Centre for Internet and Society

India: obscene pics of gods require massive human censorship of Google, Facebook

praskrishna — 2012-01-17T09:46:25Z

It's hardly the sort of Internet policy statement one hopes to hear from judges in major democracies. "Like China, we can block all such websites [who don't comply]," Justice Suresh Cait told Facebook and Google lawyers in India yesterday. "But let us not go to that situation."

No, let's not. But it's what the government wants if Internet companies won't start screening and censoring all user-generated material on social network and user-generated content sites. And they'd better do their screening by hand, not with machines.

The New York Times reported last December that India's Telecommunications and Human Resources Development Minister, Kapil Sibal, has been battling hard with Internet companies on pre-emptive screening and censorship.

About six weeks ago, Mr. Sibal called legal representatives from the top Internet service providers and Facebook into his New Delhi office, said one of the executives who was briefed on the meeting.

At the meeting, Mr. Sibal showed attendees a Facebook page that maligned the Congress Party’s president, Sonia Gandhi. “This is unacceptable,” he told attendees, the executive said, and he asked them to find a way to monitor what is posted on their sites.

In the second meeting with the same executives in late November, Mr. Sibal told them that he expected them to use human beings to screen content, not technology, the executive said.

The Internet companies insist that they can't possibly pre-screen everything that goes up. If something truly is illegal under local laws, they are generally willing to take it down when a court rules.

The main concern is obscenity (though criticism of government officials appears to touch a sore spot, too); in the current case against Facebook, Google, and others, the obscenity involves pictures of gods, goddesses, and Mohammed.

"At present it's obscene images of Gods and Goddesses, tomorrow it can be an image of someone in your family posted online. There has to be some control," Justice Cait said at yesterday's hearing. He allowed the case against the Internet companies to proceed.

Who's pressing for the court case? A journalist. NDTV has a new interview with him, in which the man presses for quick action. (Note: the actual interview portion is not in English.)

Can we censor dissent while we're at it?

Between January and June 2011, India requested that Google remove 358 bits of content by filing 68 different complaints. One was from Google Maps (for "national security"); almost every other was from YouTube, social network Orkut, and Google's Blogger platform. Almost none came with a court order.

"We received requests from state and local law enforcement agencies to remove YouTube videos that displayed protests against social leaders or used offensive language in reference to religious leaders," Google explained.

"We declined the majority of these requests and only locally restricted videos that appeared to violate local laws prohibiting speech that could incite enmity between communities. In addition, we received a request from a local law enforcement agency to remove 236 communities and profiles from Orkut that were critical of a local politician. We did not comply with this request."

This is hardly an inspiring track record. While in public the companies are criticized for obscenity, Google's most recent records show only 3 requests to remove pornographic material. Government criticism and defamation were actually the two largest categories of requested material.

As the Financial Times "beyondbrics" blog notes, the Internet companies are coming under increasing attack for content they host, despite the vagueness of the demands for censorship. For instance, "Last month, a lower court had ordered the sites to remove all 'anti-social' or 'anti-religious' content by February 6. As Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet & Society, told beyondbrics last month, it’s difficult to establish exactly what is anti-religious: for example, the Hindu profession of belief in multiple gods is blasphemous to Muslims, Christians and Jews."

Photograph by Diganta Talukdar

The blog post by Nate Anderson was published in ars technica on 14 January 2012

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/obsecene-pics-of-gods-require-massive-human-censorship

Is India Ignoring its own Internet Protections?

praskrishna — 2012-01-17T05:33:40Z

India’s information technology law of 2008 limits the liability of Internet companies for material posted on their Web sites by users, including anything government regulators deem objectionable. The firms are supposed to be notified of offensive content — by users or the authorities — and then remove it when legally warranted.

If that’s how the system is supposed to work, then why did the Indian government just sanction a criminal lawsuit against Google, Facebook and 19 other companies that all but ignores those protections in the information technology law?

That is one of the most puzzling elements of the legal drama over free speech on the Web that is unfolding in New Delhi.

The case against the companies, brought by Urdu weekly journalist Vinay Rai, accuses them of violating various provisions of India’s criminal code by allowing material that is mocking or offensive to religious and political figures to stay on their social networking sites. There are charges of inciting communal passions and disturbing public order – catchall stuff normally meant to give police tools to rein in hooligans.

The punishments for these criminal offenses can include several years of jail time and stiff fines. That these elements of the criminal code are now being used to target Internet companies is somewhat bizarre, especially when one considers the apparently careful lawyering that went into drafting protections for Internet companies a few years ago.

As Google and others fight the charges – today they are continuing an appeal in Delhi High Court to quash the case – they will likely make the case that the courts cannot ignore India’s I.T. law. “It isn’t a trivial defense – the court cannot dismiss it,” said Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society, a civil liberties advocacy group. “The I.T. act provides immunity to (Internet companies) and that should be the default starting position.”

A spokesman for India’s telecom ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment. We’ve described Mr. Rai’s rationale for filing the lawsuit in a separate post.

The crackdown on Web companies couldn’t come at a worse time for the emerging Internet sector in India, which many analysts believe has a potential to grow from about 100 million users to more than 300 million within a few years if nurtured. Facebook and Google representatives declined to comment on the case.

The protections for Internet firms are fairly clear in Section 79 of the 2008 law, known as India’s I.T. Act Amendments. An “intermediary,” or Internet firm, “shall not be liable for any third party information, data or communication link.” There are several caveats, of course – the company can’t initiate or solicit the harmful post and can’t coordinate with the offender. Under the rules that India put into place last April to implement the act, companies must remove material that is “grossly harmful, harassing, blasphemous, defamatory” as well as anything “ethnically objectionable, disparaging” or “otherwise unlawful in any manner.”

Internet companies and civil society advocates weren’t happy with those guidelines, finding them far too draconian and subjective. But at least the law required that the companies be notified of such content and be given a chance to remove it within 36 hours. (The punishments for not removing offensive content within 36 hours would depend on the underlying laws governing that content in India; in general, prison time and fines would both be possible.)

In the case of the Vinay Rai lawsuit, such procedures don’t appear to have been followed. Google has told the court it hasn’t seen the allegedly offensive material or been notified about it. Mr. Rai says he didn’t flag the content to Google or others, because he believed his duty as a citizen was to notify the government.

What was the point of passing the I.T. law if it’s being swept to the side?

The article by Amol Sharma was published in the Wall Street Journal on 16 January 2012

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/is-india-ignoring-its-own-internet-protections

India internet: clean-up or censorship?

praskrishna — 2012-01-16T11:17:11Z

Is India going the way of China? Not when it comes to development indicators. Or enhanced infrastructure. Or economic power. But in another category at which Beijing excels: web censorship.

That was the implication of a ruling on Thursday from Justice Suresh Kait, of the Delhi High Court, who told lawyers for Facebook India and Google India that unless they develop mechanisms to regulate “offensive and objectionable” material on their web sites, India is prepared to take drastic measures, according to the Hindustan Times. “Like China, we will block all such websites,” Kalit declared.

According to the IBN news channel, the government seems to be moving to make good on those threats:

Government sources said on Friday that the Delhi High Court was likely to issue sanctions to prosecute social networking sites Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo India in the ongoing spat between the companies and the Government of India over content regulation.

“Prosecution for some of the non-bailable offences requires prior sanction of the government, which has been sought and it is likely to be granted,” the sources said.

[…]

Summons are to be sent to the companies through the Ministry of External Affairs directing their heads to appear before court on March 13, which is when the next hearing will take place. The Ministry of Communication and Information Technology will file its affidavit by this evening.

Clearly there’s trouble in “the world’s largest democracy”.

Kalit’s pronouncement is the latest turn in a story that broke last month, when the New York Times reported that telecoms minister Kapil Sibal had met with executives from Google, Facebook, Yahoo and Microsoft to discuss the pre-emptive removal of “offensive material” – including, it seems, web pages that had criticized the leader of his party, Sonia Gandhi.

As beyondbrics reported, Sibal then gave a combative press conference where he said: “I believe that no reasonable person aware of the sensibilities of large sections of communities in this country and aware of community standards as they are applicable in India would wish to see this content in the public domain,” referring to “offensive material” he had shown some reporters prior to the conference.

He added, repeatedly, that the government did not believe in censorship.

Apparently, Kalit didn’t get the memo.

Lawyers for the internet giants appeared before the judge to request the dismissal of a criminal complaint filed by a private citizen in a lower court under sections of the Indian law that cover “sale of obscene books etc”, “sale of obscene objects to young person etc” and “criminal conspiracy”. The judge declined.

“The magistrate of the trial court had observed that the material submitted by the complainant contained obscene pictures and derogatory articles pertaining to various Hindu gods, Prophet Muhammad and Jesus Christ”, IBN reported.

