Access To Knowledge (A2K)

GeekUp with Erica Hagen

praskrishna — 2012-02-29T03:00:14Z

HasGeek is organizing a GeekUp with Erica Hagen of the GroundTruth Initiative on 1 March 2012 at 5 p.m. Erica will speak on the theme: "From Information to Empowerment: Unpacking the Equation".

From Information to Empowerment to Unpacking the Equation

In 2010, Erica Hagen and Mikel Maron started GroundTruth Initiative to work towards empowering communities through open data, open information and participatory processes. Erica's and Mikel's work at GroundTruth is informed by their earlier experience of working with the Map Kibera project where they helped the youth and the communities in Kibera to map their geographies and represent information about themselves to the world through citizen media. In the process, Erica and Mikel uncovered several complex dynamics about self-representation by communities, what open data really means to communities and how they apply it to their circumstances, the dynamics between participatory development and participatory technologies, and the process of using community media tools and online methods for talking about issues that matter to them.

In this lecture, Erica Hagen will talk about her work with communities in Kenya, Jerusalem, Nigeria and other parts of the world through GroundTruth Initiative. Specifically, Erica will unpack the relationship between empowerment, information, and storytelling, and what both these elements mean to communities in different parts of the world. How are communities applying the information and data that they collect about their governments and themselves? What are the challenges involved in the process of working with open data, participatory processes and technologies? How can communities apply new media and data gathering tools to achieve local goals? What does empowerment mean in the face of the delicate lines and precariousness that communities and the interveners/practitioners have to tread in the process of data gathering, representation, communication and outputs?

Interested persons need to confirm attendance by registering at http://geekup.in/2012/erica-hagen

Erica Hagen

Erica Hagen is a journalist and international development practitioner working for democracy of information and citizen participation in both online and traditional media. She is the co-founder of Map Kibera and GroundTruth Initiative. Erica has worked in four countries on development communication and evaluation, and in the United States on refugee and immigrant issues, for organizations such as United Nations Population Fund, Concern Worldwide, and Unicef. She holds a Masters Degree in International Affairs from Columbia University, New York.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/geek-up-with-erica

GeekUp with Alan Knott-Craig

praskrishna — 2012-06-29T11:11:52Z

HasGeek and CIS invite you to a lecture by Alan Knott-Craig at CIS office in Bangalore on June 30, 2012, from 5.00 p.m. to 6.30 p.m.

Alan is founder of World of Avatar and CEO of Mxit, Africa’s largest social network. Between 2003 and 2006, Alan co-founded five companies in the mobile services sector. In 2006, he was appointed managing director of iBurst, a broadband network operator in South Africa. In April 2008, he published Don’t Panic, a best selling book aimed at persuading emigrant South Africans to return home. In June 2008, he founded The Trust, an NGO focused on assisting charities access skills and capital. In 2009, he was named as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. In June 2012 he published Mobinomics, the story of Mxit and mobile in Africa. Alan is a qualified Chartered Accountant (SA).

The Story of MXit

MXit (pronounced "mix it") is a free instant messaging application developed by MXit Lifestyle (Pty) Ltd. in South Africa that runs on multiple mobile and computing platforms. According to a 2011 study by consultancy World Wide Worx, MXit currently has about 10 million active subscribers, making it the largest mobile social network in Africa.

MXit allows users to send and receive one-on-one text and multimedia messages to and from other users, and in general chat rooms. MXit also supports gateways to other instant messaging platforms such as MSN Messenger, ICQ and Google Talk.

On 1 April 2009, MXit released an open-source plug-in for the libPurple library. This allows applications using the libPurple library such as Pidgin and Adium to connect to the MXit network. This coincided with the release of the MXit Developer Zone web-site and documentation on the MXit client protocol. MXit has been included as a standard protocol in Pidgin since version 2.6.4.

Agenda

17:00 - 17:05	Welcome with Tea, Coffee, and Snacks
17:05 - 17:15	Lightning Talks
17:15 - 18:00	The Story of MXit
18:00 - 18:30	Q & A

For registration, click here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/geek-up-with-alan-knott-craig

Geekup @ CIS

praskrishna — 2011-12-26T07:39:53Z

CIS is hosting a Geekup tomorrow, December 27, 2011 in its office in Bangalore. Shyam Mani will be giving a talk.

Shyam Mani

Based out of Singapore, Shyam (aka fox2mike on IRC and most of the intertubes) is one of the folks on the Mozilla IT team outside the USA. A geek at heart, he’s a part-time Gentoo developer, loves photography and volunteers as a race official for Formula 1 races in Singapore and Australia.

A peek into Mozilla IT

Mozilla IT manages over 7 datacenters in San Jose, Santa Clara, Phoenix in the US and Amsterdam as well as Beijing and 7 offices in Mountain View, San Francisco, Vancouver, Toronto, Paris, Auckland and Beijing with over 4000 servers and virtual machines. They support Mozilla's mission on a 24/7 basis by making sure critical infrastructure functions as expected and is always available (when they're not being BOFHs). The 45 member strong team is primarily based out of the US and has a person each in India and Singapore.

This talk will provide an insight into Mozilla's Infrastructure in terms of scale and the methods/tools used to manage the same.

We will open with lightning talks from Bangalore's geeks. That means you. Give us a 5-10 minute intro to the tools you use or how your organization's IT is structured. Help get the mood going before Shyam's talk.

