Centre for Internet and Society

Lakshadweep Notifications (OCR)

praskrishna — 2013-03-27T03:28:20Z

Find below the unedited scanned versions of the notifications received from the Government of Lakshadweep.

The folder contains the following:

Guidelines for Functioning of KIOSKS for Encouraging Self Employment among Disabled Persons in the Islands, Lakshadweep.
Guidelines for Grant of Unemployment Allowance and Special Job to Persons with Disabilities.
Guidelines for Issuing Identity Card to Persons with Disabilities for Availing Government Benefits and Concessions.
Notification on Amendments in regard to Payment of Pension of Old Destitute Old-aged, Widows, Physically Disabled, Abandoned Ladies/Destitutes.
Notification on Setting up of District Disability Rehabilitation Centre at Kavaratti.
Notification for Constitution of a Local Level Committee for implementation of National Trusts Act, 1999.
Notification for Constitution of Lakshadweep State Executive Committee.
Notification for Constitution of Island Level Committee to Scrutinize, Certify and Recommend the Applications of Individuals/Voluntary Organizations related to Disability Section under the Chairmanship of Sub Divisional Officers/Deputy Collectors.
Notification for Constitution of a State Level Committee under the Chairmanship of Secretary (Welfare) with Representatives of Concerned Department/Agencies to Co-ordinate and Monitor the Implementation of the National Programme for Rehabilitation for Persons with Disabilities in Lakshadweep.

Click to download the OCR files.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/accessibility/resources/lakshadweep-ocr-notifications

Lakshadweep (OCR) Notifications

praskrishna — 2013-03-27T03:25:33Z

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/lakshadweep-ocr-notifications.zip

Lakshadweep (Govt) Notifications

praskrishna — 2013-03-27T03:19:13Z

The following folder contains a series of notifications received by CIS from the Government of Lakshadweep recently.

The folder contains the following:

Guidelines for Functioning of KIOSKS for Encouraging Self Employment among Disabled Persons in the Islands, Lakshadweep.
Guidelines for Grant of Unemployment Allowance and Special Job to Persons with Disabilities.
Guidelines for Issuing Identity Card to Persons with Disabilities for Availing Government Benefits and Concessions.
Notification on Amendments in regard to Payment of Pension of Old Destitute Old-aged, Widows, Physically Disabled, Abandoned Ladies/Destitutes.
Notification on Setting up of District Disability Rehabilitation Centre at Kavaratti.
Notification for Constitution of a Local Level Committee for implementation of National Trusts Act, 1999.
Notification for Constitution of Lakshadweep State Executive Committee.
Notification for Constitution of Island Level Committee to Scrutinize, Certify and Recommend the Applications of Individuals/Voluntary Organizations related to Disability Section under the Chairmanship of Sub Divisional Officers/Deputy Collectors.
Notification for Constitution of a State Level Committee under the Chairmanship of Secretary (Welfare) with Representatives of Concerned Department/Agencies to Co-ordinate and Monitor the Implementation of the National Programme for Rehabilitation for Persons with Disabilities in Lakshadweep.

Click to download the files (PDFs) received from the from the Government of Lakshadweep.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/accessibility/resources/lakshadweep-govt-notifications

Lakshadweep Government Notifications

praskrishna — 2013-03-27T03:15:43Z

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/lakshadweep-govt-notifications.zip

Faculty Seminar: Talk on Normativising Competitive Markets Contextually; Transmission Art Installation — Reordered Spaces

praskrishna — 2013-03-27T12:29:52Z

This event was organized by Azim Premji University on December 26, 2012. Sharath Chandra Ram installed and presented the Re-ordered Spaces. Abhayraj Naik gave a talk.

About the Installation

In the light of recent legal debates concerning street food vending, the video installations question habits of consumption and politics of public spaces complemented by a radio transmission of the audioscape, representing tactical ownership of available spectrum resource within private spaces.

Original installation link can be read here.
Click to read the full details of the event published on the website of Azim Premji University on March 26, 2013

About the Talk

Using urban street food vending as an example, this paper explores the possibilities of a contextualised normative outlook towards competitive markets, competition law, and economic policy in India. I argue that such an outlook would need to creatively engage with the phenomenon of substantial employment informality in India while also judiciously avoiding the allure of dogmatic half-truths based on empirically contestable assumptions about efficiency, illegality and welfare. In India the informal food sector caters to a vast population of desperately poor (and hungry) consumers who cannot afford a qualitatively substitutable product that is retailed through the formal production process. Private enterprise at generating affordable access to food in public spaces remains legally ambiguous, and the narratives of street food law, and street vending more generally, indicate confusion over how to understand the informal sector’s role in competitive urban retail trade. This paper suggests that a distinctively Indian perspective of constitutional economics is required to help us realign our (presently misguided) economic development models to appropriately recognize the empirical realities of the entrepreneurs in our midst, the pre-commitments of our unique constitutional order and competition policy, and the real demands of our customers as citizens.

