
institutions within the state system are equally statist in terms of the way in
which they control resources, wield power, maintain territorial integrity and
statist quo and interact with different citizen groups. To explain this in more
concrete terms, let us take the instance of the forest authorities in India. Forest
departments tend to be much more authoritarian and controlling of forest lands
and forest resources and consequently the people within their jurisdictions and
territory. This authority of the forest department stems from historical
factors and it has been further reinforced through the laws passed in the post-independence
period regarding protection of wildlife and various resources and produces of
forests. Moreover, as mandated in the Constitution of India, forests symbolize an
essential aspect of the territorial integrity of the state. Hence, the powers
that have been conferred, both constitutionally and by central governments and
cabinet ministries on forest departments and officials over time, is more than
the powers that have been granted to other state institutions and departments
in the context of control over the state’s natural resources. Therefore, the
manner in which forest departments function in relation with citizens as well
as in relation with other state institutions and government departments
produces and reinforces certain perceptions of the state i.e., authoritarian,
autocratic, corrupt, wielding excessive power, curbing group liberties, punitive,
among others. In yet some other aspects of governance and everyday life, we
find that police forces have unlimited powers and depending on socio-economic
status and networks, different citizen groups have different perceptions of and
relationships with the police and therefore, of the state which the police
forces represent. Groups living in slums and squatter settlements tend to fear
and dread police forces most because these groups tend to be marked as criminal
owing to their (supposedly) ‘illegal’ occupancy of state/public/private land
which in turn makes them the first targets of law and order and markers of
criminality. Hence, community based organizations (CBOs) train slum dwellers
and squatters, foremost, on how to interact with the police, how to conduct themselves
in police stations, and provide them with information regarding the laws and
procedures which immediately affect poor people’s lives and their relationship
with the police and law and order<a name="_ednref" href="#_edn3"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[iii]</span></a>. On the
other hand, vehicle owning populations tend to the loathe the police (mainly
traffic police and beat station cops) for demanding unnecessary bribes and
engaging in what are seen to be as extortionist practices.</p>
<p>At this point, it will be instructive and insightful to
ask the questions who/what is the state and where is it located (both
physically and symbolically). There are myriad answers to this question, as one
strand of sociologists, anthropologists and political scientists variously
studying the “everyday state” in India and across the world have demonstrated
and argued. In the past, scholars such as Philipp Abrams (1988) have questioned
whether the state really exists in reality or is it simply an idea, a powerful
construct that has been passed down to us by history and theory? Abrams has simultaneously
asked questions about the methodologies for studying the state – do we go back
to histories and theories to locate and understand the state or do we examine the
practices of state more carefully. Each of these approaches carries with it its
own problems of studying and explaining the state. Abrams fundamentally suggests
that the state is associated with coherence, homogeneity and compositeness, all
of which are imaginary attributes that do not exist on the ground. Then, is the
concept of the state useful at all and if so, why?</p>
<p>For the purposes of this series on the ‘responsive state’
as well as the larger monograph which tries to trace the history of
transparency, ICTs, Internet and politics in India, it is necessary for us to
deal with the idea and the different practices of state in as much entirety and
variety as may be possible. This is because discourses of transparency,
e-governance policies and programmes and the use of ICTs to create/reform
citizen-government interfaces are based on a particular idea of the state i.e.,
a notion of order as stemming from conformity/adherence to law, ‘the state’ as
the final arbiter of disputes between peoples, ‘the state’ as the provider of
welfare and therefore, ‘the state’ as a benefactor and a benevolent leviathan,
and ‘the state’ as rational and orderly and internally coherent, cogent and
composite. As I will explain in subsequent posts, ICTs, e-governance systems
and the Internet are deployed precisely to reinforce these ideas of the Indian
state to the people as well as to reorder, realign and re-engineer processes and
personnel who are seen as stepping outside the lines of law and due process.
