Pathways to Higher Education

RAW Lectures #02: Anil Menon on 'Undermining the Tyrant’s Protocols: Speculative Fiction and Freedom'

sumandro — 2016-02-09T08:43:57Z

Anil Menon will give a talk on 'Undermining the Tyrant’s Protocols: Speculative Fiction and Freedom' at the Centre for Internet and Society's office in Bangalore on Wednesday, January 13, 2016 at 6 pm. Please join us for tea and coffee before the lecture at 5.30 pm.

Update: The video recording of the lecture can be accessed here.

The RAW Lectures series was initiated by the Researchers at Work (RAW) programme to take stock, reflect, and chart courses into the studies of Internet in/from India. The lectures address the experiences and practices of Internet in India as plural and intertwined with longer-duration processes. The lectures also critically respond to the questions around the methods of studying Internet in/from India, and the opportunities and challenges of studying Indian society on/through the Internet.

It gives us great pleasure to announce that Anil Menon will present the second lecture of the series on Wednesday, January 13, 2016, at 6 pm.

Undermining the Tyrant’s Protocols: Speculative Fiction and Freedom

Story-telling, like the internet, depends on the existence of fixed protocols between the sender and the receiver. However, by manipulating ambiguity and contexts, speculative fiction constantly creates new and ever-changing protocols of reading. This makes it hard to define what exactly speculative fiction is. Spec-fic may be described as a catch-all term to describe genres such as magic-realism, fabulist fiction, slipstream, science-fiction, fantasy and various fusions thereof. In my talk, I will outline the history of spec-fic on the subcontinent, and show how it was used by authors such as Kylas Chundar Dutt to undermine imperialist narratives. In the last decade, the internet, which may be conceived as a speculative network, has emerged as another such tool. Internet access in India is growing at an extraordinary rate, but less well-known is the fact that Indian spec-fic is also undergoing a rather remarkable renaissance. I will show that these two threads of development are related, mutually reinforcing, and point to an interesting metaphor of speculative sovereignity, perhaps unique to India, and that serves to undermine any would-be tyrant’s protocols.

Anil Menon

Anil Menon’s research work has appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as Intl J. of Neural Networks, Neural Proc. Letters, IEEE Trans On Evolutionary Computation, Foundations of Genetic Algorithms, British J. of the History of Science, and Small Business Economics. His short fiction has appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies including Interzone, Interfictions, Strange Horizons, Jaggery Lit Review, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. His stories have been translated into German, French, Chinese, Romanian and Hebrew. His debut novel The Beast With Nine Billion Feet (Zubaan Books, 2010) was short-listed for the 2010 Vodafone-Crossword award and the Carl Brandon Society's 2011 Parallax Award. Along with Vandana Singh, he co-edited Breaking the Bow (Zubaan Books 2012), an international anthology of speculative fiction inspired by the Ramayana epic. His most recent work is the novel Half Of What I Say (Bloomsbury, 2015).

Website: http://anilmenon.com/.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/raw-lectures-02-anil-menon

RAW Lectures #02: Anil Menon on 'Speculative Fiction and Freedom' - Video

sneha-pp — 2016-02-09T08:38:19Z

Anil Menon spoke on 'Undermining the Tyrant’s Protocols: Speculative Fiction and Freedom' at the second event of the RAW Lectures series in Bangalore on January 13, 2016. Here is the video recording of the talk and the discussion that followed.

RAW Lectures

The Researchers at Work programme initiated the RAW Lectures series to take stock, reflect, and chart courses into the studies of Internet in/from India. The lectures address the experiences and practices of Internet in India as plural and intertwined with longer-duration processes. The lectures also critically respond to the questions around the methods of studying Internet in/from India, and the opportunities and challenges of studying Indian society on/through the Internet.

Lecture #02 - Undermining the Tyrant’s Protocols: Speculative Fiction and Freedom

More: http://cis-india.org/raw/raw-lectures-02-anil-menon.

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Video: MP4, OGG, and Torrent.

The video is shared under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/raw-lectures-02-anil-menon-video

RAW Lectures #01: Nishant Shah on 'Stories and Histories of Internet in India' - Video

sneha-pp — 2016-02-09T08:45:00Z

Dr. Nishant Shah spoke on the 'Stories and Histories of Internet in India' at the first event of the RAW Lectures series in Bangalore on March 6, 2015. Here is the video recording of the talk and the discussion that followed.

RAW Lectures

Lecture #01 - Stories and Histories of Internet in India

Dr. Nishant Shah is the Professor of Culture and Aesthetics of New Media at the Leuphana University Lüneburg, Research Associate at COMMON MEDIA LAB, Affiliate at DIGITAL CULTURES RESEARCH LAB, and International Tandempartner at HYBRID PUBLISHING LAB. He is the co-founder and former-Director-Research at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, India.

More: http://cis-india.org/raw/raw-lectures-01-nishant-shah.

Download

Video files: MP4, OGG, and Torrent.

The video is shared under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/raw-lectures-01-nishant-shah-video

RAW Lectures #01: Nishant Shah on 'Stories and Histories of Internet in India'

praskrishna — 2016-01-10T08:05:30Z

Dr. Nishant Shah will give a talk on 'Stories and Histories of Internet in India' at the Centre for Internet and Society's office in Bangalore on March 6, 2015 at 6 p.m. Please join us for tea and coffee before the lecture at 5.30 p.m.

Update: The video recording of the lecture can be accessed here.

Introducing the first research initiative at the Researchers at Work programme in the Centre for Internet and Society, Professor Nishant Shah wrote:

“Although many disciplines, organisations and interventions in various areas deal with internet technologies, there has been very little work in documenting the polymorphous growth of internet technologies and their relationship with society in India... We wanted to first propose that the Internet is not a monolithic object that exists in the same way across geographies and social borders. It is necessary to approach the Internets, as plural, available in different forms, practices and experiences to people from different locations and sections of the society... The second proposal was that while the digital and Internet technologies are new, they do not necessarily only produce new things. There is a need to map the histories and pre-histories of Internets.”

The Researchers at Work programme is initiating the RAW Lectures series to take stock, reflect, and chart courses into the studies of Internet in/from India. The lectures will address the experiences and practices of Internet in India as plural and intertwined with longer-duration processes, as foregrounded by Nishant above. The lectures will also critically respond to the questions around the methods of studying Internet in/from India, and the opportunities and challenges of studying Indian society on/through the Internet.

It gives us immense pleasure to invite Nishant to present the first lecture of the series on Friday, March 06, 2015. The title of the lecture is "Once There was the Internet: Of Stories and Histories of Internet in India."

Dr. Nishant Shah

Nishant is the Professor of Culture and Aesthetics of New Media at the Leuphana University Lüneburg, Research Associate at COMMON MEDIA LAB, Affiliate at DIGITAL CULTURES RESEARCH LAB, and International Tandempartner at HYBRID PUBLISHING LAB. He is the co-founder and former-Director-Research at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, India.

In his varied roles, he has been committed to producing infrastructure, frameworks and collaborations in the global south to understand and analyse the ways in which emergence and growth of digital technologies have shaped the contemporary social, political and cultural milieu. He edited a series of monographs on “Histories of Internet(s) in India” that looks at the complicated relationship that technologies have with questions of gender, sexuality, body, city, governance, archiving and gaming in a country like India. He was also the principal researcher for a research programme that produced the four-volume anthology “Digital AlterNatives With a Cause?” that examines the ways in which young people’s relationship with digital technologies produces changes in their immediate environments.

His Ph.D. thesis titled “The Technosocial Subject: Cities, Cyborgs and Cyberspace” builds a framework to examine the technosocial identities that are produced at the intersection of law, digital technologies and everyday cultural practices in emerging information societies like India. Nishant was an Asia Research fellow looking at the cost and infrastructure of building IT Cities like Shanghai. He is the author of a recent thought-piece titled “Whose Change is it Anyway? – Towards a future of digital technologies and citizen action in emerging information societies” that seeks to revisit the debates around digital activism and change in the global context. His current interests are in critically intervening in debates around Digital Humanities and conditions of change mediated by technologies.

More: http://cdc.leuphana.com/people/#nishant-shah

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/raw-lectures-01-nishant-shah

Raina Roy and Abhiraj Bag - Kolkata’s trans community has been locked out of healthcare and livelihood

Raina Roy and Abhiraj Bag — 2020-08-01T14:54:16Z

Over six months into the outbreak of Covid-19 in India, it has become clear that the pandemic does not affect everybody equally. It has amplified the sufferings of the already-marginalised trans community. Raina Roy spoke to 10 trans persons and trans rights activists in Kolkata over the course of the past few months to better understand the situation. The piece was transcribed by Abhiraj Bag and edited by Kaarika Das and Srravya C, researchers at the Centre for Internet and Society, India. This work is part of a project at CIS on gender, welfare and surveillance, supported by Privacy International, United Kingdom.

Originally published by Scroll on July 28, 2020.

Raina is a founder of Samabhabona (Baishamya Durikaran Samiti), a trans-led organisation in Kolkata working with trans rights since 2013. Abhiraj is a trans rights activist based in Kolkata.

Several members of our community have lost their livelihoods due to the lockdown and remain unemployed for over three months now. Those engaged in sex work and begging have no respite in sight for the foreseeable future. As a community, we are more likely to be unemployed as traditional employment opportunities are inaccessible to us. Our health concerns are also diverse, as we grapple with gender dysphoria alongside other psychosocial issues. Covid-19 has exacerbated these inequalities and effectively locked us out of livelihood as well as healthcare.

An alienating system

When it comes to accessing institutional healthcare, visiting hospitals can be a daunting ordeal for trans men and trans women, as we frequently encounter discrimination and stigmatisation from healthcare providers.

Even in emergency cases such as accidents, medical attention is delayed due to confusion whether the patient should be admitted to the male or female ward. Finding compassionate healthcare providers is difficult, especially in government hospitals. Most often, they are not sensitised to trans-health issues.

Such experiences have alienated us from the healthcare system and left several members of the trans community reluctant to seek medical help.

Access to general healthcare has further worsened with Covid-19, as many are unable to seek emergency medical assistance. With no sustainable source of income and deteriorating health condition, elderly trans persons are hit with a double whammy. Despite their failing health, there is presently no provision for routine health check-up which they can avail. The reluctance to consult a healthcare service provider has increased due to the added risk of infection.

SRS services are city-centric

Many in the community had scheduled their sex reassignment surgery or SRS and started taking the necessary hormonal medication. However, because of Covid-19, they have now had to postpone their surgery indefinitely. This uncertainty further aggravated distress together with issues of hormonal imbalance. Due to loss of income, many are resorting to alternative cheap hormonal medication and without proper medical supervision, its consequence could be harmful.

Those who have undergone SRS or are currently on hormone replacement therapy often experience side effects such as rise in blood pressure and blood sugar levels, urinary tract infection, and other immunity-compromising problems. To treat these side-effects, a patient may need to consult an endocrinologist, gynaecologist or urologist. However, such specialists are only available at district hospitals. At the sub-district level, we may be able to consult a gynaecologist at best. An endocrinologist or urologist would be available only if we travelled to the district hospitals or medical college hospitals.

A lockdown spanning over three months, restrictions on travel and closure of public transport have made the city-centric, SRS-related healthcare systems inaccessible to the transgender persons in smaller towns and villages. Pre-Covid-19, a few NGOs and community-based organisations provided sexual health services. However, they were unable to continue their services during the lockdown. This has adversely impacted the trans community’s access to sexual health services.

So far, two trans women have been tested positive for Covid-19 in Kolkata. Thanks to the intervention from activists and other allies, they were quarantined in the female ward when they tested positive. Both were asymptomatic and are presently self-isolating at home. Within the trans community, there is inadequate awareness about Covid-19 testing protocols and procedures. The saving grace has been the dedicated provisioning of ten beds at the MR Bangur Hospital, specifically reserved for transgender persons.

Community care

The most hard-hitting impact of Covid-19 is undoubtedly on the mental health of our community. Often faced with social stigma and physical abuse, we take refuge in the comfort of each other’s support. In the absence of familial ties, community support is vital for our well-being. However, Covid-19 and the consequent lockdown measures, has distanced us from our only source of support and solace – community interaction and meet-ups.