Notes on the Speakers:

Abhayraj Naik works on issues in legal theory, philosophy, criminal justice, urban governance, ecology, and technology. He holds law degrees from the National Law School of India University (Bangalore) and the Yale Law School (New Haven).

Sharath Chandra Ram has research and pedagogical interests in citizen science, multimodal interaction, accessibility and digital humanities. He graduated from the University of Edinburgh specializing in Artificial Intelligence and interactive virtual environments and is Faculty at Srishti School of Art Design & Technology. As a researcher at the Centre for Internet & Society, he coordinates activities of the Metaculture Media Lab , an open citizen lab, now part of Columbia University's 'Dorkbot' collective.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/azimpremji-university-december-26-2012-talk-on-normativising-competitive-markets-contextually

Iraqi Public Data Scenario Workshop

praskrishna — 2013-03-26T09:43:47Z

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/iraqi-public-data.pdf

Future of Privacy in India

praskrishna — 2013-03-26T05:14:45Z

DSCI and ICOMP are organizing a meet on Privacy at the Oberoi Hotel in New Delhi on April 5, 2013. Sunil Abraham will be participating in this event as a speaker.

In recent years, there has been an increasing deployment of ICT in the collection of personal information by both private sector and state agencies. Data is a reason for empowerment for both commercial and public purposes. The prolific use of the Internet for search, social networking cloud computing and e-commerce transactions places increasing amounts of personal information and Internet history in hands of dominant private sector players. Data is undeniably the capital of the Internet. While technology has evolved to be able to collect, store and mine increasing amounts of data for improved public services or for commercial purposes, there are understandable concerns over the lack of accountability for the purposes and limits of the use of personal data. These concerns demand an appropriate regulatory framework for Privacy.

As an important step toward formulating the privacy bill, an Expert Group headed by Justice A P Shah provides inputs based on a study of the international landscape of privacy laws, along with the predominant privacy concerns ensuing from technological advancements. The Committee’s report, submitted in Oct 2012 has recommended Nine Principles as the cornerstone for privacy legislation. While the Privacy Act is under development, DSCI and iCOMP are organizing a meet focusing on the following areas:

Outline an appropriate Indian context for privacy: the nine principles
Presentation of the state of play on privacy in key markets (practices, Issues, regulatory interventions)
Analyse the scope and implications of data collection by public agencies in India.
Analyse privacy challenges and risks related to commercial use of data collected on the Internet by private players
Consider how India can address these challenges and enshrine privacy principles in legislation

Key Speakers

Dr. Gulshan Rai, DG, CERT-In*

Mr. Simon Davis, London School of Economics

Mr. Manoj Joshi, JS, DOPT*

Mr. Kanta Roy, CEO, NeGD*

Dr. Kamlesh Bajaj, CEO, DSCI

Mr. Sunil Abraham, ED, CIS

* To be confirmed

Event Flow

Opening Remark by Mr. S V Divvaakar, Executive Director, ICOMP
Framework for Privacy Regulation in India, By Dr. Kamlesh Bajaj, CEO, DSCI
Keynote Address
‘Privacy :The International state of play’, by Mr. Simon Davis, London School of Economics
Panel Discussion 1: Context of Privacy in India
Panel Discussion 2: Business responsibility in the age of ‘data driven’ transformations

Date: April 5, 2013
Time: 9.00 a.m. to 1.00 p.m.
Venue: Oberoi Hotel, Nilgiri Room, New Delhi

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/future-of-privacy-in-india-on-april-5-2013-at-oberoi-hotel-new-delhi

Press controls ‘send wrong message to rest of world’

praskrishna — 2013-03-26T04:51:54Z

Britain could trigger an international media crackdown if the Government goes ahead with plans for a Royal Charter to introduce a new Press regulator, free speech campaigners warned yesterday.

Read the article written by Jerome Starkey from Johannesburg, Francis Elliott from Delhi and David Brown. It was published in the Times on March 21, 2013. Sunil Abraham is quoted.