Whether such technological interventions and the technology itself succeeds in
enforcing this vision of order and absolute alignment is an issue that
necessitates asking several nuanced questions:</p>
<ul><li>How does the state – primarily decision-makers and
policy-makers – imagine and understand technology and its application? </li><li>How are e-governance policies interpreted and
implemented by government officials (and even private parties) on the ground? </li><li>How do officials internalize the visions ingrained
in e-governance policies and deployments of ICTs and how does this impact the
manner in which they implement directives from the state in this regard and
subsequently interact with citizens?</li><li>Who gains and who loses when ICTs, e-governance
and the Internet are deployed to deliver services to people electronically, to
provide information and to create better government-citizen interfaces? </li><li>How are gains and losses assessed and why are they
assessed as such? Who assesses the gains and losses and why?</li><li>Are gains and losses absolute and irreversible? </li><li>Do some deployments of ICTs, e-governance
strategies and the Internet produce impacts that can only be seen and evaluated
in the long run? </li><li>How does the state – in terms of power, authority,
implementation of law and order and preservation of territorial integrity –
manifest through the various deployments of ICTs and e-governance policies in
different contexts?</li></ul>
<p>These questions regarding the impact of ICTs, Internet
and e-governance programmes on different citizen groups as well as the notions
and practices of the state require us to turn our attention towards
understanding the concepts of government, governance and administration and
grounding our understandings of these concepts in the manner in which various
government departments and institutions interact with citizens, on an everyday
basis, in the process of governing and administering. Revisiting and opening up
these concepts is further essential because governments and administrators are
responsible for interpreting (and therefore, translating) and implementing the
state’s policies and visions on the ground. This does not imply that the state
is separate from government and administration. In fact, as we saw in the
example of the forest departments and police forces, certain arms of the government
and administration can be highly statist in the manner in which they exercise
powers, control resources, make decisions and interact with citizens. We also
saw above that not all government departments and state institutions are
equally comfortable with and aligned with the state idea i.e., in terms of
notions of law, order, authority and power. It therefore, becomes necessary to
understand how different government departments and administrators understand,
embody and even negotiate notions of law, order and power, what are the
historical, political and social sources which shape the functioning and
ideologies of different government departments, and how are notions of law,
order, responsiveness and transparency configured when these different government
departments implement various e-governance policies and transparency
initiatives in an effort to become responsive.</p>
<p>Let us briefly examine the concept of government and in
the process, tackle the important issue of state-society relationship.</p>
<p><strong>Government
– the State in Society and the Society in State:</strong>
Governments are the concrete face of the state and the state idea. They are
bodies/institutions/organizations which perform duties of the state and
discharge the state’s obligations towards its people. Some of the primary
obligations include:</p>
<ul><li> delivering the state’s welfare resources to
different citizen groups,</li><li> attending to and fulfilling and/or negotiating
people’s varied claims and demands for entitlements,</li><li>resolving people’s complaints, disputes and
grievances,</li><li>maintaining law and order and ensuring compliance
with law,</li><li>providing infrastructure and services that are
considered necessary for people’s well-being as well as for the physical
territory’s (i.e., the state’s) development and progress.</li></ul>
<p>Governments are expected to function in ways that aid in
maintaining the integrity of the territory and therefore, the authority of the
state. Governments must therefore, follow the policies formulated by the state
and implement them in letter and spirit. However, implementation rarely happens
in the exact letter and spirit because of a variety of factors including:</p>
<p>1.
Inadequate release of funds which in turn is
triggered by factors such as competition over power, territory and loyalty, competition
between political parties, poor allocation to essential budgetary heads in the
programme implementation, desire within government agencies to curb the
autonomy of individual departments/personnel by providing fewer funds, etc.</p>
<p>2.
Existing competition between administrative
agencies, government employees and decision-makers which can be altered because
of implementation. This, in turn, can prevent implementation altogether or, the
implementing authorities may implement policies in a way that aids in
preserving certain kinds of autonomy, powers and interests of the implementing
agencies.</p>
<p>3.
Multiple claims that arise in the course of
implementation which in turn puts implementation on a sticky course and alters
the letter(s) and spirit of the original policies as government agencies,
administrators and the various implementing authorities negotiate (and even
suppress) the claims made by different interest groups (which includes citizen
groups, government agencies themselves, middlemen, competing political parties,
among others).</p>
<p>Essentially then, government institutions and departments
– the concrete faces of the state – are mired in multiple claims and interests
not only with respect to implementation but also in the way in which they
function in everyday life. These claims are advanced not only by citizen groups
but also by the very employees of governments and by agencies and authorities
related with various aspects of the governments’ functioning. Here, we need to
address the issue of state-in-society and society-in-state which tends to be
overlooked and even ignored in accounts and theories about the state. The state
– wherever is experienced and however, it is sighted – is part of the gamut
known as society. This means that the people working as government
employees/state employees are simultaneously members of other networks and
social groups. Consequently, they hold and embody various views and ideas that
may be in consonance with as well as contradictory to notions of power,
authority, law and order. These government employees also compete for the
resources of the state – water, sanitation, housing sites, roads, electricity –
as much as they are responsible for delivering the same resources to different
citizen groups. In the process of delivery of welfare and service provision
then, interests are shaped from time to time depending on the socio-economic
and political positions of the administrators, bureaucrats and people’s
representatives in charge as well as their association with various kinds of
networks that enable them to maintain/enhance their personal/institutional
positions and powers. Some of these interests and networks also shape the roles
of government employees and administrators i.e., elected representatives,
municipal field staff, engineers, etc., can also become middlemen in the process
of delivering services and resources. How they function as middlemen depends on
the resources in question as well as the political, social and administrative
contexts in which the services are provided.</p>
<p>This aspect of state-in-society which is visible when we closely
examine how governments and administrative departments and institutions
function is an important factor that not only shapes interests and policy
implementation but also influences that manner in which the state – power,
authority, law and order – manifests in the interactions between citizens and
governments. Therefore, when attempts are made to reconfigure or reform the
interfaces between governments and citizens by introducing e-governance tools
and ICTs, essentially the entire gamut of networks, social norms, conventions
and negotiations that underlies government-citizen interfacing is tried to be
put in line with a rational conception of law, due process and order. This
implies that certain arms of the state attempt to reinforce and reorder
particular government departments and functionaries in line with the idea of
the rational, orderly and law enforcing state. (These arms of the state could
be the central government in New Delhi, central government departments in New
Delhi and state governments trying to align departments and functionaries
working at different levels in the federal system hierarchy.) In turn, this
means that the complexities in government-citizen interfacing – middlemen,
opaque procedures, inadequate information, use of personal discretion, mobilization
of political, economic and personal networks - are tried to be straightened
through the application of technology which is viewed as neutral and capable of
enforcing order and uniformity in procedures and service delivery. Therefore,
it becomes essential to understand how different government departments
function and how various services are delivered in order to assess where
technology is/gets situated and how technology reorders/realigns government
functionaries in line with the statist notions of law, order and fairness.</p>
<p><strong>By way
of a conclusion …: </strong>I will end this post here, leaving it for readers
to ruminate and think over the ideas presented here. I will return back in the
next post with a more concrete history of how and why ICTs, e-governance and
Internet have been deployed in India to usher transparency and responsiveness
in the functioning of the state via government agencies and departments. The
concrete description will help put into perspective some of the conceptual
issues and insights discussed in this post.</p>
<p>Till then, adios!</p>
<p><strong>References:</strong></p>
<p>Abrams,
Philip. March 1988. “Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State”. <em>Journal of Historical Sociology</em>. Vol. 1
(1): 58-89.</p>
<p>C. J. Fuller and V. Benei (eds). 2000. <em>The Everyday State and Society in Modern India</em>. New Delhi: D. K.
