We are anonymous, we are legion

Is India Ignoring its own Internet Protections?

praskrishna — 2012-01-17T05:33:40Z

India’s information technology law of 2008 limits the liability of Internet companies for material posted on their Web sites by users, including anything government regulators deem objectionable. The firms are supposed to be notified of offensive content — by users or the authorities — and then remove it when legally warranted.

If that’s how the system is supposed to work, then why did the Indian government just sanction a criminal lawsuit against Google, Facebook and 19 other companies that all but ignores those protections in the information technology law?

That is one of the most puzzling elements of the legal drama over free speech on the Web that is unfolding in New Delhi.

The case against the companies, brought by Urdu weekly journalist Vinay Rai, accuses them of violating various provisions of India’s criminal code by allowing material that is mocking or offensive to religious and political figures to stay on their social networking sites. There are charges of inciting communal passions and disturbing public order – catchall stuff normally meant to give police tools to rein in hooligans.

The punishments for these criminal offenses can include several years of jail time and stiff fines. That these elements of the criminal code are now being used to target Internet companies is somewhat bizarre, especially when one considers the apparently careful lawyering that went into drafting protections for Internet companies a few years ago.

As Google and others fight the charges – today they are continuing an appeal in Delhi High Court to quash the case – they will likely make the case that the courts cannot ignore India’s I.T. law. “It isn’t a trivial defense – the court cannot dismiss it,” said Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society, a civil liberties advocacy group. “The I.T. act provides immunity to (Internet companies) and that should be the default starting position.”

A spokesman for India’s telecom ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment. We’ve described Mr. Rai’s rationale for filing the lawsuit in a separate post.

The crackdown on Web companies couldn’t come at a worse time for the emerging Internet sector in India, which many analysts believe has a potential to grow from about 100 million users to more than 300 million within a few years if nurtured. Facebook and Google representatives declined to comment on the case.

The protections for Internet firms are fairly clear in Section 79 of the 2008 law, known as India’s I.T. Act Amendments. An “intermediary,” or Internet firm, “shall not be liable for any third party information, data or communication link.” There are several caveats, of course – the company can’t initiate or solicit the harmful post and can’t coordinate with the offender. Under the rules that India put into place last April to implement the act, companies must remove material that is “grossly harmful, harassing, blasphemous, defamatory” as well as anything “ethnically objectionable, disparaging” or “otherwise unlawful in any manner.”

Internet companies and civil society advocates weren’t happy with those guidelines, finding them far too draconian and subjective. But at least the law required that the companies be notified of such content and be given a chance to remove it within 36 hours. (The punishments for not removing offensive content within 36 hours would depend on the underlying laws governing that content in India; in general, prison time and fines would both be possible.)

In the case of the Vinay Rai lawsuit, such procedures don’t appear to have been followed. Google has told the court it hasn’t seen the allegedly offensive material or been notified about it. Mr. Rai says he didn’t flag the content to Google or others, because he believed his duty as a citizen was to notify the government.

What was the point of passing the I.T. law if it’s being swept to the side?

The article by Amol Sharma was published in the Wall Street Journal on 16 January 2012

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/is-india-ignoring-its-own-internet-protections

India internet: clean-up or censorship?

praskrishna — 2012-01-16T11:17:11Z

Is India going the way of China? Not when it comes to development indicators. Or enhanced infrastructure. Or economic power. But in another category at which Beijing excels: web censorship.

That was the implication of a ruling on Thursday from Justice Suresh Kait, of the Delhi High Court, who told lawyers for Facebook India and Google India that unless they develop mechanisms to regulate “offensive and objectionable” material on their web sites, India is prepared to take drastic measures, according to the Hindustan Times. “Like China, we will block all such websites,” Kalit declared.

According to the IBN news channel, the government seems to be moving to make good on those threats:

Government sources said on Friday that the Delhi High Court was likely to issue sanctions to prosecute social networking sites Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo India in the ongoing spat between the companies and the Government of India over content regulation.

“Prosecution for some of the non-bailable offences requires prior sanction of the government, which has been sought and it is likely to be granted,” the sources said.

[…]

Summons are to be sent to the companies through the Ministry of External Affairs directing their heads to appear before court on March 13, which is when the next hearing will take place. The Ministry of Communication and Information Technology will file its affidavit by this evening.

Clearly there’s trouble in “the world’s largest democracy”.

Kalit’s pronouncement is the latest turn in a story that broke last month, when the New York Times reported that telecoms minister Kapil Sibal had met with executives from Google, Facebook, Yahoo and Microsoft to discuss the pre-emptive removal of “offensive material” – including, it seems, web pages that had criticized the leader of his party, Sonia Gandhi.

As beyondbrics reported, Sibal then gave a combative press conference where he said: “I believe that no reasonable person aware of the sensibilities of large sections of communities in this country and aware of community standards as they are applicable in India would wish to see this content in the public domain,” referring to “offensive material” he had shown some reporters prior to the conference.

He added, repeatedly, that the government did not believe in censorship.

Apparently, Kalit didn’t get the memo.

Lawyers for the internet giants appeared before the judge to request the dismissal of a criminal complaint filed by a private citizen in a lower court under sections of the Indian law that cover “sale of obscene books etc”, “sale of obscene objects to young person etc” and “criminal conspiracy”. The judge declined.

“The magistrate of the trial court had observed that the material submitted by the complainant contained obscene pictures and derogatory articles pertaining to various Hindu gods, Prophet Muhammad and Jesus Christ”, IBN reported.

According to the Hindustan Times:

On behalf of Google India, senior counsel Mukul Rohatgi said it was humanly not possible to filter or monitor the postings of obscene, objectionable and defamatory material. “Billions of people across the globe, post their articles on the website. Yes, they may be defamatory, obscene but cannot be checked,” he said.

A Google spokesperson issued a statement last night, saying, “We did file a petition before the Delhi High Court. The Court has now issued a notice to the petitioner. We can’t comment at this stage.”

Today, the company issued a clarification:

Today the Court has merely directed the petitioner to serve the Court order to the overseas entities at their respective addresses and has adjourned the matter to March 13th.

Last month, a lower court had ordered the sites to remove all “anti-social” or “anti-relgious” content by February 6.

As Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet & Society, told beyondbrics last month, it’s difficult to establish exactly what is anti-religious: for example, the Hindu profession of belief in multiple gods is blasphemous to Muslims, Christians and Jews.

A lower court had directed the central government to take “immediate appropriate steps” and file a report by January 13.

It has not been released yet, but later on Friday you can Google it. Take the opportunity – if India goes the way of China, it might prove more difficult in future.

This blog post by Neil Munshi was published in beyondbrics on 13 January 2012

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/clean-up-or-censorship

Keeping it Private

nishant — 2012-01-27T03:50:51Z

As we disclose more information online, we must ask who might access it and why. This article by Nishant Shah was published in the Indian Express on Sunday, 15 January 2012.

As a researcher of the blink-and-change cyberspaces, I am often asked about the future of all things digital. I generally refuse to answer such questions because researchers are happier talking about things past than things present. Also, when people ask questions of the future, they are more interested in gadgets and platforms. Will Facebook survive the next year? Will more people use Twitter? Is the mobile the new weapon of protest? Shall we all soon talk only on FaceTime? I shrug my shoulders at these questions. However private information and privacy ties all these questions.

I pronounce that 2012 is going to be the year of Personal Information Management and the need for increased privacy, where more than anything else, people will realise that what they do online is not only significant to their present, but that it might bite them in their digital futures. We have heard stories that have hinted at management of information and reputations online. Young people put compromising pictures and videos online, severely damaging their social and professional relationships; people express opinions on public forums, which might not necessarily reflect them well; users reveal personal information, which can be abused by those with malice. These instances should remind us that unlike in the physical worlds, where our foot-in-the-mouth moments, youthful indiscretions or embarrassing behaviour quickly runs through the grapevine and is forgotten, in the digital worlds, the things that we say and do, stay long after we have forgotten them.