Schedule

Welcome with tea, coffee and snacks	18:00 - 18:15
Lightning Talks	18:15 - 19:00
A peek into Mozilla IT	19:00 - 20:00

Register now

The venue has limited capacity

Fill out the form to confirm your participation. We have limited space at the venue and may not be able to accommodate everyone. Registration will allow us to keep you updated about the talk. Do tell us something about yourself so we know whom we are expecting.

Our privacy policy: We do not share your info.

Also see the HasGeek website

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/mozilla-it

GDPR and India: A Comparative Analysis

Aditi Chaturvedi — 2017-11-28T15:17:39Z

At present, companies world over are in the process of assessing the impact that EU General Data Protection Regulations (“GDPR”) will have on their businesses.

The post is written by Aditi Chaturvedi and edited by Amber Sinha

High administrative fines in case of non-compliance with GDPR provisions are a driving force behind these concerns as they can lead to loss of business for various countries such as India.

To a large extent, future of business will depend on how well India responds to the changing regulatory changes unfolding globally. India will have to assess her preparedness and make convincing changes to retain the status as a dependable processing destination. This document gives a brief overview of data protection provisions of the Information Technology Act, 2000 followed by a comparative analysis of the key provisions of GDPR and Information Technology Act and the Rules notified under it.

Download the full blog post

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/gdpr-and-india-a-comparative-analysis

Game release cancelled over gay character

praskrishna — 2014-11-22T00:24:32Z

Electronic Arts stops accepting preorders for Dragon Age: Inquisition.

The article by Jaison Lewis was published in Mumbai Mirror on November 19, 2014. Pranesh Prakash gave his inputs.

In a city where just about any kid above the age of five who can afford to do so has played Grand Theft Auto, with its profusion of violence and profanity, it appears unlikely that a game would ever be withdrawn from release owing to explicit content. But when Electronic Arts (EA), creators of several such titles, decide to cancel the release of a game in India because it features a gay character and sequences of gay sex, there are bound to be fiery debates about censorship, moral policing, and the prevalence of gratuitous violence in games.

EA have withdrawn pre-orders for Dragon Age: Inquisition, a role playing franchise in which you play a character that you create - one such role is that of Dorian, who is gay and who is featured in sequences involving gay sex. EA is now in the process of refunding the money (Rs 3,499 for the standard edition (PC) and Rs 4,000 for the collectors' edition (PC)) that gamers in India paid to have access to Dragon Age when it is released on November 21.

Milestone Interactive, the company that distributes EA titles in India, has cancelled several pre-orders for the game that were booked through their website. However, a bulk of the PC pre-orders were made on EA's Origin software, a Windows application that lets gamers buy and play games directly from the company. Electronic Arts issued the following official statement to its Origin users in India, Bangladesh and Pakistan. "In order to avoid a breach of local content laws, EA has withdrawn Dragon Age: Inquisition from sale in India and the game is no longer available for pre-order. Customers who pre-ordered the game will be contacted directly and will be fully refunded."

Though the local laws that applied were not mentioned, several online websites managed to obtain reactions from EA that implied the game's homosexual content was to blame, with mention of Section 377, which criminalises gay sex.

The Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB), a self-regulatory organisation based in New York, has classified Dragon Age as Mature, and, according to their online rating information, it "includes some sexual material: a female character briefly depicted in front of a man's torso (fellatio is implied); characters depicted topless or with exposed buttocks while lying in bed or after sex; some dialogue referencing sex/sexuality. The words "f**k," "sh*t," and "a*shole" appear in dialogue."

LGBT rights activist Aditya Bandopadhyay, said he believes EA could have withdrawn the game under pressure from the government.

"Self-censorship by corporations is even more insidious than censorship by the government, since the latter can be challenged in courts and has to abide within the limits set out within Article 19 of the Constitution, the former cannot be challenged at all except morally, "said Pranesh Prakash, member, The centre for internet and society.

"There can be no defence offered to the offensive instance of self-censorship by Electronic Arts, and is a slap against the fight by the LGBTQ community in India against oppressive colonial laws and mores. As Vikram Seth put it, it is homophobia that came into India, not homosexuality. It is homophobia that is unnatural and which militates against Indian morality. Under Article 19(1)(a), the government can be read to have a positive obligation to ensure an environment where freedom of speech and expression is guaranteed, so I call upon the government to speak out against the decision taken by Electronic Arts, " added Prakash.

"By way of legal background: Homosexuality as a gender identity is not illegal in India, while there is a case pending in the Supreme Court as to the criminality of engaging in 'unnatural' sexual intercourse. This law cannot possibly be read to hold that the public display of homosexuality in art is unlawful," he said

EA representatives were unwilling to discuss the game or the reasons for it being withdrawn from the market in India. "We are going to decline any further info beyond our statement," a spokesperson said.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/mumbai-mirror-november-19-2014-jaison-lewis-game-release-cancelled-over-gay-character

Future Value of Data

Admin — 2018-01-17T00:32:50Z

Carnegie India with support of Facebook organized a workshop in Bengaluru on January 10, 2018. Sunil Abraham participated in the workshop.

The event focused on the political economy of reform in India, foreign and security policy, and the role of innovation and technology in India's internal transformation and international relations.