Publishers.</p>
<p>Corbridge, Stuart, Glynn Williams, Manoj Srivastava and Rene Veron.
(2005) <em>Seeing the State: Governance and
Governmentality in India. </em>Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.</p>
<p>Elyachar,
Julia. 2005. <em>Markets of Dispossession:
NGOS, Economic Development and the State in Cairo.</em> Duke University Press:
Durham and London.</p>
<p>Moore, Sally
Falk. 1973. “Law and Social Change: The Semi-Autonomous Social Field as an
Appropriate Subject of Study.” <em>Law and
Society Review.</em> Vol. 7 (4): 719-746.</p>
<p>Tarlo, Emma.
2003. <em>Unsettling Memories: Narratives of
India’s ‘Emergency’.</em> Delhi: Permanent Black.</p>
<p><strong>Also see …</strong></p>
<p>Gupta, Akhil
and James Fergusson. 2002. “Spatializing States: Towards An Ethnography of
Neoliberal Governmentality”. <em>American Ethnologist.</em>
Vol. 29 (4): 981-1002. <u>See mainly part one on conceptual issues –
spatializing states.</u><em></em></p>
<div><br clear="all" />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<div id="edn">
<p class="MsoEndnoteText"><a name="_edn1" href="#_ednref"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[i]</span></a>
The concept of “field” is borrowed from Sally Falk Moore’s (1973) model of the
“semi-autonomous social field”. Moore suggests that a ‘field’ is a concrete,
observable arena that generates rules and is simultaneously influenced by
agencies and forces from outside (720). The notion of the ‘field’ aids in more
a concrete and nuanced study of institutions especially the immediate and
larger contexts in which institutions function and how this influences their
functioning, why actors make particular decisions in certain circumstances, and
how rules are formulated, adhered and resisted. Analyses will vary depending on
how we map the field and which actors and factors we include/exclude and give
primacy to in the given field.</p>
</div>
<div id="edn">
<p class="MsoEndnoteText"><a name="_edn2" href="#_ednref"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[ii]</span></a>
Here, it is important to note that despite advocacy and practice of
independence of judiciary, the judicial system of a nation functions on the
principle of the ‘law of the land’ and maintaining the integrity and
compositeness of the physical territory. In this respect, belief in the state’s
judicial system continues to perpetuate the belief that there is a singular and
ultimate source and arbiter of law, in this case the judicial system, even when
the judiciary can strike down the decisions made by the executive organs of the
state. Therefore, even if the judiciary is independent, the way in which it
functions is to maintain and preserve the state system (i.e. the territory) and
the statist quo (i.e. the state system and authority).</p>
</div>
<div id="edn">
<p class="MsoEndnoteText"><a name="_edn3" href="#_ednref"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[iii]</span></a>
Interviews with social workers from community based organizations in Mumbai,
conducted between May and November 2009.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>
</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/transparency-and-politics/of-the-state-and-the-governments-the-abstract-the-concrete-and-the-responsive'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/transparency-and-politics/of-the-state-and-the-governments-the-abstract-the-concrete-and-the-responsive</a>
</p>
No publisherzainabICT2011-08-03T09:56:52ZBlog EntryThe Responsive State --- Introduction to the Series
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/transparency-and-politics/the-responsive-state-introduction-to-the-series
<b>This post is an introduction to a series of posts on the concept of the 'responsive state'. In this series, I try to explain the various meanings that the term responsiveness has come to acquire when it is used in relation with the discourses surrounding transparency and the deployment of ICTs and the Internet to enforce transparency and thereby create a responsive state. Understanding the notion of responsiveness requires us to revisit and analyze certain concepts and the relations that have been drawn between concepts such as state, government, politics, administration, transparency, effectiveness, government-citizen interface, ICTs and effectiveness, among others. Read on to find more...</b>
<p></p>
<p align="center" style="text-align: left;">The use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and the Internet to enforce transparency is believed to create the ‘responsive state’. A responsive state is one which:</p>
<ul><li>enables citizens to participate in policy-making processes;</li><li>provides them with information about the functioning (including roles and responsibilities) of its various arms and functionaries, and the laws governing cities, the nation and other jurisdictions of administration and governance;</li><li>delivers services efficiently and in a more transparent manner;</li><li>in general, responds to citizens’ needs and demands and pays heed to their opinions, suggestions, grievances and complaints.</li></ul>
<p align="center" style="text-align: left;">In this post I will specifically examine what responsiveness has come to mean in the backdrop of the discourses and practices regarding transparency and the use of ICTs and the Internet to promote transparency and, to thereby, create a responsive state. In some posts, I will backtrack to trace what responsiveness means and how it translates in everyday life when citizens variously interact with their governments and administrative agencies, and how the discourses of transparency and uses of ICTs and the Internet have ushered new meanings of responsiveness. In some of the posts, we will need to re-visit and examine fundamental concepts such as ‘state’, ‘government’, ‘administration’ and ‘politics’, among others, to understand how the meanings and uses of these concepts have changed over time, resulting in new imaginations and beliefs about realities concerning and involving the state, government, administration and politics. Locating and understanding these transformations helps us to get a perspective on elements such as transparency, ICTs and the Internet and their existing and emergent relationships with state, government, administration, politics and citizenship.</p>