And this is where privacy kicks in. Many people in India, when they encounter the idea of “privacy”, raise their eyebrows. Culturally, we are not very private people. We celebrate our triumphs and sorrows in public, freely part with information to strangers on train rides, and don’t have qualms asking about age, marital status or salary. In the age of ubiquitous computing, we must remember that once something has been committed to the online world, it will be etched somewhere and will be available for somebody else to look at. The internet, specially with increasing bandwidth, expanded spectrum and cloud-based distributed data storage, is an unforgiving space that never lets go.

Privacy, in this brave new world, is not about disclosure. It is becoming increasingly clear that we will need to disclose more and more of our private information if we want services — from government public delivery systems to private credit and education — online. However, once we have disclosed our private information, then what? Who uses it? Who reads it? Who stores it for what purpose? What are the implications of having that private information out there?

In the digital world, privacy is about having more control over the personal information that we have disclosed, the right to know who, where, when, how and for what purposes information that we have willingly disclosed is used. And as the country finalises privacy bills, this right of the individual, whose private information is going to feed government and business ecologies, is at stake.

There is a need to institute better regulation around data protection, data mining, data retention and data retrieval that is still in the limbo in our country, at the mercy of privately crafted terms of service that we blindly accept while signing into the digital world.

It is time to move away from understanding privacy as disclosure to privacy as control of information — to know who is doing what with your private information and how you should have a say in it. And it is time to realise that just because you don’t have anything to hide, does not mean that you need to be in a state of disclosure. There is a reason why you have curtains in your house, or do not allow strangers to look into your bags.

The article was originally published in the Indian Express

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

Activists cry foul against Aadhaar

praskrishna — 2012-01-31T04:24:39Z

Biometric experts, jurists and social activists today urged the state government to immediately snap ties with the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) and stop offering Aadhaar numbers to residents.

Arguing that the creation of Aadhaar numbers had no legislative base as the National Identification Authority of India Bill, 2010, was pending with Parliament, civil society members said UIDAI’s project was unconstitutional.

They pointed out that the parliamentary standing committee had termed the biometric project “directionless”.

“The biometric database of citizens, management of which will remain in the hands of some private companies, severely infringes on the right of citizens to privacy. A rule relating to security of biometric data is yet to come up, but UIDAI is going on generating them,” said Usha Ramanathan, a jurist from Delhi at a meeting on the UID project here.

The meet on Aadhaar was convened in the state capital by the Indian Social Action Forum. The participants included social activist Dayamani Barla, director of Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society Sunil Abraham, biometric expert from Mumbai J.T. D’ Souza and member of Citizens’ Forum for Civil Liberties Gopal Krishna, among others.

The unique numbers are expected to be utilised extensively, from opening bank accounts to applying for LPG connections. UIDAI has already generated roughly 10 crore unique numbers.

Neither the Citizenship Act, 1955, nor Citizenship Rules of 2003 permit collection of biometrics, the experts added. “Both the UID and National Population Registrar projects adopt technology that risks national and individual security,” observed D’ Souza.

The news was published in the Telegraph on Thursday, 12 January 2012. Read the original story here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/activists-cry-foul-against-aadhaar

"ಕನ್ನಡ ಮತ್ತು ತಂತ್ರಜ್ಞಾನದ ಜೊತೆ ಜೊತೆಗೆ..."

praskrishna — 2012-01-16T03:59:59Z

ನಾನು ಏನಾದರು ಮಾಡಬೇಕು ಎಂದುಕೊಂಡರೆ ಸಾಲದು, ಬನ್ನಿ, ಕಾರ್ಯೋನ್ಮುಖರಾಗಿ...

ಮೊದಲ ಹೆಜ್ಜೆ

ಕನ್ನಡ ಮತ್ತು ತಂತ್ರಜ್ಞಾನದ ಬೆಳವಣಿಗೆಯಲ್ಲಿ ಪಾಲ್ಗೊಳ್ಳುವ ಆಸೆಯೇ?

ಪ್ರತಿಯೊಬ್ಬ ಕನ್ನಡಿಗನಲ್ಲೂ ಕನ್ನಡಕ್ಕೆ ದುಡಿಯುವ ಬಲವಾದ ಆಸೆಯಿರುತ್ತದೆ. ಅಕ್ಷರ ಕಲಿಯುವ ದೆಸೆಯಿಂದ ಹಿಡಿದು, ದುಡಿದು ದೊಡ್ಡವನಾಗುವವರೆಗೂ ಹೇಗೆ ತನ್ನ ಆಸೆಯನ್ನು ಈಡೇರಿಸಿಕೊಳ್ಳುವುದೆಂಬ ಪ್ರಶ್ನೆ ಮನಸ್ಸಿನಲ್ಲಿ ಸುಳಿಯುತ್ತಲೇ ಇರುತ್ತದೆ. ಮಾಹಿತಿ ತಂತ್ರಜ್ಞಾನದ ಕ್ಷೇತ್ರದಲ್ಲಂತೂ, ಅದನ್ನು ಬಳಸುವ ಸಾಮಾನ್ಯನಿಂದ ಹಿಡಿದು, ತಂತ್ರಜ್ಞಾನದ ಜೊತೆಗೇ ದಿನದೂಡುವ ತಂತ್ರಜ್ಞನವರೆಗೂ ಎಲ್ಲರಿಗೂ ಕನ್ನಡ ಬಳಸುವ ಮತ್ತು ಬೆಳೆಸುವ ಆಸೆ ಖಂಡಿತ ಇರುತ್ತದೆ. ಅಂತಹ ಆಸೆಗಳನ್ನು ಮತ್ತೆ ಚಿಗುರಿಸಿ, ಮಾಹಿತಿ ತಂತ್ರಜ್ಞಾನದ ಬಳಕೆದಾರನ ದಿನನಿತ್ಯದ ಪ್ರಶ್ನೆಗಳನ್ನು ಉತ್ತರಿಸುತ್ತಾ, ಕನ್ನಡದ ತಾಂತ್ರಿಕ ಬೆಳವಣಿಗೆಗೆ ನಾಂದಿಯಾಗಲು ನಾವು ಇಡಬೇಕಾದ ‘ಹೆಜ್ಜೆಗಳು” ಅನೇಕ.

ದೈನಂದಿನ ಬದುಕಿನಲ್ಲಿ ತಂತ್ರಜ್ಞಾನದ ಮುಖೇನ ಕನ್ನಡದಲ್ಲೇ ವ್ಯವಹರಿಸಬಹುದೇ? ಕನ್ನಡದ ತಾಂತ್ರಿಕ ಬೆಳವಣಿಗೆ ಹೇಗೆ ಸಾಧ್ಯ? ಅದರಲ್ಲಿ ತಮ್ಮನ್ನು ತಾವು ತೊಡಗಿಸಿಕೊಳ್ಳುವ ಬಗೆ ಹೇಗೆ? ಕನ್ನಡ ಭಾಷಾ ತಂತ್ರಜ್ಞಾನ ಬೆಳವಣಿಗೆಯ ತೊಡಕುಗಳ ನಿವಾರಣೆ ಸಾಧ್ಯವೇ? ತಂತ್ರಾಂಶಗಳು ನಡೆಯಬೇಕಿರುವ ಹಾದಿಯ ಕಿರು ಪರಿಚಯ ಎಲ್ಲಿ ಸಿಗಬಹುದು? ಇದಕ್ಕೊಂದು ಸಮುದಾಯವಿದೆಯೇ? ಈ ಸಮುದಾಯ ಅಭಿವೃದ್ದಿಯ ಪರಿಕಲ್ಪನೆ ಏನು? ಇತ್ಯಾದಿ ಪ್ರಶ್ನೆಗಳಿಗೆ ಉತ್ತರ ಕಂಡುಕೊಳ್ಳುವ ಸಲುವಾಗಿ ‘ಹೆಜ್ಜೆ’ ರೂಪಿತಗೊಂಡಿದೆ.

