Centre for Internet and Society

Report of Aaron Swartz Memorial Hacknight

zainab — 2013-03-02T13:32:25Z

On 19th and 20th January, HasGeek organized a hacknight to commemorate the life and works of Aaron Swartz. Zainab Bawa from HasGeek shares with us the developments.

Why host an Aaron Swartz memorial hacknight? In the aftermath of Aaron’s death, some people began expressing doubts, uncertanties and misinformed opinions about his activist causes. They questioned whether Aaron committed a ’crime’ by downloading articles from JSTOR and whether the means he used for liberating data were wrong in the first place. It was important to dispel these doubts and provide people with a better understanding about issues such as IT laws, copyright rules and access to information, and how these are implemented in different parts of the world.

Aaron had initiated several coding projects during his lifetime. Anand Chitipothu, who collaborated with Aaron at the Internet Archive and maintains his web.py framework, suggested that the hacknight could also be an opportunity where people get familiar with Aaron’s coding projects and work on some of them.

The hacknight: 87 people registered for the hacknight. Approximately 40 people turned up. Some participants proposed projects to liberate different kinds of public data such as electoral data, weather data, information about train timetables and crawling data from government and NIC websites. Developers worked on these projects to make the data searchable and usable.

Discussions during the hacknight: The hacknight started at 3 PM with a discussion about the life of Aaron Swartz and the political and legal implications of his coding projects and activism.

This discussion was led by Anand and Kiran Jonnalagadda of HasGeek.

Kiran gave an elaborate background about Aaron’s life starting with how he established RSS 1.0 as a standard and the collaboration between Aaron and Lawrence Lessig on using the RDF format for Creative Commons licensing, leading to Aaron’s work with Reddit and its acquisition by Condé Nast. Shortly after Reddit’s acquisition, Aaron left Reddit and began a career in activism. In this period, he started freeing data funded by public money which constitutionally belonged in the public domain. He published data from the catalogue of the Library of Congress and the US case law archives on the Internet Archive. Later, Aaron downloaded articles from JSTOR to release academic papers whose research was funded with public money. Before he could sift through the downloads, Aaron was caught by the police. He returned the hard disk containing the downloads. JSTOR and MIT did not pursue cases against him, but the United States government charged Aaron for breaking into the MIT campus and faking identity by changing the MAC address of his computer.

At the end of Kiran’s presentation, participants asked several questions about activism, what constitutes offensive speech, framework of IT laws in India, and the process of law-making.

At 5 PM, Sunil Abraham of the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) joined the hacknight. He made a presentation about copyright laws, the Indian IT Act and Aaron’s work.

Sunil explained how Aaron believed in the importance of access to information by releasing data from copyright and thereby enabling freedom of expression. According to Sunil, Aaron Swartz is a very troublesome hero because his data liberation projects do not fall into one neat category. Moreover, the means he used for his activism are questioned by different activist groups. This makes it difficult to pinpoint exactly what one must credit Aaron for and what category of activism his work falls under.

After Sunil’s presentation, there was a half hour discussion about the scope of copyright laws in India, copyright exemptions and what constitutes copyright infringement. Participants agreed that the trouble lies with the broad interpretations of copyright and IT laws. This enables the state and private parties to target and harass a person, often on frivolous grounds.

Discussion about hacknight projects: At 6 PM, participants with project ideas and those who wanted to join projects gathered in the garden. Over tea and snacks, groups / pairs were formed. Participants reported two difficulties here:

There weren’t enough projects to choose from i.e., fewer problems to solve
Not everyone who proposed projects could break the problem down into tasks for individual team members to work on.

This affected participants’ motivation to stay through the night.

Web.py workshop: After the tea break, Anand conducted a workshop on web.py.

Some participants came to the hacknight mainly to attend this workshop. The code used in this workshop is available on github.com/anandology/webpy-workshop.