<p align="center" style="text-align: left;">Our interest is actually to see how government–citizen interfaces are transformed through the various deployments of ICTs and the Internet to enforce transparency and responsiveness. This is because the notion of responsiveness is premised on particular understandings, beliefs and imaginations regarding:</p>
<ul><li>functioning of the state i.e., non-transparent, inefficient, non-responsive, bureaucratic; and therefore</li><li>of government–citizen interface i.e., ineffective, non-transparent and therefore, non-democratic, not producing desirable outcomes.</li></ul>
<p align="center" style="text-align: left;">It is the desire to improve government–citizen interface — mainly reform of government functioning, improving the effectiveness of interactions between governments and citizens and strengthening the possibilities of translating these interactions into outcomes. This desire has led not only non-government organizations (NGOs), social movement and civic groups and international development aid agencies but also the state to take steps towards improvising on and/or bettering avenues and channels through which citizens and governments interact with each other. The Indian state has made efforts to introduce responsiveness among its various arms and functionaries by:</p>
<ul><li>introducing and implementing new laws such as the Right to Information Act (RTI) (through pressures from and in collaboration with social movement, civic groups and the National Advisory Council);</li><li>announcing (and mandating government agencies to implement) policies that make it mandatory for municipalities, urban local bodies and other local administrative institutions to publish information that is (considered to be) relevant/necessary/potentially useful for citizens;</li><li>by necessitating the creation of websites as a means of information provision and thereby as a novel mode of interaction between governments and citizens;</li><li>by making particular kinds of data more easily available to citizens through ICTs;</li><li>by developing e-governance policies and frameworks which re-engineer government functioning and facilitate easier and more interaction between governments and citizens (including, among others, electronic delivery of some kinds of basic services).</li></ul>
<p align="center" style="text-align: left;">In this series, we will analyze each of the above steps that the Indian state has taken, either on its own initiative or owing to pressures from other actors and institutions in the polity, to institute responsiveness. Our goal is to critically evaluate the meanings of responsiveness and the consequences of establishing it (in the backdrop of transparency and the use of ICTs and Internet) – essentially what such responsiveness means for different citizen groups as well as, fundamentally, for the abstract notion of the state and the ground realities that reify the state. Given these goals, in the forthcoming posts we will individually look at the relationships between:</p>
<ol><li>State and Government – what do each of these concepts mean, how do they differ as actually existing entities, how do responsiveness and transparency apply independently to each of them as well as in their relations with each other;</li><li>Transparency and Responsiveness – why transparency has become a prerequisite for realizing responsiveness;</li><li>State and Citizens, Governments and Citizens – how are these relationships distinct and co-related in different contexts and how interfaces developed through the deployment of ICTs and the Internet configure and reconfigure these relationships;</li><li>Transparency, Responsiveness and ICTs and Internet – what kinds of imaginations underlie the use of ICTs and Internet to enforce transparency and responsiveness, how do ICTs and Internet reconfigure the meanings and virtues of transparency and responsiveness, and how are the virtues and symbolisms associated with ICT enabled transparency and responsiveness informing our understandings of politics, governance, administration and the state.</li></ol>
<p align="center" style="text-align: left;">Each of the posts, though individual, will require readers to refer to earlier posts in order to get a grasp of some of the issues being raised in the post they may be reading. On my part, I will make every attempt to cross-reference and provide extensive references to external resources that will help the reader to examine points of views on their own. </p>
<p align="center" style="text-align: left;">The next post will tackle the concepts of state and government. Without much ado, adieu till we meet next …</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/transparency-and-politics/the-responsive-state-introduction-to-the-series'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/transparency-and-politics/the-responsive-state-introduction-to-the-series</a>
</p>
No publisherzainabe-governance2011-08-03T09:58:45ZBlog EntryTransparency and Politics: Politically Aware and Participatory Citizenry
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/transparency-and-politics/internet-politics-and-transparency-2
<b>In this, her fourth blog post on her CIS-RAW project, Zainab Bawa looks at the notions of Stakeholder and Participation. </b>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/transparency-and-politics/internet-politics-and-transparency-2'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/transparency-and-politics/internet-politics-and-transparency-2</a>
</p>
No publisherzainabTransparency, Politics2011-08-23T04:34:40ZBlog EntryTransparency and Politics: Talk by Barun Mitra
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/transparency-and-politics/internet-politics-and-transparency
<b>A talk by Barun Mitra, Chairperson of the Liberty Institute, a Delhi-based think tank, was held at CIS recently, organised by Zainab Bawa in relation to her CIS-RAW project on 'Transparency and Politics'. In this post, the third in a series exploring questions of transparency and politics, Zainab reports on the lecture and discussion.</b>
<p><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/jace/3451003350/"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3655/3451003350_157d6c16f2_m.jpg" alt="Barun Mitra" height="160" width="240" align="right" /></a>On April 15, 2009, the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS)
hosted a talk by Barun Mitra on “Internet, Transparency and Politics”. Barun
Mitra is the Chairperson of Liberty Institute, a think tank based in Delhi.