Core aims of the workshop included:

Share and debate views on what changes we expect in the value of data over next decade.
Challenge and explore the underlying drivers of change across broad arena.
Debate the regional and global perspectives and highlight unique issues of greatest impact.
Build an informed collective view on the topic for all to use going forward.

For more details on Future of Value Data, click here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/future-value-of-data

Future Tech and Future Law

Admin — 2019-01-03T01:17:29Z

The Dept. of IT & BT, Government of Karnataka organised the 21st edition of Bengaluru Tech Summit from November 29, 2018 to December 1, 2018 at Palace Grounds, Bengaluru. Arindrajit Basu was a speaker at the panel on 'Future Tech and Future Law'.

The discussion was moderated by Tanvi Ratna. Aayush's co-panelists were Apar Gupta,Jaideep Reddy and Nilesh Trivedi. During his remarks, he attempted to focus on our AI research thus far and our suggestions for AI regulation.

For more details see this page.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/future-tech-and-future-law

Future of Work: Report of the ‘Workshop on the IT/IT-eS Sector and the Future of Work in India’

ambika — 2020-03-05T19:03:07Z

This report provides an overview of the proceedings and outcomes of the Workshop on the IT/IT-eS Sector and the Future of Work in India (hereinafter referred to as the “Workshop”), organised at Omidyar Networks’ office in Bangalore, on June 29, 2018.

This report was authored by Torsha Sarkar, Ambika Tandon and Aayush Rath. It was edited by Elonnai Hickok. Akash Sriram, Divya Kushwaha and Torsha Sarkar provided transcription and research assistance. A PDF of the report can be accessed here.

Introduction

The Workshop was attended by a diverse group of stakeholders which included industry representatives, academicians and researchers, and civil society. The discussions went over various components of the transition in the sector to Industry 4.0, including the impact of Industry 4.0-related technological innovations on work broadly in India, and specifically in the IT/IT-eS sector (hereinafter referred to as the “Sector”). The discussion focused on the reciprocal impact on socio-political dimensions, the structure of employment, and forms of work within workspaces.

The Workshop was divided into three sessions. The first session was themed around the adoption and impact of Industry 4.0 technologies vis-a-vis the organisation of work. Within this the key questions were: the nature of the technologies being adopted, the causes that are driving the uptake of these technologies, and the ‘tasks’ constituting jobs in the Sector.

The second session focussed on the role of skilling and re-skilling measures as mitigators to projected displacement of jobs. The issues dealt with included shifts in company, educational, and social competency profiles as a result of Industry 4.0, transformations in the predominant pedagogy of education, vocational, and skill development programmes in India, and their success in creating employable workers and filling skill gaps in the industry.

The third session looked at social welfare considerations and public policy interventions that may be necessitated in the wake of potential technological unemployment owing to Industry 4.0. The session was designed with a specific focus on the axes of gender and class, addressing questions of precarity, wages, and job security in the future of work for marginalized groups in the workforce.

Preliminary Comments

The Workshop opened with a brief introduction on the research the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) is undertaking on the Future of Work (hereinafter referred to as “FoW”) vis-a-vis Industry 4.0. The conception of Industry 4.0 that CIS is looking at is the technical integration of cyber-physical systems in production and logistics on one hand, and the use of internet of things (IoT) and the connection between everyday objects and services in the industrial processes on the other. The scope of the project, including the impact of automation on the organisation of employment and shifts in the nature and forms of work, including through the gig economy, and microwork, was detailed. The historical lens taken by the project, and the specific focus on questions of inequality across gender, class, language, and skill were highlighted.

It was pointed out that CIS’ research, in this regard, comes from the necessity of localising and re-examining the global narratives around Industry 4.0. While new technologies will be developed and implemented globally, the impact of these technologies in the Indian context would be mediated through local, political and socio-economic structures. For instance, the Third Industrial Revolution, largely associated with the massification of computing, telecommunications and electronics, is still unfolding in India, while attempts are already being made to adapt to Industry 4.0. These issues provided a starting point to the discussion on the impact of Industry 4.0 in India.

Qualifying Technological Change

Contexualising the narrative with historical perspectives

The panel for the first session commenced with a discussion around a historical perspective on job loss being brought about due to mechanisation. The distinction between Industry 3.0 and 4.0, it was suggested, was largely arbitrary, inasmuch as technological innovation has been a continuous process and has been impacting lives and the way work is perceived. It was argued that the only factor differentiating Industry 4.0 from previous industrial revolutions is ‘intelligent’ technology that is automating routine cognitive tasks. The computer, programmatic logic control (PLC) and data (called the ‘new oil’) were also a part of Industry 3.0, but intelligent technologies are able to provide greater analytical power under Industry 4.0.

The discussion also went over the distinction between the terms ‘job’, ‘task’ and ‘work’. It was argued that the term ‘job’ might be treated as a subset of the term ‘work’, with the latter moving beyond livelihood to encompass questions of dignity and a sense of fulfilment in the worker. With relation to this distinction, it was mentioned that the jobs at the risk of automation would be those that fulfill only the basic level in Maslow’s hierarchy - implying largely routine manual tasks. Additionally, it was explained that although these jobs will continue to use labour through Industry 4.0, it is only the nature of technological enablement that would change to automate more dangerous and hazardous tasks.

