Centre for Internet and Society

Tulu takes a major Wiki leap, all thanks to a dedicated team

praskrishna — 2016-08-22T16:38:47Z

Tulu is one of the five Dravidian languages but it has the least number of speakers. Though it has a script, lack of usage has made it almost obsolete, forcing Tulu writers to write in Kannada. This has, however, benefited Tulu today, allowing it to boast of its own Wikipedia

The article by Akram Mohammed was published in the Indian Express on August 21, 2016. Dr. U.B. Pavanaja was quoted. Also mirrored in Nyooz on August 22, 2016.

Anyone who proposes a Wikipedia in a new language knows the labour between the proposal stage and the period it goes live. The long phase usually erodes the enthusiasm and in many cases, the proposal never passes the incubation period. In the case of Tulu Wikipedia, there were a few determined to ensure it saw the light of the day.

Like Vasanth CN, who had rallied for the Wikipedia page since it was first proposed in 2008. A native of Dharmasthala, the language enthusiast detailed how tcy.wikipedia.org came into being. “When it was first proposed in 2008, there were six people behind it,” he recalled. After a while, the Board of Trustees and Language Committee of Wikipedia accepted the proposal.

Then came the incubation period, stretching over eight years, where enthusiasm ebbed and swelled among the parties working for a Tulu Wikipedia page. “If you see the Wikipedia homepage, you see a lot of system messages. Our task was to translate these system messages first. By 2011-12, we had succeeded in generating about 120 articles related to the Tulu language and the region in which it is spoken,” he said.The tricky part was to get the page active. It needed volunteers and they were hard to come by. “For a Wikipedia page to become live, we required at least 600 articles. Moreover, we also required at least five active volunteers who could contribute content or edit existing pages” he said.

It took several workshops at different venues to get the numbers.

Vasanth told Express that the motivation behind the project was to ensure a recognition for the language and to help it evolve. “It is important to have a knowledge base in the local language,” he said. At present, the page has over 780 articles. “If there is encouragement from government agencies such as the Tulu Academy, we can easily increase the content,” he said. He added that further support was required to upload works of ancient and modern Tulu literature, in online avenues such as wikisource.

U B Pavanaja from Centre for Internet and Society, said that efforts picked up in 2014 to make the page live. Commenting on the significance of the language, he said that Tulu had a rich heritage. Several religious books and works of literature had been translated to Tulu during the late 18th century, which included the Bible. In coastal districts, Tulu can be chosen as an optional subject today, he said.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/news/indian-express-august-21-2016-akram-mohammed-tulu-takes-a-major-wiki-leap-all-thanks-to-a-dedicated-team

Tulu gets official Wikipedia page, but Mumbai linguists say more is needed

praskrishna — 2016-08-22T02:43:08Z

Sitting in his Sunkadakatte home in Bengaluru, Dr UB Pavanaja still recalls the moment when he was at the WikiConference India 2016 in Chandigarh earlier this month. Academicians from all over India had gathered at the event, to share their views about issues related to India on Wikipedia. While the talks were still in progress, Katherine Maher, executive director, Wikimedia Foun-dation, USA, paused to make an announcement.

The article by Anju Maskeri was published in Mid-day on August 21, 2016. Dr. U.B. Pavanaja was quoted.

“The Tulu Wikipedia page has just gone live,” she boomed into the microphone. “It was a moment of great joy because we were working on this project for the last eight years,” says Pavanaja, programme manager (Indian languages) at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bengaluru, and one of the mentors of Tulu Wikipedia.

UNESCO has listed Tulu as one of the endangered languages, which is at the risk of falling out of use, because it has a few surviving speakers. Pavanaja says the Wikipedia page is a medium for people to access material on Tulu. “Today, it’s the first page that appears on Google, so the accessibility of the language will hopefully increase manifold,” Pavanaja says.