Liberty Institute conducts research and advocacy on policy issues ranging from
health, environment and trade to democracy and governance. In 2004, Liberty
Institute developed <a href="http://www.empoweringindia.org/">www.EmpoweringIndia.org</a>
(henceforth to be referred to as EI) to compile information that electoral
candidates provided in the affidavits they filed before elections. These
affidavits contain details of the candidate’s assets and liabilities, education
background, PAN number, income tax records and criminal records, if any. The
purpose of compiling this information was to standardise it and make it
available for the voters in a comprehensive format. This, in turn, would enable
voters to use the information and make informed choices when casting their votes.</p>
<p>EI has undergone several rounds of iterations and is already in the
third generation of its development. The aim has been to build a robust
database that will allow citizens to extract information as per their specific
and nuanced queries and use it during the elections and afterwards, to enforce
accountability on the part of the elected representatives. Barun Mitra began
his talk by emphasising that EI was more than just a website, contrary to what he found was the initial perception of most audiences. He explained, “I was not interested in merely the information. The larger
question driving my initiative was ‘how do we look at politics’?” EI was developed
to introduce a different paradigm of understanding politics and participating
in it.</p>
<p>The interesting aspect of Barun Mitra’s talk was the question he asked--“What
makes information flow?” He decided to move beyond the passé rhetoric of “information
is power”. Two specific experiences enabled Barun to understand this question around the flow of information. “I had made a presentation to audiences in Kerala about
EI in 2008, trying to solicit their support in disseminating the information on
the site to local groups in the state. However, the audience in Kerala saw EI
only as a website and raised questions accordingly. Following this, I made a
presentation to slum dwellers in Delhi who immediately began to demand
information about the candidates who were going to contest from their
constituencies in the 2008 New Delhi state assembly elections. The slum
dwellers and some of the groups working with them even asked me to provide the
information in Hindi and local languages. I was surprised by the fact that two
vastly diverse audiences responded in such dramatically different ways to EI. That
is when I realized that those who have sustained our democracy, namely the
poor, need this kind of information. There is a demand for it among them and
therefore, we need to supply it. The second experience was from Gujarat. During
the 2007 state assembly elections, we found that a number of local media
collectives and the <em>panchayats</em> had
used the information on EI. This was because the mainstream media was covering
the major politicians and candidates in this election while the local groups
needed information on all kinds of candidates contesting from their
constituencies. I have now come to believe that demand and supply are two
aspects to information and it needs to be provided accordingly where the demand
for it is emanating from.”</p>
<p>Barun also reiterated that EI is non-judgmental, in that it leaves
it to the audiences to decide how they want to interpret the information. This has
been a significant paradigm shift in transparency initiatives that are being developed
on the belief that providing more information to people enhances engagement between
people and the state. Websites of government departments continue to provide
information which they see as important for the citizenry. For instance, see <a href="http://www.bmrc.co.in/">www.bmrc.co.in</a>, the website of the Bangalore
Metro Rail Corporation, which claims to be transparent and provides particular
kinds of information, while concealing other aspects of the project development
and implementation. On the other hand, some non-government organisations are focusing
on organising large chunks of information concerning particular aspects of
governance, and presenting it to people in a way that allows them to extract that
information which they find relevant.</p>
<p>One of Barun Mitra’s goals for the future is to develop parameters for
judging the performance of elected representatives At the launch of EI in
Bangalore on April 16, he pointed out that while he can provide
information about the attendance records of MPs (Members of Parliament) in the Lok
Sabha (House of the People) sessions, it would be inaccurate to judge the MP’s
performance on the basis of this criteria. This is because MPs often sign the
attendance register but they may not sit through the Parliament session. He
therefore feels that more robust criteria have to be developed which will
provide a somewhat holistic picture to the people about the performance of
their elected representatives.</p>
<p>Finally, Barun Mitra spoke on the issue of authenticity of the
information filed in the affidavits. “People often ask, ‘how authentic is this
information?’ The election commission does not take it on itself to verify this
information. But I would say that authenticity is a secondary issue. First, we
have to make information available to the people. People will then, of their
own accord, raise questions about the authenticity of the information. For instance,
the Criminal Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has filed cases in the Supreme Court
challenging the authenticity and sources of the assets declared by current
chief minister (CM) of Uttar Pradesh (UP) Mayawati and former CM Mulayam Singh
Yadav.” Specifically, Mayawati’s assets in 2003, which amounted to Rs. 1 crore, increased
to Rs. 50 crores in 2007. This information came to light through
the affidavit which Mayawati had to file before the state assembly elections in
UP in 2007. “<a class="external-link" href="http://http://news.outlookindia.com/item.aspx?651599">Filing such a case was possible </a>only because Mayawati and Mulayam
Singh were compelled to provide information about their assets to the public.”</p>
<p>Barun Mitra’s talk raises an important question for me: how effective