Although digitally mediated communication has somewhat helped in coping, it is not as effective or cathartic as an in-person conversation. This has increased the susceptibility of substance abuse in the community. Parallelly, there has been a considerable rise in domestic violence cases too. Even under normal circumstances, we are more likely to encounter intimate partner violence, but are skeptical to seek redressal as the law-enforcing institutions – both judiciary and the police – are biased against us.

At hospitals, the constant misgendering that we face at the hands of healthcare professionals can be traumatising. Aparna Banerjee, a trans-person in Kolkata, said that this trauma has only worsened during Covid-19, when frontline healthcare workers are not sensitised about trans health. To escape this trauma, some trans women have resorted to unscientific castration, leading to urinary tract infection and kidney-related problems. Gender dysphoria also puts the trans community at a higher risk of anxiety, depression, self-harm and suicidal tendencies.

The political milieu

Such strains on our mental and physical health come at a time when we are already distressed by the thought of being disenfranchised. The latest National Register of Citizens list in Assam had excluded many trans persons, as they couldn’t establish family ties, for being disowned by their families. And if they were included, their gender was incorrectly stated.

With the 2019 Transgender Person Act coming into force, a District Magistrate is given the authority to recognise a person as trans. This defies the right to self-identify, as upheld in the 2014 NALSA judgement. The current provision also necessitates providing proof of surgery and has no consideration for gender incongruence. The burden of providing proof of surgery is unnerving, especially for someone who has just transitioned.

As such, the cumulative impact of the 2019 Transgender Person Act and the Citizenship Amendment Act-National Register of Citizen mandate could lead to a significant part of the community being disenfranchised. In resisting this coercive pronouncement, we staged a protest in Kolkata earlier this year.

What can be done

The health and well-being of the trans community has suffered decades of institutional neglect and the Covid-19 pandemic has intensified this suffering. Remedial policy measures have been long due and cannot be delayed any further. Shelter homes have been one of our long-standing demands, to ensure safety and care for the transgender community, particularly the elderly. It is important that such shelter homes are democratic spaces, and not religious centres, that are welcoming of trans persons from different walks of life.

Secondly, healthcare systems, both public and private, need to be more trans-friendly – doctors, nurses and other staff in hospitals and healthcare centres need to be sensitised and trained to identify and understand the healthcare needs of transmen and transwomen. Recruitment of more transgender people as health workers would go a long way in treating transgender patients more humanely, with support and care.

Measures to contain the spread of the pandemic should include increased testing of transgender persons, and tracking the testing and infection rates among trans persons. Relief measures aimed at addressing the economic crisis need to acknowledge the loss of livelihood in the trans community and provide adequate financial support and compensation. Finally, it is important that governments, both at the centre- and state-level, pay heed to our demands and include representatives from the trans community while formulating policies that impact our lives in significant ways.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/raina-roy-abhiraj-bag-transgender-community-kolkata-covid19-healthcare-livelihood

Quarter Life Crisis: The World Wide Web turns 25 this year

nishant — 2016-09-16T13:25:38Z

With the unexplained ban on websites, the state seems to have stopped caring for the digital rights of its citizens.

The article was published in the Indian Express on September 3, 2016.

The World Wide Web turned 25 this year. A quarter of a century ago, the first website went live, and since then, the world as we know it has changed. The internet is probably the fastest way a new technology has become old. There are generations who have never known the world without it being connected. And yet, it is safe to say that if put into a corner, most of us might have a tough time trying to exactly describe what the World Wide Web is, and how it operates. Like many massification technologies, the internet has quickly evolved from being the playground for geeks to tinker with and build digital networks, into a blackbox that we access through our seductively designed interfaces.

At a technological level, the internet was a standardisation protocol that allowed for distributed databases on remote computers to interact with each other using digital connections. At the heart of the internet was the impulse to share, and to share safely, new information that would lead to collaborative knowledge production and stronger network communities. The World Wide Web saw this potential of sharing information quickly as one of the most promising aspects of human futures. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, in his first vision of the WWW, had proposed that the capacity to share information, without loss of quality, would create new societies of equality and equity. In this vision, the website was a way of sharing information, expression, political desire, personal longing and social ideas, thus creating connected societies that would be able to consolidate the sum total of all human experience.

That historical moment of the technological architecture and the ideological articulation of the internet and the WWW are critical because as the internet has become increasingly privatised, with intermediaries, Internet Service Providers, and content producers claiming more and more of the digital turf, we have seen continued attack on the principles of sharing. We have, in the last few years, seen draconian crackdowns on people sharing their political views on social media, arresting young people for their political dissent online. We have witnessed the emergence of paywalls that close down content, criminalising students trying to access new knowledge towards their education. We have seen the policing of online creative spaces, monitoring users who engage in cultural production, forcing them into repressive intellectual property regimes that they do not necessarily want.

Most of these attacks on sharing have been fuelled by private companies who see the economic benefits of creating media monopolies out of the internet. These attacks have been particularly vicious because they also recognise the potentials of digital connectivity to completely disrupt the extraordinary powers of crowds who can co-create the biggest encyclopaedia in the word and undermine the corporatisation of cultural objects. And yet, in the interest of profits, there has been persistent lobbying from the private owners of the public goods of the internet, to crack down on sharing and access through legal punishment.

Like many developing countries, India has been resisting the enforcing of Intellectual Property Rights promoted by private lobbyists. In doing so, it recognises that emerging geographies need more open, universal and affordable access to information and that the true potential of digitisation lies in the capacity of the web to enable unfettered access to knowledge and cultural artefacts. Despite pressure from global lobbies, the Indian state has continued to emphasise that access for public good overrides the interest of private right holders, and has favoured the digital user’s right to access material which they might not always have the economic rights for. Some scholars say that this is where the state emphasises that the moral rights of access to information supersede the legal rights that close the possibilities of access.

Or at least, the Indian state recognised the need of its still-being-connected population to have free access till recently. With the new law that enforces a block on torrent and file sharing sites, warnings of punitive action, and an unexplained ban on websites that most users have been using for knowledge and cultural products, the state seems to have buckled under private lobbying and also stopped caring for the rights of its citizens. There will always be a split vote when it comes to figuring out the pros and cons of piracy, and it is important to recognise the right of the cultural and knowledge producer to protect their economic interests. The debates have been interesting because it was difficult to take sides and required a balancing act of negotiation between different parties.

However, with this new intervention, the Indian government seems to have taken sides, and made up its mind, that for the future of Digital India, it is going to favour the corporation, the company, the private profit making entity over the individual, the collective, and the public that sought to access information through the fundamental principle of the digital web — sharing.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-september-3-2016-nishant-shah-quarter-life-crisis-the-world-wide-web-turns-25-this-year

Public Event: Exploring Maps for Making Change

anja — 2015-10-24T14:19:32Z

The Centre for Internet and Society, in collaboration with Tactical Tech, would like to invite you to 'A Conversation on Maps for Making Change - Using Geographical Mapping Techniques to Support Struggles for Social Justice in India', at the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore.

When a migrant labourer draws a map of India, what does it look like? Can maps prove a correlation between corporate investment and Operation Green Hunt in Chhattisgarh?

For the past five months, twenty five activists, researchers, artists and techies have explored together, as part of the Maps for Making Change project, the potential of geographical mapping techniques to support struggles for social justice in India. As Maps for Making Change comes to an end, they would like to share with you their journey, their thoughts and their work, and to enter into a conversation with a much wider group of people about the potential and challenges of mapping for social justice now that new technologies can in theory be mobilised to fight for social justice by anyone with an interest in maps, but in practice remain confined to the hands of a privileged few.

Join us:

from 4 pm onwards, for an exhibition that allows you to explore the work of Maps for Making Change participants through installations, websites, conversations, information, video, ... and maps.

from 5 pm to 5.30 pm, for refreshments.

from 5.30 pm onwards, for a panel discusion which our panelists will kick off by sharing some of their own reflections and comments on mapping for social justice, to open up the conversation to a much broader discussion with all those present in the audience.

Panelists:

Reuben Jacob, Inclusive Planet

Shakun Mohini, Vimochana

Shubhranshu Choudhary, Knight International Journalism Fellow and Community Media Activist

For more information, please contact Anja Kovacs, Centre for Internet and Society: 98 11 74 72 12, anja@cis-india.org. Or check out the Maps for Making Change wiki: maps4change.cis-india.org.

Looking forward to seeing you at CIS on 28 April!

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/public-event-exploring-maps-for-making-change

Public Art, Technology and Citizenship - Blank Noise Project

denisse — 2015-04-17T10:43:55Z

Jasmeen Patheja speaks about the active citizen in the digital age, its challenges in the public and private spheres and interdisciplinary methods to overcome them.


CHANGE-MAKER: Jasmeen Patheja

PROJECT: Blank Noise Project: A volunteer-led arts collective community

STRATEGY OF CHANGE:
 Fostering an active, participatory and horizontal model of citizenship,
 empowering its volunteers to participate politically and address issues
 of street sexual harassments in the public sphere.

METHOD OF CHANGE: Public space interventions using community art and technology.

To open the interview series for the Making Change project, I interviewed Jasmeen Patheja. She is the founder of Blank Noise, a volunteer-led arts collective community that started in Bangalore and has now spread to Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, Calcutta, Chandigarh, Hyderabad, and Lucknow. It seeks to address street sexual harassment and violence by triggering dialogue and building testimonials around notions of "teasing" and "harassment" in the public discourse. The collective has garnered attention and momentum since it was founded in 2003, and ever since, it’s fostering a model of active citizenship across India through its volunteer network. The story of Blank Noise and the working of community art with technology highlight the need to create spaces of expression and experience in which civic and political creativity can develop and unfold organically.

One of the main reflections stemming from my conversation with Jasmeen was the question of how technologies can create a sense of ownership and active citizenship. At the moment, we are moving on to a scenario in which technology has a more pervasive and complex presence. It is no longer judged merely on its connective utility, but is also understood as an actor, a space and a context within the ecosystem of social change and political democratic systems. For this reason, it is paramount to get to know the citizen that is being exposed to, influenced and impacted by these technologies and identify the ways in which his self-identity, social membership and political participation (King and Waldron 1988, Turner 1986, 1990) are being molded by them.

In this post, I aim to unpack ‘active citizenship’ drawing from political science literature around citizenship and civic engagement. The analysis will be based on two dichotomies proposed by Turner: the tension between the active-passive citizen, and the contradictions between its private and public presence. I will then refer to Westmeister and Kahnein, Kabeer, Gaventa and Bennett to identify the type of citizen that Jasmeen Patheja hopes to yield through her project and the main challenges of manoeuvering in the public space. Finally, I will look at some of the tactics taken by Blank Noise to reconcile these tensions through community art and technology. This exploration of citizenship is a first stage in the journey of detecting the undertones of citizen action for social change in the digital era.

Unpacking Citizenship

ACTIVE VS. PASSIVE CITIZEN

What is the difference between an active and a passive citizen?

A passive citizen comes to existence as a subject, recipient or client of the state (...) regards its rights as privileges handed down from above (...)complies with norms yet does not act to change circumstances (...)and its security and survival are merely determined by constitutional and common law traditions

Turner places the citizenship question on two points of contention. The first: the vectorial nature of citizenship and how to recognize an ‘active or passive’ citizen. According to his analysis, a citizen either comes to existence from above as mere subject of the state, or from below as an active bearer of its rights (Mann 1987, Ullmann 1975, Turner 1990). The force and direction from which the citizen emerges has important implications for the self-identity of the individual, its confidence and disposition for political participation (Merrifield, 2001). A passive citizen regards its rights as privileges handed down from above, in such a way that citizenship becomes a strategy for social integration and cooperation (Mann, 1986). Westheimer and Kahne find the manifestation of this model in what they call a “Personally Responsible Citizen”: a dutiful citizen who complies with norms, pays taxes and obeys laws, yet does not act to change the circumstances of other communities (2004). However, defining the citizen as a passive actor constraints its role within its network. If the citizen’ security and survival are merely determined by constitutional and common law traditions, and the negotiation between institutions and the individual (Weber 1958 - refer to Turner 1990), the individual is a disempowered recipient or client (Cornwall, 2007) as opposed to the proactive agent Blank Noise looks to recruit and shape through heir interventions.

