Centre for Internet and Society

Cultural knowledge needs to be more open

praskrishna — 2015-03-12T16:41:05Z

Subhashish Panigrahi is an educator and open source activist based in Bangalore, India. He is currently working at the Centre for Internet and Society's Access To Knowledge program where he builds partnership with universities, language researchers, and GLAM organizations.

The blog post by Jen Wike Huger was published on the website of OpenSource.com. It can be read here.

Their goal is to bring more scholarly and encyclopedic content under free licenses. During his work at the Wikimedia Foundation's India Program, Subha was involved in designing community sustaining and new contributor cultivation models.

For his effort to share and spread open source far and wide, this year he was awarded a 2015 Opensource.com People's Choice Award.

His most recent articles include: Digitize any book in the public domain, on his work to with Indian poetry important to the culture. Books and more are relicensed to Creative Commons, about news from the Wikimedia Foundation. Mozilla brings Indian communities together, about the Indic FirefoxOS L10n Sprint 2014. And, Open access platform to save the Odia Indian language, on his work to preserve his native culture.

The Basics

Name: Subhashish Panigrahi ("Subha")
Opensource.com username: psubhashish
Location: India (Bengaluru and Odisha)
Occupation/Employer/Position: Programme Officer, Centre for Internet and Society
Favorite open source tool or application: Audacity
Favorite Opensource.com channel: Education

Open up to us

I was away from home for my studies and was longing to read and write more in my native language of Odia. That led me to co-found eOdissa.com, a portal to tell stories to the rest of the world about my language, history, and cultural heritage. I was a sporadic editor on Wikipedia; anonymously since 2006. Then, in 2011, I was introduced to editing for Odia Wikipedia by my mentor Shiju Alex and friend Asutosh Kar.

That was my entry point to the free software movement. And it was a trap I could never get out of!

I thankfully began a full-time job with the Wikimedia Foundation in 2012 for its India Program. The program is now housed with their Indian movement partner, Centre for Internet and Society, under the Access To Knowledge program. I work in the Bengaluru office but mostly travel to work with the communities. I work on building capacity for the Indian language Wikimedia communities, building institutional partnerships for long term outreach engagement, negotiating with publishers and copyright holders to bring more content relicensed under Creative Commons licenses, and taking part in policy level discourses around open access and enforcing free software for governance.

What open tools and data help you get things done?

For my day job, I solely rely on Wikimedia Stats to collate data related to Wikimedia projects. I use some Python programming, jQery.ime, and JavaScript for other data-related work. But, I am a people's man and my interaction is mostly with humans rather than tools.

What do you wish were more open?

GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives and museums) and many other cultural institutions have historically been the keepers of cultural knowledge. But I see possessiveness in not opening up their archival for public consumption. I wish more policy level negotiations and open collaborations were happening to open up cultural data.

What are the biggest challenges to openness that you encounter, either at work or in your life?

Community and its growth. Working in a developing nation with historical, cultural, economic, and political hindrances pulls volunteerism down. It's is a huge challenge for me. Tapping into many existing networks and communities, and leveraging ongoing activities for the betterment for the free and open source movement, is something I am struggling for.

Why choose the open source way?

I would like to quote a good friend and activist Michelle Thorne who says, "Human civilization has everything free and open from the beginning, but slowly the problems of restriction start beginning." Furthermore filmmaker Nina Paley says, "Knowledge is not created by us, rather shared by us."

If we are here to share knowledge, why to restrict its free flow?

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/opensource-feburary-18-2015-jen-wike-huger-cultural-knowledge-needs-to-be-more-open

Cultural institution AKA GLAM for more OER

praskrishna — 2016-06-09T12:51:46Z

The OER conference was held in Edinburgh, Scotland on April 19 and 20, 2016. Subhashish Panigrahi gave a talk at the event organised by the University of Edinburg.

The vision for the conference was to focus on the value proposition of embedding open culture in the context of institutional strategies for learning, teaching and research. The conference was chaired by Melissa Highton, Director of Learning, Teaching and Web Services at the University of Edinburgh, and Lorna Campbell, OER Liaison at the University of Edinburgh and EDINA Digital Education Manager. The OER 16 conference primarily focused on:

The strategic advantage of open and creating a culture of openness.
Converging and competing cultures of open knowledge, open source, open content, open practice, open data and open access.
Hacking, making and sharing.
The reputational challenges of openwashing.
Openness and public engagement.
Innovative approaches to opening up cultural heritage collections for education.

