All Blogs
- Censure for its process
- Its (in)compatibility with fundamental rights
- The failure to incorporate the suggestions of the Yashwant Sinha-led Standing Committee to UPA’s NIDAI Bill
- The possibility of surveillance that it presents
- The lack of measures to protect personal information
- Its inadequate privacy safeguards
- The questions around the realisation of its stated purpose.
RTI regarding Smart Cities Mission in India
Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) had filed an RTI on 3 February 2016 before the Ministry of Urban Development (MoUD) regarding the Smart Cities Mission in India. The RTI sought information regarding the role of various foreign governments, private industry, multilateral bodies that will provide technical and financial assistance for this project and information on Government agreements regarding PPP’s for financing the project.
The Last Chance for a Welfare State Doesn’t Rest in the Aadhaar System
Boosting welfare is the message, which is how Aadhaar is being presented in India. The Aadhaar system as a medium, however, is one that enables tracking, surveillance, and data monetisation. This piece by Sumandro Chattapadhyay was published in The Wire on April 19, 2016.
Celebrating the 13th anniversary of Kannada Wikipedia
The Kannada-language Wikipedia, arguably the largest online encyclopedia in Kannada language, celebrated its 13th anniversary on February 14, 2016 in Mangalore.
Online Censorship on the Rise: Why I Prefer to Save Things Offline
As governments use their power to erase what they do not approve of from the web, cloud storage will not be enough.
Edit-a-thon organised at Christ University Bangalore to celebrate Women’s Day
A day-long edit-a-thon was organised at Christ University Bangalore on March 12, 2016 to celebrate the Women’s Day and grow the women-related articles on Kannada Wikipedia.
Aadhaar Act and its Non-compliance with Data Protection Law in India
This post compares the provisions of the Aadhaar Act, 2016, with India's data protection regime as articulated in the Information Technology (Reasonable Security Practices and Procedures and Sensitive Personal Data or Information) Rules, 2011.
FAQ on the Aadhaar Project and the Bill
This FAQ attempts to address the key questions regarding the Aadhaar/UIDAI project and the Aadhaar (Targeted Delivery of Financial and Other Subsidies, Benefits and Services) Bill, 2016 (henceforth, Bill). This is neither a comprehensive list of questions, nor does it contain fully developed answers. We will continue to add questions to this list, and edit/expand the answers, based on our ongoing research. We will be grateful to receive your comments, criticisms, evidences, edits, suggestions for new answers, and any other responses. These can either be shared as comments in the document hosted on Google Drive, or via tweets sent to the information policy team at @CIS_InfoPolicy.
Monitoring Sustainable Development Goals in India: Availability and Openness of Data (Part II)
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are an internationally agreed upon set of developmental targets to be achieved by 2030. There are 17 SDGs with 169 targets, and each target is mapped to one or more indicators as a measure of evaluation. In this and the next blog post, Kiran AB is documenting the availability and openness of data sets in India that are relevant for monitoring the targets under the SDGs. This post offers the findings for the last 10 Goals. The first 7 has already been discussed in the earlier post.
Surveillance Project
The Aadhaar project’s technological design and architecture is an unmitigated disaster and no amount of legal fixes in the Act will make it any better.
A Large Byte of Your Life
With the digital, memory becomes equated with storage. We commit to storage to free ourselves from remembering.
Mapping MAG: A study in Institutional Isomorphism
The paper is an update to a shorter piece of MAG analysis that had been conducted in July 2015. At that time our analysis was limited by the MAG membership data that was made available by the Secretariat. Subsequently we wrote to the Secretariat and this paper is based on the data shared by them including for the years for which membership details were previously not available.
CIS - A2K Work Plan: July 2016 - June 2017
One of the key mandates of the Access to Knowledge (A2K) program at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) is to work towards catalyzing the growth of the free and open knowledge movement in Indic languages. CIS has been a steward of the Wikimedia movement in India since December 2008. Since September 2012, we at CIS-A2K, have been actively involved in growing the movement in India through (i) a grant received from the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) for the period September 2012 - June 2014, (ii) the FDC Grant received for the period July 2014 - June 2015 and (iii) the FDC Grant received for the period July 2015 - June 2016. Based on the productive experience of working with various Indic Wikimedia communities, CIS-A2K has developed this work plan for July 2016 to June 2017.
Dataset: Patent Landscape of Mobile Device Technologies in India
Patent landscape of mobile technology patents and patent applications held by 50 companies operating in India. Licensed CC-BY-SA 4.0.
Global Congress 2015 - A Collection of Resources
The 4th edition of the Global Congress 2015 was organized at the National Law School of India University in New Delhi from 15 - 17 December 2015. The largest ever in Asia, the Global Congress was jointly organized by the Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) in association with National Law University, Delhi, Open A.I.R., CREATe, Columbia University and American University.
Patents and Mobile Devices in India: An Empirical Survey
Though India has the second-largest wireless subscriber base in the world, with more than 150 mobile device vendors, it has, until recently, remained relatively unaffected by the global smartphone wars. Over the past three years, however, a growing number of patent enforcement actions have been brought by multinational firms against domestic Indian producers. These actions, which have largely resulted in judgments favoring foreign patent holders, have given rise to a variety of proposals for addressing this situation.