Patheja, as shown by the interview, aims to disrupt the passive citizen model by fostering political participation and putting its counterpart: ’the active citizen’ forward. Blank Noise believes the citizen must ground its claims from the grassroots and grow from below; yet still be visible and present in the public space, redefining problematic concepts looming in society’s social imaginary; what Turner would describe as revolutionary citizenship (1990).

How is your practice building a stronger model of citizenship?
Change cannot happen only at one level. It would involve more people and different groups from different communities. For example, with citizen-led street action; we can’t end it there. It needs to push home the cause and make [the issues] visible with the government. How do we work with the government? Learning to ask and not assume it’s all their responsibility, but learning to assert our citizenship. What does it mean to do this? What does it mean to ask for safer cities in a way that it doesn’t become somebody else’s business entirely but that it’s about being able to see we are a society. We must understand the process of citizenship; what it means to be in a democratic country and what means to be a female citizen in it.

Safe City Pledge - Delhi

Safe City Pledge - Mumbai
Courtesy of Blank Noise blog: http://bit.do/fHMm

The message is: “this is your city, this is your space. Don’t be apologetic for your presence” And over time, Action Heros are reporting change: ”I'm getting my space. I'm not thinking twice about what I have to wear.” [...]So it was not only about a vocabulary shift, but a shift in attitude.

An active citizen comes from below as an active bearer of its rights (...), feels impelled to engage and mobilize its network (...) keeps government and community members in check (...) and evolves with a higher sense of individual purpose favoring solidarity and maintaining networks of community action.

Westheimer and Kahne label this stronger orientation towards a social-change approach as the second degree of civic engagement or as the behaviour of a ‘participatory citizen’; an individual who feels impelled to engage and mobilize its network, skills and action to respond to a community need. This participation impetus is one of Patheja’s main expectations from its Action Hero Network. However, this entails relying on intimate shifts of behaviour and attitude among the volunteers, which are in essence hard to demand, inculcate and entrench by a third party.

Their approach also reflects a vision of citizenship that relies on collective action (Montgomery, 2004) to, not only keep the government in check as suggested by Westheimer and Kahnne, but other community and society members as well. From Bennett’s point of view and taking the role of information technologies into account, he would define the ideal Action Hero as a self-actualizing citizen. In contrast to its counterpart: the dutiful citizen, who sees its obligation to participate in government-centered activities, the AC evolves with higher sense of individual purpose, favouring and maintaining networks of community action, backed up by a growing distrust in media and the government. In this sense the role of technology is also paramount to how Blank Noise spreads its predicament and expands its outreach:

What is the role of technology and media in your project?
Using the web for example, we happened to stumble upon blogging and we realized there was a community there. Once [Action Heroes] started blogging and the press started writing about it, it created a community further. So, going back to the fact that our constant thread of conversation has been the web, there is a large percentage of the English speaking youth who are action hero agents anidd now have the responsibility of taking the conversations and actions forward.

On the other hand, this is not always the case. In Delhi we did an event in collaboration with Action Aid. Many of the Action Aid volunteers weren’t necessarily on Facebook. They were people who were largely Hindi speaking; their stories were about harassment in slums and these were men and women wanting to do something about the issue. So being a loose volunteer is one way, but identifying different communities is also important. Every space is a point of engagement and we use different forms of media to enable that.

Citizen participation, communication and mobilization mechanisms, mediated by the state in the past, are now taken up by the people in the form of social protest, civil disobedience, digital activism, consumerism, etc. (Bennett, 2008). The emphasis on collective action also calls for a broader understanding of the citizen, away from the state-conferred rights and duties, and a definition that includes solidarity and membership to broader communities (Ellison 1997), Heater and Kabeer defines this as a “horizontal view” that stresses the relationship between citizens over that of the state and the individual (Heater 2002, Kabeer 2007) and Berlin has also made the connection between group identity and affiliation as a building block of citizenship (1969).

[on Giving Letters to Strangers] We trigger a conversation and it takes its own journey. Over time, what does it take to lean back and relax? Each person participates establishing their own level of comfort and every person’s narrative is different. [The project is] happening in Delhi while it is happening in Bangalore; allowing it to happen in a very individual, self-confrontational and at the same time, collective experience. They are doing this alone knowing that others are doing the same.

Dear Stranger:
Giving out letters to strangers in the streets of Bangalore. Courtesy of Blank Noise blog: http://bit.do/fHJw

In this way, Blank Noise has envisioned and designed a project that fosters an active, participatory, self-actualizing and horizontal model of citizenship. This combination builds a citizen prototype with a positive disposition and attitude to civic action; traits that Gaventa identifies as elements of empowerment and political agency that can derive into higher possibilities for social change. Having citizens identify community’s ailments as their own and their network’s responsibility, results in conversations that act as causal nexus of community action. The main challenge at the moment is the implementation of this model. To what extent will the Action Hero represent this model uniformly and steadily, preventing dissonance between Blank Noise’s discourse and its practice. And secondly, how will Blank Noise volunteers negotiate their political participation between public and private spaces?

PRIVATE VS. PUBLIC SPACE

Where should the active citizen operate?

The second tension on citizenship, as identified by Turner, is its political expression on the public arena versus its manifestation on the individual’s private space. We asked Jasmeen about the crises and spaces in which Blank Noise is operating:

To what crisis is the project responding to?
The project responds to the crises and experiences of street harassment. To the sense of getting defensive, agitated, angry; creating a wall and feeling vulnerable in a city. Blank Noise was initiated at a time were street harassment was disregarded and dismissed as teasing. This ‘eve-teasing’, just going by the pulse of things, included concepts of molestation and sexual violence. There was denial, there was silence.

First point on the public vs. private dilemma lies on the issue at hand. Volunteers are working to re-conceptualize social norms around ‘safety’, ‘agency’ and ‘gender’, that are not only deeply entrenched in society, but that can also be traced back to the private domain of traditions and culture at the household level. By openly discussing ‘sexual harassment’ in the public space and enabling volunteers to express and act on the basis of a new understanding of citizenship and freedom, the collective is possibly also redefining dynamics at the private space of its volunteers. What is more, the motivation and determination to be an Action Hero, as mentioned by Patheja, must be grounded in a "personal shift and challenge".

How does this translate it into citizens taking ownership of the cause and sustained behavioral change in everyday practices?
Anger is a good starting point. It is worrying when there is no anger. And then it has to be a personal shift. We’ve learned from conversations and feedback that volunteers who would say: “we came to address the issue and we are realizing that we are doing something in ourselves”. So what is the spirit of an Action Hero? Allowing something to shift and challenging something in yourself. Last year for example we worked towards having locality specific Action Hero networks and on how this intuitive citizen can become a full citizen, in terms of being an informed citizen as well.

Acton Hero Game. Courtesy of Blank Noise blog: http://bit.do/fHKq

The expectation of a personal pledge at the individual, community and public level, signals the project is blurring the lines between the private and public domain and fostering the politicization of the citizen at all fronts. This suggests that in order for the claims and behaviour of Action Heroes to become sustainable, they must also trickle into the common citizen’s routine. In words of Arendt: “the space of appearance comes into being whenever men are together in the manner of speech and action, predating all formal constitutions of the public realm” (1989). Establishing the private-public space as a common ground works towards bringing consistency and coherence to the interventions, yet it remains in many ways problematic and threatening to individual freedoms.

Does your project create new spaces for citizen expression and action?
Our role is to build testimonials and translate them back into the public domain. An example of this is the blogathon that happened in 2006, initiated by our Action Hero. She said: let’s invite bloggers to share their experiences of street harassment. 4-5 male and female Action Heroes made the event happen and in a couple of days we had hundreds and hundreds of testimonials and people talking about this for the first time. Maybe it was the first time speaking about it, remembering things that happened ages ago and that they had never shared. Suddenly the web was seen as a space where people could speak. Suddenly people had so much to say about the issue, the person dismissing the issue and their relationship with their body and the city.

Talk To Me:
Creating spaces for conversation and collaboration. Courtesy of Blank Noise blog: http://bit.do/fHKq

Turner reflects on the French revolution tradition to shed light on this particular challenge for active citizenship, as what bound Frenchmen together was their citizen identity (Baker 1987). Passing on from state subjects, to actively voicing their political, civic and social aspirations coupled with meaningful mechanisms of participation. However, how do we reconcile this tradition of positive democracy with the American understanding of citizenship that enshrines the autonomous sanctity of the private space. American individualism values personal success and the main way to exercise political participation is through voluntary associations that do not represent a large-scale force -or a threat- with enough power to shape their lives (Bellah et. al 2008, Turner 1990). Translating this to the Bangalorean context: a changing society in which community- based traditions in the household are coexisting with an agitated and growingly individualist youth culture; the issues and interventions must be addressed in an implicational manner. The connections between the issue and individual freedoms must be made, in order for these actors to be willing to politicize their action in both the public and private spheres.

MIDDLE CLASS ACTIVISM

Can everybody be an active citizen?

The second challenge is rooted in the socio-economic group that comprises the body of volunteers of Blank Noise. I asked Jasmeen the extent to which the Action Hero Network was being led by middle class citizens.

Are you only reaching out to the middle class activist that has the resources to be part of the Blank Noise project?
Yes and no. A large percentage of our volunteers are usually web-savvy, English speaking, teenagers or in their early 20s. Others have been around for the last decade. The mainstream media also reports back mainly to the web-savvy groups. But it is also about one action hero inspiring another Action Hero. I find [the project] fascinating in terms of the spaces it leaks into. Some people tell me they were at their religious meeting and they overheard two women talking about the project, who were not necessarily web-savvy. Ultimately the media is not only reporting us but we see them as point of engagement in which more and more citizens take ownership of the issue. Although our network is largely urban middle class, we are at the point where we collaborate largely with other groups that are working with different communities so it completes the entire picture. The question is: how do you take the conversation forward? What can be that medium? and what kind of technology can get to people?

“We use different strategies to enable dialogue across communities. It could be on the street, on the blog, within a workshop; the web has been a constant space. If you are an Action Hero, yes you may be web-savvy, but you also carry the responsibility to take the conversation to another space."

Jasmeen Patheja

This demographic is ultimately an interest group leading a movement and has taken on the responsibility of spreading the call to action among its network. Foregoing the assumption that every Indian citizen wants to challenge concepts of sexual harassment in the city, the fact that one group is spreading a specific opinion puts forward a tension between the dynamics of public social protest and the existence of privatized dissent. Turner reflects on Mill’s On Liberty and shows how this could entail a threat of spreading mass opinion to the extent it makes all people alike (Turner, 1990).

Kabeer also highlights this by exploring the tension between universality versus particularity — a debate that questions the extent to which human rights advocacy in the public sphere will be equally received and supported by every group, given diversity of opinion within as well as obstacles to freedom of speech. Nyamu-Musembi attempts to bridge this dichotomy by framing universality as “the experience of resistance to general oppression” and particularity as “how resistance speaks to each relevant social context”. In order to have the issue speak to all citizen groups, Blank Noise is currently also depending on the the ability of its Action Heroes to pass on a message that speaks to the different needs and cultural sensibilities of communities who do not belong to the Anglo-speaking middle class it is currently operating with.

In response to having the protest of a specific social group translate into homogenized dissent, Jasmeen is looking to increase her outreach by approaching and working with other groups.

How can you build effective solidarity networks among middle class activists, their networks and further communities?
It is an attitude we are trying to push forward: have that conversation with your grandma; with your domestic help. We would love to do something with domestic workers for example. We don’t hear enough stories of who empowers or harasses them. That’s definitely a rising concern within the collective. We really need to have the complete spectrum and what kind of technology or strategies can be used to get it. Identifying these groups is a proposed future project and also an ongoing preoccupation. For now, our role is to trigger conversations and have them take their own journey.

METHODS FOR CHANGE

How does the combination of art and technology foster active citizenship?

Some of the strategies Blank Noise has devised to overcome these obstacles relate back to the interdisciplinary design of its interventions. First, they are designed to be highly visible and aimed at triggering dialogue. This enables opinions and thoughts to flow from the private space into the public realm. Also, community art and technology as tools of expression and reflection, work as effective channels for responses to flow back and forth between both spaces.