According to the Hindustan Times:

On behalf of Google India, senior counsel Mukul Rohatgi said it was humanly not possible to filter or monitor the postings of obscene, objectionable and defamatory material. “Billions of people across the globe, post their articles on the website. Yes, they may be defamatory, obscene but cannot be checked,” he said.

A Google spokesperson issued a statement last night, saying, “We did file a petition before the Delhi High Court. The Court has now issued a notice to the petitioner. We can’t comment at this stage.”

Today, the company issued a clarification:

Today the Court has merely directed the petitioner to serve the Court order to the overseas entities at their respective addresses and has adjourned the matter to March 13th.

Last month, a lower court had ordered the sites to remove all “anti-social” or “anti-relgious” content by February 6.

As Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet & Society, told beyondbrics last month, it’s difficult to establish exactly what is anti-religious: for example, the Hindu profession of belief in multiple gods is blasphemous to Muslims, Christians and Jews.

A lower court had directed the central government to take “immediate appropriate steps” and file a report by January 13.

It has not been released yet, but later on Friday you can Google it. Take the opportunity – if India goes the way of China, it might prove more difficult in future.

This blog post by Neil Munshi was published in beyondbrics on 13 January 2012

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/clean-up-or-censorship

Twists and turns of the SOPA opera

praskrishna — 2012-01-16T09:48:02Z

Proposed DNS filtering threatens the core protocol on which the Internet's universality depends, writes Deepa Kurup in this article published in the Hindu on 15 January 2012. Sunil Abraham is quoted in this.

As the debate over piracy and copyright infringement on the web hots up in the United States, with the Government seeking to clamp down on intellectual property rights violations online, Internet majors Reddit, Wikipedia and others are planning a complete “Internet blackout” of their services for 12 hours on January 18.

This is in protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), introduced in the House of Representatives last year, and a related legislation in the U.S. Senate, the Protect IP Act.

The way the debate is playing out pits the large media corporations — movie houses, record companies and other IP holders — against ‘Internet users', backed by powerful Internet intermediaries such as Google and Yahoo!, who also stand to lose in a clampdown on websites and services that host content that violates U.S. copyright laws.

Global Relevance

Significantly, the proposed law, backed by big business interests, equips the U.S. Government to act against any website hosting content that it believes infringes copyright, even if hosted overseas. This makes SOPA relevant, globally.

The proposed action could involve domain name system (DNS) filtering or blocking, directing advertisement providers and web payment services to stop doing business with the host and preventing search engines from linking to the site. Penalties for simply streaming copyrighted content, such as movies, personal recordings of television shows or even a clipping of your favourite pop song, could be up to five years.

On the technology side, experts have argued that the proposal to allow DNS filtering (or blocking) can potentially weaken and destabilise the Internet. DNS servers convert every request made in a human-friendly languageto an IP address that computers and networks understand. Now what SOPA proposes is that at this DNS server level, when a request is made for “rogue sites”, it is redirected.

Technically, experts believe that this will have huge implications of the stability of the internet. A whitepaper titled ‘Technical concerns raised by DNS filtering requirements', authored by technology experts, claims that while this will promote more techniques to circumvent the DNS, it threatens “the ability of DNS to provide universal naming, a primary source of the Internet's values as a single, unified, global communications network.”

The DNS is a protocol that allows for universality, which lies at the core of the internet, enabling it to grow and become the important, borderless medium it is today. Further, such blocking would make it tough to distinguish between a resolution failure and a request from a hacked server, creating security concerns. It would also be counterproductive to existing Internet security protocols.

A Firewall

While opponents of the Bill have attacked it as an attempt to create a “firewall” — akin to or even worse than the infamous one that China has for its citizens — they point out that it is at stark odds with the oft-repeated stance of the U.S. on “Internet openness”.

Companies in the business of providing web services are, understandably, against the law as it allows the Government to block access to any intermediaries that facilitate or host any material that infringe on copyrights. This affects every service that hosts user-generated content.

In an advertisement published in The New York Times, nine internet majors including eBay, Google, Yahoo! And LinkedIn, urged the Government to find “targeted ways” to combat “foreign rogue websites” while preserving “the innovation and dynamism” that make the internet a driver of “growth and job creation”. Ironically, the Government too seeks to address protection of jobs and economic interests through this legislation.

Politics of the Internet

In terms of infrastructure, the U.S. controls critical web resources. Contrasting this to the Chinese firewall that blocks content for users within its jurisdiction, the U.S. decision to redirect a link can act as a “global block”, explains Sunil Abraham, director of the Centre for Internet and Society. Physically, seven of 13 root servers (or clusters) that run the DNS system, are located in the U.S., he points out. So, for an Indian citizen who chooses to record the latest episode of Dexter and stream it online, it means that both his site and the intermediary could be blacked out, in a post-SOPA world. Currently, the IP holder would have to take the trouble of reporting or challenging this in an Indian court, Mr. Abraham explains.

In recent years, countries led by Brazil, India and China have been lobbying for a greater role for multilateral bodies in controlling the Internet. In 2010, the U.S. Government “liberated” the ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) from its direct control. But, bringing a law that allows it to come down heavily on “rogues” unilaterally, is being viewed as a step backwards.

For now, all eyes in the tech community are on the legislation, and the many debates surrounding it, which promise to be among the most controversial and interesting ones in technology in recent times.

Read the original published in the Hindu

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/twists-and-turns-of-the-sopa-opera

Wikipedia turns 11 today

praskrishna — 2012-01-16T09:41:30Z

The world's largest free encyclopaedia turns 11 on Sunday. To mark the occasion, the Wikipedia community will host events in seven cities across the country. The community is also celebrating the first anniversary of the Wikimedia India chapter.

On this occasion, the India chapter will launch a new portal (www.wikimedia.in) for easy access to Wikimedia sites in the Indian languages. Wikipedia is currently available in 21 Indian languages.

The India chapter is focussed on creating greater awareness of Wikipedia in Indian languages and to increase the volunteer editor base and Indian content through its initiatives. “The portal will make it easier to locate Indian language Wikipedias and other projects,” said Arun Ram, executive committee member of Wikimedia India.

The Bangalore event, open to all Wikipedia users, contributors and enthusiasts, is being held at the Centre for Internet and Society at Domlur (Bangalore).

Besides Bangalore, events are being held in Ahmedabad, Cuttack, Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai and Pune, all centres where Wikipedia editors or contributors are present in sizeable numbers.

‘Deepen engagement with students'

In order to address the complaint raised by the industry about students' “poor employability”, the Bangalore Chamber of Industry and Commerce organised a seminar in Bangalore on Wednesday.

A recent survey by the World Bank indicated that there was a “severe mismatch” between the skill sets required by the IT-ITES industry and what was available in graduates from Indian institutions.

S. Sadagopan, director, Indian Institute of Information Technology, said the level of engagement of the academic institutions with the students needed to be “reoriented and deepened”. “Equally important is the responsibility of the recruiters in changing their recruitment processes,” said Prof. Sadagopan. He added, “The question is, are you giving the recruits a challenging job?”

Award for networking major

Cisco announced that its Networking Academy has won the prestigious eINDIA 2011 jury choice award for the ‘Best ICT Enabled Skills Development Initiative'.

The award was conferred on Cisco Networking Academy in recognition of its efforts toward enabling students to develop valuable information, communications and technology skills for increased access to opportunities in the global economy, a release from the networking major said.

Speaking on the occasion, Bina Raj-Debur, regional head, Social Innovation Group, India and South Asia, said: “We are proud to receive this prestigious award. It is testimony to the continued efforts of the Networking Academy programme to make a positive difference to the skills-building efforts of the nation and the communities in which we live and operate. At Cisco, we aim to enhance the employability of youth through technology, enabling them to harness the enormous opportunities in the ICT domain. We are very pleased that our efforts have been recognised by industry and society alike.”

Help with transition to IPv6

Global IT major Hewlett Packard (HP) has signed a partnership agreement with the Government of Karnataka and the International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore, to conduct a pilot project that will help organisations in Karnataka through a smooth transition to Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6).

The current version of IP addressing, IPv4, is reaching its theoretical maximum of about four billion Internet addresses. IPv6 is the new Internet addressing protocol with the capacity to support 340 trillion addresses, a press release from HP said. This allows for the dramatic expansion of connected devices from computers and smart phones, to household electronics, industrial appliances, vehicles and commercial systems.

IPv6 also provides for improved quality and new applications like IP TV, telephony and ecommerce. The pilot project aims at identifying major challenges in IPV6 adoption, developing solutions to meet these challenges and actively promoting IPV6 adoption.

