Pathways to Higher Education

Reclaiming the right to privacy: Researching the intersection of privacy and gender

Ambika Tandon and Aayush Rathi — 2021-01-25T10:42:51Z

It was our privilege to be supported by Privacy International, UK, during 2019-2020, to undertake a research project focusing on reproductive health and data surveillance, and to engage on related topics with national civil society groups. Our partner organisations who led some of the research as part of this project are grassroots actors - Domestic Workers Rights Union, Migrant Workers Solidarity Network, Parichiti, Samabhabona, Rainbow Manipur, and Right to Food Campaign. Here we are compiling the various works supported by this project co-led by Ambika Tandon, Aayush Rathi, and Sumandro Chattapadhyay at the Centre for Internet and Society, India.

Previous research conducted by CIS on the subject of sexual and reproductive health (SRH) services in India observes that there is a complex web of surveillance, or ‘dataveillance’, around each patient as they avail of SRH services from the state. [1] In this project on ‘researching the intersection of privacy and gender’, we aimed to map the ecosystem of surveillance around SRH services as their provision becomes increasingly ‘data-driven’, and explore its implications for patients and beneficiaries.

Through this project, we were interested in documenting the roles played by both the public and the private sector actors in this ecosystem of health surveillance. We understand the role of private sector actors as central to state provision of sexual and reproductive health services, especially through the institutionalisation of data-driven health insurance models, as well as through extensive privatisation of public health services.

We supported studies on a range of topics that constitute the experience of sexual and gender minorities and women when accessing public health and welfare systems, including the treatment of trans persons by law and welfare systems in India, access to abortion and maternity benefits for low income women, access to ART treatments by PLHIV, and so on.

We found that many respondents had no information about welfare schemes despite being eligible, while many others were excluded from them because they did not have Aadhaar cards and other ID documents, or because of errors and inconsistencies in the same. Direct benefit transfer schemes also required mobile phone linkage and active Aadhaar-seeded bank accounts, which added another layer of requirements and excluded vulnerable populations. We also found that respondents had very little information about the storage and sharing of their data, which raises questions about the possibility of implementing complex consent architectures for digitised health data as imagined by the Indian government through policies such as the Non Personal Data Governance Framework. We found that populations that carry stigma are most likely to be excluded from health and welfare access as a result of data collection, including trans groups, PLHIV, and single women or adolescent girls seeking abortion.

Please find below the various works undertaken as part of this project. We hope these works will be useful for civil society organisations, grassroots organisations, and reproductive rights organisations.

Article

Raina Roy. (July 18, 2020). Coronavirus: Kolkata’s trans community has been locked out of healthcare and livelihood. Scroll.in. https://scroll.in/article/968182/coronavirus-kolkatas-trans-community-has-been-locked-out-of-healthcare-and-livelihood

Rosamma Thomas. (November 02, 2020). Citizen data and freedom: The fears of people living with HIV in India. GenderIT. https://www.genderit.org/articles/citizen-data-and-freedom-fears-people-living-hiv-india

Sameet Panda. (November 25, 2020). One ration card, many left behind. Indian Express. https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/one-ration-card-many-left-behind/

Sameet Panda (January 11, 2020). One Nation One Ration Card in Odisha - Only Pain, No Gain. Sanchar, page 6. https://sancharodisha.com/

Santa Khurai. (June 18, 2020). 'I feel the pain of having nowhere to go': A Manipuri trans woman recounts her ongoing lockdown ordeal. Firstpost. https://www.firstpost.com/india/i-feel-the-pain-of-having-nowhere-to-go-a-manipuri-trans-woman-recounts-her-ongoing-lockdown-ordeal-8494321.html

Shreya Ila Anasuya. (December 21, 2020). How India’s Healthcare System Lets Down Trans Men. Go Mag. http://gomag.com/article/heres-what-its-like-to-be-a-trans-man-in-india/

Policy Response

Aayush Rathi, Aman Nair, Ambika Tandon, Pallavi Bedi, Sapni Krishna, and Shweta Mohandas. (September 13, 2020). Inputs to the Report on the Non-Personal Data Governance Framework. The Centre for Internet and Society. https://cis-india.org/raw/inputs-to-report-on-non-personal-data-governance-framework/

Report

Anchita Ghatak. (December 30, 2020). Domestic Workers’ Access to Secure Livelihoods in West Bengal. Parichiti. https://cis-india.org/raw/parichiti-domestic-workers-access-to-secure-livelihoods-west-bengal

Endnotes

[1] Aayush Rathi, Is India's Digital Health System Foolproof? (2019)
Aayush Rathi and Ambika Tandon, Data Infrastructures and Inequities: Why Does Reproductive Health Surveillance in India Need Our Urgent Attention? (2019)
Ambika Tandon, Feminist Methodology in Technology Research: A Literature Review (2018)
Ambika Tandon, Big Data and Reproductive Health in India: A Case Study of the Mother and Child Tracking System (2019)

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/reclaiming-the-right-to-privacy-researching-the-intersection-of-privacy-and-gender

Reaping the Benefits of Gamification

dipali — 2015-10-24T14:24:55Z

As a part of the Making Change blog-post series, in this post we will identify a new technique: gamification. This technique is being used for sustainable environment conservation by modern day change-makers. We interview two out of three co-founders of Reap benefit- Kamal Raj and Gautam Prakash who believe in the adoption of more sustained environmental practices that induce social change towards conserving the environment.

CHANGE-MAKER: Kamal Raj,Gautam Prakash and Kuldeep Dantewadia
 
ORGANISATION: Reap Benefit 

METHOD OF CHANGE: Gamification and Human centric systems for consistent behavior change towards better waste-water-energy management. 

STRATEGY OF CHANGE: Building a new era of environmentally conscious youth in India through technology and an interdisciplinary approach to change.

We depend on the environment and the resources that it provides us, but surprisingly we are unaware of the effects of its depletion and the need to save these resources. A few of the problems that people now face are with resources like- water,waste and energy because we do not acknowledge the fact that we are wasting them unconsciously. This only triggers the need for more and more solutions which would change the way people perceive the resources and realize the need to conserve. While trying to start an initiative to come up with some solutions to manage these resources, we are approached by the question of the accessibility, affordability and sustainability of those solutions. The solutions and the practice of that solution is a two-way process for any sustainable making-change initiative.

In this post I will be introducing to you Reap Benefit and the technique of Gamification. I will bring out a comparative analysis of the various definitions by renowned gaming authorities across the world who are involved in the process of using games in non-game contexts to bring out change in the offline space. Only after this, will I be acknowledging the importance of the strategies used by Reap Benefit for making these solutions sustainable. The strategies will be- human centric solutions and gamification. Then, I will bring out the connection between these two strategies to provide you an inter-disciplinary understanding of the making change process. Next, these strategies will be coupled with the discussion on the use of technology to speed-up the process. Also, throughout this post we will be referring to the blog- Methods of Social Change written by Denisse Albornoz and we will also make an attempt to answer the questions- 'Who,Where,How' of this making change project in relation to Reap Benefit. The blog post can be accessed here.

Before the journey of the post, I would like you to read this little success story narrated by Kamal Raj in the interview that led Reap benefit a step higher in its aim for making change:

Reap benefit went to a school which received only 400 litres of water supply a day resulting in poor health and care conditions. This water would be used for washing their plates after the mid-day meal and also for sanitation systems. This would only make the place a platform for water, food and breeding mosquitoes all together. Since the students usually consumed food with their right hand, while taking the plate to wash it, they would leave the plates at one side; they would open the tap with their left hand, would take their plates again and start washing them. During this time interval, they would waste a lot of water.

As, a solution to this, Reap Benefit changed the taps which would discharge 60% less of water. They also created a clean water purification system. Now, with the same 400 litres of water, students washed their plates and adopted better sanitation practices. The challenges that they faced actually made them innovate better systems for remarkable change.

Think about these questions for a minute..

Does this story relate to physical needs?
Does this story relate to creative problem solving?
Is it a story that brings out better affordable solutions?
With this solution were the students benefited?
Was this a successful idea?

Reap Benefit

First of all, take a look at a brief introduction of Reap Benefit given by Kamal Raj:

Kamal: "Reap Benefit works to implement affordable solutions, enabling quantifiable waste-water-energy management systems, as a way to facilitate behavioural change by engaging the head, hand and heart of the user. Having worked with many people, we have realized that behaviour modification allows for more sustained adoption of environment sustainability practices. We take them through a 4-stage behavioural change process – ‘Unconsciously Wrong’, ‘Consciously Wrong’, ‘Consciously Right’ and ‘Unconsciously Right’ (we will understand this process later in the post). A link to the website is here- Reap Benefit."

Reap Benefit is bound together by the deep concern for the environment they have and the dead-lock issues that it faces. They aim for affordable solutions with maximum impact in the least time. Kamal marks that they work only with the students within the age group 10-16, because the use gamification is most effective in this age group. Also, he makes an addition to that by saying the rewards the older age groups demand are not as easy-to-meet as those of the age group they work with. It also aims to co-create experiences by working hands on with the youth: their target audience for creating change.

It is said that the more you practice the better you get. By this, I would like to introduce you to the concept of quotidian activism. Reap Benefit deeply believes in this concept. But, what does quotidian activism mean? A working definition is: the form of activism occurring everyday. This form of activism may lead to people making actions sustainable and achieve consistent behavioural change, supported by products and innovations provided by Reap Benefit (later in this post, I will introduce you to some of these innovations).

Finally, Reap Benefit highly focuses on the need to answer the ‘why’ behind the problem. This answer would provide a more personal understanding of the problem for creating change. By engaging the participant with the 'why', he will also be able to evaluate the impact and the benefits of his actions, take ownership of the problem and comprehend the need for innovation.

What is 'change' for Reap Benefit?

Presuming every organization has its own design to making change, Reap Benefit's understands it in the following way:

Gautam: “Change for us is a very sub-conscious part of your life. (It is also a) two stage process- knowledge: which will tell us we need solution and the solution. The knowledge will tell you that you are unconsciously doing the wrong thing. Then when you realize it, you go to a stage of consciously wrong. When you keep doing this you reach a stage when you know that you are consciously doing right, and soon, you are doing it every single day and then you unconsciously do it.”

I will attempt to understand their process of change by adding that this 'to be good' drive in the individual or the need for public approval is what makes them do unconsciously right everyday, and then it is only the last stage what makes it a habit. Gautam also mentions that each of these stages has an impact of its own and altogether, they become more powerful. This change process will lead to sustainable change according to him.

We have seen the change agents that are vital to create change, but how is this change executed? In the next section we will look at two strategies used for making change: gamification and human-centred design and later, we will only try to produce a connection between them.

Discovering Gamification

In this section, we will unpack the first part of the 'how' question. First of all, we will compare the various definitions of the technique given by people involved in understanding the use of game elements in the non-game contexts, to create change in the emotional and social behaviour of people. The definitions of these three people in the big list of so-called gamification authorities will be used provides us with keywords for a comparative understanding of what the technique means. These three people are:

JANE McGONIGAL: She is an American game designer and author who advocates the use of mobile and digital technology to channel positive attitudes and collaboration in a real world context.

GABE ZICHERMANN: He is an author, public speaker, and self-described "serial entrepreneur." He has worked as a proponent of leveraging game mechanics in business, education, and other non-entertainment platforms to increase user engagement through gamification.

JESSE SCHELL: He is an American video game designer an acclaimed author, CEO of Schell Games and a Distinguished Professor of the Practice of Entertainment Technology.

Definitions

JANE McCONIGAL	GABE ZICHERMANN	JESSE SCHELL
“It is a blissful productivity acquired by the flourishing feeling, that is, accomplishments in a game but only with a volunteering attribute of the participant.”	“Games are the only force in the universe that can get people to take actions against their self-interest in a predictable way without using force.”	“It is a problem solving situation that you enter into because you want to.”

I would be like to bring points of intersections between these three definitions.

VOLUNTEERING ATTRIBUTE VS. USE OF FORCE: The volunteering attribute is an efficient way to foster sustainable participation, as opposed to the use of force which makes a campaign less appealing.
PROBLEM SOLVING SKILLS: Games are a very responsive way of trying to accomplish problem solving as the person is engaged with the problem and willing to solve it.
PRODUCTIVITY: There problem solving skills leads the participant to a desired outcome.

These points also give you a clear understanding of Reap Benefit who works along the same lines with the volunteer or participant to solve the problem of conservation.
But, does the usage of games actually produce behavioral change? If so, how do games provide this function? These are some of the questions we will try and attempt to answer in the next section.

Games as a Tool to Influence Behaviour

Playing games results in obtaining rewards in some form of the other. These rewards psychologically induce a positive emotional feeling in the participant. When the participant learns something through games and when that emotional feeling arises, he tries and incorporates the same solutions in the games to solving the real life problems. This brings out an improved result and problem solving ability. But what about the affordability of that solution? We need to understand ways to make it affordable because any task once done will not induce consistency in the behavior change. But the task repeated many times will improve or change the behavior over a long period of time. So, when the question of affordability (financial fear) is answered then the emotional feeling primarily can bring out change in the behavior of the individual. (Yongwen Xu, 2011).

There are also some game mechanics that are to be kept in mind to change behavior while designing games apart from just the element of fun and affordability. So, we will now look at another authority involved in gamification in the upcoming section to explore these mechanics. We will also try and understand these mechanics in relation to Reap Benefit.

Game Mechanics

Seth Priebatsch is the creator of SCVNGR and LevelUp social gaming sites. He has provided a list of game mechanics which could be necessary to understand games and why they produce particular changes for a better environment. These are:

Appointment Dynamics: to bring players to do something at a pre-defined time and place.

Influence and status: any participant or group that is involved in the change-making process, is influenced by the presence of others because of the competition and the envy that leads them to carry forward the task

Progression Dynamics: the success of the student is measured through the tasks by giving rewards.

Communal Discovery: the entire group or community works towards making change.

Seth's model could be applied to the process of creating change that Reap Benefit uses, and this is illustrated through their experience of a student-run energy audit in the field. A set of students were assigned the task of doing an audit for the energy conservation and the energy usage of a Puma store. They were just given the base for the audit but the criteria for the audit was planned by them. The students were encouraged by the thought of getting rewards for the task. Kamal recalls that they had used games to make the children understand it.

Relating this to Seth's Model, the children were given a pre-defined time and place for doing the task and were influenced both, by the element of competition between the students and also the idea of receiving a reward once the task is completed. The task only ends by obtaining a sense of communal discovery that, all together they can make change on a personal and team level. We understood Seth's model but we will try and comprehend deeper, the use of rewards for inducing behavioral change in the next section.

Rewards Mechanism

Kamal commented on Reap Benefit's 2-3 months periodic reward mechanism. He believes that this makes students equal in position before starting every task.

Kamal: "We use a lot of things like rewards to motivate them to play a game (with us) and we personalize all these rewards based on the questionnaire that we do at the beginning where we subtly understand what they like."

