Centre for Internet and Society

How Web 2.0 responded to Hazare

praskrishna — 2011-04-11T10:38:03Z

Social media often fails to give us time to form critical opinions. ‘It mirrored the spectacle that we were being fed by TV channels', says Nishant Shah in an interview with Deepa Kurup. This news was published in the Hindu on April 11, 2011.

By Day Two of the protests at Jantar Mantar, where social activist Anna Hazare was leading a fast-unto-death against corruption, most commentators were drawing fierce parallels with Tahrir Square, and other pro-democracy revolutions in the Middle-East.

Soon enough, the social media angle raised its head. After a quiet Tuesday, when television channels began to “play up” the protests, Wednesday morning saw social media platforms abuzz with chatter. Initiated by campaign organisers, the India Against Corruption team, Facebook profile badges, missed call campaigns and petitions (most notably on online campaign site Avaaz (where over 6.17 lakh have registered support) entered the scene.

In 140 characters, #janlokpal, #annahazare and the less gracious #meranetachorhain began to trend on Twitter. YouTube shows up around 2,000 video results, a lot of which are amateur videos shot by participants.

‘Causes' application requests for “brandishing corruption”, ‘Like'-this-revolution requests and Tweets on how you can indeed weed out the corruption demon with a Re-Tweet, were abound.

But did this social media buzz translate into more people on the ground? Did the Tweets and chain e-mails, that were doing the rounds fairly early on, manage to drive public opinion, or outrage, as in this case? On this, the jury is divided.

Crunching numbers

Even in the Middle-East, where we saw dictators plug social media channels, experts have downplayed the pivotal role attributed to social media. A tool for sharing information, its standalone role in triggering a revolution has been dismissed by many.

In the current context, this is even more difficult to establish because efforts appear to be all too scattered, unlike in Egypt where the ‘We are all Khaled Said' page by Wael Ghonim, appeared to be a focal point of sorts.

In comparison, a simple search on Facebook reveals over 20 pages that all have around 25,000-30,000 users on-board. Mr. Hazare's Facebook profile page has over 1.3 lakh ‘Likes'.

Gaurav Mishra, social media analyst, pegs the total support at around 15 lakh. Drawing parallels with the citizen activism campaigns that emerged between the terrorist attacks in Mumbai in 2008 and the Lok Sabha elections of 2009 (the former being when social media arrived in India), Mr. Mishra also points out that corruption did go for a Six on Friday (the final day) with IPL4 dominating conversation online.

Nishant Shah, director (research) at the Centre for Internet and Society, points out that while during revolutions, the social media has proved to be a poignant and powerful tool to mobilise resources, last week it emerged that it can not only propagate dubious opinions, but also it often (because it relies on the temporal quality of making things viral) fails to give us time to form critical opinions.

He compares a platform like Avaaz, that mobilised people ‘against corruption', with long-term Ipaidabribe project (using the same digital tools) which actually leads to debate around why corruption is so endemic.

Mirrors TV

Interestingly, as Mr. Shah points out, the social media mirrored the spectacle that people were being fed by TV channels, instead of being a true discursive space of public dialogue. It's now getting clear that they are actually playing out an interesting traction as they supplement each other in bolstering of evidence and participation, he adds.

On the other hand, blogs too were abuzz. However, many did seek to provide deeper perspective, and provided more space for debate and dissent. In fact, progressive blogs even attempted to counter the one-sided commentary provided on traditional visual media.

Click here for the story in the Hindu

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/web2.0-responds-to-hazare

EU Commissioner Hedegaard to deliver keynote address at consumer world congress

praskrishna — 2011-08-20T14:34:45Z

European Union Commissioner for Climate Action, Connie Hedegaard, will deliver the opening keynote address to the Consumer International (CI) 19th World Congress in Hong Kong, 3-6 May, it has been announced.

With under a month to go until the event, Commissioner Hedegaard joins an illustrious list of internationally renowned speakers who will be addressing the world’s consumer movement at the Hong Kong Conference and Exhibition Centre (HKCEC).

Other leading speakers include Alan Jope, Chairman, Unilever Greater China; Sue Rutledge, Director, Consumer Protection, World Bank; Anwar Fazal, civil society leader and former CI President; James Guest, President, Consumers Union of the United States; and Gerd Leonhard, CEO, The Futures Agency.

The CI World Congress, which will be officially opened by Donald Tsang, Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, will be attended by leaders of consumer organisations from over 100 countries, together with representatives from industry, governments, inter-governmental bodies, and civil society. It is being co-hosted by CI member organisation, the Hong Kong Consumer Council.

Commissioner Hedegaard will address the role of consumers in the green economy, a key issue area in light of the overall Congress theme of ‘Empowering Tomorrow’s Consumers’. Other consumer issues that will feature in sessions across the four-day event include: financial services, corporate social responsibility, food safety, and consumer rights in the digital age.

Consumers International Director General, Joost Martens said:

"We are delighted to have Commissioner Hedegaard address the CI World Congress on an issue that is vital to the future of consumption patterns across the globe. Our event is about looking at ways in which consumer groups can help tackle the major challenges facing the world, and give them the tools to empower individual consumers to make a positive difference. Alongside the green economy and issues of sustainable consumption, we have an impressive array of world experts exploring issues of global importance to consumers; such as fair financial services, corporate responsibility and access to knowledge in the digital world."

Hong Kong Consumer Council Chairman, Professor Anthony Cheung said:

"Hong Kong is strategically positioned to hold this World Congress in Asia, which has witnessed some of the fastest growing economies as well as the rampant inflation affecting large populations of consumers. We are honoured to have the Congress held in Hong Kong and to have the opportunity to co-host this single most important world assembly of consumer leaders and advocates at a crucial juncture of time. Fresh ideas and new action are urgently called for to tackle the many pressing issues facing consumers worldwide."

Media accrediation for CI World Congress can be applied for here:

Notes to Editors:

Consumers International (CI) is the only independent global campaigning voice for consumers. With over 220 member organisations in 115 countries, we are building a powerful international consumer movement to help protect and empower consumers everywhere.
The Hong Kong Consumer Council (HKCC) is an independent statutory body committing itself as the trusted voice for consumer betterment towards safe and sustainable consumption in a fair and just market. Joined Consumers International (CI) in 1976, HKCC became CI Council Member in 1978 and has been the Executive Member since 1994.
Consumers International’s 19th World Congress takes place at the Hong Kong Conference and Exhibition Centre, 3-6 May. Day 1 is dedicated to fringe event with Day 2 & 3 taken up with the official programme. Day 4 is the CI General Assembly. All details are at www.consumersinternational.org/congress
The CI World Congress occurs every four to five years. It includes the General Assembly where CI’s President, Executive and Council are voted in.
The last Congress took place in Sydney in 2007. The CI World Congress was previously held in Hong Kong in 1991. The co-hosts for the event are CI’s Hong Kong member, The Consumer Council.
Full list of confirmed chairs and speakers:

Alan Jope, Chairman, Unilever in China
Alejandro Calvillo, Executive Director, El Poder del Consumidor (Mexico)
Anna Glayzer, Programme Officer (Food safety and Nutrition), Consumers International
Anthony Cheung, Chairman, Hong Kong Consumer Council
Anwar Fazal, civil-society leader and former CI President
Bart Combée, President, Consumentenbond
Connie Hedegaard, European Commissioner for Climate Action, EU Commission
David Hammerstein, intellectual property advisor, Transatlantic Consumer Dialogue, and former Spanish MEP
Diana Tsui, CSR Director, KPMG
Gerd Billen, Executive Director, The Federation of German Consumer Organisations (vzbv)
Gerd Leonhard, The Futures Agency
Guido Adriaenssens, Chief Executive Officer, International Consumer Research and Testing (ICRT)
H C Yang, Vice President and Secretary General, China Consumers' Association
Hassan Qaqaya, Chief, Capacity Building and Technical Assistance Section, Competition Law and Policy and Consumer Protection Section, UNCTAD
Helio Mattar, Founder, Akatu Institute for Conscious Consumption (Brazil)
Indrani Thuraisingham, Head of CI Office for Asia Pacific and the Middle East, Consumers International
Jaiok Kim, President, Consumers Korea
James Guest, CEO, Consumers Union of United States
Jami Solli, specialist on financial services in consumer protection law
Jan Gustav Strandenaes, Senior Adviser, The Northern Alliance for Sustainability (ANPED)
Jean Halloran, Consumers Union of United States
Jens Henriksson, International Officer, Swedish Consumers' Association
Jeremy Malcolm, Access to Knowledge Programme Coordinator, Consumers International
Jonathon Hanks, University of Cape Town
Jørgen Schlundt, Deputy Director, National Food Institute, Denmark
Justin Macmullan, Head of Campaigns, Consumers International
Lisa Gunn, Executive Director, Brazilian Institute for Consumer Defence (IDEC)
Luke Upchurch, Head of Communications, Consumers International
Niall Dunne, former Director, Saatchi & Saatchi Sustainability
Norma McCormick, Chair, ISO Committee on Consumer Policy (COPOLCO)
Peter Kell, Chair, Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC)
Premila Kumar, Chief Executive, Consumer Council of Fiji
Rasmus Kjeldahl, Executive Director, Danish Consumer Council
Ratna Devi, Deputy Secretary General, Federation of Malaysian Consumers Associations (FOMCA)
Rehan Saiyed, Storm Corporate Design Limited
Richard Henry Kimera, Chief Executive, Consent, Uganda
Robert Welford, Chairman, CSR Asia
Robin Simpson, Senior Policy Advisor, Consumers International
Samuel Ochieng, President, CIN Kenya and Consumers International
Stefan Larenas R, President, Organisation of Consumers and Users of Chile (ODECU)
Sue Rutledge, Director of Consumer Protection, World Bank
Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, Centre for Internet and Society, India
Thami Bolani, Chairman, National Consumer Forum (South Africa)

Press Contact

Luke Upchurch: lupchurch@consint.org [+44 796 894 9327]

Hong Kong Consumer Council

Clara Li clarali@consumer.org.hk [+852 2856 8589]

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/eu-commissioner-keynote-address

One for the avatar

praskrishna — 2015-05-14T12:19:34Z

With increasing instances of online avatars being victimised, users who are part of these identities need to be protected against vicious attacks. A fortnightly column on ‘Digital Natives’ authored by Nishant Shah is featured in the Sunday Eye, the national edition of Indian Express, Delhi, from 19 September 2010 onwards. This article was published on April 3, 2011.