Anand also worked on the database module of web.py to decouple it and make it into a separate python module. This project requires more work before it is completed. The code is available at: http://github.com/anandology/sqlpy

Projects at the hacknight: A complete list of projects that participants worked on during the hacknight are available on the hacknight website. We talked with some of the teams and individual participants to understand their projects, the process they followed for solving the problems, and outcomes at the end of the hacknight.

Liberating electoral data: Arun Raghavan, an open source enthusiast, and four other participants (Arun K, Praveen, Mikul and Sumant) worked on scraping electorial data from http://ceokarnataka.kar.nic.in/. They planned to build a frontend which will make it easy for users to search their names and polling booth information. Currently, the electoral roll is published as a PDF document for each polling station along with a search form (which is unreliable and fails often) for individuals to find their names on the roll and the location of their polling station.

It was difficult to parse the data because the PDFs were not designed for machine readability. Hence, the team had to spend time understanding how to extract the text. The other problem was that the person’s name was written above the father’s name, but if the person’s name was very long, it overlapped the father’s name. This made it difficult to determine where the person’s name ended and where the father’s name began. The team managed to come up with a heuristic to distinguish between the person’s name and father’s name based on slight differences in the way the text was printed on each sheet.

Arun Raghavan and other team members used Python to parse data from the PDFs. They also tried extracting data by using the search form and saving results whenever it returned them (since it failed often). The search form required a JavaScript submit, so Praveen Kumar and Arun K learned to use casper.js to emulate a browser and extract data. Praveen also used casper.js to liberate his friend Aram Bhusal’s blog from Sulekha.com. Aram made a presentation about this at the January edition of the Bangalore JS meet.

At the end of the hacknight, the group almost managed to get a dump of an entire electoral roll. The project repositories:

Other data liberation projects:

Indexing Government websites by category of information: Elvis D’souza worked on crawling government websites and indexing them by category, for e.g., education, import-export trade, science and technology, etc. According to him, government websites contain lots of information including documents and spreadsheets. At the hacknight, Elvis completed the indexing process and ran some statistics about information contained in these websites. He eventually wants to build a portal where people can access this index and the documents.
Railway timetable data: Anand scraped data from the IRCTC website. Supreeth Srinivasmurthy worked with this data to plot a map. Bibhas Debnath also worked on the timetable data to build an API. A demo of this API is yet to be released.
Parsing weather data: Asok Padda converted weather data from HTML format to Excel sheets. Hourly weather data for all weather stations in India during 2012 is parsed and uploaded to Internet Archive: http://archive.org/details/www.imdaws.com-2012
Other projects: Kashyap Kondamundi started building an app which will help people to calculate the current values of their mutual funds. He built 70% of this app at the hacknight.

HasGeek has requested participants to post updates about their projects and share links to their code.

Overall achievements from the hacknight: Participants reported the following outcomes from the hacknight:

Learning about new libraries and their applications
Awareness about IT laws and copyright frameworks in India
Opportunity to meet and network with other coders who have an interest in data-related projects or working on new project ideas.

Participants appreciated Anand’s presence as a mentor during the hacknight. He interacted with the teams and helped them when they were stuck with their projects, either with his expertise in Python or by suggesting alternative ways of approaching the problem.

HasGeek thanks CIS for sponsoring the venue and providing logistical support during the hacknight.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/hasgeek-blog-zainab-bawa-feb-6-2013-report-of-aaron-swartz-memorial-hacknight

World Bank funded Slum Sanitation Programme

zainab — 2009-02-08T10:20:42Z

This article evaluates the first phase of toilet construction in Mumbai's slums under the World Bank funded Slum Sanitation Programme (SSP).

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/transparency-and-politics/uploads/post-1/World%20bank%20funded%20SSP.pdf

Politics of SHIT

zainab — 2009-02-08T10:17:59Z

This article explains the impact of NGO intervention and reforms on the networks and circuits that poor groups developed in Mumbai for accessing basic infrastructure and secure tenure.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/transparency-and-politics/uploads/post-1/politics-of-SHIT.pdf

Of the State and the Governments - The Abstract, the Concrete and the Responsive

zainab — 2011-08-03T09:56:52Z

This post examines the concepts of state and government to lay the ground for understanding responsiveness enforced through transparency discourses and the deployment of ICTs, the Internet and e-governance programmes. It also lays the context for understanding why and how ICTs. Internet and e-governance have been deployed in India for improving government-citizen interfaces, eliminating middlemen, delivering services electronically and for introducing a range of similar reforms to institute transparency and a responsive state.