Technology as a long-term enabler of job creation

It was argued that technology has historically been associated with job creation. Historical instances cited included that of popular anxiety due to anticipated job loss through the uptake of the spinning machine and the steam engine, whereas the actual reduction in the cost of production led to greater job creation, increased mobility and improved quality of life in the long-term. Such instances were used to further argue that technology has historically not resulted in long-term job reductions.

The platform economy was posited as a model for creating jobs, through the efficient matching of supply and demand through digital platforms. It was indicated that rural to urban migration is aided by such platforms, as labourers voluntarily enrol in skilling initiatives given the certainty of employment through platformization. It was further argued that historically, Indian workers have been educated rather than skilled, and that platformization and automation, coupled with the elasticity of human needs, will provide greater incentives for technically skilled workers by creating desirable jobs.

Factors leading to differential adoption of automation

In relation to the adoption of the technologies Industry 4.0, it was argued that the mere existence of a technology does not necessitate its scalablity at an industrial level. Scalability would be possible only when the cost of labour is high relative to the costs entailed in technological adoption. This was supported by data from a McKinsey Report^{^[1]} which indicated that countries like the US and Germany would be impacted in the short term by automation, because their cost of labour is higher. Conversely, since the cost of labour in India is relatively cheap, the reality of technological displacement is still far away and the impact would not be immediate.

Similarly, a distinction was also made to account for the differential impact of automation in various sectors. For instance, it was indicated that since the IT/IT-eS sector in India is based on exporting services and outsourcing of businesses. Accordingly, if Germany automates its automobile industry, that would impact India less than if it automates the IT/IT-eS sector, as the latter is more reliant on exporting its services to developed economies. The IT/IT-eS sector was further broken down into sub-sectors with the intention of highlighting the differential impact of automation and FoW in each of these sub-sectors. It was agreed that the BPO sub-sector would be more adversely impacted than core IT services, given its constitution of routine nature of tasks at a higher risk of automation.

Disaggregating India’s Skilling Approach

The discussion around skilling measures was contextualised in the Indian context by alluding to data collected from the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) surveys. The data revealed that around 36% of India’s total population is under the age of seventeen and approximately 13% are between 18 - 24. Additional statistics suggested that only around a quarter of the workforce aged 18-24 years had achieved secondary and higher secondary education and close to 13% of the workforce was illiterate. While these numbers included both male and female workers, it was pointed out that it was an incomplete dataset as it excluded transgender workers. It was suggested it should be this segment of the Indian demographic that is targeted for significant skilling pushes, which could be catalysed through specific vocational training centres. It was also suggested that there was a need for to restructure the role of the National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC) in the Indian skilling framework.

A comprehensive picture was painted by conceptualising the skilling framework in India as 5 distinct pillars. This conceptualisation was used to debunk the narrative around NSDC being the sole entity pushing for skill development in the country. The NSDC’s function in the skilling framework was posited as providing funding to skilling initiatives with programmes lasting for a period of 3 months. These 3- month programmes were critiqued for being insufficient for effective training, especially given the low skill levels of workers going into the programmes. The NSDC’s placement rate of 12% as per their own records was used to support this argument. Further suggestions on making the NSDC more effective were made in a later discussion^{^[2]}.

Related to this, the second pillar of vocational skilling was said to be the Industrial Training Institute (ITI). The third pillar was said to be the school system which was critiqued for does not offering vocational education at secondary and senior secondary levels. The fourth pillar comprised of the 16 ministries which governed the labour laws in India - none of whose courses were National Skills Qualifications Framework (NSQF) compliant.

The fifth pillar was construed as the industry itself and the enterprise-based training it conducted. However, it was stated that India’s share of registered companies who did enterprise-based training was dismal. In 2009, the share of enterprise-based training was 16% which rose in 2014 to 36%. Further, most of these 36% were registered large firms as opposed to small and medium sized enterprises. Unregistered companies, it was suggested, were simply doing informal apprenticeships.

Joint public and private skilling initiatives

In addition to government sponsored skilling initiatives, attention was directed to skill development partnerships that took the shape of public-private initiatives. As an example, it was said that that a big player in the ride-hailing economy had worked with NSDC and other skilling entities to ensure that soft skills were being imparted to their driver partners before they were on-boarded onto the platform.

It was also brought forth that innovative forms of skilling and training were gaining traction in the education sector as well in the private sector. This was instantiated through instances of uptake of platforms which apply artificial intelligence, and within that machine learning based techniques, to generate and disseminate easier- to- consume video-based learning.

Driving Job Growth: Solving for Structural Eccentricities of the Indian Labour Market

Catalysing manufacturing-led job growth

The discussion began by discussing specific dynamics of the Indian labour markets in the context of the Indian economy. It was pointed out the productivity level of the services sector is not as high as the productivity level of manufacturing, which is problematic for job creation in a developing economy such as India witnessing capital-intensive growth in the manufacturing sector. The underlying argument was that the jobs of the future in the Indian context will have to be created in the manufacturing sector.

Several macroeconomic policy interventions were suggested to reverse the trend of capital-intensive growth in order to make manufacturing the frontier for enhanced job creation. The need for a trade policy in consonance with the industrial policy was stated as imperative. This was substantiated by highlighting the lack of an inverted duty structure governing the automobile sector that has led India to be amongst the biggest manufacturers of automobiles. The inverted duty structure entails finished products having a lower import tariff and a lower customs duty when compared to import of raw materials or intermediates. However, it was highlighted that a dissonant industrial policy failed to acknowledge that at least 50% of india’s manufacturing comes from Micro, Small & Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) and provided no assistance to MSMEs in obtaining credit, market access or technology upgradation. On the other hand, it was asserted that large corporates get 77% of the total bank credit.