Subhashish Panigrahi - Cultural Institution aka GLAM for More OER (OER16, 19-20.04.2016) from The Centre for Internet and Society

Resources

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/cultural-institution-aka-glam-for-more-oer

Cultivating India's Cyber Defense Strategy

praskrishna — 2019-11-13T14:52:33Z

Arindrajit Basu, Pranav M. Bidare and Karan Saini organized a roundtable discussion on 'Cultivating India’s Cyber Defense Strategy' at the Indian Islamic Cultural Centre in New Delhi, on November 5, 2019. The event saw a total of 27 participants including five speakers.

Agenda for the event can be accessed here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/cultivating-indias-cyber-defense-strategy

ctv3

praskrishna — 2012-10-15T09:39:03Z

ctv3

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ctv2

praskrishna — 2012-10-15T09:25:23Z

ctv2

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Crypto Night

praskrishna — 2013-08-06T06:04:05Z

Challenging government snooping at an all-night cryptography party.

This article by Rahul M was published in the Caravan on August 1, 2013. Pranesh Prakash and Bernadette Langle are quoted.

Satyakam Goswami sat in a conference hall in the Institute of Informatics & Communication in Delhi University's South Campus, furiously typing code into his laptop. He typed the string “/var/log/tor#”, into a Linux terminal, then turned to me and said, “I am one step away, man.” It was around midnight on a muggy July Saturday, and Goswami had been here for six hours. He resumed typing—and cursing under his breath in Telugu as he realised that the online instructions he was following weren’t helping.

Around him, the room bustled with the activity of around 25 other people, all participants at a Cryptoparty, a cryptography event at which programmers and non-programmers meet to share information and expertise on tools that can help thwart government spying.

Goswami was one of the organisers of the event, which was led by Bernadette Längle, a German ‘hacktivist’ who is a member of the Chaos Computer Club (CCC), Europe’s largest association of hackers. Längle was one of the organisers of the CCC’s Chaos Communication Congress in 2012, an international hackers’ meet held in Hamburg that year. While processing participant applications for the Congress, she came across a group that wanted to organise what they called a “Cryptoparty” at the meet. “I thought Cryptoparty would be a bunch of guys coming together, learning crypto and having a party,” she told me. Only at the event did she realise that Cryptoparties are rather more political affairs, at which participants experiment with ways of combating governmental intrusions into privacy and freedom.

After she graduated, Längle decided she wanted to travel. “I hadn’t been to America or Asia, and I don’t think I want to enter America,” she said. “I thought India might be a good point to start.” While she was exploring her options, she met Goswami online. “I first met Bernadette on an IRC channel, ‘hasgeek’, where she expressed her interest to come to India,” Goswami said. “I suggested that she write a proposal to CIS [the Centre for Internet and Society, in Bangalore].” Längle applied, and was accepted to work with the organisation for six months.

When Längle was teaching a one-week course on email cryptography at a CIS event, a participant suggested to her that she organise a Cryptoparty in the city. “I thought I was travelling anyway, and I can make a Cryptoparty everywhere I go,” Längle said. This led to the Bangalore Cryptoparty on 30 June, followed by the Delhi edition on 6 July. Längle then held a Cryptoparty in Dharamsala in the second week of July, and plans to hold another in Mumbai in October. At each of these, she gave tutorials on specific aspects of cryptography, such as the Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) encryption and decryption program, which Edward Snowden used to communicate with The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald during their now-famous collaboration. Participants would then experiment with these tools, sending emails and messages to each other using secure channels. The Delhi edition, which saw around 70 participants, continued late into the night, with the last exhausted stragglers shutting off their gadgets and heading home at 4 am.

I met Längle again the day after the Delhi event; with her was Pranesh Prakash, policy director at CIS, who is a commentator on issues related to surveillance and privacy. Both agreed that the Indian government’s Central Monitoring System programme, as well as Edward Snowden’s recent leaks, had resulted in a greater interest in cryptography in the country in recent months. “Without the PRISM stuff, there wouldn’t have been so many people attending,” Längle said. “People are concerned about that.” Prakash believes that the NSA leaks have served as a loud wake-up call about a longstanding state of affairs. “It’s this I-told-you-so moment for lots of people right now,” he said. “This isn’t the first time there have been revelations about the NSA spying beyond their authority. These revelations have been happening at least since 2006.”