The Mumbai connect

Sukesh Shetty, owner of Hindmata Hotel in Tardeo, who is continuing the tradition of running a restaurant business started by his grandfather, feels his connection with the language is restricted to his interaction at home. “I ensure I speak in Tulu with my children. But, my four-year-old speaks Marathi better than Tulu because we have a Mah-arashtrian maid,” he laughs.

The 46-year-old is part of the Bunta Sangha, an organisation devoted towards rallying the Tulu-speaking Bunt community.

Shetty feels the lack of availability of Tulu literature and movies in Mumbai are responsible for the declining interest in the language. “You don’t get to watch any Tulu films because they are never screened here. We don’t even have a channel that telecasts Tulu movies. But, the Wikipedia page is a step ahead,” he says.

The Tulu Wikipedia page (tcy.wikipedia.org) went live this month. Currently, there are around 200 registered users of the page

Accessing Tulu

Wikipedia is currently available in 22 Indian languages, including, Assamese, Bish-nupriya, Kashmiri, Konkani, Newari, Odia, Pali and Urdu among others. With the inclusion of Tulu, the count has gone up to 23. “There are about 200 registered users (editors) of Tulu Wikipedia. On an average, we have around eight to 10 active editors. Dr Vishwanatha Badikana, a Kannada professor, and engineer Bharatesha Alasandemaj-alu are the highest contributors,” says Dr Pavanaja.

Tulu Wikipedia was in “incubation” since 2008. This term is used to describe similar online encyclopedias, which are still waiting to go “live”. “Tulu is written in the Kannada script, but the language is believed to be 2,000 years old. But, to create a Wiki page, we needed to prove that it’s a classical language and deserves recognition. We had to submit sizeable amount of literature, ancient manuscripts and literary work for the language to qualify,” he says.

Dr Badikana, who works as a History professor at St Alosious College, Mangalore University, says they had to generate awareness about the language through workshops. “Tulu is predominantly an oral language, and hence, people don’t take interest in documenting it. With Kannada being state-recognised, it’s more popular. We had to hold writing workshops in Tulu to motivate people,” he says.

A languishing script

Of late, Tulu — believed to be one of the oldest Dravidian languages — has been generating great interest amongst linguists and academicians alike. The excavation of an ancient manuscript, Tulu Devimahatme, a prose work like the Mahabharata, from the 15th century and two epic poems written in 17th century, namely Sri Bhagavata and Kaveri by language experts in the last few years have revived interest in the language.

However, a major grouse in the community has been its non-inclusion in the Eighth Schedule of the Indian Constitution, which lists the official languages of the country. Presently, it recognises 22 languages with Tulu being the only Dravidian language to have been left out.

Professor Tukaram Poojary, who was instrumental in setting up the Rani Abbakka Tulu Research Centre in Bantwal, Karnataka in 1995, has sent a memorandum to Pranab Mukherjee, President of India for the inclusion of the language in the Eight Schedule.

“Scholars like the nineteenth missionary-linguist Bishop Robert Caldwell have called this language ‘peculiar and very interesting’,” says Poojary. According to him, Tulu is one of the most highly developed languages in the Dravidian family. “But it never received any royal patronisation as was seen with other Dravidian languages such as Telugu, Tamil or Malayalam,” he says.

Shimantur Chandrahas Suvarna, a popular Tulu writer based in Borivli has been diligently writing short stories, poems and novels in the language for the last 40 years. “Although, I write in both Kannada and Tulu, I have been focusing more on the latter, because if we don’t speak and document the language, it will die,” says the 61-year-old, who moved to Mumbai in 1979 after his father set up an Udipi hotel called Hotel Sadanand in Mazgaon.

Suvarna feels the lack of serious literature before the 15th century has hampered Tulu’s claim as one of the legitimate South Indian languages. “In the first half of the 19th century, the German missionaries popularised the language. They produced the Tulu lexicon and a Tulu-English dictionary. But, after the Christian missionaries started printing the Bible and related literature in Kannada, the old script was discarded and the Kannada script was adopted to write Tulu,” he said.