On March 21 the digital natives I worked with, across three continents, blogged to celebrate Human Rights Day in South Africa. The topic: What should be a right in the digital age? While the blogathon captured the diverse contexts and voices of digital natives around the globe, it got me thinking about the question of rights, technology and identity.

When it comes to technology-based rights — right to access, right to information, right to dis/connect, right to be online, right to privacy, etc. — there seems to be an understanding that these rights are granted to the person who engages with digital and internet technologies.

For instance, if somebody steals your identity online, you can ask for legal arbitration. The right of the physical user who is interacting with digital technologies is clearly violated. Similarly, other kinds of economic abuse through phishing or spam are also instances in which the right of the individual is clearly breached and hence justice can be dispensed.

However, in the wide world of the Web, things often become blurry. For those who simultaneously live their lives in the fused spaces of the physical and the digital, there are instances when violence takes place but there are no arbitrators for justice. One way of thinking about this, is by looking at the digital avatars that we create online. Avatars are generally visual simulations that people create for themselves to mark their presence on the Web. Within the more traditional digital interactions, avatars are straightforward — pictures of people, icons, brands, photographs of pets, cartoons, or even text based signatures . Within role-playing games and virtual immersive environments, avatars can be more adventurous, often taking up the form of fantasy bodies that the users might aspire to have.

These avatars, for digital natives, are extensions of the self and an integral part of their online presence. A lucrative industry sells digital amenities, luxuries and brands to clothe and accessorise the avatars, so that they resemble the real-life user. The users invest time, money and resources to create unique avatars. However, these avatars, which are a combination of hardware, software and wetware — part machine, part code, part human being, despite their very material presence, do not really have any rights of their own.

Because they are treated only as cultural products, they are looked at only as objects rather than as animated identities. Popular law and culture treat avatars as external and not related to the users who create them. Within a digital universe, when an avatar gets abused, there are no rights that it can claim in order to find safety or justice. Our understanding of digital rights are so tied to the idea of physical loss and injury that unless a material loss to the physical body can be demonstrated, it becomes difficult to actually invoke the rights of the victim.

For example, in social networking sites like Facebook, it is common for younger users to bully people from their schools. Instead of a direct physical attack on the person, a series of “Hate pages” crop up, where conversations which were hitherto restricted to the circle of friends, are now openly hosted, attacking one particular person. Even more subtle are the campaigns to “De-friend” people, making them social pariahs by not allowing them access to social cliques. A common practice has also been to spam the person’s account with so many unnecessary emails that they can no longer access their important mails, which get lost in the deluge. These are serious attacks, which have direct impacts on the victim’s social and mental state.

Because no obvious physical harm is done, because there is no straightforward attack on the person involved or a demonstrable loss to any physical person, these attacks go unnoticed and unresolved. Even when these claims are brought to the notice of authority, the victim is asked to “move on” because it is “merely the internet”.

It is time to realise that there is nothing “mere” about the internet and the world of digital social interaction. What happens to the online persona has direct and often horrifying consequences to bodies in the physical world. And it is time to think of the right of the avatar, so that the users, who are a part of these identities, can also be protected. If I had to choose, in the digital age, the right to be an avatar, would be the right to vote for.

Read the original in the Indian Express here

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/one-avatar

Net cracker

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T17:11:03Z

Is Facebook taking over our lives? And if it is, so what? In email interviews with new media researcher and user control advocate Marc Stumpel who is conducting a Facebook Resistance workshop this fortnight, and artist and communication designer Tobias Leingruber, the originator of the FB Resistance idea, Akhila Seetharaman attempts to answer these questions. This article was published in Time Out Bengaluru Vol. 3 Issue 19, April 1 - 14, 2011.

There’s a lot said about the role of social media in fuelling political revolutions. What do you make of the role of Facebook, for instance, in the recent uprisings in the Arab world?

Marc Stumpel Clearly, social media has been utilised as instruments by citizens in the Middle East to organise and coordinate democratic protests. They have also proven to be important sources for real-time reporting and documenting political events. The use of networked communication in political protests, however, is nothing new. In my view, it’s wrong to assume there is a causal relationship between social media and “political revolutions”. You need “the people” to instigate a revolution; they will unquestionably use any media at hand.

My interest lies more with researching and exposing the political dimension of social media, rather than questioning its relationship with the politics that we are used to talking and writing about. Platforms like Facebook and Twitter are sites of governance themselves, as the user activities, conditions and data distribution are maintained by a particular set of rules and constraints, embedded in the software.

How do social media sites control people, while at the same time giving them more outlets for self expression and communication?

MS Proprietary social networking software like Facebook have many constraints, which means that users have to abide by the laws and strict limits as defined by the software. Where is our ‘freedom’? For example, why not let the users change their background colour or ‘dislike’ something?

There have been many changes to Facebook that have met with widespread opposition and outrage. How does one make sense of these instances?

MS Facebook’s PR communication regarding its immediate software changes has been very deceptive. They’ve repeatedly used a particular vocabulary to create images of Facebook ‘apologising’ for or ‘justifying’ rigid changes. They say, ‘Look! We ‘simplified’ privacy controls, because we care about your privacy,’ while making them more complex instead.

Can you tell us a few things that Facebook users should know but don’t, about the way Facebook uses their stuff?

Tobias Leingruber Realise the nature of the company. Google is not a search engine. Google is an advertising network. Facebook is not a social network – it’s an advertising network. We are the product, ‘the sheeple’. We get to be in a herd, but we pay with our most private data. They shave our wool.

MS Facebook is not transparent about its Web user-tracking activities. Via cookies it saves every website you visit outside of Facebook that has any FB social plugin implemented. We don’t exactly know what FB does with this tracking data.

What is the Facebook Resistance?

MS Our attempt is to resist from within the system by slowly undermining and questioning it. This means we’re not leaving it and building a new one. We’re accepting the fact that Facebook has already ‘won’ for now, and we’re trying to make the best out of it by bending its rules.

Critical talk about social media landscape often borrows from the lexicon of war – with online suicide, tactical media, resistance, etc. How much of a warzone is it?

TL Nice observation! Actually ‘cyberwar’ has become very real this year, as US and Israeli militants created a worm that successfully attacked and physically destroyed parts of the Iranian nuclear research programme.

But more specifically on social media I think those extreme terms are very helpful to get people’s attention. We’re overwhelmed by information, so getting people’s attention is an art form itself.

MS We are not at ‘war’ with Facebook; we are at “softwar”, fighting for internet freedom and the adoption of open standards.

What is the potential of resistance to Facebook? What can be achieved?

TL In theory we could undermine and replace their entire system. For example, the chat – to get rid of the tracking and censorship, the system behind Facebook’s chat interface could be replaced with something else, such as the Jabber protocol through an independent server.

MS Expanding your freedom on Facebook by learning how to impose new rules and features onto the system through internet browser processing (thus, not changing any code on Facebook’s server) and spreading awareness about this possibility.

Photography by Tobias Leingruber

Read the original article here

Download the article here [pdf 3.7 mb]

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/net-cracker

On the Path to Global Open Access: A Few More Miles to Go

praskrishna — 2011-08-20T14:35:29Z

This editorial by PLoS Medicine Editors Virginia Barbour, Jocalyn Clark, Susan Jones, Melissa Norton, and Emma Veitch was published in the magazine's March 2011, Volume 8, Issue 3.

It has been a couple of months now since the withdrawal of access via HINARI to medical journals in Bangladesh by several publishers caused an upset in the medical publishing world [1]. HINARI (Health Internetwork Access to Research Initiative) is a WHO-supported program [2] that partners with subscription-based publishers to allow researchers in the world's poorest countries to access some of their journals under certain conditions (for example, researchers have to access the journal in defined institutions). After much lobbying from researchers, editors, and others following the withdrawal, HINARI access has been—for the time being at least—reinstated, though with a substantial lack of clarity over the longer term plans of a number of the publishers [3]. Although traumatic for the researchers who lost access, the incident has triggered a useful debate on the value of open access (OA; immediate, permanent free access and permanently guaranteed unrestricted reuse, as enshrined in a Creative Commons license [4] and as practiced by publishers such as PLoS) versus free access with no legal rights attached. It is hard to think of a better example to demonstrate the precariousness of this latter type of free access, which can mean that access may be withdrawn for no reason.

Now that the heat of the HINARI debate has died down, it is an opportune time to consider how this dispute, and others like it, can be used constructively to move toward a position where universal OA to the medical literature becomes the norm.

On the positive side, the debate has brought many new voices into the discussion around access, particularly those on the online discussion forum HIFA2015 [5], where the diversity and strength of opinions expressed was most likely the key instrument in ensuring that the publishers' withdrawal from HINARI was not only brought to light, but also largely reversed.

The debacle also allowed constructive discussions around the substantial limitations of HINARI and its inability to provide a long-term sustainable solution to access in the developing world. It also allowed airing of many OA issues, including the difference between free and open access [4]; the logistical difficulties experienced by some researchers in accessing online journals, such as those in locations with low bandwidth; the suspicion of some researchers of online-only journals; and concerns over publication fees.

Thus the argument about how to implement such access, particularly in the developing world, is far from over. The issues above are very familiar to OA advocates. When PLoS Medicine was getting started seven years ago, we encountered many of the same questions from the (admittedly mostly developed-world) authors and readers we canvassed then. The phenomenal growth of OA since then has reassured many of those who initially questioned the model and its sustainability: submissions and publications are increasing each year at PLoS and in other open-access journals, reflecting the increased confidence of authors in this model. OA papers are also highly accessed, though our data suggest that most of this access, and most of the authors, still come from the developed world.

The HINARI incident thus highlights the fact that HINARI is, sadly, still needed both because of traditional publishers who have not yet implemented OA, even in the developed world, and because substantial gaps remain in our knowledge about how OA will work for the developing world. Hence, there is some way to go before this model of publishing can become the norm worldwide. Despite the best intentions of open-access publishers, we have failed to reach out adequately to debate with researchers and readers in the less-developed world about the potential benefits of open access. Instead, as is often the case when the developed world prescribes for the less-developed world, we have assumed that what works well in Paris, London, or San Francisco will work just as well in Addis Ababa, Beirut, or Lima.

Some examples of these active concerns about OA: first, are OA journals being delivered in the best format for readers in the developing world? If print really is better in some places, are we doing our best to ensure that the online journals are optimized for rapid downloading and printing of articles? If access to online journals will be primarily via mobile devices rather than computers, are we delivering the content in appropriate formats? Second, do we understand the reputation metrics outside of Europe or the US that will ensure that the new OA journals are trusted and meet the requirements authors face for academic promotions or other professional needs [6]? Even more importantly, are there OA journals available that cater to the needs of readers and authors across the developing world? Should publishers be helping groups to start their own journals, rather than assuming that the existing OA journals will be accepted?