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/caravan-magazine-august-1-2013-rahul-m-crypto-night

Crypto Currency

praskrishna — 2021-07-01T09:58:02Z

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Crypto Currency

praskrishna — 2021-07-01T09:58:55Z

Crypto Currency

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Crypto Currency

praskrishna — 2021-07-01T09:57:37Z

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Cry, you nasty trolls

praskrishna — 2015-05-09T15:05:23Z

Micro-blogging site Twitter has introduced a tool that identifies abusive tweets and hides them from their targets. Will it stem the tide of viciousness online, asks Prasun Chaudhuri.

The article by Prasun Chaudhuri was published in the Telegraph on April 26, 2015. Rohini was quoted.

When India's star batsman Virat Kohli failed to perform at the India vs Australia semi-final match at the World Cup, a section of Indian fans started venting their fury on his girlfriend Anushka Sharma on Twitter. The actress, who had flown to Sydney to watch the match, was blamed for India's loss and her Twitter account was flooded with abusive posts. One Atul Khatri tweeted: Hey Anushka, can you please distract the Aussie fielders on the boundary by showing them your lip job? Plleeeaasee. One anonymous tweet requested the "public to boycott Anushka Sharma's films (sic)" while another by Bollywood producer Kamal R. Khan incited his followers to "stone Anushka's house".

The star couple are not alone. Media persons, scholars and celebrities - especially if they are women - often face such vicious attacks on Twitter. Ask Chinmayi Sripada, the Chennai-based singer, or Sagarika Ghose, a prime time TV anchor, or scholar and columnist Ramachandra Guha who have endured worse forms of assaults - ranging from threats of gang rape, torture and murder. Many Twitter users across the world have gone silent and even deactivated their Twitter accounts after being harassed on the platform.

With more and more people around the world facing such vitriolic attacks, Twitter - the San Francisco-based online social networking service - recently decided to protect its users from abusive tweets. It switched on an anti-abuse tool that automatically identifies abusive tweets and hides them from their intended target. According to Twitter, the tool will search for patterns of misuse and identify repeat offenders so as to enable the social media platform to impose account suspension on them. "Users must feel safe on Twitter in order to fully express themselves and we need to ensure that voices are not silenced because people are afraid to speak up," wrote Shreyas Doshi, director of product management at Twitter, in a blog post.

Dick Costolo, Twitter's CEO, admitted two months ago at an internal forum that his company "sucked" at dealing with bullies and abusers. He said he would "start kicking these [abusive] people off... and making sure that when they issue their ridiculous attacks, nobody hears them."

Hemanshu Nigam, former chief security officer of social media platform MySpace and software giant Microsoft in the US, hails Twitter's new move. "The new tools are meant to honour human dignity and safety. Now that online and offline persona of many social media users have converged, it's become essential for tech companies to take steps to protect people from assaults in the cyber world." Nigam, a founder of SSP Blue, a leading online security firm, had sifted through thousands of offensive comments and abusive images during his earlier avatar in social media companies. "People with such evil intentions are minuscule but their twisted expressions can have a profound impact not only on the victims but thousands of impressionable minds of young users," he says.

Abuse on social media platforms can be extremely brutal and traumatising. According to Debarati Halder, a lawyer and cyber victim counsellor based in Tirunelveli, Tamil Nadu, a large proportion of these attacks - especially those where explicit pictures and videos of sexual acts are sent - are perpetrated on women by their former boyfriends or husbands to seek revenge on their ex-partners.

She feels that social media giants have failed to protect their users and that these so-called "new tools" and automated systems fail to screen most cases of abuse. "They (social media platforms) also don't react to reports of abusive behaviour unless they are lodged by celebrities or other influential people," she adds.

While announcing the new policy, Twitter's general counsel Vijaya Gadde wrote in The Washington Post, "At times, this (tweet) takes the form of hateful speech directed at women or minority groups; at others, it takes the form of threats aimed to intimidate those who take a stand on issues. These users often hide behind the veil of anonymity on Twitter and create multiple accounts expressly for the purpose of intimidating and silencing people." She also wrote how technicians at Twitter are going to erect a "better framework to protect vulnerable users, such as banning the posting of non-consensual intimate images."