Another challenge that was highlighted was with the Government of India’s severely underfunded manufacturing cluster development programs under the aegis of the Ministry of Textiles and the Ministry of MSMEs. For sectors that contribute majorly towards India’s manufacturing output, it was asserted that these programmes were astonishingly bereft of any governing policy and suffer from several foundational issues. Moreover, it was observed that these clusters are located around the country in Tier 2, 3 and 4 cities where the quality of infrastructure is largely lacking. The Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation (AMRUT) program devised for the development of these cities is also myopic as the the target cities are not the ones where these manufacturing clusters are located. The rationale behind such an approach was that building infrastructure at geographical sites of job creation would lead to an increase in productivity which would in turn attract greater investment. This would have to necessarily be accompanied by hastening the setting up of industrial corridors - the lackadaisical approach to which was stated as a key component of India being outpaced by other developing economies in the South East Asian region.

An additional policy intervention that was suggested was from the lens of setting up of skilling centres by NSDC in proximity to these manufacturing clusters where the job creation is being evidenced as opposed to larger metropolitan cities.

Carving out space for a vocational training paradigm

It was asserted that the focus of skilling needs to be on the manufacturing rather than services sector, given the centrality of manufacturing to a developing economy undergoing an atypical structural transformation^{^[3]} - as outlined above. Further compounding the problem of jobless growth, it was stated that 50% of the manufacturing workforce have 8 or less years of education and only 5% of the workforce including those that have technical education are vocationally trained, according to the NSS, 62nd Round on Employment and Unemployment.

A gulf in primary and secondary education vis-a-vis vocational training was pointed as one of the most predominant causes behind the much touted ‘skills gap’ that the Indian workforce is said to be battling with. Using data to further cull out the argument, it was said that in 2007, the net enrollment in India for primary education had already reached 97% and that between 2010 - 2015, the secondary education enrollment rate went from 58% to 85%.^{^[4]} It was hypothesised that the latter may have risen to 90% levels since. Furthermore, the higher education enrollment rate also commensurately went up from 11% in 2006 to 26-27% in 2017.^{^[5]} It was argued that this is impossible to achieve without gender parity in higher education. This gender parity in education was contrasted with the systematic decline in the women’s labour force participation that India has been witnessing in the last 30 years.

Consequently, the ‘massification’ of higher education in India over the past 10 years was critiqued as ineffectual in comparison to the Chinese model, as the latter focused on engaging students in vocational training, which the Indian education system had failed to do. The role of the gig economy in creating job opportunities despite this gap between educational and vocational training was regarded as important, especially given the lack of growth in the traditional job markets.

Accounting for the Margins

With relation to the profiles of workers within sectors, it was indicated that factors such as gender, class, skill, income, and race must be accounted for to determine the ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ of automation. Several points were discussed with relation to this disaggregation.

Technology as an equaliser? Gender and skill-biased technological change

First, the idea of technology and development as objective and neutral forces was questioned, with the assertion that human decision-makers, who more often than not tend to be male, allow inherent biases to creep into outputs, processes, and objectives of automation. Data from the Belong Survey in IT services^{^[6]} indicated that the proportion of women in core engineering was 26% of the workforce, while that in software testing was 33%. Coupled with the knowledge that automation and technology would automate software testing first, it was argued that jobs held by female workers were positioned at a higher immediate risk of automation than male workers.

The ‘Leaky Pipe Problem’ in STEM industries i.e. the observation that female workers tend to be concentrated in entry level jobs, while senior management is largely male dominated was also brought to the fore. This was used to bolster the argument that female workers in the Sector will lose out in the shorter term, when automation adversely impacts the lower level jobs.

A survey conducted by Aspiring Minds^{^[7]} which tracked the employability of the engineering graduates was utilised to further flesh out skill biased technological change. As per the survey, 40% of the graduating students are employable in the BPO sector, while only 3% of the students are employable in the sector for software production. With the BPO sector likelier to be impacted more adversely than core IT services, it was emphasised that policy considerations should be very specific in their ambit.

Social security and the platform economy

The discussion around the platform economy commenced with a focus on how it had created economic opportunities in the formal sector by matching demand and supply on one hand, and by reducing inefficiency in the system through technology on the other. It was pointed out that these newer forms of work were creating millions of entrepreneurship opportunities that did not exist previously. These opportunities, it was suggested, were in themselves flexible and contributing the greater push towards enhancing the numbers of those that come within the ambit of India’s formal economy.

This discussion was countered by suggesting that the shift of the workforce from the informal sector to the formal sector, which companies in the gig economy claimed they contributed to, have instead restricted the kind of lives gig workers have been living historically. As an instance, it was pointed out that a farmer who had been working with a completely different set of skills was now being asked to shift to a new set of skills which would be suited for a very specific role and not transposable across occupations. In other words, it would not be meaningful skilling. It was also pointed out that what distinguishes formal work from informal is whether the worker has social security net or not - mere access to banking services or filing of tax returns was not sufficient for characterising a workforce as being formal in nature.