This information which gives ideas of how to encourage each student to get the best performance out of them.

a) Extrinsic rewards: The extrinsic reward here, for example would be allotting points to various participants/ teams. Michael Wu, a chief scientist in subjects like digital technologies, says extrinsic rewards are like a jump start to intrinsic rewards.Once the student acknowledges them, they acquire a sense of ownership and innovation and are empowered to create new solutions. Hence, awareness is not created before the task but an output from the task.

Refer to Gabe Zichermann's video for more on the importance of gamification and the rewards mechanism.

b) Intrinsic rewards: Apart from producing behavior change, gamification's can also indicate learning. One of the elements that facilitates learning would be:

Player Control: A participant will have certain amount of control while gaming which would lead to a sense of responsibility and accomplishment. Learning could be intrinsic only if there is responsibility of gaining a reward through a task.

There are many other elements that produce learning and they could be accessed here.

Human-Centric Model

Human-centred systems aim to preserve or enhance human skills, in both manual and office work, in environments in which technology tends to undermine the skills that people use in their work.

We will now answer the second part of the 'how' question and show another strategy for making change. Human centric systems do not use machines to create solutions to the problems but rather design the game with the importance of the 'user-friendly' element. This has been explored in a past post by Denisse. Access it here.

Reap Benefit's ‘transparent dustbin’ is a great model to illustrate this. The dustbin is transparent for people to see and then throw the waste in according to different types of waste. It is kept at an eye-level so that the waste already thrown inside can help the person perceive and throw his waste in the exact dustbin and to make it easily accessible for the public.

These human-centric approaches provide a consistent change in the behaviour of the individual because the method is user-friendly and make segregation easy. The objectives is to engage in unconscious behavioural change. The transparent dustbin is better explained by this audio byte of Kamal Raj:

Another innovation of Reap Benefit, is the compose mixture

Kamal says: "The idea was to throw something with it, like the degrade compost product we innovated and the waste would compost, without smell, without taking 3 months."

This mix, by giving visual feedback could be accessible by anyone due to its low cost and easy-to-use method. So, these innovations justify and explain the benefits of human centric models and also produce many new ideas in the minds of the students( James,2010). I would like to explain this by a chain of ideas that arise while segregating plastic and non-plastic waste.

The participation in the structure (waste segregation model)

The negatives of the model (harmful effects of mixing plastic in the model)

Realizing the need for another mechanism (dustbins for different types of waste)

Another idea to support the new mechanism (dustbins should be transparent and named)

The need to spread this (start campaigning for the system)

Explaining this model in brief: the waste segregation model is the segregation of plastic and other waste. During this process the three ideas that arise are: a) the harmful effects of plastic, b) the need for a plastic waste dustbin and a non-plastic waste dustbin, and the last one, b) the transparency of the dustbin. Then the major question of spreading the model by using technology arises. This would be the model thought by the participant during the discussion of the usage of technology for sustainability.

But what is sustainability and how is it important? Complementing the technique of gamification and the human- centric approaches with technology to make it a sustainable solution is a challenge. This system may be adopted by all. But the aftermath of implementing this apparatus is a challenging question. In the next section we will comprehend the role of technology adding a more positive result to Reap benefit.

The Role of Technology and Media

This section will look at how Reap Benefit uses technology and media and then try and understand how the use of technology can make these solutions sustainable.

Kamal: "There are two aspects that are already existing- knowledge and the products. So, when someone starts the journey, technology enables us to be with them in this journey without us being there. Without the sharing of photos through digital media like facebook, keeping track of the journey would not be possible. We need technology to bridge the gap."

Information access is facilitated by the use of technology and digital media or social networking, as they share the systems with their online community. But, when this access is denied the only solution is to be a part of the in-tutor system and realize the positives of the same through experience. Technology takes Reap Benefit a step higher in its aim to make sustainable change by targeting youth, the main users of social network platforms.

Making Change

We started this post with an introduction to a very strong initiative- Reap Benefit. Techniques such as gamification and human-centric systems are used effectively by this organization to create maximum benefits. It focuses highly on the use of these strategies to induce behaviour modification in youth. We attempted to build a relationship between these techniques to answer whether they are sustainable, intelligible and accessible solutions to making change.

Summing up the 'WHO,WHERE AND HOW' question- We have only understood that, to use the opportunity and take charge before others do so, we need a 3-stage plan. We understood that the WHO means the target, the change agents who will lead the initiative and comprehend the need for change by themselves. The question of WHERE focuses on the idea of making change in the public space rather than in the private sphere which limits the extent of the change. We have summarized this only by bringing out the importance of technology to make change the largest priority of youth. The question of HOW is understood in this post by the use to affordable solutions.

The problems faced by the environment call for solutions that are affordable and accessible. These two qualities of the solution would only make it sustainable.These solutions are met by various game elements in a game and the human centric approaches that engage the individual in problem solving by disseminating knowledge to them and informing them about the problems. This makes those solutions to problem-solving evaluatable through quantity and the quality of the result of the problem. Behavior change will be only possible by solutions that break the existing schemas in the society and create new innovations. (James,2010). Now, through sustainable, innovative solutions through these techniques we can make the dream of a clear and clean environment a reality.

While this blog may help you gain a positive understanding about gamification it would certainly lead you to many more questions. In this digital age, we would surely have to ‘re-game-think’ the methodologies for change again and agai,n not only in terms of using unique techniques such as gamification but also in terms of accessibility of such techniques for change in the structural divisions in society.

Footnotes

Reward is one of the elements that drives the individual to adopt the gamification technique- the reward/feedback mechanism. You can acquire a profound reading on more of these elements that leads to further making-change here- http://www.yukaichou.com/.
A few more elements like the player control and communal discovery that indicates learning through Gamification could be found here- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamification
More information on persuasive messages, strategies for changing behavior, rules for effective delivery, and how to manage the participants/audience in the making change initiative can be found-http://sustainability.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/Promoting_Sustain_Behavior_Primer.pdf
To hear a talk show of Yukaichou on TEDx about Gamification- check it here- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5Qjuegtiyc
To hear another talk show of Gabe Zichermann on TEDx about Gamification- check here- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2N-5maKZ9Q
The process of creating sustainability through gamification and technology, according to Rachel James, goes as follows:

Attracting attention by breaking the existing schemas (mental structures of preconceived idea, Jean Piaget,1926) This can be done by creating a mystery for them and then involving the individual in complex thought processing to change the schema. Story-telling could also induce emotional reactions to inspire or simulate them.
Persuade them through gamification
Make the strategies for change very rigid which cannot be changed often and acknowledge what you deliver to your audience.

Sources

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamification
James, Rachel. “Promoting Sustainable Behavior- a guide to successful communication”. Web. August 2010.
Xu, Yongwen. ” literature review on web application Gamification and analytics”. Web. August 2011.
http://www.yukaichou.com
Albornoz, Denisse. 'Methods for Social Change'. Web. February 2014. The link for the same is here- http://cis-india.org/digital-natives/making-change/methods-for-social-change.

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About Dipali Sheth:

Studying in my 3rd year at Christ University gave me the opportunity to intern at Centre for Internet and Society. This post has been a result of my internship for a month under the Making Change program at CIS. My interest in Research and New Media started the journey here and has only added to making Research my zeal in the near future.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/making-change/reaping-the-benefits-of-gamification

Reading from a Distance — Data as Text

sneha — 2015-11-13T05:29:12Z

The advent of new digital technologies and the internet has redefined practices of reading and writing, and the notion of textuality which is a fundamental aspect of humanities research and scholarship. This blog post looks at some of the debates around the notion of text as object, method and practice, to understand how it has changed in the digital context.

The concepts of text and textuality have been central to the discourse on language and culture, and therefore by extension to most of the humanities disciplines, which are often referred to as text-based disciplines. The advent of new digital and multimedia technologies and the internet has brought about definitive changes in the ways in which we see and interpret texts today, particularly as manifested in new practices of reading and writing facilitated by these tools and dynamic interfaces now available in the age of the digital. The ‘text’ as an object of enquiry is also central to much of the discussion and literature on Digital Humanities, given that many scholars, particularly in the West trace its antecedents to practices of textual criticism and scholarship that stem from efforts in humanities computing. Everything from the early attempts in character and text encoding (see TEI) to new forms and methods of digital literary curation, either on large online archives or in the form of apps such as Storify or Scoop it have been part of the development of this discourse on the text. Significant among these is the emergence of processes such as text analysis, data mining, distant reading, and not-reading, all of which essentially refer to a process of reading by recognising patterns over a large corpus of texts, often with the help of a clustering algorithm[1]. The implications of this for literary scholarship are manifold, with many scholars seeing this as a point of ‘crisis’ for the traditional practices of reading and meaning-making such as close reading, or an attempt to introduce objectivity and a certain quantitative aspect, often construed as a form of scientism, into what is essentially a domain of interpretation. But an equal number of advocates of the process also see the use of these tools as enabling newer forms of literary scholarship by enhancing the ability to work with and across a wide range and number of texts. The simultaneous emergence of new kinds of digital objects, and a plethora of them, and the supposed obscuring of traditional methods in the process is perhaps the immediate source of this perceived discomfort. There are different perspectives on the nature of changes this has led to in understanding a concept that is elementary to the humanities. Apart from the fact that digitisation makes a large corpus of texts now accessible, subject to certain conditions of access of course, it also makes texts ‘ massively addressable at different levels of scale’ as suggested by Micheal Witmore. According to him “Addressable here means that one can query a position within the text at a certain level of abstraction”. This could be at the level of character, words, lines etc that may then be related to other texts at the same level of abstraction. The idea that the text itself is an aggregation of such ‘computational objects’ is new, but as Witmore points out in his essay, it is the nature of this computational object that requires further explanation. In fact, as he concludes in the essay, “textuality is addressability” and further...this is a condition, rather than a technology, action or event”. What this points towards is the rather flexible and somewhat ephemeral nature of the text itself, particularly the digital text, and the need to move out of a notion of textuality which has been shaped so far by the conventions of book culture, which look to ideal manifestations in provisional unities such as the book.[2]

The notion of the text itself as an object of enquiry has undergone significant change. Various disciplines have for long engaged with the text - as a concept, method or discursive space - and its definitions have changed over time that have added dimensions to ways of doing the humanities. With every turn in literary and cultural criticism in particular, the primacy of the written word as text has been challenged, what is understood as ‘textual’ in a very narrow sense has moved to the visual and other kinds of objects. The digital object presents a new kind of text that is difficult to grasp - the neat segregations of form, content, process etc seem to blur here, and there is a need to unravel these layers to understand its textuality. As Dr. Madhuja Mukherjee, with the Department of Film Studies, at Jadavpur University points out, with the opening up of the digital field, there are more possibilities to record, upload and circulate, as a result of which the very object of study has changed; the text as an object therefore has become very unstable, more so that it already is. Film is an example, where often DVDs of old films no longer exist, so one approaches the ‘text’ through other objects such as posters or found footage. Such texts also available through several online archives now offer possibilities of building layers of meaning through annotations and referencing. Another example she cites is of the Indian Memory project, where objects such as family photographs become available for study as texts for historiography or ethnographic work. She points out that this is not a new phenomenon, as the disciplines of literary and cultural studies, critical theory and history have explored and provided a base for these questions, but there is definitely a new found interest now due the increasing prevalence of digital methods and spaces. One example of such a digital text perhaps is the hypertext[3]. George Landow in his book on hypertext draws upon both Barthes and Foucault’s conceptualisation of textuality in terms of nodes, links, networks, web and path, which has been posited in some sense as the ideal text. Landow’s analysis emphasises the multilinearity of the text, in terms of its lack of a centre, and therefore the reader being able to organise the text according to his own organising principle - possibilities that hypertext now offers which the printed book could not. While hypertext illustrates the post-structural notion of what comprises an open text as it were, it may still be linear in terms of embodying certain ideological notions which shape its ultimate form. Hypertext, while in a pragmatic sense being the text of the digital is still at the end of a process of signification or meaning-making, often defined within the parameters set by print culture.

But to return to what has been one of the fundamental notions of textual criticism, the ‘text’ is manifested through practices of reading and writing [4]. So what have been the implications of digital technologies for these processes which have now become technologised, and by extension for our understanding of the text? While processes such as distant reading and not-reading demonstrate precisely the variability of meaning-making processes and the fluid nature of textuality, they also seem to question the premise of the method and form of criticism itself. Franco Moretti, his book Graphs, Maps and Trees talks about the possibilities accorded by clustering algorithms and pattern recognition as a means to wade through corpora, thus attempting to create what he calls an ‘abstract model of literary history’. He describes this approach as ‘within the old territory of literary history, a new object of study’...He further says, “Distant reading, I have once called this type of approach, where distance is however not an obstacle, but a specific kind of knowledge: fewer elements, hence a sharper sense of their overall interconnection. Shapes, relations, structures. Forms. Models.” The emphasis for Moretti therefore is on the method of reading or meaning-making. There seem to be two questions that emerge from this perceived shift - one is the availability of the data and tools that can ‘facilitate’ this kind of reading, and the second is a change in the nature of the object of enquiry itself, so much so that close reading or textual analysis is not engaging or adequate any longer and calls for other methods. An example much closer home of such new forms of textual criticism is that of ‘ Bichitra’, an online variorum of Rabindranath Tagore’s works developed by the School of Cultural Texts and Records at Jadavpur University. The traditional variorum in itself is a work of textual criticism, where all the editions of the work of an author are collated as a corpus to trace the changes and revisions made over a period of time. The Tagore varioum, while making available an exhaustive resource on the author’s work, also offers a collation tool that helps trace such variations across different editions of works, but with much less effort otherwise needed in manually reading through these texts. Like paper variorum editions, this online archive too allows for study of a wider number and diversity of texts on a single author through cross-referencing and collation.

