One of the first and perhaps the most noted initiative for enhancing direct communication between politicians and the citizens, enabling access to information about the government, and attempting to create an online citizens’ community was the Digital City (DDS) project launched in Amsterdam in January 1994. DDS initially started off as a ten-week experiment whose goal was to create a model ‘digital’ city with the same amenities and features as the city of Amsterdam, with the exception that in the Digital City, people would be able to communicate directly with the municipal level politicians and they would be able to access information about the municipality. The Digital City contained bulletin boards for facilitating discussions. People were offered inexpensive internet access to be able to participate in the Digital City. In this respect, it has been pointed out the that the implementation of the Digital City was possible owing to the radical visions and efforts of the hackers who modeled internet access around the earlier cable television access which became affordable for most people in the city. The ten-week experiment became so popular that it was decided to continue the effort. The municipality of Amsterdam financially supported the project and it continued well into the late 1990s. However, in the subsequent years, it became difficult to sustain the project and by around 1999, many commercial Internet Service Providers (ISPs) came onto the scene and began providing internet access at competitive prices. Around this time, internal problems had begun to surface within the DDS management itself, which led to confusion in the future vision for DDS. Much has been written about the commercialization of the DDS and its implications for net cultures and for the notion of the Internet as a public sphere. At the same time, scholars and researchers from different disciplines have written and theorized about electronic democracy, transparency, political participation and community networks by analyzing the case of the DDS.

DDS marks an important moment in the history of transparency, politics and the Internet. Specifically, aspirations such as enhancing information access and direct communication between politicians and the public, creating a politically aware and participatory citizenry and promoting democracy via the Internet are crucial for our understanding of why the Internet is increasingly being seen and used as an important medium by the state, civil society and other actors. One of the foremost concerns in Amsterdam city in the early 1990s was the decline in the number of people who came out to vote in the elections. At that time, it was felt that by providing a forum for people to discuss important issues concerning the city, providing access to information about the municipality and facilitating communication between the elected representatives and the people would eventually lead to a more politically aware and participatory citizenry. In this post, I will analyze this particular aspect of the DDS project. In subsequent posts, I will examine other aspects of the DDS to explain how important moments in the development of the state and civil society have shaped the discourse of transparency and aspirations that have led to the use of the Internet in particular ways.

There are some conceptual and practical issues that we have to examine when we speak about increasing citizens’ participation through information access and through direct contact with state agencies and political actors via the Internet. The first issue is what motivates the individual to ‘participate’. What follows next is how do we define participation or rather, what acts constitute ‘participation’. In his talk on transparency and politics, Barun Mitra had pointed out that those individuals who have the most pressing needs, particularly day-to-day survival needs, are the ones who are most likely to vote in the elections. This includes hawkers, squatters, slum dwellers and others who fall in the category of urban poor as well as marginal farmers, sharecroppers and other segments of the rural population. We might be inclined to refer to these people as ‘stakeholders’, suggesting that they participate because their ‘stakes’ are high. However, a stake is not a given. At the same time, our stakes change as circumstances change. This also transforms our socio-economic class as well as our political positions. Let me illustrate what I am saying by elaborating on the cases of water privatization in Delhi and Mumbai.

In 2004, it was proposed that a private operator will provide water to the people of South Delhi. This proposal was part of a phased water privatization project which had been approved by the state government of New Delhi in collaboration with the World Bank. A private operator had been identified and the proposal was soon going to materialize. When news about water privatization appeared in the print media, some individuals and organizations in Delhi began to inquire about the project and the process by which the private operator had been identified. These individuals and organizations were aware of the drastic socio-political effects and the dramatic rise in water prices that had resulted from similar water privatization efforts in Cochabamba, Bolivia and Philippines. And they were concerned whether a similar situation would result in Delhi.

South Delhi is one of the most affluent parts of Delhi city. It houses the rich and the famous of the city. When the residents of South Delhi were made aware of the possible impacts of the proposed water privatization project, they launched into a campaign against it. Already, these residents were irked by the electricity privatization programme which had led to an increase in electricity tariffs with no simultaneous improvement in the quality of the service. The successful agitation against the water privatization project which led to the Sheila Dikshit government calling it off was attributed in large part to the participation of the Residential Welfare Associations (RWAs) of South Delhi, composed mainly of the affluent residents.