The news was published in the Hindu on 15 January 2012

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/wikipedia-turns-11-today

Design!PubliC — Innovation and the Public Interest

praskrishna — 2012-01-16T08:48:25Z

On the 14th of October, 2011, the Center for Knowledge Societies organized the second edition of the Design Public Conclave, a conversation on how innovation can serve the Public Interest. The conclave was held at the lovely premises of the National Gallery of Modern Art in Bangalore.

The conclave was highly interactive and brought together representatives from technology houses like Intel, GE, TCS, Infosys, and Seimens, with social sector organizations like Arghyam and funding agencies like the Gates Foundation and HIVOS. Officials from the National Planning Commission and Karnataka State Innovation Council were also involved. Speakers included the philanthropist Rohini Nilekani, interaction design expert Reto Wettach, policy advisor Ashwin Mahesh, design thinker M.P. Ranjan, among other experts from India, Sri Lanka, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Germany, the UK and the US.

The Conclave began with three panel discussions, each of which focused on the relationship between innovation and a specific sector of society: the private/corporate sector, the social sector, and the public/government sector. Each panel consisted of a moderator and four to six domain experts, but the audience was asked an encouraged to participate freely along with the discussants.

"When designing public and social initiatives, both structure and intuition are invaluable, and neither should be ignored in favor of the other." Sunil Abraham Centre for Internet and Society		"Where there is no trust, there will be no creativity, and therefore no innovation." Aditya Dev Sood Center for Knowledge Societies
"In startups, people are free to experiment without always being bogged down by commercialism, like in large corporations." Aditya Mishra Headstart Foundation			"When discussing the public interest, it is important to think about which public we’re talking about, and to specify whose interest we are working towards." Harsh Srivastava National Planning Commission
	"There is a general perception that the government doesn’t listen to us, but my perception is that not enough of us are trying to be heard." Ashwin Mahesh Mapunity
"There are many interest groups and each one believes that only their interests matter. We have to be able to compromise and collaborate." Rohini Nilekani Arghyam		"Design is like dancing while wearing handcuffs; you have to work with constraints and try and create the best possible solutions." Reto Wettach Interaction Design Studios
"Innovation is about designing something radically new, which transforms our experience of the world." M.P. Ranjan Design for India		"Public-private partnerships are often the best way to ensure that innovation happens in the public interest." Sneha Raman Center for Knowledge Societies

PANEL 1 Innovation and the Indian Corporation

This discussion focused on whether Indian corporations and how they can help bring about a culture of innovation. Panelists agreed that while Indian society is highly innovative, large Indian corporations are usually not.

The successes of large corporations often render them less willing to take risks. Also, the hierarchical decision-making structure of corporations can inhibit innovation, leaving little incentive or opportunity for subordinates to be creative.

Large corporations can play a substantial role, though, by collaborating with small entrepreneurs and working on social issues. This way, the technological expertise and infrastructural capabilities of large companies can be married with the empathetic, lived knowledge of grassroots innovators.

PANEL 2 Is Innovation in the Public and Social Sectors Possible?

This discussion focused on whether the public and social sectors can innovate. Panelists agreed that collaboration and participation are the key ingredients when innovating for the public interest. This also makes the entire process more transparent and hence keep power imbalances and misuse in check.

Private-public partnerships are the best means for innovation to happen, where governments can provide the policies and structures that support innovation, and private firms provide their expertise in developing solutions.

Another major concern that was brought up is the challenge of trust, the lack of willingness to take risks, and the fear of failure. These are all institutional challenges that need to be overcome before the social and public sectors can become capable of innovation.

PANEL 3 The Challenge of Startup Innovation

The panelists talked about startups in India and how people’s conception of them is often limited to technological products and services, largely because people are unaware that there can be startups for governance, for the social sector, for public services, and more.

They spoke about the need for a more robust and supportive startup ecology, for which the biggest problem now is no longer a lack of funding, but rather a lack of consumer belief and trust in startups. Additionally, cultural factors can contribute to the success or failure of this startup ecology: Indian society, for example, is too risk-averse and unforgiving of failure. There is, therefore, the need for an ‘innovation incubator,’ with the right architecture, guidance, mentorship, financial support and other necessary resources, to help make socially valuable startups happen.

PANEL 4 The Theory and Practice of Innovation

After lunch, panelists grappled with the question of whether innovation can be routinized, and if design is the means to do so. They talked about how good innovation necessarily stems from good design, which means adding meaningful value to a product or service.

Design can be seen as any expression of intentionality, rather than being relegated to the realm of the purely visual. All human beings, not only trained designers, are capable of designing, and erroneously think of ourselves as non-designers. This is especially true in social redesign, where citizens from any walk of life can contribute meaningful information and ideas. Hence the need for active community participation in service and policy design, as participation during the solutioneering process will mean fewer problems with implementation and realization.

In the afternoon, participants broke out into groups to brainstorm how innovation can help solve three grand challenges of Indian society. CKS researchers first presented information collected from field visits prior to the conclave in order to focus the session.

INCLUSIVE HIGHER EDUCATION	QUALITY MATERNAL AND CHILD HEALTHCARE	INDIA’S TOILET PROBLEM

Despite many government efforts, the number of students pursuing higher education in India is still dismally low. Reasons for this lie in a lack of access to institutes of higher education, insufficient finances and restrictive cultural practices and attitudes. In order to understand the challenge, CKS researchers and domain experts visited an alternative education center that utilizes omputers and online platforms to teach. Possible Solutions The success of online higher education lies in locally relevant solutions Human interaction is necessary to complement the technological interface. Create shared learning platforms to encourage collaborative learning. Insights Financial and cultural factors are the greatest barriers to education, especially for girls. Lack of awareness about opportunities, and an absence of local mentors. Language is the key barrier to using computers and the internet for education.	Maternal and child health in India is amongst the poorest in the world. This grim situation is preventable, however, with good health services, better dissemination of information, and by ensuring proper nutrition and care through pregnancy. CKS researchers conducted research on ante-natal healthcare in rural areas, in order to understand the the gaps in the delivery of these services. Possible Solutions More campaigns to make beneficiaries aware about the services they can avail. Offer incentives to healthworkers for providing better care to patients. Local government should be made stronger and more accountable. Insights Healthcare providers are three-fold: field healthworkers, public (government) clinics,and private clinics. Public clinics are cheaper but lower quality, while private clinics are expensive but are better equipped and offer better services. Field healthworkers are usually more trusted though they may be less knowledgeable.	74 percent of rural India still does not use toilets, which has wide-ranging implications on health, hygiene, safety, convenience, and privacy. The government introduced the Total Sanitation Campaign to bring toilets to all of rural India, but huge gaps in implementation still remain. CKS researchers and domain experts from Arghyam spent a day in the village of Dandi Kanahalli to understand toilet usage patterns from different respondents. Possible Solutions Support more NGOs working in this area. Create communal toilets that target women Build stronger local government Insights Most respondents did not construct toilets until it became compulsory to do so. The main challenge to toilet construction is the lack of financial resources. Despite financial constraints, communal toilets are nonexistent.

INCLUSIVE HIGHER EDUCATION

QUALITY MATERNAL AND CHILD HEALTHCARE

INDIA’S TOILET PROBLEM

Despite many government efforts, the number of students pursuing higher education in India is still dismally low. Reasons for this lie in a lack of access to institutes of higher education, insufficient finances and restrictive cultural practices and attitudes.

In order to understand the challenge, CKS researchers and domain experts visited an alternative education center that utilizes omputers and online platforms to teach.

Possible Solutions

The success of online higher education lies in locally relevant solutions
Human interaction is necessary to complement the technological interface.
Create shared learning platforms to encourage collaborative learning.

Insights
Financial and cultural factors are the greatest barriers to education, especially for girls.
Lack of awareness about opportunities, and an absence of local mentors.
Language is the key barrier to using computers and the internet for education.

Maternal and child health in India is amongst the poorest in the world. This grim situation is preventable, however, with good health services, better dissemination of information, and by ensuring proper nutrition and care through pregnancy.

CKS researchers conducted research on ante-natal healthcare in rural areas, in order to understand the the gaps in the delivery of these services.

Possible Solutions

More campaigns to make beneficiaries aware about the services they can avail.
Offer incentives to healthworkers for providing better care to patients.
Local government should be made stronger and more accountable.

Insights
Healthcare providers are three-fold: field healthworkers, public (government) clinics,and private clinics.
Public clinics are cheaper but lower quality, while private clinics are expensive but are better equipped and offer better services.
Field healthworkers are usually more trusted though they may be less knowledgeable.

74 percent of rural India still does not use toilets, which has wide-ranging implications on health, hygiene, safety, convenience, and privacy. The government introduced the Total Sanitation Campaign to bring toilets to all of rural India, but huge gaps in implementation still remain.

CKS researchers and domain experts from Arghyam spent a day in the village of Dandi Kanahalli to understand toilet usage patterns from different respondents.