ಮಾಹಿತಿ ತಂತ್ರಜ್ಞಾನದ ವಿವಿಧ ಸ್ತರಗಳಲ್ಲಿ ಕನ್ನಡದ ಬೆಳವಣಿಗೆಗೆ ಬೇಕಾದ ವಿಷಯಗಳ ಬಗ್ಗೆ ಅನುಭವಿ ತಜ್ಞರು, ತಂತ್ರಜ್ಞರು ತಮ್ಮ ಅನುಭವವನ್ನು ಹಂಚಿಕೊಳ್ಳುವುದರ ಮೂಲಕ ಪ್ರಾರಂಭವಾಗುವ ಈ ಕಾರ್ಯಕ್ರಮ, ಮೇಲೆ ಹೇಳಿದ ಅನೇಕ ಪ್ರಶ್ನೆಗಳಿಗೆ ಉತ್ತರವನ್ನು ಪಡೆದುಕೊಳ್ಳುವ ‘ಹೆಜ್ಜೆ’ಗಳ ಹಾದಿಯನ್ನು ನಿಮ್ಮ ಮುಂದೆ ತೆರೆಯಲಿದೆ.

ಬನ್ನಿ ನಮ್ಮೊಡನೆ ಜೊತೆಜೊತೆಯಾಗಿ ಹೆಜ್ಜೆ ಹಾಕಿ, ನಿಮ್ಮ ಬರುವಿಕೆಯನ್ನು ಇಂದೇ ಕಾಯ್ದಿರಿಸಿ.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/c95ca8ccdca8ca1-caeca4ccdca4cc1-ca4c82ca4ccdcb0c9cccdc9ecbeca8ca6-c9cca4cc6-c9cca4cc6c97cc6...

Future of Integrated Science Education in Higher Education in India

praskrishna — 2012-01-15T09:50:50Z

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

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

Introduction

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

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

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

Rationale

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

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

Course 1: Science-in-Making

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Course 3: Health, Technology and Bio-ethics

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

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

Course 4: National Technologies & Technologies of the Nation

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

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

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

Course 5: Sociology of Science and Science in Society

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

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

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

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

Next Steps

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

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

NGO questions people's privacy in UID scheme

praskrishna — 2012-01-12T11:45:07Z

Taking a leaf out of the recommendations of the parliamentary standing committee on finance (SCF) that raised objections on the National Identification Authority of India Bill 2010, Delhi-based NGOs have called upon the Jharkhand government to stay the execution of UID projects in the state. Jaideep Deogharia's article was published in the Times of India on 11 January 2012.

Citing excerpts from the recommendations of the SCF, headed by BJP MP Yashwant Sinha, the NGO activists asserted that the MoU signed by the government on June 25, 2010, was without any legal and constitutional mandate.

This claim, however, remains unfounded as the UIDAI is functioning under an executive order of the department of planning and has no links with the NIDAI Bill. The issue was recently clarified by the director general and mission director of UIDAI when he addressed the media in the capital during his three-day visit.

Organizing a round table, report on SCF and its implications for Aadhaar project and National Population register for multipurpose National ID Card (MNIC),

Citizens Forum for Civil Liberties member Gopal Krishna said given the fact that the Election Commission had shortlisted 15 documents as evidence of identity and citizenship, there was no need to have the 16th instrument (read UID).

"It violates citizens' basic and constitutional right to privacy because collecting biometric information of an individual was limited to criminals," he said clarifying that even in case of prisoners, the fingerprint data is supposed to be deleted after acquittal under the Prisoner Identification Act.

JT D'Souza, an expert in biometrics technology, Mumbai, gave a presentation on how biometric information was vulnerable to exploitation. Using a finger print reader, he demonstrated fake finger prints being read by the machine. He said a fingerprint on a semi solid wax slab can be filled up with adhesive and allowed to set for eight hours. "Once the adhesive block is removed, it takes up the exact marks of finger prints using which any finger print reader can be fooled," he said.

Another participant, Sunil Abraham, director, Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, said there is no data protection or privacy law in place. "The UID project was allowed to march on without any protection being put in place," he said.

"On one hand, the government wants its citizens to be transparent by giving all their biometric and demographic data, but on the other hand, people in higher authorities are making every bid to conceal facts and function in a non-transparent manner," he said.

D' Souza also raised questions about the uniqueness of fingerprints as it has never been tested on a vast population. Citing examples from foreign countries where fingerprint studies have proved to be ineffectual in establishing non duplication, he said biometric data if hacked could be misused.

Read the original published in the Times of India

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/ngo-questions-peoples-privacy-in-uid-scheme

Revealed: Bangalore’s Basic Instincts

praskrishna — 2012-01-10T06:50:25Z

This is a first – a sex survey that focusses only on Bangalore. Sure, we have sex surveys telling us what the country thinks. But we wanted to know what our city thinks about the three-letter word. The article was published in the Bangalore Mirror on 8 January 2012. Sunil Abraham is quoted right near the end on why Bangalore might not figure in Google Search rends' top 10 India locations for porn-related queries.

And it wasn’t just sex that we discussed. We also quizzed people on fidelity – emotional and physical – homosexuality and love. Predictably, Bangalore’s responses were far from predictable.

Instant attraction

Cynics may scoff at love at first sight, but youngsters are not yet cynical. And love seems to be catching people very young with kids as young as 13 claiming to be struck by Cupid, leaving even school principals shocked.

D Shashi Kumar, principal of Blossoms School, says, “Even kids from fourth to sixth standard claim to have fallen in love at first sight. I am flabbergasted and it’s difficult to deal with this though it is normal even in primary schools. Where is the innocence that one associates with childhood? They seem to be in a hurry to grow up.”

But, given Bangalore’s overwhelming response in favour of instant love, we found someone with a happy ending. Hear it from Narasimha Murthy: “We looked, we smiled and I was a goner. It’s been eight years since we got married and that love still continues to make my heart beat faster every time I see her."

True love waits?

The rip-roaring double standards for the goose and gander does not exist more strongly in any other case. Despite the emergence of the metrosexual male, men still want virgin brides.

As a result, women find it difficult to confess about their previous sexual partners. For instance, 28-year-old Menaka has been married for more than four years, but her guilty conscience hasn’t given up. “I had a boyfriend in college with whom I was intimate. When I got married, I decided to let my past be and start afresh. Everybody has a past, why rake it up and ruin your future? The more practical reason for me to have made that decision was because I knew it would ruin my married life. But then, my husband recently confessed about his affairs before we got married and now I am consumed with guilt. But what would have been even more ideal was for me to have waited till I got married,” she says.

Masti after marriage?

A city that so overwhelmingly believes in love seems to think nothing of infidelity. It’s all about the thrill.

Abhishek Rana, for instance, is a self-confessed stud since college. His list of girlfriends was like a telephone directory and he managed to date multiple girls simultaneously. Finally, he tied the knot with his childhood sweetheart (who knew about his escapades) a couple of years ago and is quite happy with his marriage. But that has not stopped the Casanova. “If anything, I am going out with more women now than I did before I was married.

Back then, it was the thrill of watching me succeed with the ladies where the others failed. Now, it is the thrill of making sure I don’t get caught by my wife. It is forbidden so it makes it more attractive. I have to come up with innovative reasons when I go home late. Once I told her I was helping my Man Friday’s daughter with homework in the office and she bought it! It’s not that I’m not happy with my wife. But, you need to keep the zing in life,” says this alumnus of a top B-school in India.