Today, there are no books or literature in the Tulu script and there are only a handful of tuluvas, who can read the script, says Suvarna.

According to him, during the last three years, there has been a surge in literary interest with more than 100 writers contributing articles, poems to a quarterly journal published by the Karnataka Tulu Sahitya Academy Research.

Last year, the University of Mumbai, in collaboration with the Kannada department, and the Rani Abbakka Tulu Research Centre, held a series of lectures on the inclusion of Tulu in the Eighth Schedule. Professor GN Upadhya, head of the department of Kannada at MU, who was part of the series, feels the issue has now become political. “There’s no political willingness on part of the MPs and MLAs to lobby for this language, because it doesn’t constitute a vote bank,” he says.

A language in restoration

Around two million people in the southwest part of Karnataka and the Kasaragod district of Kerala speak Tulu. In Mumbai, about 10 lakh people speak the language. At the beginning of the 20th century, the practice of writing the language in the Tulu script witnessed a decline and was gradually abandoned in favour of the Kannada script. It was only in 2010 that Tulu began to be taught as a subject at the higher primary level schools of coastal Karnataka.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/news/mid-day-anju-maskeri-august-21-2016-tulu-gets-official-wikipedia-page-but-mumbai-linguists-say-more-is-needed

Tulika

praskrishna — 2013-07-29T10:57:51Z

Tulika Pandey

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/Tulika.png

Trump

praskrishna — 2019-12-12T16:51:59Z

Donald Trump

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Trolled

praskrishna — 2017-05-26T00:49:57Z

Trolling

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Tree

praskrishna — 2011-06-08T12:45:59Z

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Travel Insurance Policy

praskrishna — 2018-10-13T12:29:42Z

The Centre for Internet and Society will offer overseas travel insurance policies only for people of Indian origin or those having Residential visas/ permits, OCI, or PIO cards.
The Centre for Internet and Society will provide overseas travel insurance from “Travel Companion”.
“Travel Companion” will provide complete medical and health coverage to the Indian nationals traveling overseas.
The Centre for Internet and Society will not provide travel insurance for domestic travel.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/about/policies/travel-insurance-policy

Transparent Government, via Webcams in India

praskrishna — 2011-07-21T05:41:53Z

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM, India — Little Brother is watching you. That is the premise for the webcam that a top government official here has installed in his office, as an anticorruption experiment. Goings-on in his chamber are viewable to the public, 24/7.

The chief minister of Kerala state in India has installed a webcam in his office and puts the feed online as an anticorruption measure.

In an India beset by kickback scandals at the highest reaches of government, and where petty bribes at police stations and motor vehicle departments are often considered a matter of course, Oommen Chandy is making an online stand.

"Instead of taking action against corruption, I believe that we have to create an atmosphere where everything should be in a transparent way," Mr. Chandy, who recently became chief minister of Kerala state after his coalition won a close election, said in an interview in his office. "The people must know everything."

About 100,000 visitors logged in to the video feed on the day it began, July 1. And through last Friday afternoon, it had been visited by 293,586 users.

The chief minister — equivalent to an American governor — gave the interview during a break in negotiations with leaders of the state’s private colleges over the fees they can charge students.

Although the proceedings were being streamed on his office’s Web site, as with everything captured by the webcam there was no audio. (The minister says he wants visitors and aides to speak freely when they meet him.)

Sunil Abraham, the executive director of the Center for Internet and Society in Bangalore, said he applauded Mr. Chandy’s webcams, even if the effort amounted to no more than tokenism.

"This type of tokenism is also quite useful," said Mr. Abraham, predicting it might check the behavior of not only the chief minister, but also his underlings and the powerful executives and politicians who come to visit him.

Of course, he noted, if people are intent on paying bribes, they could probably still do it outside the office.

