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List of Recommendations on the Aadhaar Bill, 2016 - Letter Submitted to the Members of Parliament
https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/list-of-recommendations-on-the-aadhaar-bill-2016
<b>On Friday, March 11, the Lok Sabha passed the Aadhaar (Targeted Delivery of Financial and Other Subsidies, Benefits and Services) Bill, 2016. The Bill was introduced as a money bill and there was no public consultation to evaluate the provisions therein even though there are very serious ramifications for the Right to Privacy and the Right to Association and
Assembly. Based on these concerns, and numerous others, we submitted an initial list of recommendations to the Members of Parliaments to highlight the aspects of the Bill that require immediate attention.</b>
<p> </p>
<h4>Download the submission letter: <a href="https://github.com/cis-india/website/raw/master/docs/CIS_Aadhaar-Bill-2016_List-of-Recommendations_2016.03.16.pdf">PDF</a>.</h4>
<p> </p>
<h3>Text of the Submission</h3>
<p>On Friday, March 11, the Lok Sabha passed the Aadhaar (Targeted Delivery of Financial and Other Subsidies, Benefits and Services) Bill, 2016. The Bill was introduced as a money bill and there was no public consultation to evaluate the provisions therein even though there are very serious ramifications for the Right to Privacy and the Right to Association and Assembly. The Bill has made it compulsory for all Indian to enroll for Aadhaar in order to receive any subsidy, benefit, or service from the Government whose expenditure is incurred from the Consolidate Fund of India. Apart from the issue of centralisation of the national biometric database leading to a deep national vulnerability, the Bill also keeps unaddressed two serious concerns regarding the technological framework concerned:</p>
<ul><li><strong>Identification without Consent:</strong> Before the Aadhaar project it was not possible for the Indian government or any private entity to identify citizens (and all residents) without their consent. But biometrics allow for non-consensual and covert identification and authentication. The only way to fix this is to change the technology configuration and architecture of the project. The law cannot be used to correct the problems in the technological design of the project.<br /><br /></li>
<li><strong>Fallible Technology:</strong> The Biometrics Standards Committee of UIDAI has acknowledged the lack of data on how a biometric authentication technology will scale up where the population is about 1.2 billion. The technology has been tested and found feasible only for a population of 200 million. Further, a report by 4G Identity Solutions estimates that while in any population, approximately 5% of the people have unreadable fingerprints, in India it could lead to a failure to enroll up to 15% of the population. For the current Indian population of 1.2 billion the expected proportion of duplicates is 1/121, a ratio which is far too high. <strong>[1]</strong></li></ul>
<p>Based on these concerns, and numerous others, we sincerely request you to ensure that the Bill is rigorously discussed in Rajya Sabha, in public, and, if needed, also by a Parliamentary Standing Committee, before considering its approval and implementation. Towards this, we humbly submit an initial list of recommendations to highlight the aspects of the Bill that require immediate attention:</p>
<ol><li><strong>Implement the Recommendations of the Shah and Sinha Committees:</strong> The report by the Group of Experts on Privacy chaired by the Former Chief Justice A P Shah <strong>[2]</strong> and the report by the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Finance (2011-2012) chaired by Shri Yashwant Sinha <strong>[3]</strong> have suggested a rigorous and extensive range of recommendations on the Aadhaar / UIDAI / NIAI project and the National Identification Authority of India Bill, 2010 from which the majority sections of the Aadhaar Bill, 2016, are drawn. We request that these recommendations are seriously considered and incorporated into the Aadhaar Bill, 2016.<br /><br /></li>
<li><strong>Authentication using the Aadhaar number for receiving government subsidies, benefits, and services cannot be made mandatory:</strong> Section 7 of the Aadhaar Bill, 2016, states that authentication of the person using her/his Aadhaar number can be made mandatory for the purpose of disbursement of government subsidies, benefits, and services; and in case the person does not have an Aadhaar number, s/he will have to apply for Aadhaar enrolment. This sharply contradicts the claims made by UIDAI earlier that the Aadhaar number is “optional, and not mandatory”, and more importantly the directive given by the Supreme Court (via order dated August 11, 2015). The Bill must explicitly state that the Aadhaar number is only optional, and not mandatory, and a person without an Aadhaar number cannot be denied any democratic rights, and public subsidies, benefits, and services, and any private services.<br /><br /></li>
<li><strong>Vulnerabilities in the Enrolment Process:</strong> The Bill does not address already documented issues in the enrolment process. In the absence of an exhaustive list of information to be collected, some Registrars are permitted to collect extra and unnecessary information. Also, storage of data for elongated periods with Enrollment agencies creates security risks. These vulnerabilities need to be prevented through specific provisions. It should also be mandated for all entities including the Enrolment Agencies, Registrars, CIDR and the requesting entities to shift to secure system like PKI based cryptography to ensure secure method of data transfer.<br /><br /></li>
<li><strong>Precisely Define and Provide Legal Framework for Collection and Sharing of Biometric Data of Citizens:</strong> The Bill defines “biometric information” is defined to include within its scope “photograph, fingerprint, iris scan, or other such biological attributes of an individual.” This definition gives broad and sweeping discretionary power to the UIDAI / Central Government to increase the scope of the term. The definition should be exhaustive in its scope so that a legislative act is required to modify it in any way.<br /><br /></li>
<li><strong>Prohibit Central Storage of Biometrics Data:</strong> The presence of central storage of sensitive personal information of all residents in one place creates a grave security risk. Even with the most enhanced security measures in place, the quantum of damage in case of a breach is extremely high. Therefore, storage of biometrics must be allowed only on the smart cards that are issued to the residents.<br /><br /></li>
<li><strong>Chain of Trust Model and Audit Trail:</strong> As one of the objects of the legislation is to provide targeted services to beneficiaries and reduce corruption, there should be more accountability measures in place. A chain of trust model must be incorporated in the process of enrolment where individuals and organisations vouch for individuals so that when a ghost is introduced someone has can be held accountable blame is not placed simply on the technology. This is especially important in light of the questions already raised about the deduplication technology. Further, there should be a transparent audit trail made available that allows public access to use of Aadhaar for combating corruption in the supply chain.<br /><br /></li>
<li><strong>Rights of Residents:</strong> There should be specific provisions dealing with cases where an individual is not issued an Aadhaar number or denied access to benefits due to any other factor. Additionally, the Bill should make provisions for residents to access and correct information collected from them, to be notified of data breaches and legal access to information by the Government or its agencies, as matter of right. Further, along with the obligations in Section 8, it should also be mandatory for all requesting entities to notify the individuals of any changes in privacy policy, and providing a mechanism to opt-out.<br /><br /></li>
<li><strong>Establish Appropriate Oversight Mechanisms:</strong> Section 33 currently specifies a procedure for oversight by a committee, however, there are no substantive provisions laid down that shall act as the guiding principles for such oversight mechanisms. The provision should include data minimisation, and “necessity and proportionality” principles as guiding principles for any exceptions to Section 29.<br /><br /></li>
<li><strong>Establish Grievance Redressal and Review Mechanisms:</strong> Currently, there are no grievance redressal mechanism created under the Bill. The power to set up such a mechanism is delegated to the UIDAI under Section 23 (2) (s) of the Bill. However, making the entity administering a project, also responsible for providing for the frameworks to address the grievances arising from the project, severely compromises the independence of the grievance redressal body. An independent national grievance redressal body with state and district level bodies under it, should be set up. Further, the NIAI Bill, 2010, provided for establishing an Identity Review Committee to monitor the usage pattern of Aadhaar numbers. This has been removed in the Aadhaar Bill 2016, and must be restored.</li></ol>
<p> </p>
<h3>Endnotes</h3>
<p><strong>[1]</strong> See: <a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/Flaws_in_the_UIDAI_Process_0.pdf.">http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/Flaws_in_the_UIDAI_Process_0.pdf</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[2]</strong> See: <a href="http://planningcommission.nic.in/reports/genrep/rep_privacy.pdf">http://planningcommission.nic.in/reports/genrep/rep_privacy.pdf</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[3]</strong> See: <a href="http://164.100.47.134/lsscommittee/Finance/15_Finance_42.pdf">http://164.100.47.134/lsscommittee/Finance/15_Finance_42.pdf</a>.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/list-of-recommendations-on-the-aadhaar-bill-2016'>https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/list-of-recommendations-on-the-aadhaar-bill-2016</a>
</p>
No publisherAmber Sinha, Sumandro Chattapadhyay, Sunil Abraham, and Vanya RakeshUIDBig DataPrivacyInternet GovernanceFeaturedDigital IndiaAadhaarBiometricsHomepage2016-03-21T08:50:09ZBlog EntryFueling the Affordable Smartphone Revolution in India
https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/digital-asia-hub-the-good-life-in-asias-21-st-century-anubha-sinha-fueling-the-affordable-smartphone-revolution-in-india
<b>Smartphones have emerged as the exemplar of mankind's quest for shrinking technologies. They embody the realization of a simple premise – that computing devices would do more and cost less. This realization has been responsible for modern society's profound transformations in communication, governance, and knowledge distribution.</b>
<p>The essay was published as part of the <a class="external-link" href="http://www.digitalasiahub.org/thegoodlife/">The Good Life in Asia's Digital 21st Century essay collection</a>.</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The launch of the iPhone in 2007 is often credited with ushering in an era of smartphones. Ever since, the world's best tech R&D has focused on increasing the capabilities of these devices. And as a result, less than a decade later, we have sub-hundred dollar smartphones. The low-cost smartphone has found an enthusiastic and insatiable market in developing countries, especially Asia. India is no exception to the Asian narrative – Micromax, Spice, and Lava (low cost smartphone manufacturers) are household names in the Indian smartphone market, which accounted for 65% of internet traffic in 2014 (Meeker, 2015).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The Indian Prime Minister, carrying the twin aspirations of catalyzing the growth of indigenous manufacturing and bridging the digital divide, launched the “Digital India” and “Make in India” campaigns last year. During his US visit, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook extended their support to the campaigns' vision (Guynn, 2011). The campaigns outline the government's elaborate initiatives to, inter alia, bridge the digital divide and build indigenous manufacturing capacity. While all these developments bode well for the indigenous smartphone, there remain some serious concerns affecting the growth of the industry – for instance, patent infringement litigations and the absence of clear legal and regulatory solutions.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">From the state of the industry and its implications, it can be concluded that: first, growing access to smartphones has been influenced by their phenomenal affordability; second, smartphones are an excellent example of technology for development (UNDP, 2001) and a facilitator of access to knowledge; and third, domestic smartphone production has occurred in an imprecise legal and regulatory environment.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">This essay attempts to build an appreciation for the role that smartphones are playing in development, specifically, by fostering Access to Knowledge. Conversations around development by public-interest groups and emerging industries often espouse Access to Knowledge to address concerns in international development, communications, technology, education, and intellectual property policy. Whereas the principle can be regarded as in-theworks, two theories inform us about the role of mobile phones in fostering Access to Knowledge. Lea Sheaver's theory classifies mobile as an Access-toKnowledge good. Lea enumerates the five key components of a robust Access to Knowledge framework, viz., education for information literacy, access to the global knowledge commons, access to knowledge goods, an enabling legal framework, and effective innovation systems (Sheaver, 2007). According to her, affordability of the good is the ultimate indicator of its efficacy as an access to knowledge good. Furthermore, inventions in microchip technology, electronics manufacturing, and software need to be supported by enabling legal and policy frameworks coupled with effective innovation systems.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Yochai Benkler's framework classifies mobile-devices as both informationembedded goods and information-embedded tools (Benkler, 2006). He says, “Information-embedded goods are those goods which are ‘better, more plentiful or cheaper because of some technological advance embedded in them or associated with their production,’ such as medicines, movies, and improved crop seed. Information-embedded tools, in turn, are those technologies necessary for research, innovation, and communication of knowledge” (Benkler, 2006). A smartphone qualifies as both because it can be used to obtain knowledge, and it depends on discoveries in microchip technology, electronics manufacturing, and software to function.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">To date, there has been no formal, theoretical or evidentiary investigation on the emergence of smartphones as an Access-to-Knowledge good. In the following sections, I will attempt to explain the smartphone’s dependence on an enabling legal framework and effective innovation systems (Lea's components). It must be borne in mind that globally, discussions affecting access to knowledge have aimed at creating balanced and inclusive systems related to intellectual property (Kapczynski & Krikorian, 2010). Therefore, the essay will focus on: first, the relationship between constituent mobile technologies and intellectual property as a function of production/deployment of smartphones in India; and second, the relationship between innovation and access.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Creating an Enabling Legal Framework to Foster Access to Knowledge</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The adage “the only lesson you can learn from history is that it repeats itself” is worth bearing in our narrative. The emergence of the smartphones industry in Asia has commonalities with the flourishing Asian piracy trade – which remains an essential access solution for low-income societies constantly barraged by expensive western media goods. The prohibitive cost of acquiring brand-name devices (e.g. Apple, HTC, Samsung, Sony) drove local production to imitate and innovate cheaper substitutes (WIPO, 2010). This occurred within the lenient and flexible intellectual property regimes prevalent in Asian countries, which continue to be constantly criticized for their failure to enact stricter intellectual property law. The hubs of smartphone production – China, Taiwan, and India – have flexible intellectual property protection law and lax enforcement measures (Centre for Internet and Society, 2012).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Concerns of intellectual property center around patent and copyright legislation, which have yet to be fully developed to address intellectual property in high-tech industries (since trademark issues remain unchanged, they will not be discussed in the essay.) As a result, constituent smartphone technologies have been shaped and governed by a blend of formal and informal rules and legal and illegal practices. This is why they are often referred to as “gray market” technologies. A smartphone in terms of constituent intellectual property can be broadly divided into hardware and software technologies. This piece will first deal with hardware, followed by software technologies.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Hardware Technologies and Their Relationship with IP Law</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Presently, most Indian manufacturers import hardware from China and Taiwan, and assemble the phones in India. A few key Indian domestic players are Maxx Mobile, Intex, Spice, and Lava, whose dominance have not gone unnoticed by foreign manufacturers. A couple of these domestic manufacturers are now embroiled in patent litigation threats or infringement suits. And as litigation piles up in Indian courts, the judiciary is slowly waking up to mobile patent litigation, but is yet to rule comprehensively. To make matters worse, the jurisdiction of the Indian antitrust regulator remains unclear, and to a certain extent overlaps with the judiciary, adding to the ambiguity. For instance, when an appellate court ruled in favor of the Swedish tech-giant Ericsson, it ordered Micromax to pay a flat 1.25 – 2% of its devices' selling price to Ericsson (Lakshane, 2015). The ruling was devoid of a more rational and reasoned approach developed by courts of other jurisdictions in similar matters, which prescribed that the infringers pay damages based on the price of the patented components only, and not the retail price of the phones. This decision risks causing a significant increase in the price of phones and potentially threatens local innovation.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The Indian government's Make in India and Digital India campaigns aim to fulfill the vision of a digitally empowered India, and the 2015 Indian Union budget also targets boosting the electronics manufacturing industry. Despite these broad initiatives, there needs to be a more focused policy in place to ensure domestic companies do not get weighed down by patent related concerns. The root cause of litigation is the vesting of a majority of critical mobile patents (Standard Essential Patents, or SEPs) by a handful tech-giants. For instance, Qualcomm owns 5700 patents around CDMA technology (qualcomm.com). In another instance, the DVD format constitutes 311 SEPs for DVD players and 272 SEPs for DVD recorders (CIS, 2012). Such a dense concentration of patents around SEPs creates a patent thicket and thereby compels Smartphone manufacturers to acquire multiple licenses, and to pay high transaction costs and huge royalties to the owner. To reduce conflict and protect domestic players from being arm-twisted into paying high royalties, the government can potentially identify critical technologies and initiate the formation of a patent pool of such technologies. The concept of a patent pool mandates that the patent holders issue licenses on fair, reasonable, and nondiscriminatory basis to interested parties. However, a nuanced and cautious approach to setting up such pools is necessary (Shapiro, 2001).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">There are interesting lessons in China's steps to encourage local innovation of Smartphone hardware as well, specifically in the form of standardized technologies. The Chinese government has actively supported the development of indigenous standards to shield domestic manufacturers from royalty exposure. In fact, the China Blue High-definition Disc (CBHD) standard was built as an alternative to the Blu-ray disc and was duly adopted by the Chinese government, which reportedly caused the royalty rates for the Blu-ray format to dip. Much later, Warner Bros, Paramount, and other motion picture producers adopted the CBHD standard as well for distribution in China.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Software Technologies and Their Relationship with IP Law</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Unlike hardware technology, where India is struggling to build manufacturing capacity, the success of the Indian software industry has already been realized. The software-as-a-service (SaAS) industry is led by Infosys, TCS, and Wipro in software exports. The prevailing trend in the industry since the 1980s was to assign ownership of their products to offshore clients. However, in the past decade, there has been a conscious shift by the Indian software development workforce to build products for Smartphone platforms. This is in response to the shift in local populations to accessing content and services online. Reports indicate that India has the second largest population of mobile applications developers (approx. 3 million) in the world, second only to the US (Livemint, 2015). The Indian government has recognized the potential of mobile application-based ventures and created funds to encourage app development in India (IAMAI, 2015).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Intellectual property protection around software is fairly ambiguous. A piece of code is potentially capable of gaining both patent and copyright protection. In the area of mobile application development, preliminary research findings indicate that coding occurs with an agnostic attitude towards intellectual property laws (Cassar, 2014). One of the reasons is ambiguity on a multitude of issues around the protection of software because Indian legislation on patent and copyright is frustratingly insufficient. There is a growing discontentment about long-term patent protection over software code, which could be detrimental to innovation – particularly, to the start-up segment of software industry. In more technologically advanced economies, software patenting has emerged as a scourge – last year, the US Supreme Court in Alice Corporation Pty Ltd v. CLS Bank International Et Al narrowed the eligibility of software inventions to gain patent protection. The activist discourse has shifted in favor of eliminating software patenting because of the incremental and obsolescent nature of a software invention, inter alia (Lapowsky, 2015). However, in a recent disappointing move, the Indian patent office widened the scope of patent-eligible subject matter for software-related inventions – a move that was decried by free software activists and industry alike. This widening of scope can only benefit tech-giants in building bigger patent portfolios, which is unnecessary and unhealthy for innovation by small and mid-tier entities (Sinha, 2015).</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Effective Innovation Systems</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Innovation ensures fresh creation of knowledge. A society cannot premise itself on the mere importation of knowledge; it must also strive to use the knowledge to meet its own local needs and environment. Innovation depends on a variety of factors – there is no singular path or factor to build an innovative and enterprising society. The patent system is often incorrectly credited with “promoting” innovation. The discourse around innovation was extremely patent-centric until studies disproved the assumptive correlation between high patenting activity and innovation. Continuing in the same vein, Lea states, “From the A2K perspective, however, relying on patents – which represent the right to exclude others from access to the innovation – is particularly problematic. Patents likely represent the segment of innovation of least value for expanding access to knowledge: improvements in the knowledge stock whose application is limited by exclusive property rights” (Shaver, 2007).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In this framework, it is also important to shed light on the growing movement of openness. Openness as a movement has been captured by various fields - Big data, software, education, media, etc. Free and Open Source Software has emerged as a key agent in information technology policy-making in India, with the Indian government adopting an open standards policy and an open software policy for its own purposes.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In the context of smartphone technologies, preliminary findings also support the shift towards openness (Huang, 2014). Industry participants have observed that openness will lead to greater benefits in private production of hardware technologies. Similarly, mobile applications developers have also voiced support of open source software (Cassar, 2014).</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Conclusion</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The discussion above identified a limited set of legal and regulatory concerns affecting the state of production/deployment of smartphones in India. These issues and findings are backed by preliminary research, and purport to sustain the emergence of the smartphone as an enabler of access to knowledge. The proposed solutions direct industry and the government alike to take immediate steps to fix problems impeding pervasive access to this knowledge good.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The experience of the smartphone industry with an imprecise legal and regulatory environment, akin to piracy, has thus far been a success story of affordability, quality substitution, and innovation. However, this narrative is now threatened by messy litigation, jurisdictional uncertainties between the anti-trust regulator and judicial system, SEP licensing issues, rise of software patents, inter alia. Despite these issues, the industry continues to grow. The future of access to knowledge is therefore bright, provided that stakeholders make efforts to meet the needs of this emerging industry and the public, including development and consumer interests.</p>
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<p><strong> References / Links / Resources</strong></p>
<ol>
<li>Benkler, Y. (2006). The Wealth Of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets And Freedom. Retrieved from http://www.benkler.org/wealth_of_networks/index.php?title=Chapter_9%2C_section_3.</li>
<li>Cassar, S. (2014). Interviews with App Developers: Open Source, Community, and Contradictions – Part III. Retrieved from: http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/interviews-with-app-developers-open-sourcecommunity-and-contradictions-iii</li>
<li>Cassar, S. (2014) Ambiguity in the App Store: Understanding India’s emerging IT sector in light of IP. Retrieved from http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/ambiguity-in-the-app-store</li>
<li>Centre for Internet and Society, Pervasive Technologies: Access to Knowledge in the Marketplace(2012, September). Retrieved from http://cis-india.org/a2k/pervasive-technologies-research-proposal.pdf/view</li>
<li>Guynn, J. (2015, September 28). Facebook, Silicon Valley like Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Retrieved from http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2015/09/27/narendra-modi-india-facebook-markzuckerberg-google-sundar-pichai-silicon-valley/72936544/</li>
<li>Huang, M. (2014). [Open] Innovation and Expertise > Patent Protection & Trolls in a Broken Patent Regime (Interviews with Semiconductor Industry - Part 3). Retrieved from: http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/ interviews-with-semi-conductor-industry-part-3</li>
<li>IAMAI (2015). An inquiry into India's app economy.</li>
<li>Kapczynski, A., Krikorian, G., (2010). Access to Knowledge in the Age of Intellectual Property. Retrieved from: https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/titles/free_download/9781890951962_Access_to_ Knowledge_in_the_Age_of_Intellectual_Property.pdf</li>
<li>Lakshane, R. (2015, September). FAQ: CIS Proposal for Compulsory Licensing of Critical Mobile Technologies. Retrieved from: http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/faq-cis-proposal-for-compulsory-licensing-ofcritical-mobile-technologies</li>
<li>Lakshane, R. (2015, February). Open Letter to Prime Minister Modi. Retrieved from: http://cis-india.org/ a2k/blogs/open-letter-to-prime-minister-modi</li>
<li>Lapowsky, I. (2015, February). If You Want to Fix Software Patents, Eliminate Software Patents. Retrieved from https://www.eff.org/mention/follow-wired-twitter-facebook-rss-eff-if-you-want-fix-software-patentseliminate-software</li>