As is apparent in the development of new kinds of tools and resources to facilitate reading, there is a problem of abundance that follows once the problem of access has been addressed to some extent. Clustering algorithms have been used to generate and process data in different contexts, apart from their usage in statistical data analysis. The role of data is pertinent here; and particularly that of big data. But the understanding of big data is still shrouded within the conventions of computational practice, so much so that its social aspects are only slowly being explored now, particularly in the context of reading practices. Big data as understood in the field of computing is data that is so vast or complex that it cannot be processed by existing database management tools or processing applications[5]. But if one were to treat data as text, as is an eventual possibility with literary criticism that uses computational methods, what becomes of the critical ability to decode the text - and does this further change the nature of the text itself as a discursive object, and the practice of reading and textual criticism as a result. Reading data as text then also presupposes a different kind of reader, one that is no longer the human subject. This would be a significant move in understanding how the processes of textuality also change to address new modes of content generation, and how much the contours of such textuality reflect the changes in the discursive practices that construct it. Most of the debate however has been framed within a narrative of loss - of criticality and a particular method of making meaning of the world. Close reading as a method too came with its own set of problems - which can be seen as part of a larger critique of the Formalists and later American New Criticism, specifically in terms of its focus on the text. As such, this further contributes to canonising a certain kind of text and thereby a form of cultural and literary production. [6] Distant reading as a method, though also seen as an attempt to address this problem by including corpora, still poses the same issues in terms of its approach, particularly as the text still serves as the primary and authoritative object of study. The emphasis therefore comes back to reading as a critical and discursive practice. The objects and tools are new; the skills to use them need to be developed. However, as much of the literature and processes demonstrate, the critical skills essentially remain the same, but now function at a meta-level of abstraction. Kathleen Fitzpatrick in her book on the rise of electronic publishing and planned technological obsolescence dwells on the manner in which much of our reading practice is still located in print or specifically book culture; the conflict arises with the shift to a digital process and interface, in terms of trying to replicate the experience of reading on paper. Add to this problem of abundance of data, and processes like curation, annotation, referencing, visualisation, abstraction etc acquire increased valence as methods of creatively reading or making meaning of content. [7]

References:

Fitzpatrick, Kathleen, “Texts”, Planned Obsolescence – Publishing, Technology and Future of the Academy, New York and London: New York University Press, 2011. pp.89 – 119.
Kirschenbaum, M.G, “The Remaking of Reading: Data Mining and the Digital Humanities”, Conference proceedings; National Science Foundation Symposium on Next Generation of Data Mining and Cyber-Enabled Discovery for Innovation, Balitmore, October 10-12, 2007, http://www. cs. umbc. edu/hillol/NGDM07/abstracts/talks/MKirschenbaum. pdf.
Landow, George. P, Hypertext: The Convergence of Critical Theory and Technology, Balitmore: John Hopkins University Press, 1992 pp 2-12
Moretti, Franco, Graphs, Maps and Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History, Verso: London and New York, 2005. p.1
Whitmore, Michael , “Text: A Massively Addressable Object”, Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Mathew K. Gold, University of Minnesota Press: 2012 pp 324 – 327 http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/24
Wilkens, Mathew, “Canons,Close Reading and the Evolution of Method” Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Mathew K. Gold, University of Minnesota Press: 2012 pp 324 – 327 http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/24

[1] For more on cluster analysis and algorithms see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_analysis

[2] See Witmore, 2012. pp 324 - 327

[3] A term coined by Theodor H. Nelson, which he describes as “a series of text chunks connected by links which offer the reader different pathways” ( As quoted in Landow, 1991. pp 2-12)

[4] Barthes, 1977. pp 155 - 164

[5] See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_data

[6] See Wilkens (2012). pp 249-252

[7] See Fitzpatrick (2011), pp 89 -119

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/reading-from-a-distance

Reading from a Distance – Data as Text

sneha-pp — 2016-06-30T05:06:58Z

An extended survey of digital initiatives in arts and humanities practices in India was undertaken during the last year. Provocatively called 'mapping digital humanities in India', this enquiry began with the term 'digital humanities' itself, as a 'found' name for which one needs to excavate some meaning, context, and location in India at the present moment. Instead of importing this term to describe practices taking place in this country - especially when the term itself is relatively unstable and undefined even in the Anglo-American context - what I chose to do was to take a few steps back, and outline a few questions/conflicts that the digital practitioners in arts and humanities disciplines are grappling with. The final report of this study will be published serially. This is the third among seven sections.

Sections

01. Digital Humanities in India?

02. A Question of Digital Humanities

03. Reading from a Distance – Data as Text

04. The Infrastructure Turn in the Humanities

05. Living in the Archival Moment

06. New Modes and Sites of Humanities Practice

07. Digital Humanities in India – Concluding Thoughts

The simultaneous emergence of new kinds of digital objects, and a plethora of them, and the supposed obscuring of traditional methods in the process is perhaps the immediate source of this perceived discomfort. There are different perspectives on the nature of changes this has led to in understanding a concept that is elementary to the humanities. Apart from the fact that digitisation makes a large corpus of texts now accessible, subject to certain conditions of access of course, it also makes texts 'massively addressable at different levels of scale' as suggested by Michael Witmore (Witmore 2012: 324-327, emphasis as in the original). According to him: "[A]ddressable here means that one can query a position within the text at a certain level of abstraction" (Ibid. 325). This could be at the level of character, words, lines etc that may then be related to other texts at the same level of abstraction. The idea that the text itself is an aggregation of such ‘computational objects’ is new, but as Witmore points out in his essay, it is the nature of this computational object that requires further explanation. In fact, as he concludes in the essay, "textuality is addressability and further ... this is a condition, rather than a technology, action or event" (Ibid. 326). What this points towards is the rather flexible and somewhat ephemeral nature of the text itself, particularly the digital text, and the need to move out of a notion of textuality which has been shaped so far by the conventions of book culture, which look to ideal manifestations in provisional unities such as the book (Ibid. 327).

Of Texts and Hypertextuality

An example much closer home of such new forms of textual criticism is that of 'Bichitra' [5], an online variorum of Rabindranath Tagore’s works developed by the School of Cultural Texts and Records at Jadavpur University. The traditional variorum in itself is a work of textual criticism, where all the editions of the work of an author are collated as a corpus to trace the changes and revisions made over a period of time. The Tagore variorum, while making available an exhaustive resource on the author’s work, also offers a collation tool that helps trace such variations across different editions of works, but with much less effort otherwise needed in manually reading through these texts. Like paper variorum editions, this online archive too allows for study of a wider number and diversity of texts on a single author through cross-referencing and collation. Prof. Sukanta Chaudhuri [6], Professor Emeritus, Department of English and School of Cultural Texts and Records at Jadavpur University, Kolkata has been part of the process of setting up this variorum. According to him the most novel aspects of this platform, or as he calls it - 'integrated knowledge site' - are to do with these functions of cross-referencing and integration. The bibliography is a hyperlinked structure, which connects to all the different digital versions of a particular text (the most being 20 versions of a single poem). The notion of a bibliography has always evoked hypertextuality – the possibility to link and cross - reference texts, but with the advent of the digital, this possibility has been fully realized, as seen in the case of the hypertext [7]. For collation, the project team developed a unique software, titled 'Prabhed,' (meaning difference in Bengali) that helps to assemble text at three levels (a) chapter in novel, act/scene in drama, canto in poem; (b) para in novel or other prose, speech in drama, stanza in poem; (c) individual words.. For instance, you can choose a particular section of a book, poem or play - and compare its occurrences across different editions and versions of the work to note their matches and differences. If two paragraphs have been removed from one chapter, and put into another, that can be traced through the collation software. If a particular word has been omitted in a later edition, or if certain lines have been rearranged in a poem, these changes can be tracked [8]. What makes the search engine 'integrated' is not simply that it can search all Tagore's works in one go, but that it links up with the bibliography and thereby with the actual text of the works. It is interesting to note here the different changes that the text undergoes to become available for study on a digital platform, where it is amenable to intense searching and querying of this kind. It is now possible to search across a large corpus of texts, for minute changes in words or sentences, and ask questions of these in terms of their usage, instances and contexts of their occurrence, thus facilitating a kind of enquiry previously never undertaken in textual studies.

The project however is not without its challenges, as Prof. Chaudhuri further outlines. Working with Indic scripts is a persistent problem for digital initiatives in India. In Bengali some work has been done in the form of a scientifically designed keyboard software called Avro, which stores all the conjunct letters preserving their separate characteristics [9]. Developing Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for scanned material in Indian languages remains a crucial issue for most digitization and archival initiatives in India. Other issues include the problem of vowel markers appearing before the consonants, even if phonetically they follow and are keyed in afterwards. To get the font and keyboard software to recognize this is a big challenge. The third challenge, especially in the case of works printed from the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century, is that there are vast differences in spelling; the same word can be spelt in different ways, and as there is no lexicon, one may not do any kind of general search. There is also the issue of a high degree of inflection in the language. A word may have a suffix (or, vibhakti) attached to it to indicate the case: one for the subject of the sentence, another for the object, another for the possessive case and so on. These are multiplied by the different forms of the verbs. The development of a lexicon in Bengali would be one of the ways to resolve many of these issues. However, as most people can only see and interact with the digital interface of Bichitra, and not really understand the process behind it, or the amount of work involved in making the platform work the way it does, funding for research and development, maintenance and sustainability is difficult to obtain. Backroom file management, which includes both paper and digital files remains a big but largely invisible task on such a platform. The total number of files generated from Bichitra is tens of millions or hundreds of millions, and many of these are offline files which would not even go on to the website. Hence while uploading the files, the basic groundwork for a retrieval system for different files serving different functions had already been laid, including the creation of a bibliography, which was a huge exercise in itself. The process of making text available as hypertext is labor that is invisibilized, and is rarely or never available to the end user.

Prof. Chaudhuri also speaks of ways in which the notion of textuality has been rendered differently through the use of the internet and digital technologies. Digital or electronic text has helped theorize better the notion of a fluid text - the fact that a text is never complete, but only bound between the covers of a book at a given point of several processes that are technological as well as social. The notion of the text itself as an object of enquiry has undergone significant change in the last several decades. Various disciplines have for long engaged with the text - as a concept, method or discursive space - and its definitions have changed over time that have added dimensions to ways of doing the humanities. With every turn in literary and cultural criticism in particular, the primacy of the written word as text has been challenged, what is understood as ‘textual’ in a very narrow sense has moved to the visual and other kinds of objects. The digital object presents a new kind of text that is difficult to grasp - the neat segregations of form, content and process seem to blur here, and there is a need to unravel these layers to understand its textuality. As Dr. Madhuja Mukherjee, with the Department of Film Studies, at Jadavpur University points out, with the opening up of the digital field, there are more possibilities to record, upload and circulate, as a result of which the very object of study has changed; the text as an object therefore has become very unstable, more so that it already is. Film is an example, where often DVDs of old films no longer exist, so one approaches the 'text' through other objects such as posters or found footage. Such texts also available through several online archives now offer possibilities of building layers of meaning through annotations and referencing. Another example she cites is of the Indian Memory project, where objects such as family photographs become available for study as texts for historiography or ethnographic work. She points out that this is not a new phenomenon, as the disciplines of literary and cultural studies, critical theory and history have explored and provided a base for these questions, but there is definitely a new found interest now due the increasing prevalence of digital methods and spaces.

Shaina Anand, artist and filmmaker, further espouses this thought when she talks about the new possibilities of textual analysis of film that are now possible, particularly in terms of temporal control, first with the DVD, then the internet and now with online archival platforms like Indiancine.ma [10] and the Public Access Digital Media Archive, or Pad.ma [11]. The first is an online archive of Indian film from the pre-copyright era (so effectively before 1955), while the second is an archive of found and archival footage, images sound clips and unfinished films [12]. Both platforms allow the user to search through an array of material, view/listen to them download or embed them as links. They make available to users not just an online database for storage and retrieval but also a space to work with a range of materials in multiple video and audio formats and themes through annotations and referencing. The annotation tool is perhaps the most innovative aspect of these platforms, wherein a user can pause, isolate a section of a sequence and annotate it using a range of options and filters. The annotations are textual, in the form of comments, commentary and marginalia (in the case of Pad.ma) and can also link to other paraphernalia around the film object, such as posters, images, advertisements and other literature. Users can also contextualize material by adding transcripts, descriptions, events, keywords, and even locating the events in the video on a map. These have brought to the fore several questions on relevance, accessibility and ownership, as in the case of raw footage from films, and opened up possibilities for such materials to be re-contextualized by the reader in different ways. This layering of annotations around the film object also creates a new research object, or text that then necessitates new methods of studying it as well. As opposed to the earlier practice of the researcher/critic having to watch the film first and then comment or analyse it, and relying on memory to generate the scholarship, it is now possible to pause, analyse or read and come back to the film and annotate the text in several ways. What does this do to the film text - the process documenting the form is new, not cinema as a form itself – is a question that comes up quite prominently here. The computational aspect also is important here, given the vast amount of footage that is now available, which then requires better lexical indexing to compute and manage large data sets. This has been a constant endeavour with Pad.ma and Indiancine.ma as well.

As in the case of film, what becomes prominent here is the move to a digital text of some sort. One such example of a digital text perhaps is the hypertext. George Landow in his book on hypertext draws upon both Barthes and Foucault’s conceptualisation of textuality in terms of nodes, links, networks, web and path, which has been posited as the 'ideal text' by Barthes (Landow 2006: 2). Landow’s analysis emphasises the multilinearity of the text, in terms of its lack of a centre, and therefore the reader being able to organise the text according to his own organising principle - possibilities that hypertext now offers which the printed book could not. While hypertext illustrates the possibilities of multilinearity of a text that can be realised in the digital, it may still be linear in terms of embodying certain ideological notions which shape its ultimate form. Hypertext, while in a pragmatic sense being the text of the digital is still at the end of a process of signification or meaning-making, often defined within the parameters set by print culture. As such it is only the narrative, and not the form itself that is multi-linear in hypertext fiction.

Textual Criticism in the Digital

But to return to what has been one of the fundamental notions of textual criticism, the 'text' is manifested through practices of reading and writing (Barthes 1977). So what have been the implications of digital technologies for these processes which have now become technologised, and by extension for our understanding of the text? While processes such as distant reading and not-reading demonstrate precisely the variability of meaning-making processes and the fluid nature of textuality, they also seem to question the premise of the method and form of criticism itself. Franco Moretti, in his book Graphs, Maps and Trees talks about the possibilities accorded by clustering algorithms and pattern recognition as a means to wade through corpora, thus attempting to create what he calls an 'abstract model of literary history' (Moretti 2005: 1). He describes this approach as "within the old territory of literary history, a new object of study." He further says, "Distant reading, I have once called this type of approach, where distance is however not an obstacle, but a specific kind of knowledge: fewer elements, hence a sharper sense of their overall interconnection. Shapes, relations, structures. Forms. Models" (Moretti 2005: 1, emphasis as in original). The emphasis for Moretti therefore is on the method of reading or meaning-making. There seem to be two questions that emerge from this perceived shift - one is the availability of the data and tools that can 'facilitate' this kind of reading, and the second is a change in the nature of the object of enquiry itself, so much so that close reading or textual analysis is not engaging or adequate any longer and calls for other methods of reading.