Medical journals have many roles, but, above all, dissemination of medical information is key. This crucial role was stated clearly back in1997 by Neil Pakenham-Walsh (the founder of HIFA2015) and colleagues, and it is no less relevant now [7]: "Providing access to reliable health information for health workers in developing countries is potentially the single most cost effective and achievable strategy for sustainable improvement in health care."

Much therefore remains to be done in improving access to health information in the developing world. By providing a logistical framework for open access (by the adoption of appropriate licenses), and by showing what can be done in the developed world with OA journals, OA publishers have done much to make it possible more widely. The next crucial step is to engage with readers, researchers, and authors in the developing world to understand better their information needs so that we don't fall into the trap of pushing information in only one direction. Open access is about facilitating the movement of knowledge—in all directions.

References

Kmietowicz K (2011) Publishers withdraw 2500 journals from free access scheme in Bangladesh. BMJ 342: d196. doi:10.1136/bmj.d196.

HINARI (2011) HINARI Access to Research in Health Programme. Available:http://www.who.int/hinari/en/. Accessed 16 February 2011.

Wise A (2011) Elsevier statement on Research4Life. Lancet 377: 377. FIND THIS ARTICLE ONLINE

PLoS (2011) Definition of Open Access. Available: http://www.plos.org/oa/definition.php. Accessed 16 February 2011.

HIFA2015 (2011) A Global Campaign: Healthcare Information for All by 2015. Available:http://www.hifa2015.org/. Accessed 16 February 2011.

Chan L, Kirsop B, Arunachalam S (2011) Towards Open and Equitable Access to Research and Knowledge for Development. PLoS Med 8: 1016. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1001016.

Packenham-Walsh N, Priestley C, Smith R (1997) Meeting the information needs of health workers in developing countries. BMJ 314: 90. FIND THIS ARTICLE ONLINE

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/path-2-global-open-access

Privacy, By Design

praskrishna — 2011-04-12T06:45:36Z

The Centre for Internet and Society invites people and organizations in the business of 'privacy online' to engage with it in Privacy, By Design — an open space discussion that brings together coders, developers, users and entrepreneurs interested in the design of privacy online.

Is Privacy something we are born with or is it constructed for us? Different actors like governments, markets, cultural negotiators, are often attributed the responsibility of defining what it means to be 'private'. In our rapidly digitizing world, Internet and digital technologies have emerged as new factors that influence the design of privacy. Ranging from social networking systems to e-governance projects and economic transactions to interpersonal relationships, the design of privacy online has become a central concern.

Privacy, By Design is a part of The Identity Project (TIP), a collaboration between the Centre for Internet and Society and the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society. It is a research inquiry that hopes to consolidate multiple perspectives, and ideas in an attempt to initiate a dialogue between people who are in the business of designing platforms and applications that pivot around privacy. For instance: How do the platforms we use define our understanding of privacy? What does privacy in the cloud look like? What are the parameters by which privacy is defined within the digital world? What role do digital technologies play in producing the 'privacy effect?'

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/events/privacy-by-design

'Privacy Matters', Ahmedabad: Conference Report

praskrishna — 2011-04-04T04:45:49Z

On 26 March 2011, civil society, lawyers, judges, students and NGO’s, gathered together at the Ahmedabad Management Association to take part in 'Privacy Matters' – a public conference organised by Privacy India in partnership with IDRC and Research Foundation for Governance in India (RFGI) — to discuss the challenges of privacy in India, with an emphasis on national security and privacy. The conference was opened by Prashant Iyengar, head researcher at Privacy India and Kanan Drhu, director of RFGI. Mr. Iyengar explained Privacy India’s mandate to raise awareness of privacy, spark civil action, and promote democratic dialogue around privacy challenges and violations in India. RFGI is a think tank established in 2009 which aims to research, promote, and implement various reforms to improve the legal and political process in Gujarat and across India. ‘Privacy Matters – Ahmedabad’ is the third conference out of the eight that Privacy India will be hosting across India. The next conference will take place in Hyderabad on 9 April 2011. It will focus on human rights and privacy.

The keynote speech, delivered by Usha Ramanathan, focused on links not often made between privacy and social phenomenon.

Ms. Usha Ramanathan opened the conference by examining the links not often made between privacy and personal security, between databases and national security, and the centrality of dislodging privacy in projects of social control. In her presentation she spoke about the inverse relationship between national and personal security, making the point that an important part of privacy is the ability of an individual to secure their own person. Today, because national security follows a policy of ubiquitous surveillance, it is almost impossible for an individual to secure their person from the state. Ms. Ramanathan also traced the beginnings of ubiquitous surveillance to the increasing global fear of terrorism, and the national break down of the criminal justice system in India. Instead of looking to the roots of terrorism and the roots of failure in the criminal justice system, the Indian State has responded to both these factors by superimposing a system of surveillance on top of the existing rule. Consequently, the state has become pan-optical — closely following the movement of its entire population. The state has been able to achieve this level of surveillance through technology, which it has used to create identifiers for its population. The use of technology by the state mediates a link between corporate interest and state interest. Thus, by facilitating the easy and ubiquitous creation of identifiers and surveillance, technology is changing the idea and the nature of privacy. For example, it is now important that a privacy law allows for individuals to protect and secure their identity, something that every individual has and every individual controls, while regulating the creation and external use of identifiers — something that is used by another (not you) to distinguish a person from the rest of the population.

Questions to Consider

How can privacy legislation work to positively regulate the use of technology by the government, so that invasion of privacy does not consequently become state policy?

How can privacy legislation distinguish between and work to protect an identity while regulating the creation and use of personal information as identifiers?

Session I of the Conference featured a Judicial Perspective of Privacy and a Presentation on the Connections between Privacy and the Federal Income Tax Regime in India.

Privacy and the Constitution

J N Bhatt, the former Chief Justice of Gujarat and Bihar, and currently the head of the Gujarat State Law Commission, spoke about privacy as a fundamental right that has been written into articles 19 and 21 of the Constitution of India. Important points from his presentation include:

As privacy is already a recognized fundamental right, the question at hand is not if there is a right to privacy, but instead how can the right to privacy be best proliferated.

Within the question of how a privacy can best be proliferated, is a question about rights and duties. Wherever there is a right to privacy there is also a corresponding duty to privacy — as rights and duties are interdependent.

Though privacy has been recognized as a fundamental right in India, when looking at the actual assertion of the right, it is important to be aware of the cultural realities of India. India is a country with 39 per cent of her population living below the poverty line, with an even lower literacy rate, and there is a direct connection between the assertion of civil liberties, an individual’s civic sense, and education.

When looking at how to best proliferate the right to privacy, governance and common law, a methodology to reach the poorest of the poor should be laid out first.

Questions to Consider

What is the best way to proliferate the right to privacy ?

What legal structures need to be in place to ensure that the poor can assert their right to privacy?
What social structures need to be in place to ensure that the poor can assert their right to privacy?

Privacy and the Indian Tax Regime

Professor Amal Dhru, visiting professor from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad and a practicing Chartered Accountant spoke on the connections between privacy and the federal income tax regime in India. In his presentation he explained how the information collected by the federal income tax regime in India can be both useful in holding a citizen accountable, and invasive of one’s personal privacy if mis-used. Important points from his presentation include:

The Indian tax regime highlights the tension between public interest as tax evasion is considered an exception to the right to privacy as it is a matter of public interest.

There is a lack of confidence in the existing banking and tax system in India. For example in the business sector, Indian investors have deposited over 700 billion dollars abroad as they are given complete privacy and security over their money.

Though there is a lack of confidence in the current banking and tax system, a tighter law is not necessarily the solution. For example, studies have found that tighter tax regimes lead to greater evasion, while looser tax regimes have higher compliance rates.

On April 1, 2011 the new tax codes for India will be implemented. The reform will give enormous power to tax offices, and as the tax authorities will become equipped to do taxes smarter – this will come at a cost to citizen’s privacy.

Questions to Consider

Just as a tighter tax law leads to a higher percentage of tax evasion, will a tight privacy law simply lead to greater numbers of privacy violations?

What creates public confidence in a law?

Should a privacy legislation be responsible for defining the public good?

Should privacy protection of tax-related information be incorporated into a privacy legislation or contained only in tax law?

To what extent should tax authorities be allowed to investigate potential tax evasion i.e., one’s computer, house or e-mail?

How does one balance the private vs. the public good?

Session II of the Conference focused on National Security and Privacy, and Cultural Conceptions of Privacy

National Security and Privacy

In the second session on Privacy and National Security, Colonel Mathew Thomas spoke on privacy and national security. Colonel Thomas is a management consultant and activity leader for development centers and has held top positions in the Indian Army, and the Defence Research and Development Organisation, where he headed the missile manufacturing facility. Sharing his personal experiences in the army he explained the connection between privacy and national security. Important points from his presentation include:

National Security is often not an internal threat, but instead an external threat.

There is a connection between the increase in surveillance and liberalization of Government.

More surveillance does not bring more security.

Foreign software poses as a threat to national security.

Greater security is gained through intelligent use and analysis of data.

A strong national security plan should not rely solely on surveillance of its citizens. Instead national security should be brought about through strong economic policies, non-reliance on foreign software, neutrality in foreign policy, fair trade policies, rural development and prevention of migration to cities, and having a politically honest and accountable governance.

Questions to Consider

Is it effective for privacy to be compromised in the name of anti- terror laws?
Can the development and distribution of indigenous software protect national privacy?
How can strong economic policies indirectly protect an individual's privacy?
How can a strong foreign policy protect an Indian citizen's privacy when it is stored or sent abroad?

Privacy as a Cultural Construct

Gagan Sethi from the Centre for Social Justice, Ahmedabad shared his opinion on privacy. Important points from his presentation include:

Privacy is a cultural construct that changes with context, perspective, and time.
When considering a privacy policy it is important to create a policy that does not strictly define what privacy is and what it is not, but instead create a policy that defines and promotes a common respect for human dignity.

Questions to Consider

If a privacy policy is developed to promote a common respect for human dignity – will it be effective?

Can you develop a policy that has a loose definition and mandate, but has strong legal teeth?

Session III of the Conference focused on Minority Identities and Privacy, Prisoner Rights, and Cyber Security.