Mr. Abraham said webcams might be a far more powerful tool if installed in police stations, drivers’ licenses offices, welfare agencies and other places where Indians interact with officials who sometimes demand bribes to do routine work. A few agencies around the country have started such surveillance, he said, but most have not.

Mr. Chandy’s effort comes as India has been racked by one corruption scandal after another. A former federal telecommunications minister is sitting in jail on charges that he gave cellphone licenses to favored companies, costing the government as much as $40 billion. Several corporate executives, an official involved in planning the Commonwealth Games and the scion of a political family are also behind bars while being tried on various corruption charges.

But transparency is tedious. For most of the day, as the videos stream from the Chandy chambers, the chief minister is either out of the office or sitting with aides and other politicians. The video from a second camera, trained on the outside chamber, shows aides at their desks answering phones or staring into their computer screens.

A career politician and a member of the ruling Congress party, Mr. Chandy, 67, had a webcam in his office when he was chief minister for two years from 2004 to 2006. But his successor, the leader of a communist coalition government, removed the device when he took over. Now in the opposition, the communists deride the webcams as a publicity stunt.

But others see virtue in such efforts, even if the details are still being refined.

In Bangalore, the top executive of a government-owned electricity utility has been using a webcam in his office. The official, P. Manivannan, said he was now installing a "hemispheric" camera that would capture the goings-on in his entire office rather than just show his visitors.

But he said he would no longer broadcast the video stream to the Web site of the Bangalore Electricity Supply Company.

"I have been getting a lot of brickbats because of the cameras,” Mr. Manivannan said in a telephone interview. "My colleagues were telling me, 'What are you trying to prove — that you are the only honest one?' "

Once the new camera is installed, Mr. Manivannan said it would record everything. But anyone interested in viewing segments of the video would have to request the clips, at no cost. That should ease tension in the office, he said, while still keeping things on the up and up.

He said he had success with a similar camera when he was in the city government and some politicians threatened to call a strike unless he reinstated a fired employee. The politicians backed off, Mr. Manivannan said, when he threatened to give a recording of their meeting to local television stations.

"I definitely believe that putting a camera helps you prove that you are accountable," he said. "I would be very happy if tomorrow the government of India decided you must have a camera."

A version of this article appeared in print on July 18, 2011, on page B3 of the New York edition with the headline: Transparent Government, Via Webcams in India.

This news by Vikas Bajaj was published in the New York Times on 17 July 2011. It can be read here. (Photo of Oommen Chandy, the Chief Minister of Kerala taken by Sanjit Das for the New York Times)

The above news was published in other languages as well:

Read the news in wprost here [Polish]
Read the news in ictnews here [Vietnamese]
Read the news in@rret sur images here [French]

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/transparent-government-india

Transparency and Privacy

praskrishna — 2014-02-28T04:54:08Z

The two concepts, transparency and privacy, can be both opposing and inter related. On one level the protection of individual privacy is achieved through institutional and governmental transparency, as transparency of actions taken by the government or private sector, concerning the individuals works to inspire trust. On another level situations of privacy and transparency bring out the question of how the public good should be balanced against public and private interests.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/transparency-and-privacy.pdf

Transparency and Privacy

praskrishna — 2014-09-07T04:05:17Z

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/transparency-privacy.zip

Transparency and Privacy

praskrishna — 2014-05-06T04:07:57Z

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Transparency and MDGs: the Role of the Media and Technology

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T10:16:21Z

Key quotes from sixth panel

“We are thinking globally, acting locally. We take the bottom-up approach with radio for people in the community to tell their government what they need and to partake in decision making process.”
— Lucy Maathai, Slums Information Development and Resource Centers, Kenya