Rohini Lakshane, programme officer at the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society, says that Twitter had simplified and enhanced its system of reporting abuse in December last year. "Measures such as muting and blocking users and manual review of reports were already in place. The changes included mechanisms for Twitter's review teams to expedite responses from dire forms of abuse," she says.

Evidently, these measures have not been too effective. Says Lakshane, "Women are still disproportionately targeted on Twitter and several users simply choose to leave rather than face the strain of dealing with abuse, rape and death threats, and insults."

Singer Sripada, however, is one of those few Twitter users who stood up against her abusers. When she tweeted in support of Tamil fishermen who were attacked by the Sri Lankan Navy, she was flooded with abusive tweets that were tantamount to sexual harassment. She says, "I took on the abusers - one of them a professor at a top fashion institute. I filed a case under Section 66A of the IT Act (which is now defunct) and they were jailed for two weeks. That was when I saw the worst face of online abuse."

Advocate Halder rues the recent scrapping of Section 66A of the IT Act to protect freedom of speech. "The act could have have been modified to protect victims of abuse." She believes the new Twitter policy to check abuse may not be able to check the spread of the meta data of a post as it is replicated across thousands of sites.

"If the visuals or texts depict explicit sex, these spread like wildfire in voyeuristic websites, mirror sites and caches before any law enforcer anywhere in the world can react," says Siddhartha Chakraborty, a cyber expert based in Calcutta. A single tweet, a Facebook comment or a YouTube video "gone viral" often causes significant damage to an individual or a company before they can even report the abuse, says Rajiv Pratap, a data analyst based in Calcutta and California.

The problem also lies with over 20 million robot users - or automated accounts, not actively operated by humans but remotely controlled by groups of anonymous people - who are difficult to track. "These bots generate a lot of spam and even abusive comments," says Harsh Ajmera, a social media expert based in New Delhi. "Twitter is not striking at all the nasty content, but putting various checks like limiting the reach, asking you to get rid of those tweets which can protect genuine users."

On the other hand, stresses Lakshane, using parameters such as the number of flags (reports of abuse) a tweet receives can have implications for free speech - an unpopular but non-abusive view could also be targeted. Moreover, it's essential for reviewers to understand cultural and linguistic connotations to be able to effectively address abuse.

Still, Nigam is hopeful. He says, "Social media companies are going through a learning curve. As they evolve they will learn how to rein in abusers."

Twitter's 288 million users worldwide are waiting for that to happen.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/the-telegraph-april-26-2015-prasun-chaudhuri-cry-you-nasty-trolls

crunching data

praskrishna — 2013-12-13T03:54:44Z

Crunching Data

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crunching data

praskrishna — 2013-12-13T03:52:46Z

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Crunchbase

praskrishna — 2013-08-08T05:40:21Z

Crunchbase

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Crowdsourced innovation for government projects and services is easier said than done

praskrishna — 2017-02-07T15:36:38Z

Late January. The buzz was palpable at the MLR Convention Centre in South Bengaluru. Developers were streaming into 50p, a conference organised by HasGeek, which has curated technology forums since 2011. But this wasn't just one of the six HasGeek communions that the programmers attend annually. 50p put the spotlight on digital payments, which meant the gathering would be more diverse than anything before.

The article by Kunal Talgeri was published in the Times of India on February 3, 2017. Sunil Abraham was quoted.

Of the 250-plus attendees in two days, only 40% were developers. There were around 10 lawyers, an activist here, a social-impact investor there, product managers, and a 20-strong team from online payment systems company PayPal. There were managers from traditional banks too. "We realised early on that one thing the developer community really needs to know is how various payment-systems work, like who makes what percentage (in the value chain)?," said Zainab Bawa, cofounder of HasGeek. "It is a big mystery to them."

Kiran Jonnalagadda, co-founder of HasGeek and Bawa's husband, concurred: "A payment conference cannot primarily be centred on technology. Regulations make a bulk of the difference." So the interdisciplinary forum traversed areas as diverse as customer data and privacy, payment-systems unique to India, regulations, and the Watal Committee report apart from technology.

HasGeek got folks from the payments industry to converse with developers. At the outset, Bawa spelt out to the audience something about technology's role in society. "While we (coders) are here to bridge gaps, we also need to understand that technology is not necessarily the solution. Developers must have their ears to the ground." She had touched upon the divide between the coder community and the government.