Possible Solutions

Support more NGOs working in this area.
Create communal toilets that target women
Build stronger local government

Insights
Most respondents did not construct toilets until it became compulsory to do so.
The main challenge to toilet construction is the lack of financial resources.
Despite financial constraints, communal toilets are nonexistent.

Quo Vadis

This edition of Design Public made it clear that innovation was a high priority for different stakeholders in society, but also that many players lack a clear understanding of how to actually go about the process of creating a new product or service. This would suggest that what is really required in India today is training around the fundamentals of innovation, including the process of understanding needs, developing concepts, protyping a solution and then further enhancing the new and innovative solution. In addition, we realized that many of the large scale challenges being faced by Indian society have to do with deficiencies of trust, inadequate avenues and channels for people to participate in decision making processes and that these are the more fundamental barriers to broadbasing a culture and associated practices of innovation in this society. These are the themes that we have resolved to work on further in future editions of Design Public.

A participant questions the panelists during a discussion on startup innovations

Opportunities for Sponsorship and Partnership

The Design Public consortium is now soliciting support and sponsorship from organizations, agencies and corporations that are particularly interested in these topics. Sponsorships follow the following tiered structure:

Institutional Sponsor US $10,000/-
Dinner Sponsor US $5,000/-
Event Partner US $3,000/-

We also welcome contributions of content and other kinds of support in kind that might allow the event to proceed to greater effect. These may include travel support for speakers, accommodation bursaries for worthy cases, student scholarships, sponsored dinners, paid breakfast tables and special expert and media access by arrangement.

To find out how to become part of the Design Public Consortium, please contact CKS team members in New Delhi and Bangalore as below:
New Delhi: Khushboo Hasija | khushboo.hasija@cks.in | +91 97115 18587
Bangalore: Anand Vijayan | anand.vijayan@cks.in | +91 93437 87505

December 2011 | Published by Center for Knowledge Societies

Jamuna Ramakrishna (HIVOS) in conversation with Dilini Wijeweera (Lirneasia)

Participants from the audience contribute to the discussion on policies and programs for innovation

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/design-public-2014-innovation-and-the-public-interest

Activists cry foul against Aadhaar

praskrishna — 2012-01-31T04:24:39Z

Biometric experts, jurists and social activists today urged the state government to immediately snap ties with the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) and stop offering Aadhaar numbers to residents.

Arguing that the creation of Aadhaar numbers had no legislative base as the National Identification Authority of India Bill, 2010, was pending with Parliament, civil society members said UIDAI’s project was unconstitutional.

They pointed out that the parliamentary standing committee had termed the biometric project “directionless”.

“The biometric database of citizens, management of which will remain in the hands of some private companies, severely infringes on the right of citizens to privacy. A rule relating to security of biometric data is yet to come up, but UIDAI is going on generating them,” said Usha Ramanathan, a jurist from Delhi at a meeting on the UID project here.

The meet on Aadhaar was convened in the state capital by the Indian Social Action Forum. The participants included social activist Dayamani Barla, director of Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society Sunil Abraham, biometric expert from Mumbai J.T. D’ Souza and member of Citizens’ Forum for Civil Liberties Gopal Krishna, among others.

The unique numbers are expected to be utilised extensively, from opening bank accounts to applying for LPG connections. UIDAI has already generated roughly 10 crore unique numbers.

Neither the Citizenship Act, 1955, nor Citizenship Rules of 2003 permit collection of biometrics, the experts added. “Both the UID and National Population Registrar projects adopt technology that risks national and individual security,” observed D’ Souza.

The news was published in the Telegraph on Thursday, 12 January 2012. Read the original story here

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/activists-cry-foul-against-aadhaar

"ಕನ್ನಡ ಮತ್ತು ತಂತ್ರಜ್ಞಾನದ ಜೊತೆ ಜೊತೆಗೆ..."

praskrishna — 2012-01-16T03:59:59Z

ನಾನು ಏನಾದರು ಮಾಡಬೇಕು ಎಂದುಕೊಂಡರೆ ಸಾಲದು, ಬನ್ನಿ, ಕಾರ್ಯೋನ್ಮುಖರಾಗಿ...

ಮೊದಲ ಹೆಜ್ಜೆ

ಕನ್ನಡ ಮತ್ತು ತಂತ್ರಜ್ಞಾನದ ಬೆಳವಣಿಗೆಯಲ್ಲಿ ಪಾಲ್ಗೊಳ್ಳುವ ಆಸೆಯೇ?

ಪ್ರತಿಯೊಬ್ಬ ಕನ್ನಡಿಗನಲ್ಲೂ ಕನ್ನಡಕ್ಕೆ ದುಡಿಯುವ ಬಲವಾದ ಆಸೆಯಿರುತ್ತದೆ. ಅಕ್ಷರ ಕಲಿಯುವ ದೆಸೆಯಿಂದ ಹಿಡಿದು, ದುಡಿದು ದೊಡ್ಡವನಾಗುವವರೆಗೂ ಹೇಗೆ ತನ್ನ ಆಸೆಯನ್ನು ಈಡೇರಿಸಿಕೊಳ್ಳುವುದೆಂಬ ಪ್ರಶ್ನೆ ಮನಸ್ಸಿನಲ್ಲಿ ಸುಳಿಯುತ್ತಲೇ ಇರುತ್ತದೆ. ಮಾಹಿತಿ ತಂತ್ರಜ್ಞಾನದ ಕ್ಷೇತ್ರದಲ್ಲಂತೂ, ಅದನ್ನು ಬಳಸುವ ಸಾಮಾನ್ಯನಿಂದ ಹಿಡಿದು, ತಂತ್ರಜ್ಞಾನದ ಜೊತೆಗೇ ದಿನದೂಡುವ ತಂತ್ರಜ್ಞನವರೆಗೂ ಎಲ್ಲರಿಗೂ ಕನ್ನಡ ಬಳಸುವ ಮತ್ತು ಬೆಳೆಸುವ ಆಸೆ ಖಂಡಿತ ಇರುತ್ತದೆ. ಅಂತಹ ಆಸೆಗಳನ್ನು ಮತ್ತೆ ಚಿಗುರಿಸಿ, ಮಾಹಿತಿ ತಂತ್ರಜ್ಞಾನದ ಬಳಕೆದಾರನ ದಿನನಿತ್ಯದ ಪ್ರಶ್ನೆಗಳನ್ನು ಉತ್ತರಿಸುತ್ತಾ, ಕನ್ನಡದ ತಾಂತ್ರಿಕ ಬೆಳವಣಿಗೆಗೆ ನಾಂದಿಯಾಗಲು ನಾವು ಇಡಬೇಕಾದ ‘ಹೆಜ್ಜೆಗಳು” ಅನೇಕ.

ದೈನಂದಿನ ಬದುಕಿನಲ್ಲಿ ತಂತ್ರಜ್ಞಾನದ ಮುಖೇನ ಕನ್ನಡದಲ್ಲೇ ವ್ಯವಹರಿಸಬಹುದೇ? ಕನ್ನಡದ ತಾಂತ್ರಿಕ ಬೆಳವಣಿಗೆ ಹೇಗೆ ಸಾಧ್ಯ? ಅದರಲ್ಲಿ ತಮ್ಮನ್ನು ತಾವು ತೊಡಗಿಸಿಕೊಳ್ಳುವ ಬಗೆ ಹೇಗೆ? ಕನ್ನಡ ಭಾಷಾ ತಂತ್ರಜ್ಞಾನ ಬೆಳವಣಿಗೆಯ ತೊಡಕುಗಳ ನಿವಾರಣೆ ಸಾಧ್ಯವೇ? ತಂತ್ರಾಂಶಗಳು ನಡೆಯಬೇಕಿರುವ ಹಾದಿಯ ಕಿರು ಪರಿಚಯ ಎಲ್ಲಿ ಸಿಗಬಹುದು? ಇದಕ್ಕೊಂದು ಸಮುದಾಯವಿದೆಯೇ? ಈ ಸಮುದಾಯ ಅಭಿವೃದ್ದಿಯ ಪರಿಕಲ್ಪನೆ ಏನು? ಇತ್ಯಾದಿ ಪ್ರಶ್ನೆಗಳಿಗೆ ಉತ್ತರ ಕಂಡುಕೊಳ್ಳುವ ಸಲುವಾಗಿ ‘ಹೆಜ್ಜೆ’ ರೂಪಿತಗೊಂಡಿದೆ.