<li>Meeker, M. (2015). 2015 Internet Trends. Retrieved from http://www.kpcb.com/partner/mary-meeker</li>
<li>PTI (2015). Google aims to make India a hub for app development. Livemint. Retrieved from: http:// www.livemint.com/Industry/rwWUfp30YezONe0WnM1TIO/Google-aims-to-make-India-a-hub-for-appdevelopment.html</li>
<li>Qualcomm Enters Into CDMA Modem Card License Agreement with Seiko Instruments Incorporated. (n.d.). Retrieved November 13, 2015, from https://www.qualcomm.com/news/releases/2000/06/20/ qualcomm-enters-cdma-modem-card-license-agreement-seiko-instruments</li>
<li>Shapiro, C. (2001). Navigating the Patent Thicket: Cross Licenses, Patent Pools, and Standard Setting. Innovation Policy and the Economy, 1, 119-150. Retrieved from: http://www.nber.org/chapters/c10778.pdf</li>
<li>Shaver, L. (2007). Defining and Measuring Access to Knowledge: Towards an A2K Index. Faculty Scholarship Series. Paper 22. retrieved from: http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/fss_papers/22</li>
<li>Sinha, A. (2015). Comments on the Guidelines for Examination of Computer Related Inventions (CRIs). Retrieved from http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/comments-on-the-guidelines-for-examination-of-computerrelated-inventions-cris</li>
<li>United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report 2001: Making New Technologies Work for Human Development (2001). Retrieved from http://hdr.undp.org/reports/global/2001/en/</li>
<li>World Intellectual Property Organisation. (2010, Dec 1-2). Media Piracy in Emerging Economies: Price, Market Structure and Consumer Behavior. Retrieved from the WIPO website: http://www.wipo.int/edocs/ mdocs/enforcement/en/wipo_ace_6/wipo_ace_6_5.pdf</li>
</ol>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/digital-asia-hub-the-good-life-in-asias-21-st-century-anubha-sinha-fueling-the-affordable-smartphone-revolution-in-india'>https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/digital-asia-hub-the-good-life-in-asias-21-st-century-anubha-sinha-fueling-the-affordable-smartphone-revolution-in-india</a>
</p>
No publishersinhaFeaturedIntellectual Property RightsAccess to KnowledgePervasive Technologies2016-03-16T15:23:43ZBlog EntryInternet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 - Studying Internet in India: Call for Sessions (Extended to Nov 22)
https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-call
<b>With great excitement, we are announcing the beginning of an annual conference series titled Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC), the first edition of which is to take place in Delhi during February 25-27, 2016 (yet to be confirmed). This first conference will focus on the theme of 'Studying Internet in India.' The word 'study' here is a shorthand for a range of tasks, from documentation and theory-building, to measurement and representation. We invite you to propose sessions for the conference by Sunday, November 22, 2015. Final sessions will be selected during December and announced by December 31, 2015. Below are the details about the conference series, as well instructions for proposing a session for the conference.</b>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>Call for Sessions document: <a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/internet-researchers-conference-irc-2016-studying-internet-in-india-call-for-sessions/at_download/file">Download (PDF)</a></strong></p>
<p><strong>Call for Sessions poster: <a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/internet-researchers-conference-irc-2016-studying-internet-in-india-call-for-sessions-poster/at_download/file">Download (PNG)</a></strong></p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Internet Researchers’ Conference</h2>
<p>The last decades have seen a growing entanglement of our daily lives with the internet, not only as modes of communication but also as shared socio-politico-cultural spaces, and as objects of study. The emergence of new artifacts, conditions, and sites of power/knowledge with the prevalence of digital modes of communication, consumptions, production, distribution, and appropriation have expectedly attracted academic and non-academic explorers across disciplines, professions, and interests. Researchers across the domains of arts, humanities, and social sciences have attempted to understand life on the internet, or life after the internet, and the way digital technologies mediate various aspects of our being today. These attempts have in turn raised new questions around understanding of digital objects, online lives, and virtual networks, and have contributed to complicating disciplinary assumptions, methods, and boundaries.</p>
<p>The Researchers at Work (RAW) programme at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) is very excited to invite you to take part in the first of a series of annual conferences for researchers (academic or otherwise) studying internet in India. These conferences will be called the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC), with the abbreviation reminding us of an early protocol for text-based communication over internet. The first edition will be organised around the theme of ‘studying internet in India.’ The word study here is a shorthand for a range of tasks, from documentation and theory-building, to measurement and representation.</p>
<p>This conference series is founded on the following interests:</p>
<ul><li>Creating discussion spaces for researchers studying internet in India and in other comparable regions.</li>
<li>Foregrounding the multiplicity, hierarchies, tensions, and urgencies of the digital sites and users in India.</li>
<li>Accounting for the various layers, conceptual and material, of experiences and usages of internet and networked digital media in India.</li>
<li>Exploring and practicing new modes of research and documentation necessitated by new (digital) forms of objects of power/knowledge.</li></ul>
<p> </p>
<h2>Studying Internet in India</h2>
<p>The inaugural conference will be held in Delhi (<strong>to be confirmed</strong>) on February 25-27, 2015. It will comprise of discussion and workshop sessions taking place during the first two days, and a writing sprint and a final round table taking place during the third day.</p>
<p>The conference will specifically focus on the following questions:</p>
<ul><li>How do we conceptualise, as an intellectual and political task, the mediation and transformation of social, cultural, political, and economic processes, forces, and sites through internet and digital media technologies in contemporary India?</li>
<li>How do we frame and explore the experiences and usages of internet and digital media technologies in India within its specific historical-material contexts shaped by traditional hierarchies of knowledge, colonial systems of communication, post-independence initiatives in nation-wide technologies of governance, a rapidly growing telecommunication market, and informal circuits of media production and consumption, among others?</li>
<li>What tools and methods are made available by arts, humanities, social science, and technical disciplines to study internet in India; how and where do they fail to meet the purpose; what revisions and fresh tool building are becoming necessary; and how should the usage of such tools and methods be taught?</li>
<li>Given the global techno-economic contours of the internet, and the starkly hierarchical and segmented experiences and usages of the same in India, how do we begin to use the internet as a space for academic and creative practice and intervention?</li></ul>
<p> </p>
<h2>Sessions</h2>
<p>The conference will not be organised around papers but sessions. Each session will be one and half hour long. Potential participants may propose sessions that largely engage with one of the questions listed above.</p>
<p>Each proposed session must have at least two, and preferably three, co-leaders, who will drive the session, and prepare a session document after the conference. The proposed session can either involve a discussion, or a workshop.</p>
<p>In a discussion session, the co-leaders may present their works (not necessarily of the academic kind), or invite others to present their works, on a specific theme, which will be followed by a discussion, as structured by the co-leaders.</p>
<p>In a workshop session, the co-leaders will engage the participants to undertake individual or collaborative work in response to a series of questions, challenges, or provocations offered by the co-leaders at the beginning of the session. The proposed work may involve writing, searching, copying, building, etc., but <strong>not</strong> speaking.</p>
<p>Both the kinds of sessions are open to presentations and collaborations in the textual format or in other formats, including but not limited to code-based works and multimedia installations.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Writing Sprint</h2>
<p>At the writing sprint, on the third day morning, all the participants will collaboratively put together the first draft of a handbook on tools and methods of studying Internet in India. It will be created as an online, open access, multilingual, and editable (wiki-like) book, and will be meant for extensive usage and augmentation by students, researchers, and others.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Final Round Table</h2>
<p>This will take place after the lunch on the third day to wrap-up the conversations (and propose new initiatives, hopefully) emerging during the previous days of the conference, to make plans for follow-up works (including the first IRC Reader), and to speculate about the shape of the next year’s conference.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>IRC Reader</h2>
<p>The IRC Reader will be produced as documentation of the conversations and activities at the conference. The Reader, obviously, will have the same theme as the conference, and will largely comprise of the session documentation (not necessarily textual) prepared by the co-leaders of the session concerned. Once all the session documentation is shared by the co-leaders and is temporarily published online, all the participants will be invited to share their comments, which will all be part of the final Reader of the conference.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Proposing a Session</h2>
<p>To propose a session, each team of two/three co-leaders will have to submit the following documents:</p>
<ul><li>The name of the session: It should be created as a <strong>hashtag</strong>, as in #BlackLivesMatter, or #RefugeesWelcome.</li>
<li>A plan of the proposed session that should clarify its context, the key questions/challenges/provocations for the session, and how they connect to any one of the four questions listed above. Write no more than one page.</li>
<li>If it is a discussion session: Mention what will be presented at the session, and who will present it. Share the abstracts of the papers to be presented (if any). Each abstract should not be longer than 300 words.</li>
<li>If it is a workshop session: Mention what you expect the participants to do during the session, and how the co-leaders will support them through the work. Write no more than one page.</li>
<li>Three readings, or objects, or software that you expect the participants to know about before taking part in the session.</li>
<li>CVs of all the co-leaders of the session.</li></ul>
<p>We understand that finding co-leaders for a session you have in mind might be difficult in certain cases. One possible way for you to find co-leaders is by sharing your session idea on the <a href="https://lists.ghserv.net/mailman/listinfo/researchers" target="_blank">researchers@cis-india.org</a> mailing list. Alternatively, you may keep an eye on the list to see what potential topics are being discussed. If you are facing any difficulty subscribing to the mailing list, please write to <a href="mailto:raw@cis-india.org">raw@cis-india.org</a>.</p>
<p>All session proposals must be submitted by <strong>Sunday, November 22</strong> (extended), 2015, via email sent to <a href="mailto:raw@cis-india.org">raw@cis-india.org</a>.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Selection of Sessions</h2>
<p>All proposed sessions, along with related documents, will be published online by <strong>November 30</strong>. All co-leaders of proposed sessions will be invited to vote for 8 sessions before <strong>December 15</strong>. The sessions with maximum votes will be selected for the conference, and the list of such sessions will be published on <strong>December 31</strong>, 2015.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Venue, Accommodation, and Travel</h2>
<p>The conference is most likely to take place in Delhi on <strong>February 25-27, 2016</strong>. The place, dates, and venue will be confirmed by <strong>December 31</strong>, 2015.</p>
<p>The conference organiser(s) will cover all costs related to accommodation and hospitality during the conference.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, we are not sure if we will be able to pay for travel expenses of the participants. We will confirm this by <strong>December 31</strong>, 2015.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-call'>https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-call</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroInternet Researcher's ConferenceFeaturedLearningIRC16Researchers at Work2015-11-15T07:48:17ZBlog EntryOpen Letter to PM Modi on Intellectual Property Rights issues on His Visit to the United States of America in September, 2015
https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/open-letter-on-intellectual-property-rights-issues-during-your-visit-to-the-united-states-of-america-in-september-2015
<b>This is an open letter by CIS to the Prime Minister, Shri Narendra Modi in light of his impending visit to the USA. This letter asks the Prime Minister to urge the USA to ratify the Marrakesh Treaty; and asks that India not be a party to TPP negotiations, in light of recent reports on a study encouraging India to join the TPP.
</b>
<p> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Shri Narendra Damodardas Modi<br />Hon’ble Prime Minister of India<br />152, South Block, Raisina Hill<br />New Delhi-110011</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">22 September, 2015</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Dear Sir,</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">We write on behalf of the Centre for Internet and Society, India <a name="_ftnref1" href="#_ftn1">[1]</a>, a Bangalore and New Delhi based not-for-profit organization engaging in research on among others, accessibility for persons with disabilities, intellectual property rights, openness and access to knowledge. Over the past fifteen months, we have welcomed and support certain initiatives of our government as being in line with some of our research interests, specifically, the "Make in India" and "Digital India" initiatives, and your vision of a digitally empowered India, as we have noted in an earlier open letter to you. <a name="_ftnref2" href="#_ftn2">[2]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">This letter is in light of your visit to the United States of America (“USA”) this month, to articulate a two-fold request:<em> first, </em>that during the course of your visit you request the government of the USA to ratify the Marrakesh Treaty for visually impaired persons (“Marrakesh Treaty”); <a name="_ftnref3" href="#_ftn3">[3]</a> and <em>second, </em>that the Indian government not enter into any negotiations around the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement (“the TPP”).</p>
<h3>On the Marrakesh Treaty</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify;">According to figures by the World Blind Union, approximately 90% of all published material is not accessible to blind or print disabled people. <a name="_ftnref4" href="#_ftn4">[4]</a> The severity of the ‘book famine’ experienced by the world’s estimated 300 million blind or otherwise print or visually disabled people (of which an estimated 63 million are in India) was highlighted by India in its Closing Statement at the Diplomatic Conference convened to conclude the Marrakesh Treaty. <a name="_ftnref5" href="#_ftn5">[5]</a> India has historically been a strong advocate of the spirit of the Marrakesh Treaty, becoming the first country to ratify it in June, 2014. <a name="_ftnref6" href="#_ftn6">[6]</a> Amendments in 2012 to India’s copyright law predated the signature to the Marrakesh Treaty. These amendments created disability and works neutral exceptions to our copyright law, well beyond the mandate of the Marrakesh Treaty.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The true realization of the promise of the Marrakesh Treaty however will remain a distant dream until the treaty comes into effect (three months) after 20 Member States have ratified it or acceded to it. <a name="_ftnref7" href="#_ftn7">[7]</a> According to information available from the World Intellectual Property Organization <a name="_ftnref8" href="#_ftn8">[8]</a>, this number is currently only 9, and the USA is not one of the countries to have done so. The USA is home <a name="_ftnref9" href="#_ftn9">[9]</a> to some of the largest publishers of both academic and other/leisure material including Penguin Random House, Harper Collins, John Wiley & Sons, the RELX Group, McGraw-Hill Education, Scholastic and Cengage Learning to name a few. It accounts for a large volume of the world’s book and other print material export. The active participation of the USA through the ratification of the Marrakesh treaty is critical if the treaty is to be truly effective.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">During your visit, we urge you request the government of the United States of America to ratify the Marrakesh Treaty at the earliest. This will bring us one important step closer to eradicating the book famine.</p>
<h3>On the TPP</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify;">We are concerned after reports <a name="_ftnref10" href="#_ftn10">[10]</a> of a recent study authored by C Fred Bergsten that encourages India to join the TPP. On this front, we are in complete agreement with the reported statement of the Hon’ble Ambassador Shri Arun K. Singh, where he disagrees with some of the findings and analysis of this recent report. <a name="_ftnref11" href="#_ftn11">[11]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The TPP has come into severe criticism <a name="_ftnref12" href="#_ftn12">[12]</a> over the years <a name="_ftnref13" href="#_ftn13">[13]</a> from a vast multitude <a name="_ftnref14" href="#_ftn14">[14]</a> of sources <a name="_ftnref15" href="#_ftn15">[15]</a> (including a group of 30 law professors in 2012) <a name="_ftnref16" href="#_ftn16">[16]</a> across the various countries that are a party to the negotiations. Among others and most relevant to us as an organization is the criticism around the secrecy of negotiations <a name="_ftnref17" href="#_ftn17">[17]</a> as well as the content of the chapter on intellectual property in the TPP. It is our belief that eventually, India stands to lose as a result of the TPP <a name="_ftnref18" href="#_ftn18">[18]</a> with its possible adverse impact on our economy. <a name="_ftnref19" href="#_ftn19">[19]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The rigid intellectual property protections (including criminal penalties for unintentional copying) <a name="_ftnref20" href="#_ftn20">[20]</a> sought to be enforced through the TPP would benefit only US pharmaceutical and entertainment industries. <a name="_ftnref21" href="#_ftn21">[21]</a> These provisions (among others) mandate the inclusion of TRIPS plus provisions in national laws, envisage possible extensions in term of protection on patents, restrict copyright exceptions and limitations, extend copyright protection terms and impose a higher liability on intermediaries; <a name="_ftnref22" href="#_ftn22">[22]</a>all of which would be disastrous for an emerging economy such as India’s, which is a heavy user of intellectual property and not a heavy producer of the same.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Historically, India has been a supporter of a transparent, multilateral decision making process, a commitment to which was also reiterated recently by the Hon’ble Minister of State for Commerce and Industry, Smt. Nirmala Sitharaman. <a name="_ftnref23" href="#_ftn23">[23]</a>India has also raised many of its concerns (on the secrecy of the negotiations as well as substantive provisions themselves) around the TPP and its close cousin, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (“ACTA”) in 2011 <a name="_ftnref24" href="#_ftn24">[24]</a> and 2012 <a name="_ftnref25" href="#_ftn25">[25]</a> at the World Trade Organization (“WTO”) TRIPS Council and on the ACTA in 2010, also at the WTO Trips Council. <a name="_ftnref26" href="#_ftn26">[26]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">In light of the above, we strongly urge the Indian government to not engage in negotiations on the TPP. At a minimum, we would request that any engagement in TPP negotiations be preceded by national consultations on the same, soliciting input from various stakeholders with diverging interests, including academia, civil society, industry associations, large Indian corporations, small and medium enterprises and multi- national corporations, rights holders associations and other interest groups.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">We thank you for the opportunity to present these views to you. We do hope that you will consider these suggestions favourably, in the interests of India’s economic and social development. We welcome any opportunity to assist you with any queries you may have with regard to these submissions.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Thank you.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Yours truly</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">(For the Centre for Internet and Society, India)</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Pranesh Prakash, Policy Director<br />Nehaa Chaudhari, Programme Officer</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Copies to:</p>
<ol style="text-align: justify;" type="1">
<li>Smt. Smriti Zubin Irani, Minister for Human Resource Development, Government of India.</li>
<li>Prof. (Dr.) Ram Shankar Katheria, Minister of State for Human Resource Development (Higher Education), Government of India.</li>
<li>Smt. Nirmala Sitharaman, Minister of State for Commerce and Industry, Government of India.</li>
<li>Shri Vinay Sheel Oberoi, Secretary (Department of Higher Education), Ministry of Human Resources Development, Government of India, Government of India.</li>
<li>Shri Amitabh Kant, Secretary (Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion), Ministry of Commerce and Industry, Government of India.</li></ol>
<p> <br /><br />(Edit - 25 September, 2015) - The following people have reached out to us in support of this letter and have expressed a desire to have their signatures placed on record as support. We wish to acknowledge the same. </p>
<ol><li>Prof. Dinesh Abrol - Convenor, National Working Group on Patent Laws and WTO<br /></li><li>Dr. B. Ekbal - President, Democratic Alliance for Knowledge Freedom, Kerala</li><li>T.C. James - President, NIPO</li><li>Dr. Suman Sahai - Chairperson, Gene Campaign</li><li>Dr. Biswajit Dhar - Professor, Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University</li></ol>
<div> </div>
<p> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn1" href="#_ftnref1">[1]</a>See generally <a href="http://cis-india.org/">http://cis-india.org/</a> (last accessed 22 September, 2015).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn2" href="#_ftnref2">[2]</a>Rohini Lakshane, Open Letter to Prime Minister Modi, available at <a href="http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/open-letter-to-prime-minister-modi">http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/open-letter-to-prime-minister-modi</a> (last accessed 22 September, 2015); Centre for Internet and Society/Rohini Lakshane, Digital India & Make in India : Form a patent pool of critical mobile technologies – CIS India, available at <a href="http://www.medianama.com/2015/03/223-digital-india-make-in-india-form-a-patent-pool-of-critical-mobile-technologies-cis-india/" rel="noreferrer">http://www.medianama.com/2015/03/223-digital-india-make-in-india-form-a-patent-pool-of-critical-mobile-technologies-cis-india/</a> (last accessed 22 September, 2015).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn3" href="#_ftnref3">[3]</a>The Marrakesh Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works by Visually Impaired Persons and Persons with Print Disabilities adopted on June 27, 2013. Treaty text and other official documentation available at <a href="http://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/ip/marrakesh/" rel="noreferrer">http://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/ip/marrakesh/</a> (last accessed 22 September, 2015).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn4" href="#_ftnref4">[4]</a>World Blind Union, Marrakesh Treaty – Right to Read Campaign, available at <a href="http://www.worldblindunion.org/English/our-work/our-priorities/Pages/right-2-read-campaign.aspx" rel="noreferrer">http://www.worldblindunion.org/English/our-work/our-priorities/Pages/right-2-read-campaign.aspx</a> (last accessed 22 September, 2015).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn5" href="#_ftnref5">[5]</a>Pranesh Prakash, India’s Closing Statement at Marrakesh on the Treaty for the Blind, available at <a href="http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/india-closing-statement-marrakesh-treaty-for-the-blind">http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/india-closing-statement-marrakesh-treaty-for-the-blind</a> (last accessed 22 September, 2015).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn6" href="#_ftnref6">[6]</a>Nehaa Chaudhari, India’s Ratification of the Marrakesh Treaty Celebrated; Accessible Books Consortium Launched, available at <a href="http://cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/indias-ratification-of-marrakesh-treaty-celebrated">http://cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/indias-ratification-of-marrakesh-treaty-celebrated</a> (last accessed 22 September, 2015).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn7" href="#_ftnref7">[7]</a>Article 18 of the Marrakesh Treaty.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn8" href="#_ftnref8">[8]</a>World Intellectual Property Organization, WIPO Administered Treaties: Contracting Parties > Marrakesh VIP Treaty (Treaty not yet in force), available at <a href="http://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/ShowResults.jsp?lang=en&treaty_id=843" rel="noreferrer">http://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/ShowResults.jsp?lang=en&treaty_id=843</a> (last accessed 22 September, 2015).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn9" href="#_ftnref9">[9]</a>Publishers Weekly, The World’s 57 Largest Book Publishers, 2015, available at <a href="http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/international/international-book-news/article/67224-the-world-s-57-largest-book-publishers-2015.html" rel="noreferrer">http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/international/international-book-news/article/67224-the-world-s-57-largest-book-publishers-2015.html</a> (last accessed 22 September, 2015).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn10" href="#_ftnref10">[10]</a>S Rajagopalan, US Report Pushes India to Join the Trans-Pacific Partnership, available at <a href="http://www.dailypioneer.com/world/us-report-pushes-india-to-join-trans-pacific-partnership.html" rel="noreferrer">http://www.dailypioneer.com/world/us-report-pushes-india-to-join-trans-pacific-partnership.html</a> (last accessed 22 September, 2015); Indo-Asian News Service on NDTV, India Can Boost Exports by $500 Billion with Trade Liberalization: Study, available at <a href="http://www.ndtv.com/india-news/india-can-boost-exports-by-500-billion-with-trade-liberalization-study-1218887" rel="noreferrer">http://www.ndtv.com/india-news/india-can-boost-exports-by-500-billion-with-trade-liberalization-study-1218887</a> (last accessed 22 September, 2015); Raghavendra M., India can boost exports by $500 billion with trade liberalization: study, available at <a href="http://www.americanbazaaronline.com/2015/09/18/india-can-boost-exports-by-500-billion-with-trade-liberalization-study/" rel="noreferrer">http://www.americanbazaaronline.com/2015/09/18/india-can-boost-exports-by-500-billion-with-trade-liberalization-study/</a> (last accessed 22 September, 2015); Press Trust of India in the Business Standard, India can boost exports by USD 500 bn by joining the TPP: report, available at <a href="http://www.business-standard.com/article/pti-stories/india-can-boost-exports-by-usd-500-bn-by-joining-tpp-report-115091701149_1.html" rel="noreferrer">http://www.business-standard.com/article/pti-stories/india-can-boost-exports-by-usd-500-bn-by-joining-tpp-report-115091701149_1.html</a> (last accessed 22 September, 2015); Seema Sirohi, India must expand its trade before it gets left behind in the race, available at <a href="http://blogs.economictimes.indiatimes.com/letterfromwashington/india-must-expand-its-trade-before-it-gets-left-behind-in-the-race/" rel="noreferrer">http://blogs.economictimes.indiatimes.com/letterfromwashington/india-must-expand-its-trade-before-it-gets-left-behind-in-the-race/</a> (last accessed 22 September, 2015).