are initiatives like EI in fostering interaction between the state and the
citizens? I will address this question in my next blog post, where I will examine the
case of the Digital City project in Amsterdam. I will look at the concepts and practices
of cyberspace, urban space and citizenship through the Digital City Project and
other projects undertaken to foster transparency. I will then try to analyse the initiatives
undertaken during the 2009 general elections in India and make some tentative
remarks on democracy and participation.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/transparency-and-politics/internet-politics-and-transparency'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/transparency-and-politics/internet-politics-and-transparency</a>
</p>
No publisherzainabLecture2011-08-03T09:53:12ZBlog EntryTransparency and Politics: An Introduction [II]
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/transparency-and-politics/transparency-and-politics-an-introduction-to-the-project-part-ii
<b>In this post, the second in a series documenting her CIS-RAW project, Zainab Bawa explains how transparency is embedded in particular institutional contexts. This impacts the ways in which transparency materially manifests and also has implications for administrative politics.</b>
<p></p>
<p>In the <a class="external-link" href="http://http://www.cis-india.org/research/cis-raw/histories-of-the-internet/transparency-and-politics/2009/02/08/transparency-and-politics-an-introduction-to-the-project-part-i"><u>last post</u> </a>,
I briefly tried to explain how the concept of transparency has evolved since
the early 1990s and the changes it has undergone over time. My aim in this post
is to explain how transparency is not a neutral concept but is embedded in the dynamics
that exist in political institutions and government agencies. I will present the
case of the municipal corporation in Mumbai city, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (popularly referred to as the
BMC) to drive home my point. By the end of the post, I also hope to draw some
connections between politics and transparency.</p>
<p><strong>The Municipality and Autonomy</strong>: Every city has a municipal corporation. Municipalities have often been deemed as corrupt, inefficient, self-serving and
negligent of the state of affairs in cities. This is so because the corrupt
practices which municipalities are usually associated with, i.e., bribes in
issuing birth and death certificates, water connections, licenses and
permissions, are experienced by most citizens on a daily basis and are also
more visible than the forms of corruption in which the higher levels of
governments engage. People also experience civic problems on a daily basis and these
are automatically attributed to the inefficiency in the municipal administration,
because the municipality is seen as the agency responsible for resolving these
problems. However, the powers of the municipality are constrained by higher
level government agencies as well as by the dearth of financial resources. For example,
the municipal corporation of Mumbai, the BMC, is headed by
the commissioner who is directly appointed by the Maharashtra state government.
This allows the state government to control the municipality and the city.
Thus, the actions of the BMC and the decisions it makes are directly influenced
by the state government.</p>
<p><strong>Political
Party Competition and the Municipality:</strong> Each municipality
has an elected council comprising of directly elected municipal councilors. In
the BMC, the Shiv Sena party has a majority in the municipal council. However, the
state government is Congress-led. This introduces political party competition that
manifests on the city. The Congress government is likely to introduce laws and
policies, as well as constitute administrative bodies which will reduce the
power of the Shiv Sena-led municipal council and bring the council under
the control of the state government. This impacts the executive powers of the municipal
councilors who may have to seek permission to carry out civic works from the state
government-constituted administrative bodies. The independently constituted
administrative bodies also have the powers to levy taxes, which then cut into
the amount of overall tax that could have been collected by the municipality
were it operating independently.</p>
<p><strong>Internal
Competition within Municipalities:</strong> Another dynamic in
municipalities concerns the relationship between the senior bureaucrats and the
municipal councilors and between the senior bureaucrats and the executive staff
of the municipality. In all the municipalities across India, senior bureaucrats
are drawn from the Indian Administrative Services (IAS) cadre. They determine
the annual budgetary allocations to all the departments within the municipality
and also frame policies for the city. A great deal of power is therefore vested
in the senior bureaucrats. The policies framed by the senior bureaucrats have
to be implemented by the executive staff of the municipality, such as the water
and sanitary department engineers and the clerks and the administrative staff
of the various departments in the municipality. This executive staff is in regular
contact with the various constituencies served by the municipality. But they
operate via multiple rationalities.</p>
<p>For example, while the water department engineers
may follow strict rules in issuing temporary water connections to builders
undertaking construction work, they may exercise personal discretion in providing
water to people living in the slums. Such personal discretion ‘bypasses’ the
rules and laws that determine who is eligible for a water connection. Thus, it is
known that in many Indian cities, the engineers of the water departments often issue
water connections to the slum dwellers on humanitarian grounds, operating under
the morality that people cannot be denied access to water because of their apparently 'illegal' status. Such individual rationalities are classed as 'corrupt'
practices. These also irk the senior bureaucrats who would like their policies
to be implemented in the exact letter and spirit in which they were framed.