ಮಾಹಿತಿ ತಂತ್ರಜ್ಞಾನದ ವಿವಿಧ ಸ್ತರಗಳಲ್ಲಿ ಕನ್ನಡದ ಬೆಳವಣಿಗೆಗೆ ಬೇಕಾದ ವಿಷಯಗಳ ಬಗ್ಗೆ ಅನುಭವಿ ತಜ್ಞರು, ತಂತ್ರಜ್ಞರು ತಮ್ಮ ಅನುಭವವನ್ನು ಹಂಚಿಕೊಳ್ಳುವುದರ ಮೂಲಕ ಪ್ರಾರಂಭವಾಗುವ ಈ ಕಾರ್ಯಕ್ರಮ, ಮೇಲೆ ಹೇಳಿದ ಅನೇಕ ಪ್ರಶ್ನೆಗಳಿಗೆ ಉತ್ತರವನ್ನು ಪಡೆದುಕೊಳ್ಳುವ ‘ಹೆಜ್ಜೆ’ಗಳ ಹಾದಿಯನ್ನು ನಿಮ್ಮ ಮುಂದೆ ತೆರೆಯಲಿದೆ.

ಬನ್ನಿ ನಮ್ಮೊಡನೆ ಜೊತೆಜೊತೆಯಾಗಿ ಹೆಜ್ಜೆ ಹಾಕಿ, ನಿಮ್ಮ ಬರುವಿಕೆಯನ್ನು ಇಂದೇ ಕಾಯ್ದಿರಿಸಿ.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/c95ca8ccdca8ca1-caeca4ccdca4cc1-ca4c82ca4ccdcb0c9cccdc9ecbeca8ca6-c9cca4cc6-c9cca4cc6c97cc6...

Future of Integrated Science Education in Higher Education in India

praskrishna — 2012-01-15T09:50:50Z

The Higher Education Innovation and Research Application (HEIRA) at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS) and the Centre for Contemporary Studies (CCS) at the Indian Institute of Sciences (IISc) hosted a two day workshop on 2 and 3 January 2012 on the Future of Integrated Science Education in Higher Education in India at the Centre for Contemporary Studies, IISc, where they invited a core group of academics and researchers from the leading technology and science studies institutes in the country, to look at the possibility of designing innovative and new curricula for undergraduate students in India.

The conversations across the two days involved participants from IISc Bangalore, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) Pune, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) Pune, Indian Institute of Technologies (IIT) Delhi, Ambedkar University Delhi, School of Women’s Studies Jadavpur University Kolkata, Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education Mumbai, SNDT College Mumbai, King’s College London, and the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) Bangalore. This report captures some of the key points that emerged in the dialogue while also looking at the possibility of building an integrated science course for undergraduate students in India.

Introduction

Within higher education in India, there has been a strong polarisation and hierarchy of disciplines, with the pure, applied and life sciences at the top, professional courses in the middle, and social sciences, humanities and arts education at the bottom of the stack. Despite the fact that elementary and formative education in schools is geared towards a broader approach leading to integration of knowledge and skills across disciplines, the higher education landscape is overtly hostile, with disciplinary boundaries very tightly drawn. However, in recent years, as disciplines have collapsed due to advances in research and pedagogy, there has been a blurring of disciplinary boundaries. Interdisciplinarity and multidisciplinarity have become the buzz-words that have regularly been invoked by new universities, modernising curricula and the innovative cross-disciplinary structures of knowledge production outside the university structure. We have, hence, seen various spaces like the Indian Institute of Sciences and the Indian Institute of Technologies, opening humanities and social sciences research and education spaces to introduce their students to other forms of knowledges.

Unfortunately, both these ideas — of interdisciplinarity and integration — have been very limited in their scope and creativity. Interdisciplinarity plays itself out in a hostile environment where social sciences produce a critique of the ‘hegemony of science’, “positivist world views” and ‘experimental models’ in knowledge industries and with natural sciences (applied and theoretical), discrediting the non-objective ways of understanding phenomena and the emphasis on the human, the affective and the experiential that marks methods and analyses in social sciences and humanities. The bridge between the two remains shaky, and most attempts at interdisciplinarity either stay within identifiable disciplines (physics-chemistry-biology coming together in molecular biology, or sociology, literature and political theory joining hands in cultural studies). There is very little attempt at cross-paradigm dialogues that can breach the gap between natural and human sciences, humanities and the arts. Even when efforts have been made at integration, there is a relationship of inequity that is presumed in the two disciplines, leading to each criticising each other, rather than providing a critique that can reflectively and critically examine the biases and prejudices of each discipline, opening it up to new forms of inquiry, methods and knowledges.

In a few parts of the world, programmes in science-technology-society (STS) – including but not limited to philosophy of science, history of science, epistemology of science, and critique of science — have tried to integrate the different models of knowledge and research. However, most of them suffer from the fact that the researchers are generally social scientists who critique sciences from the outside and vice versa. In the rare occasions when people from within sciences have tried to produce a critique of their own disciplines, these voices have been quelled under sciences’ privileged position that exempts it from the same scrutiny that other knowledge claims were historically put under. The vibrant and dynamic debates of STS studies, research and critique do not reflect strongly in the Indian education system where such interventions are still few and far between. It is in this space where there is a paucity of integrated science teaching and a growing need for the same that the participants at the workshop addressed.

Rationale

It is necessary to explain what integrated science actually means. Till now, the efforts at integration have been at either exposing science students to social and human sciences, or to train students in social and human sciences to critique existing philosophies, modalities and structures of knowledge produced through the pure and natural sciences. In each of the attempts, there is an endorsement of the Cartesian dualism (mind-body, nature-culture, objective-subjective, etc.) that led to the splitting of knowledge systems into these different schisms. Integrated science is an attempt by which a simultaneous critique of two disciplines which are not complementary to each other opens up a dialogue and a mode of inquiry where each discipline can reflect on its own practices and presumptions while learning from the other. In the process, what emerges is a curriculum that is not only about the content but about the methods of producing a critique of existing knowledge structures. Keeping this in mind, short four-day courses were proposed which would demonstrate this ambition and also produce new curriculum which can actually be taught in three different locations: IISER Pune, Central University of Jharkhand and the Central University of Tamil Nadu.

I give a brief synopsis of five of the courses proposed, that this core team is planning to develop over the next year, using the three locations as the sandbox where they can be structured, taught and built upon.

Course 1: Science-in-Making

What is Science? What is not? How do we make these distinctions from our own science practice and research? How do we unpack the different methods, models and modes of knowledge production within science and understand that they are not pre-given but are actually constructed and despite their alleged objectivity, construct certain world-views? The course aims to route the history of science by looking at the Cartesian dualism and tracing its way to the emergence and contestation of Newtonian Science.

Beginning with a distinction between mechanical causality and teleological causality, the course, through stories and scientific conflicts would introduce students to thinking about how the fundamental truth of their disciplines are actually made in error. Three illustrative stories of Mendel, Milliken, and Addington would be used as the basis of showing how, if these scientists had actually applied the rigorous error analysis protocols of contemporary science, they would not have been able to make the claims that they did, which have formed the basis of so many scientific disciplines.

This ends by exploring the Data-Theory connections with science and the actual practice of science to offer a way of looking at the role of creativity, affect, experience, instincts, subjectivity, etc. in the process of knowledge making within sciences, rather than leaving them in sterile controlled lab-like environments within which science is generally taught.

Course 2: Seeing what you see: Cognition and the human mind

One of the most contended concepts between natural and human sciences has been about ways and methods of looking, knowing and understanding. Cognition studies helps complicate the picture from both the disciplines by positing a series of questions: What KIND of mind are you trying to study? How has the mind been accounted for in human history? Social sciences have dealt with this question by turning it into one of human behaviourism where as the natural sciences have deployed an algorithmic reductionism by concentrating on localising parts of the brains to establish catalyst-effect relationships.

The course aims to look at modern theories of mind and brain studies to show how they are infinitely plastic and cannot be localised. The attempt is to break away from the hierarchical neuronal model and introduce the students to the brain as complex, plastic, and dynamic. Drawing from life and biological sciences as well as psychology and artificial intelligence studies, the effort is to show how the methodological departures in each field produce a certain way by which we see ourselves and the world around us.

It ends by looking at the problems and the possibilities of the two popular models of understanding the human mind – The Mind that Thinks and the Mind that Dreams. Opening up sciences to questions of affect and empathy and expanding horizons of social sciences to look at theories of evolution and physiology, by locating them on the site of digital technologies, will help build better models of understanding the human mind-brain.

Course 3: Health, Technology and Bio-ethics

Technologies of health care are often posited to us as benign and for our own good. Questions of ethics – unless they ‘grossly violate’ concepts of life – are never factored into the practice of these technology mediated practices. This course wants to unravel the ‘truths’ and ‘knowledges’ of technologies of health care in order to look at the texts, institutions, attitudes and practices that construct health practices and how they gloss over the question of ethics.