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn11" href="#_ftnref11">[11]</a>S Rajagopalan, US Report Pushes India to Join the Trans-Pacific Partnership, available at <a href="http://www.dailypioneer.com/world/us-report-pushes-india-to-join-trans-pacific-partnership.html" rel="noreferrer">http://www.dailypioneer.com/world/us-report-pushes-india-to-join-trans-pacific-partnership.html</a> (last accessed 22 September, 2015)</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn12" href="#_ftnref12">[12]</a>Natasha Lennard, Noam Chomsky: Trans-Pacific Partnership is a “neoliberal assault”, available at <a href="http://www.salon.com/2014/01/13/chomsky_tpp_is_a_neoliberal_assault/" rel="noreferrer">http://www.salon.com/2014/01/13/chomsky_tpp_is_a_neoliberal_assault/</a> (last accessed 22 September, 2015); Zach Carter and Ryan Grim, Noam Chomsky: Obama Trade Deal a ‘Neoliberal Assault’ to ‘Further Corporate Domination’, available at <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/13/noam-chomsky-obama-trans-pacific-partnership_n_4577495.html?ir=India&adsSiteOverride=in" rel="noreferrer">http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/13/noam-chomsky-obama-trans-pacific-partnership_n_4577495.html?ir=India&adsSiteOverride=in</a> (last accessed 22 September, 2015); Sean Flynn;, Margot E Kaminski, Brook K Baker and Jimmy H Koo., "Public Interest Analysis of the US TPP Proposal for an IP Chapter" (2011). PIJIP Research Paper Series. Paper 21. <a href="http://digitalcommons.wcl.american.edu/research/21" rel="noreferrer">http://digitalcommons.wcl.american.edu/research/21</a> (last accessed 22 September, 2015).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn13" href="#_ftnref13">[13]</a>BBC News, TPP: What is it and why does it matter?, available at <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/business-21782080" rel="noreferrer">http://www.bbc.com/news/business-21782080</a> (last accessed 22 September, 2015);</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn14" href="#_ftnref14">[14]</a>For a compilation on writing on the TPP <em>see</em> James Love, Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP also known as the TPPA), available at <a href="http://keionline.org/tpp" rel="noreferrer">http://keionline.org/tpp</a> (last accessed 22 September, 2015); <em>see also </em>American University Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property, Trans-Pacific Partnership, available at <a href="http://infojustice.org/tpp" rel="noreferrer">http://infojustice.org/tpp</a> (last accessed 22 September, 2015).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn15" href="#_ftnref15">[15]</a>Zach Carter, Alan Grayson on Trans-Pacific Partnership: Obama Secrecy Hides ‘Assault on Democratic Government’, available at <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/18/alan-grayson-trans-pacific-partnership_n_3456167.html?ir=India&adsSiteOverride=in" rel="noreferrer">http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/18/alan-grayson-trans-pacific-partnership_n_3456167.html?ir=India&adsSiteOverride=in</a> (last accessed 22 September, 2015); James Love, KEI analysis of Wikileaks leak of TPP IPR text, from August 30, 2013, available at <a href="http://keionline.org/node/1825" rel="noreferrer">http://keionline.org/node/1825</a> (last accessed 22 September, 2015); Ian Verrender, The TPP has the potential for real harm, available at <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-03-16/verrender-the-tpp-has-the-potential-for-real-harm/6321538" rel="noreferrer">http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-03-16/verrender-the-tpp-has-the-potential-for-real-harm/6321538</a> (last accessed 22 September, 2015).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn16" href="#_ftnref16">[16]</a>Sean Flynn, Law Professors Call for Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Transparency, available at <a href="http://infojustice.org/archives/21137" rel="noreferrer">http://infojustice.org/archives/21137</a> (last accessed 22 September, 2015).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn17" href="#_ftnref17">[17]</a>Sachie Mizohata, "The Trans-Pacific Partnership and Its Critics: An introduction and a petition," The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 11, Issue 36, No. 3, available at <a href="http://japanfocus.org/-Sachie-MIZOHATA/3996/article.html" rel="noreferrer">http://japanfocus.org/-Sachie-MIZOHATA/3996/article.html</a> (last accessed 22 September, 2015).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn18" href="#_ftnref18">[18]</a>Vijay Rajamohan, Trans-Pacific Partnership – Should India Join this Mega Trade Deal?, available at <a href="http://swarajyamag.com/world/trans-pacific-partnership-should-india-join-this-mega-trade-deal/" rel="noreferrer">http://swarajyamag.com/world/trans-pacific-partnership-should-india-join-this-mega-trade-deal/</a> (last accessed 22 September, 2015).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn19" href="#_ftnref19">[19]</a>Sylvia Mishra, How will the Trans-Pacific Partnership affect India?, available at <a href="http://www.observerindia.com/cms/sites/orfonline/modules/analysis/AnalysisDetail.html?cmaid=85684&mmacmaid=85685" rel="noreferrer">http://www.observerindia.com/cms/sites/orfonline/modules/analysis/AnalysisDetail.html?cmaid=85684&mmacmaid=85685</a> (last accessed 22 September, 2015).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn20" href="#_ftnref20">[20]</a>Gabrielle Chan, Trans-Pacific Partnership: a guide to the most contentious issues, available at <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/10/trans-pacific-partnership-a-guide-to-the-most-contentious-issues" rel="noreferrer">http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/10/trans-pacific-partnership-a-guide-to-the-most-contentious-issues</a> (last accessed 22 September, 2015).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn21" href="#_ftnref21">[21]</a>James Love, New leak of TPP consolidated text on intellectual property provides details of pandering to drug companies and publishers, available at <a href="http://www.keionline.org/node/2108" rel="noreferrer">http://www.keionline.org/node/2108</a> (last accessed 22 September, 2015); Vijay Rajamohan, Trans-Pacific Partnership – Should India Join this Mega Trade Deal?, available at <a href="http://swarajyamag.com/world/trans-pacific-partnership-should-india-join-this-mega-trade-deal/" rel="noreferrer">http://swarajyamag.com/world/trans-pacific-partnership-should-india-join-this-mega-trade-deal/</a> (last accessed 22 September, 2015) referencing Paul Krugman.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn22" href="#_ftnref22">[22]</a>William New, Leaked TPP Draft Reveals Extreme Rights Holder Position Of US, Japan, Outraged Observers Say, available at <a href="http://www.ip-watch.org/2014/10/17/leaked-tpp-draft-reveals-extreme-rights-holder-position-of-us-japan-outraged-observers-say/" rel="noreferrer">http://www.ip-watch.org/2014/10/17/leaked-tpp-draft-reveals-extreme-rights-holder-position-of-us-japan-outraged-observers-say/</a> (last accessed 22 September, 2015).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn23" href="#_ftnref23">[23]</a>Lalit K Jha, India not being left out of global trade pacts: Minister, available at <a href="http://www.thestatesman.com/news/business/india-not-being-left-out-of-global-trade-pacts-minister/91679.html" rel="noreferrer">http://www.thestatesman.com/news/business/india-not-being-left-out-of-global-trade-pacts-minister/91679.html</a> (last accessed 22 September, 2015).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn24" href="#_ftnref24">[24]</a>Thirukumaran Balasubramaniam, WTO TRIPS Council: India raises concerns on ACTA and TPPA on discussion of “Trends in the Enforcement of IPRs”, available at <a href="https://donttradeourlivesaway.wordpress.com/2011/10/29/wto-trips-council-india-raises-concerns-on-acta-and-tppa-on-discussion-of-trends-in-the-enforcement-of-iprs/" rel="noreferrer">https://donttradeourlivesaway.wordpress.com/2011/10/29/wto-trips-council-india-raises-concerns-on-acta-and-tppa-on-discussion-of-trends-in-the-enforcement-of-iprs/</a> (last accessed 22 September, 2015).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn25" href="#_ftnref25">[25]</a>Thirukumaran Balasubramaniam, 28 Feb 2012: Intervention delivered by India at WTO TRIPS Council on IP Enforcement Trends noting concerns with ACTA and TPPA, available at <a href="http://keionline.org/node/1376" rel="noreferrer">http://keionline.org/node/1376</a> (last accessed 22 September, 2015).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><a name="_ftn26" href="#_ftnref26">[26]</a>Kanaga Raja, ACTA comes in for criticism at the TRIPS council, available at <a href="http://www.twn.my/title2/wto.info/2010/twninfo100606.htm" rel="noreferrer">http://www.twn.my/title2/wto.info/2010/twninfo100606.htm</a> (last accessed 22 September, 2015).</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/open-letter-on-intellectual-property-rights-issues-during-your-visit-to-the-united-states-of-america-in-september-2015'>https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/open-letter-on-intellectual-property-rights-issues-during-your-visit-to-the-united-states-of-america-in-september-2015</a>
</p>
No publisherPranesh Prakash and Nehaa ChaudhariAccess to KnowledgeIntellectual Property RightsAccessibilityFeaturedHomepage2015-09-25T06:43:12ZBlog EntryMaking Public Libraries Accessible to People with Disabilities
https://cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/making-public-libraries-accessible-to-people-with-disabilities
<b>The Centre for Internet & Society was one of the 20 disability rights groups that wrote to the Ministry of Culture on January 23, 2013 seeking remedial action on the barriers faced by persons with disabilities in accessing public libraries in India.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">To,<br />Hon’ble Ministers of Culture, HRD, Social Welfare<br />Secretaries of the above Ministries/Departments<br />January 23, 2013</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Dear Sir/Madam</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span><b>Sub: Making Public Libraries Accessible for Persons with Disabilities </b></span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span> </span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">We, the organizations representing persons with disabilities listed at the end of this document would like to bring to your attention for your urgent remedial action on the barriers faced by persons with disabilities in accessing public libraries in the country.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">As you are aware, India has approximately 150 million persons with disabilities<a href="#fn1" name="fr1">[1]</a>who have the inalienable fundamental right to life as enshrined in the Constitution including the right to seek knowledge and education. Public libraries play a critical role in creating an enabling environment for citizens to gain knowledge, information and education. This is particularly true in the case of persons with disabilities who have limited access to purchase books through mainstream shops due to various barriers including lack of physical access to shops, lack of availability of books in accessible formats like Braille, etc. India has signed and ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and therefore India is required to "to take all appropriate measures, including legislation, to modify or abolish existing laws, regulations, customs and practices that constitute discrimination against persons with disabilities<a href="#fn2" name="fr2">[2]</a>, "to develop, promulgate and monitor the implementation of minimum standards and guidelines for the accessibility of facilities and services open or provided to the public<a href="#fn3" name="fr3">[3]</a>” and take all appropriate measures to ensure that persons with disabilities enjoy access to libraries<a href="#fn4" name="fr4">[4]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The recent copyright amendments enabling libraries to convert their collections into accessible formats free of cost for the benefit of persons with disabilities coupled with technological developments in the form of cost effective screen reading software have created an unprecedented opportunity to make libraries accessible to persons with visual impairment and dyslexia. Additionally increased clarity on standards for physical access also now enables libraries to be made physically accessible without expensive modifications to enable wheelchair users and those with limited mobility access the libraries.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">We understand that the Ministry of Culture has constituted a high powered committee as part of the National Mission on Libraries to look into revamping the library system in the country. We urge that the issue relating to making public libraries accessible to persons with disabilities is taken up by the government on a fast track basis, a separate budget is allocated for this exercise and libraries are made accessible on a priority basis. Please find attached a brief note on the steps to be taken to make libraries accessible to persons with disabilities.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">We recommend that regional consultations are conducted through which additional data can be gathered on regional/language/types of communication/availability of power and related issues. We also urge you take steps to extend library services to rural areas across the country. We are happy to assist the government in this initiative. Do let us know how we can contribute to this effort.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Thank you and best regards,</p>
<ol style="text-align: justify; "> </ol><ol style="text-align: justify; ">
<li><b>Inclusive Planet Centre for Disability Law and Policy (<a href="http://www.inclusiveplanet.org.in">www.inclusiveplanet.org.in</a>)</b><br />Rahul Cherian<br />+91 98403 57991<a href="mailto:rahul.cherian@inclusiveplanet.org.in"><br />rahul.cherian@inclusiveplanet.org.in</a></li>
<li><b>AccessAbility (<a href="http://www.accessability.co.in">www.accessability.co.in</a>)</b><br />Shivani Gupta+91 93102 45743<br />shewany@gmail.com</li>
<li><b>Xavier’s Resource Centre for the Visually Challenged (<a href="http://www.xrcvc.org">www.xrcvc.org</a>)</b><br />Sam Taraporevala<br />+91 99670 28769<br />sam@xrcvc.org</li>
<li><b>Saksham Charitable Trust (<a href="http://www.saksham.org">www.saksham.org</a>)</b><br />Dipendra Manocha<br />+91 98180 94781<a href="mailto:dipendra.manocha@gmail.com"><br />dipendra.manocha@gmail.com</a></li>
<li><b>National Platform for the Rights of the Disabled</b><br />Murali Alathur<br />+91 98687 68543<a href="mailto:nprd.in@gmail.com"><br />nprd.in@gmail.com</a></li>
<li><b>National Institute of Speech and Hearing (<a href="http://www.nish.ac.in">www.nish.ac.in</a>)</b><br />Samuel Mathew<br />+91 99615 68443<a href="mailto:snm@nish.ac.in"><br />snm@nish.ac.in</a></li>
<li><b>Centre for Internet and Society (<a href="http://www.cis-india.org">www.cis-india.org</a>)</b><br />Nirmita Narasimhan<br />+91 98458 68078<br />nirmita@cis-india.org</li>
<li><b>Indian Institute of Cerebral Palsy (<a href="http://www.iicpindia.org">www.iicpindia.org</a>)</b><br />Jeeja Ghosh<br />+91 94330 45340<a href="mailto:jeeja.ankur@gmail.com"><br />jeeja.ankur@gmail.com</a></li>
<li><b>National Centre for Autism (<a href="http://www.autism-india.org/">www.autism-india.org</a>)</b><br />Merry Barua<br />+91 98102 25923<a href="mailto:merry.barua@gmail.com"><br />merry.barua@gmail.com</a></li>
<li><b>Ability Foundation (<a href="http://www.abilityfoundation.org">www.abilityfoundation.org</a>)</b><br />Janaki Pillai<a href="mailto:ability@abilityfoundation.org" target="_blank"><br />ability@abilityfoundation.org</a></li>
<li><b>Nilesh Singit, Disability Rights Activist</b><br />+9199205 58867<a href="mailto:contact@nileshsingit.org" target="_blank"><br />contact@nileshsingit.org</a></li>
<li><b>Andhjan Kalyan Trust (<a href="http://www.aktrust.org/" target="_blank">www.aktrust.org</a></b><b>)</b><br />Praful Vyas<br />+9194282 61878<a href="mailto:aktrust.drj@gmail.com" target="_blank"><br />aktrust.drj@gmail.com</a></li>
<li><b>AccessIndia</b><br />Harish Kotian<br />hpkotian@rbi.org.in</li>
<li><b>Blind Graduates Forum of India</b><br />Harish Kotian<br />hpkotian@rbi.org.in</li>
<li><b>Tamilnadu Handicapped Federation Charitable Trust</b><br />T.M.N Deepak<br />+91 98406 46953<a href="mailto:deepaknathan@gmail.com"><br />deepaknathan@gmail.com</a></li>
<li><b>Human Rights Law Network AP Unit</b><br />M.A. Shakeel<a href="mailto:mashakeel2000@gmail.com"><br />mashakeel2000@gmail.com</a></li>
<li><b>Global Ability in Disability</b><br />Sai Padma<br />+91 9052627070<a href="mailto:saipadma@gmail.com" target="_blank"><br />saipadma@gmail.com</a></li>
<li><b>Mitra Jyothi</b><br />Madhu Singhal<a href="mailto:mj.tblibrary@gmail.com"><br />mj.tblibrary@gmail.com</a></li>
<li><b>Vaishnavi Jayakumar, Human Rights Activist</b><br />jayakumar.vaishnavi@gmail.com</li>
<li><b>Swadhikaar</b><br />Pavan Muntha<a href="mailto:pavanmuntha@gmail.com"><br />pavanmuntha@gmail.com</a></li>
<li><b>Samarthyam (<a href="http://www.samarthyam.org/" target="_blank">www.samarthyam.org</a>)</b><br />Anjlee Agarwal<br />+91 98105 58321<a href="mailto:samarthyaindia@yahoo.com" target="_blank"><br />samarthyaindia@yahoo.com</a></li>
</ol>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">With inputs from:</p>
<ol style="text-align: justify; "> </ol><ol style="text-align: justify; ">
<li><b>Stephen M. Shore, Ed.D.</b><br />Assistant Professor of Special Education, Adelphi University<br />International consultant, presenter, and author<br />Person on the autism spectrum<br />USA</li>
<li><b>Tania Meinyczuk</b><br />Director, Autistic Strategies Network<br />Autistic Consultant<br />South Africa</li>
<li><b>Shellique Carby</b><br />Self-Advocate<br />South Africa</li>
<li><b>Fazli Azeem</b><br />South Asian Self-Advocate for the Autism Spectrum<br />Fulbright Scholar @ MassArt Boston, USA<a href="http://www.fazliazeem.com/" target="_blank"><br />www.fazliazeem.com</a><br />Pakistan</li>
<li><b>Michael Vestergaard Drejer</b><br />IT Consultant<br />Denmark</li>
</ol>
<h2 style="text-align: justify; ">Making Public Libraries Inclusive For Persons With Disabilities – An Overview</h2>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Problem Statement</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">It is estimated that India has approximately 150 million persons with disabilities<a href="#fn5" name="fr5">[5]</a> (“PWDs”). Depending on their disability, PWDs have varying degrees of problems in accessing libraries and the material available at libraries. PWDs cannot access the premises of libraries since the buildings themselves are not accessible. People who are blind or have low vision cannot access reading material in libraries since the reading materials are not in formats that are accessible. It is estimated that less than 0.5% of books are available in formats that are accessible by people who are blind or have low vision. It is therefore critical that libraries in India are made inclusive so as to become accessible by PWDs.</p>
<h2 style="text-align: justify; ">Suggestions For Improvement</h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Given below are suggestions to make the public library system inclusive to PWDs based on internationally recognized best practices:</p>
<ol style="text-align: justify; "> </ol><ol style="text-align: justify; ">
<li style="text-align: justify; "><b>Accessibility</b><br />Structural modifications must be made to the library to ensure that PWDs can use the library building easily and safely, without any barriers or obstructions. Some of the modifications required include accessible parking, clear paths of travel to and throughout the facility, entrances with adequate, clear openings or automatic doors, handrails, ramps and elevators, accessible tables and public service desks, and accessible public conveniences such as toilets, and drinking fountains. Other reasonable modifications may include visible alarms in toilets and general usage areas and signs that have Braille and easily visible character size, font, contrast and finish.<br />For further information see <b>Annexure 1</b> and <a href="http://socialjustice.nic.in/glinecpwd.php">http://socialjustice.nic.in/glinecpwd.php</a></li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><b>Accessible Formats and Library as a Distribution Centre</b><br />People, who are blind, have low vision, dyslexia and other print disabilities cannot access reading materials in printed formats. They require reading material in “accessible formats” such as Braille, large print, audio recordings and electronic formats including digital talking books. In addition, people with some disabilities may find it difficult to come to the library. Under the recently amended Copyright Act libraries can convert books into the accessible formats specified above free of cost and without requiring permission from publishers and can distribute them in physical form and in electronic form including over the Internet to persons with disabilities.<br /><br />Libraries now have the unprecedented opportunity to create an extensive collection of reading material in the accessible formats mentioned above in English and all Indian languages and make them available at the library in the form of physical copies, on CDs and other media, as well as over the Internet. The catalog of the collection must be in accessible formats. For digitization of books State Level Focal Points to be created for this purpose possibly at State level libraries. For further information on the standards to be adhered to when the library undertakes digitization see <b>Annexure 2</b>. State Level Focal Points will get production done through outsourcing or with some inhouse facilities for production of digital content. A National Level Focal point with full time staff will be required for standardization and networking between the State Level Focal Points and maintaining the central server as mentioned below. The central server will have a database containing digital copies of works in accessible formats created by the State Focal Points and other organizations that undertake the conversion of material into accessible formats such as the National Federation of the Blind<a href="#fn6" name="fr6">[6]</a>, All India Confederation of the Blind<a href="#fn7" name="fr7">[7]</a>, Daisy Forum of India<a href="#fn8" name="fr8">[8]</a> and the Indian Institute of Cerebral Palsy.<a href="#fn9" name="fr9">[9]</a> Requests for books in accessible formats can be sent to these organizations as well. The central server will also be connected to the Braille presses. Each public library at the district level will act as a distribution point for accessible formats and will be connected to the central server so that requests for books at each of the libraries can be sourced from the database on the central server. This is advantageous as the list of books available at each library will be constantly updated once they are added to the database. In addition, persons with disabilities must be able to download books in accessible formats from the database without coming to the library.<br /><br />The website of each library must contain the catalog of material available in accessible formats and the services provided for persons with disabilities. The website of the libraries and the centralized database must adhere to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 as outlined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) so that persons with print disabilities can access the websites and the database. Each library must take orders for accessible books from library users over the internet and over the telephone and source the books from other libraries. Libraries must work together to enable interlibrary exchange of books in accessible formats including hard copy Braille books.<br /><br />All existing books published in India must be digitized over a period 7 years and all new books must be digitized within 60 days of their first publication in India. Special efforts must be made to provide accessible formats in Indian languages as these are extremely limited. An advisory committee consisting of specialist representatives from disability organizations, among others, may be constituted to oversee the implementation of this project. The expert committee will be associated with both the National Level Focal Points and the State Level Focal Points.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><b>Assistive Aids and Equipment</b><br />PWDs require certain assistive aids and equipment to be able to fully utilize the services of the library and the information available therein. Some forms of accessible formats specified above can only be accessed using assistive aids. Libraries must provide the assistive aids/equipment specified in <b>Annexure 3.</b></li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><b>Training and sensitization</b><br />Adequate training and sensitization must be given to library staff to ensure that they are able to interact with PWDs. This training can be in the nature of a short refresher course and the training and sensitization programs must be evolved in consultation with the disability sector and must be conducted with the assistance of experts in the disability space.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><b>Specialized personnel and services</b><br />The library should have a dedicated person to interact with persons with disabilities. This person should have a background in disability, highly motivated, familiar with sign language and also be responsible for providing specific assistance required by persons with disabilities such as guiding them to print out books in Braille, procuring books from the online database etc. The library should offer specialized services to PWDs including a telephonic help line and home delivery of books ordered online or over the phone and reading service at designated times at the library. It is pertinent to note that literature for the blind has no postal fees. Each library must have a specific section on disability related reading material. It is also essential to cooperate with other libraries around the world to share learning.</li>
</ol>
<h2 style="text-align: justify; ">Annexure 1<a href="#fn10" name="fr10">[10]</a></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Accessibility</b></p>
<ol style="text-align: justify; "> </ol>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>a. </b><b>Outside the library</b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li style="text-align: justify; ">The main gate of the entrance of the library must be made accessible in accordance with applicable accessibility standards. If the main entrance cannot be made accessible, a secondary accessible entrance should be provided.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">At least covered three parking spaces marked with the international symbol of Accessibility (wheelchair symbol) close to the library entrance must be provided.</li>
<li>Clear and easy to read signposting must be provided. </li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Unobstructed and well lit access paths from the main gate to the entrance of the library must be provided. All steps must be replaced/complimented with ramps having less than 5% gradient, with railings on both sides.</li>
<li> Smooth and non-slip surface must be used throughout.</li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>b. </b><b>Getting into the library</b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li>A person using any kinds of support such as wheelchair, crutches or walker, cane, or guide dog, should be able to enter through the door and pass through security check points, if any, without encountering obstacles. </li>
<li>All mobility aids and assistive devices including wheelchairs, walkers, communicators among others must be able to pass through security checkpoints, if any. </li>
<li> Applicable accessibility standards must be adhered to.</li>
<li>Sufficient space must be provided in front of the door to allow a wheelchair to turn around.</li>
<li> Entrance door should be wide enough to allow a wheelchair to enter. </li>
<li> Non-automatic doors should be operable using one hand.</li>
<li> Glass doors, if any, must be highlighted with contrast colour band at eye level to prevent persons with low vision banging into these.</li>
<li> Stairs and steps edges must be marked with a contrasting color band.</li>
<li> Pictogram signs must be provided for services and amenities such as toilets, elevators, stairways. </li>
<li> Elevators, if any, must be well lit with buttons and signs in Braille and synthetic speech. </li>
<li> Elevator buttons reachable from a wheelchair.</li>
<li> At least 5 wheelchairs (preferably motorized) or mobility scooters must be made available for use by persons with physical disabilities</li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>c. </b><b>Inside the library</b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li> All parts of the library should be accessible.</li>
<li>The catalogs must be available in accessible formats.</li>
<li>Clear and easy-to-read signs with pictograms must be provided.</li>
<li>Service desks should be located close to the entrance. </li>
<li>A certain number of tables and computer workstations should be adapted for persons in wheelchairs. </li>