As is apparent in the development of new kinds of tools and resources to facilitate reading, there is a problem of abundance that follows once the problem of access has been addressed to some extent. Clustering algorithms have been used to generate and process data in different contexts, apart from their usage in statistical data analysis. The role of data is pertinent here; and particularly that of big data. But the understanding of big data is still shrouded within the conventions of computational practice, so much so that its social aspects are only slowly being explored now, particularly in the context of reading practices. Big data as not just a reference to volume but also its other aspects of data such as velocity, scope, and granularity among others significantly increases the ambit of what the term covers, with implications for new epistemologies and modes of research (Kitchin 2014). But if one were to treat data as text, as is an eventual possibility with literary criticism that uses computational methods, what becomes of the critical ability to decode the text – and does this further change the nature of the text itself as a discursive object, and the practice of reading and textual criticism as a result. Reading data as text then also presupposes a different kind of reader, one that is no longer the human subject. This would be a significant move in understanding how the processes of textuality also change to address new modes of content generation, and how much the contours of such textuality reflect the changes in the discursive practices that construct it. Most of the debate however has been framed within a narrative of loss - of criticality and a particular method of making meaning of the world. Close reading as a method too came with its own set of problems - which can be seen as part of a larger critique of the Formalists and later New Criticism, specifically in terms of its focus on the text. As such, this further contributes to canonising a certain kind of text and thereby a certain form of cultural and literary production (Wilkens 2012). Distant reading as a method, though also seen as an attempt to address this problem by working with corpora as opposed to select texts, still poses the same issues in terms of its approach, particularly as the text still serves as the primary and authoritative object of study. The emphasis therefore comes back to reading as a critical and discursive practice. The objects and tools are new; the skills to use them need to be developed. However, as much of the literature and processes demonstrate, the critical skills essentially remain the same, but now function at a meta-level of abstraction. Kathleen Fitzpatrick in her book on the rise of electronic publishing and planned technological obsolescence dwells on the manner in which much of our reading practice is still located in print or specifically book culture; the conflict arises with the shift to a digital process and interface, in terms of trying to replicate the experience of reading on paper (Fitzpatrik 2011). Add to this problem of abundance of data, and processes like curation, annotation, referencing, visualisation, abstraction etc. acquire increased valence as methods of creatively reading or making meaning of content (Ibid.). More importantly, it also points towards a change and diversity in the disciplinary method. Where close reading was once the only method by which a text became completely accessible to the reader, it is now possible to approach it through a set of processes, thus urging us to rethink the method of enquiry itself.

Whether as object, method or practice, the notion of textuality and the practice of the reading have undergone significant changes in the digital context, but whether this is a new domain of enquiry is a question we may still need to ask. Matthew G. Kirschenbaum in his essay on re-making reading (quoted earlier in this chapter) suggests that perhaps the function of these clustering algorithms, apart from serving to supplant or reiterate what we already know is to also ‘provoke’ new ideas or questions (Kirschenbaum XXXX: 3). The conflict produced between close and distant reading, the shift from print to digital interfaces would therefore emerge as a space for new questions around the given notion of text and textuality. But if one were to extend that thought, it may be pertinent to ask if DH can now provide us with a vibrant field that will help produce a better and more nuanced understanding of the notion of the text itself as an object of enquiry. This would require one to work with and in some sense against the body of meaning already generated around the text, but in essence the very conflict may be where the epistemological questions about the field are located. The digital text, owing to the possibilities of ‘massive addressability,’ mentioned earlier is now more fluid and socialized. The renewed focus on the textual is most apparent in this manner of imagining the text, using the metaphor of a highly interlinked, networked and shared text. It also puts forth important questions then of how we understand technology a certain way, especially in the context of language and representation as an important factor of understanding new textual objects. Is technology a tool for textual analysis, or is it in inherent to our understanding of the nature of the text? Is the development of these methods of enquiry shaped by certain disciplinary requirements, and do they also challenge or create new conflicts for traditional methods of enquiry? The growth in the study of different media objects, such as video and cinema, and the advent of areas such as media studies, oral history, media archaeologies has further prompted concerns regarding the study of the digital object in these disciplines, and a rethinking of how we understand the notion of the text.

Notes

[1] "The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) is a consortium which collectively develops and maintains a standard for the representation of texts in digital form. Its chief deliverable is a set of Guidelines which specify encoding methods for machine-readable texts, chiefly in the humanities, social sciences and linguistics. Since 1994, the TEI Guidelines have been widely used by libraries, museums, publishers, and individual scholars to present texts for online research, teaching, and preservation." See: http://www.tei-c.org/.

[2] See: https://storify.com/

[3] See: http://www.scoop.it/

[4] For more on text mining see Lisa Guernsey in 'Digging for Nuggets of Wisdom,' in The New York Times, October 16, 2003 http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/16/technology/circuits/16mine.html?pagewanted=print. For more on data mining, distant reading, and the changing nature of reading practices see Matthew Kirschenbaum in 'The Remaking of Reading,' http://www.csee.umbc.edu/~hillol/NGDM07/abstracts/talks/MKirschenbaum.pdf.

[5] See: http://bichitra.jdvu.ac.in/.

[6] Interview with author, July 30, 2015.

[7] A term coined by Theodor H. Nelson, which he describes as "a series of text chunks connected by links which offer the reader different pathways." As quoted in George Landow, Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology, Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1992, 2-12.

[8] Bichitra, 'Collation Guide,' accessed on September 17, 2015, http://bichitra.jdvu.ac.in/bichitra_collation_guide.php.

[9] Omicron Lab, accessed September 17, 2015. https://www.omicronlab.com/avro-keyboard.html.

[10] See: http://pad.ma/.

[11] See: http://indiancine.ma/.

[12] For more on these platforms see the section on DH institutions in India.

References

Barthes, Roland. "From Work to Text". In Image, Music, Text. London: Fontana Press, 1977.

Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. "Texts" in Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology and the Future of the Academy. New York: New York University Press, 2011.

Kirschenbaum, Matthew. "The Remaking of Reading". http://www.csee.umbc.edu/~hillol/NGDM07/abstracts/talks/MKirschenbaum.pdf.

Kitchin, Rob. 'Big Data, New Epistemologies, and Paradigm Shifts,' Big Data & Society, 2014, April–June, pp. 1–12, DOI: 10.1177/2053951714528481.

Landow, George. Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.

Moretti, Franco. Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History, Verso, 2005.

Wieseltier, Leon, 'Crimes Against Humanities,' The New Republic, September 3, 2013, http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114548/leon-wieseltier-responds-steven-pinkers-scientism.

Wilkens, Mathew. "Canons, Close Reading and the Evolution of Method". In Debates in the Digital Humanities Ed. M.K. Gold. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012.

Witmore, Michael. "Text: A Massively Addressable Object". In Debates in the Digital Humanities, Ed. M.K. Gold. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/reading-from-a-distance-data-as-text

Re:wiring Bodies: Call for Review

nishant — 2015-04-03T10:50:15Z

The Researchers At Work Programme, at the Centre for Internet and Society, advocates an Open and transparent process of knowledge production. We recognise peer review as an essential and an extremely important part of original research, and invite you, with the greatest of pleasures, to participate in our research, and help us in making our arguments and methods stronger.

Dr. Asha Achuthan's research project on "Rewiring Bodies" is a part of the Researchers @ Work Programme at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore. From her vantage position, straddling the disciplines of medicine an Cultural Studies, through a gendered perspective. Dr. Achutan historicises the attitudes, imaginations and policies that have shaped the Science-Technology debates in India, to particularly address the ways in which emergence of Internet Technologies have shaped notions of gender and body in India. Her work at the Centre for Contemporary Studies (IISC, Bangalore) gives a further context to unpack Internet Technologies in a larger context of Technology-Society interface. This original monograph draws from Gender studies, STS research, extand policies, empirical data, Cultural Studies and Feminist epistemological of Sciences, to build a new knowledge framework to address the Internet questions which popular cybercultures or mainstream media studies have ignored.

The monograph by Dr. Asha Achuthan, has emerged out of the "Rewiring Bodies" project which started nine months ago. The project has involved many public entries available at http://www.cis-india.org/research/cis-raw/histories/rewiring. The first draft of the monograph is now available for public review and feedback. Please click on the links below to choose your own format for accessing the document.

Word [word file, 339 kb]
PDF [PDF, 712 kb]

We appreciate your time, engagement and feedback that will help us to bring out the monograph in a published form. Please send all comments or feedback to nishant@cis-india.org or you can use your Open ID to login to the website and leave comments to this post.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/rewiring-bodies/rewiring-call-for-review

Re:Wiring Bodies

Asha Achuthan — 2015-04-14T12:49:46Z

Asha Achuthan initiates a historical research inquiry to understand the ways in which gendered bodies are shaped by the Internet imaginaries in contemporary India. Tracing the history from nationalist debates between Gandhi and Tagore to the neo-liberal perspective based knowledge produced by feminists like Martha Nussbaum; Asha’s research offers a unique entry point into cyberculture studies through a feminist epistemology of science and technology. The monograph establishes that there is a certain pre-history to the Internet that needs to be unpacked in order to understand the digital interventions on the body in a range of fields from social sciences theory to medical health practices to technology and science policy in the country.

Section I (Attitudes to Technology) attempts to trace the trajectories of the critiques of technology standing in for science in the Indian context. This section traces the methodology of critique itself that animates the political in India and shows the ways in which these critiques access anterior difference, the ways in which they posit resistance as providing the crisis to closure of hegemonic western science and the ways in which this resistance fails to meet the promise of crisis.

Section II (Mapping Transitions) explores in detail the responses to science and technology in feminist and gender work in India. Here, Asha presents an ‘attitude’ to technology as discrete from ‘man’. Feminist and gender work in India have articulated four responses to technology across state and civil society positions. These being the presence of women as agents of technological change, the demand for improved access for women to the fruits of technology, the demand for inclusion of women as a constituency that must be specifically provided for by technological amendments a need for recognition of technology’s ills particularly for women and the consequent need for resistance to technology on the same count.

Keeping in mind that woman’s lived experiences have served as the vantage point for all four of the responses to technology in the Indian context, Asha suggests the need to revisit the idea of such experience itself, and the ways in which it might be made critical, rather than valorising it as an official counterpoint to scientific knowledge, and by extension to technology. Section III (Working towards an Alternative) does not address the ‘technology question’ in a direct sense but makes an effort to make that exploration.

Asha concludes by saying that she treats technology as a part of the philosophy of modern western science and the relationship between technology and bodies is the more obvious relationship upon which the formulations of human-technology relationships are built.

Download the monograph here [PDF, 2.58 MB]

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/rewiring-bodies

RBI Consultation Paper on P2P Lending: Summary

Pavishka Mittal — 2016-05-18T12:12:23Z

The Reserve Bank of India published a Consultation Paper on Peer-to-Peer Lending on April 28, 2016. The Paper proposes to bring the P2P lending platforms under the purview of RBI’s regulation by defining P2P platforms as NBFCs under section 45I(f)(iii) of the RBI Act. Once notified as NBFCs, RBI can issue regulations under sections 45JA and 45L. The last date for submission of comments to the Consultation Paper is May 31, 2016. In this post, Pavishka Mittal presents a summary of the Paper.

1. Introduction

2. Crowdfunding and P2P Lending

3. Observations Made Regarding Current Practice of P2P Lending Companies

4. Types of Regulatory Regimes for P2P Lending Companies across the World

5. Arguments against Regulation

6. Arguments for Regulation

7. Proposed Regulatory Framework

7.1. Permitted Activity

7.2. Prudential Requirements

7.3. Governance Requirements

7.4. Business Continuity Plan (BCP)

7.5. Customer Interface

7.6. Reporting Requirements

8. Scope of RBI's Regulation

9. Endnotes

10. Author Profile

1. Introduction

The Reserve Bank of India published a Consultation Paper on Peer-to-Peer Lending on April 28, 2016 [1]. The Paper notes that:

Although nascent in India and not significant in value yet, the potential benefits that P2P lending promises to various stakeholders (to the borrowers, lenders, agencies etc.) and its associated risks to the financial system are too important to be ignored. The Reserve Bank (the Bank) has therefore found it necessary to put out this discussion paper to elicit public opinion and views of the various stakeholders on the future course of action having regard to the current legal and regulatory framework in place to regulate the business of financial intermediation.

Here I present a summary of the Consultation Paper. The next post in this series will discuss in detail the different types of obligations that the Peer-to-Peer (henceforth, P2P) Lending Companies will have to satisfy if classified as Non-Bank Financial Companies, and other related issues.

2. Crowdfunding and P2P Lending

The Paper starts with discussing (and distinguishing) SEBI’s Consultation Paper on Crowdfunding in India, published on June 17, 2014, to avoid overlap of jurisdiction [2]. SEBI's paper classified crowdfunding initiatives in to:

Community Crowdfunding: 1) Social Lending, and 2) Reward Crowdfunding; and
Financial Return Crowdfunding: 1) Peer-to-Peer Lending, and 2) Equity Crowdfunding.

Traditionally, Start-ups are funded through private equity, angel investor or loan arrangements with a financial institution. Any offering of public equity takes place only after the product or business becomes commercially viable. However, in Equity based Crowdfunding solicitation is done at an earlier stage. It refers to fund raising by a business, particularly early-stage funding, through offering equity interests in the business to investors online through a crowdfunding platform website acting as the intermediary.

Though, P2P lending did not appear to involve securities, loan/notes/contracts can be traded on a P2P platform or a secondary market. Thus, these loans may become securities, with the contract between the lender and the borrower being the security note.

In summary, SEBI’s paper suggested that under Security Based Crowd funding, the possible routes that could be explored are the following:

Equity based Crowd Funding (EbC): Raising equity through a crowd funding platform.
Debt Based Crowd Funding (DbC) Raising of funds by issuing debentures or debt securities through a crowd funding platform.
Fund Based Crowd Funding (FbC): Raising of funds for pooling under an Alternative Investment Fund (AIF) through a crowd funding platform.

3. Observations Made Regarding Current Practice of P2P Lending Companies

P2P lending is in relation to unsecured loans.
The borrowers and the lenders can be both natural and juristic persons.
The interest rate can range from a flat interest rate fixed by the platform to dynamic interest rates as agreed upon by the borrowers and the lenders to cost plus model (operational costs plus margin for platform and returns for lender).
The companies often follow a reverse auction model in which the lenders bid for a borrower’s loan proposal and the borrower has the freedom to either accept or reject the offer.
Borrowers are able to avail lower rates than those offered by money lenders/unorganized sector. Lenders can obtain higher returns than what conventional investment opportunities offer.
Some of these are involved in the business targeted at micro finance activities with the stated primary goal being social impact and providing easier access of credit to small entrepreneurs.
The borrowers pay an origination fee (either a flat rate fee or as a percentage of the loan amount raised) according to their risk category.
The lenders, depending on the terms of the platform, have to pay an administration fee and an additional fee if they choose to use any additional service (e.g. legal advice etc.), which the platform may provide.
The platform provides the service of collecting loan repayments and doing preliminary assessment on the borrower’s creditworthiness.
The regulatory concerns in such cases would relate to KYC and recovery practices. Since all payments are through bank accounts, the KYC exercise can be deemed to have been carried out by the banks concerned. The platform facilitates collection of post-dated cheques from the borrower in the name of the lender as a proxy for repayment of the loan.
The platform does NOT profit from the difference in the deposit and the loan rates, as is the case with Banking Financial Institutions.
In summary, while crowd funding - equity, debt based and fund based- would fall under the purview of capital markets regulator (SEBI), P2P lending would fall within the domain of the RBI.