Taking the clinic, the experience of health care, the role of the patient in healing and the hidden role of technologies, from eugenics to assisted death, the course takes the students through different discourses that rest on technology-nature debates in order to understand what it means to be human within a network of health care. Foregrounding the human over the patient, it then looks at the science-experience binary to offer alternative ways of thinking about technology-body-life relationships. It also unravels the ‘romance of science’ and the need to factor it out of our attitudes and practices with the digital technologies of care and life.

Course 4: National Technologies & Technologies of the Nation

In the history of science, the abstraction of facts and experiments from the larger socio-political contexts is accompanied by the abstraction of skills and knowledge from the larger scientific intellectual. How do we re-tell the story of conditions that made certain kinds of sciences possible and validated? How do we see the role of the nation state in promoting, shaping and endorsing certain kinds of technologies and technological choices? This course looks at the alternative history of science to examine different instances when India has thought of itself as a scientific nation.

Beginning with the colonial encounter and technologies of biometric sciences – photography, cranial measurements, surveys, etc., the course looks at how different technologies of the personal to the massive industrial projects like postal services, trains, etc., help establish the sovereignty of a nation state. The second instance it examines is the imagination of India as a nuclear state, to see how the history of technologies is also a history of war, violence and terror.

The third instance is the instance of liberalisation and the ways in which economic choices shaped the telecommunication wave initiated during the Rajiv Gandhi era. It examines the ways in which the material presence of TV, telephones, ISD centres, etc., change the ways in which we understand and experience the nation. The course ends by looking at the rise of the digital and the internet, and how, in the era of digital globalisation, we have new questions like food security, bio informatics, etc., which get mediated by these technologies.

Course 5: Sociology of Science and Science in Society

How do science and scientists work? What are the kind of work cultures and ethos that they belong to? How do we understand their practice while being outside of it? What happens when we are inside the space? These are the questions that serve as a catalyst for this course. The main ambitions of the course are two-fold:

To reflect upon practice of science – Looking at how science is done. What we get taught is a series of rote skills and methods without actually looking into how the scientific method is constructed and what does it critique in its practice.
To see how science is received – There is a social context to science which is rarely attributed to the science itself. While there is study of how science contributes to society, there is little awareness on how science is structured by its reception in various circles – policy, regulation, social discourse, arts, cultures, expectations, popular media, speculative fiction, etc.

The course begins with Descartes and Bacon to explain the cause-and-effect structure of the experimental method within the narrative of science. It introduces the notion of ‘magic of science’ to look at the ideas of secularism, democratization, patronage, wonder, creativity, etc. which are built into the very structure of scientific discovery and technological innovation. In the process, it seeks to dismantle the positivist presumptions of science and technology – logic, reason, experiment etc., – and look at contesting and complementary accounts of reality which accompany scientific discourse.

Introducing the coupling of development and process of science as a constructed one, by looking at the different kinds of resistances which it has faced and how it is changed to negotiate with those resistances, it seeks to make a distinction between the scientific intellectual and pragmatic contexts of science and bring together these two trajectories to understand our practice better.

Next Steps

Each of these courses is going to begin as a four-day module which can be taught to undergraduate students at CUJ in the coming year.
A detailed course description with bibliography, module objectives, methodologies, annotations and class-notes will be created and compiled together to form an introductory course.
Each module, based on the teaching experience, feedback from students and peers, and more conversations, will be developed in a full-semester course, that will be accompanied by video lectures and podcasts by different instructors.
The ambition is to produce full teachable open courses for different locations, which can also be taught by people outside the core group.
Additional plans for doing faculty training for capacity building can also be thought of.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/integrated-science-education-in-india

NGO questions people's privacy in UID scheme

praskrishna — 2012-01-12T11:45:07Z

Taking a leaf out of the recommendations of the parliamentary standing committee on finance (SCF) that raised objections on the National Identification Authority of India Bill 2010, Delhi-based NGOs have called upon the Jharkhand government to stay the execution of UID projects in the state. Jaideep Deogharia's article was published in the Times of India on 11 January 2012.

Citing excerpts from the recommendations of the SCF, headed by BJP MP Yashwant Sinha, the NGO activists asserted that the MoU signed by the government on June 25, 2010, was without any legal and constitutional mandate.

This claim, however, remains unfounded as the UIDAI is functioning under an executive order of the department of planning and has no links with the NIDAI Bill. The issue was recently clarified by the director general and mission director of UIDAI when he addressed the media in the capital during his three-day visit.

Organizing a round table, report on SCF and its implications for Aadhaar project and National Population register for multipurpose National ID Card (MNIC),

Citizens Forum for Civil Liberties member Gopal Krishna said given the fact that the Election Commission had shortlisted 15 documents as evidence of identity and citizenship, there was no need to have the 16th instrument (read UID).

"It violates citizens' basic and constitutional right to privacy because collecting biometric information of an individual was limited to criminals," he said clarifying that even in case of prisoners, the fingerprint data is supposed to be deleted after acquittal under the Prisoner Identification Act.

JT D'Souza, an expert in biometrics technology, Mumbai, gave a presentation on how biometric information was vulnerable to exploitation. Using a finger print reader, he demonstrated fake finger prints being read by the machine. He said a fingerprint on a semi solid wax slab can be filled up with adhesive and allowed to set for eight hours. "Once the adhesive block is removed, it takes up the exact marks of finger prints using which any finger print reader can be fooled," he said.

Another participant, Sunil Abraham, director, Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, said there is no data protection or privacy law in place. "The UID project was allowed to march on without any protection being put in place," he said.

"On one hand, the government wants its citizens to be transparent by giving all their biometric and demographic data, but on the other hand, people in higher authorities are making every bid to conceal facts and function in a non-transparent manner," he said.

D' Souza also raised questions about the uniqueness of fingerprints as it has never been tested on a vast population. Citing examples from foreign countries where fingerprint studies have proved to be ineffectual in establishing non duplication, he said biometric data if hacked could be misused.

Read the original published in the Times of India

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/ngo-questions-peoples-privacy-in-uid-scheme

Revealed: Bangalore’s Basic Instincts

praskrishna — 2012-01-10T06:50:25Z

This is a first – a sex survey that focusses only on Bangalore. Sure, we have sex surveys telling us what the country thinks. But we wanted to know what our city thinks about the three-letter word. The article was published in the Bangalore Mirror on 8 January 2012. Sunil Abraham is quoted right near the end on why Bangalore might not figure in Google Search rends' top 10 India locations for porn-related queries.

And it wasn’t just sex that we discussed. We also quizzed people on fidelity – emotional and physical – homosexuality and love. Predictably, Bangalore’s responses were far from predictable.

Instant attraction

Cynics may scoff at love at first sight, but youngsters are not yet cynical. And love seems to be catching people very young with kids as young as 13 claiming to be struck by Cupid, leaving even school principals shocked.

D Shashi Kumar, principal of Blossoms School, says, “Even kids from fourth to sixth standard claim to have fallen in love at first sight. I am flabbergasted and it’s difficult to deal with this though it is normal even in primary schools. Where is the innocence that one associates with childhood? They seem to be in a hurry to grow up.”

But, given Bangalore’s overwhelming response in favour of instant love, we found someone with a happy ending. Hear it from Narasimha Murthy: “We looked, we smiled and I was a goner. It’s been eight years since we got married and that love still continues to make my heart beat faster every time I see her."

True love waits?

The rip-roaring double standards for the goose and gander does not exist more strongly in any other case. Despite the emergence of the metrosexual male, men still want virgin brides.

As a result, women find it difficult to confess about their previous sexual partners. For instance, 28-year-old Menaka has been married for more than four years, but her guilty conscience hasn’t given up. “I had a boyfriend in college with whom I was intimate. When I got married, I decided to let my past be and start afresh. Everybody has a past, why rake it up and ruin your future? The more practical reason for me to have made that decision was because I knew it would ruin my married life. But then, my husband recently confessed about his affairs before we got married and now I am consumed with guilt. But what would have been even more ideal was for me to have waited till I got married,” she says.

Masti after marriage?

A city that so overwhelmingly believes in love seems to think nothing of infidelity. It’s all about the thrill.

Abhishek Rana, for instance, is a self-confessed stud since college. His list of girlfriends was like a telephone directory and he managed to date multiple girls simultaneously. Finally, he tied the knot with his childhood sweetheart (who knew about his escapades) a couple of years ago and is quite happy with his marriage. But that has not stopped the Casanova. “If anything, I am going out with more women now than I did before I was married.

Back then, it was the thrill of watching me succeed with the ladies where the others failed. Now, it is the thrill of making sure I don’t get caught by my wife. It is forbidden so it makes it more attractive. I have to come up with innovative reasons when I go home late. Once I told her I was helping my Man Friday’s daughter with homework in the office and she bought it! It’s not that I’m not happy with my wife. But, you need to keep the zing in life,” says this alumnus of a top B-school in India.