<li>Shelves must ideally be reachable from a wheelchair </li>
<li> Chairs with sturdy armrests must be provided</li>
<li> Unobstructed aisles between bookcases must be provided and wide enough to accommodate wheelchairs and one person not on a wheelchair.</li>
<li>Visible and audible fire alarms must be provided. </li>
<li>Non-fluorescent lighting. In case fluorescent lighting is used there must be an area free of visual clutter and sharp light contrasts, with plain walls and cubicles. </li>
<li>Printers must be kept in areas away from reading areas to reduce sound in the reading areas.</li>
<li>Suitable sound insulation to be used to minimize sound in the reading areas.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Stack area should have clear aisle space for wheelchair and bi-lateral crutch users (3ft. min.). Where book stacking is in shelves and areas beyond reach of persons with disabilities using mobility aids, human assistance should be available to access books.</li>
<li>Plants inside the space can help with air filtering, which can make a huge difference to the level of comfort.</li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>d. </b><b>Toilets</b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The library should have at least one toilet for PWDs, equipped with the following:</p>
<ol style="text-align: justify; "> </ol>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li> Clear signs with pictogram indicating the location of the toilets</li>
<li>Door wide enough for a wheelchair to enter and sufficient space for a wheelchair to turn around</li>
<li>Room enough for a wheelchair to pull up next to the toilet seat </li>
<li>Toilet with handles and flushing lever reachable for persons in wheelchairs </li>
<li>Alarm button reachable for persons in a wheelchairs </li>
<li>Washbasin, mirror at the appropriate height </li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>e. </b><b>Information Desk and Circulation desk </b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li>The desks must be of adjustable height to enable persons in wheelchair to be able access the desk</li>
<li>Chairs must be provided at the desk</li>
<li>Induction loop system for hearing impaired persons</li>
</ul>
<h2 style="text-align: justify; ">Annexure 2</h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Standards for material converted into digital formats by libraries</b></p>
<ol style="text-align: justify; "> </ol>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li>Master Digital Documents of converted material must be maintained in DAISY XML format.</li>
<li>All Master Digital Documents in Indic Languages must be encoded in Unicode [UTF8/16] and formatted using a royalty-free Open Type Font.</li>
<li>All Master Digital Documents must be tagged according to DAISY standards to capture semantic information for parts, units, chapter headings, subsections, pagination, ordered and un-ordered list, tables, images along with their alternative text, math equations, title, author, footnote, end-note, text box, abbreviation, acronym, etc.</li>
<li>Metadata information about the publication as prescribed in the DAISY Standards must be added to all Master Digital Documents.</li>
<li>Distribution of digital copies of the Master Digital Documents through web sites or otherwise must be done in epub format.</li>
<li>If other standards are used for different target populations those standards must be compliant with the National Open Standards Policy and the Interoperability Framework for E-Governance in India. </li>
<li>DAISY audio format for Indic languages. </li>
</ul>
<h2 style="text-align: justify; "><b>Annexure 3</b></h2>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; "><b>Assistance Aids/Equipment </b></h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>For assisting persons with Visual Impairment or blindness or autism spectrum disorders:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Persons with vision impairments or blindness or autism spectrum disorders would benefit from software and hardware for enlarging displays on the monitor or reading material through a speech synthesizer.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Some of the most common assistive aids/equipment are:</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">For magnification</p>
<ul>
<li>Screen-magnification software. This program allows people with low vision to access computer information by enlarging the screen display or tailoring the display to accommodate their disability.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li> Large magnification devices such as closed-circuit television magnifiers (CCTV). This system employs a video camera lens to enlarge text from three to thirty times normal text size</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li> Handheld magnifiers</li>
</ul>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">For Screen reading</p>
<table class="listing" style="text-align: justify; ">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Screen reader software programs enables individuals who are blind or visually impaired to access the information on a computer screen through voice output. Some examples are NVDA (an open source software) or Dolphin or Jaws (proprietary software). Screen reading software with Indian language support must be provided.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Scanning and reading software helps those with low or no vision. Scans printed text and verbalizes the text via synthetic speech using optical character recognition technology.</li>
</ul>
</td>
<td><img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/ComputerOperation.png/@@images/313def6f-7dc4-4716-9c4a-d3273a2b224d.png" alt="Computer Operation" class="image-inline" title="Computer Operation" /><br /></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">At least one computer must face outward and not against the wall since people with autism spectrum disorders find it disturbing to have people walking behind them.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">For Braille support -</p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Braille Translating Software - To produce correctly formatted and coded Braille one needs a Braille Translation Software. A document prepared by a word processing program is loaded into the translation software. The final document may be printed in Braille by a Braille embosser. </li>
<li>Braille Embosser - Braille embossers print Braille output from a computer by punching dots onto paper and enable users to make hard copies of documents. </li>
<li>Refreshable Braille displays and DAISY players.</li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">All multimedia content to have audio descriptions</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">For Assisting people with Hearing Impairment or Deafness</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Users with deafness or have hearing impairments do not have problems using the computer except problems will arise from programs and websites that have audio cues.</p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li>Sound Sentry This option directs the operating system to display a visual signal when a sound is generated by a Windows application. Sound sentry in built into Windows and Apple operating systems.</li>
<li>All multimedia content to have captions</li>
</ul>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">For Assisting people with Learning Disabilities</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Specialized software programs and hardware for people who have learning differences will display print as well as provide auditory reading of the text simultaneously.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">For Assisting people with Physical Disabilities</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Persons with physical disabilities may need assistance in using the computer apart from having physical accessibility. The following items increase computer usability and safety:</p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li>Special input devices such as trackballs, joysticks, switches, touch pads, and augmented keyboards (micro keyboards or oversize keyboards with enlarged keys)</li>
<li>A computer camera/tracker allows users to manipulate the cursor through head movement.</li>
<li>Software utilities that replaces the functionality of a standard keyboard with a full-featured, onscreen keyboard.</li>
<li>Speech to text software such as Dragon Naturally Speaking</li>
<li>Motorized wheelchairs to be used by physically impaired users especially motorized chairs whose seat can raise so that users can reach books on higher shelves on the rack. </li>
<li>Availability of reachers to access books that may be placed too low or too high on the book rack.</li>
<li>Page turners</li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b> </b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Useful Links</b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li> <b>American Library Association:</b><a href="http://www.ala.org/ascla/asclaissues/libraryservices"> http://www.ala.org/ascla/asclaissues/libraryservices</a></li>
<li><b>International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions:</b><a href="http://archive.ifla.org/VII/s9/nd1/iflapr-89e.pdf"><b> </b>http://archive.ifla.org/VII/s9/nd1/iflapr-89e.pdf</a></li>
<li><b>World Wide Web Consortium:</b><a href="http://www.w3.org/WAI/"><b> </b>http://www.w3.org/WAI/<br /></a></li>
</ul>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">[<a href="#fr1" name="fn1">1</a>]. The World Health Organization estimates that 15% of the population is disabled. http://www.who.int/disabilities/world_report/2011/factsheet.pdf<br />[<a href="#fr2" name="fn2">2</a>]. Article 4.1 (b) of the UNCRPD<br />[<a href="#fr3" name="fn3">3</a>]. Article 9.2 (a) of the UNCRPD<br />[<a href="#fr4" name="fn4">4</a>]. Article 30. 1 (c) of the UNCRPD<br />[<a href="#fr5" name="fn5">5</a>]. The World Health Organization estimates that 15% of every population is disabled. http://www.who.int/disabilities/world_report/2011/factsheet.pdf<br />[<a href="#fr6" name="fn6">6</a>]. For more information see www.nabindia.org<br />[<a href="#fr7" name="fn7">7</a>]. For more information see www.aicb.org.in<br />[<a href="#fr8" name="fn8">8</a>]. For more information see www.daisyindia.org<br />[<a href="#fr9" name="fn9">9</a>]. For more information see <a href="http://www.iicpindia.org">www.iicpindia.org</a><br />[<a href="#fr10" name="fn10">10</a>]. Based on checklist prepared by the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions available at <a href="http://archive.ifla.org/VII/s9/nd1/iflapr-89e.pdf">http://archive.ifla.org/VII/s9/nd1/iflapr-89e.pdf</a>. These should be over above the guidelines prescribed here <a href="http://socialjustice.nic.in/glinecpwd.php">http://socialjustice.nic.in/glinecpwd.php</a></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/making-public-libraries-accessible-to-people-with-disabilities'>https://cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/making-public-libraries-accessible-to-people-with-disabilities</a>
</p>
No publisherRahul CherianFeaturedAccessibility2013-01-24T11:10:18ZBlog EntryEssays on #List — Selected Abstracts
https://cis-india.org/raw/essays-on-list-selected-abstracts
<b>In response to a recent call for essays that social, economic, cultural, political, infrastructural, or aesthetic dimensions of the #List, we received 11 abstracts. Out of these, we have selected 4 pieces to be published as part of a series titled #List on the r@w blog. Please find below the details of the selected abstracts. The call for essays on #List remains open, and we are accepting and assessing the incoming abstracts on a rolling basis.</b>
<p> </p>
<h4>1. <a href="#manisha">Manisha Chachra</a></h4>
<h4>2. <a href="#meghna">Meghna Yadav</a></h4>
<h4>3. <a href="#sarita">Sarita Bose</a></h4>
<h4>4. <a href="#shambhavi">Shambhavi Madan</a></h4>
<hr />
<h3 id="manisha"><strong>Manisha Chachra</strong></h3>
<h4><em>MeToo in Indian journalism: Questioning access to internet among intersectional women and idea of rehabilitative justice in digital spaces</em></h4>
<p>The advent of LoSHA and MeToo era witnessed an intriguing intersection of technology, politics and gender. The list and name-shame culture of social media has not only displayed changing power dynamics in digital space but an increasing movement towards engendering of internet spaces. The social, political and economic matrix defined by power relationships -- a patriarchy reflected in internet spaces, percolating in our interactions confronted a major challenge when women rose up to claim the same space. Internet space cannot be called a virtual reality as it is a sharp mirror into what is going in the power dynamics of society and politics. My paper broadly seeks to examine this engendering of spatial reality of digital space by looking at various conversations that took place on Twitter around MeToo in Indian journalism. MeToo has been widely understood as narration of one’s tale and how that experiential reality is connected with other women. However, a universalisation of such an experience often neglects intersectional reality attached to women’s experiences -- belonging to different caste, class, ethnicity and other
kinds of differences. My paper attempts to question how far MeToo in digital space accommodated the differential aspects of woman as a heterogeneous category. The spatial realities of technological spaces function like a double edged sword-- liberating as well as mobility paralysing. I use the term mobility paralysis to denote a contradiction in digital space-- which might be equally available to all sections of women but not fairly accessible. The accessibility is often a reflection of deep rooted patriarchies and kinship relationships that bind women in same
voiceless zone. MeToo in Indian journalism is a case study of how women of different backgrounds access digital spaces in questioning this mobility paralysis and inch towards a certain kind of emancipatory politics. Examining MeToo from the perspective of a social movement emerging on Twitter and Facebook, I aim to scrutinise scope of rehabilitative justice for the accused. The emergence of lists, and claiming of spaces is attached to the question of justice and being guilty or innocent of allegations. Online spaces in the recent times have also emerged as platforms of e-khaps (online khap panchayats with certain gatekeepers of the movement) where screenshot circulation, photoshop technology could be used to garner a public response against a particular person. It is interesting how after MeToo the question was not whether the person is guilty or accused rather how they should abandon their social media accounts and probably go absent virtually. In such a context, it is crucial to question the relationship between justice, one’s digital identity and who owns this identity. If rehabilitative justice is not an option, and apology-seeking is not available, what are we hoping from MeToo? The aim of any name-shame movement must be to reclaim digital space, narrate experiences and also to leave scope for others to respond, and seek justice. The question of justice is also closely linked with how women from intersectional backgrounds access internet, and emancipate
themselves.</p>
<h3 id="meghna"><strong>Meghna Yadav</strong></h3>
<p>For most people, the Internet is now synonymous with social media. Likewise, consumption of content on the Internet has shifted. We’ve moved from an earlier design of explicitly going to content-specific websites, to now, simply “logging in” and being presented with curated content spanning multiple areas. The infrastructure for consuming this content, however, remains predominantly screen based, implying a space constraint. Websites must, hence, decide what content users are to be presented with and in what order. In other words, social media must
generate itself as a ranked list of content.</p>
<p>In the classical theory of social choice, a set of voters is called to rank a set of alternatives and a social ranking of the alternatives is generated. In this essay, I propose to look at ranking of content as a social choice problem. Ranking rules of different social media platforms can be studied as social welfare functions for how they aggregate the preferences of their voters (i.e. users). Current listings of content could be modelled as the results of previously held rounds of voting. Taking examples, Reddit is built on a structure of outward voting, visceral through ‘upvotes’ and ‘downvotes’, constantly displaying to users the choice they have to alter content ranks on the website. TikTok, on the other hand, relies on taking away most of the voting power of its users.</p>
<p>As the Internet tends towards centralisation, studying how different list ranking rules aggregate our choices and in turn, alter the choices presented to us, becomes important to design a more democratic Internet.</p>
<h3 id="sarita"><strong>Sarita Bose</strong></h3>
<h4><em>Mapping goes local: A study of how Google Maps tracks user’s footprints and creates a ‘For You’ list</em></h4>
<p>The ‘Explore Nearby’ feature in Google Maps has three sections – Explore, Commute and For You. Of this, ‘For You’ section contains ‘Lists based on your local history’ as mentioned by Google itself. The Google Maps auto tracks a user’s movements and creates a digital footprint map and lists up events, programmes, restaurants, shops etc for the user. This research will focus on the ‘For You’ feature of Google Maps and its cultural and social dimensions. The work will focus on how the mapping is done and the logic behind drawing up the list. It will try to find out how the economy of Google Maps works. Why some lists shows up while some doesn’t. What kind of ‘algorithm – economy – user’ matrix is used to make up the list? The work will also try to understand cultural dimensions based on mind mapping techniques of Google. This research will follow three dimensions. The first is the mapping of user’s footprints itself and how the distance covered by a user becomes the user’s own digital existence. The Google Maps automatically asks for reviews of places the user might have visited or passed. The question is what algorithm is Google using to ask for the review? Is it pre-pointed or post-pointed? Thus, we come to the second part. Is Google only listing places that paid it or is it trying to digitally map a user’s area of geographical reach in general. If so, why? This brings us to the third dimension of the research work. What kind of cultural mapping is done of the user? The list the user gets is based on his own history and as more data is added, the more mapping is done. These three dimensions are intricately woven with each other and the work will try to establish this relationship.</p>
<h3 id="shambhavi"><strong>Shambhavi Madan</strong></h3>
<h4><em>List of lists of lists: Technologies of power, infrastructures of memory</em></h4>
<p>Lists make infinities comprehensible, and thus controllable. By virtue of the ubiquity of cyberspace and the digitized information infrastructures curating reality within these infinities, we are increasingly subjected to curatorial efforts of individuals as well as codes – algorithmic and architectural.</p>
<p>Statistical lists are Foucauldian technologies of power in modern societies; tools for the functioning of governmentality – not just in terms of state control over population phenomena but the governmentality of groups or individuals over themselves. The framework of biopolitics identifies a bureaucracy imposed by determining social classifications through listing and categorizing, within which people must situate themselves and their actions (Foucault, 2008). Thus, the authorship of lists is often reflective of power that allows for the perpetuation of hegemonic constructions of social reality, making the lists themselves sites of struggle.</p>
<p>This paper seeks to contextualize (public-oriented) lists as forms of biopolitical curation that often lie at points of intersection between collective consciousness and social order, through an approach that problematizes the socio-technics of agency and the subjective objectivity of authorship. Although list-making acts such as the National Population Register, NRC, #LoSHA, the electoral roll, the census, and Vivek Agnihotri’s call for a list of “Urban Naxals” all differ in terms of content, intent, and impact, and contain different asymmetries of power, the lowest common denominator lies in their role as producers of public knowledge and consequently, infrastructures of public memory. This approach allows for a reinterpretation of the fundamental duality of lists of and within publics: <em>the functionality of enforcing/maintaining social order, and the phenomenological practise of publicly self-presenting with a (semi-material) manifestation of a collective identity</em>. The former sees the use of lists as tools of population management, enacting citizenship and belonging through forms of inclusion and exclusion; the latter is reflective of the workings of self-autonomy – redefining the authorship of justice and punishment – in networked societies. Thus, a secondary theme in this paper would be to question the change and significance in the role of authorship through a phenomenological comparative of lists that are institutionalised practice versus those that are open and collaborative.</p>
<p>Both the act of list-making and the lists themselves are framed as coalescences of material and imaginary, by juxtaposing the idea of infrastructures as primarily relationalities – i.e. they can’t be theorized in terms of the object alone (Larkin, 2013) – with Latour’s relational ontology of human and non-human actors. The list itself is a non-human object/actant that after emerging as a product of co-construction, takes on an agential role of its own (Latour, 2005). Each of these lists can be considered as a quasi-object, a complex convergence of the technological and the social. Both #LoSHA and the NRC are not mere placeholders being ‘acted upon’, but real and meaningful actors acting as cultural mediators and not intermediaries. The integration of a socio-technical, infrastructural approach with one that emphasizes upon the aesthetics of authorship and public memory allows the subject to be seen as constitutive of an embodied, relational experience as opposed to just existing as a dissociative (re)presentation.</p>
<p><strong>References:</strong></p>
<p>Foucault, M. 2008. <em>The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978-1979</em>. Trans. G. Burchell. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.</p>
<p>Larkin, B. 2013. "The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructural." <em>Annual Review of Anthropology</em>. 42:327-343.</p>
<p>Latour, B. 2005. <em>Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory</em>. Oxford: Oxford University Press.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/essays-on-list-selected-abstracts'>https://cis-india.org/raw/essays-on-list-selected-abstracts</a>
</p>
No publishersneha-ppResearchers at WorkListRAW BlogFeaturedInternet Studies2019-09-03T13:38:12ZBlog EntryWhite Paper on RTI and Privacy V1.2
https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/white-paper-on-rti-and-privacy-v-1.2
<b>This white paper explores the relationship between privacy and transparency in the context of the right to information in India. Analysing pertinent case law and legislation - the paper highlights how the courts and the law in India address questions of transparency vs. privacy. </b>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; "><b>Introduction</b></h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Although the right to information is not specifically spelt out in the Constitution of India, 1950, it has been read into Articles 14 (right to equality), 19(1)(a) (freedom of speech and expression) and 21 (right to life) through cases such as <i>Bennet Coleman</i> v. <i>Union of India</i>,<a href="#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1">[1]</a> <i>Tata Press Ltd. </i>v.<i> Maharashtra Telephone Nigam Ltd.</i>,<a href="#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2">[2]</a> etc. The same Articles of the Constitution were also interpreted in <i>Kharak Singh</i> v.<i>State of U.P.</i>,<a href="#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3">[3]</a> <i>Govind</i> v. <i>State of M.P.</i>, <a href="#_ftn4" name="_ftnref4">[4]</a> and a number of other cases, to include within their scope a right to privacy. At the very outset it appears that a right to receive information -though achieving greater transparency in public life - could impinge on the right to privacy of certain people. The presumed tension between the right to privacy and the right to information has been widely recognized and a framework towards balancing the two rights, has been widely discussed across jurisdictions. In India, nowhere is this conflict and the attempt to balance it more evident than under the Right to Information Act, 2005 (the "<b>RTI Act</b>").</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Supporting the constitutional right to information enjoyed by the citizens, is the statutorily recognized right to information granted under the RTI Act. Any potential infringement of the right to privacy by the provisions of the RTI Act are sought to be balanced by section 8 which provides that no information should be disclosed if it creates an unwarranted invasion of the privacy of any individual. This exception states that there is no obligation to disclose information which relates to personal information, the disclosure of which has no relationship to any public activity or interest, or which would cause unwarranted invasion of the privacy of the individual unless the larger public interest justifies the disclosure of such information. <a href="#_ftn5" name="_ftnref5">[5]</a> The Act further goes on to say that where any information relating to or supplied by a third party and treated by that party as confidential, is to be disclosed, the Central Public Information Officer or State Public Information Officer has to give written notice to that party within five days of receiving such a request inviting such third party (within ten days) to make its case as to whether such information should or should not be disclosed.<a href="#_ftn6" name="_ftnref6">[6]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">A plain reading of section 11 suggests that for the section to apply the following three conditions have to be satisfied, i.e. (i) if the PIO is considering disclosing the information (ii) the information relates to the third party or was given to a Public Authority by the third party in confidence; and (iii) the third party treated the information to be a confidential. It has been held that in order to satisfy the third part of the test stated above, the third party has to be consulted and therefore a notice has to be sent to the third party. Even if the third party claims confidentiality, the proviso to the section provides that the information cannot be withheld if the public interest in the disclosure outweighs the possible harm or injury that may be caused to the third party, except in cases of trade or commercial secrets.<a href="#_ftn7" name="_ftnref7">[7]</a> The Courts have also held that section 11 should be read keeping in mind the exceptions contained in section 8 (discussed in detail later) and the exceptions contained therein. <a href="#_ftn8" name="_ftnref8">[8]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">This principle of non disclosure of private information can be found across a number of common law jurisdictions. The United Kingdom's Freedom of Information Act, 2000 exempts the disclosure of information where it would violate the data protection principles contained in the Data Protection Act, 1998 or constitute an actionable breach of confidence.<a href="#_ftn9" name="_ftnref9">[9]</a> The Australian Freedom of Information Act, 1982 categorizes documents involving unreasonable disclosure of personal information as conditionally exempt i.e. allows for their disclosure unless such disclosure would be contrary to public interest.<a href="#_ftn10" name="_ftnref10">[10]</a> The Canadian Access to Information Act also has a provision which allows the authorities to refuse to disclose personal information except in accordance with the provisions of the Canadian Privacy Act. <a href="#_ftn11" name="_ftnref11">[11]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">An overview of the RTI Act, especially sections 6 to 8 seems to give the impression that the legislature has tried to balance and harmonize conflicting public and private rights and interests by building sufficient safeguards and exceptions to the general principles of disclosure under the Act. <a href="#_ftn12" name="_ftnref12">[12]</a> This is why it is generally suggested that section 8, when applied, should be given a strict interpretation as it is a fetter on not only a statutory right granted under the RTI Act but also a pre-existing constitutional right. <a href="#_ftn13" name="_ftnref13">[13]</a> Logical as this argument may seem and appropriate in some circumstances, it does present a problem when dealing with the privacy exception contained in section 8(1)(j). That is because the right to privacy envisaged in this section is also a pre-existing constitutional right which has been traced to the same provisions of the Constitution from which the constitutional right of freedom of information emanates.