4. Types of Regulatory Regimes for P2P Lending Companies across the World

Complete Exemption / Non-regulation due to Lack of Definition: Regulations already in place to be applicable which protect the borrowers from unfair interest rates, unfair credit provision, and false advertising. Hence no further, or specific, regulation is undertaken.
Intermediary Regulation: Registration required as an intermediary to enable it to access the market. Other rules and requirements determine how the platform should conduct its business (for example, the licensing needed to provide credit and/or financial services).
Banking Regulation: To be applicable due to their credit intermediation functions. As such, the platforms must obtain a banking licence; fulfil disclosure requirements and other such regulations.
US Model: Involves two levels of regulation, involving a central agency (SEC in this case) and state legislations.

5. Arguments against Regulation

The presence of regulation would lend credibility to P2P lending, attracting lenders with low awareness to these platforms who may not understand the risks involved specially in the context of susceptibility of these platforms to attract high risk borrowers. Regulation may stifle the growth of an innovative, efficient and accessible avenue for borrowers who either do not have access to formal financial channels or are denied loans by them. The market for P2P lending, currently in a nascent stage does not pose an immediate systemic risk nor any significant impact on monetary policy transmission mechanism.

6. Arguments for Regulation

Considering the significance of the online industry and the impact which it can have on the traditional banking channels/NBFC sector, it would be prudent to regulate this emerging industry. Regulation would reduce its potential to disrupt the financial sector and throw surprises. As P2P lending promotes alternative forms of finance, where formal finance is unable to reach and also has the potential to soften the lending rates as a result of lower operational costs. Therefore, the importance of these methods of financing needs to be acknowledged. If the sector is left unregulated altogether, there is the risk of unhealthy practices being adopted by one or more players, which may have deleterious consequences.
Section 45S of RBI Act prohibits an individual or a firm or an unincorporated association of individuals from accepting deposits, if his or its business wholly or partly includes any of the activities specified in clause (c) of section 45-I (i.e. activities of a financial institution); or if his or its principal business is that of receiving of deposits under any scheme or arrangement or in any other manner, or lending in any manner. Contravention of Section 45S is an offence punishable under section 58B (5A) of RBI Act. As per the Act, ‘‘deposit’’ includes and shall be deemed always to have included any receipt of money by way of deposit or loan or in any other form, but does not include any amount received from an individual or a firm or an association of individuals not being a body corporate, registered under any enactment relating to money lending which is for the time being in force in any State. Since the borrowers and lenders brought together by a P2P platform could fall within these prohibitions, absence of regulation may lead to perpetrating an illegality.

7. Proposed Regulatory Framework

RBI concludes that a regulatory mechanism would facilitate the creation of an alternative avenue of credit. It proposes to bring the P2P lending platforms under the purview of RBI's regulation by defining P2P platforms as NBFCs under section 45I(f)(iii) of the RBI Act by issuing a notification in consultation with the Government of India. After the notification, RBI can issue directions under sections 45JA and 45L of RBI Act to such platforms regarding registration requirements and prudential norms. Below are the features of the proposed regulation.

7.1. Permitted Activity

Considering the present stage of development, the platform could be registered only as an intermediary. i.e. the borrowing and the lending activity could not be reflected on the Balance Sheet. The platform will be required to ensure that section 45S of the RBI Act is not attracted by its activities. The platforms will be prohibited from giving any assured return either directly or indirectly. The platforms will be allowed to opine on the suitability of a lender and creditworthiness of a borrower. Adequate regulations on advertisements will also be put in place. It will also be mandated that funds will have to necessarily move directly from the lender’s bank account to the borrower’s bank account to obviate the threat of money laundering. The guidelines would also prohibit the platforms being used for any cross-border transaction in view of FEMA provisions relating to transactions between residents and non-residents.

7.2. Prudential Requirements

The prudential requirements will include a minimum capital of Rs 2 crore. With a view to ensure that there is enough skin in the game at a later date, leverage ratio may be prescribed so that the platforms do not expand with indiscriminate leverage. Given that the lenders may include uninformed individuals, prudential limits on maximum contribution by a lender to a borrower/segment of activity could also be specified.

7.3. Governance Requirements

The guidelines in this regard will include fit and proper criteria for promoters, directors and CEO. A reasonable proportion of board members having financial sector background could be suggested. The guidelines may also require the P2P lender to have a brick and mortar place of business in India. The management and operational personnel of the platform would need to be stationed within the country.

7.4. Business Continuity Plan (BCP)

The platforms need to put in place adequate risk management systems for its smooth operations. BCP and back up for the data needs to be put in place since the platform also acts as a custodian of the agreements/cheques etc. In case of failure of the platform to continue its operations, it should have a ‘living will’ or alternative arrangement in the form of an agreement for continuation of its operations.

7.5. Customer Interface

Most of the platforms operating in India provide a credit score for the borrowers using their customized algorithms. Confidentiality of the customer data and data security would be the responsibility of the Platform. Transparency in operations, adequate measures for data confidentiality and minimum disclosures to borrowers and lenders would also be mandated through a fair practices code. The current regulations applicable to other NBFCs will be made applicable to the P2P platforms in regard to recovery practice. The operators would also be mandated to have a proper grievance redress mechanism to deal with complaints from both lenders and borrowers and require reporting to the Board.

7.6. Reporting Requirements

In order to assist monitoring, the platforms will need to submit regular reports on their financial position, loans arranged each quarter, complaints etc. to the Reserve Bank. The Bank may come out with a detailed reporting requirement.

8. Scope of RBI's Regulation

It may be noted here that RBI has powers to regulate entities which are in the form of companies or cooperative societies. However, if the P2P platforms are run by individuals, proprietorship, partnership or Limited Liability Partnerships, it would not fall under the purview of RBI. Hence, it is essential that P2P platforms adopt company structure. The notification can therefore specify that no entity other than a company can undertake this activity. This will render such services provided under any other organisational structure illegal. Alternatively, the other forms of structure may be regulated by the State Governments.

Comments are sought on following aspects of this discussion paper:

Whether there is a felt need for regulating P2P lending platforms?
Is the assessment of P2P lending and risks associated with it adequate?
Are there any other risks which ought to be addressed?
Is the proposed approach to regulating these platforms adequate?
Any other relevant issues pertaining to P2P lending.

9. Endnotes

[1] See: https://www.rbi.org.in/scripts/bs_viewcontent.aspx?Id=3164.

[2] See: http://www.sebi.gov.in/cms/sebi_data/attachdocs/1403005615257.pdf.

10. 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/rbi-consultation-paper-on-p2p-lending-summary

RBI Consultation Paper on P2P Lending: Legality and Implications

Pavishka Mittal — 2016-05-31T13:25:37Z

1. Introduction

2. Legal Basis for Classifying P2P Lending Platforms as NBFCs

3. Legal Implications of Classifying P2P Lending Platforms as NBFCs

3.1. Threshold Mechanism under Indian Law

3.2. Change in Management or Control of NBFCs

3.3. Compliance with KYC/AML/CFT Norms

3.4. Compliance with Guidelines on Fair Practices Code for NBFCs

3.5. Obligations to Share Credit Information

4. Endnotes

5. Author Profile

1. Introduction

RBI in its Consultation Paper has proposed to classify Peer-to-Peer (P2P) lending platforms as NBFCs. NBFCs in India are considered to be an alternative to the banking sector, with the only distinction being the prohibition on collecting demand deposits and the absence of running accounts. The established categories of NBFCs as per section 45I include loan, investment, asset finance and residuary non-banking companies incorporated under the Companies Act 1956. This blog post will examine the various categories of NBFCs in India and whether P2P lending platforms are within any of these established categories under law. The legality of the proposed course of action by the RBI in its consultation paper is subsequently examined. Further, the legal implications of the same, i.e the components of the increased compliance by the P2P platforms is discussed in detail.

2. Legal Basis for Classifying P2P Lending Platforms as NBFCs

P2P lenders are platforms serving as marketplaces for the lenders and the borrowers of funds to connect. Their very business model does not render them as a provider of finance, they are only an intermediary in the financial services sector. There is no question that loan companies are NBFCs under section 45I(f) of the RBI Act, 1935 [1]. However, since these P2P platforms do not provide any finance themselves, there can be no ground for classifying them as a loan company within section 45I of the RBI Act. NBFCs are also classified into deposit taking NBFCs and non-deposit taking NBFCs. In this situation, the question of permissibility, or legal basis, of taking deposits by the platform does not arise as the funds are to be directly transferred from the lender to the borrower, as stipulated in the Consultation Paper itself. The Paper further states that the balance sheet of the platform cannot indicate any borrowing/lending activity, which entails that the platform cannot itself provide finance or receive any funds for the provision of loans to others. Platforms are not allowed to determine the interest rates as they are not a party to the transaction. Neither would they be liable in cases of default by the borrower. These rules, standard for P2P platforms in other jurisdictions too, confirm the assumption that the platform itself is not providing finance and thus, cannot be entrusted with any liability, obligation from the transaction. However, it has to be vigilant in its role in maintaining data on the market participants on the platform for the fulfillment of KYC norms.

Serious concerns as to the financial health of the economy, however, are bound to arise if such entities are to continue operations without any regulatory supervision. The existing regulations, when made could not have fathomed the niche business models of the present. It is for this reason that sector-specific guidelines are often released for the benefit of all market participants as was seen in the case the revised e-commerce regulations [2]. In the present case, the proposed action is classifying P2P lending platforms as NBFCs with the RBI reserving the power to name any 'non-banking institutions' as NBFCs. Clause (a) of section 45I of the RBI Act 1934 declares that the business of a non banking financial institution includes the business of a non-banking financial company as specified under subsection (f). Clause (iii) of subsection (f) defines a non-banking financial company to include any other non-banking institution or class of such institutions, as the RBI may, with the previous approval of the Central Government and by notification in the Official Gazette, specify. Clause (c), in contrast identifies NBFCs through their activities, through their 'principal business'. The fifty/fifty test to determine the principal business of the firm as to the engagement of at least fifty percent of the assets of the firm in the core operations of the firm is not applicable if the RBI chooses to declare any 'non-banking institution' as a NBFC. In the present case, in the absence of any established characteristics of a NBFC within clause (c), the RBI has made use of clause (f) to meet the primary objective of regulation. The RBI will not exceed its regulatory authority in doing so. The only restriction on such an action is that an NBFCs cannot include any institution whose principal business is that of agricultural activity, industrial activity, sale/purchase of goods, sale/purchase/construction of immovable property.

3. Legal Implications of Classifying P2P Lending Platforms as NBFCs

The Reserve Bank under section 45JA of the RBI Act 1934, can validly determine the policy and give directions to all or any of the non-banking financial companies relating to income recognition, accounting standards, making of proper provision for bad and doubtful debts, capital adequacy based on risk weights for assets and credit conversion factors for off-balance sheet items and also relating to deployment of funds by a non-banking financial company, or a class of non-banking financial companies, or non-banking financial companies generally, as the case may be. Further, such non-banking financial companies shall be bound to follow the policy so determined and the directions so issued. Without prejudice to the generality of the powers named above, the Bank may also give directions to NBFCs generally or to a class of NBFCs or to any particular NBFC as to (a) the purpose for which advances or other fund based or non-fund based accommodation may not be made; and (b) the maximum amount of advances or other financial accommodation or investment in shares and other securities which, having regard to the paid-up capital, reserves and deposits of the NBFC’s and other relevant considerations, which can be validly made by that NBFC.

Section 45JA of the RBI Act 1934 is illustrious of the vast powers with the central bank to frame directions and policies applicable to NBFC’s. Powers of regulation extend to the subjective satisfaction of the RBI that the affairs of the NBFC are being conducted in a manner prejudicial to its depositors or the NBFC itself other than the established grounds of public interest and regulation of the financial system of the country to its advantage. This is of importance to P2P lending platforms because the characterization of their organizations as NBFCs would not just indicate compliance with the existing regulatory mechanism applicable to NBFCs but also any other direction, notification, policy that can be validly issued in the future on the subjective satisfaction of the above broad grounds. P2P lending platforms, many not even public companies presently may not be able to operate in the manner that is most beneficial to its private interests in the interest of the public. Further, no other legal form of organization other than a company would be valid under law. Further, no P2P Platform would be able to adopt any other legal form of organization (sole proprietorship, partnership etc.) other than a company due to the fact that clause (c) grants the power on the RBI to name any non-banking financial ‘company’ to include any other non-banking ‘institution’ or class of ‘institutions’. These ‘institutions’, when named NBFCs under law would be companies and would have to change their form of organization, by registration as a company within the Companies Act 2013, if necessary.

As per section 45I of the RBI Act 1934, all NBFCs excepting those which are regulated by other statutory/regulatory bodies are to be registered with the RBI. P2P lending platforms will thus have to comply with the following:

Minimum net worth requirement of Rs 2 crore for registration.
Make minimum investments as stipulated in RBI notifications in central, state government securities and would be liable to pay a penal interest in the case of non-compliance.
A minimum of 20% of net profits will have to be transferred to the Reserve Fund from which no appropriations are permissible except with intimation to the Central Bank within 21 days from such withdrawal.
Statements, information called for under the provisions of chapter IIIB would have to be furnished.
RBI bank is empowered to file a winding up petition if it is satisfied that the NBFC is unable to pay its debt or its continuance is detrimental to public interest/depositors of the company.
Prohibited from disclosing any information contained in any statement or return submitted by such company under the provisions of Chapter IIIB; or obtained through audit or inspection or otherwise by the Bank. Such information is to be treated as confidential with the exception of disclosure to any other NBFC in accordance with the practice and usage customary amongst such companies or as permitted or required under any other law.
Scope of business of banks is limited by section 16(1) of Banking Regulation Act - the only limitation being the prohibition on checking facilities, due to absence of demand deposits.

3.1. Threshold Mechanism under Indian Law

Due to differential financial risk posed by different categories of NBFCs, there exist different regulatory mechanisms applicable to the different classes. For these reasons other than administrative convenience, NBFCs were categorised into the following three groups:

Deposit accepting NBFCs,
Non-deposit accepting NBFCs with assets of less than Rs.100 crore, and
Non-deposit accepting NBFCs with assets of Rs.100 crore and above.

With the aim to achieve a balance between under-regulation and over-regulation in the sector, RBI increased the threshold asset size for an NBFC to be considered systemically important (NBFC-ND-SI) from Rs.100 crore to Rs.500 crore [3]. A simplified regulatory framework has been established for NBFCs which are not systemically important (NBFCs-ND), i.e. NBFCs having total assets less than Rs.500 crore.

As per Economic Times, Faircent’s [4] enterprise valuation, which can be indicative of its net assets, is Rs 50 crore [5]. Keeping in mind that Faircent is arguably one of the biggest market players in the P2P segment, it seems that most P2P lending platforms will have net assets worth less than 500 crore, at least in the near future. Thus, this blog post, to analyse the applicable regulatory regime relies on the assumption that P2P lending platforms, if recognized as NBFCs, would not be systematically important as per the criteria laid down under law. Systematically Important NBFCs have different leverage, capital adequacy, asset classification, corporate governance and disclosure norms.