Senior bureaucrats therefore devise the discourse of transparency in order to
bring the junior administrative staff under their control.</p>
<p>At the same time, there is a high degree of animosity
and tension in the relationship between the elected municipal councilors and
the senior bureaucrats. The latter actively brand the former as corrupt, whereas
the councilors see the actions of the senior bureaucrats as impediments in
their ability to serve their constituencies. Both the councilors and the
senior bureaucrats have the powers to sanction contracts and appoint
contractors to carry out civic works, such as laying down of water pipelines,
repairs and maintenance of roads, and repairs of sewerage infrastructure. The appointment
of contractors can be discretionary and often, some contractors are favoured
over others. The councilors and bureaucrats compete with each other in the
appointment of contractors because such appointments can bring them monetary rewards
from the contractors. The bureaucrats attempt to conceal their ‘discretionary’ practices
by labeling the councilors as corrupt. The bureaucrats are also safeguarded by the
perception of their status i.e., the IAS officers are often seen as non-corrupt
and are known to have a high level of integrity. The councilor therefore
becomes the natural target.</p>
<p>This is not to say that councilors do not engage in
corruption. They often do, but their corrupt practices need to be read in
specific contexts rather than from normative standpoints. Thus, during
interviews with municipal councilors in 2006, I found that some councilors
extend help to the poor groups in their constituencies from their personal
expenditures. One councilor elected from one of the wards in South Mumbai had
then explicitly mentioned to me, 'The council does not pay me a high salary for
my work. There are many poor people in my constituency who need immediate
medical help and I do not hesitate to give them whatever monetary help I personally
can. I make sure that the building department officials do not harass those
poor people in my area who have built a loft inside their houses in order to
carry out manufacturing activities from within the house and thus sustain
themselves financially. I also ensure that the hawkers who temporarily set up
stalls in the month of Ramzaan are not evicted from my area because I am
eventually answerable to God for the actions I commit during the holy month. But
when a contractor, whose contract I have helped to pass for carrying out civic
works in my area, offers me a <em>gift</em>
(of money) of his own volition, I accept it. I do so because I also spend a
good deal from my own pocket and I need to compensate myself, as well as
maintain a cash flow which will help me to serve the people.'</p>
<p><strong>Transparency
and Politics:</strong> The institutional context that I have presented above
is by no means exhaustive. The alliances and oppositions in the scheme of
administrative politics are also not permanent. These shift according to the
context and are shaped by the contests for power. The discourse and practices
of transparency are located in this context. By referring to transparency,
senior bureaucrats, policy makers and aid agencies seek to control the multiple
rationalities and everyday discretionary practices that are rife in
administration and streamline the decision-making process. This has
implications for different socio-economic groups who also come under the radar
of visibility when administrative staff are sought to be disciplined. Accordingly,
the relationship between the different state agencies and citizen groups gets
shaped.</p>
<p>For example, around 2003, a non-government organization called Praja
introduced a centralized, online system for complaint management in
the BMC. The aim of this system was to simplify the process of lodging
complaints about civic problems and introduce efficiency and accountability in
the administration in terms of resolving citizens’ complaints. The BMC received
many complaints concerning hawkers and vending on the streets. A section of
researchers and activists initially felt that the centralized complaint system
was working against hawkers. However, over time, it came to be realized that
the evictions of hawkers in Mumbai did not take place owing to the complaints
lodged by the citizens. The complaints no doubt gave (negative) visibility to
the hawkers and the problem of occupied streets and pavements. One of the
officers in the municipality who I interviewed in 2007 mentioned, 'When a
shopping mall owner is irked by the presence of hawkers outside his mall, he
will not go online and register a complaint on the centralized complaint
system. He will simply make a personal appointment with the commissioner, make
his case before the commissioner, and ensure that the hawkers are removed. The online
centralized complaint system is not used by such persons.' This comment is
instructive because it also shows us that despite the introduction of
transparency, bypasses and slippages continue to take place since the
engagement between the state and its citizens is fashioned by multiple rationalities,
ability and resources to access government agencies and authorities, the
ability to influence them, and by particular contexts.</p>
<p>In the next post, I will present my findings on the
relationship between transparency and access to information. How does the
framework of rights enable access to information? How is access to information variously
influenced when information is published for the sake of broadcast as against
when information is made available in certain ways to enhance participation?</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/transparency-and-politics/transparency-and-politics-an-introduction-to-the-project-part-ii'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/transparency-and-politics/transparency-and-politics-an-introduction-to-the-project-part-ii</a>
</p>
No publisherzainabe-governance2011-08-03T09:59:07ZBlog EntryTransparency and Politics: An Introduction [I]
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/transparency-and-politics/transparency-and-politics-an-introduction-to-the-project-part-i
<b>This is the first in a series of blog posts documenting Zainab Bawa's CIS-RAW project on Transparency and Politics. This post briefly explains how the notion of transparency has developed over time, and the changes that it has been through. </b>
<p></p>
<p>Since 2005, I have been carrying out ethnographic research on
cities, particularly on issues of governance, politics and economic practices
in cities. In 2004, I began working for an organization in Mumbai named <a class="external-link" href="http://www.praja.org/">Praja</a>.