Unhappy about gays

It has been nine long years since Adithya Rao’s (name changed) father has spoken to him. “I was 24 when I told him I was gay and that was it. He slapped me and that was the last time he ever spoke to me,” says this designer who takes his boyfriends home to introduce them to his mother. “She is the one who keeps peace in the family,” says Adithya.

Forget the decriminalisation of Article 377. Homosexuality is still taboo in the city. Nithin Manayath, who is gay and a very vocal activist for the rights of homosexuals, says it is the shame around the idea of being homosexual that is the main problem. This 33-year-old English literature professor says, “My extended family knows that I am gay because I have even appeared on television. But I still have overzealous aunts and uncles who tell me about this ‘nice girl’ that I should meet. So depending on who it is, I politely tell them to introduce me to guys instead. I don’t think it is the idea of men sleeping with men that has them in knots. Their problem is talking about it in public. Even my parents don’t really talk about it. My mum is sometimes okay talking about it. But dad prefers to just never bring it up.”

Live-in is in

For ad woman Ashima, 28, and HR professional Jeremy, 31, (names changed), after five years of being in a relationship, the next logical step was to move in together. Although the decision didn’t come easy with parents opposing it, the couple went ahead and moved in together in January last year. Ashima says she always wanted to live together with her partner before taking the plunge.

“When you are dating someone, it’s different. You don’t get to spend that much time together. It is only when you are living with a person that you can understand how your partner lives, know his personal hygiene, his moods, his habits. I thought living-in would be a good way to test our compatibility before deciding to get married,” said Ashima.

Jeremy says moving in was also a matter of convenience. “It made sense economically as well for us to move in together. Both our parents don’t live in the city but when we told them about our decision, their primary concern was what people would say,” he said.

Dr Bhupendra Chaudhury, consultant psychiatrist, The Apollo Clinic, Koramangala, says that live-in relationships are never permanent. “Live-in relationships are always transient. The good thing about a live-in relationship is that both the people in the relationship are not sure about where the relationship will lead. With a change in the demographic trend where most people are living away from their families, a live-in relationship is natural. With such couples, there is no family pressure and with both partners working, they can afford their own expenses and in most cases parents don’t know about it. A live-in relationship can either end in separation or marriage but I have never come across any couple who has lived together for long. It is never permanent,” said Dr Bhupendra.

In the case of Ashima and Jeremy, they passed the compatibility test and after a year of living together, they are ready to say ‘I do’ this month.

Pure emotions

When Uma Rao found out that her husband of 30 years had cheated on her with a young girl, it hit her hard. “At first, I thought he was going through a mid-life crisis and was looking to spice up his life. I imagined it was just a fling. But, when he said that he was in love with her, I was shattered,” says Uma who divorced her husband last month.

But what if it was the other way round? Rajesh, Uma’s former husband, says: “If Uma had had the affair, I don’t think I would have been able forgive her. I think it is a man-woman thing,” says the father of a 20-something daughter. Incidentally, he’s considering marrying his girlfriend who is also in her 20s.

One wild night

“Why not,” asks Pavithra (name changed), a college student who has already had multiple partners. “I am single and I have the right to enjoy life,” says the nubile young thing who does not label it as sexual promiscuity, but experimentation. “I don’t come from my mother’s generation to subscribe to the idea that you have to sleep with only your husband. Sexual attraction has nothing to do with love or other mushy emotions,” she says.

But for 39-year-old Manjunath, a photographer who indulges in one-night stands, “one-night-stands or a sexual partner is a much better option than dating somebody after you get married. It is too much risk with too little benefit. Enjoy the experience and move on.”

The work-shift rift

Any sexologist tell you that the most number of cases with marital problems are between couples who work in highly stressful jobs. “Couples are now older as people are more concerned about their careers. They do not realise that people have to give time to a marriage. I once had a couple come in after just two weeks of their marriage. While the wife worked in an advertising firm, the husband worked in a call centre.

So they had no time for each other and they realised this within two weeks of marriage. Relationships need patience and perseverance more than anything else. Finally, it came as no surprise that they were divorced within a year,” says Mamtha Shetty, a psychiatrist in the city.

Social network gets a poke

“My husband works in Mumbai and I work in Bangalore. We meet once in a month and Facebook is the only way I keep in touch with him and know what is happening in his life minute by minute. Now, most people think that we can do this over the phone, but we are so tired at the end of the day, I don’t have the energy to have a long-drawn conversation,” says Shefali Gupta.

There are many such couples, you realise, if you listen to Suma Gowda, a private marriage counsellor. “I had a case where the couple were on the verge of getting a divorce, because the husband had complimented his ex-girl friend on Facebook. But what made it even more weird was that their entire fight was going on on Facebook. They refused to talk about it at home whenever they got together. You need to understand that talking is what keeps the marriage going,” she says.

“The days of marriage as an institution are all but over. Today people see it as a compartment and that is where the problem begins. You have to emotionally invest in relationships. Couples today treat it like they can lock it away as a small part of their lives instead of looking at it as an anchor. They don’t have the patience to make a relationship work and it is not just marriage that I am talking about. It is almost like couples have a separate person for every need of theirs,” says Sushil Unni, a certified life coach.

Porn supremacy

Vinutha Reddy never understood why her husband would lock himself in his study. “My husband was uninterested in me sexually. We had had sex once in the six months that we were married. When I finally summoned the courage and told him that we need to get some help, he refused. After a lot of pressure from the family, he agreed, and it was then that he opened up about his fetish for middle-aged women. He would surf the internet all night to find these websites. There was nothing I could do about it,” says the homemaker who is still in the marriage since the last five years because of family pressure.

But despite this, Bangalore does not figure in the top 10 of porn-surfing cities in India while Mangalore makes it. Sunil Abraham, executive director, Centre for Internet Society, explains the science of surfing. “If you look at the Google trend or any other website, Bangalore does not figure among the top 10 cities that surfs for porn. But that does not mean that Bangalore does not surf porn. It only means that we have a very sophisticated surfer with a very specific type. They don’t go through Google or other websites. They know how to go about it. But whether it affects their personal lives is lot more complicated,” he says.

After a lot of family pressure, he opened up about his fetish for middle-aged women.

Read the original in Bangalore Mirror

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/revealed-bangalore2019s-basic-instincts

Facebook, Google face censorship in India

praskrishna — 2012-01-09T05:10:37Z

Religious leaders in India are on a collision course with social media websites including Google, Facebook and Yahoo. Two Indian courts recently asked these American companies as well as 19 other websites to take down “anti-religious” material. They are now required to report their compliance by February. Betwa Sharma's blog post was published in SmartPlanet on 5 January 2012. Sunil Abraham has been quoted in it extensively.

Information technology minister Kapil Sibal also met with a delegation of different faith groups who are worried that certain internet content could lead to communal discord. India’s 1.2 billion people are made up of majority Hindus but it also has the third largest population of Muslims as well as large number of Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains and other faiths.

India has an estimated 100 million internet users–the third largest in the world after U.S and China. The proposed restrictions are not at all comparable to China’s but is the internet free enough for the world’s largest democracy?

Some observers are suspicious that promoting religious or social harmony is a front for censoring the internet. Sunil Abraham, head of Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), said that "traditional intellectual property rights holders like movie studios, music companies and software vendors are trying to protect their obsolete business models by pushing for the adoption of blanket surveillance and filtering technologies."

"They have found common cause with both totalitarian and so-called democratic regimes across the world interested in protecting the political status-quo after upheavals like the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, Anonymous and the Pirate Party," he said.

The Indian government has tried to reassure the public that it is not trying to censor. Google’s Transparency Report, however, recorded that out of the 358 items requested to be removed by the Indian government from Jan-June 2011, 255 had to do with government criticism and only a handful with hate speech.

Sibal has also been speaking to executives from Facebook, Yahoo and Google in India. But no agreement has been reached on taking down hate speech. New rules, issued in April, require internet intermediaries like Facebook and Yahoo to check for “unlawful” material and take it down.

CIS will soon be releasing a report called “Intermediary Liability in India: Chilling Effects on Free Expression on the Internet 2011." For the report, CIS conducted a sting operation by sending flawed takedown notices to seven intermediaries. The results showed that six intermediaries over-complied with the notices. "From the responses from the intermediaries don’t have sufficient legal competence or unwilling to dictate resources to determine legality of an online expression," Abraham said.

"Various pretexts like national security, protection of children, crackdown on online crime and terrorism, defense against cyber war etc are used to compromise civil liberties and clamp down on freedom of expression," he added.