In Mumbai, the Water Distribution Improvement Project (WDIP) was officially launched in May 2006 in the K-East ward. A study was going to be conducted from February 2006 onwards to gauge what aspects of water delivery required improvement and how 24x7 water supply could be realized. NGOs and activists opposed the study right from its inception because as per the contract signed between the consultants appointed for conducting the study and the World Bank, the consultants were to be responsible for drafting the documents and organizing the bidding process for providing 24x7 water supply to K-East ward. While the World Bank and the municipality of Mumbai (BMC) stated that WDIP was not a water privatization project but only a study, activists and NGOs pointed out that the outcomes of the study were pre-determined and water was going to be contracted to a private operator at the end of the study. Between February 2006 and November 2007, some of these NGOs and activists tried to approach the property owning affluent residents of K-East ward to agitate against the study. However, these residents did not heed to the appeals. Eventually, in November 2007 NGOs rejected the study on the grounds that it had not accounted for the ground realities in the ward.

What is interesting in both the above cases is how the affluent classes in each of these cities responded to water privatization. In Delhi, they came out in support of the agitations mainly because the private operator was about to take over the water supply operations and also because earlier experiences with power supply privatization had created awareness among the affluent classes that they could not trust blanket privatization efforts. In Mumbai, on the other hand, the affluent classes were not keen to participate mainly because the situation in Mumbai was not as urgent as it was in Delhi and the ‘stakes’ of these affluent classes were not at as great a peril as was the case in Delhi. The reason why I have cited these two cases is to draw our attention to the fact a stakeholder is a fluid entity and that the stakes vary in each circumstance. This influences why and how individual will choose to participate. This aspect of participation therefore needs to be borne in mind when we conceive and evaluate interventions for instituting transparency via political participation.

The second issue, which I pointed above, is the question of what acts constitute participation. On the one hand, participation is seen as norm, taking place in particular ways, by particular means. On the other hand, participation is a moment-to-moment, everyday act. Seen this way, a hawker’s act of squatting in a marketplace or on a pavement is as much an act of political participation as that of a property owning resident who becomes a member of his/her local area committee or resident welfare association. Both these individuals are directly and indirectly interacting with government institutions and with different arms of the state, though what makes the resident’s act legitimate and desired is the fact that he/she is a legal, property owning individual whereas the hawker is an ‘illegal’ individual, encroaching on public space. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the discourse of participation was shaping as practical interventions were being implemented to ‘enhance’ participation. In 1995, Diane Singerman theorized on participation by analyzing how particular populations in Cairo were interacting with government agencies through family networks. She critiqued political scientists for not considering ‘informal’ acts of participation, arguing that these ‘informal’ acts stemmed as much from ideology as formal acts did. However, as the discourse shaped in the 1990s, it turned out that formal acts of participation were considered more positively than ‘informal’ acts of mobilizing politicians and municipal governments for accessing basic services. The latter were deemed as acts of corruption. The discourse of participation grew mainly from the experience of participatory budgeting which was introduced in Porto Alegre city in Brazil in 1989 as part of an overall reforms package. Here, citizens in each neighbourhood expressed what basic amenities they required and how money should accordingly be allocated in the budget for the neighbourhood by the city municipality. With the growing influence of civil society organizations in Indian cities since 1998, these formal means of participation which were also seen as crucial for instituting transparency were strongly being advocated. In 2002, a Bangalore based organization named Janaagraha launched PROOF (Public Record of Operations and Finance) for motivating people to participate in budgeting for their wards and for insisting on municipalities to disclose how budgetary allocations were spent. This directly challenged decision-making processes within municipalities, thereby automatically putting poorer populations under the radar of scrutiny. This form of participation began to reinforce the belief that urban municipalities are corrupt and that they primarily engage in serving the urban poor, an act of ‘clientelist politics’. Around this time, civil society groups were also lobbying for the establishment of platforms such as ward committees and area committees via changes in laws, which would enable people to participate in political processes. These developments in the discourse of participation have also contributed to the shaping the notion of transparency and influencing the use of the internet accordingly.