In the introductory post, I had suggested that we needed to examine the notion of the ‘responsive state’, particularly in the context of discourses around transparency and the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and the Internet to institute transparency and thereby create a responsive state. I argued that interrogating the notion of the ‘responsive state’ is necessary to understand how responsiveness and even statehood actually translate on the ground for different citizen groups when ICTs and the Internet are deployed to provide information to citizens, to deliver services electronically, to eliminate middlemen, to re-engineer processes in government departments and state institutions, and to make the state more visible and (therefore, supposedly) more accessible and responsive to its people.

In this post, I want to open up the concepts of the state and the government in a more fundamental way to begin our explorations regarding ‘responsiveness’ and the ‘responsive state’. Attending to the idea and the practice of the state and the government in everyday life will open up the meanings that ‘responsiveness’ and transparency, ICTs and the Internet are attributed within different contexts and in the range of relationships that exist between the state and its citizens, governments and citizens, and across state and government institutions. It is necessary to understand how relationships between citizens and governments and across the range of government and state institutions get shaped by the contexts within which governance is carried out, and the “fields”[i] within which we locate and study governments, governance, transparency and technology. This will enable us to nuance the notion and the translation of responsiveness in its online, offline, transparent, secretive, overt and/or surreptitious avatars.

I will begin this post by explaining the similarities and differences between the concepts (and ground realities) of state and the government as well as the relationships that exist between these entities. This conceptual clarification will set the context for understanding the genesis and application of responsiveness and transparency and the deployment of ICTs and the Internet to usher responsiveness and transparency in India in subsequent blog posts.

The State – Abstract-Concrete, Composite-Fragmented, Homogeneous-Heterogeneous: The state is an abstract idea which has its concrete basis in a physical territory. The state is also reified through an organizational structure that is referred to as the bureaucracy. We, as citizens, give legitimacy and authority to the idea of the state and statehood by conferring powers on certain representatives, institutions and systems to make decisions on our behalf and to exercise power for maintenance of law and order. The notion of the state (more concretely the institutions representing and exercising powers on behalf of the state) also derives legitimacy and authority from the Constitution and the laws of the land. The image of the state, as has been passed down to us by particular narratives of history and certain strands of political philosophy as well as through the print and electronic media is that the state is a composite, compact structure which has absolute - and in certain contexts unlimited powers. The “state idea” (Abrams, 1988) remains a powerful organizing concept in the lives of citizens as well as the employees and representatives of the state. This is because the concept of the state provides a sense of structure and coherence in our lives which in turn creates a sense of belongingness to a territory (physical space) and/or an institution (such as public services, public sector institutions, municipality, government departments, etc). This sense of structure, coherence and order is further reinforced by the following beliefs:

1. That the state, organized and reified through its bureaucratic machinery, functions in a rational, orderly manner. This is the classic idea of the state promoted by Max Weber;

2. That the state is the source as well as the guardian of laws. These laws will protect and preserve the integrity of the territory and in turn, the integrity (and compositeness) of the state (where the notion of the state and its notional boundaries are based on an actual, physical territory);