(Photo-facebook24h.com/Google images)

Read the original published by SmartPlanet

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/facebook-google-face-censorship-in-india

Tweet a Review of Digital AlterNatives with a Cause Books

praskrishna — 2012-01-07T14:42:32Z

Essays from 'Digital AlterNatives with a Cause?' books are getting reviewed. We invite everyone to participate in this book review event! Deadline: January 31

Read one essay from the 'Digital AlterNatives with a Cause?' books published by the Centre for Internet & Society and HIVOS.
Download PDFs here.

Post a review on your blog

Tweet the review's link on Twitter using #TweetReview and copy @cis_india

For e.g. "Unpacking the shiny packaging of Digital Natives" Book 2 To Think #TweetReview http://cis-india.org/digital-natives/unpacking-from-shiny-packaging @cis_india
Send us a link to your view

For more details about the event and the essays you want to review, email: nilofar.ansh@gmail.com

Tweet-a-Review is a monthly event organized as part of the 'Digital Natives with a Cause?' project.

Read previous reviews here

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/events/tweet-a-review

Trail of the Trolls

praskrishna — 2012-01-04T07:55:05Z

Bullying and abuse on the Internet is on the rise. Smitha Verma finds out why most offenders are going scot-free in this article published in the Telegraph on 4 January 2012.

When Shahana Nair Joshi, a young professional from Delhi, wrote a blog post titled ‘An Open Letter to a Delhi Boy’ last year, she was not prepared for the repercussions that followed. The post went viral overnight and received as many as 7,000 comments. Her blog post, which was a rant against the stereotypical Delhi man, became a topic of discussion on social networking sites, inviting with it a flurry of praise. But the fan following also brought with it an equal number of trolls (those who post inflammatory messages in an online community).

“Soon sexual insults, derogatory messages and inflammatory content became the norm,” says Joshi. “Then I started moderating the comments on my blog and went on to block trolls on Twitter,” says Joshi whose Twitter follower list jumped from 100 to 1,000 within a week. “One person even went to the extent of issuing a death threat to me over the phone,” she adds. “I decided to ignore the trolls as that is the best possible solution.”

Cases similar to Joshi’s are on the rise in cyber world. At a time when social networking sites are being asked to monitor and censor their content, bullying on the Internet is at an all time high. Trolls hide behind the anonymity that a social networking site provides to post derogatory comments and obscene remarks.

According to Supreme Court lawyer Pavan Duggal, harassment on social networking sites is emerging as one of the biggest problems in the online world. “Six out of 10 people aren’t aware of what constitutes a cyber crime. As a result they aren’t reported. Neither the victims nor the abusers know what is an offence,” says Duggal.

But even if a case of bullying on the Internet is reported, the law is somewhat fuzzy when it comes to bringing the offender to book. In India, social media come under a variety of civil and criminal laws. The Information Technology Act, 2000, tackles most cases related to cyber crimes. “However, we take recourse to not just the IT Act, 2000, and its amendments thereunder, but also to other legislation, such as the Indian Penal Code (IPC), the Trade Marks Act, the Copyright Act, etc., to tackle cyber crimes in India,” says Gurpreet Singh, Internet law head, Amarjit & Associates, Delhi.

Bullying on the Internet consists of abuses that may have emotional and physical repercussions. “Trolling provokes a non-productive argument and as of now it is not considered a criminal offence anywhere in the world,” says Sunil Abraham, executive director, Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore. However, most Internet users point out that trolling is out and out harassment that often verges on sexual harassment as well.

“I am routinely harassed by trolls. Even if I block them, they create a new twitter handle, start following me and post abusive comments,” says Joy Das, an advertising professional from Mumbai. His strong stand on several issues makes him a favourite among the trolls. Once Das had gone to the extent of filing a case and shared the details of the troll with the cyber crime cell department of the state police. He withdrew the case when the abuser retreated.

One of the main problems in taking action against a troll is that no legal definition of bullying is provided in Indian laws. As Karnika Seth, a Delhi-based cyber law expert, points out, “Even though the laws are in place, there is a clear lack of definition of offensive terms.”

Still, the laws do provide some relief in cases of harassment by Internet trolls. Usually, Section 509 of the IPC comes into effect when there is an intention to insult the modesty of a woman. “The offence also extends to an online medium,” says Singh of Amarjeet & Associates. “Besides Section 509, various other sections such as Section 503 and Section 504 of the IPC can also be invoked based upon the particular facts of a case,” adds Singh.

The networking sites on their part aren’t proactive when it comes to keeping a check on trolls. Twitter maintains that it is a communications platform, not a content mediator. “Removal of content does not in and of itself resolve the issue that led to the content being posted in the first place,” blogs the head of Twitter’s safety centre.

If you want to know the IP address and other details about the bully, you will have to file a police complaint and the copy should be sent to Twitter, informs Nabeel Ziyaan, a Bangalore-based entrepreneur and a contributor to Twitter’s ‘#140help’ section which deals with user queries. “In such cases, Twitter will work with the law enforcement agency,” says Ziyaan.

An accused can be booked for mental cruelty and sexual harassment under the provisions of the IPC as well as under Sections 67(a) & 67(b) of the IT Amendment Act, 2008, depending upon the facts and circumstances of the case. Section 66(a) lays down, for example, that any person who sends, by means of a computer resource or a communication device, any information that is grossly offensive or has menacing character or any information which he knows to be false, but for the purpose of causing annoyance, shall be punishable with imprisonment for a term which may extend to three years or with a fine which may extend to Rs 5 lakh or with both.

According to Section 67(a), whoever publishes or transmits in the electronic form any material which contains a sexually explicit act or conduct shall be punished with up to five years’ imprisonment and with a fine which may extend to Rs 10 lakh. And Section 67(b) hands out punishment for publishing or transmitting material depicting children in a sexually explicit act in an electronic form.

But law enforcement agencies are not always able to work out a way to track the trolls. “IP addresses can be spoofed using different software. In fact, innocent people can get punished if a troll hides under a proxy server,” says Seth.

Experts say that cyber laws need clarification and appropriate interpretation. The public should also be made aware of what constitutes a cyber offence. Until that happens, the trolls will, in all probability, trawl the Internet and maul Netizens at will.

Trail of the Trolls was published in the Telegraph on 4 January 2012

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/trail-of-trolls

Constitution of Group of Experts to Deliberate on Privacy Issues

praskrishna — 2012-01-04T07:49:37Z

It has been decided to constitute a Small Group of Experts under the Chairmanship of Justice A.P. Shah, Former Chief Justice, Delhi High Court, to identify the privacy issues and prepare a paper to facilitate authoring the Privacy Bill. The constitution of the proposed group and ToR are as follows:

Constitution of the Group

S.No.	Name	Designation
1	Justice A.P. Shah, Former Chief Justice, Delhi High Court	Chairman
2	Shri. R S Sharma, DG UIDAI	Member
3	Dr. Gulshan Rai, Director General CERT-In, DIT	Member
4	Sh. Rajiv Kapoor, JS, DOPT	Member
5	Representative, Department of Legal Affairs	Member
6	Sh. Som Mittal, President, NASSCOM	Member
7	Ms. Barkha Dutt, NDTV	Member
8	Dr. (Ms) Usha Ramanathan, Researcher & Advocate	Member
9	Sh. PraneshPrakash, Programme Manager, Centre for Internet & Society	Member
10	Dr. Kamlesh Bajaj, CEO, Data Security Council of India (DSCI)	Member
11	Dr. Nagesh Singh, Adviser, Planning Commission	Member
12	Sh. R K Gupta, Adviser (CIT&I), Planning Commission	Member

Terms of Reference
- To study the Privacy laws and related bills promulgated by various countries.
- To make an in-depth analysis of various programmes being implemented by GoI from the point of view of their impact on Privacy.
- To make specific suggestions for consideration of the DOPT for incorporation in the proposed draft Bill on Privacy.
The Chairman may co-opt other Members to the group for their specific inputs.
The expenditure towards TA/DA in connection with the meetings of the Group in respect of the official members will be borne by their respective Ministries/Departments. Domestic travel in respect of non-Official Members of the group would be permitted by Air India (economy class) and the expenditure would be met by the Planning Commission.
The group will be serviced by the CIT & I Division, Planning Commission.
The group shall submit its report by 31st March 2012.

(S Bose)
Under Secretary to the Government of India

To:
The Chairman and all Members of the Group of Experts
Copy forwarded to:

PS to Deputy Chairman, Planning Commission
PS to MOS (Planning, PA, S&T and ES), Planning Commission
PS to all Members of the Planning Commission
PS to Member Secretary, Planning Commission
Director (PC), IFA unit,Deputy Secretary (Admn.),Planning Commission
Administration/Accounts/General Branches, Library, CIT & I Division, Planning Commission
Information Officer, Planning Commission

(S Bose)
Under Secretary to the Government of India

Download the PDF we got from the Planning Commission.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/constitution-of-group-of-experts