Privacy and Minority Identities

Bobby Kuhnu, a lawyer and activist, presented in the third session on Privacy, Minority Identities, and Security. In his talk Mr. Kuhnu through the use of three examples examined the ideological underpinnings of the discourse on privacy and its bearings on socially marginalized identities in the context of the Indian State and the constitutional right to privacy. Important points from his presentation include:

In India, names can be sensitive and personal information like one’s religion, family, caste, and background can all be known through a name.
Because of the sensitivity of a person’s name, many people do not feel safe or comfortable in their own identity.
Reservation lists and public postings of information, can and have been used to discriminate and violate another’s privacy.

Questions to Consider

Should a privacy legislation requirement throughout institutions and government bodies that names should not be publicly displayed to the point of identification?
What is the most effective way of legally protecting an individual from discrimination based on their name?

Perspectives of Privacy

In the last portion of the day, Yash Sampat and Aditya Yagnik spoke on the origins of privacy and privacy in the cyber world. Vimmi Surti spoke on prisoner's rights and privacy and Ramswaroop Chaudhary presented on minority identities in South Asia and privacy. Important points from their presentation include:

Internet has led to an increase in privacy violations.
The result of privacy infringements is often the deprivation of individuals from safe access to services availed to them.
When looking at privacy as the protection of human dignity, prisoner’s rights are violated through overcrowding in prisons, poor health, and poor sanitation.

Questions to Consider

Are there legal mechanisms that can be put in place to ensure the least amount of deprivation to services when an individual’s privacy is invaded?

To what extent should prisoners be availed the right to privacy?

The concluding session was a time for discussion and opinion sharing

From the closing session, and the above sessions many themes and questions pertaining to privacy came out that will need to be addressed when considering the way forward for a privacy legislation including:

Regulation of ubiquitous surveillance in the name of national security
Regulation over public display of names and personal information
The need to distinguish between identity and identifier.
The need to protect an individual's identity while regulating the production and use of identifiers.
Privacy rights and prisoners: what does the right to privacy mean to a prisoner, i.e., clean facilities and health care.
Can the right to privacy be a platform for individuals to claim sanitary/safe working and living conditions.
Recognize the changing nature of privacy rights in a technological society.
Privacy implications of biometric usage.
Creation of a definition of when privacy rights will supersede identification needs.
How can government institutions, like the tax department, incorporate and protect the right to privacy with the collection of large amounts of data for more efficient services.
Privacy and the family

Download the report and agenda here [pdf - 452kb]

Also see Matthew's presentation [powerpoint file 116kb]

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/privacy/privacy-matters-report-from-ahmedabad

March 2011 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2012-07-30T10:59:46Z

Greetings from the Centre for Internet and Society! In this issue we are pleased to present you the latest updates about our research, upcoming events, and news and media coverage.

Researchers@Work

RAW is a multidisciplinary research initiative. CIS believes that in order to understand the contemporary concerns in the field of Internet and society, it is necessary to produce local and contextual accounts of the interaction between the Internet and socio-cultural and geo-political structures. To build original research knowledge base, the RAW programme has been collaborating with different organisations and individuals to focus on its three year thematic of Histories of the Internets in India. Monographs finalised from these projects are online for peer review.

New Blog Entry by Zainab Bawa in Transparency and Politics

A History of Transparency, Politics and Information Technologies in India

Digital Natives with a Cause?

Digital Natives with a Cause? is a knowledge programme initiated by CIS and Hivos, Netherlands. It is a research inquiry that seeks to look at the changing landscape of social change and political participation and the role that young people play through digital and Internet technologies, in emerging information societies. Consolidating knowledge from Asia, Africa and Latin America, it builds a global network of knowledge partners who want to critically engage with the dominant discourse on youth, technology and social change, in order to look at the alternative practices and ideas in the Global South. It also aims at building new ecologies that amplify and augment the interventions and actions of the digitally young as they shape our futures.

Column on Digital Natives

A fortnightly column on ‘Digital Natives’ authored by Nishant Shah is featured in the Sunday Eye, the national edition of Indian Express, Delhi, from 19 September 2010 onwards. The following was published recently:

Watson knows the Question [Indian Express, March 6, 2011]

Blog Entries by Maesey Angelina

Maesey Angelina works as a programme officer at Hivos, Jakarta on gender, women and development while exploring research initiatives on Digital Natives in Indonesia. She spent one month in CIS, working on her dissertation, exploring the Blank Noise project under the Digital Natives with a Cause framework. She writes a series of blog entries. The new ones are:

Blog Entries by Samuel Tettner

Samuel Tettner is a Digital Natives Coordinator in CIS. He has written the following blog entries:

Accessibility

Estimates of the percentage of the world's population that is disabled vary considerably. But what is certain is that if we count functional disability, then a large proportion of the world's population is disabled in one way or another. At CIS we work to ensure that the digital technologies, which empower disabled people and provide them with independence, are allowed to do so in practice and by the law. To this end, we support web accessibility guidelines, and change in copyright laws that currently disempower the persons with disabilities.

Featured Research

Accessible Mobile Handsets in India: An Overview

Blog Entry

Note on the Authorities under the Working Draft of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2011 (9th February 2011)

Intellectual Property

CIS believes that access to knowledge and culture is essential as it promotes creativity and innovation and bridges the gaps between the developed and developing world positively. Hence, the campaigns for an international treaty on copyright exceptions for print-impaired, advocating against PUPFIP Bill, calls for the WIPO Broadcast Treaty to be restricted to broadcast, questioning the demonization of 'pirates', and supporting endeavours that explore and question the current copyright regime. Its latest endeavour has resulted into these:

Featured Research

Pirates, Plagiarisers, Publishers [ Written by Prashant Iyengar and originally published in the Economic & Political Weekly, February 26, 2011, Vol XLVI No 9]

Submission

Comments to the Ministry on WIPO Broadcast Treaty (March 2011)

Openness

Workshops organised

Design!publiC [Taj Vivanta, New Delhi, March 18, 2011]
Open Access to Scientific Information Indian International Centre [New Delhi, March 16, 2011]

Internet Governance

Although there may not be one centralized authority that rules the Internet, the Internet does not just run by its own volition: for it to operate in a stable and reliable manner, there needs to be in place infrastructure, a functional domain name system, ways to curtail cyber crime across borders, etc. The Tunis Agenda of the second World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), paragraph 34 defined Internet governance as “the development and application by governments, the private sector and civil society, in their respective roles, of shared principles, norms, rules, decision-making procedures, and programmes that shape the evolution and use of the Internet.” CIS involvement in the field of Internet governance has taken the following shape:

Submissions

CIS is doing a project, ‘Privacy in Asia’. It is funded by Privacy International (PI), UK and the International Development Research Centre, Canada and is being administered in collaboration with the Society and Action Group, Gurgaon. The two-year project commenced on 24 March 2010 and will be completed as agreed to by the stakeholders. It was set up with the objective of raising awareness, sparking civil action and promoting democratic dialogue around challenges and violations of privacy in India. In furtherance of these goals it aims to draft and promote over-arching privacy legislation in India by drawing upon legal and academic resources and consultations with the public.

Submission

Privacy and Governmental Database

Workshops organized

Privacy Matters - A Public Conference in Ahmedabad [Ahmedabad, March 26, 2011]
Public Talk by Dr. Ian Brown on Privacy, Trust and Biometrics [Centre for Contemporary Studies, IISc, Bangalore, March 21, 2011]
Electronication: Ragas and the Future [Jaaga, Bangalore, March 6, 2011]
Role of the Internet in Fostering Freedom of Expression and Strengthening Activism in India - A Workshop in Delhi [Constitution Club, New Delhi, March 4, 2011]
Global Challenges to Freedom of Expression [Constitution Club, New Delhi, March 4, 2011]

Telecom

The growth in telecommunications in India has been impressive. While the potential for growth and returns exist, a range of issues need to be addressed for this potential to be realized. One aspect is more extensive rural coverage and the second aspect is a countrywide access to broadband which is low at about eight million subscriptions. Both require effective and efficient use of networks and resources, including spectrum. It is imperative to resolve these issues in the common interest of users and service providers. CIS campaigns to facilitate this:

Featured Research

India's untapped potential: Are a billion people losing out because of spectrum?

Column

Shyam Ponappa is a Distinguished Fellow at CIS. He writes regularly on Telecom issues in the Business Standard and these articles are mirrored on the CIS website as well.

Big-Bang Budgets? [published in the Business Standard on March 3, 2011]

Forthcoming Events

CIS is organising some conferences/workshops in the month of March/April:

Web Sites Accessibility Evaluation Methodologies: A New Imperative for State Parties to the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities[Hyderabad International Convention Centre, Hyderabad]
Shadow Search Project (SSP) in CIS [CIS, Bangalore]
Facebook Resistance Workshop [CIS, Bangalore]

News & Media Coverage

Networking its way to better governance (Hindu, March 28, 2011]
‘Learn from failed UK NIR project’ (Deccan Chronicle, March 22, 2011]
Design!publiC - News from Livemint (Livemint, March 18, 2011)
Muzzling the Internet (Outlook, March 17, 2011)
Battle for the Internet (Down to Earth, Issue: March 15, 2011)
Cause and effect Facebook-style (Hindustan Times, March 13, 2011)
Catch-all approach to Net freedom draws activist ire (Sunday Guardian, March 13, 2011)
Lives suspended in the Web (Indian Express, March 11, 2011)
Draft IT guidelines may gag internet freedom (Times of India, March 11, 2011)
Govt proposal to muzzle bloggers sparks outcry (Times of India, March 10, 2011)
New Indian Rules May Make Online Censorship Easier (Yahoo News, March 7, 2011)
Anti-Social Network (Mail Today, February 27, 2011)

Follow us elsewhere

Get short, timely messages from us on Twitter
Follow CIS on identi.ca
Join the CIS group on Facebook
Visit us at www.cis-india.org

CIS is grateful to Kusuma Trust which was founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin, for its core funding and support for most of its projects.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/about/newsletters/march%20-2011-bulletin

Towards Open and Equitable Access to Research and Knowledge for Development

praskrishna — 2011-08-18T05:04:54Z

There is growing recognition that the capacity to conduct research and to share the resulting knowledge is fundamental to all aspects of human development, from improving health care delivery to increasing food security, and from enhancing education to stronger evidence-based policy making. This article by Leslie Chan, Barbara Kirsop and Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam was published in PLoS (Public Library of Science) on March 29, 2011.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/open-equitable-access-to-research-knowledge

Websites Accessibility Evaluation Methodologies: Conference Report

praskrishna — 2011-11-08T10:45:32Z

G3ict, W3C and CIS co-organised a panel on 30 March 2011 from 4.30p.m to 6.00 p.m., in the W3C track at the Twentieth International World Wide Web Conference in Hyderabad. The panel discussed web accessibility evaluation methodologies and their challenges and practical technical survey methodologies alternatives. The panel was moderated by Nirmita Narasimhan and featured four speakers — Shadi Abou Zahra (W3C/WAI), Neeta Verma (Senior Technical Director, NIC), Srinivasu Chakravartula (Accessibility Manager, Yahoo India) and Glenda Sims (Senior Accessibility Consultant, DeQue Systems).