“For HIV/AIDS in Botswana during the 1990s, we tried creating big billboards saying ‘get tested’, we tried working through NGOs, but it was not until we also got local churches and local tribal leaders together, that things changed. We had to focus on getting buy-in from the political leadership and every local leader. UNDEF was set up to fill the gaps between UN agencies like UNICEF, UNDP, etc. What I have seen in botswana and 30 years of experience, is that if we always add information and communication at the end, we will fail. Rather we need to make sure that it is integrated all along. Furthermore, people in Botswana are aware of technologies, but they do not feel that they can use it or are supported to use it. Instead they use traditional methods, such as churches, in bars, and with local tribal leaders. The UN are mostly used to dealing with formal institutions, but in order to help the bottom billion in the world, we need to engage with the informal institutions, sometimes even with the ‘bad guys’”.
— Bjoern Ferde, UNDP Oslo Center, Norway

“If a transparency system is based on suspicion rather than trust, it breeds corruption. If your demand for transparency and accountability undermines social safety nets, you will undermine your entire argument. Transparency may seem to add to accountability, but we must understand that it oftens undermines privacy (in the Gujarat genocide, muslims were found and killed by rioters using tax and electoral records). In addition, in india, a name alone reveals a lot of information on caste, area and religion, so what is normal in the west – disclosing names – is not always a good idea. Finally, in many places, particularly those in conflict, disclosing your income may lead to groups turning up at your door and demanding a share.”

— Sunil Abraham, Centre for Internet and Society, India

“It’s great what ARTICLE 19 is doing. There’s often a lot of discussion within communities, but not so often discussions between communities. I want to connect the media too. So little has been done at the international level on how information and communication help development. We do need to acknowledge that the media has massive advantages as an information and transparency mechanism. If you ask politicians what they are worried about in regards to transparency, they are worried about the media. In peru, a report states that Fujimori bribed media executives 100x the amount that he bribed a judge. Indeed, there are so few people paid within UN organisations to focus on understanding and using communication to effect people’s lives. We are operating in a strategic vaccum. It’s hugely exciting to work out where we can go in the future. This event takes us a long way forward.”
— James Deane, BBC World Trust, UK

“There are simple and creative ways to demonstrate information, such as the ‘stone’ test. In Botswana, each person in a village was asked to place a stone in the middle of the group for every person that died due to HIV/AIDS. It created an immediate and devastating effect when people suddenly visualised the effect on their community and then collectively began to think about what that meant in regards to families and society.”
— Bjoern Ferde, UNDP Oslo Center, Norway

“In the south we call the media the fourth estate – a moral and ethical force to protect democracy and the constitution of our country. In the north however, we have a business model which completely removes any sense of ethics. The Indian Express, for example, will only talk about markets, not about people and their lives in poverty. Furthermore, whilst we want information shared, we do not want the information collected by the state to destroy the people.
— Aruna Roy, MKSS

Read the original

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/transparency-mdgs-key-quotes

Transnational Due Process: A Case Study in Multi-stakeholder Cooperation

praskrishna — 2015-11-07T15:47:41Z

The Internet & Jurisdiction Project is organizing the workshop “Transnational due process: A case study in multi-stakeholder cooperation” at the Internet Governance Forum convened by the United Nations on November 10-13, 2015. Sunil Abraham will be a speaker in this event.

Multi-stakeholder cooperation is necessary to develop and implement operational solutions to Internet Governance challenges. One such challenge is the tension between the cross-border nature of the Internet and diverse national jurisdictions. As a result, direct requests are increasingly addressed by public authorities and courts in one country to Internet platforms and DNS operators in other jurisdictions for domain seizures, content takedowns and user identification.

The roundtable at the Internet Governance Forum 20125 will gather participants in the I&J Project from different stakeholder groups to report on the progress of the Internet & Jurisdiction process and talk about:

the method employed to develop this framework, challenges encountered and solutions found
the potential distribution of roles among the respective stakeholders in the operation of the diverse framework components