Unhappy about gays

It has been nine long years since Adithya Rao’s (name changed) father has spoken to him. “I was 24 when I told him I was gay and that was it. He slapped me and that was the last time he ever spoke to me,” says this designer who takes his boyfriends home to introduce them to his mother. “She is the one who keeps peace in the family,” says Adithya.

Forget the decriminalisation of Article 377. Homosexuality is still taboo in the city. Nithin Manayath, who is gay and a very vocal activist for the rights of homosexuals, says it is the shame around the idea of being homosexual that is the main problem. This 33-year-old English literature professor says, “My extended family knows that I am gay because I have even appeared on television. But I still have overzealous aunts and uncles who tell me about this ‘nice girl’ that I should meet. So depending on who it is, I politely tell them to introduce me to guys instead. I don’t think it is the idea of men sleeping with men that has them in knots. Their problem is talking about it in public. Even my parents don’t really talk about it. My mum is sometimes okay talking about it. But dad prefers to just never bring it up.”

Live-in is in

For ad woman Ashima, 28, and HR professional Jeremy, 31, (names changed), after five years of being in a relationship, the next logical step was to move in together. Although the decision didn’t come easy with parents opposing it, the couple went ahead and moved in together in January last year. Ashima says she always wanted to live together with her partner before taking the plunge.

“When you are dating someone, it’s different. You don’t get to spend that much time together. It is only when you are living with a person that you can understand how your partner lives, know his personal hygiene, his moods, his habits. I thought living-in would be a good way to test our compatibility before deciding to get married,” said Ashima.

Jeremy says moving in was also a matter of convenience. “It made sense economically as well for us to move in together. Both our parents don’t live in the city but when we told them about our decision, their primary concern was what people would say,” he said.

Dr Bhupendra Chaudhury, consultant psychiatrist, The Apollo Clinic, Koramangala, says that live-in relationships are never permanent. “Live-in relationships are always transient. The good thing about a live-in relationship is that both the people in the relationship are not sure about where the relationship will lead. With a change in the demographic trend where most people are living away from their families, a live-in relationship is natural. With such couples, there is no family pressure and with both partners working, they can afford their own expenses and in most cases parents don’t know about it. A live-in relationship can either end in separation or marriage but I have never come across any couple who has lived together for long. It is never permanent,” said Dr Bhupendra.

In the case of Ashima and Jeremy, they passed the compatibility test and after a year of living together, they are ready to say ‘I do’ this month.

Pure emotions

When Uma Rao found out that her husband of 30 years had cheated on her with a young girl, it hit her hard. “At first, I thought he was going through a mid-life crisis and was looking to spice up his life. I imagined it was just a fling. But, when he said that he was in love with her, I was shattered,” says Uma who divorced her husband last month.

But what if it was the other way round? Rajesh, Uma’s former husband, says: “If Uma had had the affair, I don’t think I would have been able forgive her. I think it is a man-woman thing,” says the father of a 20-something daughter. Incidentally, he’s considering marrying his girlfriend who is also in her 20s.

One wild night

“Why not,” asks Pavithra (name changed), a college student who has already had multiple partners. “I am single and I have the right to enjoy life,” says the nubile young thing who does not label it as sexual promiscuity, but experimentation. “I don’t come from my mother’s generation to subscribe to the idea that you have to sleep with only your husband. Sexual attraction has nothing to do with love or other mushy emotions,” she says.

But for 39-year-old Manjunath, a photographer who indulges in one-night stands, “one-night-stands or a sexual partner is a much better option than dating somebody after you get married. It is too much risk with too little benefit. Enjoy the experience and move on.”

The work-shift rift

Any sexologist tell you that the most number of cases with marital problems are between couples who work in highly stressful jobs. “Couples are now older as people are more concerned about their careers. They do not realise that people have to give time to a marriage. I once had a couple come in after just two weeks of their marriage. While the wife worked in an advertising firm, the husband worked in a call centre.

So they had no time for each other and they realised this within two weeks of marriage. Relationships need patience and perseverance more than anything else. Finally, it came as no surprise that they were divorced within a year,” says Mamtha Shetty, a psychiatrist in the city.

Social network gets a poke

“My husband works in Mumbai and I work in Bangalore. We meet once in a month and Facebook is the only way I keep in touch with him and know what is happening in his life minute by minute. Now, most people think that we can do this over the phone, but we are so tired at the end of the day, I don’t have the energy to have a long-drawn conversation,” says Shefali Gupta.

There are many such couples, you realise, if you listen to Suma Gowda, a private marriage counsellor. “I had a case where the couple were on the verge of getting a divorce, because the husband had complimented his ex-girl friend on Facebook. But what made it even more weird was that their entire fight was going on on Facebook. They refused to talk about it at home whenever they got together. You need to understand that talking is what keeps the marriage going,” she says.

“The days of marriage as an institution are all but over. Today people see it as a compartment and that is where the problem begins. You have to emotionally invest in relationships. Couples today treat it like they can lock it away as a small part of their lives instead of looking at it as an anchor. They don’t have the patience to make a relationship work and it is not just marriage that I am talking about. It is almost like couples have a separate person for every need of theirs,” says Sushil Unni, a certified life coach.

Porn supremacy

Vinutha Reddy never understood why her husband would lock himself in his study. “My husband was uninterested in me sexually. We had had sex once in the six months that we were married. When I finally summoned the courage and told him that we need to get some help, he refused. After a lot of pressure from the family, he agreed, and it was then that he opened up about his fetish for middle-aged women. He would surf the internet all night to find these websites. There was nothing I could do about it,” says the homemaker who is still in the marriage since the last five years because of family pressure.

But despite this, Bangalore does not figure in the top 10 of porn-surfing cities in India while Mangalore makes it. Sunil Abraham, executive director, Centre for Internet Society, explains the science of surfing. “If you look at the Google trend or any other website, Bangalore does not figure among the top 10 cities that surfs for porn. But that does not mean that Bangalore does not surf porn. It only means that we have a very sophisticated surfer with a very specific type. They don’t go through Google or other websites. They know how to go about it. But whether it affects their personal lives is lot more complicated,” he says.

After a lot of family pressure, he opened up about his fetish for middle-aged women.

Read the original in Bangalore Mirror

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/revealed-bangalore2019s-basic-instincts

Facebook, Google face censorship in India

praskrishna — 2012-01-09T05:10:37Z

Religious leaders in India are on a collision course with social media websites including Google, Facebook and Yahoo. Two Indian courts recently asked these American companies as well as 19 other websites to take down “anti-religious” material. They are now required to report their compliance by February. Betwa Sharma's blog post was published in SmartPlanet on 5 January 2012. Sunil Abraham has been quoted in it extensively.

Information technology minister Kapil Sibal also met with a delegation of different faith groups who are worried that certain internet content could lead to communal discord. India’s 1.2 billion people are made up of majority Hindus but it also has the third largest population of Muslims as well as large number of Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains and other faiths.

India has an estimated 100 million internet users–the third largest in the world after U.S and China. The proposed restrictions are not at all comparable to China’s but is the internet free enough for the world’s largest democracy?

Some observers are suspicious that promoting religious or social harmony is a front for censoring the internet. Sunil Abraham, head of Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), said that "traditional intellectual property rights holders like movie studios, music companies and software vendors are trying to protect their obsolete business models by pushing for the adoption of blanket surveillance and filtering technologies."

"They have found common cause with both totalitarian and so-called democratic regimes across the world interested in protecting the political status-quo after upheavals like the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, Anonymous and the Pirate Party," he said.

The Indian government has tried to reassure the public that it is not trying to censor. Google’s Transparency Report, however, recorded that out of the 358 items requested to be removed by the Indian government from Jan-June 2011, 255 had to do with government criticism and only a handful with hate speech.