The panel began with an introduction and background by Nirmita Narasimhan on the digital dispositions of the UNCRPD, obligations of states parties and the need to have clearly defined and credible evaluation methodologies for effective policy formulation and implementation.

Shadi Abou Zahra gave a brief overview of the WCAG 2.0 guidelines and discussed some of the important points which need to be borne in mind while doing large scale evaluation of websites. He talked about the selection of tools, limitations of automated tools, importance of selection of pages for manual testing, sampling techniques, qualitative versus quantitative analysis, different types of testing such as expert and user testing and evaluation goal and scalability issues.

Neeta Verma discussed the guidelines for Indian websites brought out by the NIC in February 2010 and said that as per the checkpoints in the guidelines, there were a small percentage of checkpoints which could be tested using automated tools, some percentage for which expert and user testing was required. She presented one approach to evaluation adopted by the NIC, which was to certify the CMS rather than individual pages since the latter would be extremely difficult in cases of websites having thousands of pages, as was the case with several government websites. She stressed the need for positive thinking, user involvement and on the need to have an organized community of trained accessibility experts in India to whom the government could outsource testing work.

Srinivasu made a distinction in Yahoo’s approach with regard to accessible websites between existing and upcoming websites. He said that for existing websites, the approach was to do an evaluation, prepare a report and prioritize the issues to be addressed. And as far as new websites are concerned, the attempt should be to keep accessibility in the loop right from the development stage itself. In terms of doing evaluation, he said that his methodology was to first quickly run an automated tool to check for errors. Then depending upon the number and kinds of errors, he would decide whether or not to follow up with a manual test. If the errors thrown up were few or nil, then he would do a manual test of some pages. However, if there were many errors and many of the errors were very basic ones like no alt text attributes, no headings, etc., then he may decide not to go ahead with the manual test at all.

Shadi also pointed out that sometimes it was possible that a website could be error free, except for one error, but if this one error was that the pay button on a shopping site was inaccessible, then the website would have to be evaluated as inaccessible since this was the most important button in the website rendering it usable or unusable. Shadi pointed that automated testing was critical to do large scale evaluations, but that this would only help in getting a quantitative analysis while aggregating results, whereas for a qualitative analysis, one would still have to do a manual test with users and experts and pay special attention to the kinds of pages which are selected for this type of test.

While highlighting the importance of manual testing, Srinivasu pointed out that although an automated tool could tell you whether or not an alt attribute was present, it could not determine whether that attribute was the appropriate one. When asked to share his impression on the common inaccessible features on government websites which he has been testing in large numbers over the past few weeks, he said that he found a lot of errors which were very basic, like no headings, no alt attributes, table based layouts, missing keyboard functionality for drop down menus, dynamic websites which used Java script and Ajax instead of Aria and so on.

Glenda walked the audience through the methodology which she used for evaluating a single client’s website, how she used manual testing to do a baseline accessibility survey of the Texas University website and then used different tools to test different things, for example, desktop tools like Fire Eyes and accessibility tools for testing page by page. Glenda also talked about the importance of testing authoring tools, producing enterprise accessibility report, code validation, and accessibility validators to test with assistive technology. Glenda concurred with the other speakers that accessibility evaluation and monitoring should be at all stages of the website’s development life cycle — accessibility at the design stage, testing and mediating during development to ensure that it continues to remain accessible, because a lot of websites start out by being accessible, but lose accessibility somewhere along the way and finally test for monitoring accessibility of the website.

Some other issues which were discussed were the importance of user level for determining accessibility and choice of users, evaluation methodology to include reporting of minor changes in order to allow for monitoring of progress even if it is on a small scale, need for testers to think from every person and every device perspective, doing component and template testing for new websites as a good way to check for accessibility and the importance of aggregation and report writing. Overall there was a consensus amongst speakers that any effective and credible evaluation methodology, especially for large scale evaluation, would involve a mix of automated and manual testing with users and experts and would have to be done at every stage of development and maintenance of a website.

See the event on W3C website here

Presentations

See Glenda Sims presentation in Youtube
See Srinivasu's presentation here
Download Glenda Sims presentation here [ppt file, 5.85 MB]
Neeta Verma presentation here [ppt file, 11.4 MB]

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/websites-accessibility-evaluation-methodologies

The Draft Electronic Delivery of Services Bill, 2011 – Comments by CIS

praskrishna — 2011-08-02T07:37:37Z

The Draft Electronic Delivery of Services Bill, 2011 (“Bill”) is a Bill to provide for delivery of government services manadatorily through electronic means by phasing out manual delivery of services. It is heartening to note that the Bill shifts the approach to electronic delivery of services by Government agencies to one as part of the citizens' right to service delivery through electronic means rather than a luxury or benefit doled out by the Government. The Bill introduces bodies exclusively accountable for ensuring that electronic delivery of services by the Government at the state and central levels. While this is a welcome move on the part of the Government there are a few comments we, at the Centre for Internet and Society, have on the present version of the Bill:

Accessibility
The Bill does not make it mandatory for all Government services to be accessible to all including persons with disabilities. The Bill refers to the term “access”, as defined in Section 2(1)(a) from the prespective of merely gaining physical access to the services or availability of such services1 rather than from the perspective of catering to the ability of a person with print (or other) disbilities from gaining access to the services in the normal format. It is very important that the electronic services are delivered in a format which is accessible to all persons including persons with disbilities, elderly persons etc. It should be mandatory for the Government to comply with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and National Informatics Centre (NIC) guidelines for web accessibility. It is also important to ensure accessibility of all documents produced during service delivery by Government agencies.
Linguistic Accessibility
Section 5(2)(b) of the Bill requires the Government to prescribe a framework for all its agencies to ensure web presence or enablement which refers to rendering electronic services in the language chosen by the user. In pursuance of the same, it is important for delivery of services to be available in all national languages of India to begin with in addition to the content being encoded in Unicode font for all languages. It is important to note that there are not many open fonts available for Indian languages. Hence, it must be ensured that the Government allocates sufficient funds to ensure linguistic accessbility of the services delivered, while ensuring implementation of the provisions of the Bill.
Public Scrutiny
In order to ensure transparency of Government services and process of service delivery, it is essential that the Bill incorporates a provision to enable citizens to gain access to information provided by the Government as part of the service delivery process unless disclosing such information would amount to violation of any applicable law. Similarly, provision should be made for making public all RTI applications filed with the Government and responses to them.
Use of Free and Open Source Software
Considering that electronic service delivery by Government agencies is effected through public money, it is important that Governments are urged to use Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) for service delivery. This cuts costs to a great extent and also make the process more transparent and capable of customisation to varied needs of different departments. It is important to insert a provision requiring the Government to use FOSS as far as possible and in the event of any use of proprietary software, the Government should clearly explain the reason for such use, the costs incurred for the same, the additional benefit derived out of its use and other relevant details.
Open Standards
The Bill must stress on use of open standards for all computer resources and service delivery systems by Government agencies. As is the case with FOSS, such use brings down operation costs drastically and makes the service delivery process transparent and available for all to use. Use of ODF formats for documents, HTML for websites, ISA standards for hardware is recommended. It is also useful to ensure compliance with W3C guidelines by the concerned Government departments during implementation of the Bill.
Whistleblower Exception
The Bill does not contain any safeguards to ensure free and fearless disclosure of any wilful violation of the law impacting larger public interest. It is important to include a provision protecting any person exposing any violation of the provisions of the Bill or blowing the cover off any scam or farudulent activity decieving the public committed by service providers under the Bill. Such protection can be given by ensuring that the actions of such whistleblower, to the extent required for the exposure, does not constitute an offence under the provisions of the Bill.
Penalties for Offences
- Chapter 4 of the Bill gives a detailed list of acts constituting an offence under the Act including Section 15 which specifically relates to offences by companies. It is critical to ensure that the punishment and penalities for offences extend not only to citizens and companies but also to Government officials who misuse information they are privy to under the provisions of the Bill. In fact, a separate provision specifically applicable to the various offences which could be committed by Government officials under the Bill can reduce misuse of its provisions by the Government.
- It is to be noted that several provisions listed under Chapter 4 of the Bill covering offences and penalties are a reproduction of the provisions for the same under the Information Technology Act, 2000 (“IT Act”). Such reprodution is unnecessary and acts which are already deemed to be offences and have punishments prescribed for them under the IT Act (or any other legislation for the time being in force in India) need not be covered again in the Bill. This will avoid duplication and confusion in the legislations.
- Section 19(1) of the Bill provides that no alleged offence under the Bill can be tried in a court of law unless the Central Electronic Delivery of Services Commissioner (“Central Commissioner”) or the State Electronic Delivery of Services Commissioner (“State Commissioner”) authorises the same by issuing a complaint in this regard to the relevant court. This provision directly conflicts with a citizen's constitutional right to seek legal redress since it takes away his freedom to approach a court of law for redressal of his grievance without the permission of the Commissioners. It is recommended that the provision be either deleted or suitably modify so that it is not in violation of this constitutional right.
Bottoms up Approach
A decentralised approach should be adopted along the lines of the Panchayati Raj system giving the citizen a greater say in the framework and implementation of service delivery by Government agencies. Implementation can be at the Panchayat and District levels apart from State levels. Citizens must be able to access and update their information. Furthermore, they should be able to define to a certain extent, access control to their information. This will automatically make them eligible or ineligible for various government services.
Charges for service delivery
Section 4 of the Bill authorises the Government to allow service providers to collect charges for electronic service delivery while Section 3(2) provides for the Government to regulate the manner and method of payment of such charges. It is critical to ensure that such charges levied under the provisions of the Bill do not exceed the charges levied by the Government agency for manual delivery of services. Charges for manual service delivery may include charges for photocopy, printing, paper, postage etc., all of which are totally eliminated during service delivery through electronic means. Thus, levying the same charges, let alone greater charges for electronic service delivery is totally unnecessary and places an additional burden on the citizen ultimately defeating the very purpose of the Bill.
Security in payment of charges
Section 3(2) of the Bill provides for the Government to regulate the manner and method of payment of charges for delivery of services.It is important that each transaction that takes place is done securely and without the exposure of an individuals confidential details. There are many ways to structure the transaction of payment of fees to achieve this goal. We reccommend that the SCOSTA smart card structure is used for completing and processing a transaction.
Data Security and Privacy
Section 5(1)(e) of the Bill requires the Government to ensure integrity, security and confidentiality of data collected, preserved and retained. We recommend that in addition to this, the Government also ensures integrity, security and confidentiality of data or information that is transferred, accessed or deleted. We also recommend that the Bill requires the Government to prescribe a framework under Section 5(2) for agency privacy policies to ensure that they are interoperable and consistent between different departments of the Government.
Functions of the Central Commissioner
Section 8 of the Bill grants the Central Commissioner the power to perform any or all of the functions listed in the provision including Section 8(f) which refers to the power of the State Commissioner in conducting the work of the State Government agencies. A Central Government authority may not have a say in all matters under the purview of the State Governments. This aspect has been left out for consideration while drafting this provision and hence it needs to be relooked at.
Cut-off Date for Implementation
While the Bill mandates a cut off period of 180 days for the Government to finalise on the scope, framework and manner of service delivery under its provisions, it states that the Government “may” prescribe a framework for implementation of the provisions. It is recommended, for the purpose of ensuring speedy implementation of the provisions, that the term “may” in Section 5(2) be replaced by “shall”.
Transparency of Government Agencies
Transparency and accountability of the Government towards the citizen is as important as the transparency of the citizen towards the Government. Therefore, the provisions of the Bill must ensure that the Government activities are transparent to the citizens by making available to the citizens, details of the responsible officials under the Bill, manner of service delivery and other relevant information in this regard.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/draft-electronic-delivery-services