Relatedly, the possibility of social security was discussed for the unorganised sector and microworkers. One of the possibilities discussed was to ensure state subsidised maternity, disability, and death security, and pensions for workers below the poverty line. The fiscal brunt borne by the government for such a scheme was anticipated to not be above 0.4% of the GDP. It was suggested that this would move forward the conversation on minimum wage and fair work, which would be of great importance in broader conversations around working conditions in the platform economy.

The interplay of gender and platformisation

It was highlighted that trends in automation are going to change the occupational structure in the digital economy - the effect of which will especially be felt in cognitive routine jobs given their increased propensity to platformisation. A World Economic Forum report^{^[8]} was cited which indicated the disproportional risk of unemployment faced by women given their concentration in cognitive routine jobs was also brought up.

The discussion logically undertook a deeper look at the platformisation of work with a specific focus on freelance microwork and its impact on the female labour force and culled out certain positive mandates arising from such newer forms of work. It was suggested that industries are more likely to employ female workers in microwork due to lower rates of attrition, and flexible labour. It was reiterated that freelancing in India extends beyond data entry and other routine jobs, to include complex work - thereby also catering to skilled workers desirous of flexibility. Platforms designing systems to meet the demand for flexible work were also discussed, such as platforms geared towards female workers undertaking reskilling measures and counselling for females returning from maternity leave or sabbaticals. Additionally, the difficulty of defining freelancing under existing frameworks of employment, compounded by the lack of legal structures for such work, was outlined.

Systemic challenges within the Indian labour law framework

Static design of legal processes

Labour law was, naturally, acknowledged as a key determinant in the conversation around both the uptake and impact of automative technologies encapsulated within Industry 4.0.

The archaic nature of India’s labour law framework was highlighted as a major impediment to ensuring both worker rights as well as the ease of conducting commerce. It was pointed out that organised labour continues to be under the ambit of the Industrial Disputes Act, which was made effective in 1947, has undergone minimal amendments since. This was critiqued on the basis that the framework for the law is embedded in its historical context, and while the industrial landscape in the country has transformed drastically since the implementation of the Industrial Disputes Act, the legal framework has not evolved. Similarly, the Karnataka Shops and Establishments Act, 1961 which regulates the Sector today was enacted much before the Sector even opened up in India in the 1990s.

Additionally, it was pointed out that the consolidation of the fragmented extant framework of labour laws in India was being consolidated into 4 labour codes without any wholesale modernisation push reforming the laws being consolidated. Consequently, it was argued that the government has to drive changes through policies alone as the legal framework remains static. Barriers to implementation of adequate policies were also discussed, such as the political impact of labour policies, lack of state initiative to deal with the impact of the future of work, apart from the historic inability of the law to keep up with the state of labour and economy.

Labour law arbitrage

One of the reasons behind the increasing contractualizing of labour in India was attributed to over-regulation. There was consensus that the labour law regime was not conducive to industry in India leading to greater opportunistic behaviours from industry participants. It was acknowledged that the political clout that a lot of contractors (of labourers) enjoy along with providing primary employers greater flexibility to hire and fire employees at will has led to a widespread utilisation of contract labour entities.

It was further stated that industry behaviour has adopted several other tools of arbitrage to not consider labour law as a key impediment in the ease of scaling business. Empirical evidence of labour law arbitrage was cited to drive home the point - according to national surveys, 80-85% of enterprises employ less than 99 workers as the law mandates stricter compliance requirements for enterprises employing 100 or more workers^{^[9]}. This was acknowledged a serious hurdle to scaling businesses.

Problems behind other apparently well-intentioned legislation from a public policy lens having counterproductive consequences was also highlighted. In the space of labour laws, the example of the recently enacted Maternity Benefit (Amendment) Act, 2017 was cited. By enhancing maternity benefits, without accounting for other provisioning such as a paternity benefit inclusion, it was anticipated that companies may entirely shy away from hiring women.

Policy Paralysis

The discussion progressed towards a high-level discussion around the efficacy of law vis-a-vis state policy as a means to create a system of checks and balances in the context of Industry 4.0. It was highlighted that law, by design, would be outpaced by technological change. The common law system of law operating in India is premised on a time-tested emphasis on post-facto regulation. In other words, it is reactionary. While policy making in India suffers from a similar plague of playing catch-up, it is in large part due to a bureaucratic structure premised on generalism - a pressing need for domain expertise in policy making was emphasised upon. Having said that, it was stated that it is the institutional design of policy making institutions that needs rectification. What was acknowledged was the success, albeit scant, that individual states have had in policy making catering to specific yet diverse domains. A greater push towards clear and progressive evidence-based policy pushes was stressed upon with the anticipation that it would lead to self-regulation by the industry itself - be it in terms of the future of employment or of the economic direction that the industry will embark on.

Concluding Remarks

The discussions during the course of the Workshop situated the discourse around Industry 4.0 within the contours of the Indian labour realities and the IT sector within that.

As a useful starting point, various broader perspectives around the impact of technological change on the quantum of jobs were brought forth. While the industry perspective was that of technology as an enabler of job creation in the long-run, it was sufficiently tempered by concerns around those impacted adversely in the short to medium-term time frames. These concerns coalesced towards understanding the potential impact of Industry 4.0 on the nature of work, as well as mitigation tools to ease the impact of technological disruption on labour.