Sibal has also been speaking to executives from Facebook, Yahoo and Google in India. But no agreement has been reached on taking down hate speech. New rules, issued in April, require internet intermediaries like Facebook and Yahoo to check for “unlawful” material and take it down.

CIS will soon be releasing a report called “Intermediary Liability in India: Chilling Effects on Free Expression on the Internet 2011." For the report, CIS conducted a sting operation by sending flawed takedown notices to seven intermediaries. The results showed that six intermediaries over-complied with the notices. "From the responses from the intermediaries don’t have sufficient legal competence or unwilling to dictate resources to determine legality of an online expression," Abraham said.

"Various pretexts like national security, protection of children, crackdown on online crime and terrorism, defense against cyber war etc are used to compromise civil liberties and clamp down on freedom of expression," he added.

(Photo-facebook24h.com/Google images)

Read the original published by SmartPlanet

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/facebook-google-face-censorship-in-india

Trail of the Trolls

praskrishna — 2012-01-04T07:55:05Z

Bullying and abuse on the Internet is on the rise. Smitha Verma finds out why most offenders are going scot-free in this article published in the Telegraph on 4 January 2012.

When Shahana Nair Joshi, a young professional from Delhi, wrote a blog post titled ‘An Open Letter to a Delhi Boy’ last year, she was not prepared for the repercussions that followed. The post went viral overnight and received as many as 7,000 comments. Her blog post, which was a rant against the stereotypical Delhi man, became a topic of discussion on social networking sites, inviting with it a flurry of praise. But the fan following also brought with it an equal number of trolls (those who post inflammatory messages in an online community).

“Soon sexual insults, derogatory messages and inflammatory content became the norm,” says Joshi. “Then I started moderating the comments on my blog and went on to block trolls on Twitter,” says Joshi whose Twitter follower list jumped from 100 to 1,000 within a week. “One person even went to the extent of issuing a death threat to me over the phone,” she adds. “I decided to ignore the trolls as that is the best possible solution.”

Cases similar to Joshi’s are on the rise in cyber world. At a time when social networking sites are being asked to monitor and censor their content, bullying on the Internet is at an all time high. Trolls hide behind the anonymity that a social networking site provides to post derogatory comments and obscene remarks.

According to Supreme Court lawyer Pavan Duggal, harassment on social networking sites is emerging as one of the biggest problems in the online world. “Six out of 10 people aren’t aware of what constitutes a cyber crime. As a result they aren’t reported. Neither the victims nor the abusers know what is an offence,” says Duggal.

But even if a case of bullying on the Internet is reported, the law is somewhat fuzzy when it comes to bringing the offender to book. In India, social media come under a variety of civil and criminal laws. The Information Technology Act, 2000, tackles most cases related to cyber crimes. “However, we take recourse to not just the IT Act, 2000, and its amendments thereunder, but also to other legislation, such as the Indian Penal Code (IPC), the Trade Marks Act, the Copyright Act, etc., to tackle cyber crimes in India,” says Gurpreet Singh, Internet law head, Amarjit & Associates, Delhi.

Bullying on the Internet consists of abuses that may have emotional and physical repercussions. “Trolling provokes a non-productive argument and as of now it is not considered a criminal offence anywhere in the world,” says Sunil Abraham, executive director, Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore. However, most Internet users point out that trolling is out and out harassment that often verges on sexual harassment as well.

“I am routinely harassed by trolls. Even if I block them, they create a new twitter handle, start following me and post abusive comments,” says Joy Das, an advertising professional from Mumbai. His strong stand on several issues makes him a favourite among the trolls. Once Das had gone to the extent of filing a case and shared the details of the troll with the cyber crime cell department of the state police. He withdrew the case when the abuser retreated.

One of the main problems in taking action against a troll is that no legal definition of bullying is provided in Indian laws. As Karnika Seth, a Delhi-based cyber law expert, points out, “Even though the laws are in place, there is a clear lack of definition of offensive terms.”

Still, the laws do provide some relief in cases of harassment by Internet trolls. Usually, Section 509 of the IPC comes into effect when there is an intention to insult the modesty of a woman. “The offence also extends to an online medium,” says Singh of Amarjeet & Associates. “Besides Section 509, various other sections such as Section 503 and Section 504 of the IPC can also be invoked based upon the particular facts of a case,” adds Singh.

The networking sites on their part aren’t proactive when it comes to keeping a check on trolls. Twitter maintains that it is a communications platform, not a content mediator. “Removal of content does not in and of itself resolve the issue that led to the content being posted in the first place,” blogs the head of Twitter’s safety centre.

If you want to know the IP address and other details about the bully, you will have to file a police complaint and the copy should be sent to Twitter, informs Nabeel Ziyaan, a Bangalore-based entrepreneur and a contributor to Twitter’s ‘#140help’ section which deals with user queries. “In such cases, Twitter will work with the law enforcement agency,” says Ziyaan.

An accused can be booked for mental cruelty and sexual harassment under the provisions of the IPC as well as under Sections 67(a) & 67(b) of the IT Amendment Act, 2008, depending upon the facts and circumstances of the case. Section 66(a) lays down, for example, that any person who sends, by means of a computer resource or a communication device, any information that is grossly offensive or has menacing character or any information which he knows to be false, but for the purpose of causing annoyance, shall be punishable with imprisonment for a term which may extend to three years or with a fine which may extend to Rs 5 lakh or with both.

According to Section 67(a), whoever publishes or transmits in the electronic form any material which contains a sexually explicit act or conduct shall be punished with up to five years’ imprisonment and with a fine which may extend to Rs 10 lakh. And Section 67(b) hands out punishment for publishing or transmitting material depicting children in a sexually explicit act in an electronic form.

But law enforcement agencies are not always able to work out a way to track the trolls. “IP addresses can be spoofed using different software. In fact, innocent people can get punished if a troll hides under a proxy server,” says Seth.

Experts say that cyber laws need clarification and appropriate interpretation. The public should also be made aware of what constitutes a cyber offence. Until that happens, the trolls will, in all probability, trawl the Internet and maul Netizens at will.

Trail of the Trolls was published in the Telegraph on 4 January 2012

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/trail-of-trolls

Constitution of Group of Experts to Deliberate on Privacy Issues

praskrishna — 2012-01-04T07:49:37Z

It has been decided to constitute a Small Group of Experts under the Chairmanship of Justice A.P. Shah, Former Chief Justice, Delhi High Court, to identify the privacy issues and prepare a paper to facilitate authoring the Privacy Bill. The constitution of the proposed group and ToR are as follows:

Constitution of the Group

S.No.	Name	Designation
1	Justice A.P. Shah, Former Chief Justice, Delhi High Court	Chairman
2	Shri. R S Sharma, DG UIDAI	Member
3	Dr. Gulshan Rai, Director General CERT-In, DIT	Member
4	Sh. Rajiv Kapoor, JS, DOPT	Member
5	Representative, Department of Legal Affairs	Member
6	Sh. Som Mittal, President, NASSCOM	Member
7	Ms. Barkha Dutt, NDTV	Member
8	Dr. (Ms) Usha Ramanathan, Researcher & Advocate	Member
9	Sh. PraneshPrakash, Programme Manager, Centre for Internet & Society	Member
10	Dr. Kamlesh Bajaj, CEO, Data Security Council of India (DSCI)	Member
11	Dr. Nagesh Singh, Adviser, Planning Commission	Member
12	Sh. R K Gupta, Adviser (CIT&I), Planning Commission	Member

Terms of Reference
- To study the Privacy laws and related bills promulgated by various countries.
- To make an in-depth analysis of various programmes being implemented by GoI from the point of view of their impact on Privacy.
- To make specific suggestions for consideration of the DOPT for incorporation in the proposed draft Bill on Privacy.
The Chairman may co-opt other Members to the group for their specific inputs.
The expenditure towards TA/DA in connection with the meetings of the Group in respect of the official members will be borne by their respective Ministries/Departments. Domestic travel in respect of non-Official Members of the group would be permitted by Air India (economy class) and the expenditure would be met by the Planning Commission.
The group will be serviced by the CIT & I Division, Planning Commission.
The group shall submit its report by 31st March 2012.