Globally, governments are only just beginning to be exposed to the geeks. "The broader theme of digitisation and opening up of APIs (application programming interface) is happening across the world," said Sanjay Swamy, managing partner at Prime Venture Partners, and an Aadhaar volunteer with the Unique Identity Authority of India (UIDAI) until early 2011. APIs empower developers to build applications that access the features or data of an operating system or service. This requires developers to come together with, in this case, the government.

The digital dream has never showed more promise in India—the chance for a few developers to build a platform that can digitise government services for millions of users. "The government wants to use hackathons for digital disruption—leverage hackers to build solutions for them," says Subhendu Panigrahi, co-founder of Venturesity that helps companies find developers.

This is easier said than done. But how did India even get to this point?

CODE NAME: GENESIS
On 10 June 2016, the Indian Software Product Industry Round Table (iSPIRT) think-tank released a paper that took note of the country moving from "data poor to data rich."

This was a few weeks after the UIDAI platform Aadhaar crossed 1 billion enrolments. "The Aadhaar system can authenticate 100 million transactions per day in real time," iSPIRT stated. The paper also pointed to three national platforms - essentially services that would in time digitise government services on a national scale.

These were the Goods and Services Tax (GST) Network, the Bharat Bill Payment System which would cover utility services (electricity, water, gas, and so on), and the electronic toll collection system.

All three platforms come under the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), an umbrella organisation for retail payment systems in India. iSPIRT had helped NPCI organise a hackathon in Mumbai in February 2016 to build prototypes for harnessing the Unified Payment Interface (UPI) platform's application programming interface to digitise bank transfers in real time. Similarly, steps were being taken to open up APIs to large companies for the other NPCI platforms.

On its part, iSPIRT was drawing the attention of a breed of software developers to the national-scale opportunities ahead. It unequivocally stated: "Data flows benefit public services and governments." But even as India moves to being data rich, the outreach to developers - estimated to be more than 5 million in India - could be futile for two reasons.

First, government departments and traditional systems of, say, nationalised banks have a technology procurement culture that is at odds with how developers build digital solutions. While government is the largest technology procurer, procurement contracts typically have clauses that encourage lowest (cost) bidders, which rarely spawns innovation.

"Government needs to adopt and evangelise pro-challenger tools and policies that reduce barriers to experimentation, level-playing field and encourage innovating around national issues," wrote Swati T Satpathy for iSPIRT in a November 2015 paper titled 'Igniting Hundreds of Experiments'.

Second, independent developers still have to come out in larger numbers for the best solutions to shine. Sachin Gupta, CEO of HackerEarth, another developer platform, agrees: "Governments may still go ahead and give projects to a TCS and Wipro, but they want to crowdsource the innovation, prototype and the whole concept. They want to build an active relationship with the tech community."

These can be government bodies at the state level, too, like the Department of Urban Land Transport in Karnataka, for whom Venturesity helped with a 'transit hack' to solve traffic in Bangalore with submissions like how to enable carpooling or track public transport.

"The government is really interested in the final product or an app they can use," Panigrahi said. For this, governments are willing to distribute their APIs to eventually own the app. "Developers participate in such hackathons to make it part of their portfolios or resumes, or because they love building products, or for the prize-money."

This is crowd sourced innovation. Yet, culturally, it is hard for developers and governments' interests to be aligned.

INSIDE THE DICHOTOMY
The API-driven approach is based on a philosophy in the United States that dates back to the 1960s. It a culture of giving powerful building blocks, as opposed to just building an actual solution, said Jonnalagadda. A 'solution' evolves into a platform if it can serve as 'building blocks' for the next set of developers to build on.

"A good product is also one on top of which something more can be built. That has been the principle on which the developer community has thrived," he said. This approach works well in technology. "It means you are slow, but also that you are a lot more mature and innovative."

The government has got this aspect right, by opening up secure APIs to nationalscale projects and systems. But while they have provided such building blocks, they have already decided the path to meet goals like financial inclusion. Mobile apps like BHIM (Bharat Interface for Money) are becoming the default mode of reaching the masses. Many observers agree with the smartphone as a medium for India, but developers feel web browsers are more secure than apps.