Oppressive regimes will use the example of the planned regulation in Britain to justify tighter controls on their own media, it was claimed. Campaigners from across the Commonwealth are preparing to urge the Queen not to approve the Royal Charter when it is presented by the Privy Council on May 8. Senior journalists and campaigners in Africa and Asia accused Britain of “chilling media freedom” by legitimising state interference in the media.

Phenyo Butale, the director of South Africa’s Freedom of Expression Institute, said: “African governments have shown they are uncomfortable with free press acting as a watchdog, holding them to account. A move to statutory regulation in the UK would really be a gift for them.”

In Somalia, one of the most dangerous countries in the world to be a journalist, reporters said that they were alarmed by the British plans. “It’s alarming that the British Government is regulating the freedom of its press,” said Mohammed Ibrahim, secretary-general of the Somali Union of Journalists.

Sunil Abraham, director of the Centre for Internet and Society, a Bangalore-based organisation that campaigns against the Indian Government’s often heavy-handed attempts to regulate online content, said that the UK had surrendered the moral high ground in an important international debate.

“The UK has traditionally made free speech an important component of their foreign policy and when their own internal actions contradict their external position . . . they no longer have any influence on the Indian situation,” he said.

The Editorial Board of The New York Times wrote that the proposed regulation would “do more harm than good”, adding: “It is worth keeping in mind that journalists at newspapers like The Guardianand The [New York] Times, not the police, first brought to light the scope and extent of hacking by British tabloids. It would be perverse if regulations . . . ended up stifling the kind of hard-hitting investigative journalism that brought it to light in the first place.”

Mumsnet, one of the most popular blogging sites, has sought a guarantee from the Government that it would not be caught by the regulations. The Department for Culture, Media and Sport told the website that it “will ultimately be for the court to decide on the definition of a ‘relevant publisher’ ” covered by the new regulations “but our view is that Mumsnet would not be covered by the new regime”.

Justine Roberts, the website’s founder, has asked to be specifically included in the list of exempted websites.

The House of Lords will vote on Monday on the definition of “relevant publisher” when peers consider new amendments to the Crime and Courts Bill. Some of Britain’s major newspaper and magazine publishers have indicated that they will not join the new regulator.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/the-times-uk-jerome-starkey-francis-elliott-david-brown-march-21-2013-press-controls-send-wrong-message-to-rest-of-world

Privacy Protection Bill 2013

praskrishna — 2013-04-07T04:58:43Z

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/privacy-protection-bill-2013.pdf

India’s Civil Liberties Crisis: Of Bans, Blocks, Bullying and Biometrics

praskrishna — 2013-03-25T10:39:43Z

Malavika Jayaram will be a speaker at this event which is organized by the Center for Global Communication Studies and will be held at Annenberg School of Communication, University of Pennslyvania, Philadelphia, on March 28, 2013, from 12 p.m. to 1.30 p.m.

Read about the event on the website of the Center for Global Communication Studies.

Unlike the US First Amendment, the first amendment to the Constitution of India actually strengthened state regulation over freedom of speech. Irony aside, the amendment that is considered by many scholars as the first media crisis in post-colonial India has increasing relevance today. Its prioritization of sovereignty and national security over democratic rights and institutions has resulted in a zone of contestation between nation building and free speech. This is playing out through a series of battles involving website blocking, book banning, biometric databases and bullying of all kinds.

In the last few months, an all-girl rock band in Kashmir was silenced, a village in Bihar banned women and girls from using mobile phones, and we had yet another Salman Rushdie controversy. Movies were blocked. Facebook and Google were taken to court for hosting objectionable content. Paintings were removed from an art gallery at the “suggestion” of the police because they depicted Hindu deities as semi-nude. At the same time, there was a drive to digitize governance and to build biometric databases to enumerate and record every individual. The impacts on free speech, anonymity, and privacy were considered fair game in the drive towards progress, inclusion, and maintenance of public order.

The relationship between the citizen and the state is undergoing a radical transformation mediated by the marriage of welfare schemes and commercial interests. The privacy of one’s body and identity is challenged by initiatives to capture fingerprints, irises, faces, and transactions. The heckler’s vote is increasingly powerful in silencing free expression. Civil society is under siege for resisting the onslaught of draconian legislation, arbitrary restrictions, and the banning of various forms of cultural output. Narratives are being constructed that attribute all civic engagement with “western values” and with being mouthpieces of foreign interests.