(S Bose)
Under Secretary to the Government of India

To:
The Chairman and all Members of the Group of Experts
Copy forwarded to:

PS to Deputy Chairman, Planning Commission
PS to MOS (Planning, PA, S&T and ES), Planning Commission
PS to all Members of the Planning Commission
PS to Member Secretary, Planning Commission
Director (PC), IFA unit,Deputy Secretary (Admn.),Planning Commission
Administration/Accounts/General Branches, Library, CIT & I Division, Planning Commission
Information Officer, Planning Commission

(S Bose)
Under Secretary to the Government of India

Download the PDF we got from the Planning Commission.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/constitution-of-group-of-experts

2011: The year India began to harness social media

praskrishna — 2012-01-04T07:19:07Z

About half a decade ago, netizens began to expand their online presence by forging new relationships, rediscovering old ones and sharing information and content on what came to be collectively termed as social media. The year gone by marked a new milestone for this social media phenomenon, which saw a paradigm shift from merely being a networking platform to becoming a political tool, writes Satarupa Paul in the Sunday Guardian on 1 January 2012.

2011 was a year of diametrically contradictory events, however, what joined these diverse proceedings together was their concurrent presence in social media, which attracted users to its growing landscape, changing forever the ways in which we connect and interact online.

An infographic by Search Media Journal showed that registered users on social networking premier Facebook grew more than 80% in the past year, taking the count to 640 million people. It said that if Facebook were a country, it would be the world's third largest, after China and India. Interestingly, microblogging site Twitter saw a whopping growth of more than 250% in the number of tweets per day. Social media penetration increased by 3% in India to more than 38 million users. Social media agency We Are Social says that India now has the second-highest number of LinkedIn users and the fourth-highest number of Facebook users in the world. However, a fascinating aspect of the growth in India's social media landscape is that most of it has been achieved by mobile subscription, which jumped by 71% in 2011.

Nishant Shah, Director of Research at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, identifies three important social media trends for India in 2011, which can be extended to the rest of the world. "Firstly, we saw an increased sharing of digital content whether photos, videos, songs, news or blogs," he says, pointing to the Why This Kolaveri Di video, which went viral on YouTube with over 1.3 million views within a week of its release. "The second and most prominent trend was the mobilisation of masses towards particular causes," Shah says. Twitter and Facebook helped gather mass support for the Anna Hazare movement in India. Even the Arab Spring uprisings, notably in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East, relied heavily on social media, as did the Occupy Wall Street protests, where Twitter established itself as a communicator of the movement.

"The third aspect is the draconian censorship measures that followed as governments realised the threats they faced from social media platforms.The mobilisation on social media that ultimately translated into protests saw a critical mass being achieved, which made governments take notice and impose the draconian rules."

"The third aspect is the draconian censorship measures that followed as governments realised the threats they faced from social media platforms," says Shah. Anja Kovacs of The Internet Democracy Project explains, "To understand what led to the censorship rules being enforced in the last one year, one has to understand the concept of critical mass." She says that for a medium to become effective, it has to reach a threshold of people active on it. "The mobilisation on social media that ultimately translated into protests saw a critical mass being achieved, which made governments take notice and impose the draconian rules," she said. In Egypt, President Hosni Mubarak attempted to cut off the Internewwt, betraying his fear of this arsenal of social networking, while in India, the Minister for Communications and Information Technology, Kapil Sibal, demanded that Internet firms should self-censor users' content. Kovacs says, "This was an extension of the Information Technology Rules introduced in April 2011, which requires intermediaries like Facebook, Google, etc., to remove any content if an individual complains against it on flimsy grounds like 'disparaging' or 'harmful for children'."

Most of these censorship attempts have only backfired, with social media users vehemently opposing and criticising them. But with pressure mounting from governments to curtail content, social media experts hope that 2012 will be a better year for one's freedom on the web. "I hope that social media remains as open as it is now and doesn't fall victim to the draconian measures," Shah says. Kovacs agrees, "Instead of censorships on weak arguments, we should try and have wider debates in society about what should be allowed and what not. Hope we will be able to achieve broader agreements in the coming year."

The original article was published in the Sunday Guardian

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/2011-the-year-india-began-to-harness-social-media

Click to Change

nishant — 2012-01-03T09:35:56Z

From organising political protests and flash mobs to uploading their versions of Kolaveri Di, people brought about change with the help of the internet, writes Nishant Shah in this article published in the Indian Express on 1 January 2012.

2011 was a year of connections. At the turn of the last decade, there were many qualms that we are all becoming “alone together”. There was fear that digital webs are building societies of isolated individuals. It was presumed that as cellphones become ubiquitous, broadband becomes affordable, and the digital realm emerges as a significant arbitrator of our everyday life, human connections will lose out to digital connectivity. However, the course of the year has shown that the wide and democratic access to digital and internet technologies has led to creative forms of connections between people. Researchers have proved that the social web has decreased the social gaps between people — the six degrees of separation is now reduced to 4.7 degrees of distance.

Here is a look at five areas that changed dramatically in 2011 as digital proximities shaped closer human relations.

The Political: From the Arab Spring and the iconic gathering of people at Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt, to the unprecedented mobilisation of people who came out in support of Team Anna’s anti-corruption campaign in India, to the Occupy movements across the world, people reshaped themselves as citizens in 2011. The ability of social networking sites to pass messages, and to share ideas and inspire people to take to the streets has changed the world as we know it. Instead of being passive observers of political protests, thousands of people took to the streets, demanding their rights and expressing their opinions on the politics of their countries.

The Social: This was also the year of the flash mob. After the first excitement in 2003, when the first flash mob was orchestrated in Mumbai, the idea had fizzled out, facing legal opposition and social disinterest. However, in 2011, the flash mob came back with a vengeance — from the ‘slut walks’ which addressed public sexual harassment in our cities, to the organised and ‘permitted’ dance performance at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus in Mumbai. Planned and executed through viral media, social web and cellphone messages, flash mobs allow people to explore new relationships with malls and roads.

The Cultural: Bollywood took to the digital world this year, with celebrity blogs and tweets about their personal lives (remember the craze around the Bachchan baby), professional relationships and upcoming movies. Movies like Ra.One experimented with social media integration, producing gaming platforms and interactive environments for fans. However, it was all eclipsed by the rage that asked the simple question: “Why this Kolaveri Di?” What started off as a promo for an upcoming film became one of the most shared videos of the year, leading to thousands of people uploading their versions of the song, recorded with cheap digital video devices.

The Economic: Perhaps one of the most dramatic changes has been the way corporate houses have started harnessing the power of the Web to go beyond just selling. While advertorials and commissioned bloggers are still going strong, there is a clear recognition that the social web might be one of the ways to influence people towards becoming more responsible citizens. Big Cinema’s magnificent “silent” national anthem that captures children with speech and hearing disability performing to Jana Gana Mana stole our hearts at the beginning of the year, and was followed quickly by Aircel’s campaign, Save Our Tigers.

The Personal: 2011 was a year of crises: natural disasters that destroyed cities in the US, Thailand, New Zealand, the nuclear crisis at the Fukushima prefecture in Japan, or the bomb blasts in Mumbai and Delhi. No matter where, netizens emerged as heroes. They created Facebook pages to mobilise resources, built Twitter hashtags to offer help, organised information mashups to keep people updated and offered help to those who needed it. People of the year, this year, were people, who showed how their spaces of leisure and entertainment are also spaces through which they can reach out to strangers online.