Why did you take a multi-stakeholder approach and brought together technology and art?
The entire collective is really based on defining strategies and identifying approaches to breaking denial and building conversation. Our role is enabling dialogue across forms of media and using different strategies to enable dialogue across communities. There are also lots of questions of how to create an art practice that can be collaborative and participatory. Where does art exist? How can art exist, be, feel confrontational? Can arte provoke? How can we build testimonials? Could be on the street, on the blog, twitter or within a workshop. The web has been a constant space. We also work with the web in a way that we have a growing community of Action Heroes, and if you are web-savvy, you carry the responsibility to take the conversation to another space.

Twitter campaign. Courtesy of: http://bit.do/fHLK

Public art installation to redefine sexual harassment and eve-teasing. Courtesy of Caravan Magazine: http://bit.do/fHLV

Bennett and his work on civic engagement in the digital age, notes that one of the main strategies for positive civic engagement is nurturing creative and expressive actions in this generation.

How does this approach work towards creating sustainable change?
We are creating tool kits for different ideas so the community can take it forward. There are many creative processes that equip them to initiate action in a community space. For instance, the Yelahanka Action Heroes workshop (http://yelahankaactionheroes.wordpress.com/), was a one month initiative that got Sristhi students to arrive to action heroism through games, like the Hahaha Sangha for example. We invited women out of their homes, and we would speak through pure laughter, gibberish and a sense of play. In doing that, people felt they knew each other. Anonymity was broken, people felt comfortable and safety was established. We are working towards creating safe public spaces and going beyond the biases that come from language or through age. But through the Hahaha Sangha we found there is still a need for facilitators to continue the project with the purpose of creating a safe space. Also, one of our interns is in charge of creating an Action Hero College Network and spreading information about different events, calendars, etc. It is still fluid but we are moving in that direction. Action Heroes are the strength of the project.

Hahaha Sangha sessions - Courtesy of Blank Noise blog http://bit.do/fHMb

The ideal of an engaged youth must be sustained by the empowerment of young people; getting them to recognize their personal expression and identities in collective spaces (Bennett, 2008). By setting in place mechanisms and opportunities to critically dissect societal problems and develop a political perspective as put forward by Westheimer and Kahne, as well as the awareness, self-identity and political confidence to act, as noted by Gaventa, the Blank Noise interventions become a context in which active citizenship is more likely.

Conclusion

This analysis, part of the Methods of Social Change research project, aimed to shed light on how change-makers such as Blank Noise still place a heavy consideration on the notion of citizenship when designing, framing and implementing their projects. What is more, it is paramount to identify the working characteristics of an ‘active citizen’ and reflect on whether these are desirable and necessary in the populace to make political and social change more likely. It also contributes to the Making Change project by unpacking the workings of a change actor that is not confined to the ‘category of citizen’ but is still closely linked to processes of citizen action and social change in Bangalore.

As seen throughout this post, the analysis of our citizen is not grounded on its relationship with the state, but instead on its disposition, self-identity and notion of social membership. After identifying our ideal active citizen: an active bearer of his rights, that defines itself horizontally in relation to other citizens and their rights, participates in political processes and is informed about and at odds with power imbalances, the Blank Noise experience demonstrated spatial tensions in implementing this ideal and practice in the public and private realms. Designing strategies and identifying technologies that enable a flow of thought and action between both spaces is a way of restructuring the ecosystem in which volunteers from the Action Hero Network interact with each other, reclaim their citizenship and alter the status quo from within. While Blank Noise is not starting a revolution, it is consolidating a process of steady and growing resistance in the public and private discourse of sexual harassment and eve-teasing in the city.

Shah also notes there are implicit codes allowing only certain people to embrace this model of citizenship. This was evident on the demographic that comprises the activist bases of Blank Noise and the risks of homogenizing the political space with their discourse of change. Jasmeen Patheja brought this point forward herself, but with full confidence on the ability of dialogue and conversation to keep luring other social groups and communities into joining the debate. We discussed opportunities from exploring the foreign women experience in the public space in India to expanding the Blank Noise basis through simultaneous international interventions enabled and coordinated through technology. The network is ever-growing and its mechanisms of change are constantly innovating and adapting through its content. In the meantime, the ‘active citizen’ remains at the core of it all, pushing the project forward; fighting among other battles, that of its identity’s reassertion in the landscape of change.

Sources

Arendt, Hannah (1989) The Human Condition. Chicago, IL and London: The University of Chicago Press.
Baker, Keith Michael. The French Revolution and the creation of modern political culture. Vol. 3. Pergamon Press, 1987.
Bennett, W. Lance. "Changing citizenship in the digital age." Civic life online: Learning how digital media can engage youth 1 (2008): 1-24.
Berlin, Isaiah. "Two concepts of liberty." Berlin, I (1969): 118-172.
Bellah, Robert Neelly, ed. Habits of the heart: individualism and commitment in American life: with a new preface. University of California Pr, 2008.
Cornwall, Andrea, and Vera Schatten Coelho, eds. Spaces for change?: the politics of citizen participation in new democratic arenas. Vol. 4. Zed Books, 2007.
Ellison, N. (1997) ‘Towards a new social politics: citizenship and reflexivity in late modernity’, Sociology, 31(4): 697–717.
Gaventa, John, and Rajesh Tandon “Citizen engagements in a globalizing world." Globalizing citizens: New dynamics of inclusion and exclusion (2010): 3-30.
Heater, D. (2002) World Citizenship: Cosmopolitan Thinking and Its Opponents, London: Continuum
Kabeer, Naila, ed. Inclusive citizenship: Meanings and expressions. Vol. 1. Zed Books, 2005.
Kathryn Montgomery et al., Youth as E-Citizens: Engaging the Digital Generation. Center for Social Media, 2004. Retrieved February 15, 2007. http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/ecitizens/project.htm.
Mann, Michael. "Ruling class strategies and citizenship". Sociology 21, no.3 (1987): 339-354
Shah, Nishant “Whose Change is it Anyways? Hivos Knowledge Program. April 30, 2013.
Turner, Bryan. Outline of a Theory of Citizenship. Sociology (May 1990), 24 (2), pg. 189-217
Westheimer, Joel, and Joseph Kahne. "What kind of citizen? The politics of educating for democracy." American educational research journal 41, no. 2 (2004): 237-269

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/making-change/blank-noise-citizenship

Production Sprint — A Public Exhibition at CIS

praskrishna — 2015-10-24T14:23:30Z

The Making Change project invites you for a public exhibition of stories of change from all over Asia, where the first of its Production Sprints will take place. The exhibition will be held at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) office in Bangalore on June 7, 2014 between 5 p.m. and 7 p.m.

Download the event flier [PDF, 402 Kb]

What does 'Making Change' mean to you? What are the processes of change? The infrastructure of change? The actors of change? A round-table discussion and exhibition by 23 change makers from 15 countries in Asia, at the Centre for Internet & Society, Saturday, 7th June, 5 - 7 p.m. Please do come.

The Making Change project questions traditional understandings of change –where change is employed in the name of power, reduced to a ‘spectacle’ by global media and goes largely unquestioned in the public discourse- and aims to build more adequate frameworks to address the idea of change in the context of common knowledge, networked media and information societies.

Making Change is hosting focused, intensive, and production-oriented workshops called Production Sprints to facilitate the convergence of actors and ideas.These will be spaces of knowledge exchange between change-makers around processes, narratives and experiences of change and of experimentation with multi-modal forms and formats of knowledge production (text, image, sound, etc). Participants will be asked to group around four topics: concepts, crises ecologies and networks of change. These visions and practices, we hope will produce new ways of thinking about change.

During the Bangalore production sprint, we will document the various knowledges acquired through the pre-production stage and the 5 day intensive sessions on formats, storytelling and visual presentation modes; and we will close with an exhibition of the resulting narratives of change. We invite you to come and participate in the exhibition.

Date: June 7th, 2014
Time: 5pm- 7pm
Location: The Center for Internet and Society

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/events/production-sprint-public-exhibition-at-cis

Procurement Through Digital Platforms

SEWA Cooperative Federation and Centre for Internet & Society — 2022-07-26T14:35:47Z

Procurement policies, both public and private, can play a significant role in determining inclusive market participation, particularly for informal women workers and their collective enterprises.

Executive Summary

Various factors, including pricing, compliance and transparency in systems, can determine how and upto what extent women are able to utilise procurement platforms. With the emergence of a new, digital economy, procurement platforms (public and private) too have adopted technology-enabled systems. For informal women workers and their collective enterprises, the ability to engage with these interfaces also determines if and to what extent they can link with the supply chain.

In this report, we map the experiences of women’s collective enterprises (owned by informal women workers), particularly their capacities to use digital procurement platforms and the concurrent challenges that they face. The challenges highlighted in this report present an opportunity for procurement policies to deliberate and adapt, so that women workers can also utilise these platforms.

As a Women’s Enterprise Support System, SEWA Cooperative Federation was able to study eight women’s collective enterprises - owned, managed and used by informal women workers - with respect to procurement.

We interviewed board members, managers, and members of these collective enterprises, across sectors: agriculture, manufacturing, services, transport, and were able to understand key issues that emerged.

Click to read the full report

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/procurement-through-digital-platforms

Presentation at Global Digital Humanities Symposium

sneha-pp — 2019-05-03T09:41:53Z

P.P. Sneha gave a virtual presentation of her work on digital cultural archives at the Global Digital Humanities Symposium organised by Michigan State University on March 21-22, 2019.

Puthiya Purayil Sneha (Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, India)

The archive has been an important context for conversations around digital humanities (DH) in India, as it has been globally. The last few decades have seen several large-scale efforts in digitalization across various sectors, including state institutions (National Museum, National Cultural Audio-Visual Archive (IGNCA)) universities (Jadavpur University, Ambedkar University,) and individual and collaborative efforts (Indian Memory Project, Indiancine.ma ) to name a few. The emergence of new fields like DH, digital cultures and cultural analytics also indicate several shifts in scholarship, pedagogy and practice, on the one hand alluding to the potential offered by democratizing technologies, but also reflecting persistent challenges related to the digital divide, and more specifically politics around the growth and sustenance of the humanities disciplines.

The growth of new areas of study and creative practice like DH has brought about a renewed focus on the creation of digital corpora, and the need for new technologies and methods of research, more specifically through the development of digital pedagogies. The contexts of these questions are however much wider, located in long-spanning efforts in digitization and digital literacy more broadly, which are still fraught with challenges of access, usage and context. Even as the colonial imagination of state archives remains prevalent in India, digital archival initiatives facilitated by infrastructure such as open source content management systems and tools like web annotation have opened up spaces for alternate narratives. Drawing upon excerpts from a report on mapping the field of DH in India, and ongoing conversations on the digital transition in archival practices, this presentation seeks to understand the politics of digital archiving in a postcolonial context, and how it informs larger trajectories of digitalisation, and the growth of fields like DH in India today.

For more info click here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/presentation-at-global-digital-humanities-symposium

Practicing Feminist Principles

ambika — 2021-12-07T00:54:54Z

AI can serve to challenge social inequality and dismantle structures of power.

Artificial intelligence systems have been heralded as a tool to purge our systems of social biases, opinions, and behaviour, and produce ‘hard objectivity’. However, on the contrary, it has become evident that AI systems can sharpen inequalities and bias by hard coding it. If left unattended, automated decision-making can be dangerous and dystopian.

However, when appropriated by feminists, AI can serve to challenge social inequality and dismantle structures of power. There are many routes to such appropriation – resisting authoritarian uses through movement-building and creating our own alternative systems that harness the strength of AI towards achieving social change.

Feminist principles can be a handy framework to understand and transform the impact of AI systems. Key principles include reflexivity, participation, intersectionality, and working towards structural change. When operationalised, these principles can be used to enhance the capacities of local actors and institutions working towards developmental goals. They can also be used to theoretically ground collective action against the use of AI systems by institutions of power.

Reflexivity in the design and implementation of AI would imply a check on the privilege and power, or lack thereof, of the various stakeholders involved in an ecosystem. By being reflexive, designers can take steps to account for power hierarchies in the process of design. A popular example of the impact of power differentials is in national statistics. Collected largely by male surveyors speaking to male heads of households, national statistics can often undervalue or misrepresent women’s labour and health. See Data2x. “Gender Data: Sources, Gaps, and Measurement Opportunities,” March 2017 and Statistics Division. “Gender, Statistics and Gender Indicators Developing a Regional Core Set of Gender Statistics and Indicators in Asia and the Pacific.” United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific, 2013. AI systems would need to be reflexive of such gaps and plan steps to mitigate them.