<a href="#_ftn14" name="_ftnref14">[14]</a> Therefore there is an ambiguity regarding the treatment and priority given to the privacy exception vs. the disclosure mandate in the RTI Act, as it requires the balancing of not only two competing statutory rights but also two constitutional rights.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; "><b>The Privacy Exception </b></h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">As discussed earlier, the purpose of the RTI Act is to increase transparency and ensure that people have access to as much public information as possible. Such a right is critical in a democratic country as it allows for accountability of the State and allows individuals to seek out information and make informed decisions. However, it seems from the language of the RTI Act that at the time of its drafting the legislature did realize that there would be a conflict between the endeavor to provide information and the right to privacy of individuals over the information kept with public authorities, which is why a privacy exception was carved into section 8(1)(j) of the Right to Information Act. The Act does not only protect the privacy of the third party who's information is at risk of being disclosed, but also the privacy of the applicant. In fact it has now been held that a private respondent need not give his/her ID or address as long as the information provided by him/her is sufficient to contact him/her.<a href="#_ftn15" name="_ftnref15">[15]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">It is interesting to note that although the RTI Act gives every citizen a right to information, it does not limit this right with a stipulation as to how the information shall be used by the applicant or the reason for which the applicant wants such information. <a href="#_ftn16" name="_ftnref16">[16]</a> This lack of a purpose limitation in the Act may have privacy implications as non sensitive personal information could be sought from different sources and processed by any person so as to convert such non-sensitive or anonymous information into identifiable information which could directly impact the privacy of individuals.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The exception in S. 8(1)(j) prohibits the disclosure of personal information for two reasons (i) its disclosure does not relate to any public activity or interest or (ii) it would be an unwarranted invasion into privacy. The above two conditions however get trumped if a larger public interest is satisfied by the disclosure of such information.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">One interesting thing about the exception contained in section 8(1)(j) is that this exception itself has an exception to it in the form of a proviso. The proviso says that any information which cannot be denied to the central or state legislature shall not be denied to any person. Since the proviso has been placed at the end of sub-section 8(1) which is also the end of clause 8(1)(j), one might be tempted to ask whether this proviso applies only to the privacy exception i.e. clause 8(1)(j) or to the entire sub-section 8(1) (which includes other exceptions such as national interest, etc.). This issue was put to rest by the Bombay High Court when it held that since the proviso has been put only after clause 8(1)(j) and not before each and every clause, it would not apply to the entire sub-section 8(1) but only to clause 8(1)(j), thus ensuring that the exceptions to disclosure other than the right to privacy are not restricted by this proviso.<a href="#_ftn17" name="_ftnref17">[17]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Scope of Proviso to section 8(1)(j)</b><br />Though the courts have agreed that the proviso is applicable only to section 8(1)(j), the import of the proviso to section 8(1)(j) is a little more ambiguous and there are conflicting decisions by different High Courts on this point. Whereas the Bombay High Court has laid emphasis on the letter of the proviso and derived strength from the objects and overall scheme of the Act to water down the provisions of section 8(1)(j), <a href="#_ftn18" name="_ftnref18">[18]</a> the Delhi High Court has disagreed with such an approach which gives "undue, even overwhelming deference" to Parliamentary privilege in seeking information. Such an approach would render the protection under section 8(1)j) meaningless, and the basic safeguard bereft of content.<a href="#_ftn19" name="_ftnref19">[19]</a> In the words of the Delhi High Court:</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">" <i> The proviso has to be only as confined to what it enacts, to the class of information that Parliament can ordinarily seek; if it were held that all information relating to all public servants, even private information, can be accessed by Parliament, Section 8(1)(j) would be devoid of any substance, because the provision makes no distinction between public and private information. Moreover there is no law which enables Parliament to demand all such information; it has to be necessarily in the context of some matter, or investigation. If the reasoning of the Bombay High Court were to be accepted, there would be nothing left of the right to privacy, elevated to the status of a fundamental right, by several judgments of the Supreme Court. </i> "</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The interpretation given by the Delhi High Court thus ensures that section 8(1)(j) still has some effect, as otherwise the privacy exception would have gotten steamrolled by parliamentary privilege and all sorts of information such as Income Tax Returns, etc. of both private and public individuals would have been liable to disclosure under the RTI Act.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Unfortunately, the RTI Act does not describe the terms "personal information" or "larger public interest" used in section 8(1)(j), which leaves some amount of ambiguity in interpreting the privacy exception to the RTI Act. Therefore the only option for anyone to understand these terms in greater depth is to discuss and analyse the case laws developed by the Hon'ble Supreme Court and the High Courts which have tried to throw some light on this issue.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">We shall discuss some of these landmark judgments to understand the interpretations given to these terms and then move on to specific instances where (applying these principles) information has been disclosed or denied.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Personal Information</b><br />The RTI Act defines the term information but does not define the term "personal information". Therefore one has to rely on judicial pronouncements to understand the term a more clearly. Looking at the common understanding and dictionary meaning of "personal" as well as the definition of "information" contained in the RTI Act it could be said that personal information would be information, information that pertains to a person and as such it takes into its fold possibly every kind of information relating to the person. Now, such personal information of the person may, or may not, have relation to any public activity, or to public interest. At the same time, such personal information may, or may not, be private to the person. <a href="#_ftn20" name="_ftnref20">[20]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The Delhi High Court has tried to draw a distinction between the term "private information" which encompasses the personal intimacies of the home, the family, marriage, motherhood, procreation, child rearing and of the like nature and "personal information" which would be any information that pertains to an individual. This would logically imply that all private information would be part of personal information but not the other way round. <a href="#_ftn21" name="_ftnref21">[21]</a> The term 'personal information' has in other cases, been variously described as "identity particulars of public servants, i.e. details such as their dates of birth, personal identification numbers",<a href="#_ftn22" name="_ftnref22">[22]</a> and as including tax returns, medical records etc.<a href="#_ftn23" name="_ftnref23">[23]</a> It is worth noting that just because the term used is "personal information" does not mean that the information always has to relate to an actual person, but may even be a juristic entity such as a trust or corporation, etc.<a href="#_ftn24" name="_ftnref24">[24]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Larger Public Interest</b><br />The term larger public interest has not been discussed or defined in the RTI Act, however the Courts have developed some tests to determine if in a given situation, personal information should be disclosed in the larger public interest.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Whenever a Public Information Officer is asked for personal information about any person, it has to balance the competing claims of the privacy of the third party on the one hand and claim of public interest on the other and determine whether the public interest in such a disclosure satisfies violating a person's privacy. The expression "public interest" is not capable of a precise definition and does not have a rigid meaning. It is therefore an elastic term and takes its colors from the statute in which it occurs, the concept varying with the time and the state of the society and its needs. This seems to be the reason why the legislature and even the Courts have shied away from a precise definition of "public interest". However, the term public interest does not mean something that is merely interesting or satisfies the curiosity or love of information or amusement; but something in which a class of the community have some interest by which their rights or liabilities are affected.<a href="#_ftn25" name="_ftnref25">[25]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">There have been suggestions that the use of the word "larger" before the term "public interest" denotes that the public interest involved should serve a large section of the society and not just a small section of it, i.e. if the information has a bearing on the economy, the moral values in the society; the environment; national safety, or the like, the same would qualify as "larger public interest".<a href="#_ftn26" name="_ftnref26">[26]</a> However this is not a very well supported theory and the usage of the term "larger public interest" cannot be given such a narrow meaning, for example what if the disclosure of the information could save the lives of only 10 people or even just 5 children? Would the information not be released just because it violates one person's right to privacy and there is not a significant number of lives at stake? This does not seem to be what all the cases on the right to privacy, right from <i>Kharak Singh<a href="#_ftn27" name="_ftnref27"><b>[27]</b></a></i> all the way to <i>Naz Foundation</i>, <a href="#_ftn28" name="_ftnref28">[28]</a> seem to suggest. Infact, in the very same judgment where the above interpretation has been suggested, the Court undermines this argument by giving the example of a person with a previous crime of sexual assault being employed in an orphanage and says that the interest of the small group of children in the orphanage would outweigh the privacy concerns of the individual thus requiring disclosure of all information regarding the employee's past.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In light of the above understanding of section 8(1)(j), there seem to be two different tests that have been proposed by the Courts, which seem to connote the same principle although in different words:</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">1. The test laid down by <i>Union Public Service Commission</i> v. <i>R.K. Jain</i>:</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(i) The information sought must relate to „Personal information‟ as understood above of a third party. Therefore, if the information sought does not qualify as personal information, the exemption would not apply;</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(ii) Such personal information should relate to a third person, i.e., a person other than the information seeker or the public authority; AND</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(iii) (a) The information sought should not have a relation to any public activity qua such third person, or to public interest. If the information sought relates to public activity of the third party, i.e. to his activities falling within the public domain, the exemption would not apply. Similarly, if the disclosure of the personal information is found justified in public interest, the exemption would be lifted, otherwise not; OR (b) The disclosure of the information would cause unwarranted invasion of the privacy of the individual, and that there is no larger public interest involved in such disclosure. <a href="#_ftn29" name="_ftnref29">[29]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">2. The other test was laid down in <i>Vijay Prakash</i> v. <i>Union of India</i>, but in the specific circumstances of disclosure of personal information relating to a public official:</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(i) whether the information is deemed to comprise the individual's private details, unrelated to his position in the organization;</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(ii) whether the disclosure of the personal information is with the aim of providing knowledge of the proper performance of the duties and tasks assigned to the public servant in any specific case; and</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(iii) whether the disclosure will furnish any information required to establish accountability or transparency in the use of public resources. <a href="#_ftn30" name="_ftnref30">[30]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Constitutional Restrictions</b><br />Since there is not extensive academic discussion on the meaning of the term "larger public interest" or "public interest" as provided in section 8(1)(j), one is forced to turn to other sources to get a better idea of these terms. One such source is constitutional law, since the right to privacy, as contained in section 8(1)(j) has its origins in Articles 14,<a href="#_ftn31" name="_ftnref31">[31]</a> 19(1)(a) <a href="#_ftn32" name="_ftnref32">[32]</a> and 21<a href="#_ftn33" name="_ftnref33">[33]</a> of the Constitution of India. The constitutional right to privacy in India is also not an absolute right and various cases have carved out a number of exceptions to privacy, a perusal of which may give some indication as to what may be considered as 'larger public interest', these restrictions are:</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">a) Reasonable restrictions can be imposed on the right to privacy in the interests of the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States, public order, decency or morality, or in relation to contempt of court, defamation or incitement to an offence; <a href="#_ftn34" name="_ftnref34"><sup><sup>[34]</sup></sup></a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">b) Reasonable restrictions can be imposed upon the right to privacy either in the interests of the general public or for the protection of the interests of any Scheduled Tribe;<a href="#_ftn35" name="_ftnref35"><sup><sup>[35]</sup></sup></a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">c) The right to privacy can be restricted by procedure established by law which procedure would have to satisfy the test laid down in the <i>Maneka Gandhi case</i>.<a href="#_ftn36" name="_ftnref36"><sup><sup>[36]</sup></sup></a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">d) The right can be restricted if there is an important countervailing interest which is superior; <a href="#_ftn37" name="_ftnref37"><sup><sup>[37]</sup></sup></a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">e) It can be restricted if there is a compelling state interest to be served by doing so; <a href="#_ftn38" name="_ftnref38"><sup><sup>[38]</sup></sup></a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">f) It can be restricted in case there is a compelling public interest to be served by doing so; <a href="#_ftn39" name="_ftnref39"><sup><sup>[39]</sup></sup></a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">g) The <i>Rajagopal tests - </i>This case lays down three exceptions to the rule that a person's private information cannot be published, <i>viz. </i> i) person voluntarily thrusts himself into controversy or voluntarily raises or invites a controversy, ii) if publication is based on public records other than for sexual assault, kidnap and abduction, iii) there is no right to privacy for public officials with respect to their acts and conduct relevant to the discharge of their official duties. It must be noted that although the Court talks about public records, it does not use the term 'public domain' and thus it is possible that even if a document has been leaked in the public domain and is freely available, if it is not a matter of public record, the right to privacy can still be claimed in regard to it.<a href="#_ftn40" name="_ftnref40"><sup><sup>[40]</sup></sup></a></p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; "><b>Section 8(1)(j) in Practice <br /></b></h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The discussion in the previous chapter regarding the interpretation of section 8(1)(j), though (hopefully) helpful still seems a little abstract without specific instances and illustrations to drive home the point. In this chapter we shall endeavor to briefly discuss some specific cases regarding information disclosure where the issue of violation of privacy of a third party was raised.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Private Information of Public Officials</b><br />Some of the most common problems regarding section 8(1)(j) come up when discussing information (personal or otherwise) regarding public officers. The issue comes up because an argument can be made that certain information such as income tax details, financial details, medical records, etc. of public officials should be disclosed since it has a bearing on their public activities and disclosure of such information in case of crooked officers would serve the interests of transparency and cleaner government (hence serving a larger public interest). Although section 8(1)(j) does not make any distinction between a private person and a public servant, a distinction in the way their personal information is treated does appear in reality due to the inherent nature of a public servant. Infact it has sometimes been argued that public servants must waive the right to privacy in favour of transparency.<a href="#_ftn41" name="_ftnref41">[41]</a> However this argument has been repeatedly rejected by the Courts, <a href="#_ftn42" name="_ftnref42">[42]</a> just because a person assumes public office does not mean that he/she would automatically lose their right to privacy in favour of transparency.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">If personal information regarding a public servant is asked for, then a distinction must be made between the information that is inherently personal to the person and that which has a connection with his/her public functions. The information exempted under section 8(1)(j) is personal information which is so intimately private in nature that the disclosure of the same would not benefit any other person, but would result in the invasion of the privacy of the third party.<a href="#_ftn43" name="_ftnref43">[43]</a> In short, the Courts have concluded that there can be no blanket rule regarding what information can and cannot be disclosed when it comes to a public servant, and the disclosure (or lack of it) would depend upon the circumstances of each case.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Although the earlier thinking of the CIC as well as various High Courts of the country was that information regarding disciplinary proceedings and service records of public officials is to be treated as public information in order to boost transparency,<a href="#_ftn44" name="_ftnref44">[44]</a> however this line of thinking took almost a U-turn in 2012 after the decision of the Supreme Court in <i>Girish Ramchandra Deshpande </i>v. <i>Central Information Commissioner,<a href="#_ftn45" name="_ftnref45"><b>[45]</b></a></i> and now the prevailing principle is that such information is personal information and should not be disclosed unless a larger public interest is would be served by the disclosure.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">It would also be helpful to look at a list of the type of information regarding public servants which has been disclosed in the past, gleaned from various cases, to get a better understanding of the prevailing trends in such cases:</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(i) Details of postings of public servants at various points of time, since this was not considered as personal information; <a href="#_ftn46" name="_ftnref46">[46]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(ii) Copies of posting/ transfer orders of public servants, since it was not considered personal information; <a href="#_ftn47" name="_ftnref47">[47]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(iii) Information regarding transfers of colleagues cannot be exempted from disclosure, since disclosure would not cause any unwarranted invasion of privacy and non disclosure would defeat the object of the RTI Act;<a href="#_ftn48" name="_ftnref48">[48]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(iv) Information regarding the criteria adopted and the marks allotted to various academic qualifications, experience and interview in selection process for government posts by the state Public Service Commission;<a href="#_ftn49" name="_ftnref49">[49]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(v) Information regarding marks obtained in written test, interview, annual confidential reports of the applicant as well as the marks in the written test and interview of the last candidate selected, since this information was not considered as personal information; <a href="#_ftn50" name="_ftnref50">[50]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(vi) Information relating to the appointment and educational certificates of teachers in an educational institution (which satisfies the requirements of being a public authority) was disclosed since this was considered as relevant to them performing their functions. <a href="#_ftn51" name="_ftnref51">[51]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The performance of an employee/officer in an organization is primarily a matter between the employee and the employer and normally those aspects are governed by the service rules which fall under the expression "personal information", the disclosure of which has no relationship to any public activity or public interest. To understand this better below is a brief list of the type of information that has been considered by the Courts as personal information which is liable to be exempt from disclosure under section 8(1)(j):</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(i) (a) Salary details, (b) show cause notice, memo and censure, (c) return of assets and liabilities, (d) details of investment and other related details, (e) details of gifts accepted, (f) complete enquiry proceedings, (g) details of income tax returns;<a href="#_ftn52" name="_ftnref52">[52]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(ii) All memos issued, show cause notices and orders of censure/punishment etc. are personal information. Cannot be revealed unless a larger public interest justifies such disclosure;<a href="#_ftn53" name="_ftnref53">[53]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(iii) Disciplinary information of an employee is personal information and is exempt under section 8(1)(j); <a href="#_ftn54" name="_ftnref54">[54]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(iv) Medical records cannot be disclosed due to section 8(1)(j) as they come under "personal information", unless a larger public interest can be shown meriting such disclosure;<a href="#_ftn55" name="_ftnref55">[55]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(v) Copy of personnel records and service book (containing Annual Confidential Reports, etc.) of a public servant is personal information and cannot be disclosed due to section 8(1)(j);<a href="#_ftn56" name="_ftnref56">[56]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(vi) Information regarding sexual disorder, DNA test between an officer and his surrogate mother, name of his biological father and step father, name of his mother and surrogate step mother and such other aspects were denied by the Courts as such information was considered beyond the perception of decency and was an invasion into another man's privacy.<a href="#_ftn57" name="_ftnref57">[57]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">It is not just the issue of disclosure of personal details of public officials that raises complicated questions regarding the right to information, but the opposite is equally true, i.e. what about seemingly "public" details of private individuals. A very complicated question arose with regard to information relating to the passport details of private individuals.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Passport Information of Private Individuals</b><br />The disclosure of passport details of private individuals is complicated because for a long time there was some confusion because of the treatment to be given to passport details, i.e. would its disclosure cause an invasion of privacy since it contains personally identifying information, specially because photocopies of the passport are regularly given for various purposes such as travelling, getting a new phone connection, etc. The Central Information Commission used a somewhat convoluted logic that since a person providing information relating to his residence and identity while applying for a passport was engaging in a public activity therefore such information relates to a public activity and should be disclosed. This view was rejected by the Delhi High Court in the case of <i>Union of India</i> v. <i>Hardev Singh</i>,<a href="#_ftn58" name="_ftnref58">[58]</a> and the view taken in<i>Hardev Singh</i> was later endorsed and relied upon in <i>Union of India </i>v. <i>Rajesh Bhatia</i>, <a href="#_ftn59" name="_ftnref59">[59]</a> while hearing a number of petitions to decide what details of a third party's passport should be disclosed and what should be exempt from disclosure.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">A list of the Courts conclusions is given below:</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><i><span>Information that can be revealed:</span></i></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(i) Name of passport holder;</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(ii) Whether a visa was issued to a third party or not;</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(iii) Details of the passport including dates of first issue, subsequent renewals, dates of application for renewals, numbers of the new passports and date of expiry;</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(iv) Nature of documents submitted as proof;</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(v) Name of police station from where verification for passport was done;</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(vi) Whether any report was called for from the jurisdictional police;</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(vii) Whether passport was renewed through an agent or through a foreign embassy;</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(viii) Whether it was renewed in India or any foreign country;</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(ix) Whether tatkal facility was availed by the passport holder;</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><i><span>Information that cannot be revealed:</span></i></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(i) Contents of the documents submitted with the passport application;</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(ii) Marital status and name and address of husband;</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(iii) Whether person's name figures as mother/guardian in the passport of any minor;</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(iv) Copy of passport application form;</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(v) Residential address of passport holder;</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(vi) Details of cases filed/pending against passport holder;</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(vii) Copy of old passport;</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(viii) Report of the police and CID for issuing the passport;</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(ix) Copy of the Verification Certificate, if any such Verification Certificate was relied upon for the issue of the passport.