Important facets of technological adoption within the Sector were highlighted, such as potential for scalability as well as the distinct eccentricities of the various sub-sectors the IT sector subsumed. The differential impact within the various sub-sectors was pegged to the differential composition of automatable tasks (routine, rule-based) within each sub-sector. However, questions regarding the exact contours of task composition were left unanswered signalling a potential area for further research. On the other hand, the primary challenge to technological adoption faced from the labour-supply side was skilling, or the lack thereof. This was contextualised in the larger scheme of structural issues plaguing the skilling machinery operating in the country, which lead to inadequate dispensation of technical and vocational education and training (TVET). In terms of additional structural issues that would potentially have an impact on how Industry 4.0 plays out in the Indian context, attention was directed towards overdue reform of the labour law framework which has already struggled with incorporating newer forms of working engagements such as platform and gig work, that are being evidenced as a part of Industry 4.0.

An underlying theme that found mention across sessions was the need to devote attention to prevent further marginalisation as a consequence of technological disruption of the already marginalised. Evidence from government datasets as well as from literature around concepts such as skill biased technological change, the leaky pipe problem, and the U-shaped curve of female labour force participation were cited to explicate these issues. The merits of different policy measures to address these concerns, such as social security, living wages, and maternity benefits were also discussed.

While the Workshop touched upon several facets of the discourse around Industry 4.0 in the Sector, it also sprung up areas that require further inquiry. Questions around where in the value chain use-cases for Industry 4.0 technologies were emerging needed a more comprehensive understanding. Moreover, the impact of Sector Skill Councils (SSCs), a central aspect of the skilling ecosystem in India, wasn’t touched upon. An additional path of inquiry that emerged pertained to evolving constructive reforms to legal and economic policy frameworks as top-down interventions within the Sector that could be anticipated to play a significant role in the uptake and impact of Industry 4.0 technologies.

^{^[1]} McKinsey Global Institute, A future that works: Automation, employment, and productivity, https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/featured%20insights/Digital%20Disruption/Harnessing%20automation%20for%20a%20future%20that%20works/MGI-A-future-that-works-Executive-summary.ashx, (accessed 10 August 2018).

^{^[2]} See discussion under ‘Catalysing manufacturing-led job growth‘.

^{^[3]} R. Verma, Structural Transformation and Jobless Growth in the Indian Economy, The Oxford Handbook of the Indian Economy, 2012.

^{^[4]} S. Mehrotra, ‘The Indian Labour Market: A Fallacy, Two Looming Crises and a Tragedy’, CSE Working Paper, April 2018.

^{^[5]} ibid.

^{^[6]} Mohita Nagpal, ‘Women in tech: There are 3 times more male engineers to females’, belong.co, http://blog.belong.co/gender-diversity-indian-tech-companies, (accessed 10 August 2018).

^{^[7]} Aspiring Minds, National Programming Skills Report - Engineers 2017, https://www.aspiringminds.com/sites/default/files/National%20Programming%20Skills%20Report%20-%20Engineers%202017%20-%20Report%20Brief.pdf, (accessed 11 August 2018).

^{^[8]} World Economic Forum, The Future of Jobs Employment, Skills and Workforce Strategy for the Fourth Industrial Revolution: Global Challenge Insight Report, January 2016.

^{^[9]} Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, All India Report of Sixth Economic Census, Government of India, 2014.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/future-of-work-report-of-the-workshop-on-the-it-it-es-sector-and-the-future-of-work-in-india

Future of Work in the ASEAN

aayush — 2020-03-05T19:22:50Z

A literature review of the future of work in automotive manufacturing and IT services in the ASEAN region, authored by Aayush Rathi, Vedika Pareek, Divij Joshi, and Pranav M B.

Read the research paper: Download (PDF)

Authored by Aayush Rathi, Vedika Pareek, Divij Joshi, and Pranav Bidare

Research assistance by Sankalp Srivastava and Anjanaa Aravindan

Edited by Elonnai Hickok and Ambika Tandon

Supported by Tides Foundation

Introduction

The world of work, and its future, have attracted a lot of attention in recent times. The discussion has been provoked by the confluence of recent technological breakthroughs that portend to have wide-ranging implications on work and livelihoods. In what has been termed the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” or “Industry 4.0” , the discussion has engaged numerous stakeholders. However, no shared understanding of what this future of work will look like has materialised. Historical scholarship around technological change and its impact on the labour market was focussed in the context of high-income countries. Contemporaneously, however, research is being produced that outlines the possible futures of work in low and middle-income contexts. It is exigent to generate scholarship dedicated to low and middle-income contexts given that in addition to technological drivers, the future of work will be mediated through region and country specific factors such as socioeconomic,geopolitical and demographic change.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/future-of-work-in-the-asean

Future of Privacy in India

praskrishna — 2013-03-26T05:14:45Z

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

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

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

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

Key Speakers

Dr. Gulshan Rai, DG, CERT-In*

Mr. Simon Davis, London School of Economics

Mr. Manoj Joshi, JS, DOPT*

Mr. Kanta Roy, CEO, NeGD*

Dr. Kamlesh Bajaj, CEO, DSCI

Mr. Sunil Abraham, ED, CIS

* To be confirmed

Event Flow

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

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

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

Future of Integrated Science Education in Higher Education in India

praskrishna — 2012-01-15T09:50:50Z

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

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

Introduction

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

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

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

Rationale

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

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

Course 1: Science-in-Making

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Course 3: Health, Technology and Bio-ethics

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

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

Course 4: National Technologies & Technologies of the Nation

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

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

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

Course 5: Sociology of Science and Science in Society

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

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

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

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

Next Steps

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

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

Fundamental Right to Privacy — Three Years of the Puttaswamy Judgment

pranav — 2020-08-24T07:46:10Z

Today marks three years since the Supreme Court of India recognised the fundamental right to privacy, but the ideals laid down in the Puttaswamy Judgment are far from being completely realized. Through our research, we invite you to better understand the judgment and its implications, and take stock of recent issues pertaining to privacy.