The RBI issued Prudential Norms Directions for Non-Systematically Important Non-Banking Financial (Non-Deposit Accepting or Holding) Companies in 2015 [6]. This framework classifies non deposit taking NBFCs on the basis of their access to public funds and customer interface. Subclause (ii) of clause (3) of Paragraph 1 states that these directions, excepting paragraph 15 are not applicable to NSI-NBFC’s provided that they do not accept or hold public funds. As per paragraph 15, a certificate will have to be submitted to the Regional Office of the Department of Non-Banking Supervision by the statutory auditor within one month from the date of finalization of the balance sheet and in any case not later than December 30th of that year.

NSI-ND-NBFCs do not have to comply with the limited prudential norms when there is no access to public funds, either directly or indirectly. In the present case, the P2P Platform will not itself have any access to public funds, the funds being transferred directly from the lender to the borrower. The RBI in its consultation paper has proposed the applicability of a leverage ratio to P2P platforms which is in contravention of Paragraph 1 of the deemed regulations. The powers of the RBI under section 45JA of the RBI Act 1934 do not include the making of any directions/regulations which involve the applicability of a leverage ratio. If P2P platforms are made to comply with the deemed leverage ratio requirement under law, 7, it results in apprehension as the possibility of applicability of the other provisions of the NSI-ND-NBFC Prudential Norms Directions. The question as to the existence of regulatory authority to impose the leverage ratio arises which deserves clarification by the RBI.

3.2. Change in Management or Control of NBFCs

The Non-Banking Financial Companies (Approval of Acquisition or Transfer of Control) Directions, 2014 [herein after referred to as ‘Change in Control Directions’) was a step towards ensuring that all NBFCs are managed by ‘fit and proper’ management [8]. Earlier, only intimation with the Regional Office was required.

In 2015, addressing the responses from the industry, the RBI issued revised guidelines [9] to make prior written permission of the Reserve Bank be required for the following activities:

Any takeover or acquisition of control of an NBFC, which may or may not result in change of management.
Any change in the shareholding of an NBFC, including progressive increases over time, which would result in acquisition/ transfer of shareholding of 26 per cent or more of the paid up equity capital of the NBFC. This would not extend to cases involving buyback of shares/ reduction in capital provided approval from a competent court has been obtained.
Any change in the management of the NBFC which would result in change in more than 30 per cent of the directors, excluding independent directors. Prior approval would not be required for those directors who get re-elected on retirement by rotation.
Further, P2P lending platforms will have to continue to inform the RBI regarding any change in their directors/ management as stipulated under Non-Systemically Important Non-Banking Financial (Non-Deposit Accepting or Holding) Companies Prudential Norms (Reserve Bank) Directions, 2015.

3.3. Compliance with KYC/AML/CFT Norms

Non-deposit-taking NBFCs with assets of Rs 25 Crore and above are to comply with Know Your Customer (KYC) norms / Anti-Money Laundering (AML) standards / Combating of Financing of Terrorism (CFT) through the allotment of Unique Customer Identification Code for NBFC Customers in India (UCIC) as intimated by the RBI in its circular dated May 3, 2013 [10]. According to RBI's master circular dated July 1, 2014 [11], NBFCs are required to prepare a risk profile of each customer and apply enhanced due diligence measures on higher risk customers. Further, NBFCs are to put in place policies, systems, and procedures for risk management keeping in view the risks involved in a transaction, account or banking/business relationships. In 2015, the RBI issued another notification [12], which stated that the periodicity of the updation of the data required to be maintained through the 'client due diligence' directions should not be less than once in five years in the case of low risk category customers, and not less than once in two years in case of high and medium risk categories. Full KYC exercise will have to be done every two years for high risk, every eight years for medium risk, and every ten years for low risk individuals and entities taking in to account the adequacy of the data obtained through client due diligence measures, if any. The 2014 directions also stated that detailed guidelines on Customer Due Diligence (CDD) measures made applicable to Politically Exposed Person (PEP) and their family members or close relatives will have to be complied with.

Further, NBFCs have been warned in the notification that the information collected from the customer for the purpose of opening of account should be kept confidential, and should not be divulged for cross selling or any other purposes. NBFCs have to ensure that the information sought from the customer is relevant to the perceived risk, is not intrusive, and is in conformity with the guidelines issued in this regard. Any other information from the customer should be sought separately with her/his consent, and after opening the account.

If the NBFC has knowledge or reason to believe that the client account opened by a professional intermediary is on behalf of a single client, the client must be identified. NBFCs should not allow opening and/or holding of an account on behalf of a client/s by professional intermediaries, like Lawyers, Chartered Accountants, etc., who are unable to disclose the true identity of the beneficial owner due to professional obligations of customer confidentiality. Some documents have been specified which should be called for and verified for the opening of an account in the name of a proprietary concern.

A Principal officer should be appointed to ensure compliance with the KYC/AML/CFT norms and the obligations under the Prevention of the Money Laundering Act 2002. A system should be made for the recording of transactions involving counterfeit coins/currency, cash exceeding Rs 10 lakh rupees, either individually or in a series, and for transactions that are ‘suspicious’ according to the Money Laundering Act 2002. NBFCs should maintain for at least ten years from the date of transaction between the NBFC and the client, all necessary records of transactions referred to in rule 3 of the Prevention of Money-laundering (Maintenance of Records of the Nature and Value of Transactions, the Procedure and Manner of Maintaining and Time for Furnishing Information and Verification and Maintenance of Records of the Identity of the Clients of the Banking Companies, Financial Institutions and Intermediaries) rules 2005, (hereinafter, referred to as the PMLA rules) to enable the reconstruction of transactions and the provision of evidence for prosecution of persons involved in criminal activity [12]. Even if P2P lending platforms do not enter into the transaction with the customer for the provision of the loan itself, there does exist a transaction involving the payment of processing fee etc. to the P2P lending platform, indicating compliance with the PMLA rules. Further, records pertaining to the identification of the customer will have to be maintained for a period of ten years after the termination of the business relationship. ‘Suspicious transactions’ will have to be reported to the Financial Intelligence Unit India. To combat financing of terrorism activities, continuous screening and monitoring of transactions which have no apparent economic or visible lawful purpose should be done. NBFCs should give special attention to business relationships and transactions with persons in countries which do not or insufficiently apply the FATF recommendations.

3.4. Compliance with Guidelines on Fair Practices Code for NBFCs

Though P2P lending platforms are not loan companies, the object of classifying them as a NBFC would be defeated if they are not made to comply with the RBI established FCP guidelines. These requirements include:

All communications to the borrower shall be in the vernacular language or a language as understood by the borrower.
To enable the borrower to make an informed decision, loan application forms should include necessary information which affects the interest of the borrower, so that a meaningful comparison with the terms and conditions offered by other NBFCs.
A system of providing acknowledgement for receipt of all loan applications with a time frame should be established.
The amount of the loan sanctioned along with the terms and conditions including annualised rate of interest and method of application thereof should be kept on record by the NBFC.
NBFCs shall mention the penal interest charged for late repayment in bold in the loan agreement.
Non furnishment of a copy of the loan agreement or enclosures quoted in the loan agreement being an unfair practice, NBFCs are, therefore, advised to furnish a copy of the loan agreement along with a copy each of all enclosures quoted in the loan agreement to all the borrowers at the time of sanction / disbursement of loans.
The NBFCs should give notice to the borrower of any change in the terms and conditions including disbursement schedule, interest rates, service charges, prepayment charges etc.
NBFCs should also ensure that changes in interest rates and charges are effected only prospectively. A suitable condition in this regard should be incorporated in the loan agreement. Decision to recall / accelerate payment or performance under the agreement should be in consonance with the loan agreement.
NBFCs should release all securities on repayment of all dues or on realisation of the outstanding amount of loan subject to any legitimate right or lien for any other valid claim. If such right of set off is to be exercised, the borrower shall be given notice about the same with full particulars about the remaining claims and the conditions under which NBFCs are entitled to retain the securities till the relevant claim is settled/paid.
NBFCs should refrain from interference in the affairs of the borrower except for the purposes provided in the terms and conditions of the loan agreement (unless new information, not earlier disclosed by the borrower, has come to the notice of the lender).
In case of receipt of request from the borrower for transfer of borrowed account, the consent or objection of the NBFC, should be conveyed within 21 days from the date of receipt of request. Such transfer shall be as per transparent contractual terms in consonance with law.
In the matter of recovery of loans, the NBFCs should not resort to undue harassment. Staff should adequately trained to deal with the customers in an appropriate manner.
The Board of Directors of NBFCs should also lay down an appropriate grievance redressal mechanism within the organization to resolve disputes arising in this regard.
NBFCs will have the freedom of implementing measures which enhance the scope of the guidelines without sacrificing their underlying spirit.

The directions as to the formation of appropriate internal principles and procedures in determining interest rates excepting processing and other charges are not be applicable to P2P lending platforms. Thus, P2P lending platforms are not be made to adopt the interest rate model and communicate with the borrower as to the approach for gradation of risk and rationale for charging different rate of interest to different categories of borrowers.

3.5. Obligations to Share Credit Information

In terms of Section 2(f) (ii) of the Credit Information Companies (Regulation) Act, 2005, a non-banking financial company as defined under clause (f) of Section 45-I of the Reserve Bank of India Act, 1934 has also been included as "credit institution" [13]. Further, the Credit Information Companies (Regulation) Act provides that every credit institution in existence shall become a member of at least one credit information company [14]. Thus all NBFCs being credit institutions are required to become a member of at least one credit information company as per the statute. In this regard, in terms of sub-sections (1) and (2) of Section 17 of the Credit Information Companies (Regulation) Act, 2005, a credit information company may require its members to furnish credit information as it may deem necessary in accordance with the provisions of the Act and every such credit institution has to provide the required information to that credit information company.

In terms of Regulation 10(a) (ii) of the Credit Information Companies Regulations, 2006, every credit institution shall:

keep the credit information maintained by it, updated regularly on a monthly basis or at such shorter intervals as may be mutually agreed upon between the credit institution and the credit information company; and
take all such steps which may be necessary to ensure that the credit information furnished by it, is update, accurate and complete.

Thus, P2P lending platforms will have to regularly disclose credit information, both current and historical, to enable the creation of robust databases with Credit Information Companies.

4. Endnotes

[1] See: https://rbidocs.rbi.org.in/rdocs/Publications/PDFs/RBIAM_230609.pdf.

[2] See: http://dipp.nic.in/English/acts_rules/Press_Notes/pn3_2016.pdf.

[3] See: https://rbidocs.rbi.org.in/rdocs/content/pdfs/PNNBFC200315.pdf.

[4] See: https://www.faircent.com/.

[5] See: http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/small-biz/startups/faircent-com-raises-pre-series-a-funding-of-250k/articleshow/47630279.cms.

[6] See: https://www.rbi.org.in/scripts/NotificationUser.aspx?Id=9830&Mode=0.

[7] See: http://dipp.nic.in/English/acts_rules/Press_Notes/pn3_2016.pdf.

[8] See: https://rbi.org.in/Scripts/NotificationUser.aspx?Id=8899&Mode=0#f1.

[9] See: https://rbi.org.in/Scripts/BS_NBFCNotificationView.aspx?Id=9934.

[10] See: https://rbi.org.in/scripts/NotificationUser.aspx?Id=7962&Mode=0.

[11] See: https://rbi.org.in/scripts/NotificationUser.aspx?Id=9081&Mode=0.

[12] See: https://rbi.org.in/Scripts/BS_NBFCNotificationView.aspx?Id=9449.

[13] See: http://www.incometaxindia.gov.in/Pages/acts/credit-information-companies-act.aspx.

[14] See: https://rbi.org.in/Scripts/BS_ViewMasCirculardetails.aspx?id=9913#16.

5. Author Profile

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/rbi-consultation-paper-on-p2p-lending-legality-and-implications

RBI Consultation Paper on P2P Lending: Data Security and Privacy Concerns

vipul — 2016-06-01T11:41:17Z

On April 28, 2016 the Reserve Bank of India published a consultation paper on P2P Lending and invited comments from the public on the same. The Paper discusses what P2P lending is, the various regulatory practices that govern P2P lending in different jurisdictions and lists our arguments for and against regulating P2P lending platforms.

Arguments against Regulation

The arguments against regulation of P2p lending companies as set out in the paper are (briefly):

Regulating an exempt or nascent sector may be perceived as rubber stamping the industry through regulation, thus lending credibility to the P2P lending which could attract ill informed lenders to the sector who may not understand all the risks associated with the industry. In this way Regulation may cause more harm than good.
Regulations may also be perceived as too stringent, thus stifling the growth of an innovative, efficient and accessible industry.
The P2P lending market is currently in a nascent stage and does not pose an immediate systemic risk meriting regulation.

Arguments in favour of Regulation

The arguments for regulating the market on the other hand are:

Considering the significance of the online industry and the impact which it can have on the traditional banking channels/NBFC sector, it would be prudent to regulate this emerging industry.
The, the importance of these methods of financing, specially in sectors where formal lending cannot reach, needs to be acknowledged.
If the sector is left unregulated altogether, there is the risk of unhealthy practices being adopted by one or more players, which may have deleterious consequences.
Section 45S of RBI Act prohibits an individual or a firm or an unincorporated association of individuals from accepting deposits “if its business wholly or partly includes any of the activities specified in clause (c) of section 45-I (i.e. activities of a financial institution); or if his or its principal business is that of receiving of deposits under any scheme or arrangement or in any other manner, or lending in any manner. Contravention of Section 45S is an offence punishable under section 58B (5A) of RBI Act. As per the Act, ‘‘deposit’’ includes and shall be deemed always to have included any receipt of money by way of deposit or loan or in any other form, but does not include any amount received from an individual or a firm or an association of individuals not being a body corporate, registered under any enactment relating to money lending which is for the time being in force in any State. Since the borrowers and lenders brought together by a P2P platform could fall within these prohibitions, absence of regulation may lead to perpetrating an illegality.”

After listing out the arguments, the paper adopts the approach of regulating this industry and proposes to bring P2P lending platforms under the purview of RBI’s regulation by defining them as Non Banking Financial Companies (NBFCs) under section 45-I(f)(iii) of the RBI Act. Once notified as NBFCs, RBI can issue regulations under sections 45JA and 45L. Though there is scope to comment on many aspects of the consultation paper our comments here will be limited to the data security and privacy aspects of the recommendations.