I will end the first part of this post here. In the next part of the post, I will refer to participation and the notion of the stakeholder to explain the dynamics of information access and direct communication with elected representatives. I propose that both information access and communication with politicians need to be viewed in normative and tactical terms in order to broaden our understanding of transparency, how the internet gets used in order to perpetuate transparency and the repercussions of such internet-mediated transparency.

EI has undergone several rounds of iterations and is already in the third generation of its development. The aim has been to build a robust database that will allow citizens to extract information as per their specific and nuanced queries and use it during the elections and afterwards, to enforce accountability on the part of the elected representatives. Barun Mitra began his talk by emphasising that EI was more than just a website, contrary to what he found was the initial perception of most audiences. He explained, “I was not interested in merely the information. The larger question driving my initiative was ‘how do we look at politics’?” EI was developed to introduce a different paradigm of understanding politics and participating in it.

The interesting aspect of Barun Mitra’s talk was the question he asked--“What makes information flow?” He decided to move beyond the passé rhetoric of “information is power”. Two specific experiences enabled Barun to understand this question around the flow of information. “I had made a presentation to audiences in Kerala about EI in 2008, trying to solicit their support in disseminating the information on the site to local groups in the state. However, the audience in Kerala saw EI only as a website and raised questions accordingly. Following this, I made a presentation to slum dwellers in Delhi who immediately began to demand information about the candidates who were going to contest from their constituencies in the 2008 New Delhi state assembly elections. The slum dwellers and some of the groups working with them even asked me to provide the information in Hindi and local languages. I was surprised by the fact that two vastly diverse audiences responded in such dramatically different ways to EI. That is when I realized that those who have sustained our democracy, namely the poor, need this kind of information. There is a demand for it among them and therefore, we need to supply it. The second experience was from Gujarat. During the 2007 state assembly elections, we found that a number of local media collectives and the panchayats had used the information on EI. This was because the mainstream media was covering the major politicians and candidates in this election while the local groups needed information on all kinds of candidates contesting from their constituencies. I have now come to believe that demand and supply are two aspects to information and it needs to be provided accordingly where the demand for it is emanating from.”

Barun also reiterated that EI is non-judgmental, in that it leaves it to the audiences to decide how they want to interpret the information. This has been a significant paradigm shift in transparency initiatives that are being developed on the belief that providing more information to people enhances engagement between people and the state. Websites of government departments continue to provide information which they see as important for the citizenry. For instance, see www.bmrc.co.in, the website of the Bangalore Metro Rail Corporation, which claims to be transparent and provides particular kinds of information, while concealing other aspects of the project development and implementation. On the other hand, some non-government organisations are focusing on organising large chunks of information concerning particular aspects of governance, and presenting it to people in a way that allows them to extract that information which they find relevant.

One of Barun Mitra’s goals for the future is to develop parameters for judging the performance of elected representatives At the launch of EI in Bangalore on April 16, he pointed out that while he can provide information about the attendance records of MPs (Members of Parliament) in the Lok Sabha (House of the People) sessions, it would be inaccurate to judge the MP’s performance on the basis of this criteria. This is because MPs often sign the attendance register but they may not sit through the Parliament session. He therefore feels that more robust criteria have to be developed which will provide a somewhat holistic picture to the people about the performance of their elected representatives.

Finally, Barun Mitra spoke on the issue of authenticity of the information filed in the affidavits. “People often ask, ‘how authentic is this information?’ The election commission does not take it on itself to verify this information. But I would say that authenticity is a secondary issue. First, we have to make information available to the people. People will then, of their own accord, raise questions about the authenticity of the information. For instance, the Criminal Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has filed cases in the Supreme Court challenging the authenticity and sources of the assets declared by current chief minister (CM) of Uttar Pradesh (UP) Mayawati and former CM Mulayam Singh Yadav.” Specifically, Mayawati’s assets in 2003, which amounted to Rs. 1 crore, increased to Rs. 50 crores in 2007. This information came to light through the affidavit which Mayawati had to file before the state assembly elections in UP in 2007. “Filing such a case was possible only because Mayawati and Mulayam Singh were compelled to provide information about their assets to the public.”