Second Expert Meeting on Human Rights and the Internet

praskrishna — 2011-06-08T10:01:55Z

The second expert meeting on human rights and the Internet is being organised by the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs and the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Opinion and Expression on 30 and 31 March 2011 in Stockholm (Sweden). Anja Kovacs will participate in this meeting.

List of Participants (draft)

Alison LeClaire Christie alison.leclairechristie@international.gc.ca	Minister-Counsellor and Deputy Permanent Representative, Canadian mission to UN in Geneva
Anabella Rivera libert.expresion@gmail.com	Executive Director, DEMOS, Guatemala
Anja Kovacs anja@cis-india.org	Fellow, The Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore
Anna Nawrot anna.nawrot@rwi.lu.se	Researcher, Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights, Lund, Sweden
Annie Game agame@cjfe.org	Executive Director, CJFE-IFEX
Anriette Esterhuysen anriette@apc.org	Executive Director, Association for Progressive Communications, South Africa
Arthit Suriyawongkul arthit@gmail.com	Thai Neitzen Network, Centre for Popular Media Reform
Brett Solomon brett@accessnow.org	Executive Director, Access Now
Charlotta Bredberg charlotta.bredberg@sida.se	Thematic Coordinator for Democracy, Human Rights, Peace and Security, Global Programme Unit, Department for Global Cooperation, Sida
Cynthia Wong cynthia@cdt.org	Director, Project on Global Internet Freedom, Center for Democracy and Technology, Washington DC
Daniel Westman Daniel.Westman@juridicum.su.se	Researcher and Teacher, Faculty of Law, Stockholm University
Danny Aerts danny.aerts@iis.se	CEO, The Internet Infrastructure Foundation (.SE)
David Mothander davidmothander@google.com	Nordic Policy Counsel, Google, Stockholm
Dunja Mijatovic pm-fom@osce.org	OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media
Eduardo Bertoni eberto2@palermo.edu	Director, Center for Studies on Freedom of Expression and Access to Information, Palermo University School of Law, Argentina
Eric King eric@privacy.org	Human Rights and Technology Advisor, Privacy International
Grace Githaiga ggithaiga@hotmail.com	Kenya ICT Action Network (KICTANET)
Guy Berger G.Berger@ru.ac.za	Professor, School of Journalism & Media Studies, Rhodes University, South Africa
Helena Bjuremalm helena.bjuremalm@sida.se	Senior Policy Specialist, Democracy Assistance, Sida
Hossam Bahgat Hossam@eipr.org	Executive Director, Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, Cairo
Jan Kleijssen jan.kleijssen@coe.int	Director, Directorate General of Human Rights and Legal Affairs, Council of Europe
Jean-Luc Delvert Jean-luc.DELVERT@diplomatie.gouv.fr	Counsellor, Human Rights Division, Ministry for Foreign Affairs, France
Jean-Pierre Kempeneers, jem.kempeneers@minbuza.nl	Head of the Human Rights Division, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, The Netherlands
Jermyn P Brooks jermynbrooks@aol.com	Chair, Global Network Initiative
Joana Varon joana@varonferraz.com	Researcher, Centre for Technology and Society, Rio De Janeiro
Joe McNamee joe@mcnamee.eu	EU Advocacy Coordinator, European Digital Rights Initiative
Joy Liddicoat joy@liddicoatlaw.co.nz	Project Coordinator, Internet Rights are Human Rights, APC, South Africa
Kurt Erik Lindqvist kurtis@netnod.se	CEO, NETNOD, Stockholm
Lee Hibbard Lee.HIBBARD@coe.int	Coordinator for Internet Governance and Information Society, Council of Europe
Lisa Horner LisaH@global-partners.co.uk	Head of Research & Policy, Global Dialogue, London
Lise Bergh lise.bergh@amnesty.se	Director, Amnesty International, Swedish Section
Louise Bermsjö louise.bermsjo@sida.se	Programme Manager for Democracy and Human Rights, Global Programme Unit, Department for Global Cooperation, Sida
Lucille Morillon internet@rsf.org	Head, Bureau of New Media, Reporters sans frontières
Maciej TOMASZEWSKI maciej.tomaszewski@ec.europa.eu	European Commission DG INFSO, Unit A3 Internet; Network & Information Security
Maria Häll maria.hall@enterprise.ministry.se	Deputy Director, Division for Information Technology Policy, Ministry of Enterprise, Energy and Communications, Sweden
Mats Ringborg mats.ringborg@foreign.ministry.se	Ambassador of Sweden to OECD and UNESCO
Matthew Barzun BarzunMW@state.gov	US Ambassador to Sweden
Michael Camilleri MCamilleri@oas.org	Attorney, office of the Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression, OAS
Nicklas Lundblad nlundblad@google.com	Senior Policy Counsel, Public Policy and Government Affairs, Google
Nicole Gregory nicole.gregory@fco.gov.uk	Head of Human Rights Section, Human Rights and Democracy Department, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, UK
Orest Nowosad onowosad@ohchr.org	Director, Special Procedures of the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights
Patrik Fältström patrik@frobbit.se	Distinguished Consulting Engineer, Cisco
Patrik Hiselius Patrik.Hiselius@teliasonera.com	Senior Advisor, Public Affairs, Group Communications, Telia Sonera
Paula Uimonen paula@spidercenter.org	Director, The Swedish Program for ICT in Developing Regions, Stockholm
Richard Allan, ric@fb.com	Director of Policy in Europe, Facebook
Richard Esguerra gwen@eff.org	Senior Activist, Global Internet Freedom Policy, Electronic Frontier Foundation
Robert Guerra guerra@freedomhouse.org	Project Director, Internet Freedom, Freedom House
Robert Hårdh Robert.Hardh@civilrightsdefenders.org	Executive Director, Civil Rights Defenders, Stockholm
Sally Elkhodary sally.khodary@anhri.net	Programs Director, The Arabic Network for Human Rights Information, Cairo
Sarah Labowitz LabowitzSB@state.gov	Office of the Coordinator for Cyber Issues, US State Dept
Staffan Jonson staffan.jonson@iis.se	Policy Adviser, The Internet Infrastructure Foundation (.SE)
Sylvie Coudray s.coudray@unesco.org	Division for Freedom of Expression, Democracy and Peace, UNESCO
Thomas Hajnoczi, Thomas.HAJNOCZI@bmeia.gv.at	Ambassador, Permanent Representative of Austria to Council of Europe
Toby Mendel toby@law-democracy.org	Executive Director, Centre for Law and Democracy
Vilhelm Konnander vilhelm.konnander@gmail.com	Global Voices
Wolfgang Benedek wolfgang.benedek@uni-graz.at	Professor, Faculty of Law, Graz University, Austria
Yaman Akdeniz yaman.akdeniz@bilgi.edu.tr Ženet Mujić zenet.mujic@osce.org	Associate Professor of Law, Faculty of Law, Istanbul Bilgi University Senior Adviser, office of the OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media

Organisers

Frank la Rue Co-Chair of the meeting libert.expresion@gmail.com	UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Opinion and Expression
Olof Ehrenkrona Co-Chair of the meeting olof.ehrenkrona@foreign.ministry.se	Ambassador, Political Adviser to Foreign Minister Carl Bildt, MFA, Sweden
Per Sjögren per.sjogren@foreign.ministry.se	Head, Dept of International Law, Human Rights and Treaty Law, MFA, Sweden
Hans Dahlgren hans.dahlgren@foreign.ministry.se	Ambassador for Human Rights, MFA, Sweden
Måns Molander mans.molander@foreign.ministry.se	Head of Human Rights Section, MFA, Sweden
Johan Hallenborg johan.hallenborg@foreign.ministry.se	Special Adviser, HR Section, MFA, Sweden
Maria Koliopanou maria.koliopanou@foreign.ministry.se	Assistant, HR Section, MFA, Sweden
Karin Keil Pettersson karin.keil-pettersson@foreign.ministry.se	Assistant, HR Section, MFA, Sweden
Pauline Etemad pauline.etemad@foreign.ministry.se	Intern, HR Section, MFA Sweden
Rolf Ring rolf.ring@rwi.lu.se	Deputy Director, Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law, Lund, Sweden
Gordana Jankovic Gordana.Jankovic@osf-eu.org	Director, Open Society Foundation Media Program
Vera Franz vfranz@osf-eu.org	Senior Program Manager, Information Program, Open Society Foundations
Stewart Chisholm Stewart.Chisholm@osf-eu.org	Senior Manager for Freedom of Expression, Open Society Media Program

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/notices/second-expert-meeting

India Should Watch Its Internet Watchmen

praskrishna — 2011-05-06T05:08:05Z

The month after terrorists attacked Mumbai in 2008, India's government initiated legislation enabling it to eavesdrop on electronic communication and block websites on grounds of national security. There was no public debate before the bill in question was introduced, and hardly any debate inside parliament itself before it passed in 2009. In the law, there were no guidelines about the extent to which an individual's right to privacy would be breached. And there was certainly no mention, and therefore, reassurance, that due process would be followed when it came to restricting access to websites. This article by Rahul Bhatia was published in the Wall Street Journal on March 28, 2011.