Jonnalagadda cites a 50p session, 'Everyone can see your credit card details. Seriously,' where the speaker Arnav Gupta described the flow of the web as independent websites that can't actually communicate with each other. As against this, every function of a mobile app is a subset of the parent app. "So whatever password you type for one 'function' can be visible to the parent, which never happens on the web," Jonnalagadda said. "If security is defined by the fact that it is tested against being broken, a mobile app is trusted on the basis of goodwill. For developers, this is a shitty way to do technology. It bothers the heck out of him when a security model assumes goodwill because government wants an app."

Also, solutions need a decentralised approach from governing bodies like local municipalities. Independent budgets and decision-making can lead to stronger links between government and local service providers. There are exceptions to this, like Singapore, a city nation. But in larger developed countries like the United States, local government bodies are stronger than in India. "Here, we are getting even more centralised over time," Jonnalagadda said. It makes the government look like a monolith in the eyes of developers. How can the two be compatible? "We haven't found a solution yet."

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/the-times-of-india-february-3-2017-kunal-talegri-crowdsourced-innovation-for-government-projects-and-services-is-easier-said-than-done

Criticism mounts over India censorship

praskrishna — 2012-08-27T06:38:51Z

India’s government is facing fierce criticism from privacy groups, political opponents and irate internet users accusing it of an excessive and poorly targeted censorship drive as it seeks to contain social alarm triggered by communal unrest.

This article written by James Crabtree in Mumbai and Tim Bradshaw in San Francisco was published in Financial Times on August 24, 2012. Pranesh Prakash is quoted.

Following panicked scenes among groups from the nation’s troubled north-east and fearing an escalation of urban violence between Muslim and Hindu groups, the administration this week instructed internet companies, including Facebook and Google, to block more than 300 web pages and more than a dozen Twitter accounts it claimed were inflaming communal tensions.

But by Friday the order was being assailed as an example of administrative incompetence, as internet analysts revealed that many of the pages contained seemingly harmless material from foreign media organisations, political columnists and critics of India’s government.

Pranesh Prakash, a legal expert at the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society, said: “I am not questioning their original motives, but I do think this is excessive and incompetent censorship.”

Political opponents also accused the government of over-reach, including Narendra Modi, the controversial chief minister of the state Gujarat and a member of the Hindu nationalist BJP party, who on Friday used a Twitter post to call the moves a “crackdown on freedom of speech”.

The government denies it is being heavy handed. “We are only taking strict action against those accounts or people which are causing damage or spreading rumours,” said Kuldeep Dhatwalia, an Indian home ministry spokesman. “We are not taking action against other accounts, be it on Facebook, Twitter or even SMSes.”

Twitter found itself at the centre of the growing controversy, as government spokespeople accused the US-based social networking site of failing to respond to requests to block users, some of which involved accounts appearing to impersonate Manmohan Singh, the prime minister.

Twitter responded by suspending a number of impersonator accounts and is now in discussions with the prime minister’s office in an attempt to defuse the row, according to people familiar with the matter. A spokesperson for Twitter declined to comment.

Angry users also used the site to attack the restrictions using the hashtags #GOIblocks and #Emergency2012, the latter a highly charged reference to prime minister Indira Gandhi’s two-year period of rule by decree in the late 1970s.

India has a long history of censorship measures designed to prevent communal violence, ranging from restrictions introduced under the British Raj in the early 20th century to more recent edicts banning Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses and restricting derogatory portrayals of religious figures in Bollywood movies.

“Blocking content to help mitigate a volatile situation involving civilian security could be justified,” says Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “But when the government expresses equal concern about fake Twitter handles or criticism of political leaders, it begins to look like censorship.”

The online restrictions followed related measures restricting to five the number of text messages that could be sent from most Indian mobile phones, although this was lifted to 20 on Thursday.

They also came during a week of deepening political crisis in the world’s largest democracy, as opposition leaders repeatedly halted parliamentary proceedings and called for Mr Singh’s resignation in the aftermath of a critical report from India’s government auditor.

“These threats to social harmony are real, but like almost everything the Indian state is doing at present, the restrictions incompetently deal with a few symptoms rather than addressing causes,” says Pratap Bhanu Mehta of the Centre for Policy Research, a think tank in New Delhi. “They are simply exacerbating a crisis of trust, not solving it.”

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/www-ft-com-aug-24-2012-james-crabtree-tim-bradshaw-criticism-mounts-over-india-censorship