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Other Instances </b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Apart from the above two broad categories of information that has been the subject of intense judicial discussion, certain other situations have also arisen where the Courts have had to decide the issue of disclosure under section 8(1)(j), a brief summary of such situations is given below:</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(i) names and details of people who received money as donations from the President out of public funds was considered as information which has a definite link to public activities and was therefore liable to be disclosed;<a href="#_ftn60" name="_ftnref60">[60]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(ii) information regarding the religion practiced by a person, who is alleged to be a public figure, collected by the Census authorities was not disclosed since it was held that the quest to obtain the information about the religion professed or not professed by a citizen cannot be in any event; <a href="#_ftn61" name="_ftnref61">[61]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(iii) information regarding all FIRs against a person was not protected under section 8(1)(j) since it was already a matter of public record and Court record and could not be said to be an invasion of the person's privacy;<a href="#_ftn62" name="_ftnref62">[62]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(iv) information regarding the income tax returns of a public charitable trust was held not to be exempt under section 8(1)(j), since the trust involved was a public charitable trust functioning under a Scheme formulated by the District Court and registered under the Bombay Public Trust Act as such due to its character and activities its tax returns would be in relation to public interest or activities.<a href="#_ftn63" name="_ftnref63">[63]</a></p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; "><b>Conclusion</b></h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">A discussion of the provisions of section 8 and 11 of the RTI Act as well as the case laws under it reveals that the legislature was aware of the dangers posed to the privacy of individuals from such a powerful transparency law. However, it did not want the exceptions carved out to protect the privacy of individuals to nullify the objects of the RTI Act and therefore drafted the legislation to incorporate the principle that although the RTI Act should not be used to violate the privacy of individuals, such an exception will not be applicable if a larger public interest is to be served by the disclosure. This principle is in line with other common law jurisdictions such as the U.K, Austalia, Canada, etc. which have similar exceptions based on privacy or confidentiality.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">However it is disappointing to note that the legislature has only left the legislation at the stage of the principle which has left the language of the exception very wide and open to varied interpretations. It is understandable that the legislature would try to keep specifics out of the scope of the section to make it future proof. It is obvious that it would be impossible for the legislature or the courts to imagine every single circumstance that could arise where the right to information and the right to privacy would be at loggerheads. However, such wide and ambiguous drafting has led to cases where the Courts and the Central Information Commission have taken opposing views, with the views of the Court obviously prevailing in the end. This was illustrated by the issue of disclosure of passport details of private individuals with a large number of CIC cases taking different views till the High Court of Delhi gave categorical findings on the issue in the <i>Hardev Singh</i> and <i>Rajesh Bhatia</i> cases. Similar was the issue of service details of public officials since before the decision of the Supreme Court in the case of <i>Girish Ramchandra Deshpande</i> in 2012 the prevailing thinking of the CIC was that details of disciplinary proceedings against public officials are not covered by section 8(1)(j), however this thinking has now taken a U-turn as the Supreme Court's understanding of the right to privacy has taken stronger roots and such information is now outside the scope of the RTI Act, unless a larger public interest in the disclosure can be shown.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The ambiguity that arises in application when trying to balance the right to privacy against the right to information is a drawback in incorporating only a principle and leaving the language ambiguous in any legislation. This paper does not advocate that the legislature try to list out all the instances of this problem that are possibly imaginable, this would be too time consuming and may even be counterproductive. However, it is possible for the legislature to adopt an accepted practice of legislative drafting and list certain instances where there is an obvious balancing required between the two rights and put them as "<i>Illustrations</i>" to the section. This device has been utilised to great effect by some of the most fundamental legislations in India such as the Contract Act, 1872 and the Indian Penal Code, 1860. An alternative to this approach could be to utilize the approach taken in the Australian Freedom of Information Act, where the Act itself gives certain factors which should be considered to determine whether access to a particular document would be in the public interest or not.</p>
<h2 style="text-align: justify; "><b>List of References</b></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><b>Primary Sources</b></span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">1. Australia Freedom of Information Act, 1982.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">2. <i>Bennet Coleman</i> v. <i>Union of India</i>, AIR 1973 SC 106.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">3. <i>Bhagat Singh </i>v. <i>Chief Information Commissioner, </i>2008 (64) AIC 284 (Del).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">4. Calcutta High Court, WP (W) No. 33290 of 2013, dated 20-11-2013.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">5. Canadian Access to Information Act.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">6. <i>Canara Bank</i> v. <i>Chief Information Commissioner</i>, 2007 (58) AIC Ker 667</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">7. Constitution of India, 1950.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">8. <i>Govind</i> v. <i>State of M.P.</i>, Supreme Court of India, WP No. 72 of 1970, dated 18-03-1975.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">9. <i>Haryana Public Service Commission </i>v. <i>State Information Commission, </i>AIR 2009 P & H 14.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">10. <i>Jamia Millia Islamia v. Sh. Ikramuddin</i>, Delhi High Court, WP(C) 5677 of 2011 dated 22-11-2011.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">11. <i>Jitendra Singh</i> v. <i>State of U.P.</i>, 2008 (66) AIC 685 (All).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">12. <i>Kharak Singh</i> v. <i>State of U.P.</i>, AIR 1963 SC 129.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">13. <i>Maneka Gandhi </i>v. <i>Union of India</i>, Supreme Court of India, WP No. 231 of 1977, dated 25-01-1978.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">14. <i>Naz Foundation</i> Delhi High Court, WP(C) No.7455/2001 dated 02-07-2009.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">15. <i>P.C. Wadhwa</i> v. <i>Central Information Commission</i>, Punjab and Haryana High Court, LPA No. 1252 of 2009 dated 29-11-2010.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">16. <i>Paardarshita Public Welfare Foundation</i> v. <i>Union of India and others</i>, AIR 2011 Del 82.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">17. <i>President's Secretariat</i> v. <i>Nitish Kumar Tripathi</i>, Delhi High Court, WP (C) 3382 of 2012, dated 14-06-2012.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">18. <i>Public Information Officer</i> v. <i>Andhra Pradesh Information Commission</i>,2009 (76) AIC 854 (AP).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">19. <i>R. Rajagopal v. Union of India</i>, Supreme Court of India, dated 7-10-1994.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">20. <i>Rajendra Vasantlal Shah</i> v. <i>Central Information Commissioner, New Delhi</i>, AIR 2011 Guj 70.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">21. <i>Rajinder Jaina</i> v. <i>Central Information Commission</i>, 2010 (86) AIC 510 (Del. H.C.).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">22. Right to Information Act, 2005</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">23. <i>Secretary General, Supreme Court of India</i> v. <i>Subhash Chandra,</i> Delhi High Court - Full Bench, LPA No.501/2009, dated 12-01-2010.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">24. <i>Srikant Pandaya</i> v. <i>State of M.P.</i>, AIR 2011 MP 14.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">25. <i>Surendra Singh </i>v. <i>State of U.P</i>, AIR 2009 Alld. 106.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">26. <i>Surup Singh Hyra Naik</i> v. <i>State of Maharashtra</i>, 2007 (58) AIC 739 (Bom).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">27. <i>Tata Press Ltd. </i>v.<i> Maharashtra Telephone Nigam Ltd.</i>, (1995) 5 SCC 139.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">28. U.K. Freedom of Information Act, 2000.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">29. <i>UCO Bank</i> v. <i>Central Information Commissioner and another</i>, 2009 (79) AIC 545 (P&H).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">30. <i>Union Centre for Earth Science Studies </i>v. <i>Anson Sebastian, </i>AIR 2010 Ker. 151</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">31. <i>Union of India</i> v. <i>Hardev Singh</i> WP(C) 3444 of 2012 dated 23-08-2013.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">32. <i>Union of India </i>v. <i>Rajesh Bhatia</i> WP(C) 2232/2012 dated 17-09-2013.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">33. <i>Union Public Service Commission </i>v. <i>R.K. Jain</i>, Delhi High Court W.P.(C) 1243/2011 & C.M. No. 2618/2011 ( for stay), dated 13-07-2012.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">34. <i>Vijay Prakash</i> v. <i>Union of India</i>, 2009 (82) AIC 583 (Del).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><b>Secondary Sources</b></span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">1. "Country Report for U.K.", Privacy International, available at <a href="https://www.privacyinternational.org/reports/united-kingdom">https://www.privacyinternational.org/reports/united-kingdom</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">2. "Country Report for Australia", Privacy International, available at <a href="https://www.privacyinternational.org/reports/australia">https://www.privacyinternational.org/reports/australia</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">3. "Country Report for Canada", Privacy International, available at <a href="https://www.privacyinternational.org/reports/canada">https://www.privacyinternational.org/reports/canada</a>.</p>
<div style="text-align: justify; ">
<hr />
<div id="ftn1">
<p><a href="#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1">[1]</a> AIR 1973 SC 106. This case held that the freedom of the press embodies in itself the right of the people to read.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn2">
<p><a href="#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2">[2]</a> (1995) 5 SCC 139.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn3">
<p><a href="#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3">[3]</a> AIR 1963 SC 129.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn4">
<p><a href="#_ftnref4" name="_ftn4">[4]</a> Supreme Court of India, WP No. 72 of 1970, dated 18-03-1975.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn5">
<p><a href="#_ftnref5" name="_ftn5">[5]</a> Section 8(1) in its entirety states as follows:</p>
<p>(1) Notwithstanding anything contained in this Act, there shall be no obligation to give any citizen,-</p>
<p>(a) information, disclosure of which would prejudicially affect the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security, strategic, scientific or economic interests of the State, relation with foreign State or lead to incitement of an offence;</p>
<p>(b) information which has been expressly forbidden to be published by any court of law or tribunal or the disclosure of which may constitute contempt of court;</p>
<p>(c) information, the disclosure of which would cause a breach of privilege of Parliament or the State Legislature;</p>
<p>(d) information including commercial confidence, trade secrets or intellectual property, the disclosure of which would harm the competitive position of a third party, unless the competent authority is satisfied that larger public interest warrants the disclosure of such information;</p>
<p>(e) information available to a person in his fiduciary relationship, unless the competent authority is satisfied that the larger public interest warrants the disclosure of such information;</p>
<p>(f) information received in confidence from foreign Government;</p>
<p>(g) information, the disclosure of which would endanger the life or physical safety of any person or identify the source of information or assistance given in confidence for law enforcement or security purposes;</p>
<p>(h) information which would impede the process of investigation or apprehension or prosecution of offenders;</p>
<p>(i) cabinet papers including records of deliberations of the Council of Ministers, Secretaries and other officers:</p>
<p>Provided that the decisions of Council of Ministers, the reasons thereof, and the material on the basis of which the decisions were taken shall be made public after the decision has been taken, and the matter is complete, or over:</p>
<p>Provided further that those matters which come under the exemptions specified in this section shall not be disclosed;</p>
<p>(j) information which relates to personal information the disclosure of which has no relationship to any public activity or interest, or which would cause unwarranted invasion of the privacy of the individual unless the Central Public Information Officer or the State Public Information Officer or the appellate authority, as the case may be, is satisfied that the larger public interest justifies the disclosure of such information:</p>
<p>Provided that the information which cannot be denied to the Parliament or a State Legislature shall not be denied to any person.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn6">
<p><a href="#_ftnref6" name="_ftn6">[6]</a> Section 11 of the RTI Act.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn7">
<p><a href="#_ftnref7" name="_ftn7">[7]</a> <i>The Registrar General</i> v. <i>A. Kanagaraj</i>, (Madras High Court, 14 June 2013, available at http://www.indiankanoon.org/doc/36226888/.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn8">
<p><a href="#_ftnref8" name="_ftn8">[8]</a> Arvind Kejriwal v. Central Public Information Officer, (Delhi High Court, 30 September 2011, available at http://www.indiankanoon.org/doc/1923225/.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn9">
<p><a href="#_ftnref9" name="_ftn9">[9]</a> Sections 40 and 41 of the U.K. Freedom of Information Act, 2000.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn10">
<p><a href="#_ftnref10" name="_ftn10">[10]</a> Section 11A read with section 47-F of the Australia Freedom of Information Act, 1982.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn11">
<p><a href="#_ftnref11" name="_ftn11">[11]</a> Section 19 of the Canadian Access to Information Act.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn12">
<p><a href="#_ftnref12" name="_ftn12">[12]</a> <i>Public Information Officer</i> v. <i>Andhra Pradesh Information Commission</i>,2009 (76) AIC 854 (AP).</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn13">
<p><a href="#_ftnref13" name="_ftn13">[13]</a> <i>Bhagat Singh </i> v. <i>Chief Information Commissioner, </i>2008 (64) AIC 284 (Del).</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn14">
<p><a href="#_ftnref14" name="_ftn14">[14]</a> Articles 14, 19(1)(a) and 21 of the Constitution of India, 1950.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn15">
<p><a href="#_ftnref15" name="_ftn15">[15]</a> Calcutta High Court, WP(W) No. 33290 of 2013, dated 20-11-2013.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn16">
<p><a href="#_ftnref16" name="_ftn16">[16]</a> <i>Jitendra Singh</i> v. <i>State of U.P.</i>, 2008 (66) AIC 685 (All).</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn17">
<p><a href="#_ftnref17" name="_ftn17">[17]</a> <i>Surup Singh Hyra Naik</i> v. <i>State of Maharashtra</i>, 2007 (58) AIC 739 (Bom).</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn18">
<p><a href="#_ftnref18" name="_ftn18">[18]</a> <i>Surup Singh Hyra Naik</i> v. <i>State of Maharashtra</i>, 2007 (58) AIC 739 (Bom), para 14. Where the Court held that since the medical records of a convict cannot be denied to Parliament or State legislature therefore they cannot be exempted from disclosure under the Act.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn19">
<p><a href="#_ftnref19" name="_ftn19">[19]</a> <i>Vijay Prakash</i> v. <i>Union of India</i>, 2009 (82) AIC 583 (Del).</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn20">
<p><a href="#_ftnref20" name="_ftn20">[20]</a> <i>Union Public Service Commission </i> v. <i>R.K. Jain</i>, Delhi High Court W.P.(C) 1243/2011 & C.M. No. 2618/2011 ( for stay), dated 13-07-2012.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn21">
<p><a href="#_ftnref21" name="_ftn21">[21]</a> <i>Union Public Service Commission </i> v. <i>R.K. Jain</i>, Delhi High Court W.P.(C) 1243/2011 & C.M. No. 2618/2011 ( for stay), dated 13-07-2012.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn22">
<p><a href="#_ftnref22" name="_ftn22">[22]</a> <i>Vijay Prakash</i> v. <i>Union of India</i>, 2009 (82) AIC 583 (Del).</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn23">
<p><a href="#_ftnref23" name="_ftn23">[23]</a> <i>Secretary General, Supreme Court of India</i> v. <i>Subhash Chandra,</i> Delhi High Court - Full Bench, LPA No.501/2009, dated 12-01-2010.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn24">
<p><a href="#_ftnref24" name="_ftn24">[24]</a> <i>Jamia Millia Islamia v. Sh. Ikramuddin</i> , Delhi High Court, WP(C) 5677 of 2011 dated 22-11-2011.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn25">
<p><a href="#_ftnref25" name="_ftn25">[25]</a> <i>Union Public Service Commission </i> v. <i>R.K. Jain</i>, Delhi High Court W.P.(C) 1243/2011 & C.M. No. 2618/2011 ( for stay), dated 13-07-2012.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn26">
<p><a href="#_ftnref26" name="_ftn26">[26]</a> <i>Union Public Service Commission </i> v. <i>R.K. Jain</i>, Delhi High Court W.P.(C) 1243/2011 & C.M. No. 2618/2011 ( for stay), dated 13-07-2012.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn27">
<p><a href="#_ftnref27" name="_ftn27">[27]</a> AIR 1963 SC 129.<i> </i></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn28">
<p><a href="#_ftnref28" name="_ftn28">[28]</a> Delhi High Court, WP(C) No.7455/2001 dated 02-07-2009.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn29">
<p><a href="#_ftnref29" name="_ftn29">[29]</a> <i>Union Public Service Commission </i> v. <i>R.K. Jain</i>, Delhi High Court W.P.(C) 1243/2011 & C.M. No. 2618/2011 (for stay), dated 13-07-2012. This ruling was overturned by a Division Bench of the High Court relying upon a subsequent Supreme Court ruling, however, it could be argued that the Division Bench did not per se disagree with the discussion and the principles laid down in this case, but only the way they were applied.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn30">
<p><a href="#_ftnref30" name="_ftn30">[30]</a> <i>Vijay Prakash</i> v. <i>Union of India</i>, 2009 (82) AIC 583 (Del).</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn31">
<p><a href="#_ftnref31" name="_ftn31">[31]</a> Right to equality.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn32">
<p><a href="#_ftnref32" name="_ftn32">[32]</a> Freedom of speech and expression.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn33">
<p><a href="#_ftnref33" name="_ftn33">[33]</a> Right to life.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn34">
<p><a href="#_ftnref34" name="_ftn34">[34]</a> Article 19(2) of the Constitution of India, 1950.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn35">
<p><a href="#_ftnref35" name="_ftn35">[35]</a> Article 19(5) of the Constitution of India, 1950.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn36">
<p><a href="#_ftnref36" name="_ftn36">[36]</a> <i>Maneka Gandhi </i> v. <i>Union of India</i>, Supreme Court of India, WP No. 231 of 1977, dated 25-01-1978. The test laid down in this case is universally considered to be that the procedure established by law which restricts the fundamental right should be just, fair and reasonable.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn37">
<p><a href="#_ftnref37" name="_ftn37">[37]</a> <i>Govind </i> v.<i> State of M.P</i><i>.</i>, Supreme Court of India, WP No. 72 of 1970, dated 18-03-1975.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn38">
<p><a href="#_ftnref38" name="_ftn38">[38]</a> <i>Govind </i> v.<i> State of M.P</i><i>.</i>,<i> </i>Supreme Court of India, WP No. 72 of 1970, dated 18-03-1975.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn39">
<p><a href="#_ftnref39" name="_ftn39">[39]</a> <i>Govind </i> v.<i> State of M.P</i><i>.</i>, Supreme Court of India, WP No. 72 of 1970, dated 18-03-1975. However the Court later used phrases such as "reasonable restriction in public interest" and "reasonable restriction upon it for compelling interest of State" interchangeably which seems to suggest that the terms "compelling public interest" and "compelling state interest" used by the Court are being used synonymously and the Court does not draw any distinction between them. It is also important to note that the wider phrase "countervailing interest is shown to be superior" seems to suggest that it is possible, atleast in theory, to have other interests apart from public interest or state interest also which could trump the right to privacy.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn40">
<p><a href="#_ftnref40" name="_ftn40">[40]</a> <i>R. Rajagopal v. Union of India</i> , Supreme Court of India, dated 7-10-1994. These tests have been listed as one group since they are all applicable in the specific context of publication of private information.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn41">
<p><a href="#_ftnref41" name="_ftn41">[41]</a> <i>Vijay Prakash</i> v. <i>Union of India</i>, 2009 (82) AIC 583 (Del).</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn42">
<p><a href="#_ftnref42" name="_ftn42">[42]</a> <i>Secretary General, Supreme Court of India</i> v. <i>Subhash Chandra,</i> Delhi High Court - Full Bench, LPA No.501/2009, dated 12-01-2010. Also see <i>Vijay Prakash</i> v. <i>Union of India</i>, 2009 (82) AIC 583 (Del).</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn43">
<p><a href="#_ftnref43" name="_ftn43">[43]</a> <i>Canara Bank</i> v. <i>Chief Information Commissioner</i>, 2007 (58) AIC Ker 667. This case also held that information cannot be denied on the ground that it would be too voluminous.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn44">
<p><a href="#_ftnref44" name="_ftn44">[44]</a> <i>Union Centre for Earth Science Studies </i> v. <i>Anson Sebastian, </i>AIR 2010 Ker. 151; <i>Union Public Service Commission </i>v. <i>R.K. Jain</i>, Delhi High Court W.P.(C) 1243/2011 & C.M. No. 2618/2011 (for stay), dated 13-07-2012</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn45">
<p><a href="#_ftnref45" name="_ftn45">[45]</a> 2012 (119) AIC 105 (SC).</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn46">
<p><a href="#_ftnref46" name="_ftn46">[46]</a> <i>Girish Ramchandra Deshpande</i> v. <i>Central Information Commissioner</i>, 2012 (119) AIC 105 (SC).</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn47">
<p><a href="#_ftnref47" name="_ftn47">[47]</a> <i>Girish Ramchandra Deshpande</i> v. <i>Central Information Commissioner</i>, 2012 (119) AIC 105 (SC).</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn48">
<p><a href="#_ftnref48" name="_ftn48">[48]</a> <i>Canara Bank</i> v. <i>Chief Information Commissioner</i>, 2007 (58) AIC Ker 667.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn49">
<p><a href="#_ftnref49" name="_ftn49">[49]</a> <i>Haryana Public Service Commission </i> v. <i>State Information Commission, </i>AIR 2009 P & H 14.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn50">
<p><a href="#_ftnref50" name="_ftn50">[50]</a> <i>UCO Bank</i> v. <i>Central Information Commissioner and another</i>, 2009 (79) AIC 545 (P&H).</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn51">
<p><a href="#_ftnref51" name="_ftn51">[51]</a> <i>Surendra Singh </i> v. <i>State of U.P</i>, AIR 2009 Alld. 106.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn52">
<p><a href="#_ftnref52" name="_ftn52">[52]</a> <i>Girish Ramchandra Deshpande</i> v. <i>Central Information Commissioner</i>, 2012 (119) AIC 105 (SC).</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn53">
<p><a href="#_ftnref53" name="_ftn53">[53]</a> <i>Girish Ramchandra Deshpande</i> v. <i>Central Information Commissioner</i>, 2012 (119) AIC 105 (SC).</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn54">
<p><a href="#_ftnref54" name="_ftn54">[54]</a> <i>R.K. Jain</i> v. <i>Union Public Service Commission</i>, Delhi High Court, LPA No. 618 of 2012, dated 12-11-2012.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn55">
<p><a href="#_ftnref55" name="_ftn55">[55]</a> <i>Secretary General, Supreme Court of India</i> v. <i>Subhash Chandra,</i> Delhi High Court - Full Bench, LPA No.501/2009, dated 12-01-2010.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn56">
<p><a href="#_ftnref56" name="_ftn56">[56]</a> <i>Srikant Pandaya</i> v. <i>State of M.P.</i>, AIR 2011 MP 14.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn57">
<p><a href="#_ftnref57" name="_ftn57">[57]</a> <i>Paardarshita Public Welfare Foundation</i> v. <i>Union of India and others</i>, AIR 2011 Del 82. It must be mentioned that this case was not exactly under the procedure prescribed under the RTI Act but was a public interest litigation although the courts relied upon the provisions of the RTI Act.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn58">
<p><a href="#_ftnref58" name="_ftn58">[58]</a> WP(C) 3444 of 2012 dated 23-08-2013.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn59">
<p><a href="#_ftnref59" name="_ftn59">[59]</a> WP(C) 2232/2012 dated 17-09-2013.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn60">
<p><a href="#_ftnref60" name="_ftn60">[60]</a> <i>President's Secretariat</i> v. <i>Nitish Kumar Tripathi</i>, Delhi High Court, WP (C) 3382 of 2012, dated 14-06-2012.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn61">
<p><a href="#_ftnref61" name="_ftn61">[61]</a> <i>P.C. Wadhwa</i> v. <i>Central Information Commission</i>, Punjab and Haryana High Court, LPA No. 1252 of 2009 dated 29-11-2010.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn62">
<p><a href="#_ftnref62" name="_ftn62">[62]</a> <i>Rajinder Jaina</i> v. <i>Central Information Commission</i>, 2010 (86) AIC 510 (Del. H.C.).</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn63">
<p><a href="#_ftnref63" name="_ftn63">[63]</a> <i>Rajendra Vasantlal Shah</i> v. <i>Central Information Commissioner, New Delhi</i>, AIR 2011 Guj 70.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/white-paper-on-rti-and-privacy-v-1.2'>https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/white-paper-on-rti-and-privacy-v-1.2</a>
</p>
No publishervipulFeaturedHomepageInternet GovernancePrivacy2014-11-09T02:53:51ZBlog EntryRound Table on Assessing the Efficacy of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) for Public Initiatives: A Report
https://cis-india.org/events/event-blogs/round-table-assessing-efficacy
<b>Zainab Bawa reports on the Round Table on Assessing the Efficacy of Information and Communication Technologies for Public Initiatives, hosted by the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, on 17 June 2009, in collaboration with the Liberty Institute, New Delhi. </b>
<p></p>
<p>
In
recent times, there has been an upsurge in the use of ICTs to provide
information to people and to elicit participation. Individuals, corporate
organisations, NGOs, civil society organisations, collectives, municipalities,
political parties and politicians have been using the internet and other
mediums to communicate with people. The round table was organised primarily to
discuss two issues:</p>
<ol><li>What is the
effectiveness of the initiatives introduced in recent times?</li><li>How do we
move forward in terms of partnerships/collaborations in the areas of data
gathering, sharing, dissemination and architecture of information? </li></ol>
<p>Given
the constraints of time, however, we were only able to discuss a few issues with
respect to efficacy of initiatives, rather than come up with a concrete action
plan on how to measure effectiveness of many of the existing initiatives. This
remains an agenda for subsequent meetings.</p>
<p>This round table was the first meeting of its kind. It
brought together participants from diverse backgrounds to discuss key issues
involved in leveraging ICTs towards various ends, and to collaborate with each
other on ongoing initiatives. Participants included researchers,
persons who have developed information platforms and databases, individuals
working in the area of leveraging technology for streamlining processes in
society and people who have been studying usage patterns of social media tools.