It's taken about two years for the first signs of misuse to show up. And there may be many more, as the government uses vague discretion instead of firm rules to police India's Internet. Various groups can exploit these discretionary powers to their own ends.

Earlier this month, the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), the body appointed by the government to protect India's information infrastructure, blocked a text-message provider that sends out advertisements in bulk over mobile phone. It also blocked Typepad.com, a publishing platform used frequently by bloggers. Both restrictions have now been lifted.

Most contentiously, a Delhi court ordered CERT-In to block access to Zone-H.org, an Italian security giant that acts as a repository of hacked websites—that is, it collects screen grabs of sites that are infiltrated, which later proves valuable for studying the cyber crime in question. A representative of this website accused an Indian cyber security firm, E2 Labs, of using Zone-H's logo and images to promote its own cyber security school courses. E2 Labs dragged Zone-H to court in 2009 and, on grounds of defamation, had Zone-H's website blocked. What muddies the waters is that E2 Labs claims to work for the government.

Nobody knows what threat, if any, these websites posed to national security. Users who tried accessing them simply received a one-line message from their service providers that the sites had been blocked due to "instructions from the Department of Telecom." That message later disappeared, replaced by the standard error message: "Page Not Found."

Many bloggers immediately started comparing this case to the situation they found themselves in 2006, when the government banned Blogspot.com right after Mumbai's suburban train system was hit by bomb blasts. The Department of Telecom then did not offer an official reason, leaving people guessing that this was some kind of response to that terrorist attack.

That's happening again. The guidelines under which CERT-In operates say that all information related to website blocking is classified. Moreover, its mandate does not include communicating with the public. Which is why everyone is in the dark. Nobody even knows how widespread the blockade is. There's no hint of the process involved. There's no course for redress for those who own the affected sites.

Inquiries from journalists about the Department of Telecom's method of functioning have gone unanswered. When cornered by the press this month, India's Information Technology minister Kapil Sibal, who oversees this department, passed responsibility to the ministry of home affairs, which manages the nation's internal security.

Perhaps there are legitimate reasons for blocking these websites. India has faced its share of terrorist attacks that have, in the last decade, begun to affect the country's urban centers. Terrorists have gotten more sophisticated. The 2008 Mumbai assault especially put pressure on security personnel to be electronically vigilant, because the terrorists used satellite phones and internet technology to communicate. Since then, the government has ramped up its scrutiny of the Internet, including getting into a high-profile dispute last year with Blackberry-maker Research in Motion. Blogs are fair game, too, seeing as how terrorist groups have been known to use them for recruiting and communication. But if there are good reasons this time for blocking the sites in question, they're unknown and unexplained.

That lack of explanation is cause for alarm. First, there's the impact on businesses. Intermediary guidelines proposed by the Department of Information Technology put the onus on service providers to remove any material that, in addition to endangering national security, "causes inconvenience or annoyance," is "grossly offensive or menacing in nature," or "belongs to another person." These open-ended guidelines mean service providers have to spend a good chunk of their time dealing with government officials to determine, say, what is offensive.

The larger impact is on the rule of law. The clumsiness with which New Delhi has blocked these sites undermines any legitimacy the laws have. Lawyers I've spoken with already say that the guidelines, which are open to wide interpretation, violate the country's constitution.

This legal debacle has implications beyond any immediate security concerns. Despite being a democracy with a vigorous free press, India can't afford to take freedom of speech for granted. The concern here is that a statute intended to protect the country from terrorism may also give new legal cover to people trying to restrict speech for other reasons.

Already, thanks in part to the lack of political support for free speech, varied groups hijack cracks or loopholes in the legal framework to their populist ends. For instance, a colonial-era law against religious insults was used in 2007 to appease Hindu nationalists who wanted the government to punish Muslim painter M.F. Hussain for depicting "Mother India" in the nude. That case suggests that the new ill-considered and badly implemented rules for online policing could be exploited by political or business interests.

India undoubtedly faces a serious terrorism problem. But New Delhi needs to defend itself through laws that don't end up impinging on free speech in damaging, undemocratic ways.

Mr. Bhatia is a writer with Open Magazine in Mumbai.

Read the original story here

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/internet-watchmen

Networking its way to better governance

praskrishna — 2011-04-01T15:13:04Z

New policy to regulate Government presence on social media. This article by Deepa Kurup was published in the Hindu on March 28, 2011.

The official Facebook page of the Karnataka Criminal Investigation Department, “DGPCIDKARNATAKA”, is a string of one-sided comments punctuated with official-ese, or newspaper links of some prominent crime or an article by the officials.

The Twitter account, also started around June 2010, has all of 38 tweets, and barely any interaction with “common” men/women. Started with much fanfare, these are among the very few State Government agencies that took to social media, but haven't taken it beyond mere formalities. On the brighter side, blogs by a few Ministers — most prominently, Higher Education Minister V.S. Acharya and Minister for Law and Parliamentary Affairs S. Suresh Kumar — are lively and even interactive, in spurts. A few government departments too have blogs, but none remarkable.

Though the Indian Government's tryst with social media is fairly new — it took a few Twitter controversies, courtesy former Minister @ShashiTharoor, to make the government sit up and take note — some departments such as IndiaPost, the Delhi Traffic Police, Census India and even the Planning Commission, have been able to take it beyond mere posturing and have interacted with citizens, even tried to solve problems. IndiaPost's Twitter page is a good example of how agencies can engage with stakeholders, at least to an extent.

A draft policy

Twitter recently hit headlines again when foreign secretary Nirupama Sen logged on with an official ID and interacted with Indians stranded in Libya looking to make their way back. All these examples, that have earned these departments accolades, has prompted the Indian Government to come up with a new policy for social media.

The e-governance group of the Department of Information Technology (DIT) held a meeting this week to draw up guidelines to “regulate” Government presence on social media sites.

Speaking to The Hindu, a DIT official said this had been on the Government's agenda because efforts in this direction had been all too scattered, and some of the success stories had convinced them that it could be a good platform for interaction. The official added that the feedback they got on the 12th Planning Commission's Facebook page was seen as a good example of how these tools could be leveraged.

But why regulate at all? Regulating social media use by government officials is imperative mainly to ensure that use of information or data is compliant with existing laws.

Consistency needed

Sunil Abraham, director of the Centre for Internet and Society, a Bangalore-based non-governmental organisation, points out that with no general rules in place, the use of Twitter or Facebook account varies according to the bureaucrats heading the departments. “This cannot be the case as the channel of communication has to be a continuous thing, and the data shared with citizens has to be accurate; which means the same standards need to be applied to online sharing of data as is applied to offline data handling. Departments should also be obliged to back-up online data periodically,” he says.

For instance, a traffic police department announced that citizens could share pictures of traffic rule offenders on Facebook or on its website, to facilitate tracking of offenders. “Such a move could have huge privacy implications, and may also lead to vigilante activism,” warns Mr. Abraham, adding that we need a policy so that all activity, however casual it may seem, is compliant with existing law governing data protection and privacy.

With the Government jumping on to the 2.0 bandwagon (often under pressure like in Mumbai where citizens created a Facebook page for the police forcing them to create a real one), it is time to really make it official. So, while the idea of giving a face to government agencies and pushing for transparency and greater interaction with citizens, standardisation of social media use is indeed the way forward.

Read the original article in the Hindu here

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/networking-better-governance

A History of Transparency, Politics and Information Technologies in India

praskrishna — 2011-08-03T09:59:15Z

In this blog post, Zainab Bawa reviews the different spectrums of information, transparency and politics.

Politics has always been fashioned by information, a friend1 pointed out when I mentioned to her about this blog post I was writing to summarize my research on the CIS-RAW monograph about the history of Transparency, Politics and Information Technologies in India.

The question that then arises is what kinds of information and subsequently, what kinds of politics (and vice-versa) are we referring to? I want to begin this blog post by reviewing the different spectrums of information and the contexts within which these different kinds of information become important/unimportant/valuable/invaluable for which groups in our polity? Consequently, how are our own notions of politics informed and how does politics, in terms of ideals such as democracy, equity, access, rights and justice, evolve/perpetuate in practice?

We, as individuals and as part of various groups in society, thrive on information for sustaining and enhancing different aspects of our lives, be they social, political, economic, cultural or historical. The criticality of information, especially information networks, has been revealed to us starkly in recent times by the 3G licensing scam where major corporations were vying for ‘insider’ information that would make it easier for them to obtain the requisite telecom licenses. Clearly, the 3G scam is not the first (and neither will it be the last) instance of the politics of lobbying, aligning with individuals and networks which provide ‘the’ ‘insider’ information and the capitalization of this information. We have known about the politics of ‘insider information’ in the context of stock markets and through Hamish McDonald’s explication of the way corporate giants such as Reliance and then Bombay Dyeing (aka the Wadia clan) have been ‘cultivating’ their ‘insider’ sources in the central government cabinets and ministries. The secrecy and more importantly the exclusiveness that underlies this kind of ‘insider’ information angers a certain strand of public and deepens the cynicism that pervades across a large section of the citizenry. The nature of this secrecy and exclusiveness gets compounded by the fact that there are phenomenally vast sums of money that are involved in this form of ‘insider’ information and the ensuing scams, thereby agitating different people because had there been ‘fair play’ and ‘true competition’, the monies could have benefitted the targeted beneficiaries in a ‘proper’ manner.

There is another kind of ‘insider’ information which exists on this spectrum of ‘insider’ information in particular and information in general, which I want to bring to your attention here. In 2008, I was researching the practices and reach of microfinance in Mumbai 2My research led me, for the first time, to the resettlement and rehabilitation (R&R) housing colonies of Mumbai.