In this talk, I will give an overview of the strands of discord that are forming the fabric of India’s latest crisis of democracy. I will unpack some of the rhetoric behind the government’s drive to grasp the individual, and make the citizen visible to the state in an unprecedented manner. I will also discuss my experiences working with civil society in India, and the tools and techniques used to engage with policy formation and to adapt to the future of advocacy.

A dual-qualified lawyer, Malavika Jayaram spent eight years in London - with global law firm Allen & Overy in the Communications, Media & Technology group, and then with Citigroup. She relocated to India in 2006, and wears 3 hats as a practising lawyer, a Fellow at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) and a PhD scholar. As a partner at Jayaram & Jayaram, Bangalore, she focuses on corporate/tech transactions and has a special interest in new media and the arts. At CIS, Malavika collaborates on projects that study legislative and policy changes in the internet governance and privacy domains. As a PhD scholar, she is looking at data protection and privacy in India, with a special focus on e-governance schemes and the new biometric ID project.

A graduate of the National Law School of India, she has an LL.M. from Northwestern University, Chicago. She is on the advisory board of the Indian Journal of Law & Technology and is the author of the India chapter for the Data Protection & Privacy volume in the Getting the Deal Through series, launched this year. She is one of 10 Indian lawyers featured in “The International Who's Who of Internet e- Commerce & Data Protection Lawyers 2012” directory.

She is currently running a research project for Internews, studying internet policy in India. This will produce a landscape overview and interviews with various stakeholders in this domain.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/global-asc-upenn-events-indias-civil-liberties-crisis

Internet Censorship, Surveillance, and Corporate Transparency

praskrishna — 2013-03-25T10:29:50Z

Google’s Dorothy Chou will be in conversation with international experts Annenberg School of Communication, St., Philadelphia, on April 3, 2013, from 4.30 p.m. to 6.00 p.m. Malavika Jayaram is participating in the event as a panelist. The event is organised by Center for Global Communication Studies and Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania.

Read full details of the event was published on the website of Center for Global Communication Studies.

Since mid 2010 Google has been publishing data about the requests it receives from governments to remove content or hand over user data. This regularly updated Transparency Report reveals alarming trends: Government surveillance is on the rise, everywhere. Even worse, a large number of government censorship and surveillance requests are of dubious legality even according to the host countries’ own laws. In a world where citizens increasingly rely on digital products and services owned and operated by private corporations for their civic and political lives, the implications for human rights and democracy around the world are troubling.

Dorothy Chou, Senior Policy Analyst who leads Google's efforts to increase transparency about how it responds to government censorship and surveillance demands, will discuss Google's Transparency Report with Rebecca MacKinnon, Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation and an international panel of experts:

Ronald Lemos, the Director of the Center for Technology and Society at the Fundação Getúlio Vargas (FGV) School of Law in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Hu Yong, Associate Professor, Peking University School of Journalism and Communication

Malavika Jayaram, Fellow, Center for Internet and Society, Bangalore and Annenberg CGCS;

Gregory Asmolov, PhD Candidate, London School of Economics; Global Voices "RuNet Echo" contributor and Russian social media expert.

This event is part of the cross-disciplinary, university-wide “New Technologies, Human Rights, and Transparency” project funded by the university’s Global Engagement Fund and hosted by Annenberg’s Center for Global Communications Studies in partnership with Wharton, PennLaw, Engineering, and the School of Arts and Sciences. The project aims to examine the relationship between government and corporate power in today’s digitally networked world, bringing together research partners from across the university and around the world to develop a methodology to evaluate and compare the policies and practices of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) companies as they affect Internet users’ freedom expression and privacy in a human rights context.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/global-asc-upenn-events-internet-censorship-surveillance-and-corporate-transparency

Kannada Wikipedia Workshop, Mysore — Coverage in Prajavani

praskrishna — 2013-03-25T08:49:20Z

A Kannada Wikipedia workshop was organized by the Centre for Internet and Society in Mysore on March 24, 2013. Dr. U.B. Pavanaja participated in the event. Prajavani has published a report of the event on March 25, 2013.