Most of the participants were using ICTs to improve information access
related to health issues, education, budgets, development of rural areas and
recently, elections and governance. In the subsequent sections, I will briefly
elaborate on some of the key themes around which discussions took place
during the round table.</p>
<p><strong>Building on Ideas:</strong> In the morning
and pre-lunch sessions, one issue that featured prominently was the importance of developing ideas rather than trying to work out a perfect model that
we believe will solve what we perceive to be people’s problems. Two of the
participants explained that they started implementing ideas as they came to
them, rather than trying to come up with a framework that they thought would
work for the masses. They worked towards evolving their ideas, exploring what
works and what does not. One of them further pointed out that such evolution
cannot be observed as it happens; it only becomes apparent in hindsight. Hence,
discussions such as the current round table are useful.</p>
<p>It is
also important to note that we are still in a nascent stage of understanding
how ICTs can impact people’s lives and deploying them accordingly. As a result, many efforts are likely to be in the stage of trial and error.</p>
<p><strong>Key areas of interest and concern:</strong> Based
on the input from participants in the morning session, we
arrived at a list of areas that require more understanding and discussion.</p>
<ol><li><u>Information gathering, dissemination, access –
including information architecture, technology design</u>:
Here, three issues were discussed:</li>
<ul><li>Who are we talking about when we refer to information
access? It was pointed out that information is crucial particularly for people
who do not have computers and for whom internet is not a priority. The intensity
with which they seek information is remarkable. One of the participants argued
that we undervalue the potential of information to make a difference to
people’s lives.</li><li>How do we deliver information? Providing information
is not enough.</li><li>Representativeness of the information for those who it
is provided for.
</li></ul>
</ol>
<p>Another issue that was referred to
was whether language is a problem, i.e., most information is available only in
English. One of the participants suggested that this is not the case because Google has found that a very small percentage of the population actually refers
to material on the web in languages other than English.</p>
<ol type="1" start="2"><li><u>Community mobilization</u>:
During the deliberations, we referred to the problem of replication of initiatives. Two observers of social media pointed
out that replication happens because people are trying to create their own
unique communities around their initiatives. This is an important insight
for future efforts and also indicates the need to share databases and
information that individuals and organisations have compiled. They also
suggested that it is important to discover existing communities and spaces
where conversations around issues of governance, education, health and
development are taking place. This helps to plug into existing resource
pools and to extend outreach. <br /></li></ol>
<ol type="1" start="3"><li><u>Citizens’ participation</u>:
Initiatives that work and why they
succeed - We briefly discussed the Jaagore campaign and India Vote Report,
which were launched before the 2009 national elections in India to enable
people to register on the electoral rolls and to report irregularities during
elections respectively. Some people found it difficult to register
themselves on the Jaagore website and some had difficulties in finding the
local offices where they needed to follow-up with the process. It was also
pointed out that Vote Report did not connect with the end user because it
would have been easier to report irregularities and anomalies via SMS
rather than trying to report them by logging on to the site. If one looks
at the case of the Online Complaint Management System (OCMS) developed by
Praja, the availability of the telephone hotline service through which
citizens could register their complaints helped in widening usage. Thus,
it appears that two issues are pertinent:</li>
<ul><li>Whether the initiative connects with the people who
are likely to use it;</li><li>Simplicity of design/system that enables more users. <br />
</li></ul>
</ol>
<p><strong>Target
Audience:</strong> One of
the participants pointed out that some initiatives do not work because they are
targeted towards the wrong audiences. For example, when it comes to voting and
elections, poor groups are the ones who go out and vote in large numbers.
Hence, information systems need to be tailored to provide them with the data
that they need most. Access also has to be configured accordingly. In some
instances, the target is too broad to reach out effectively.</p>
<p>It appears that there is a need to
develop strategies on how platforms and databases that have been created to
enhance access to information can be made known among the masses and how people
can be made aware to use them. It is equally important to understand what
constitutes ‘information’ and for whom. Here,
the other issue to explore is how information links back to the people for who
it is provided.</p>
<ol type="1" start="4"><li><u>Technology</u>: In this
area, a key concern was the high costs involved in developing technologies
and whether we could learn from each other’s experience of developing
technologies instead of reinventing the wheel. We also discussed whether
open source software helps to reduce costs of development. The other issue
with respect to open source is whether there is enough assistance and
support available to resolve problems that may crop up during use of
technology from time to time. </li></ol>
<p><strong>Sharing
of Data:</strong> Discussions also veered around the issue of whether
appropriate technology and applications could be created to help with sharing
existing databases and information pools. We did not discuss this issue
in depth, but it remains relevant for subsequent meetings.</p>
<ol type="1" start="5"><li><u>Back end integration</u>: According
to some of the participants, one of major problems is the interface
between government and citizens, which remains weak. Technology
can be used to enhance the interactions. Participants also pointed out
the difficulty in obtaining data from government bodies that is important
to create the interface between government and citizens. A participant
involved with the Jaagore campaign referred to the problem of back-end
integration during their efforts to help citizens register themselves with
the election commission (EC) offices. A participant from Google similarly
reported that they faced problems in obtaining election results from the EC’s
offices as a result of which, they had to rely on their partners for this
information. Here too, we could not deliberate on how to resolve this
problem, but this could be a major theme for a subsequent meeting. <br /></li></ol>
<ol type="1" start="6"><li><u>Performance (monitoring, evaluation)</u>:
One of the themes that participants zeroed in on was the evaluation of
the performance of elected representatives and making this evaluation available for
people to see. Here, the debate was around the problem of evaluation being carried out according to the criteria we set which may not seem relevant
to other sections of society. One of the suggestions that came up was to
develop a matrix for evaluation and put out information accordingly.
People can then use it to make their own judgments. <img src="https://cis-india.org/events/event-blogs/uploads/00016.jpg/image_preview" alt="rt2" class="image-right" title="rt2" /><br /></li></ol>
<p>In
the post-lunch session, some of the participants shared their experiences with
implementation and also the work they and their organisations are currently
engaged with. Towards the end of the round table, each one of the participants
explained their respective projects and how they may wish to collaborate with
other participants (who were present) in their initiatives. An e-group called “CIS-Info-Access” has
been created to take these conversations and collaborations further. </p>
<h3><strong>Evaluation of the Round Table and Way Forward:</strong> <br /></h3>
<p>When
invitations were sent out to people to participate in the round table, many of
the invitees expressed a genuine and enthusiastic interest in being part of
this effort. As mentioned above, one of the reasons for this enthusiasm was
because this was the first meeting of its kind, bringing together
individuals from the fields of technology, research and implementation. We
invited a total of 35 people out of which 27 finally attended the meeting.
The diversity of the participants was an asset in that a variety of issues were
brought to the table. The drawback was that there was not enough time to
discuss some of the pertinent issues in depth. Future meetings can be tailored
to discuss one or two specific themes such as back-end integration and sharing
of information, technology issues, ideas for mobilising citizens and
communities, etc.</p>
<p>The
possibilities of collaboration between participants in this meeting are immense
and we hope that some of the synergies will materialise into concrete outcomes.
Further, a few participants have expressed an interest in organising similar
meetings in their cities/towns, perhaps focusing on a few issues instead of
bringing people together under a broad theme. Of some of the issues discussed,
participants have indicated that back-end integration with government and
ideating on different ways of disseminating data can be further deliberated on
in future. One of the participants also suggested that there is a need to make
‘data’ more relevant to people’s lives.</p>
<p>While
the meeting was fruitful in many respects, one issue needs to be underlined.
This concerns the imagination of internet and ICTs as mediums that can resolve all existing problems with respect to citizen-government
interface, streamlining of processes and provision of information. Such an
overarching imagination of technology overlooks the cultural, economic, social and
political specificities of communities and contexts. Technology
can also have negative implications in some circumstances. It also needs to be
reinforced that technology is embedded in society and culture. Therefore we
need to view technology as one of the avenues among others available which will
facilitate interactions between people and their governments and the state.
Democratisation is more likely to be realised through such a perspective.</p>
<p></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/events/event-blogs/round-table-assessing-efficacy'>https://cis-india.org/events/event-blogs/round-table-assessing-efficacy</a>
</p>
No publishersachiaSocial mediaDigital ActivismDigital AccessPublic AccountabilityDiscussionFeaturedTransparency, Politics2011-08-20T22:28:55ZBlog EntryCritical Point of View: A Wikipedia Reader
https://cis-india.org/research/conferences/conference-blogs/wikipedia-reader
<b>For millions of internet users around the globe, the search for new knowledge begins with Wikipedia. The encyclopedia’s rapid rise, novel organization, and freely offered content have been marveled at and denounced by a host of commentators. Critical Point of View moves beyond unflagging praise, well-worn facts, and questions about its reliability and accuracy, to unveil the complex, messy, and controversial realities of a distributed knowledge platform.</b>
<p>The essays, interviews and artworks brought together in this reader form part of the overarching Critical Point of View research initiative, which began with a conference in Bangalore (January 2010), followed by events in Amsterdam (March 2010) and Leipzig (September 2010). With an emphasis on theoretical reflection, cultural difference and indeed, critique, contributions to this collection ask: What values are embedded in Wikipedia’s software? On what basis are Wikipedia’s claims to neutrality made? How can Wikipedia give voice to those outside the Western tradition of Enlightenment, or even its own administrative hierarchies? <em>Critical Point of View</em> collects original insights on the next generation of wiki-related research, from radical artistic interventions and the significant role of bots to hidden trajectories of encyclopedic knowledge and the politics of agency and exclusion.</p>
<p><strong>Contributors</strong>: Amila Akdag Salah, Nicholas Carr, Shun-ling Chen, Florian Cramer, Morgan Currie, Edgar Enyedy, Andrew Famiglietti, Heather Ford, Mayo Fuster Morell, Cheng Gao, R. Stuart Geiger, Mark Graham, Gautam John, Dror Kamir, Peter B. Kaufman, Scott Kildall, Lawrence Liang, Patrick Lichty, Geert Lovink, Hans Varghese Mathews, Johanna Niesyto, Matheiu O’Neil, Dan O’Sullivan, Joseph Reagle, Andrea Scharnhorst, Alan Shapiro, Christian Stegbauer, Nathaniel Stern, Krzystztof Suchecki, Nathaniel Tkacz, Maja van der Velden</p>
<p><strong>Colophon</strong>: Editors: Geert Lovink and Nathaniel Tkacz. Editorial Assistance: Ivy Roberts and Morgan Currie. Copy-Editing: Cielo Lutino. Design: Katja van Stiphout. Cover Image: Ayumi Higuchi. Priner: Ten Klei, Amsterdam. Publisher: Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam. Supported by: The School for Communication and Design at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (Hogeschool van Amsterdam DMCI), the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) in Bangalore and the Kusuma Trust.</p>
<ul><li>Download the pdf for free <a class="external-link" href="http://www.networkcultures.org/_uploads/%237reader_Wikipedia.pdf">here</a></li><li>To order a hard copy of the reader, send an email: books@networkcultures.org<br /></li></ul>
<p>Geert Lovink and Nathaniel Tkacz (eds), <em>Critical Point of View: A Wikpedia Reader</em>, Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2011. ISBN: 978-90-78146-13-1, paperback, 385 pages.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/research/conferences/conference-blogs/wikipedia-reader'>https://cis-india.org/research/conferences/conference-blogs/wikipedia-reader</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaFeaturedCPOV2011-05-13T07:24:16ZBlog EntryWikiwars: 12th, 13th January, Bangalore
https://cis-india.org/research/conferences/conference-blogs/wikwarsreg
<b>The Centre for Internet and Society and the Institute of Network Cultures brought together a critical range of scholars, academicians, practitioners, artists and researchers to inquire into the new conditions which emerge with the rise of Wikipedia. The first of two events, WikiWars was the beginning of a knowledge network that shall contribute to a reader titled Critical Point of View, becoming the first resource tool to engage creatively and fruitfully with the diverse range of questions that surround Wikipedia. </b>
<p>The Wikipedia has emerged as the de facto global reference of dynamic knowledge. Different stakeholders – Wikipedians, users, academics, researchers, gurus of Web 2.0, publishing houses and governments have entered into fierce debates and discussions about what the rise of Wikipedia and Wiki cultures means and how they influence the information societies we live in. The Wikipedia itself has been at the centre of much controversy, pivoted around questions of accuracy, anonymity, vandalism, expertise and authority.</p>
<p> The first event, titled WikiWars is scheduled on the 12th and 13th of January 2010. This is the registration page for interested participants who want to join us in the discussions at the WikiWars.</p>
<p>For Event Details look <a href="https://cis-india.org/events/wikiwars" class="external-link"> here</a></p>
<p>For information on Programme, Panels, participants and presentation titles, look <a href="https://cis-india.org/research/conferences/wikiwars" class="internal-link" title="Wikiwars.xls">here</a> (MS Office) or <a href="https://cis-india.org/research/conferences/conference-blogs/uploads/wikiwarsprog1/view" class="external-link">here</a> (PDF document)</p>
<p>For more details on WikiWars and CPOV, look <a href="https://cis-india.org/publications/workshops/conference-blogs/Wikiwars" class="external-link">here</a></p>
<p>We have, apart from the 40 presenters, 45 seats available for interested participants to join the discussions.</p>
<strong>There are no fees for registration, but the seats are limited, available only on first come first serve basis and not expandable.<br /></strong>
<p> </p>
To register, email us on : nishant@cis-india.org
<p>Registrations closes: 10th January, 12:00 midnight, Indian Time.</p>
<p>Make sure you give us the following information in your registration request: <strong>Name, Email address, Cell phone/contact number, Institutional affiliation, Position/Designation, Areas of interest.</strong></p>
<p>We will publish the final list of registered participants on the 11th of January 2010. Registered participants will be provided with a Registration kit and lunch & refreshments during the event.</p>
<p>Please Note: We might not be able to accommodate participants who turn up at the venue without prior registration due to logistical constraints.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/research/conferences/conference-blogs/wikwarsreg'>https://cis-india.org/research/conferences/conference-blogs/wikwarsreg</a>
</p>
No publishernishantFeaturedWikipedia2012-03-13T10:43:09ZBlog EntryWikiWars - A report
https://cis-india.org/research/conferences/conference-blogs/wwrep
<b>The Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore and the Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, hosted WikiWars – an international event that brought together scholars, researchers, academics, artists and practitioners from various disciplines, to discuss the emergence and growth of Wikipedia and what it means for the information societies we inhabit. With participants from 15 countries making presentations about Wikipedia and the knowledge ecology within which it exists, the event saw a vigorous set of debates and discussions as questions about education, pedagogy, language, access, geography, resistance, art and subversion were raised by the presenters. The 2 day event marked the beginning of the process that hopes to produce the first critical reader – Critical Point of View (CPOV) - that collects key resources for research and inquiry around Wikipedia.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The
debates around Wikipedia, the de facto dynamic knowledge production system
online, are very fairly divided into two competing camps. There is a group of
people who swear by Wikipedia – celebrating its democratic processes of
knowledge production, ease of access, and the de-canonisation of knowledge to
produce the ‘WikiWay’; And then there is a group of people who swear at
Wikipedia – raising concerns over authenticity, reliability, vulgarisation of
knowledge and the de-hierarchisation of knowledge systems that Wikipedia seems
to embody. The debates between the two groups are often passionate and situated
in wildly speculative and often personal interests and investments in Wikipedia
and the Web 2.0 Information Revolution that it seems to be a symptom of. The
debates also play out in various international locations, most of them relying
on personal anecdotes, experiences and half hearted data that does not stand
the tests of rigour.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">WikiWars,
then, concentrated on things which are about Wikipedia but also not about Wikipedia.
In many ways, as Geert Lovink, the Director of INC suggested, WikiWars was a
recognition of the fact that Wikipedia has come of age and can now be
systematically and philosophically examined as a work in progress that has
long-term implications about our future. It was the ambition of the Editorial
team (consisting of Geert Lovink, Sabine Nerdeer, Nathaniel Tkacz, Johanna
Niyesito, Sunil Abraham and Nishant Shah) to veer away from the recognised
battle-lines drawn in, around and about Wikipedia, and instead examine the
fault-lines that run under many of our assumptions, prejudices and imaginations
of Wikipedia. And Wikiwars, through careful screening and invested interests,
became one of the first platforms in the world to initiate a critical discourse
on Wikipedia, seeking to engage with its histories, it contemporary
manifestations and practices, and the futures that it seeks to inhabit.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The
different presentations brought in located debates, theoretical and
philosophical concepts and personal experiences to build frameworks that
explain and contextualise Wikipedia as one of the most contested spaces online.
The eight panels across two days dealt with four major thematic areas which
need to be summarised in brief:</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst">1. <strong><u>Education, Pedagogy and
Knowledge:</u></strong> At the very basis of Wikipedia (and
other structures like it) is the question of knowledge production, the
possibility of using it as an educational tool and the potentials it has for
introducing new pedagogies and learning practices in and outside of institutionalised
education. Presenters from various disciplines engaged with these questions in
interesting ways.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst"> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle">Usha
Raman from Teacher Plus in Hyderabad, brought in the question of primary
education, the need for teacher training programmes and the ways by which
infrastructure development needs to be thought through when talking of
Wikipedia and education in the Indian context. The
necessity of locating Wikipedia in a much larger debates on learning were also
echoed by Noopur Rawal and Srikeit Tadepalli, students from Christ University
who brought their experience of Wikipedia and the expectations from classroom
education and learning in their presentation. </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle"> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle">In
the same field, but from a different approach, a panel examined Wikipedia as a site to critique
Western Knowledge production systems. Stian Haklev and Johanna Niyesito
concentrated on the questions of language and knowledge production. Haklev made
an impassioned argument deconstructing the utopian idea of Wikipedia’s
multilingual dreams and instead made a call for recognising the black-holes
when it comes to non-English production and consumption of knowledge on
Wikipedia. He further explored the implications that linguistic imbalance has
on the very governance structure of Wikipedia and its communities. Niyesito
challenged the ‘global’ and ‘cosmopolitan’ image that Wikipedia has built for
itself and posited the idea of Wikipedia as a translingual space where
different languages and cultures negotiate common understandings and processes
of producing knowledge. HanTeng
Liao explored knowledge production through the market economy of key-words to
see how the linguistic biases of search engines that harvest these keywords,
determines the access and visibility of different Wikipedia pages.</p>
<strong><u>Resistance, Diversity
and Representation:</u></strong> While these questions were present as
undercurrents to most of the presentations at WikWars, they were perhaps most
fiercely present in the debates that followed the presentations by Eric Ilya
Lee (Academia Sinica, Taiwan), YiPing Tsou (National Central University,
Taiwan), William Beutler and Eric Zimmerman (IDC, Israel).
<p> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle">For
Lee and Tsou, the responses to the Chinese language Wikipedia from popular
media and personal experiences, were demonstrative of the fact that the lack of
diverse means of representation and participation lead to a strong resistance
of Wikipedia in Taiwan. Beutler
looked at the heavily contested editorial space and policies of Wikipedia to
make a point about how lack of effective governance systems based on
mutual tolerance and diversity lead to
stressful and often traumatic experiences for users who might not be
represented through the mainstream ideas and
ideologies of an English speaking populace.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle">Zimmerman
took a startling position, calling for a regime of attribution and dissolving
the pseudonymous structures of knowledge production in Wikipedia in order to
build designs of trust and verification into the system, thus leading to better
and more credible research tools and representations.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle">The
tone of debates was altered with presentations by Mark Graham (Oxford Research
Institute) and the team of artists Nathaniel Stern and Scott Kildal, the team
responsible for the Wikipedia Art Project. Graham
showed the complexity of visualising space and how the production of space (or
physical geography) on Wikipedia often reflects the virtual density of access
and presence online. Showing a nuanced set of images that help mapping these
new geographies for a richer diversity and representation, Graham showed how
systems like Wikipedia ‘cannot know what they cannot know’ despite the reliance
on the wisdom of crowds.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle">Stern
and Kildall, in giving an account of their project which used Wikipedia’s
policies to undermine and challenge it, show how the institutionalisation of a
space and its ‘canonisation’ can quickly lead to a new set of problems where
the space becomes the very thing it had set itself against.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle"> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle">3. <strong><u>Politics of Free, Open
and Exclusion:</u></strong> The rhetoric of free and open have been
built into all popular discourses around Wikipedia. However, the presentations
at WikiWars showed that these need to be taken with at least a pinch of salt
and further examined for what they signify. Alok
Nandi of Architempo made a dramatic and creative revisit of these guiding
principles of Wikipedia. He showed how an inquiry into rituals of
participation, distortion and access on Wikipedia can promote, not merely
looking at the politics of exclusion but also at the politics of inclusion and
the problems therein.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle"> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle">Dror
Kamir’s evocative narrative of ‘Your side, my side and Wikipedia’ illustrated
how the question of boundaries, of knowledges, of facts and truths get
distorted as language, community, nationality, etc. come into play in recording
and documenting knowledge on Wikipedia. Concentrating on conflict zones in the
Middle East, he talked about the lack and perhaps the impossibility of
producing neutrality the way in which Wikipedia demands of its users. These
ideas resonated with the propositions that ShunLing Chen from Harvard had
floated in the opening panel to explore the ‘boundary work’ of Wikipedia and
how it defines and produces itself in relation to external forces and
controversies. These
discussions on the politics of presence, absence, inclusion and exclusion were
further layered by presentations by Linda Gross, Elad Weider, Heather Ford and
Nathaniel Tkacz who produced a critique of the Free and Open, taking a
cautionary step away from accepting these as inherently good.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle"> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle">While
Gross explored the structure of egalitarianism that Wikipedia builds for
itself, Ford presented an analysis of the licensing regimes of the knowledge
produced within Wikipedia and the problems they pose to traditional knowledges
and non-mainstream information. Weider,
trained as a lawyer, critiqued the neo-liberal discourse around Wikipedia and
tried to correlate the communities with markets. Tkacz’s historical overview of
Free and Open, resulted in a compelling inquiry into the very structures that
inform the shape and functioning of objects like Wikipedia.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Twitter:
#WikiWars <a href="http://twitter.com/wikiwars">http://twitter.com/wikiwars</a>
and <a href="http://www.twitter.com/jackerhack/wikiwars">www.<strong>twitter</strong>.com/jackerhack/<strong>wikiwars</strong></a><cite></cite></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Flickr:
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/30479432@N03/sets/72157623193288710/">http://www.flickr.com/photos/30479432@N03/sets/72157623193288710/</a></p>
<p>
CPOV blog : <a href="http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/cpov/">http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/cpov/</a></p>
<p> </p>
<p>The videos fom the Wikiwars event are embedded below:</p>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHM_HIA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHM_QoA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHM_RgA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHM_z4A"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHN2T4A"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHN2gMA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHN2iUA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHN2z0A"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHN3C4A"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHN3QYA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHN3QYA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHOgCwA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHOgGgA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHOgiUA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHOqA4A"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHOqxYA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHOrhIA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHOrm4A"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHOrycA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHOzEoA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHQoxAA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHQo3MA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHSrGAA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHSsTcA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHToz8A"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHUuGIA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHUuTIA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHUugsA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHUvW8A"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHUvk8A"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHVuwwA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHdpxMA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHdz3IA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHd0DMA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHd0iYA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHf4nkA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHf404A"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHf43AA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHf5EIA"></embed>
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<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHh10oA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHh114A"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHh%2B0AA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHh%2B2EA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHh_AcA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHh_A8A"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHh_lQA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHh_w4A"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHjmiIA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHjnHEA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHjuxkA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHjuzwA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHjvRUA"></embed>
<embed height="270" width="320" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHj4kEA"></embed>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/research/conferences/conference-blogs/wwrep'>https://cis-india.org/research/conferences/conference-blogs/wwrep</a>
</p>
No publishernishantDigital GovernanceWikipediaFeaturedCyberculturesWorkshopCPOV2010-10-06T11:21:56ZBlog EntryCPOV : Wikipedia Research Initiative
https://cis-india.org/research/conferences/conference-blogs/cpov
<b>The Second event, towards building the Critical Point of View Reader on Wikipedia, brings a range of scholars, practitioners, theorists and activists to critically reflect on the state of Wikipedia in our contemporary Information Societies. Organised in Amsterdam, Netherlands, by the Institute of Network Cultures, in collaboration with the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, the event builds on the debates and discussions initiated at the WikiWars that launched off the knowledge network in Bangalore in January 2010. Follow the Live Tweets at #CPOV</b>
<p>Second international conference of the <em>CPOV Wikipedia Research
Initiative</em> :: March 26-27, 2010 :: OBA (Public Library Amsterdam,
next to Amsterdam central station), Oosterdokskade 143, Amsterdam.</p>
<p>Wikipedia is at the brink of becoming the de facto global reference
of dynamic knowledge. The heated debates over its accuracy, anonymity,
trust, vandalism and expertise only seem to fuel further growth of
Wikipedia and its user base. Apart from leaving its modern counterparts
Britannica and Encarta in the dust, such scale and breadth places
Wikipedia on par with such historical milestones as Pliny the Elder’s
Naturalis Historia, the Ming Dynasty’s Wen-hsien ta- ch’ eng, and the
key work of French Enlightenment, the Encyclopedie. <span id="more-10604"></span>The multilingual Wikipedia as digital
collaborative and fluid knowledge production platform might be said to
be the most visible and successful example of the migration of FLOSS
(Free/ Libre/ Open Source Software) principles into mainstream culture.