If 2011 has shown us anything, it is that technologies in themselves are neither the problem nor the solution. It is the people who use them and inhabit them that shape the futures of our technology landscapes. And we might be spending more time behind an interface but that seems to make us only more human.

Read the original published by the Indian Express

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The Historian Wins Over the Biographer

nishant — 2011-12-31T12:15:10Z

In Walter Isaacson's eponymous biography of Steve Jobs, the multibillion dollar man who is credited with single handedly changing the face of computing and the digital media industry, we face the dilemma of a biographer: how do you make sense of a history that is so new, it is still unfolding? Nishant Shah's detailed review of Steve Jobs' biography is now out in the Biblio and is is available online (after a free registration) as a PDF.

And how do you stitch it together around a person so iconic that he was always larger than life? Steve Jobs, the authorised story, that Steve Jobs never got to read because of his death to cancer on 5th October 2011, captures the tension between being a biographer and a historian that marks Isaacson's ambitious project. As a biographer, he hasn't yet achieved enough critical distance with the subject at hand, and hence, instead of engaging with Jobs to give us inroads into his mind, we get a history that dons the mantle of objectivity and accuracy, to create a eulogy that would fit Steve Jobs' journey from Apple II to Apps.

Written lucidly in a fairly conversational style reminiscent of Isaacson’s time spent with the Time Magazine, Steve Jobs is a story stitched together with love, care, rigour and honesty, to look at the times, people, places and circumstances that created the megalith icon Steve Jobs. Isaacson, whose earlier works include biographical histories of Benjamin Franklin (Simon & Schuster, 2003) and Albert Einstein (Simon & Schuster, 2008), confesses to his love of exploring the intersections of technology and humanity. He establishes Steve Jobs as a worthy successor in the series, using Jobs’ own description of himself – “I always thought of myself as a Humanities person as a kid, but I liked electronics” – as the springboard for writing this ambitious history.

Like a good historian, Isaacson refuses to take Jobs at face value, well aware of his ‘Reality Distortion Field’ that sucks you in even if you are aware of it, making reality appear in morphed forms. With a rigour that befits the project, he sets out in search of the historical truth using over a hundred interview sources comprised of influential people in Jobs’ life, an exhaustive riffling through the public discourse around Apple and its poster boy, a shrewd hand on the economic and technological pulse of the late 20th century and an uncanny ability to read between the lines. The result is a biography filled with tales that we know, stories that we speculated about, anecdotes about what we suspected.

In one of the most memorable interviews in the book, Isaacson interviews Debi Coleman, one of the early managers at Apple, who says, “He would shout at a meeting, ‘You ---hole, you never do anything right.’ ... Yet I consider myself the absolute luckiest person in the world to have worked with him.” Isaacson traces
this peculiar power that Jobs had over people in his life, to make them feel special and worthless at the same time, to Jobs’ own early knowledge of his adoption and of his oscillations between feeling “Abandoned. Special”. Isaacson shows how Jobs’ own life constantly referenced these two positions – from his dysfunctional relationships with women (the short story of how he got his girlfriend pregnant at 23 and then abandoned her, even denying paternity), to his long travels to India in search of spiritual belonging, and the lessons he learned from his adoptive father, who he hero-worshipped only to later realise that he was “smarter than him” — the adoption and its effects on his young mind, come up repeatedly. It serves as a way of understanding his abrasive attitude to authority, his rude and insensitive behaviour with colleagues and friends, and his strange fads at self improvement that ranged from fruitarian diets to extreme purging and fasting.

Steve Jobs offers a wide range of examples of his awful behaviour – the bullying, the belittling, the lying – till you are numbed by them. At the same time, there is a fanboy who takes us gleefully through the history that preceded the world of iPod, iPhone and iPad, with backstories of the known, the presumed and the plausible. The book quenches the thirst for information about one of the most private public figures and confirms the polarity, not only of Jobs’ dealings with the world, but also his own life and how he saw it. There is an explosion of facts – unknown facts – that entice you into reading the book, but facts alone do not a good biography make.

What is missing from the book, is insight. Throughout the book, while Jobs’ own dramatic life choices sustain your attention and interest, the author does not work too hard at either creating his own impressions of Jobs or at giving insight in more than the surface. There is no doubt that Isaacson is an expert historian— the most enjoyable parts of the book are when he looks at the histories that came together to create Jobs. Using his rich knowledge of the ’70s and the ’80s in the USA he portrays an enchanted universe of the hippy lifestyle, rebellious attitudes to authority, reforming education system, the transition from the analogue to digital technologies, and the heyday of creative experimentation enjoyed by a plush economy.

The layers of enchantment start fading when Isaacson lets go of the mantle of history and starts talking about the person he is studying. It is almost as if after having done his research on Jobs and then failing to invest in him as an author, he sought respite in writing history rather than giving us more of the person involved. Which is why, after reading the first half of the book, going through a series of strategic beginnings, looking at a wide range of people like Steve Wozniak, Nolan Bushnell, Andrea Cunningham, Daniel Kotke and Mike Markkula, one gets a feeling that you know more about these people than you know about Jobs. While each one of these characters, even in their cameo appearances, bring flavour, variety, complexity and emotionality to the tale, Jobs remains the “enlightened but cruel” person who, even as he grows and transforms, remains tied to that description. Jobs becomes an organising principal for making sense of the jumbled influences behind the making of Apple rather than a person we can know more about. He is often named as an enigma but there is very little effort put into actually exploring his mystery. The historian wins over the biographer in getting you more interested in the time-space continuum rather than in the person.

I don’t want you to go away with the idea that there is not much substance to Isaacson’s writing. With a fine pen (which could have done with a little reflexive editing — and I am sure this would have happened had the book been released as planned in January of next year instead of being brought forward to fill the void created by Jobs’ death), Isaacson does lead us into Jobs’ universe (if not into his head) in interesting ways. He paints little sketches of the past — like Jobs’ run-in with Bill Gates, like Apple’s rivalry with IBM, like Apple’s ‘stealing’ of the GUI (Graphic User Interface) ideas and technology from Xerox PARC, like the first Mac advertisement that posited Apple as the rebel against the ‘thought police’ in George Orwell’s dystopian epic 1984, or even in the parting of ways between the two Steves (Jobs and Wozniak). Isaacson knows how to tell even an oft-told story well and takes you through a simple but intricate narrative of how Jobs became the poster-boy of the company he founded and his eventual ousting from it as a result of his obnoxious behaviour and the obsessive compulsive personality that was affecting the productivity and business of Apple.

However, the second half of the book, separated with some poignant and memorable pictures from Jobs’ life, makes it clearer than ever that Isaacson’s interest in Jobs is not as a biographer but as a historian. It deals with Jobs’ ousting from Apple, his near bankrupt status as both Next and Pixar fell to bad days, and the eventual return of Jobs to the Apple empire not as the prodigal son but the ascendant angel. In pithy prose, Isaacson captures the turmoil, frustration and chaos that emerged when the brightest star of the computing industry almost collapsed in his own overambition. We get a sense of the ruthlessness, the hard heartedness and the short memory of a technology industry that is simultaneously unforgiving, forgetful and hinged on a business ethic of capital and market expansion. If Isaacson notices the irony of Jobs’ own firing of “B grade players” from his Macintosh project and the abrasive dismissal of “shitheads” that Jobs regularly engaged in, to feed his own sense of power and control, he doesn’t dwell on it.