3. That laws are supreme and everyone is equal before the law;

4. That laws will enforce order and provide relief, redressal, entitlements and access to welfare to one and all.

The state is thus imagined as a benign authority, a benefactor, which must protect its people, provide them with welfare and at the same time, safeguard order and integrity of the territory (and therefore, order and integrity of the state structure/organization). The state also remains the last resort that people have for articulating their claims and getting them fulfilled. There is therefore, a tenuous relationship with the state where as much as certain ideological groups/belief systems/world views and various citizen groups desire the state’s role and intervention in the individual’s life to be minimized, they still continue to view the state i.e., the law courts and the common judicial system[ii], to be the ultimate source of law and the final arbiter of disputes. To cite an example, even though the private property rights framework gives precedence to the individual over the state, advocates of private property invariably assume or necessitate the existence of an overarching/central legal system to which individuals can take their disputes and grievances. This kind of advocacy automatically creates a paradox for individual freedom because a centralized legal system functions on the basis of uniform laws that may not consider the particularities and the uniqueness of each dispute over private property. Moreover, such a centralized legal system has the capacity to impinge on the individuals’ and groups’ freedoms especially when individuals’ and groups’ practices of ownership and usufruct (which can be social, historical, cultural and negotiated over time) do not comply with corresponding legalistic notions and practices.

The concept of the state is also associated with the notion of power where the state holds and wields power. The relationship between the state and its citizens is defined by this power equation. The notion of democracy is hinged on the idea that since people confer powers upon the state and they elect representative governments by voting at elections, citizens should also be able to contain the powers of the state and prevent the state from becoming an absolute, authoritarian entity. Deliberations, debate and discussion over the state’s policies and decisions (and a free press) are viewed as tools through which the state’s actions can be questioned, criticized and when necessary, contained. It is for the purposes of deliberations, debate and discussion that publishing of information about state policies as well as the processes through which decisions are made is deemed as quintessential in certain frameworks (and corresponding policies) of the ‘responsive state’.

The notion of the state remains a powerful idea in people’s imaginations and actions. The belief in the existence of a state system/organization enables people to make claims on what they see as state institutions or employees of the state. At the same time, as researchers and theorists excavating the “everyday state” argue, what also matters is how people ‘encounter’ the state when they make claims and/or seek resources, who they ‘mark’ as the state in these encounters, and what their ‘experience’ of the state is – a monolith, a bureaucratic mess, a sloth, a responsive entity and/or apathetic (Corbridge, Srivastava, et al, 2005; Fuller and Benei, 2000; Elyachar, 2005; Tarlo, 2003). The nature of the encounters with ‘the state’ and consequently the perceptions of power and authority vary depending on the institutions/personnel that different people approach. This implies that the institutions within the state system are different from each other and they function in diverse ways and contexts. These institutions are also not equally and cordially aligned with the idea of the state and the state system. Moreover, the resources that they variously control have different kinds of significance and meanings for both, the officials in charge of the respective institutions as well as the people vying for those resources. In short, not all institutions within the state system are equally statist in terms of the way in which they control resources, wield power, maintain territorial integrity and statist quo and interact with different citizen groups. To explain this in more concrete terms, let us take the instance of the forest authorities in India. Forest departments tend to be much more authoritarian and controlling of forest lands and forest resources and consequently the people within their jurisdictions and territory. This authority of the forest department stems from historical factors and it has been further reinforced through the laws passed in the post-independence period regarding protection of wildlife and various resources and produces of forests. Moreover, as mandated in the Constitution of India, forests symbolize an essential aspect of the territorial integrity of the state. Hence, the powers that have been conferred, both constitutionally and by central governments and cabinet ministries on forest departments and officials over time, is more than the powers that have been granted to other state institutions and departments in the context of control over the state’s natural resources. Therefore, the manner in which forest departments function in relation with citizens as well as in relation with other state institutions and government departments produces and reinforces certain perceptions of the state i.e., authoritarian, autocratic, corrupt, wielding excessive power, curbing group liberties, punitive, among others. In yet some other aspects of governance and everyday life, we find that police forces have unlimited powers and depending on socio-economic status and networks, different citizen groups have different perceptions of and relationships with the police and therefore, of the state which the police forces represent. Groups living in slums and squatter settlements tend to fear and dread police forces most because these groups tend to be marked as criminal owing to their (supposedly) ‘illegal’ occupancy of state/public/private land which in turn makes them the first targets of law and order and markers of criminality. Hence, community based organizations (CBOs) train slum dwellers and squatters, foremost, on how to interact with the police, how to conduct themselves in police stations, and provide them with information regarding the laws and procedures which immediately affect poor people’s lives and their relationship with the police and law and order[iii]. On the other hand, vehicle owning populations tend to the loathe the police (mainly traffic police and beat station cops) for demanding unnecessary bribes and engaging in what are seen to be as extortionist practices.