Prajavani published a report of the Kannada Wikipedia workshop held at Mysore on March 25, 2013.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/kannada-wikipedia-workshop-report-in-prajavani

Korean Trans Cine-Media in Global Contexts: Asia and the World Event

praskrishna — 2013-03-21T10:31:35Z

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/korean-trans-cine-media-in-global-contexts.pdf

Korean Trans Cine-Media in Global Contexts: Asia and the World

praskrishna — 2013-03-21T10:32:40Z

This conference to be held from March 27 to 29, 2013 is being organized by Trans - Asia Screen Culture Institute, Cinema Studies, Korean National university of Arts, Korean Film Archive and Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre Museum, Waseda University.

Click to read about the conference published on the website Trans-Asia Screen Culture Institute

Nishant Shah will be participating in this event as part of our collaboration with the Inter Asia Cultural Studies consortium, to launch a new research cluster around trans-cine-media in the global context along with Kim SoYoung and Earl Jackson. He will speak on "The Asian Intercourse : Reimagining the Inter-Asia moment through ‘net-porn’ In networks".

The conference is a response to what we see as a new epistemic shift, a new possibility for the reading of Korean cinema and Korean media texts. The previous “discovery” or “acceptance” of Im Kwon-Taek at Cannes, and the ambivalent Japanese obsession with “Winter Sonata” are moments in a recognition of Korean textual achievements that, at best, maintain a hierarchical (and highly circumscribed) “tolerance” of Korean cultural production. The subsequent achievements of other directors such as Pak Chan-wook and Kim Ki-duk deepened and expanded the hermeneutic situation internationally – a tendency that has continued in recent European conferences dedicated to Korean auteurs and most recently, Kim Ki-duk’s receiving the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.

Moreover, Korean transformations of Japanese media texts have advanced a new kind of alchemical conversation across media that engages both the present and the past in new, multi-vocal ways. Beyond these mass-media events that can capture the attention of journalists, is the years of work of the scholars involved with the decentering of film history and canon in the work of scholars such the late Paul Willemen. And in addition to the “external” legitimation of the international film festival circuit are the internal developments within Korean cinema – namely the recent resurgence of a vital and engaged independent cinema – in both fiction documentary films. These events create an environment in which we can return anew to Korean cinema- past, present, and future – to read and realize in ways not-here-to-fore possible.

These readings will include taking Korean cinema seriously on its own terms, but also to set Korean cinema in dialogue with other East Asian Cinemas in a global context.

The outcome of the conference will be contributed to the project entitled as “A Compendium of History of Korean Cinema” sponsored by National Research Foundation of Korea.

Click to download the full program.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/trans-review-korean-trans-cine-media-in-global-contexts

DML 2013 – Fourth Annual Conference

praskrishna — 2013-03-21T09:52:59Z

The fourth annual conference – DML2013 – was organized around the theme “Democratic Futures: Mobilizing Voices, and Remixing Youth Participation” and was held between March 14-16, 2013 in Chicago, Illinois. The Centre for Internet and Society was one of the sponsors for this event.

The Digital Media and Learning Conference is an annual event supported by the MacArthur Foundation and organized by the Digital Media and Learning Research Hub located at the UC Humanities Research Institute, University of California, Irvine.

We had a special track that ran through the conference on "Whose Change Is It Anyway? Futures, Youth, Technology And Citizen Action In The Global South (And The Rest Of The World)". Noopur Raval was one of the 16 presenters that we had selected on the tracks. Nishant Shah was one of the members in the Conference Committee.

Whose Change Is It Anyway? Futures, Youth, Technology And Citizen Action In The Global South (And The Rest Of The World)

Whose Change Is It Anyway? sought to explore new entry points into the discourse on youth, technology and change, with a specific focus on (but not restricted to) the Global South and the last decade of citizen action. This conference track sought to fashion frameworks and structures that provide new ways of interpreting and understanding outcomes that technology mediated citizen action has to offer, as well as the future of citizen led interventions: What enables, catalyzes and moves young people to reinvent themselves as citizen actors? What are the interventions and narratives of change that fail to fit into a ‘success’ rubric, but are still significant in the processes of change they initiate? How do we understand these ‘new’ events as hybrids, connecting with existing histories, contexts, media and technologies in their regions? Is there an alternative discourse that does not necessarily adopt frameworks arising from the knowledge centers of the West? Do these discourses help challenge and rework global vocabularies by offering new ways of looking at citizen action and change? The track invited provocative hypotheses, in-depth analyses, dialogues and contestations around these ideas, through innovative interactive presentation formats. The dialogue was informed by experimental and new methods of information and knowledge production, focusing on the Global South and its larger transnational contexts at the junctures of youth, technology and change.

For more info on the event, click here

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/dml-hub-net-dml-2013