Data Security and Privacy Concerns

While the understanding of potential borrowers, specially those who have had experiences with commercial financial institutions, is that the more amount of information they provide, the better their chances become of getting a loan. This perception emanates from the fact that any potential borrower is asked for a myriad of documents, including personally identifying documents before a request for a loan is considered, infact for almost all financial institutions it is part of their core prudential norms to ask for identity documents before disbursing a loan. Getting as much information as possible from the borrower is not just a quirk of the financial institutions but it makes business sense for them, since it is those institutions who bear the risk of recovery of their money. There is no reason why the same logic or allowing creditors all the information about the borrower should not be applicable to P2P lending platforms, as far as the principle of prudential business practices is concerned. However, the key difference between disclosing information to P2P lending platforms as opposed to financial institutions is that whilst the information supplied to financial institutions stays limited to the institution and its employees, a large amount of the information (though not necessarily all) given to P2P platforms is made available to all potential creditors, which in P2P lending translates to any internet user who registers as a potential creditor. In this way the potential for the information to reach a wider group of people is much higher and therefore privacy and data security risks require special attention in P2P lending.

In section 5.3(v) of the Paper it is recommended that “Confidentiality of the customer data and data security would be the responsibility of the Platform. Transparency in operations, adequate measures for data confidentiality and minimum disclosures to borrowers and lenders would also be mandated through a fair practices code.” Whilst the fair practices code has not yet been developed or at least not yet made publicly available, as companies in the P2P lending industry are body corporates, these fair practice codes should be in line with and satisfy the requirements of section 43A of the Information Technology Act, 2000 (“IT Act”) as well as the Guidelines issued by the RBI’s Guidelines on Information security, Electronic Banking, Technology risk management and cyber frauds [1].

The minimum standards for data protection in Indian law have been laid down by section 43A of the IT Act and the Information Technology (Reasonable security practices and procedures and sensitive personal data or information) Rules, 2011 (“Rules”) issued under section 43A. As per Rule 4 of the Rules P2P platforms would be required to have a privacy policy to deal with sensitive personal data, which includes any details regarding financial information such bank account, credit/debit cards, etc [2].

This policy would have to be published on the website of the platforms and would provide for a number of things such as (i) Clear and easily accessible statements of its practices and policies; (ii) type of personal or sensitive personal data or information collected; (iii) purpose of collection and usage of such information; (iv) disclosure of information including sensitive personal data or information; (v) reasonable security practices and procedures for the data. The other requirements of the Rules as regards consent before usage of the information, collection limitations, imparting information/notice to the consumer (information provider), retention limitation, purpose limitation, opt-out option, disclosure, etc. will also be applicable to P2P platforms and the fair practices code that the RBI would issue for this purpose will have to take all these issues into account.

The Rules also provide that body corporates will be considered to have complied with reasonable security practices if they have implemented such security practices and standards and have a comprehensive documented information security programme and information security policies that contain managerial, technical, operational and physical security control measures that are commensurate with the information assets being protected with the nature of business. Although there are no such practices which have been endorsed by any governmental body for P2P lending platforms, however the Department of Banking Supervision, Reserve Bank of India, has issued guidelines on “Information security, Electronic Banking, Technology risk management and cyber frauds" [3]. which could be relied upon until a fair practices code is put into place. The major privacy and data security provisions of these guidelines are given below:

Security Baselines: The guidelines require banks to be proactive in identifying and specifying the minimum security baselines to be adhered to by the service providers to ensure confidentiality and security of data;
Back up records: A cloud computing system must ensure backup of all its clients' information;
Security steps: An institution may take the following steps to ensure that risks with respect to confidentiality and security of data are adequately mitigated: (i) Address, agree, and document specific responsibilities of the respective parties in outsourcing; (ii) Discuss and agree on the instances where customer data shall be accessed; (iii) Ensure that service provider employees are adequately aware and informed on the security and privacy policies.
Confidentiality: Agreements should provide for maintaining confidentiality of customer's information even after the contract expires or is terminated by either party and specify the liability in case of security breach or leakage.
Encryption: Normally, a minimum of 128-bit SSL encryption is expected. Banks should only select encryption algorithms which are well established international standards.
Fraud Risk Management: It is also necessary that customer confidential information and other data/information available with banks is secured adequately to ensure that fraudsters do not access it to perpetrate fraudulent transactions.

Although inclusion of the above principles in the fair practices code would be helpful, however since the workings of P2P platforms are quite unique, therefore it would be counterproductive to restrict the security and privacy protocols to only those applied to regular banking transactions and the fair practices code should take into account these unique problems of P2P lending rather than seek to apply the existing norms blindly.

Endnotes

[1] See: https://rbidocs.rbi.org.in/rdocs/content/PDFs/GBS300411F.pdf.

[2] The Rules define “sensitive personal data or information” as information relating to: "(i) password, (ii) financial information such as Bank account or credit card or debit card or other payment instrument details, (iii) physical, physiological and mental health condition, (iv) sexual orientation, (v) medical records and history, (vi) Biometric information, (vii) any detail relating to the above clauses as provided to body corporate for providing service, and (viii) any of the information received under above clauses by body corporate for processing, stored or processed under lawful contract or otherwise."

[3] See: http://rbidocs.rbi.org.in/rdocs/content/PDFs/GBS300411F.pdf.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/rbi-consultation-paper-on-p2p-lending

RBI and Regulation of Digital Financial Services in India, 2012-2016

Shivalik Chandan — 2016-07-11T06:27:23Z

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) published its first guideline on mobile banking in 2008, and the conversation on integrating Aadhaar numbers with bank account numbers on one hand and mobile numbers on the other started as soon as UIDAI was established. However, it is the post-2010 period, with rapid growth of the e-commerce sector in India, that saw rise of digital financial services and intermediaries, and hence the demand for regulatory intervention in the sector. This essay by Shivalik Chandan tracks RBI policies and guidelines responding to and shaping the regulatory framework of the digital financial sector in India, including both mobile banking and online transactions.

1. Introduction

2. Mobile Banking in India

2.1. Customer Enrolment Issues identified by the RBI

2.2. Technical Issues identified by the RBI

2.3. The Way Forward

3. Online Payments in India

3.1. Regulatory Response to Online Payment Instruments

3.2. Infrastructure for Online Payments between Private Parties

3.3. Infrastructure for Online Payments involving the Government

3.4. The Way Forward

4. Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Lending

5. Conclusion

6. Endnotes

7. Author Profile

1. Introduction

The advent of new technology usually leads to innovation in industry. Regardless of the sector, new technology is almost always adopted to make tasks easier and more efficient, and this applies to the financial sector as well. Advancements such as credit cards and ATMs have fundamentally changed the process of banking and finance. The past few years have seen some major innovation in the sector, leading to a shift in the way people interact with the financial system of the country. Pursuant to the same, the Reserve Bank of India has responded to these advancements to make sure that they do not go unchecked.

The e-commerce industry in India has seen unprecedented growth over the last few years, largely because of a higher level of internet penetration among the population. From a worth of $3.9 billion in 2009, the worth of the Indian e-commerce market went up to $12.6 billion in 2013 [1]. The number of online shoppers was 35 billion in 2014, and is now expected to cross 100 million by the end of this year [2]. The newfound presence of the e-commerce industry in the country has led to a new form of payment: the online wallet. A more convenient method than using a credit card for every transaction, it is expected to achieve a compound annual growth rate of 68% this year [3].

A priority of the RBI since the mid-2000s has been financial inclusion. The term is usually defined with respect to financial exclusion, which is construed as the inability to access necessary financial services in an appropriate form due to problems associated with access, conditions, prices, markets, or self-exclusion. In contrast, financial inclusion is the delivery of financial services at affordable costs to disadvantaged sections of society. There is no single metric that can determine the amount of financial inclusion, and specific indicators such as number of bank accounts and number of bank branches only provide a partial picture [4].

In 2013, CRISIL launched an index (Inclusix) to measure the status of financial inclusion in India. The index combines branch penetration, deposit penetration, and credit penetration into one metric. The report was the first regional, state-wise, and district-wise assessments of financial inclusion ever measured, and the first analysis of inclusion trends over a three-year period. Some key conclusions found in the report were [5]:

The all-India CRISIL Inclusix score of 40.1 is low, though there were clear signs of progress – this score had improved from 35.4 in 2009.
Deposit penetration is the key driver of financial inclusion – the number of savings accounts (624 million), is almost four times the number of loan accounts (160 million).

2. Mobile Banking in India

Perhaps the biggest change in banking in recent times has been the introduction of mobile banking. The RBI issued its first set of regulatory guidelines to do with mobile banking in 2008, where banks were permitted to transfer funds from one bank account to another through the mobile platform. From 2010 to 2012, the number of users of mobile banking services grew 277.68% (from 5.96 million to 22.51 million) and the value grew a whopping 875.6% (from Rs. 6.14 billion to Rs. 59.90 billion). These figures clearly indicate that mobile banking in the country is growing at a very high rate. Yet, as of 2014, there were 350 to 500 million unique mobile subscribers and only 22 million mobile banking customers [6].

The RBI clearly recognised the potential for a widespread increase in mobile banking as well as the opportunity of increasing financial inclusion in the country, and made recommendations for “addressing the consumer acquisition challenges as well as the technical aspects” [7]. Recommendations such as alternate channels for mobile registration such as ATMs, uniformity in the mobile registration process across banks, and standardisation and simplification of the MPIN generation process were made by the RBI. Despite the potential in mobile banking as a channel for financial services, and financial inclusion, the RBI identified several challenges with the platform, which were of two types – customer enrolment related issues, and technical issues.

2.1. Customer Enrolment Issues identified by the RBI

The following customer enrolment issues were identified by the RBI:

Mobile Number Registration: In order to avail mobile banking services, the customer needs to go to a branch of the bank or an ATM of that bank to register their mobile number. The RBI recommended that registration be made possible through other channels as well, and that registration forms be made uniform to ease the customer experience.
MPIN Generation: The process for MPIN generation is different across banks, and requires a visit to the bank branch in some cases. The RBI recommended that the process be standardised and that the MPIN be intimated to the customer through their handset without necessitating a visit to the bank.

These recommendations were implemented by the RBI in its Master Circular issued in December 2014 [8].

2.2. Technical Issues identified by the RBI

One of the major technical issues identified by the RBI was the fact that there is a large disparity in the type of mobile handset, and consequentially, the technology most customers have. The majority of handsets in the country are GSM or CDMA enabled, and a comparatively small number have GPRS technology. The RBI identified three major ways of mobile banking utilised by most banks as SMS, USSD, and application based banking. The problems the RBI identified with the SMS method were that the service is not encrypted, and that it may become inconvenient for customers to remember the syntax required for the commands. The USSD system solves the complexity issue, as it presents an interactive menu and is much faster than SMS. However, it is still not a secure means of communication. A big step forward for the USSD system has been the implementation of the National Unified USSD Platform by the National Payments Corporation of India with a single short code (*99#) to utilise the common USSD channel for mobile banking for all banks [9].

The RBI conceded that application based mobile banking is the best way to offer the service both in terms of user friendliness as well as security, but stated that developing these applications requires a large amount of research and development due to the extremely high number of permutations and combinations of handsets and operating systems available on the market, and that smartphones are in the minority as far as type of handsets go. To resolve these issues, the RBI suggested that banks continue offering all three services, so that the largest number of people can take advantage of mobile banking services. The RBI also recommended that all banks implement a uniform mobile banking system across all three architectures (SMS, USSD, and applications) for the ease of consumers [10].

2.3. The Way Forward

In the two years since these recommendations were published, smartphones and GPRS connections (both required for application-based mobile banking) have become a lot cheaper and have permeated a larger section of the Indian society. Hopefully, this trend will gradually reflect in the banking sector and lead to a boom in application-based mobile banking. The next challenge that the RBI will face in the coming years in the field of mobile banking is the replacement of credit cards with smartphones. Both Apple and Google (with Apple Pay and Android Pay) are utilising NFC technology in smartphones to enable customers to store their credit card information on their smartphone and simply tap it onto a terminal to complete the transaction, and even though it is available in a small number of countries presently, it is only a matter of time before it is introduced in India, and this development has been addressed by the RBI in the ‘Vision 2012-2015’ document, where they have addressed the requirement of updating all PoS terminals at the merchant ends, as well as developing an open standard for all NFC transactions, regardless of the payment system operators [11].

The RBI has announced its intention to review the guidelines for mobile banking to address issues relating to customer registration, safety and security of transactions, risk mitigation, and customer grievance redressal measures, with the intention of promoting mobile phones as access channels to payment and banking services. The policy efforts will also focus on ensuing that mobile banking services are provided to non-smartphone users across the country as well [12].

3. Online Payments in India

The National Payments Corporation of India was set up in 2009 as an umbrella organisation for all retail payment systems (under section 25 of the Companies Act) with the core objective of consolidating and integrating the multiple systems with varying service levels into a nation-wide, uniform, and standard business process for all retail systems [13, 14]. In 2012, the RBI, in its Vision 2012-2015 document, recognised the development of new e-payment systems and the increasing proportion of transactions taking place through these systems. The introduction of technology such as cloud computing, mobile telephony, service oriented architecture, and an increasing popularity of the virtual world would, according to the RBI, lead to significant changes in the way payments would be processed in the future. The document elucidated the possibility of the movement away from cash transactions to electronic transactions, leading to their goal of a ‘less-cash economy’ [15]. The RBI set the objective of innovating towards the convergence of products and services which should be available across all delivery channels to all, in a low-cost, safe, and efficient manner. The RBI held that its regulatory stance would be to promote innovation to achieve the goals of inclusion, accessibility, and affordability, while remaining technology neutral [16].

3.1. Regulatory Response to Online Payment Instruments

The introduction of online wallets has provided consumers with a simpler and more efficient method to complete online transactions across a wide variety of merchants, and is growing at a considerable rate. A master circular was issued by the RBI in December 2014, outlining the guidelines that these wallets (which are considered a part of ‘pre-paid payment instruments’) must follow. In the circular, RBI defined three types of payment instruments or wallets.

Closed wallets can be issued by a company to a consumer for buying goods exclusively from that company, such as Flipkart or Amazon. They do not need any sort of permission or regulation from the RBI as they do not permit cash withdrawal or redemption, and hence are not classified as payment systems.
Semi-closed wallets can be used to purchase goods and services at clearly identified merchant locations which have a specific contract with the issuer to accept the payment instrument. NBFCs can issue semi-closed wallets which need to be authorised by the RBI. The most commonly known online wallets (such as Paytm and Mobikwik) fall under this category.
Open wallets can be used for the purchase of goods and services (including financial services) at any card accepting merchant terminal and can also be used for cash withdrawal at ATMs. However, these can only be issued by banks with approval from the RBI [17].

The RBI has classified three categories of pre-paid payment instruments that can be issued:

Up to Rs. 10,000, by accepting the minimum details of the customer, provided that the amount outstanding at any time does not exceed Rs. 10,000 and the total value of reloads per month does not exceed Rs. 10,000. These can only be issued in electronic form.
From Rs. 10,001 to Rs. 50,000, by accepting any ‘officially valid document’ defined under rule 2(d) of the PML Rules, 2005, which are amended from time to time. These are to be non-reloadable in nature.
Up to Rs. 1,00,000 with full KYC, and these can be reloadable in nature. The balance in the PPI should not exceed this amount at any time [18].