Participants

ANNE CARBLANC, Head of Division, Directorate for Science, Technology and Industry, OECD
EILEEN DONAHUE, Director Global Affairs, Human Rights Watch
BYRON HOLLAND, President and CEO, CIRA (Canadian ccTLD)
CHRISTOPHER PAINTER, Coordinator for Cyber Issues, US Department of State
SUNIL ABRAHAM, Executive Director, CIS India
ALICE MUNYUA, Lead dotAfrica Initiative and GAC representative, African Union Commission
Speaker tbc, Google
FRANK LaRUE, Former UN Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression
Speaker tbc, German Federal Foreign Office
HARTMUT GLASER, Executive Secretary, Brazilian Internet Steering Committee
MATT PERAULT, Head of Policy Development, Facebook

This was published on the website of Internet & Jurisdiction Also see this on IGF website.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/transnational-due-process-a-case-study-in-multi-stakeholder-cooperation

Transnational Due Process: A Case Study in MS Cooperation

praskrishna — 2015-11-08T03:27:02Z

nternet Governance Forum (IGF) 2015 will be held at Jao Pessoa in Brazil from November 10 to 13, 2015. The theme of IGF 2015 is Evolution of Internet Governance: Empowering Sustainable Development. Internet & Jurisdiction Project is organizing a workshop on Transnational Due Process on November 13, 2015. Sunil Abraham is a panelist.

Since 2012, the Internet & Jurisdiction Project facilitates a multi-stakeholder dialogue process on this issue. More than 80 entities have collaboratively produced a draft transnational due process framework. Here, the concept of multi-stakeholder cooperation is therefore relevant both as method (the dialogue process) and as outcome (the collaborative framework).

The roundtable will gather participants in the I&J Project from different stakeholder groups to describe:

the method employed to develop this framework, challenges encountered and solutions found
the potential distribution of roles among the respective stakeholders in the operation of the diverse framework components

The expected benefit is to share concrete experiences around innovative approaches for multi-stakeholder cooperation such as issue-based networks, inter-sessional work methods and transnational policy standards.

This session will also present the proposed framework to the IGF community to solicit feedback, reach out to new actors and discuss the way forward. The roundtable will be prepared in 2015 by two dedicated meetings in Germany and Brazil, as well as by a number of other sessions with stakeholders around the world organized by the Internet & Jurisdiction Project.

Click to read the details on IGF website.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/transnational-due-process-a-case-study-in-ms-cooperation

Transforming urbanscapes: ATM in cities

praskrishna — 2012-03-13T10:43:51Z

This is the first in series of posts where I will try and articulate the transformation in the urban landscape that one can attribute either directly or in-directly to information and communication technologies. I am keen in discussing changes that are more fundamental in terms of architectural typology and spatial constructs and all this while looking for things that are specific to an Indian city. And that is where the story becomes rather interesting; Indian cities are unique and so when a shift occurs in its material constructs it must be analyzed with reference to its peculiar context.

Automated Teller Machines (ATM) are an accepted part of the city landscape. They are omnipresent and expected to be near you anytime anywhere. Not surprising the other common interpretation of the acronym ATM has popularly been “Any Time Money”! The functioning of ATM is absolutely dependent on the connection of these machines with the mother server of the bank. Without the networked connection through internet, the ATMs machines are dead and practically cannot do anything. ATMs are dependent on internet and the very presence of thousands of ATM spaces in our cities is perhaps the most reoccurring reminder of the spatial alteration of the urban landscape. This phenomenon needs to be dissected further and I will try and answer the following questions in the process.

What is the nature of the ATM spatial typology and how does it fit with the physical context?
What are the meaning that are attached to the ATM space and what do they now signify?

Occurrence, Repetition and Assurance

ATM’s like the hoardings of a recent advertisement campaign repeats itself at most part of the city. The same banner, color, bright light and the bored security guard at the gate. Absolutely predictable, repetitive and thoroughly efficient. They are suppose to do a simple function of vending currency note at most times. But they are now an important element in the city that repeats and can be easily identified. They are not only doing the function of vending money but also serve as an important advertisement of the bank and announce its presence in the city. ATM’s multiple occurrence in a city surely reinforces the idea of the aspirational middle class of Indian cities.