At this point, it will be instructive and insightful to ask the questions who/what is the state and where is it located (both physically and symbolically). There are myriad answers to this question, as one strand of sociologists, anthropologists and political scientists variously studying the “everyday state” in India and across the world have demonstrated and argued. In the past, scholars such as Philipp Abrams (1988) have questioned whether the state really exists in reality or is it simply an idea, a powerful construct that has been passed down to us by history and theory? Abrams has simultaneously asked questions about the methodologies for studying the state – do we go back to histories and theories to locate and understand the state or do we examine the practices of state more carefully. Each of these approaches carries with it its own problems of studying and explaining the state. Abrams fundamentally suggests that the state is associated with coherence, homogeneity and compositeness, all of which are imaginary attributes that do not exist on the ground. Then, is the concept of the state useful at all and if so, why?

For the purposes of this series on the ‘responsive state’ as well as the larger monograph which tries to trace the history of transparency, ICTs, Internet and politics in India, it is necessary for us to deal with the idea and the different practices of state in as much entirety and variety as may be possible. This is because discourses of transparency, e-governance policies and programmes and the use of ICTs to create/reform citizen-government interfaces are based on a particular idea of the state i.e., a notion of order as stemming from conformity/adherence to law, ‘the state’ as the final arbiter of disputes between peoples, ‘the state’ as the provider of welfare and therefore, ‘the state’ as a benefactor and a benevolent leviathan, and ‘the state’ as rational and orderly and internally coherent, cogent and composite. As I will explain in subsequent posts, ICTs, e-governance systems and the Internet are deployed precisely to reinforce these ideas of the Indian state to the people as well as to reorder, realign and re-engineer processes and personnel who are seen as stepping outside the lines of law and due process. Whether such technological interventions and the technology itself succeeds in enforcing this vision of order and absolute alignment is an issue that necessitates asking several nuanced questions:

How does the state – primarily decision-makers and policy-makers – imagine and understand technology and its application?
How are e-governance policies interpreted and implemented by government officials (and even private parties) on the ground?
How do officials internalize the visions ingrained in e-governance policies and deployments of ICTs and how does this impact the manner in which they implement directives from the state in this regard and subsequently interact with citizens?
Who gains and who loses when ICTs, e-governance and the Internet are deployed to deliver services to people electronically, to provide information and to create better government-citizen interfaces?
How are gains and losses assessed and why are they assessed as such? Who assesses the gains and losses and why?
Are gains and losses absolute and irreversible?
Do some deployments of ICTs, e-governance strategies and the Internet produce impacts that can only be seen and evaluated in the long run?
How does the state – in terms of power, authority, implementation of law and order and preservation of territorial integrity – manifest through the various deployments of ICTs and e-governance policies in different contexts?

These questions regarding the impact of ICTs, Internet and e-governance programmes on different citizen groups as well as the notions and practices of the state require us to turn our attention towards understanding the concepts of government, governance and administration and grounding our understandings of these concepts in the manner in which various government departments and institutions interact with citizens, on an everyday basis, in the process of governing and administering. Revisiting and opening up these concepts is further essential because governments and administrators are responsible for interpreting (and therefore, translating) and implementing the state’s policies and visions on the ground. This does not imply that the state is separate from government and administration. In fact, as we saw in the example of the forest departments and police forces, certain arms of the government and administration can be highly statist in the manner in which they exercise powers, control resources, make decisions and interact with citizens. We also saw above that not all government departments and state institutions are equally comfortable with and aligned with the state idea i.e., in terms of notions of law, order, authority and power. It therefore, becomes necessary to understand how different government departments and administrators understand, embody and even negotiate notions of law, order and power, what are the historical, political and social sources which shape the functioning and ideologies of different government departments, and how are notions of law, order, responsiveness and transparency configured when these different government departments implement various e-governance policies and transparency initiatives in an effort to become responsive.