Here, I was introduced to the concepts of transparency, accountability and
governance. These were the buzzwords of that
time, articulated vociferously by some of the civil society organisations that had
sprung up in Mumbai and Bangalore to cleanse the city of maladministration. However, the notion of transparency originated earlier, in the 1990s. It was conceptualised as an antidote which would help to pull
the state out of the morass of corruption and bribery that it had fallen into. Governments
seeking loans from international agencies such as the World Bank and USAID for
reforming their departments and for improving the delivery of civic services
were asked to make their functioning transparent as a necessary prerequisite. </p>
<p> </p>
<p>Making government transparent mainly involved
introducing the double entry
accounting system for keeping a record of all the assets that the government
owns (which could then be mortgaged in case the government defaulted on loan repayments),
and to track all expenditures against the available balance in order to show where
and how the money has been spent and to prevent over-spending. Transparency was also enforced through the
imposition of some models for implementing infrastructure. For instance, in
Mumbai, under the <a class="external-link" href="http://web.worldbank.org/external/projects/main?pagePK=64283627&piPK=73230&theSitePK=40941&menuPK=228424&Projectid=P010480">sewage disposal programme</a>,
the World Bank gave a large grant for building toilets in the slums. The actual
construction of the toilets would, however, be the responsibility of community
organisations working in the slums. This model was imposed because of the
assumption that community organisations are more aware of the needs of the slum
dwellers and they would not engage in the rent-seeking behavior which is (presumed
to be) characteristic of municipal officials and elected councilors. An analysis
of the toilet construction programme is <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/transparency-and-politics/uploads/post-1" class="internal-link" title="Post 1">available here</a>. For our purposes,
we need to keep in mind that reform in municipal budgeting and prescribing
models which would reduce the scope for corruption were some of the early
materialisations of the notion of transparency.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>We now move
to the next important phase in the history of transparency--the
conception and the gradual implementation of the Right to Information (RTI) Act
in India. RTI is based on the idea that the citizen should have access to any
kind of information that she requires. <strong>Under
RTI, transparency was sought to be implemented in the process</strong> <strong>by which the citizen asks for information from
the state</strong>. This means that whereas earlier, the citizen could have acquired
the same information by giving bribes to government officials and/or through
various other circuits and means, now she could legitimately ask for the information
and the state became bound by law to give it. There was also a stamp of
legitimacy to the information that was eventually given. It could be used to challenge
government officials, make the state accountable for its actions and reform
governing practices in a much larger public domain than what could be possible
before. I will not evaluate the RTI Act here; I will leave it for a subsequent
post. But what interests me is the relationship between regulation and
transparency. Can transparency be enforced through law? What implications does such
enforcement have on governing practices as well for different socio-economic
groups? Does enforcement cause the state to become transparent in some area and
opaque in others?</p>
<p>The next
major impetus to the development of the notion of transparency came with:</p>
<ol><li>The increasing penetration of the
Internet in India,</li><li> Implementation of e-governance
policies which made it mandatory for municipalities and government agencies to
publish information about their departments, budgets, and the welfare schemes
and programmes on offer from them</li><li>Coupling Right to Information with Duty
to Publish which meant that while the citizen had the right to seek
information, the state and its agencies had a duty to voluntarily publish more
and more information about themselves</li><li>A demand from existing and emerging
civil society organisations as well as institutions such as the World Bank to
improve the delivery of civic services by eliminating middle-men and all those processes
which increase the possibility of bribe giving and taking,</li><li>A further demand from the same
organisations that the processes by which decisions are made and the
reasons/logic of these decisions should be made available for public eyes, the
aim here being that the decision-making process should be made uniform and ‘objective’.</li></ol>
<p>It is interesting to note how the Internet gets linked to the concept of
transparency. The Internet does provide a vast space for publishing information,
but that is not all. The ‘virtual space’ of the Internet is very closely linked
with the way we want our cities to be i.e., absolutely visible,
monitorable and manageable. This can be achieved partly by making information
about the various aspects of urban governance available online, and partly by publishing
information about all those population groups and political practices that are
classed as ‘informal’ and ‘illegal’. In the course of this project, I
will try to further develop the link between the space of the Internet and that of the
city by describing some of the initiatives and case studies about transparency
and politics.</p>
<p>It is also important
to remember that transparency is not a static concept. It emerges in and is
shaped by contexts. For example, the increased emphasis on municipalities to introduce
double entry accounting systems in order to make the budgetary process
transparent, particularly between 2004 and 2006, was linked to the fact that
international financial institutions, who wanted to invest in urban infrastructure
development during this period, could now see what assets municipalities
possessed and whether these assets could be cashed in (both metaphorically and
materially) in future. In this case, transparency translated as particular kinds
of visibilities for particular groups. Transparency can be also used as a trope
to justify interventions such as cleaning of voter lists, introduction of
identification cards and removing certain decision-making powers from local
governments and transferring them to other government bodies. We will need to
bear these aspects of transparency in mind as we understand it and evaluation
its implications.</p>
<p>In this
post, I have tried to explain how the notion of transparency has developed over time, and the changes
that it has been through. This provides the first part of the background to the
project. In the next post, I will explain what politics means in practice and
how transparency now enters and modifies the realm of politics.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/transparency-and-politics/transparency-and-politics-an-introduction-to-the-project-part-i'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/transparency-and-politics/transparency-and-politics-an-introduction-to-the-project-part-i</a>
</p>
No publisherzainabTransparency, Politics2011-08-23T04:34:50ZBlog Entry