Participation as a principle focuses on the process. A participatory process would account for the perspectives and lived experiences of various stakeholders, including those most impacted by its deployment. In the health ecosystem, for instance, this would include policymakers, public and private healthcare providers, frontline workers, and patients. A health information system with a bottom-up design would account for metrics of success determined by not just high-level organisations such as the World Health Organisation and national governments, but also by providers and frontline workers. Among other benefits, participation in designing AI systems also leads to buy-in and ownership of the technology right at the outset, promoting widespread adoption.

Intersectionality calls for addressing the social difference in the datasets, design, and deployment of AI. Research across fields has shown the perpetuation of inequality based on gender, income, race, and other characteristics through AI that is based on biased datasets.

The most critical principle is to ensure that AI systems are working to challenge inequality, including inequality perpetrated by patriarchal, racist, and capitalist systems. Aligning with feminist objectives means that systems that have objectives that do not align with feminist goals – such as those that enhance state capacities to surveil and police – would immediately be excluded. Systems that are designed to exclude and oppress will not work to further feminist goals, even if they integrate other progressive elements such as intersectional datasets or dynamic consent architecture (which would allow users to opt in and out easily).

We must work towards decreasing social inequality and achieve egalitarian outcomes in and through its practice. Thus, while explicitly feminist projects such as those that produce better datasets or advocate for participatory mechanisms are of course practicing this principle, I would argue that it is also practiced by any project that furthers feminist goals. Take for example AI projects that aim to reduce hate speech and misinformation online. Given that women and other marginalised groups are often at the receiving end of violence, such work can be classified as feminist even if it doesn’t actively target gender-based violence.

All technology is embedded in social relations. Practicing feminist principles in the design of AI only serves to account for these social relations and design better, more robust systems. Feminist practitioners can mobilise these to ensure a future of AI with inclusive, community-owned, participatory systems, combined with collective challenges to systems of domination.

References

Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575–99. https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066.

Link to the original article here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/practicing-feminist-principles

Porn: Law, Video, Technology

Namita A Malhotra — 2015-04-14T12:43:14Z

Namita Malhotra’s monograph on Pornography and Pleasure is possibly the first Indian reflection and review of its kind. It draws aside the purdah that pornography has become – the forbidden object as well as the thing that prevents you from looking at it – and fingers its constituent threads and textures.

This monograph is not so much about a cultural product called porn as it is a meditation on visuality and seeing, the construction and experience of gazing, technology and bodies in the law, modern myths, the interactions between human and filmic bodies. And technology not necessarily as objects and devices that make pornography possible (but that too), but as history and evolution, process and method, and what this brings to understanding what pornography is.

Namita’s approach brings film studies, technology studies, critical theory, philosophy, literature and legal studies into a document that reads as part literature review, part analysis, going deep, as a monograph should. Reading through this I was struck by the ways of seeing and writing, that a subject like pornography demands – and allows for. I found the structure of the entire piece well conceived, akin to 3D models of spirals rather than linear, much like the experience of watching itself, perhaps. Personally, I know I’m going to keep going back to this monograph for its rich references as much as for how Malhotra examines visual (con)texts across multiple disciplines. And, far from being a distant academic paper, I see how Namita has worked in and been informed by her own fond appreciation of diverse texts with useful and unusual departures into literature and philosophy.

The emphasis on amateur pornography is critical considering the pandemic of hysterical blindness that afflicts public conversations in India around this phenomenon in particular, and the Obscene more generally. A line from the monograph ‘pornography does ideological work’ stands out for me, as Namita shows how it (the monograph, amateur porn, pornography) effectively slices through the careful fabrications called Nation, Culture and Justice in particular; and also in terms of how porn constitutes particular kinds of knowing, speech and experience that reflect on the status quo of politics and of seeing/visuality. The deep engagement with the Mysore Mallige movie/case is an interesting and tender one, perhaps one of the first such in-depth analyses, and a great example of how amateur porn works and what it means.

Considering the appalling lack of insight in responding to the Obscene and the Pornographic, the messy rhetoric and outrage that result when the Pornographic is made public, when the law acts on the visual, on technology, Namita’s analysis is a sharp lens that provides much-needed rejoinders. The sections dealing with these kinds of past events – the moment of public outrage around the revelation of a piece of porn, it’s journey of creation and circulation, the public and institutional esponses to it, are really excellent analyses of a particular kind of moment in contemporary Indian society that have become (to my mind) increasingly difficult to talk about.

There can only be more sharing of this document, perhaps re-purposed, in parts, to become more accessible to communities engaged with commenting, acting and responding to the Obscene, the Visual and the Law (I say this from a perspective of utility and instrumentality that “activism” necessarily deploys, but within what is possible for cannibalisation. Also, because people don’t read) because there just isn’t enough thoughtful work on pornography in the current climate.

The monograph moves to examining the ‘being’ of the pornographic artifact as a digital image and how and why it, especially “video pornography provides a new model for relating to the mass-produced, one in which the body’s susceptibility constitutes both a yielding and a resistance to the hypnotic seduction of the image.”

I find this quote tantalising for it offers a critical perspective on pornography as a challenging politics rather than as ‘merely’ text, which is what this monograph attempts to do. To take this further and to explore the response between the visual and the human, the “something that takes place between the text and the person watching”, could be to move towards reception studies and studies of the experiencing of porn either as star/creator, fan or audience. There are fascinating possibilities here for inventive methodologies and formats in which this could be done, montage-ing academic text with visual ethnographies, online aggregation and collation of visual data and experiences, and so on. This next stage could be exciting in how it could really engage with the body of porn and its people.

Introduction by Maya Ganesh

Download the monograph here [PDF, 3.73 MB]

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/porn-law-video-technology

Policy Shaping in the Indian IT Industry: Recommendations by NASSCOM, 2006-2012

Pavishka Mittal — 2016-07-04T08:11:05Z

This is the first of a series of three blog posts, authored by Pavishka Mittal, tracking the engagements by NASSCOM and iSPIRT in suggesting and shaping the IT industry policies in India during 2006-2016. This posts focuses on the policy activities of NASSCOM in 2006-2012 with specific reference to Special Economic Zones, E-Commerce Industry and Transfer Pricing, along with a few other miscellaneous important recommendations.

1. Introduction

2. Tax Reforms in Special Economic Zones (SEZs)

3. E-Commerce Industry

4. Transfer Pricing Issues

5. Other Recommendations

5.1. Concerns with the Union Budget Proposals

5.2. Request for Clarity in Classification of Transactions and Guidelines

5.3. New Retrograde Obligations under Law

6. Endnotes

7. Author Profile

1. Introduction

The National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) was established in 1988 as a non-profit, global trade association registered under the Indian Societies Act 1860 representing the interests of the IT Industry, now with over 1500 members. Its objective is to facilitate trade in the software development and services, software products, IT enabled/BPO services and e-commerce. It also undertakes research projects for facilitating innovation in advanced software and maintains data on industry trends, even a national database of registered and verified knowledge workers in the industry. Nevertheless, its role of policy advocacy cannot be over emphasized. It regularly interacts with the Government of India to bring about a favourable business environment for the IT Industry.

This blog post, the first part in a series, discusses NASSCOM’s major issues with policies of the Government of India in the period 2006-2012. The concerns of the IT industry, as highlighted by NASSCOM in the period aforementioned are with reference to the Special Economic Zones, E-Commerce Industry and Transfer Pricing broadly along with other miscellaneous important recommendations. The subsequent blog posts will focus on specific tax issues post 2012 and will elaborately discuss transfer pricing related concerns.

2. Tax Reforms in Special Economic Zones (SEZs)

The ITes and BPO industry constitutes a sizable portion of the number of SEZs in the country [1] so much so that it has been argued that the IT industry alone reaps the benefits of the SEZs and STPIs to the exclusion of the other sectors [2].

The most salient incentive in the SEZ Act enacted by the Government of India in 2005 had been income tax exemption of export profits which contributed to the scheme’s success in attracting major investments [3]. Further, exemption from minimum alternate tax had been provided under section 115JB of the Income Tax Act. However, in 2011, the government decided to impose a Minimum Alternate Tax upto the rate of 18.5% on the book profits of SEZ’s developers and units through the Finance Act 2012 by introducing amendments to the Income Tax Act 1961, to be effective from April 2012 [4]. NASSCOM took a strong stance against equality in corporate tax liability as such tax is sought to be imposed upon income derived from investments made with a commitment of tax exemption. The intention of the government in making such policies having regressive outcomes will be judged if key promised characteristics of SEZs were differential economic laws from the remaining domestic territory. For all practical purposes, they are deemed to be foreign territories for the levy of trade duties and tariffs [5]. In the case of Mindtree Limited v. Union of India [6], software company Mindtree argued that the imposition of MAT in SEZs was against the concept of promissory estoppel and the doctrine of legitimate expectation, which rendered such taxes constitutionally invalid [7]. Even though a time limit was not prescribed for the above tax exemption, it was argued that SEZ policy was predicated on tax relief and the subsequent change in policy was arbitrary and unfair. Individual taxpayers and undertakings should not be affected by subsequent laws if they make sizable investments, modify business models and bear the added expenses of moving into or developing a SEZ. It cannot be disputed that this argument is untenable keeping in mind that the legislature cannot be bound by past promises in line with practical considerations and their independence with regard to the effective discharge of public functions. It was held that the legislature cannot be bound by the doctrine of promissory estoppel [8].

The Adani group had also challenged the imposition of MAT in the Gujarat HC in 2011 on the ground that that any amendments to the SEZ Act can only be brought about by amendments to the SEZ Act itself, and not through the Finance Act [9]. The SC in Madurai District Central Cooperative Bank Ltd. [10] held that the parliament has the authority to introduce a new charge of tax even by incorporating it in any other statute other than the act. However, the fact remains that such policies lead to a volatile business environment and the importance of stable business policies cannot be overemphasized. In 2011, NASSCOM recommended that MAT be withdrawn as it is opposed to the government’s long term policy of SEZ’s growth [11]. Alternatively, it stated that the imposition of MAT be withdrawn to ensure the continued economic viability of the SEZs which have already been notified by the government [12]. It also stated that international norms should be applied for the determination of the MAT rate, which was 1/3rd of the corporate tax rates [13].

Another concern highlighted by other stakeholders was the prescribed period of ten years for the setting of the MAT against regular tax liability. This MAT credit may expire or be on the verge of expiration for participants in SEZs who enjoy tax holiday for a prescribed number of years when they start operations due to absence of initial tax liability. Foreign investors will face difficulties in claiming tax benefits in their home jurisdictions for MAT paid in India. Further, the exemption granted to SEZ developers as to the levy of Dividend Distribution Tax @ 15% has been revoked by the Finance Ministry in 2011 severely affecting the IT industry.

The government finally took note of the increased disinvestment as a consequence of such taxes and proposed to make the imposition of MAT and Dividend Distribution Tax inapplicable to SEZ’s in 2015 [14].

3. E-Commerce Industry

NASSCOM in 2012 suggested the lowering of the interchange tax rate on debit cards transactions by the RBI. Debit cards possess lower risk in comparison to credit cards, the transactions being concluded immediately and the same should be reflected in the form of differential taxes. A standard 1-2% interchange/transaction fees were generally levied by banks. NASSCOM also recommended the introduction of a 2% tax incentive on the purchase of products online to facilitate increased purchases and encourage consumers to even undertake small value transactions online. Further, it emphasized that the base of e-commerce users have to be expanded. It commented on the differences in the Internet usage costs between China and India, USD 10 and USD 15-20 respectively. High internet usage costs can only be indicative of reduced Internet access. However, this is not to state that the E-commerce industry is unsuited for India due to infrastructural inefficiencies. NASSCOM has stated that India as of 2012 possesses over 100 million Internet users. Technology has to be developed which would reduce dropout rates of transactions. Further it suggested the creation of an online receipt repository which would store all online transaction receipts, accessible through mobile phones or the internet. It would contribute in increasing customer confidence by enabling tracking of payment, delivery etc.