ATM’s dots the urban landscape while glowing in the night when every other shop and establishments are asleep. A 24 hour petrol pump, the all night coffee shop and of course the railway station tea shop that open all night are the other such night owls that reassure us that the city is not dead and everything will start again tomorrow.

These all night establishment have an important urban function; that of sheltering the lost souls in the night and keeping alive the idea of a city on the move.

The Private in Public: Banking in the City Spaces

The ATMs are extensions of the banks that reach out in the city. They are the point of receiving money (our money) from the bank. Banking has extended to public place and this is a very important phenomenon. Historically of course, informal banking has been taking place in street corners and small shacks in most old areas, but again only in certain parts of the city that are associated with such activities.

The ATM’s extend banking in public domain, but through a rather scared and conditioned spaces of the room where the solitary ATM machines lie. The ATM machines occur everywhere signifying that a lifestyle in a consumer society. But ATMs as extension of banking space, are creating a rather interesting contradiction. Banks were never public places really and privacy was always a very important component of banking. Traditionally customers never did transactions in full public view. Money was collected, counted and snugly inserted in wallet or a non-noticeable bag in the comfort of the high counter and inside a fairly semi-public space of the bank. The space of the bank became the place of transaction in extremely limited public view. Moreover the view was not really of strangers but of fellow customers as worried about privacy as the “viewed” subject themselves.

The ATM’s present a new problem; as at one level it creates a space in many parts of the city where a customer can carry out transaction (mostly withdrawals of currency notes) but in full public view of the market place. This is rather interesting and the situation demands a public display of ones rather private (not necessarily secretive) exercise of doing financial transactions. Not surprising there is always a swiftness of action when people withdraw money from an ATM!

“Why can’t they have more ATM machines in the city? Multinational banks but pathetic service, I tell you. And what the hell is that guy doing. He has already withdrawn twice. Is he talking to the machine”…. An impatient customer in the ATM queue.

It is not surprising that waiting outside an ATM machine is not as comfortable as lets say waiting for our turn to buy vegetables or a boarding pass before a flight. ATM’s spatial typology are still reflective of this fundamental contradiction. It is not clear whether the ATM can be as public as a grain shop or as private as a public toilet! At one level the ATM’s have to be very accessible and visible, making it easier for people to use but at the same time they have to be guarded, controlled and monitored.

That is why perhaps there are two distinct parts of the ATM space; The facade which is formed by the back lit name of the bank written in a particular manner and the window from which one can view the ATM machine lying inside. This together becomes like a two dimensional graphics (visual brand) that announces the presence of the ATM. The second is essentially the conditioned room that keeps the machines, which tries and give some sense of the privacy to the customer and perhaps facilitate the security of the machine. Not to forget the security guard, who sits and practically does nothing!

See below the exploded view of the essential ATM typology

I wish if someone can tell me if a bored security guard always found along with an ATM is essentially an Indian phenomenon?

It is not surprising that the ATM on the wall on public street has practically failed to inspire any confidence and are rather rare to find these days. I do not think it is only the concern of security of the ATM machine. I guess the machines are more secured as embedded objects in a wall rather than being stand alone in a room. It seems it is has to do with discomfort associated with doing financial transaction in full public view and that is why the closed room.

The ATM in its present form has not really integrated with the other elements of the city as it essentially sits in the building typology that is meant for small shops. It does not exist in any particular combination of other shops. One of the reason for vitality in Indian city is the nature of combination of various agglomerated shopping and commerce.

For example Tea shop on street-balloon vendor - Chat wala - Cold drink and Ice-cream shop - Pan Shop - Florists - Newspaper Vendor - Archies Card Gallery - Stationary shop and so on!

ATM machine is surely the black sheep unless of course it can be viewed and designed as a utility urban furniture like a bus stand, parking meter, letter box, public toilets or a telephone booth.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/internet-society-and-space-in-indian-cities/transforming-urbanscapes-atm-in-cities