Will Aadhaar Act Address India’s Dire Need For a Privacy Law?
The article was published by Quint on March 31, 2016.
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The passage of the Aadhaar (Targeted Delivery of Financial and Other Subsidies, Benefits and Services) Act, 2016 (will hereby be referred to as “the Act”) has led to flak for the government from privacy advocates, academia and civil society, to name a few.
To my mind, the opposition deserves its fair share of criticism (lacking so far), for its absolute failure to engage with and act as a check on the government in the passage of the Act, and the events leading up to it.
The government’s introduction of the Act as a ‘money bill’ under Article 110 of the Constitution of India (“this/the Article”) is a mockery of the constitutional process. It renders redundant, the role of the Rajya Sabha as a check on the functioning of the Lower House.
Article 110 limits a ‘money bill’ only to six specific instances: covering tax, the government’s financial obligations and, receipts and payments to and from the Consolidated Fund of India, and, connected matters.
The Act lies well outside the confines of the Article; the government’s action may attract the attention of the courts.
Political One-Upmanship
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| Finance Minister Arun Jaitley (left) listens to Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Governor Raghuram Rajan. (Photo: Reuters) |
In the past, the Supreme Court (“the Court”) has stepped into the domain of the Parliament or the Executive when there was a complete and utter disregard for India’s constitutional scheme. In recent constitutional history, this is perhaps most noticeable in the anti-defection cases, (beginning with Kihoto Hollohan in 1992); and, in the SR Bommai case in 1994, on the imposition of the President’s rule in states.
In hindsight, although India has benefited from the Court’s action in the Bommai and Hollohan cases, it is unlikely that the passage of the Aadhaar Act as a ‘money bill’, reprehensible as it is, meets the threshold required for the Court’s intervention in Parliamentary procedure.
Besides, the manner of its passage, the Act warrants
Instead, a part of the Aadhaar debate has involved political one-upmanship between the Congress and the BJP, pitting the former’s NIDAI Bill against the latter’s Aadhaar Act.
While an academic comparison between the two is welcome, its use as a tool for political supremacy would be laughable, were it not deeply problematic, given the many serious concerns highlighted above.
Better Than UPA Bill?
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| The Act may have more privacy safeguards than the earlier UPA Bill. (Photo: iStockphoto) |
And while the Act may have more privacy safeguards than the earlier UPA Bill, critics have argued that they not up to the international standard, and instead, that they are plagued by opacity.
Additionally, despite claims that the Act is a significant improvement over the UPA Bill, it fails to address concerns, including around the centralised storage of information, that were raised by civil society members and others.
Perhaps most problematically, however, the Act takes away an individual’s control of her own information. Subsidies, government benefits and services are linked to the mandatory possession of an Aadhar number (Section 7 of the Act), effectively negating the ‘freedom’ of voluntary enrollment (Section 3 of the Act). This directly contradicts the recommendations of the Justice AP Shah Committee, before whom the Unique Identification Authority of India had earlier stated that enrollment in Aadhaar was voluntary.
To make matters worse, the individual does not have the authority to correct, modify or alter her information; this lies, instead, with the UIDAI alone (Section 31 of the Act). And the sharing of such personal information does not require a court order in all cases.
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| Kanhaiya Kumar speaking in JNU on 3 March 2016. (Photo: PTI) |
These recent events around Aadhaar have only underscored the dire urgency for comprehensive privacy legislation in India and, the need to overhaul our data protection laws to meet our constitutional commitments along with international standards.
8 Challenges In Growing Indian-Language Wikipedias
While speaking at BHASHA: Indian Languages Digital Festival, a day-long discourse at New Delhi on Indian languages and their state in new media, especially digital platforms, I touched upon Wikipedia in Indian languages. Most people, in fact, do not even know that Wikipedia exists in many Indian languages.
TRAI Consultation on Differential Pricing for Data Services - Post-Open House Discussion Submission
The Centre for Internet and Society sent this submission to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) following the Open House Discussion on Differential Pricing of Data Services, held in Delhi on February 21, 2016.
Report on eSpeak with NVDA Screen Reader and Assistive Technology for Visually Challenged
The Centre for Internet & Society, Bangalore and National Association for the Blind, New Delhi in collaboration with Centre for Differently Abled Persons, Bharathidasan University, Tiruchirappalli organized a workshop on eSpeak with NVDA Screen Reader and Assistive Technology for Visually Challenged at Centre for Differently Abled Persons, Bharathidasan University, Tiruchirappalli on January 21, 2016.
Consultation on 'National Geospatial Policy' - Notes and Submission
The Department of Science and Technology, Government of India, has constituted a National Expert Committee for developing a draft National Geospatial Policy (NGP) to provide appropriate guidelines for collection, analysis, use, and distribution of geospatial information across India, and to assure data availability, accessibility and quality. A pre-drafting consultation meeting for the NGP was organised in Delhi on February 03, 2016. Ms. Anubha Sinha represented CIS at the meeting, and shares her notes.