The RBI in response to the recommendations of NASSCOM and the Online Payment Advisory Group [15] and in consultation with all concerned stakeholders, decided to put a maximum limit on the Merchant Discount Rate (MDR) for transactions undertaken with a debit card [16].

4. Transfer Pricing Issues

Transfer Pricing has become the dominant international tax issue affecting multinational corporations operating in India [17]. As noted by NASSCOM, a steep rise in litigation and the number of transfer pricing adjustments with the Indian Revenue Authority (IRA) has been observed due to ‘increased scrutiny’ by the IRA who has been rejecting the profit declared by foreign companies accruing to Indian subsidiaries by applying very high markups in this sector. Increased complications in setting valid prices through this process have arisen due to the rising presence of ‘highly complex transactions’ involving intangibles and multi-tiered services across the world. The Finance Act 2012 extended the applicability of domestic party transactions to certain related domestic parties, if the aggregate value of such transactions exceeds INR 5 crore, to any expenditure with respect to which deduction is claimed while calculating profits and to transactions related to businesses eligible for profit-linked tax incentives, including SEZ units under section 10AA [18].

NASSCOM has proposed a three pronged approach to the problem of backlog of cases and absence of certainty of price of transactions:

Implementation of Safe Harbour provisions to resolve existing disputes.
Introduction of Advance Pricing Agreements [19] to set fair and transparent prices.
Initiation of review of the structure and procedure of the Dispute Resolution Panel [20].

The Finance Act 2009 introduced section 92CB [21] in the Income Tax Act 1961 which provided for the subjection of the arms length price determined under section 92C or section 92CA to Safe Harbour Rules, to be declared by the Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT). For the valid determination of such a transfer price, the minimum transfer price that a taxpayer is expected to earn for international transactions is prescribed along with certain specific norms for particular transactions. The safe harbour transfer price for eligible transactions is subject to certain prescribed minimum ceilings [22]. A price determined in accordance with such guidelines would be deemed to be an Arms Length Price (ALP). To that extent the safe Harbour Rules are in the nature of ‘presumptive taxation’ and incentivises IT firms to avoid unnecessary litigation by opting for the same. Unilateral, bilateral and multilateral Advance Pricing Agreements, binding on the taxpayer and the revenue authorities for five consecutive years have been introduced with effect from 1 July 2012. Certain domestic transactions are inapplicable for APA’s in the absence of other monetary conditions/stipulations under law for entering into an APA. Documentation on comparables is required to be maintained to substantiate compliance with arms length principle.

The concerns of the prescribed rates include non-representation of industry benchmarks and economic realities in as much as the prescribed rates exceed the actual arms length prices, often leading to the risk of double taxation in foreign jurisdictions. The division of IT services into two components has also been criticized as many of the activities might overlap. NASSCOM has stated that it is not clear how the existing current issues are proposed to be resolved. The introduction of domestic parties as applicable parties to be subject to the transfer pricing regulations will only increase the complexity in the law. There has been subsequent judicial development involving the establishment of some principles for the valid determination of comparables for the purpose of identifying an acceptable transfer price which will be discussed in the next blog post.

5. Other Recommendations

5.1. Concerns with the Union Budget Proposals

NASSCOM summarized that the Union Budget Proposals 2012-13 focus on the reduction of the fiscal deficit through higher taxation rather than expenditure management. More specifically, it focuses on the following concerns of the IT Industry:

The issues of tax simplification have not been resolved as no roadmap for the implementation of the Direct Taxes Code and the Goods and Services Tax Bill has been provided.
The increase in the Current Account Deficit should have incentivized the government to introduce measures which facilitate high value exports, which has been wholly ignored from the budget.
Increase in indirect taxes, namely excise duty and service tax is a retrograde policy measure.
Restrictive conditions in the SEZ Act 2005 which do not facilitate the setting up of small companies, have to be modified.
There is no mention of reduction of Tax Deducted at Source (TDS) for SMEs and introduction of non-profit linked incentives in the form of employment benefits etc. in the proposal.
Similar provisions should also be introduced for Tier II and III cities in the country.
Some announcements as to the simplification of service tax refund and the removal of the provisions involving dual levy of service tax and VAT are not sufficient to resolve ambiguities in law. NASSCOM, in light of the increasing delays of service tax, suggested exemption of export activity from such tax and the applicability of a simplified mechanism similar to CENVAT wherein exemption will be provided to exporters in proportion of their exports to total sales.

5.2. Request for Clarity in Classification of Transactions and Guidelines

NASSCOM in its pre-budget recommendations had suggested that in light of the confusion of the characterization of software as goods or services and the resultant dual taxation, in the form of taxes paid to both the Central and the State Governments, the provision of software, whether customized or packaged should be treated as a service irrespective of the media and mode of transfer with the assurance from the States that no VAT shall be leviable on software. Further, guidelines have to be outlined for various e-commerce transactions like database subscription, cloud computing, webhosting and data warehousing. Onsite exporter of services are being denied the benefits of certain tax exemptions due to the sunset of STPI provisions, thus forming the need for a formal clarification by the government deeming these activities to be an integral component of the IT services industry.

5.3. New Retrograde Obligations under Law

NASSCOM emphasized that the introduction of certain provisions, related to GAAR, related party transactions and the withholding of tax in the Finance Bill, some of these retrospective in nature, enhance the difficulties faced by the IT industry. Increased obligations on the corporate tax payers in the form of imposition of additional taxes will only increase the scope of multiple interpretations of the provisions which will lead to the exercise of discretionary powers by the tax authorities.

6. Endnotes

[1] As of September 2011, a significant majority of the 143 operational SEZs in the country belonged to the IT/ITeS and electronic hardware as per data released by the Ministry of Commerce and Industry.

[2] See: http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2012-02-25/news/31099874_1_sez-unit-sez-promoters-multi-product.

[3] Section 10AA of the Income Tax Act provides for 100% income tax exemption on export income for SEZ units for the first five years, 50% for the next five years and 50% of the ploughed back export profit for the next five years.

[4] See: http://www.business-standard.com/article/economy-policy/govt-imposes-18-5-mat-on-sez-developers-units-111022800153_1.html.

[5] See: http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2005-07-08/news/27506703_1_special-economic-zone-act-sez-act-sez-bill.

[6] (2013)260CTR(Kar)146.

[7] The doctrines of promissory estoppel and legitimate expectation, arising from legal relationships and reasonable expectation, respectively, are flexible equitable reliefs not defined in any statute. Judicial decisions have held that a party would not be entitled to go back on a clear and unequivocal promise which was intended to create legal relations, knowing or intending that it would be acted upon by the other party to whom the promise was made and acted upon by the other party under the doctrine of promissory estoppel. Legitimate expectation of a certain treatment arises against representation by an administrative authority, whether express (through promises), or implied (through consistent past practice) despite absence of any right otherwise.

[8] It was held that the action of the government is legal as every tax exemption provision should also incorporate a sunset clause. The deletion of the exemption under law would only reduce the erosion of the tax base.

[9] See: http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2011-05-11/news/29532409_1_sez-act-minimum-alternative-tax-mat.

[10] Madurai District Central Cooperative Bank Ltd. v. ITO (1975) 101 ITR 24(SC), the form and method of introduction of a legislation is not of importance provided the requirement of competence by the legislature to pass the deemed law with respect to its subject matter is satisfied. An amendment of a taxing statute, by an unconventional method of incorporation through an act of a different pith and substance is not unconstitutional. The primary purpose of the Finance Acts is to prescribe tax rates for taxes specified in the Income Tax Act. However, the above fact does not restrain the freedom of the legislature to impose an altogether new tax through the Finance Act or any other deemed legislation besides the Income Tax Act.

[11] See: http://www.nasscom.in/nasscom-prebudget-recommendations.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid.

[14] See: http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2015-02-13/news/59119589_1_sez-developers-and-units-minimum-alternate-tax-special-economic-zones.

[15] Formed in 2012 to examine the challenges faced by the E-commerce Industry in India and to recommend changes needed to facilitate the creation of a vibrant online payment sector.

[16] Not exceeding 1 percent for transaction amount for value above 2,000. The directive was issued under section 18 of the Payments and Settlement Systems Act, with effect from July 1, 2012.

[17] See: http://www.pwc.com/gx/en/international-transfer-pricing/assets/india.pdf.

[18] This amendment would extend to any other transaction as may be specified and would be applicable for FY 2012-13 and subsequent years.

[19] An Advance Pricing Agreement, generally covering multiple years, entered into between a taxpayer and at least one tax authority lays down the method of transfer pricing to be applicable to the taxpayer’s inter-company transactions which eliminates the need for transfer pricing adjustments for enclosed transactions provided the terms of the agreement are complied with.

[20] The Finance Act 2009 inserted section 144C in the Income Tax Act which provides for the constitution of an alternative dispute resolution mechanism for transfer pricing taxation matters, namely a DRP (Dispute Resolution Panel) consisting of three commissioners rank officers.

[21] Section 92CB defines Safe Harbour to be ‘circumstances under which the income tax authorities shall accept the transfer pricing declared by the assessee.’ The procedure for adopting safe harbour, the transfer price to be adopted, the compliance procedure upon adoption of safe harbours and circumstances in which a safe harbour adopted may be held to be invalid is specified in the new rules in 10TA to 10AG issued by the CBDT on 18th September 2013.

[22]

Provision of software development services and information technology enabled services with insignificant risks- upto rs 500 crore- 20% or more on total operating costs, above rs 500 crore- 22% or more on total operating costs.
Provision of knowledge processes outsourcing services with insignificant risks-25% or more on total operating costs.
Provision of specified contract R & D services wholly or partly relating to software development with insignificant risks- 30% or more on total operating costs.

7. Author Profile

Pavishka Mittal is a law student at West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences, Kolkata and has completed her second year. She takes contemporary dance very seriously and hopes to contribute to the dance community in India. Other than dancing, she indulges in binge-watching in her spare time.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/policy-shaping-in-the-indian-it-industry-recommendations-by-nasscom-2006-2012

Policy Shaping in the Indian IT Industry: Recommendations by NASSCOM on Transfer Pricing, 2014-2016

Pavishka Mittal — 2016-07-29T08:39:48Z

This is the final part of a series of three blog posts, authored by Pavishka Mittal, tracking the engagements by NASSCOM and iSPIRT in suggesting and shaping the IT industry policies in India during 2006-2016. This post aims to explain the law of transfer pricing in India, and the suggestions made by NASSCOM regarding the same. Transfer pricing is regarded as one of the most controversial operations of multinationals resulting in tax avoidance and arbitrage.

1. Introduction

2. Method of Operation of Tax Avoidance through Invalid Transfer Prices

3. The Law of Transfer Pricing in India

4. Recommendations by NASSCOM in its Pre-Budget Memorandum, 2014-2015

5. Recommendations by NASSCOM in its Pre-Budget Memorandum, 2015-2016

6. Recommendations by NASSCOM in its Pre-Budget Memorandum, 2016-2017

7. Endnotes

8. Author Profile

1. Introduction

The following blog post, the third part in the series on ‘Policy Shaping in the Indian IT Industry’ aims to explain the law of transfer pricing in India and the suggestions made by NASSCOM regarding the same. Transfer pricing is regarded as one of the most controversial operations of multinationals resulting in tax avoidance and arbitrage. The blog post proceeds with explaining how transfer pricing is used by MNCs to avoid tax. The applicable legislations and government notifications are stated to better understand the policy recommendations. The law discussed is applicable to all business concerns, including the IT industry. Judicial development as to tests for valid comparables, arms length prices discussed is with particular reference to the software industry.

2. Method of Operation of Tax Avoidance through Invalid Transfer Prices

When an entity of a multinational organization sells goods, provides services etc to another entity of the same organization in another country, the price charged for these goods/services is called ‘transfer price’. Since transactions involving transfer pricing are between controlled or related legal entities within an enterprise, these prices may be entirely arbitrary and completely unrelated to the costs incurred in the supply of these goods/services. This is done to transfer profit made in a jurisdiction which has higher taxes to another entity of the same organization in another jurisdiction where taxes are low. Essentially, revenue is shifted to lower profits in a division of an enterprise located in a country that levies high income taxes and raise profits in a country that is a tax haven that levies no (or low) income taxes causing concern for government taxing authorities. The MNC as a whole maintains higher profits in the form of tax saving. Ideally, a transfer price should match either what the seller would charge an independent, arm's length customer, or what the buyer would pay an independent, arm's length supplier. Transfer pricing, also referred to as base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS), is a major tool for corporate tax avoidance. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has fairly comprehensive guidelines which have been adopted with some modification by many countries.