Barun Mitra’s talk raises an important question for me: how effective are initiatives like EI in fostering interaction between the state and the citizens? I will address this question in my next blog post, where I will examine the case of the Digital City project in Amsterdam. I will look at the concepts and practices of cyberspace, urban space and citizenship through the Digital City Project and other projects undertaken to foster transparency. I will then try to analyse the initiatives undertaken during the 2009 general elections in India and make some tentative remarks on democracy and participation.

In the last post , I briefly tried to explain how the concept of transparency has evolved since the early 1990s and the changes it has undergone over time. My aim in this post is to explain how transparency is not a neutral concept but is embedded in the dynamics that exist in political institutions and government agencies. I will present the case of the municipal corporation in Mumbai city, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (popularly referred to as the BMC) to drive home my point. By the end of the post, I also hope to draw some connections between politics and transparency.

The Municipality and Autonomy: Every city has a municipal corporation. Municipalities have often been deemed as corrupt, inefficient, self-serving and negligent of the state of affairs in cities. This is so because the corrupt practices which municipalities are usually associated with, i.e., bribes in issuing birth and death certificates, water connections, licenses and permissions, are experienced by most citizens on a daily basis and are also more visible than the forms of corruption in which the higher levels of governments engage. People also experience civic problems on a daily basis and these are automatically attributed to the inefficiency in the municipal administration, because the municipality is seen as the agency responsible for resolving these problems. However, the powers of the municipality are constrained by higher level government agencies as well as by the dearth of financial resources. For example, the municipal corporation of Mumbai, the BMC, is headed by the commissioner who is directly appointed by the Maharashtra state government. This allows the state government to control the municipality and the city. Thus, the actions of the BMC and the decisions it makes are directly influenced by the state government.

Political Party Competition and the Municipality: Each municipality has an elected council comprising of directly elected municipal councilors. In the BMC, the Shiv Sena party has a majority in the municipal council. However, the state government is Congress-led. This introduces political party competition that manifests on the city. The Congress government is likely to introduce laws and policies, as well as constitute administrative bodies which will reduce the power of the Shiv Sena-led municipal council and bring the council under the control of the state government. This impacts the executive powers of the municipal councilors who may have to seek permission to carry out civic works from the state government-constituted administrative bodies. The independently constituted administrative bodies also have the powers to levy taxes, which then cut into the amount of overall tax that could have been collected by the municipality were it operating independently.

Internal Competition within Municipalities: Another dynamic in municipalities concerns the relationship between the senior bureaucrats and the municipal councilors and between the senior bureaucrats and the executive staff of the municipality. In all the municipalities across India, senior bureaucrats are drawn from the Indian Administrative Services (IAS) cadre. They determine the annual budgetary allocations to all the departments within the municipality and also frame policies for the city. A great deal of power is therefore vested in the senior bureaucrats. The policies framed by the senior bureaucrats have to be implemented by the executive staff of the municipality, such as the water and sanitary department engineers and the clerks and the administrative staff of the various departments in the municipality. This executive staff is in regular contact with the various constituencies served by the municipality. But they operate via multiple rationalities.

For example, while the water department engineers may follow strict rules in issuing temporary water connections to builders undertaking construction work, they may exercise personal discretion in providing water to people living in the slums. Such personal discretion ‘bypasses’ the rules and laws that determine who is eligible for a water connection. Thus, it is known that in many Indian cities, the engineers of the water departments often issue water connections to the slum dwellers on humanitarian grounds, operating under the morality that people cannot be denied access to water because of their apparently 'illegal' status. Such individual rationalities are classed as 'corrupt' practices. These also irk the senior bureaucrats who would like their policies to be implemented in the exact letter and spirit in which they were framed. Senior bureaucrats therefore devise the discourse of transparency in order to bring the junior administrative staff under their control.