The most dramatic rags-to-riches fairy tale of Jobs’ rise to power and his subsequent emergence as a tech superstar who changed the world as we know it with the iPod, iTunes, iPhone and iPad, in a quest to make his mark in history, is a lacklustre effort. The narrative is slow and sluggish, often making you want to skim through the page and move on. There is also a repeated emphasis on how Jobs was a visionary, was brilliant, was a man who, as he grew, was getting to deal with his life better, instead of an analysis of the different events that have marked Jobs’ public and personal life. The historian, when faced with the present just rushes through it to complete the book. Yet, the last interviews with Jobs, where he refers to himself as a machine, “one click, and it is all gone” are rich in emotions and texture. Isaascon does justice to Jobs’ belief in his being good “at making people talk”. There is a sense of closure that comes with angst, grief, pain and the feeling of loss that Jobs’ death must incite.

The discontent I am left with is that in what is being read as a homily to the man, there is very little of the man in it. I knew Steve Jobs, through the legends and stories that surround him, as an abrasive and arrogant whizkid who manipulated everybody around him ruthlessly to execute his own visions and dreams. I knew Steve Jobs, through the public discourse and rumours, as a flawed man who could be at once the best and the worst thing that could happen to you, using people as gods when he needed them and shattering them when he no longer needed them in his new visions. I knew Steve Jobs, through the grapevine and the gossip as a man who was obsessed with control and as one who sought spirituality in design and salvation in a good sale. I knew Steve Jobs as a bundle of contradictions and contrariness and while this book explains in fascinating ways the confluences that created this legend, it gives me very little in terms of understanding the man behind the mask.

The interwebz are already abuzz with the debates for or against Steve Jobs. There is surprise at how Isaacson waters down some of the personal and professional scuffles, often bordering on the unrelenting and the unethical, in his rendering of Jobs’ life. Speculation is rife about some of the more controversial decisions that Jobs took and whose side Isaacson is on. The book captures, comprehensively, so much of Jobs’ life that it is bound to lead to infinite discussion and critique. However, I would recommend that you read the book not as a biography but as a history. If you read it as a history where Steve Jobs features prominently, because, after all, histories are written by those who win, you will be rewarded richly. It is a history that offers innovative ways of looking at technology, one that maps one of the most crucial transitions of the 20th century from the analogue to the digital and shows how a handful of people have shaped the information age we live in. However, if you approach Steve Jobs as a way of understanding Steve Jobs, chances are you will feel short changed.

Read the original published in the Biblio VOL. XV NOS. 11 & 12, NOVEMBER- DECEMBER 2011

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/historian-wins-over-biographer

Of Surrogate Futures and Scattered Temporalities

nishant — 2011-12-30T10:15:12Z

There can be no refuting Michael Edwards’ claim that the world we live in is not only thick with problems, but that the problems that we are collectively trying to address are ‘thick...complex, politicized and unpredictable...complicated and contested’.

This is what he calls the ‘magic bullet’ approach to accounting for the work we do in a language and framework shaped by neo-liberal and corporate productivity in the age of late-capitalism. It is also difficult to disagree with the fact that the solutions we work with, are often too thin, fetishising enumeration of impact more than actual systemic change in areas of intervention.

His call for significantly transforming ‘existing systems of knowledge, politics and economics’ reminds me of another moment of crisis that Michel Foucault was addressing when he called for a systemic change in conditions of ‘Life, Labour and Language’ as a means of restructuring the human condition. I find Foucault’s formulation as a direct complement to Edwards’ triangulation because in his design of the futures, there is an inspiring prominence given to affect, affection, belonging, cohesion, and happiness – things which are often lost in the world of ‘quantiphilia’ that accompanies the ‘quick-fix cost efficient’ alternatives that are gaining centrality in contemporary development discourse..

I find myself nodding vigorously at Edwards’ fine critique of technocratic social innovation that is being offered as the panacea that shall cure all our problems from authoritarian regimes (as in the case of the Arab Spring) to poverty and mortality (as being supported in Asian and African countries to counter unemployment and AIDS).

In the knowledge collaboration on Digital Natives with a Cause? with Hivos, we have increasingly found that it is necessary to think of technology, not as a tool of mediation and arbitration (or of mobilisation and organisation) but as a condition of living. The extraordinary focus on granting access and facilitating inclusion in the digital world often misses out on the need to build social, cultural, political, intellectual, financial and emotional infrastructure that allows for a new kind of collaboratively formed action to come into being.

Instead, following the battle cries of an almost redundant ICT for Development (ICT4D) warrior, governments, NGOs and civil societies are obsessively building physical infrastructure without taking into consideration the quality of access, life, safety, responsibility and change that these technologies bring in. A concentration on these technologies as benign tools (much as a hammer is, till it comes and hits you on the head) obfuscates the complicated, or to use Edwards’ term ‘thick’ reality of technology ecology (politics, power and culture) and instead produces ‘thin’ solutions which are generally one-size, and fit nobody.

These thin solutions also, often depend on heroic individuals rather than Everyday Digital Natives who can actually produce change from the bottom-up, in ways that might be outside the scale, scope and understanding of traditional NGO work.

And yet, I have some reservations in the futures that Edwards conjures for those of us who work with, at, within and through INGOs towards a collective vision of global human development. I shall try and work through them, deeply appreciative of the provocations that Edwards sets forward in this thought-piece and recognising this as building upon his ideas - more a dialogue than an irresolute conflict. And to map my arguments, I am going to fall upon 2 metaphors that I have been thinking through in the last few months.

Surrogacy: Quickly defined as a process where One takes the place of Another, I offer Surrogacy as a way of problematizing Edwards’ rather persuasive metaphor of ‘bridging’. While the essay insightfully looks at the problem of INGOs as a product of their times, and their need to radically restructure their form and practice, the idea of bridging does not offer enough departure from the very points of origin that are being critiqued.

The imagination of an INGO of the future as mediating, arbitrating, managing, making interventions still strongly adheres to the idea that the INGO is essentially a surrogate structure that stands in for the State, the Community, the Society, the Individual, in the furtherance of its goal.

This surrogate structure has been at the centre of most rights based and development design in the last half-century and has led to many problems that fail to address questions of sustainability and longevity. If, we were to rethink the role of the INGO in the future, they cannot be merely about acknowledging different local movements and political happenstance.

We need to look at what happens when the surrogate structure of peerage, patronage and protection is dismantled to initiate change.

One possible solution is to look at the INGO – like I was arguing with technologies – not as actors or agents of change. The ambition might be to imagine the INGO as producing conditions within which change happens, thus looking at a wider investment within different sectors and actors of change, which goes beyond merely capacity building or short term thin solutions.

Temporality: The commonsensical understanding of the contemporary is something that belongs to its own time. We use the idea of the contemporary to refer to simultaneity of events. Martin Heidegger, in his brilliant treatise on ‘Being and Time’ suggests that the Contemporary does not refer to 2 things happening at the same time but actually refers to 2 things that do not belong to the same time, happening together.

It is a powerful way of proposing a Heterotemporality or diverse times within which different geo-political contexts and socio-cultural movements exist. There seems to be a unified future that we are talking about when we look at the notion of our collective futures. However, it might be more fruitful to realise that there are various futures which might actualise at different times and that there has to be a way of accounting for this temporal diversity, which does not yet reflect in our plans for the future.

The Heterotemporality demands different languages, concepts, pasts and practices to come together to form specific and flexible futures for the people we work with. If the century of development work has taught us something, it is the fact that imagining false futures for people who live in different temporalities often create great conditions of precarity, danger and violence for them.

Maybe it is time to first ask the question, “whose future are we addressing, when we talk about a future of the INGOs?” and start a new set of conversations about selective histories, visible presents and imagined futures that inform our discourse and practice in contemporary times.

Photo credit main picture: A connection between past and future, by Gioia De Antoniis

Read the original published in The Broker here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/surrogate-futures-scattered-temporalities