Amber Sinha dissects the Puttaswamy Judgment through an analysis of the sources, scope and structure of the right, and its possible limitations. [link]

Through a visual guide to the fundamental right to privacy, Amber Sinha and Pooja Saxena trace how courts in India have viewed the right to privacy since Independence, explain how key legal questions were resolved in the Puttaswamy Judgement, and provide an account of the four dimensions of privacy — space, body, information and choice — recognized by the Supreme Court. [link]

Based on publicly available submissions, press statements, and other media reports, Arindrajit Basu and Amber Sinha track the political evolution of the data protection ecosystem in India, on EPW Engage. They discuss how this has, and will continue to impact legislative and policy developments. [link]

For the AI Policy Exchange, Arindrajit Basu and Siddharth Sonkar examine the Automated Facial Recognition Systems (AFRS), and define the key legal and policy questions related to privacy concerns around the adoption of AFRS by governments around the world. [link]

Over the past decade, reproductive health programmes in India have been digitising extensive data about pregnant women. In partnership with Privacy International, we studied the Mother and Child Tracking system (MCTS), and Ambika Tandon presents the impact on the privacy of mothers and children in the country. [link]

While the right to privacy can be used to protect oneself from state surveillance, Mira Swaminathan and Shubhika Saluja write about the equally crucial problem of lateral surveillance — surveillance that happens between individuals, and within neighbourhoods, and communities — with a focus on this issue during the COVID-19 crisis. [link]

Finally, take a dive into the archives of the Centre for Internet and Society to read our work, which was cited in the Puttaswamy judgment — essays by Ashna Ashesh, Vidushi Marda and Bhairav Acharya that displaced the notion that privacy is inherently a Western concept, by attempting to locate the constructs of privacy in Classical Hindu [link], and Islamic Laws [link]; and Acharya’s article in the Economic and Political Weekly, which highlighted the need for privacy jurisprudence to reflect theoretical clarity, and be sensitive to unique Indian contexts [link].

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/fundamental-right-to-privacy-three-years-of-the-puttaswamy-judgment

FUEL Kannada - Workshop on Kannada Computing Terminology

praskrishna — 2012-02-23T10:32:59Z

A two days workshop on the standardization of Kannada computing terminologies was organized on January 28th and 29th 2012 at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), Bangalore under the FUEL project. This FUEL Kannada workshop aimed at the community review and standardization of frequently encountered computing terminologies in Kannada. FUEL Kannada Evaluation meet aimed at solving the problem of inconsistency and lack of standardization in computer software translations in Kannada language. This workshop was hosted by CIS, sponsored by Red Hat and organized by Sanchaya (sanchaya.net).

Along with well know television actress Jayalaxmi Patil. members from Banavasi Balaga, Translators, Kanaja Content writer, Linguistics, Journalists participated in this workshop. Shankar Prasad welcomed every one and explained the importance and need of standardization of Kannada Computing Terminologies. KaGaPa's Secretary Narasimha Murthy shed light on the past work on computing terminologies.

This workshop discussed on 578 commonly appearing entries people use. FUEL Kannada Evaluation meet was a concrete move towards solving the problem and after the meet, FUEL Kannada came with the standard translation of entries in Kannada language for the first time that are frequently being used by a normal user.

Localization is the process of transforming a product into different languages and adapting it for a specific locale. As the localization process becomes more complex and involves more players and tools, problems related to consistency of translations and terminology are faced. Henceforth, in this context the need of such type of meet is significant and important. Except few languages, this type effort is generally the first effort for most of Indic languages for computing terminologies.

FUEL tries to provide a standardized and consistent computer interface for users. Before Kannada language, FUEL already completed evaluation phase for 9 other Indian languages.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/fuel-kannada-workshop-on-kannada-computing-terminology

FTN: Should social networking sites be censored?

praskrishna — 2011-12-08T05:32:41Z

Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal met the representatives of Facebook, Google and others seeking to device a screening mechanism. Sunil Abraham was on CNN-IBN from 10.00 p.m. to 10.30 p.m. speaking about freedom of expression in India.

VIDEO

Watch the original video on IBN Live here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/censor-social-networking-sites

From Virtual to Reliable: Exploring Freedom and Facts in the World of WWW (World Wide Web)

praskrishna — 2017-03-29T04:01:25Z

An interactive seminar on internet freedom was organized by the Embassy of the Kingdom of Netherlands and Adaan Foundation on March 21, 2017 at the India International Centre in New Delhi. Saikat Dutta and Amber Sinha were panelists.

The seminar was coincident with the inauguration of the World Press Photo Exhibition 2016. In total there were four panelists. Read the agenda here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/from-virtual-to-reliable-exploring-freedom-and-facts-in-the-world-of-www-world-wide-web