3.2. Infrastructure for Online Payments between Private Parties

Pursuant to the goal of enabling infrastructure for financial transactions between private parties, the NPCI implemented the Immediate Payment Service (IMPS) in 2010. The service offers an instantaneous, 24x7 interbank electronic fund transfer service, which can be utilised through mobile, internet, or an ATM. This service is superior to the previously used NEFT service, as NEFT transactions are settled in batches and hence are not in real time. Also, the NEFT service is only available during the working hours of the RTGS system, while the IMPS can be used at any time [19].

Building on the IMPS service, the NPCI has developed the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), which will allow customers to transfer money and make payments almost as easily as they send messages. Multiple bank accounts can be linked to one application, and the need for sharing sensitive information such as bank account numbers, OTPs, or mobile numbers has been eliminated. This interface has been touted to have a large impact on the payment space, and help the economy move closer to a ‘less-cash’ economy [20]. On launch of the Interface in April of this year, 29 banks concurred to provide UPI services to their customers, and 21 of those banks have already joined the UPI as payment service providers.

On downloading the UPI application of a bank, a ‘virtual identifier’ is generated by the application which works as a payment identifier for sending and collecting money, and is protected by a single click two-factor authentication. The virtual ID is an email ID-like format: for example, if a customer named ABC had an account in HDFC bank, his virtual ID would be ABC@hdfc. However, the customer has the choice to use his/her mobile number or Aadhar number in place of the name. In order to protect the customer’s privacy, there is no account number mapper anywhere except the customer’s bank. When a customer selects UPI as the payment mode for an online transaction and the request reaches the merchant’s server, it is immediately passed onto the acquiring bank’s server where a UPI collection transaction is initiated on the customer’s virtual identifier. This request reaches the customer’s phone through the UPI server on the basis of the virtual identifier, and the customer authenticates it using the MPIN to complete the transaction [21].

The UPI can be utilised for real-world transactions as well. Instead of handing over cash, the customer can simply tell the cashier his/her virtual ID. The cashier can then initiate a pay request through the UPI, and the customer can authenticate it on his/her phone, leading to the completion of the transaction [22].

3.3. Infrastructure for Online Payments involving the Government

In the ‘Vision 2012-2015’ document, the RBI outlined an opportunity of developing a bill payment system for payments toward insurance premiums, utility payments, taxes, school fees, etc. To this end, a committee was set up to analyse the potential for an electronic GIRO (General Interbank Recurring Order) payment system in India. Under the recommendation of the Committee, a Giro Advisory Group (GAG) was set up with the objective of defining a framework which enables the creation of pan India touch points for bill payments, which submitted its report in March 2014. The GAG recommended a tiered system for bill systems in the country – a central unit which would set the standards, and various operating bodies which would work in accordance with the standards set by the central body. Draft guidelines for the Bharat Bill Payment System (BBPS) were published on the RBI website in August 2014 for public comments. Based on recommendations, the RBI published guidelines for the implementation of the BBPS in November 2014.

The BBPS will consist of two types of bodies, which will carry out distinct functions:

Bharat Bill Payment Central Unit (BBPCU): The single authorised body which will set the necessary technical, operational, and technical standards for the entire system and its participants, and will also undertake clearing and settlement activities. The NPCI will serve as the BBPCU.
Bharat Bill Payment Operating Units (BBPOU): The authorised operational units, which will work in adherence to the standards set by the BBPCU.

The objective of the BBPS is to implement an integrated bill payment system which offers interoperable and accessible bill payment systems to customers through a network of agents, enabling multiple payment modes, and providing instant confirmations of the payments. Hence, the RBI decided that all existing players (both banks and non-banks) catering to the requirement of bill payments as well as the aggregation of payment services will be a part of the BBPS [23]. Initially, the BBPS is expected to cover repetitive payments for everyday utility services such as electricity, water, gas, telephone, and DTH. The plan is to gradually expand the scope to include other types of repetitive payments like school/university fees, municipal taxes, etc.

On 20 October, 2015, the RBI issued a press release inviting applications from entities engaged in bill payments, for authorisation to operate as BBPOUs, stating the function as “facilitating collection of repetitive payments for everyday utility services, such as, electricity, water, gas, telephone and Direct-to-Home (DTH)” [24].

As of May 2016, 33 companies were reportedly approved by the RBI to function as BBPOUs. PayU India, PayTm, Oxigen, SBI, ICICI bank, HDFC bank, Kotak Mahindra Bank, Bank of Baroda, Axis Bank and RBL Bank and TechProcess have confirmed their BBPOU license [25]. The system is expected to launch in July this year [26].

3.4. The Way Forward

The RBI, in its ‘Vision 2018’ document, has outlined the future plans relating to pre-paid instruments. With an increase in the number of entities authorised to issue PPIs, there has been a growth in their usage for the purchase of goods and services as well as transfer of funds. The RBI plans to review the provisions relating to PPIs about KYC requirements, customer-facing aspects such as safety and security, risk mitigation measures, complaint redressal mechanisms, forfeiture of unutilised balances, and fraud monitoring. The RBI also plans to monitor developments in technology which impact the financial services industry, such as distributed ledgers, blockchain, etc. and develop regulatory frameworks as required [27].

4. Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Lending

Another new development in the banking and finance sector is the introduction of peer to peer lending (hereinafter referred to as P2P lending). P2P lending is a form of crowdfunding which is essentially an online platform designed to bring together lenders and borrowers. A fee is charged from both and this fee goes to providing services such as collecting loan repayments and doing a preliminary assessment on the trustworthiness of the borrower. The RBI issued a consultation paper on this in April 2016 and invited responses from the various stakeholders.

The RBI identified that even though there is no credible data on the total lending through P2P platforms, close to 20 P2P lending platforms were launched in the last year, and there are presently around 30 such platforms in the country. After looking at the operational business model of these companies, the RBI found that the major regulatory concerns would relate to KYC and recovery practices.

After holding that regulation might lend credibility to P2P lending and therefore cause low-awareness lenders to make high-risk investments, and might stifle the growth of an innovative and efficient avenue for borrowers who either do not have access to or have been rejected by traditional loan mechanisms, the RBI argued for regulation in the following ways. Firstly, they held that in its nascent stage, the industry might disrupt the financial sector and it would be better to avoid such disruption. Secondly, the lower operational costs might lead to a softening of lending rates, and the RBI feels that it would benefit the P2P lending platforms if they were regulated. Thirdly, they identified the potential for unethical practices being adopted by any of the players in the market in the absence of regulation. Finally, the RBI held that borrows and lenders which are brought together by the P2P platform might be perpetrating an illegality under Section 45S of the RBI Act if they are unregulated.

Based on these considerations, the RBI recommended regulations on the P2P platforms in order to “facilitate the orderly growth of this sector so that its ability to provide an alternative avenue for credit for the right kind of borrowers is harnessed.” Some of the regulations proposed by the RBI were the limiting of P2P lending platforms to the role of an intermediary between lenders and borrowers, a requirement of a minimum capital of Rs. 2 crore and prudential limits on the maximum contribution by a lender (since they may include uninformed individuals), and the enforcement of adequate risk management systems to ensure smooth operations [28].

5. Conclusion

The RBI, setting out a goal of financial inclusion and a less-cash economy, has kept up with developing technology in the financial sector, in order to ensure that consumers can glean the benefits of these advancements, and the goals it set out can be achieved.

Mobile banking is one of the largest opportunities for financial inclusion in countries, and the RBI, through its policy efforts, is trying to ensure that it reaches maximum penetration in the country. E-commerce is growing in the country, leading to a new financial space being created, which the RBI is privy to. The NPCI has been a boon in this sector, achieving a considerable amount since it was launched. P2P lending, a new and relatively untested development is gaining momentum in the country, and the RBI has begun to take concrete steps to make sure it does not get out of hand.

Technological advancements will continue to change all industries, including the financial services industry, and it is the task of the RBI to make sure that these advancements are utilised to the best of their abilities, so as to benefit the customers in the country as best as possible.

6. Endnotes

[1] PwC, (2014). Evolution of E-commerce in India. [online] Available at: http://www.pwc.in/assets/pdfs/publications/2014/evolution-of-e-commerce-in-india.pdf [Accessed 6 Jul. 2016].

[2] The Times of India. (2014). "Online shoppers in India to cross 100 million by 2016: Study."[online] Available at: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/tech-news/Online-shoppers-in-India-to-cross-100-million-by-2016-Study/articleshow/45217773.cms [Accessed 6 Jul. 2016].

[3] Singh, A. (n.d.). "Mobile Wallets – Market, Opportunities and Challenges." [online] Altimetrik.com. Available at: http://www.altimetrik.com/wisdometrik/mobile-wallets-market-opportunities-and-challenges/ [Accessed 6 Jul. 2016].

[4] Thorat, Usha. (2008). "Financial Inclusion and Information Technology". Keynote address by Deputy Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, at the "Vision 2020 – Indian Financial Services Sector" event hosted by NDTV, in Mumbai, September 12. Available at: http://www.bis.org/review/r080917d.pdf [Accessed 6 Jul. 2016].

[5] CRISIL, (2013). "Finance Minister launches ‘CRISIL Inclusix’." [online] Available at: http://www.crisil.com/Ratings/Brochureware/News/CRISIL-Inclusix-launch-pr_250613.pdf [Accessed 8 Jul. 2016].

[6] Reserve Bank of India, (2014). Mobile Banking - Report of the Technical Committee. [online] Available at: https://rbi.org.in/scripts/PublicationReportDetails.aspx?UrlPage=&ID=760 [Accessed 6 Jul. 2016].

[7] Ibid.

[8] Reserve Bank of India, (2014). Master Circular - Mobile Banking Transactions in India - Operative Guidelines. [online] Available at: https://rbidocs.rbi.org.in/rdocs/notification/PDFs/65MNF052B434ED3C4CE391590891B8F3BE66.PDF [Accessed 8 Jul. 2016].

[9] National Payments Corporation of India. (n.d.). "Overview of *99# Service." [online] Available at: http://www.npci.org.in/Product-Overview-NUUP.aspx [Accessed 8 Jul. 2016].

[10] Supra note [6].

[11] Reserve Bank of India, (2012). Payment Systems in India: Vision 2012-15. [online] Available at: https://www.rbi.org.in/Scripts/PublicationVisionDocuments.aspx?Id=678 [Accessed 6 Jul. 2016].

[12] Reserve Bank of India, (2015). Payment and Settlement Systems in India: Vision 2018. [online] Available at: https://rbidocs.rbi.org.in/rdocs/PublicationReport/Pdfs/VISION20181A8972F5582F4B2B8B46C5B669CE396A.PDF [Accessed 6 Jul. 2016].

[13] National Payments Corporation of India. (n.d.). "About Us - National Payments Corporation of India." [online] Available at: http://www.npci.org.in/aboutus.aspx. [Accessed 6 Jul. 2016].

[14] See also: Bihari, D. and Chandra, S. (2015). "The Electronic Banking Revolution in India." Journal of Internet Banking and Commerce, [online] (20), p.110. Available at: http://www.icommercecentral.com/open-access/the-electronic-banking-revolution-in-india.php?aid=59261#corr [Accessed 8 Jul. 2016].

[15] The term ‘less-cash economy’ was possibly first used in the context of national regulatory framework by the Bank Indonesia in 2006, and was implemented through the ‘Ayo ke Bank’ program [http://www.adb.org/sites/default/files/publication/156004/adbi-wp149.pdf]. Its usage by the European Payments Council in 2009 [http://www.sepaitalia.eu/uploads/making_sepa_a_reality_v.3.pdf], and the Aite Group in context of the USA [http://aitegroup.com/report/less-cash-society-forecasting-cash-usage-united-states] gave it international attention. RBI first used the term in its 'Payment Systems in India: Vision 2012-15' document.

[16] Supra note [8].

[17] Reserve Bank of India, (2014). Master Circular – Policy Guidelines on Issuance and Operation of Pre-paid Payment Instruments in India. [online] Available at: https://rbidocs.rbi.org.in/rdocs/notification/PDFs/116MCPPI20062014FL.pdf [Accessed 6 Jul. 2016].

[18] Supra note [9].

[19] National Payments Corporation of India. (n.d.). "IMPS - Background." [online] Available at: http://www.npci.org.in/aboutimps.aspx [Accessed 6 Jul. 2016].

[20] Nair, V. (2016). "NPCI’s unified payment interface to start in April." [online] Available at: http://www.livemint.com/Industry/ZA9pPkeGdY9wrChh1BDQhN/NPCIs-unified-payment-interface-to-start-in-April.html [Accessed 6 Jul. 2016].

[21] Mathew, G. (2016). "Unified Payments Interface system: Faster, easier and smoother."[online] The Indian Express. Available at: http://indianexpress.com/article/technology/tech-news-technology/unified-payments-interface-upi-payment-system-faster-easier-and-smoother-2754125/ [Accessed 7 Jul. 2016].

[22] The Hindu. (2016). "RBI's Unified Payments Interface makes payments easier than ever." [online] Available at: http://www.thehindu.com/business/Economy/unified-payments-interface/article8470746.ece [Accessed 7 Jul. 2016].

[23] Lakshminarasimhan, P. (2016). "Bharat Bill Payment System likely to be launched in July." [online] The Financial Express. Available at: http://www.financialexpress.com/article/industry/companies/bharat-bill-payment-system-likely-to-be-launched-in-july/257040/ [Accessed 7 Jul. 2016].

[24] Reserve Bank of India, (2015). "RBI invites Applications for authorising Bharat Bill Payment System Operating Units (BBPOUs)." [online] Available at: https://www.rbi.org.in/Scripts/FS_PressRelease.aspx?prid=35274&fn=9 [Accessed 7 Jul. 2016].

[25] Srivastava, V. (2016). "RBI Grants License to 33 Companies For Bharat Bill Payment System." [online] Thetechportal.com. Available at: http://thetechportal.com/2016/05/17/rbi-grants-license-33-companies-operate-bharat-bill-payment-system/ [Accessed 7 Jul. 2016].

[26] Supra note [23].

[27] Supra note [10].

[28] Reserve Bank of India, (2016). Consultation Paper on Peer to Peer Lending. [online] Available at: https://rbidocs.rbi.org.in/rdocs/Content/PDFs/CPERR280420162D5F13C3A2204F4FB6A2BEA7363D0031.PDF [Accessed 6 Jul. 2016].

7. Author Profile

Shivalik Chandan is a student at National Law University, Delhi, who has completed two years of the B.A. LLB course. He enjoys watching movies, playing the drums, and listening to (almost all genres of) music in his spare time.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/rbi-regulation-digital-financial-services-in-india-2012-2016

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.

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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