At the same time, there is a high degree of animosity and tension in the relationship between the elected municipal councilors and the senior bureaucrats. The latter actively brand the former as corrupt, whereas the councilors see the actions of the senior bureaucrats as impediments in their ability to serve their constituencies. Both the councilors and the senior bureaucrats have the powers to sanction contracts and appoint contractors to carry out civic works, such as laying down of water pipelines, repairs and maintenance of roads, and repairs of sewerage infrastructure. The appointment of contractors can be discretionary and often, some contractors are favoured over others. The councilors and bureaucrats compete with each other in the appointment of contractors because such appointments can bring them monetary rewards from the contractors. The bureaucrats attempt to conceal their ‘discretionary’ practices by labeling the councilors as corrupt. The bureaucrats are also safeguarded by the perception of their status i.e., the IAS officers are often seen as non-corrupt and are known to have a high level of integrity. The councilor therefore becomes the natural target.

This is not to say that councilors do not engage in corruption. They often do, but their corrupt practices need to be read in specific contexts rather than from normative standpoints. Thus, during interviews with municipal councilors in 2006, I found that some councilors extend help to the poor groups in their constituencies from their personal expenditures. One councilor elected from one of the wards in South Mumbai had then explicitly mentioned to me, 'The council does not pay me a high salary for my work. There are many poor people in my constituency who need immediate medical help and I do not hesitate to give them whatever monetary help I personally can. I make sure that the building department officials do not harass those poor people in my area who have built a loft inside their houses in order to carry out manufacturing activities from within the house and thus sustain themselves financially. I also ensure that the hawkers who temporarily set up stalls in the month of Ramzaan are not evicted from my area because I am eventually answerable to God for the actions I commit during the holy month. But when a contractor, whose contract I have helped to pass for carrying out civic works in my area, offers me a gift (of money) of his own volition, I accept it. I do so because I also spend a good deal from my own pocket and I need to compensate myself, as well as maintain a cash flow which will help me to serve the people.'

Transparency and Politics: The institutional context that I have presented above is by no means exhaustive. The alliances and oppositions in the scheme of administrative politics are also not permanent. These shift according to the context and are shaped by the contests for power. The discourse and practices of transparency are located in this context. By referring to transparency, senior bureaucrats, policy makers and aid agencies seek to control the multiple rationalities and everyday discretionary practices that are rife in administration and streamline the decision-making process. This has implications for different socio-economic groups who also come under the radar of visibility when administrative staff are sought to be disciplined. Accordingly, the relationship between the different state agencies and citizen groups gets shaped.

For example, around 2003, a non-government organization called Praja introduced a centralized, online system for complaint management in the BMC. The aim of this system was to simplify the process of lodging complaints about civic problems and introduce efficiency and accountability in the administration in terms of resolving citizens’ complaints. The BMC received many complaints concerning hawkers and vending on the streets. A section of researchers and activists initially felt that the centralized complaint system was working against hawkers. However, over time, it came to be realized that the evictions of hawkers in Mumbai did not take place owing to the complaints lodged by the citizens. The complaints no doubt gave (negative) visibility to the hawkers and the problem of occupied streets and pavements. One of the officers in the municipality who I interviewed in 2007 mentioned, 'When a shopping mall owner is irked by the presence of hawkers outside his mall, he will not go online and register a complaint on the centralized complaint system. He will simply make a personal appointment with the commissioner, make his case before the commissioner, and ensure that the hawkers are removed. The online centralized complaint system is not used by such persons.' This comment is instructive because it also shows us that despite the introduction of transparency, bypasses and slippages continue to take place since the engagement between the state and its citizens is fashioned by multiple rationalities, ability and resources to access government agencies and authorities, the ability to influence them, and by particular contexts.

In the next post, I will present my findings on the relationship between transparency and access to information. How does the framework of rights enable access to information? How is access to information variously influenced when information is published for the sake of broadcast as against when information is made available in certain ways to enhance participation?

Since 2005, I have been carrying out ethnographic research on cities, particularly on issues of governance, politics and economic practices in cities. In 2004, I began working for an organization in Mumbai named Praja. Here, I was introduced to the concepts of transparency, accountability and governance.  These were the buzzwords of that time, articulated vociferously by some of the civil society organisations that had sprung up in Mumbai and Bangalore to cleanse the city of maladministration.  However, the notion of transparency originated earlier, in the 1990s. It was conceptualised as an antidote which would help to pull the state out of the morass of corruption and bribery that it had fallen into. Governments seeking loans from international agencies such as the World Bank and USAID for reforming their departments and for improving the delivery of civic services were asked to make their functioning transparent as a necessary prerequisite. 