However, such celebration should contain critical insights, informed by
the changing realities of the Internet at large and the Wikipedia
project in particular.</p>
<p>The CPOV Research Initiative was founded from the urge to stimulate
critical Wikipedia research: quantitative and qualitative research that
could benefit both the wide user-base and the active Wikipedia community
itself. On top of this, Wikipedia offers critical insights into the
contemporary status of knowledge, its organizing principles, function,
and impact; its production styles, mechanisms for conflict resolution
and power (re-)constitution. The overarching research agenda is at once a
philosophical, epistemological and theoretical investigation of
knowledge artifacts, cultural production and social relations, and an
empirical investigation of the specific phenomenon of the Wikipedia.</p>
<p>Conference Themes: Wiki Theory, Encyclopedia Histories, Wiki Art,
Wikipedia Analytics, Designing Debate and Global Issues and Outlooks.</p>
<p>Follow the live tweets on http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23CPOV</p>
<p>Confirmed speakers: Florian Cramer (DE/NL), Andrew Famiglietti (UK),
Stuart Geiger (USA), Hendrik-Jan Grievink (NL), Charles van den Heuvel
(NL), Jeanette Hofmann (DE), Athina Karatzogianni (UK), Scott Kildall
(USA), Patrick Lichty (USA), Hans Varghese Mathews (IN), Teemu Mikkonen
(FI), Mayo Fuster Morell (IT), Mathieu O’Neil (AU), Felipe Ortega (ES),
Dan O’Sullivan (UK), Joseph Reagle (USA), Ramón Reichert (AU), Richard
Rogers (USA/NL), Alan Shapiro (USA/DE), Maja van der Velden (NL/NO),
Gérard Wormser (FR).</p>
<p>Editorial team: Sabine Niederer and Geert Lovink (Amsterdam), Nishant
Shah and Sunil Abraham (Bangalore), Johanna Niesyto (Siegen), Nathaniel
Tkacz (Melbourne). Project manager CPOV Amsterdam: Margreet Riphagen.
Research intern: Juliana Brunello. Production intern: Serena Westra.</p>
<p>The CPOV conference in Amsterdam will be the second conference of the
CPOV Wikipedia Research Initiative. The launch of the initiative took
place in Bangalore India, with the conference WikiWars in January 2010.
After the first two events, the CPOV organization will work on
producing a reader, to be launched early 2011. For more information or
submitting a <a href="http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/cpov/reader">reader</a>
contribution.</p>
<p>Buy your ticket <a href="http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/cpov/practical-info/tickets/">online</a>
(with iDeal), or register by sending an email to: info (at)
networkcultures.org. One day ticket: €25, students and OBA members:
€12,50. Full conference pass (2 days): €40, students and OBA members:
25.</p>
<p>Organized by the Institute of Network Cultures Amsterdam, in
cooperation with the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore,
India.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/research/conferences/conference-blogs/cpov'>https://cis-india.org/research/conferences/conference-blogs/cpov</a>
</p>
No publishernishantConferenceOpen StandardsDigital ActivismDigital GovernanceDigital AccessPublic AccountabilityResearchFeatured2011-08-23T02:52:25ZBlog EntryCritical Point of View: Videos
https://cis-india.org/research/conferences/conference-blogs/cpovvid
<b>The Second event for the Critical Point of View reader on Wikipedia was held in Amsterdam, by the Institute of Network Cultures and the Centre for Internet and Society. A wide range of scholars, academics, researchers, practitioners, artists and users came together to discuss questions on design, analytics, access, education, theory, art, history and processes of knowledge production. The videos for the full event are now available for free viewing and dissemination.</b>
<pre>These are the links to the videos of all the talks for the CPoV Conference
in Amsterdam - Enjoy!
SESSION 1
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://vimeo.com/10605801">http://vimeo.com/10605801</a> Ramon Reichert (AT)
Rethinking Wikipedia: Power, Knowledge and the Technologies of the Self
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://vimeo.com/10606220">http://vimeo.com/10606220</a> Jeanette Hofmann (DE)
Wikipedia between Emancipation and Self-Regulation
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://vimeo.com/10606547">http://vimeo.com/10606547</a> Mathieu O’Neil
(AU) The Critique of Law in Free Online Projects
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://vimeo.com/10696489">http://vimeo.com/10696489</a> Gerard Wormser(FR)
The Knowledge Bar
SESSION 2
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://vimeo.com/10607993">http://vimeo.com/10607993</a> Joseph Reagle (USA)
Wikipedia and Encyclopedic Anxiety
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://vimeo.com/10608291">http://vimeo.com/10608291</a> Charles van den Heuvel (NL)
Authoritative Annotations, Encyclopedia Universalis Mundaneum, Wikipedia
and the Stanford Encycloped
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://vimeo.com/10697853">http://vimeo.com/10697853</a> Dan O’Sullivan (UK)
An Encyclopedia for the Times: Thoughts on Wikipedia from a His- torical
Perspective
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://vimeo.com/10699949">http://vimeo.com/10699949</a> Alan Shapiro (USA/DE)
Gustave Flaubert Laughs at Wikipedia
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.vimeo.com/10607690">http://www.vimeo.com/10607690</a> Discussion session 2 Encyclopedia Histories
Moderaror: Nathaniel Tkacz
Speakers: Joseph Reagle, Charles van den Heuvel, Dan O'Sullivan, Alan Shapiro
SESSION 3
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.vimeo.com/10701587">http://www.vimeo.com/10701587</a> Hendrik-Jan Grievink (NL)
Wiki Loves Art
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.vimeo.com/10702729">http://www.vimeo.com/10702729</a> Scott Kildall (USA)
Wikipedia Art: Citation as Performative Act
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://vimeo.com/10741921">http://vimeo.com/10741921</a> Patrick Lichty (USA)
Social Media, Cultural Scaffolds, and Molecular Hegemonies. Musings on
Anarchic Media, WIKIs, and De-territorialized Art
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.vimeo.com/10607690">http://www.vimeo.com/10607690</a> Discussion session 3 Wiki Art
Moderator: Rachel Somers Miles
Speakers: Hendrik-Jan Grievink, Scott Kildall, Patrick Lichty
SESSION 4
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://vimeo.com/10747211">http://vimeo.com/10747211</a> Felipe Ortega (ES)
New Trends in the Evolution of Wikipedia
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://vimeo.com/10748335">http://vimeo.com/10748335</a> Stuart Geiger (USA)
Bot Politics: The Domination, Subversion, and Negotiation of Code in
Wikipedia
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://vimeo.com/10748727">http://vimeo.com/10748727</a> Hans Varghese Mathews (IN)
Clustering the Contributors to a Wikipedia Page
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://vimeo.com/10748888">http://vimeo.com/10748888</a> Esther Weltevrede (NL) and Erik Borra (BE/NL)
Controversy Analysis with Wikipedia
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.vimeo.com/10749027">http://www.vimeo.com/10749027</a> Discussion session 4 Wiki Analytics
Moderator: NIshant Shah
Speakers: Felipe Ortega, Stuart Geiger, Hans Varghese Mathews, Esther
Weltevrede & Erik Borra
SESSION 5
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://vimeo.com/10750350">http://vimeo.com/10750350</a> Lawrence Liang (IN)
Wikipedia and the authority of knowledge
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://vimeo.com/10750495">http://vimeo.com/10750495</a> Teemu Mikkonen (FI)
Kosovo War on Wikipedia, Tracing the Conflict and Concensus on the
Wikipedia Talk pages
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://vimeo.com/10799887">http://vimeo.com/10799887</a> Andrew Famiglietti (USA)
Negotiating the Neutral Point of View: Politics and the Moral Economy of
Wikipedia
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://vimeo.com/10772241">http://vimeo.com/10772241</a> Florian Cramer(DE/NL)
The German WikiWars and the limits of objectivism
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.vimeo.com/10799600">http://www.vimeo.com/10799600</a> Discussion session 5 Designing Debate
Moderator: Caroline Nevejan
Speakers: Lawrence Liang, Teemu Mikkonen, Andrew Famiglietti, Florian Cramer
SESSION 6
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://vimeo.com/10772313">http://vimeo.com/10772313</a> Mayo Fuster Morell (IT)
Wikimedia Governance: The Role of the Wikimedia Foundation and the Form
and Geopolitics of its Internationalization
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://vimeo.com/10800562">http://vimeo.com/10800562</a> Athina Karatzogianni (UK)
Wikipedia’s Impact on the Global Power-Knowledge Hierarchies
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://vimeo.com/10800100">http://vimeo.com/10800100</a> Maja van der Velden (NL/NO)
When Knowledges Meet: Database Design and the Performance of Knowledge
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://vimeo.com/10800206">http://vimeo.com/10800206</a> Amit Basole (IN)
Knowledge Satyagraha: Towards a People’s Knowledge Movement
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.vimeo.com/10800354">http://www.vimeo.com/10800354</a> Discussion session 6 Global Issues and Outlooks
Moderator: Johanna Niesyto
Speakers: Mayo Fuster Morell, Athina Karatzogianni, Maja van der Velden,
Amit Basole
</pre>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/research/conferences/conference-blogs/cpovvid'>https://cis-india.org/research/conferences/conference-blogs/cpovvid</a>
</p>
No publishernishantConferenceArtFeaturedCyberculturesCommunitiesCPOV2010-04-20T20:04:31ZBlog EntryLocating Internets: Histories of the Internet(s) in India — Research Training and Curriculum Workshop: Call for Participation
https://cis-india.org/research/conferences/conference-blogs/workshop
<b>Deadline for submission: 26th July 2011-06-08;
When: 19th - 22nd August, 2011;
Where: Centre for Environmental Planning and Technology (CEPT) University, Ahmedabad;
Organised by: Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore and CEPT University, Ahmedabad.
Please Note: Travel support is only available for domestic travel within India.</b>
<p>LOCATING INTERNETS is an innovative, multi-disciplinary, workshop that engages with some of the most crucial debates around Internet and Society within academic scholarship, discourse and practice in India. It explores Where, When, How and What has changed with the emergence of Internet and Digital Technologies in the country. The Internet is not a singular monolithic entity but is articulated in various forms – sometimes materially, through accessing the web; at others, through our experiences; and yet others through imaginations of policy and law. Internets have become a part of our everyday practice, from museums and archives, to school and university programmes, living rooms and public spaces, relationships and our bodily lived realities. It becomes necessary to reconfigure our existing concepts, frameworks and ideas to make sense of the rapidly digitising world around us. The Internet is no longer contained in niche disciplines or specialised everyday practices. LOCATING INTERNETS invites scholars, teachers, researchers, advanced research students and educationalists from any discipline to learn and discuss how to ask new questions and design innovative curricula in their discipline by introducing concepts and ideas from path-breaking research in India.</p>
<p>Comprised of training, public lectures, open discussion spaces, and hands-on curriculum building exercises, this workshop will introduce the participants to contemporary debates, help them articulate concerns and problems from their own research and practice, and build knowledge clusters to develop innovative and open curricula which can be implemented in interdisciplinary undergraduate spaces in the country. It showcases the research outputs produced by the Centre for Internet and Society’s Researchers @ Work Programme, and brings together nine researchers to talk about alternative histories, processes, and bodies of the Internets, and how they can be integrated into mainstream pedagogic practices and teaching environments.</p>
<h3>Knowledge Clusters for the Workshop</h3>
<p>LOCATING INTERNETS is designed innovatively to accommodate for various intellectual and practice based needs of the participants. While the aim is to introduce the participants to a wide interdisciplinary range of scholarship, we also hope to address particular disciplinary and scholarly concerns of the participants. The workshop is further divided into three knowledge clusters which help the participants to focus their energies and ideas in the course of the four days.</p>
<ul><li><strong>Bridging the Gap</strong>: This workshop seeks to break away from the utopian public discourse of the Internets as a-historical and completely dis-attached from existing technology ecologies in the country. This knowledge cluster intends to produce frameworks that help us contextualize the contemporary internet policy, discourse and practice within larger geo-political and socio-historical flows and continuities in Modern India. The first cluster chartsdifferent pre-histories of the Internets, mapping the continuities and ruptures through philosophy of techno-science, archiving practices, and electronifcation of governments,to develop new technology-society perspectives.</li><li><strong>Paradigms of Practice</strong>:One of the biggest concerns about Internet studies in India and other similar developed contexts is the object oriented approach that looks largely at specific usages, access, infrastructure, etc. However, it is necessary to understand that the Internet is not merely a tool or a gadget. The growth of Internets produces systemic changes at the level of process and thought. The technologies often get appropriated for governance both by the state and the civil society, producing new processes and dissonances which need to be charted. The second cluster looks at certain contemporary processes that the digital and Internet technologies change drastically in order to recalibrate the relationship between the state, the market and the citizen.</li><li><strong>Feet on the Ground</strong>: The third cluster looks at contemporary practices of the Internet to understand the recent histories of movements, activism and cultural practices online. It offers an innovative way of understanding the physical objects and bodies that undergo dramatic transitions as digital technologies become pervasive, persuasive and ubiquitous. It draws upon historical discourse, everyday practices and cultural performances to form new ways of formulating and articulating the shapes and forms of social and cultural structures.</li></ul>
<h3>Workshop Outcomes</h3>
<p>The participants are expected to engage with issue of Internet and it various systemic processes through their own disciplinary interests. Apart from lectures and orientation sessions, the participants will actively work on their own project ideas during the period in groups and will be guided by experts. The final outcome of the workshops would be curriculum for undergraduate and graduate teaching space of various disciplines in the country.</p>
<h3>Participation Guidelines</h3>
<p>LOCATING INTERNETS is now accepting submissions from interested participants in the following format:</p>
<ol><li>Name:</li><li>Institutional affiliation and title:</li><li>Address:</li><li>Email address:</li><li>Phone number:</li><li>A brief resume of work experience (max. 350 words)</li><li>Statement of interest (max. 350 words)</li><li>Key concerns you want to address in the Internet and Society field (max. 350 words)</li><li>Identification with one Knowledge-cluster of the workshop and a proposal for integrating it in your research/teaching practice (max. 500 words)</li><li>Current interface with technologies in your pedagogic practices (max. 350 words)</li><li>Additional information or relevant hyperlinks you might want to add (Max. 10 lines)<br /></li></ol>
<pre>Notes:</pre>
<ul><li>Submissions will be accepted only from participants in India, as attachments in .doc, .docx or .odt formats at <a class="external-link" href="mailto:locatinginternets@cis-india.org">locatingInternets@cis-india.org</a></li><li>Submissions made beyond 26th July 2011 may not be considered for participation. <br /></li><li>Submissions will be scrutinized by the organisers and selected participants will be informed by the 30th July 2011, about their participation.</li><li>Selected participants will be required to make their own travel arrangements to the workshop. A 2nd A.C. train return fare will be reimbursed to the participants. Shared accommodation and selected meals will be provided at the workshop.</li><li>A limited number of air-fare reimbursements will be available to participants in extraordinary circumstances. All travel support is only available for domestic travel in the country.<br /></li></ul>
<p><strong>Chairs</strong>: Nishant Shah, Director-Research, Centre for Internet and Society Bangalore;</p>
<p>Pratyush Shankar, Associate Professor & Head of Undergraduate Program, Faculty of Architecture, CEPT University</p>
<p><strong>Supported by</strong>: Kusuma Foundation, Hyderabad</p>
<p><strong>Experts</strong>:Anja Kovacs, Arun Menon, Asha Achuthan, Ashish Rajadhykasha, Aparna Balachandran, Namita Malhotra, Nithin Manayath, Nithya Vasudevan, Pratyush Shankar, Rochelle Pinto and Zainab Bawa</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/research/conferences/conference-blogs/workshop'>https://cis-india.org/research/conferences/conference-blogs/workshop</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaDevelopmentGamingDigital ActivismDigital GovernanceResearchCISRAWFeaturedCyberculturesarchivesNew PedagogiesWorkshopIT Cities2011-07-21T06:00:39ZBlog EntryBig Data and Positive Social Change in the Developing World: A White Paper for Practitioners and Researchers
https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/big-data-and-positive-social-change-in-developing-world
<b>I was a part of a working group writing a white paper on big data and social change, over the last six months. This white paper was produced by a group of activists, researchers and data experts who met at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Centre to discuss the question of whether, and how, big data is becoming a resource for positive social change in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).</b>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Bellagio Big Data Workshop Participants. (2014). “Big data and positive social change in the developing world: A white paper for practitioners and researchers.” Oxford: Oxford Internet Institute. Available online: <a class="external-link" href="http://ssrn.com/abstract=2491555">http://ssrn.com/abstract=2491555</a>.</p>
<h2>Summary</h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Our working definition of big data includes, but is not limited to, sources such as social media, mobile phone use, digitally mediated transactions, the online news media, and administrative records. It can be categorised as data that is provided explicitly (e.g. social media feedback); data that is observed (e.g. mobile phone call records); and data that is inferred and derived by algorithms (for example social network structure or inflation rates). We defined four main areas where big data has potential for those interested in promoting positive social change: advocating and facilitating; describing and predicting; facilitating information exchange and promoting accountability and transparency.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In terms of <span class="ff5">advocating and facilitating</span>,<span class="_0 _"> </span> we discussed ways in which volunteered data may <span class="_0 _"> </span>help organisations to open up new public spa<span class="_0 _"></span>ces for discussion and awareness<span class="_0 _"></span>-building; how both aggregating data and working across different databa<span class="_0 _"></span>ses can be tools for building awa<span class="_0 _"></span>reness, and howthe digital data commons can also configure new<span class="_0 _"></span><span class="ff5"> </span>communities and actions<span class="_0 _"></span> (sometimes serendipitously) through data science and aggregation. Finally, we also<span class="_0 _"></span> looked at the problem of overexposure and ho<span class="_0 _"></span>wactivists and organisations can<span class="_0 _"></span> protect themselves and hide their digital footprin<span class="_0 _"></span>ts. The challenges w<span class="ls2">e</span> identified in this area were how to interpret data<span class="_0 _"></span> correctly when supplementary information may b<span class="_0 _"></span>e lacking; organisational capacity constraints aro<span class="_0 _"></span>und processing and storing data,<span class="_0 _"></span> and issues around data dissemination, i.e. the pos<span class="_0 _"></span>sible negative consequences of inadvertently ide<span class="_0 _"></span>ntifying groups or individuals<span class="_0 _"></span>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Next, we looked at the way big data can help describe and predict, functions which are particularly important in the academic, development and humanitarian areas of work where researchers can combine data into new dynamic, high-resolution datasets to detect new correlations and surface new questions. With data such as mobile phone data and Twitter analytics, understanding the data’s comprehensiveness, meaning and bias are the main challenges, accompanied by the problem of developing new and more comprehensive ethical systems to protect data subjects where data is observed rather than volunteered.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The next group of activities discussed was facilitating information exchange. We looked at mobile-based information services, where it is possible for a platform created around a particular aim (e.g. agricultural knowledge-building) to incorporate multiple feedback loops which feed into both research and action. The pitfalls include the technical challenge of developing a platform which is lean yet multifaceted in terms of its uses, and particularly making it reliably available to low-income users. This kind of platform, addressed by big data analytics, also offers new insights through data discovery and allows the provider to steer service provision according to users’ revealed needs and priorities.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Our last category for big data use was accountability and transparency, where organisations are using crowdsourcing methods to aggregate and analyse information in real time to establish new spaces for critical discussion, awareness and action. Flows of digital information can be managed to prioritise participation and feedback, provide a safe space to engage with policy decisions and expose abuse. The main challenges are how to keep sensitive information (and informants) safe while also exposing data and making authorities accountable; how to make the work sustainable without selling data, and how to establish feedback loops so that users remain involved in the work beyond an initial posting. In the crowdsourcing context, new challenges are also arising in terms of how to verify and moderate real-time flows of information, and how to make this process itself transparent.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Finally, we also discussed the relationship between big and open data. Open data can be seen as a system of governance and a knowledge commons, whereas big data does not by its nature involve the idea of the commons, so we leaned toward the term ‘opening data’, i.e. processes which could apply to commercially generated as much as public-sector datasets. It is also important to understand where to prioritise opening, and where this may exclude people who are not using the ‘right’ technologies: for example, analogue methods (e.g. nailing a local authority budget to a town hall door every month) may be more open than ‘open’ digital data that’s available online.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Our discussion surfaced many questions to do with representation and meaning: must datasets be interpreted by people with local knowledge? For researchers to get access to data that is fully representative, do we need a data commons? How are data proprietors engaging with the power dynamics and inequalities in the research field, and how can civil society engage with the private sector on its own terms if data access is skewed towards elites? We also looked at issues of privacy and risk: do we need a contextual risk perspective rather than a single set of standards? What is the role of local knowledge in protecting data subjects, and what kinds of institutions and practices are necessary? We concluded that there is a case to be made for building a data commons for private/public data, and for setting up new and more appropriate ethical guidelines to deal with big data, since aggregating, linking and merging data present new kinds of privacy risk. In particular, organisations advocating for opening datasets must admit the limitations of anonymisation, which is currently being ascribed more power to protect data subjects than it merits in the era of big data.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Our analysis makes a strong case that it is time for civil society groups in particular to become part of the conversation about the power of data. These groups are the connectors between individuals and governments, corporations and governance institutions, and have the potential to promote big data analysis that is locally driven and rooted. Civil society groups are also crucially important but currently underrepresented in debates about privacy and the rights of technology users, and civil society as a whole has a responsibility for building critical awareness of the ways big data is being used to sort, categorise and intervene in LMICs by corporations, governments and other actors. Big data is shaping up to be one of the key battlefields of our era, incorporating many of the issues civil society activists worldwide have been working on for decades. We hope that this paper can inform organisations and<br />individuals as to where their particular interests may gain traction in the debate, and what their contribution may look like.</p>
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<p><b><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/big-data-and-positive-social-change.pdf">Click to download the full white paper here</a></b>. (PDF, 1.95 Mb)</p>
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For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/big-data-and-positive-social-change-in-developing-world'>https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/big-data-and-positive-social-change-in-developing-world</a>
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No publishernishantBig DataPrivacyInternet GovernanceFeaturedOpennessHomepage2014-10-01T03:52:35ZBlog Entry