3. The Law of Transfer Pricing in India

The Finance Act 2012 rendered domestic transactions between related entities also subject to the law of transfer pricing, to avoid tax arbitrage between states.

Sections 92 to 92F of the Income Tax Act 1961, largely based on the OECD’s guidelines, deal with the law of transfer pricing for intra-group cross border and specific domestic transactions. Income or expenses arising from these international or specified domestic transactions have to be computed according to the principles applicable for the determination of the arms length price. Section 92F defines an Arms Length Price as the price applied, or proposed to be applied to transactions between persons other than associated enterprises in ‘uncontrolled conditions’ [1].

The concept of a range of values representative of an Arms Length Price (ALP) is not acceptable under Indian law, a single price has to be submitted by the taxpayer by the calculation of the arithmetic mean in case of multiple values. Range benefit percentage, applicable in differences between the transfer price and the ALP, is released for each individual industry, starting from FY 2012-13. Since the burden lies on the taxpayer to prove that the deemed Transfer price is the ALP, he is required to maintain documents and information on an annual basis as specified under Rule 10D of the Income Tax Rules, 1962. Section 10D does not have to be complied with for international transactions below INR 10 million and specified domestic transactions below INR 50 million. However, the taxpayer should possess sufficient data to substantiate the ALP. Safe harbour rules, to be released by the CBDT, would obviate the need for companies to carry detailed comparability and benchmarking exercises. In Vanenburg Group B.V. and Dana Corporation, the Authority for Advance Rulings held that income not subject to tax in India would not have to comply with TP regulations of India. However, the same does not extend to entities enjoying a tax holiday in India. Thus, the transfer pricing regulations would have to be complied with by IT firms in SEZ’s etc. The use of foreign comparables is not permitted under Indian law.

4. Recommendations by NASSCOM in its Pre-Budget Memorandum, 2014-2015

In the pre-budget memorarandum on transfer pricing issues, published on June 2014, NASSCOM made the following recommendations [2]:

Use of Multiple Year Data: Current Indian TP regulations, Rule 10B (4) of the Income tax Rules 1962 (Rules) provide for use of data of the financial year in which the international transaction has been entered into. It further permits use of multiple year data (period not being more than two years prior to such financial year), if such data reveals facts which could have an influence on the determination of transfer prices in relation to the transactions being compared. NASSCOM argued that single year data may not adequately reflect the business conditions, performance of the taxpayer and multiple year data is useful to even out the fluctuations caused by business, economic and product life cycle. Further, if relevant data is not available in the public databases at the time when the benchmarking exercise is undertaken, multiple/prior year data should be accepted. Relevant clarifications should be incorporated in the regulations that clearly permit use of multiple year data for comparability analysis.
Use of Interquartile Range instead of Arithmetic Mean: Indian transfer pricing regulations stipulate an arithmetic mean of the margins of all comparables to determine the arm's length margin in case more than one comparable is identified. It was argued that Arithmetic mean of margins leads to a skewed determination of arm’s length margins as it is influenced by outliers. While median is acceptable globally, inter-quartile range is also used in many countries as the outcome is less sensitive to extremes in the sample. The TP regulations be amended to permit application of the concept of an arm’s-length range of prices, similar to provisions contained in the OECD regulations or allow use of inter quartile range as those of other developed nations which would be more indicative of market realities.
Retention of Tolerance Band as Standard Deduction: The newly inserted subsection 2A to section 92C through the Finance Act 2012 with effect from 1st April 2002 clarifies that the benefit of 5 % is not a standard deduction and overturns the laws as interpreted by various Tribunals. The tolerance band limits have themselves been amended to the price at which the international transaction or specified domestic transaction has actually been undertaken, provided that the transaction price does not exceed one per cent, in case of wholesale traders; and does not exceed three per cent, in all other cases. NASSCOM recommended that since the law requires the arm’s length price to be the arithmetical mean and does not prescribe inter quartile range which is a globally accepted best practice, the provision of tolerance band as standard deduction be retained.
Certain and Consistent Guidelines should be Issued by the Board after Giving Due Consideration for the following factors:
1. Inter-Company Loans: there should not be requirement for charging interest loans which a) are quasi-equity in nature (these loans should be regarded as equity), and b)are provided out of surpluses of the Indian parent. Global practices for benchmarking interest rates to be charged, if any, by considering comparable interest rates prevailing in the borrower’s country.
2. Guarantee / Letter of Comfort / Undertaking: Arms length price should be determined in terms of the future benefits to be received by the company furnishing the guarantee and the business rationale involved. The association of the parent company for securing contracts as a group should not be construed as resulting in international transactions between the Indian Company and the overseas subsidiary.
3. Headquarter and Regional Headquarter Cost Allocations: There is lack of data in the public domain as to industry benchmarks related to management payouts, guidance as to specific documentation should be given.
4. Adjustments for Differences in Functions and Risks: Clear guidelines on carrying out economic and risk adjustments with proper methodology required. Due consideration should be awarded to business strategies and commercial realities such as market entry strategies, non-recovery of initial set-up costs and other legitimate business peculiarities while determining the arm’s length pricing.
5. Guidance as to the Meaning of Restructuring Required to be Laid down: Section 92B considers a transaction of business restructuring or reorganization as an international transaction. However, there is no definition of restructuring or reorganization in the Act. Further, there is no clarity as to whether a transaction of business restructuring or reorganization would need to be reported if the act of business restructuring results in the enterprises becoming an AE.
6. Invalidity of Extension of Transfer Pricing Provisions to Corporate Actions: Transactions such as issue, buyback and redemption of shares are capital transactions and are not subject to income tax, except in the case of capital gains arising out of these transactions. The understanding is that these corporate actions are initiated by the shareholders of the company and do not have a bearing on the taxable income of the entity. However, the Revenue without any rationale has been classifying these as international transactions which have to be benchmarked and documented. If this is continued, transactions such as issue of bonus shares (ratio of bonus issue), and rate of dividend declared, or discount/premium on issue or redemption of preference shares etc. may also get covered within the purview of transfer pricing provisions. NASSCOM stated that guidance as to the rationale of this transfer pricing application is necessary. Further, guidance as to the terms and conditions to be complied with in instances of issue, buyback or redemption of share to mitigate the exposure to transfer pricing litigation is required.
Enlarged Scope of “International Transaction” Retrospectively: The intent of TP regulations being the reduction of tax avoidance, the provision to bring the business restructuring transactions within the transfer pricing ambit should be withdrawn. The definition of intangibles being too broad and open for interpretation needs to be rationalized. Guidance as to the appropriate methodologies to evaluate ALPs of intangibles is required. Given the increasing quantum of cross border financing and inter-company lending etc., appropriate guidance should be issued in this regard. Further, the amendment, being substantive in nature, shall be made prospective to achieve certainty and stability.
Upward Revision in Monetary Threshold of TP Documentation Required: For aggregate value of transactions exceeding INR 10 million, TP documentation is required. This monetary threshold has not been altered since the introduction of TP Regulations in the Income-tax Act, 1961. Due to the increasing quantum of cross border transactions, the prescribed limit is low considering the rise in the value of software traded, requiring almost all companies in this sector to maintain onerous documentation.
Penalty Provisions: Penalty provisions have been made more stringent vide Finance Act 2012. Transfer Pricing Officer can now ask the taxpayer to pay penalty under section 271AA at the rate of 2 per cent of value of international transaction due to failure to keep information in addition to another 2 per cent under section 271G for not furnishing the information besides regular penalty under section 271(1)(c) of the Act. NASSCOM suggested that the penalty should be restricted to tax in dispute and not linked to the value of transaction.
Domestic Transfer Pricing: Section 92BA has been inserted vide Finance Act 2012 by which the coverage of transfer pricing has been expanded to include certain 'Specified Domestic Transactions' if the aggregate amount of all such transactions entered by the assessee in the previous year exceeds Rs. 5 crores in the previous year. NASSCOM suggested that the threshold limit be extended to Rs. 15 crore.

The term ‘Specified Domestic Transactions’ has a very wide coverage and a relatively low monetary threshold for exemption. It would include any expenditure in respect of which payment has been made or is to be made to a related party referred to in clause (b) of sub-section (2) of section 40A of the Act. Since such expenditure would include capital expenditure, a clarification as to the applicability of these provisions to revenue expenditure only has to be made. Further, the scope of the provision is not in sync with the SC decision in the case of Glaxo SmithKline. The Supreme Court had held that TP should be applicable to transactions between a profit making and a loss unit / company and between units / assesses having different tax rates. Other than the scenarios contemplated above, a corresponding adjustment should be allowed and hence provided for on the statute.

This amendment also covers a scenario wherein the payment of remuneration by the company to its director or relative of such directors is also required to be at arm's length which casts an onerous responsibility on the company vis - à- vis justification of the arm's length nature of such payments.

A clarification as to ambiguity in relation to the definition of the term ‘closely connected persons’ as described in section 80IA (10) of the Act is required. Guidance for benchmarking directors remuneration should be provided. Further, clarity should be provided with regard to inter-unit allocation of costs between eligible and non-eligible units i.e. whether corporate cost allocations from a non-tax holiday unit of a company to a tax holiday unit of the same company would get covered within the provisions of Section 80-IA and consequently need to be reported as a specified domestic transaction.

The Advance Pricing Agreement (APA) provisions, only applicable to only international transactions presently, should be extended to domestic transactions governed by TP regulations.
Changes in Dispute Resolution Panel: The DRP issues directions with the stated objective of keeping the issues alive since the Revenue has filed appeals before the High Court / Supreme Court which is contrary to the objective of dispute resolution. It is structurally suffering from impaired independence owing to the fact that the DRP is a constitution of CIT/DIT. It is not able to fulfil its central purpose of dispute resolution due to the fact that CIT/DIT has to discharge their regular duties in addition to these duties involving revenue collection targets. NASSCOM recommended that DRP be constituted as an ‘independent’ judicial board with panelists from economic, legal and accounting backgrounds having knowledge of income tax matters. To avoid actual or perceived bias, specific provisions may be inserted to restrain a jurisdictional Commissioner/ Director from being appointed as a member of the DRP hearing cases falling within his/ her jurisdiction. Further cases which are covered by decisions of courts and are found to be without merit should be withdrawn suo-moto.
Absence of Article 9(2) in DTAAs with Belgium, Germany, France, Singapore, and the Republic of Korea: The Tax administration has to follow the practice of not admitting cases of economic double taxation under Mutual Agreement Procedure and Advance Pricing Agreements. Negotiation of bilateral APAs (in case an Indian entity has associated enterprises in such countries), MAPs are disallowed in such countries. Though the OECD has stated that two sovereign states can mitigate double taxation arising out of TP adjustments through invoking Article 25(3), India has had reservations with such an approach on the ground OECD Model Tax Conventions do not represent internationally agreed guidance. India suggested an Inter-Governmental Commission with a balanced representation from the Governments of developing and developed countries to take decisions with regard to these provisions. To ensure continued trade with these countries, advice is needed from the government on how to address challenges arising from the absence of these provisions in tax treaties.
Rollback for APAs: Currently an application for APA, once agreed upon is prospective in the sense that they are applicable for the years agreed upon in the agreement. It is recommended that once an APA is finalized, the tax payer should be allowed to close the open years for which assessment proceedings have not yet been initiated and years for which assessment or appeal proceedings are pending before the TPO, DRP/CIT (A), having regard to the agreement reached in the APA.
Safe Harbour Rules and its Impact on Assessments: In contrast to APAs, the Safe harbour notifications have had limited uptake.
1. Rationalization of Margins: The current margins varying from 20 to 30 percent depending on the characterization of the entity are very high and are not indicative of ALPs. More feasible margins should be declared after taking into account the rationalization of margins by the higher appellant authority. The imbalance APA and the Safe Harbour scheme has to be restored, especially for small and medium enterprises, to reduce unnecessary pressure on the APA system as the preferred route.
2. Overlaps between R&D and Software Development: Both are separate categories having different limits under the safe harbour rules. The substantial overlaps between the above activities due to a very fine line of distinction between the two are not reduced through the present ambiguous definitions, subject to interpretation. Due to the exclusion of research and development from software development, information technology enabled services and knowledge process outsourcing services in the draft rules, new litigation on the classification of such service providers would arise. NASSCOM, thus, recommended that both the categories be merged and revised safe harbour rules be notified.
Levy of Penalty on Single Transaction to be Rationalized: Since penalty provisions are implemented with the intention to get the tax payer to adhere to the provisions of the Act rather than cause considerable hardship, only single penalties should be levied to avoid duplication of penalty. In the event that a tax payer has not maintained the documents, such taxpayer should be penalized only under section 271AA and not under both section 271 AA and section 271 G. Further, penalty should not be imposed for non-reporting of transactions which gets covered under the purview of international transaction by virtue of retrospective amendments, due to impossibility of performance.
Non-Processing of Refunds when Notice Issued u/s 143(2): The Finance Act 2012 has inserted clause 1(D) to section 143 of the Act, specifying that the processing of a return under section 143(1) of the Act shall not be necessary, where a notice has been issued under section 143(2) of the Act. Though the language of the aforesaid provision suggests that it is directory and not mandatory in nature, however, it has been observed that the Tax Office is not processing any refunds under section 143(1) because of this provision. Further, in case of the aforesaid entities, a draft assessment order is passed and typically it takes almost one year more to get the final assessment order. Following the above, excess taxes if any paid over the final tax liability by any entity gets stuck for ~ five financial years. In case the final assessment order is high or there is an undue demand, assesses are required to pay further taxes without getting the refund originally due causing undue hardship to assessees. NASSCOM recommended that the clause prescribing a time limit of four years from the end of the financial for the completion of assessment of entities to which transfer pricing provision applies be deleted. This provision is also causing undue pressure on the Revenue in the form of interest liability for a longer period.