Making government transparent mainly involved introducing the double entry accounting system for keeping a record of all the assets that the government owns (which could then be mortgaged in case the government defaulted on loan repayments), and to track all expenditures against the available balance in order to show where and how the money has been spent and to prevent over-spending. Transparency was also enforced through the imposition of some models for implementing infrastructure. For instance, in Mumbai, under the sewage disposal programme, the World Bank gave a large grant for building toilets in the slums. The actual construction of the toilets would, however, be the responsibility of community organisations working in the slums. This model was imposed because of the assumption that community organisations are more aware of the needs of the slum dwellers and they would not engage in the rent-seeking behavior which is (presumed to be) characteristic of municipal officials and elected councilors. An analysis of the toilet construction programme is available here. For our purposes, we need to keep in mind that reform in municipal budgeting and prescribing models which would reduce the scope for corruption were some of the early materialisations of the notion of transparency.

We now move to the next important phase in the history of transparency--the conception and the gradual implementation of the Right to Information (RTI) Act in India. RTI is based on the idea that the citizen should have access to any kind of information that she requires. Under RTI, transparency was sought to be implemented in the process by which the citizen asks for information from the state. This means that whereas earlier, the citizen could have acquired the same information by giving bribes to government officials and/or through various other circuits and means, now she could legitimately ask for the information and the state became bound by law to give it. There was also a stamp of legitimacy to the information that was eventually given. It could be used to challenge government officials, make the state accountable for its actions and reform governing practices in a much larger public domain than what could be possible before. I will not evaluate the RTI Act here; I will leave it for a subsequent post. But what interests me is the relationship between regulation and transparency. Can transparency be enforced through law? What implications does such enforcement have on governing practices as well for different socio-economic groups? Does enforcement cause the state to become transparent in some area and opaque in others?

The next major impetus to the development of the notion of transparency came with:

1. The increasing penetration of the Internet in India,
2. Implementation of e-governance policies which made it mandatory for municipalities and government agencies to publish information about their departments, budgets, and the welfare schemes and programmes on offer from them
3. Coupling Right to Information with Duty to Publish which meant that while the citizen had the right to seek information, the state and its agencies had a duty to voluntarily publish more and more information about themselves
4. A demand from existing and emerging civil society organisations as well as institutions such as the World Bank to improve the delivery of civic services by eliminating middle-men and all those processes which increase the possibility of bribe giving and taking,
5. A further demand from the same organisations that the processes by which decisions are made and the reasons/logic of these decisions should be made available for public eyes, the aim here being that the decision-making process should be made uniform and ‘objective’.

It is interesting to note how the Internet gets linked to the concept of transparency. The Internet does provide a vast space for publishing information, but that is not all. The ‘virtual space’ of the Internet is very closely linked with the way we want our cities to be i.e., absolutely visible, monitorable and manageable. This can be achieved partly by making information about the various aspects of urban governance available online, and partly by publishing information about all those population groups and political practices that are classed as ‘informal’ and ‘illegal’. In the course of this project, I will try to further develop the link between the space of the Internet and that of the city by describing some of the initiatives and case studies about transparency and politics.

It is also important to remember that transparency is not a static concept. It emerges in and is shaped by contexts. For example, the increased emphasis on municipalities to introduce double entry accounting systems in order to make the budgetary process transparent, particularly between 2004 and 2006, was linked to the fact that international financial institutions, who wanted to invest in urban infrastructure development during this period, could now see what assets municipalities possessed and whether these assets could be cashed in (both metaphorically and materially) in future. In this case, transparency translated as particular kinds of visibilities for particular groups. Transparency can be also used as a trope to justify interventions such as cleaning of voter lists, introduction of identification cards and removing certain decision-making powers from local governments and transferring them to other government bodies. We will need to bear these aspects of transparency in mind as we understand it and evaluation its implications.

In this post, I have tried to explain how the notion of transparency has developed over time, and the changes that it has been through. This provides the first part of the background to the project. In the next post, I will explain what politics means in practice and how transparency now enters and modifies the realm of politics.