These R & R colonies had been built to rehabilitate slum dwellers and squatters (occupying lands owned by different government agencies and private individuals/parties) whose possessions (claims over land and built structures were coming in the way of widening roads and railway tracks and building flyovers and rail over bridges under two mega infrastructure projects in Mumbai city then. Policies were formulated to compensate and rehabilitate persons and households who would be affected by these mega projects (PAPs and PAHs). I interviewed some of the PAPs and PAHs in an effort to understand the R&R process and the impact that the process had had on their lives and their relationship with the city and its governance.
During many of these interviews, the issue of ‘insider information’ repeatedly came up. PAPs and PAHs explained to me that as part of the R&R policies, surveys had been conducted to identify persons and households who would be eligible for compensation and resettlement. During the surveys, surveyors tried to determine since when the individuals and households had been residing in their houses/on the land, whether they owned the lands/built structures, and whether the structure was to be enumerated as a single unit or more and accordingly what should be the corresponding compensation awarded to the affected person/household. One form of ‘insider information’ in this context pertained to the knowledge of when the surveys would be carried out in the different settlements/squatted spaces so that people would make arrangements accordingly to claim entitlements under the R&R policies. For instance, in many cases, more than one family resided in the same built structure and consequently, only one house would be allotted in lieu of that structure irrespective of the number of families residing in it. Prior knowledge of the surveys, which was usually just a day or two before, would enable these families/households to determine how they would articulate their claim for more than one housing unit, either through appeal to the surveyor’s moral rationalities, or through graft and subversive strategies such as putting up makeshift structures, etc.

A second aspect of ‘insider’ information pertained to the number of units that would be allotted to different households/individuals i.e., those groups, leaders, NGOs (non-government organizations), CBOs (community based organizations), individuals and actors who were directly responsible for the allotment of housing and shops units under the R&R policies allotted more than the ‘fair’ share of entitlements to their favoured constituencies/households. Such actors even traded i.e., sold, the housing unit allotments to persons who were eager to buy these ‘low-income’ units, thus, giving rise to a form of property market around R&R policies and this kind of state intervention. Also, those who had direct/indirect access to actors making such allotments used their influence to obtain at least the compensation that should have accrued to them or more and, as mentioned above, persons interested in purchasing housing units despite not being from the settlement or even the same economic and social milieu influenced the ‘decision-makers’ in this case. An interesting outcome of this kind of ‘insider information’ was that those who had struggled to receive their due R&R compensations perceived these ‘extra legal’ (in this context) allotments as kabza (capture) of the resources (and space which is a premium in Mumbai city) offered under government policies. This notion of ‘kabza’ has now become part of the vocabulary of parties aggrieved by the allotment process and is being mobilized for fulfilling certain kinds of claims advanced before planning agencies in Mumbai, municipalities and the Maharashtra state government.

A third highly interesting form of ‘insider information’ in this R&R process was the prior knowledge that R&R would take place in due course of time, surveys would be conducted and there would be compensations awarded in the form of housing units and commercial spaces. This prior knowledge fuelled an atmosphere of intense speculation in some settlements where many individuals and households began to sell their possessions, built structures, shop spaces, etc., to newcomers (who would then be entitled to compensation under R&R) and the sellers moved out of the settlement to other areas, probably those that would not be marked for R&R or to neighbouring areas. Property values rose in such cases because newcomers were eager to be enumerated for a ‘secure’ entitlement, in this case a house/shop. Apart from the speculation which ensued from this form of ‘insider information’, ambiguity was also created, mainly related to determining who were the ‘original’ inhabitants and who were the ‘fake/newcomers’. There were no easy answers to resolving this ambiguity and interestingly, this ambiguity now resides (and may be legitimated in due course of time) in the survey records of the NGOs which were responsible for conducting the surveys, in the government’s entitlements’ records and now, in the property registries of the planning department and municipality that are being created as part of legalization of ownership of the R&R housing and commercial units.

What I have tried to explain through the examples of the 3G scam and the R&R process in Mumbai is that there is a spectrum of contexts and situations across which information gets created, circulated/percolated and transmitted in particular forms and through exclusive networks and circuits. The spectrum of information gets created through this variety of contexts and the spectrum gets defined and redefined, time and again, in terms of the value and the criticality attributed to different kinds of information and therefore, the implications that are perceived to stem from hiding such information(s) and excluding different groups of people from accessing it. Assessing the implications of transparency, opacity and secrecy of information in different contexts becomes more complex when we understand how and why different actors and institutions within the state, in between the state-civil society complex, and a variety of other actors advocate for transparency and the vocabulary and manner in which they articulate claims and projects for transparency.

There is also the issue of scale of exposure of a particular scam or some other act of secrecy/‘insider’ information which leads us to assess transparency or the lack of it in highly normative and morally laden ways. For instance, the 3G scam acquired the issue of national importance because of the involvement of the national government in Delhi and a handful of corporations who gained vast sums of money in direct and indirect ways; the fact that the scam appeared as an act of cheating to several cell phone users in India and especially to the tax-paying publics who have already been articulating complaints about their entitlements with respect to poor quality or complete lack of government and municipal resources; the manner in which this scam was interpreted, analyzed and then communicated to the public through different media (newspapers, television, blogs, protests, etc). Whereas, the lack of transparency in the housing allotment process under the R&R policies’ implementation does not get the same kind of reactions and outcry by the same set of tax payers and citizenry base because of the scale of the issue and therefore, the exposure (something to think about), the disdain that exists among tax payers and citizens against slum dwellers, squatters and such ‘illegal’ groups and the widespread cynicism that resettled or rehabilitated squatters and slum dwellers will eventually go back to squatting and occupying public lands because this is their ‘inherent’ nature. The other, more important question, is whether the different kinds of ‘insider’ information(s) involved in the R&R implementation process should be made public because if these were made public, would the unfairness and ‘corruption’ in the process and the ambiguities that have emerged from the implementation be reversed? Even more importantly, do government agencies have the resources and the grasp to deal with reversing the survey and allotment process given that information concerning land is not only fuzzy but by nature is both incomplete and contested? And, following from the question of correcting wrongs and setting right the rights, does it imply that my analyses of the lack of transparency and the forms of ‘insider’ information in the R&R process actually legitimizes the corruption and inequities involved in allotments? (I deal with this question in a more detailed manner in the monograph.)

The other question that is connected with both the 3G scam and the problems with the R&R policy implementation process (and also the recent WikiLeaks and cablegate controversy surrounding the buying of elected representatives for the vote of confidence) is who are the people controlling information and what resources do they have at their disposal to hide or reveal some things to which publics? This question is not simply a matter of the BJP (Bhartiya Janata Party) having the financial and other resources at its disposal to engineer a plot for destabilizing the UPA (United Progressive Alliance) government. It is also a matter of say a licensing department in a municipality or a land and estates department in an urban governance set-up which is mired, by both default and design[3], in histories and presents of information inadequacies, information controls, claims (made by claimants from among citizens and state) and the corresponding access and/or lack of it to government resources and land/space. How do we evaluate/assess these departments’ acts of transparency and the lack of it as well as their strategies of information percolation, control and dissemination given their institutional and political context as well as the histories and the very kinds and nature of information that define and redefine their functioning?

Clearly then, we are talking about power – power relations and equations – here, and in this respect one would wonder what more does this monograph do other than discuss these power dynamics. But the monograph really does more than this. It tries to read these power dynamics in the context of how they inform and shape our understandings of information per se i.e., what constitutes information and how certain forms of information are made legitimate or illegitimate. The monograph also tries to analyze the notions and practices of authentication and certification of information that have come into being either directly or indirectly through mobilizations around access to information, use of information and rights of citizens, and how these efforts of authentication and certification shape the very nature of information and the politics around its production and transmission in different contexts. I must add here, therefore, that the monograph uses the term information technologies in a very broad sense even when it is covering a history of information technologies, mainly digital ICTs (Information and Communication Technologies) such as databases, websites and e-governance. The monograph also looks at how these digital technologies get embedded within the existing and emerging technologies and institutions of governance and information production, circulation and percolation. Such an approach, I argue in the monograph, broadens the manner in which we view and evaluate digital technologies and their power as well as its appropriations (a term and practice discussed in much greater detail in the monograph) by different actors within the state and among the public.

There are two questions that I have to address before I close down this blog post. The first question is how I understand and define transparency and second is how I conceive politics. Transparency resides within the domain of information – the way in which information is produced (materially and symbolically), accessed, used, circulated, reproduced, appropriated, subverted and transmitted through various channels and mediums. I do not work with a single definition of transparency because as much as transparency is a desired norm, it is also a double-edged sword where the act of making something transparent has various kinds of repercussions, direct and indirect, on different strands of society. What I bring through this monograph is an urge to review transparency in more critical and thicker ways. This does not mean that we have to abandon the project of transparency altogether. Rather, we need to critically examine the emerging relationship between transparency, information and data and the increasing emphasis on ‘rational’ and ‘scientific data sets’ (such as budgetary analyses, certified information under the Right to Information (RTI) act, etc.) as the means of enforcing transparency and therefore, accountability – would not such transparency come with certain political costs for our society and who bears these costs and at what expense? This monograph therefore, examines transparency as a practice that has to be abstracted from the different contexts in which it is being applied, advocated and the manner in which claims for transparency are being advocated.

Politics – phew! Shall we get started on this? Of course! I will try and keep this brief. I started with explaining how there is a spectrum across which information exists. Politics also exists on a spectrum, and that spectrum is beyond one of ‘from petty corruption to high corruption’, from extortion of bribes by cops to 2G and 3G scams. At the moment, not only states within India and its central government, all parts of the globe are mired in various kinds of scandals and scams that are increasingly moving our thinking and even our faith into revolutions and radical overthrow of governments. At another end of the spectrum of our thinking and conception of politics is a strand of thinkers who have forced us to think about “quiet” (Bayat, 1997) and “insurgent” (Holston, 2008) politics, one that is articulated through very complex claims that arise and diminish in different contexts (Chatterjee, 2004; Benjamin, 1996, 2005, 2008). My task in this monograph is to explain this spectrum of politics, especially how it plays out in the context of transparency and information technologies. I will discuss the complexities of claims, autonomy, institutional politics and norms/ideals. The challenge of this monograph is to convince different stakeholders and the public to interrogate our notions of politics, and to instill a sense of optimism in a time which is an one interesting one for all of our lives and aspirations.

Notes

1Mythri Prasad, Ph.D. Scholar, Centre for Development Studies (CDS), Trivandrum.

2Research conducted under the aegis of Delphi Research Services, Bangalore, and for the purposes of my doctoral dissertation.

3 I am grateful to Narayana Gatty, faculty at Azim Premji University, for raising this issue of ‘default and design’ in the context of his research on e-governance and its impact on citizens and state agents.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/transparency-and-politics/transparency-politics-it-in-india