5. Recommendations by NASSCOM in its Pre-Budget Memorandum, 2015-2016

In addition to repeating the key contentious issues highlighted in the previous pre-budget memorandum, some additional issues were brought up [3]. NASSCOM requested the government to make the revised to be issued Transfer Pricing Policy retrospective in nature and in sync with global practices. The Finance Minister had announced significant changes in Transfer Pricing rules and policy in the July 2014 Budget with an aim to address disputes and litigations around estimating ALPs.

Applicability of Transfer Pricing on Companies Eligible for Tax Holiday u/s 10A/10AA: NASSCOM contended that the assessing officers are “arbitrarily and/or mechanically” invoking the transfer pricing provisions even in cases where the assessees are eligible for tax relief’s u/s 10A/10AA or have related party transactions with well-regulated tax jurisdictions. It recommended that transfer pricing provisions shall not be invoked against tax payers:
- who are entitled to tax holidays (section 10A/10AA reliefs) in India,
- In respect of transactions with countries as listed in a “white list” (to be prescribed) which shall include jurisdictions having higher tax rates/best tax practices.
Filing of Form 3CEB by Foreign Companies: As per the existing Indian Transfer pricing provisions, there are conflicting views, on whether, the foreign companies are required to file Transfer Pricing report in Form 3CEB in India, even if income subject to an international transaction is not chargeable to tax in India or where the transaction entered with the foreign entity is already reported by the Indian entity in its Form 3CEB as per the provisions of the existing Indian transfer pricing law. In principle, the foreign residents not having a permanent establishment in India should not be required to file Transfer Pricing report (Form 3CEB) in India keeping in view the compliances done by the Indian entity. NASSCOM recommended the government to clarify that that the provisions of Indian transfer pricing would not apply to foreign companies/foreign residents unless they have a permanent establishment in India.

6. Recommendations by NASSCOM in its Pre-Budget Memorandum, 2016-2017

In addition to repeating the key contentious issues highlighted in the previous pre-budget memorandum, some additional issues were brought up [4]:

Changes Proposed in the Rules for the Computation of the Arms Length Price: The draft rules released continue to deviate from global norms and associated statistical concepts. NASSCOM stated that the prescribed percentile range of 35th to 65th, mandating minimum number of comparables to qualify for use of range and multiple year data will not have a significant impact on the current situation.
- Applicability of Range and Multiple Year Data on Selected Methods: The rules restrict the application of the following to Transactional Net Margin Method, Resale Price Method and Cost Plus Method used to determine ALPs. This rule, being in contrast to international practice wherein no such restrictions on the method to be applied for using range and multiple year data for determining AlPs exist should be removed. New rules which do not confine the use of range, multiple year data to the above methods should be released.
- Number of Comparables for Applicability of “Range” Concept: The rules prescribe a minimum of 6 comparable companies, based on the similarity of their functions, assets and risks (FAR) with the tested party for the adoption of “range” concept which may be difficult for all transactions due to constraints such as data availability, business comparability, quantitative comparability, etc. Consequently, most taxpayers may not be able to adopt the range concept. Further, if during the audit stage the number of final comparables fall below the mandated 6, due to rejection of certain comparable companies, the method of determining ALP will change from “Range” concept to Arithmetic mean which will add to complexities and increased litigation. NASSCOM stressed that the OECD Guidelines do not outline a minimum number of comparable entities to be considered for calculation of range. NASSCOM recommended that the rules should not specify any minimum number of comparable entities as a prerequisite for the use of “range” concept. Alternatively, it suggested a reduction in minimum requirement of comparable companies for application of the range concept from 6 to 4 comparable transactions. A clarification may be issued as to the applicability of the arithmetic mean concept in case the number of comparables fall below 4. Further, guidance may be provided regarding the selection of appropriate comparables considering the various constraints thereby allowing flexibility to the taxpayers in preparing reliable set for comparable companies.
- “Range” between 35 to 65 Percentile instead of Inter-Quartile Range: The rules provide a range between 35 to 65 percentile of the data set which may not provide relative reliability on comparable price. The range of 35th to 65th percentile is narrow than interquartile range 25th to 75th percentile, restricting the set of finally selected comparables. Further, use of inter-quartile range (25th to 75th percentile) is amongst the globally accepted best practice and also closer to economic realities wherein prices, and or margins, are compared to those within a range and not at to a particular point. NASSCOM recommended that the rules be modified to provide that the interquartile range from the 25th to 75th percentile would be used to test the arm’s length nature of the transaction.
- Use of Multiple Rear Data: Rule 10B(4) as notified provides that the data to be used in analyzing the comparability of an uncontrolled transactions with an international transaction or a specified domestic transaction will be:
  - the data relating to the current year ; or
  - the data relating to the financial year immediately preceding the current year, if the data relating to the current year is not available at the time of furnishing the return of income by the assessee , for the assessment year relevant to the current year.
  Further data of the current year, shall be used during the transfer pricing audit if it becomes available at the time of assessment.
  
  The above para prescribes the use of “Multiple year data” concept in case of only three methods viz. the Transactional Net Margin Method, Resale Price Method, or Cost Plus Method. NASSCOM highlighted that the requirement of use of the financial data of comparable companies which is not available in the public domain on or before the specified date, but which becomes available subsequently by the time of assessment, will not be in line with the contemporaneous documentation requirement under the Indian TP provisions. It is not clear whether at the time of assessment, the data of the current year can be used by both the taxpayer and the department. It further highlighted that the illustration to the notification provides for the use of the data of the current year and immediately preceding 2 years in contrast to the notification providing for the use of data of the current year or the data relating to the financial year immediately preceding the current year contributing to ambiguity. Also use of data of current year and the 2 preceding years is not in line with the global best practices which allow three years data to be used excluding current year’s data. It will be an issue for overseas tested parties, which follow rules for data as per their respective jurisdictions ( eg. previous three years data) to get and use current year data.
  
  NASSCOM recommended that the taxpayer should be allowed to use data of prior three years (not including current year), which is available in the database at the time of preparation of TP documentation. Also it should be extended to CUP, PSM and other methods as well. The data of current year can be used only if it is available at the time of preparation of TP documentation and not subsequently at the time of assessment. The provision that use of data of the current year can be used during the transfer pricing assessment if it becomes available should be done away with as by that time pricing and commercial arrangements would have already been set keeping in mind the data available. The benefit of multiple year data should also be made available to past years whose assessment proceedings have not yet been completed i.e for FYE 2012, FYE 2013 and FYE 2014.
Concerns on APA Roll Back Provisions in cases of DTAAs Comprising Article 9(2): Rule 10 MA(3) of the APA rollback rules provides as follows: “Notwithstanding anything contained in sub-rule (2), rollback provisions shall not be provided in respect of international transaction for a rollback year, if – ….(ii) the application of rollback provisions has the effect of reducing the total income or increasing the loss, as the case may be, of the applicant as declared in the return of income of the said year.

NASSCOM contended that the above position of rollback is not justified in the case of bilateral APA applications wherein the treaty itself provides for corresponding deduction in the other contracting state for avoidance of double taxation, i.e., Article 9(2). It recommended that suitable modifications be made in the present rules, to allow rollback provisions which have the effect of reducing the total income or increasing the loss of the applicant for the relevant year.
Risk Based Assessment Audits: NASSCOM stated that in relation to transfer pricing audits, presently a transaction value threshold is being adopted by the Revenue for case selection; which should be replaced by an objective risk based assessment approach which may be set out through instructions/circulars on an annual basis. The recent Instruction No. 8/2015 issued on October 16th, 2015 sets out that the Assessing Officer should apply more discretion in referring cases for scrutiny by the Transfer Pricing Officer. It would be helpful if some criteria or parameters are laid out based on which a referral could be made. Further, a transaction value based audit approach is not always an indicator of the need for scrutiny for such transactions and should be supplemented with some qualitative criteria for case selection.
Safe Harbour Rules Not Effective for the Sector - Need for Rationalizing the Margins: Currently, the margins notified under the safe harbour vary from 20 to 30 percent depending on the characterization of the entity, which are high and are not reflective of market realities. Redefining safe harbour margins, which have so far remained ineffective, should be undertaken on a priority to encourage uptake by the Industry. Emphasizing the importance of safe harbours for easing the regulatory compliance for SMEs, NASSCOM recommended more practical and feasible margins (that are reflective of ALPs) be notified under the safe harbour rules, especially after taking into account the rationalization of margins by the higher appellant authority.
Continued Aggressive Assessments: The Indian IT Industry has been facing several unwarranted assessments on account of transfer pricing adjustments. Tax authorities continue to pose problems by adopting different criteria of selecting comparables for benchmarking. Further, filters adopted by the authorities across jurisdictions are ignoring business conditions. Tax authorities use companies earning supernormal profits (margins 50% to 80%) and industry giants as comparables. Recent rulings and judgments passed in favour of the taxpayers are continued to be overlooked.
Ambiguities in Domestic Transfer Pricing: The Finance Act 2015 increased the threshold for applicability of Domestic Transfer Pricing from INR 5 crores to INR 20 crores. However ambiguity around some provisions like directors’ remuneration and associated comparables continue. Domestic transfer pricing provisions should apply only in transactions involving income escaping tax and not in case tax neutral transactions i.e. where there is a transaction between two entities both of which pay tax, such a transaction will be tax neutral since a deduction in the hands of one entity will automatically be taxed in the hands of the other entity. Hence in such a case, domestic transfer pricing provisions should not apply and there should be a specific exemption introduced in the law to this effect. NASSCOM repeated its concerns highlighted in the previous pre- budget memorandum.

7. Endnotes

[1] It prescribes the following methods for its computation:

Comparable uncontrolled price (CUP) method,
Resale price method (RPM),
Cost plus method (CPM),
Profit split method (PSM),
Transactional net margin method (TNMM), and
Such other methods as may be prescribed.

As notified by the CBDT, any such other method may be used which details the price for uncontrolled transactions between unassociated companies in similar circumstances after the consideration of all relevant facts.

[2] See: http://www.nasscom.in/sites/default/files/policy_update/Transfer-Pricing_NASSCOM-Jun14.pdf.

[3] See: http://www.nasscom.in/sites/default/files/policy_update/NASSCOM%20pre-budget%20recommendations%20-%20Transfer%20Pricing.pdf..

[4] See: http://www.nasscom.in/sites/default/files/policy_update/NASSCOM-pre-budget-recommendations-Transfer-Pricing.pdf.