Let us briefly examine the concept of government and in the process, tackle the important issue of state-society relationship.

Government – the State in Society and the Society in State: Governments are the concrete face of the state and the state idea. They are bodies/institutions/organizations which perform duties of the state and discharge the state’s obligations towards its people. Some of the primary obligations include:

delivering the state’s welfare resources to different citizen groups,
attending to and fulfilling and/or negotiating people’s varied claims and demands for entitlements,
resolving people’s complaints, disputes and grievances,
maintaining law and order and ensuring compliance with law,
providing infrastructure and services that are considered necessary for people’s well-being as well as for the physical territory’s (i.e., the state’s) development and progress.

Governments are expected to function in ways that aid in maintaining the integrity of the territory and therefore, the authority of the state. Governments must therefore, follow the policies formulated by the state and implement them in letter and spirit. However, implementation rarely happens in the exact letter and spirit because of a variety of factors including:

1. Inadequate release of funds which in turn is triggered by factors such as competition over power, territory and loyalty, competition between political parties, poor allocation to essential budgetary heads in the programme implementation, desire within government agencies to curb the autonomy of individual departments/personnel by providing fewer funds, etc.

2. Existing competition between administrative agencies, government employees and decision-makers which can be altered because of implementation. This, in turn, can prevent implementation altogether or, the implementing authorities may implement policies in a way that aids in preserving certain kinds of autonomy, powers and interests of the implementing agencies.

3. Multiple claims that arise in the course of implementation which in turn puts implementation on a sticky course and alters the letter(s) and spirit of the original policies as government agencies, administrators and the various implementing authorities negotiate (and even suppress) the claims made by different interest groups (which includes citizen groups, government agencies themselves, middlemen, competing political parties, among others).

Essentially then, government institutions and departments – the concrete faces of the state – are mired in multiple claims and interests not only with respect to implementation but also in the way in which they function in everyday life. These claims are advanced not only by citizen groups but also by the very employees of governments and by agencies and authorities related with various aspects of the governments’ functioning. Here, we need to address the issue of state-in-society and society-in-state which tends to be overlooked and even ignored in accounts and theories about the state. The state – wherever is experienced and however, it is sighted – is part of the gamut known as society. This means that the people working as government employees/state employees are simultaneously members of other networks and social groups. Consequently, they hold and embody various views and ideas that may be in consonance with as well as contradictory to notions of power, authority, law and order. These government employees also compete for the resources of the state – water, sanitation, housing sites, roads, electricity – as much as they are responsible for delivering the same resources to different citizen groups. In the process of delivery of welfare and service provision then, interests are shaped from time to time depending on the socio-economic and political positions of the administrators, bureaucrats and people’s representatives in charge as well as their association with various kinds of networks that enable them to maintain/enhance their personal/institutional positions and powers. Some of these interests and networks also shape the roles of government employees and administrators i.e., elected representatives, municipal field staff, engineers, etc., can also become middlemen in the process of delivering services and resources. How they function as middlemen depends on the resources in question as well as the political, social and administrative contexts in which the services are provided.

This aspect of state-in-society which is visible when we closely examine how governments and administrative departments and institutions function is an important factor that not only shapes interests and policy implementation but also influences that manner in which the state – power, authority, law and order – manifests in the interactions between citizens and governments. Therefore, when attempts are made to reconfigure or reform the interfaces between governments and citizens by introducing e-governance tools and ICTs, essentially the entire gamut of networks, social norms, conventions and negotiations that underlies government-citizen interfacing is tried to be put in line with a rational conception of law, due process and order. This implies that certain arms of the state attempt to reinforce and reorder particular government departments and functionaries in line with the idea of the rational, orderly and law enforcing state. (These arms of the state could be the central government in New Delhi, central government departments in New Delhi and state governments trying to align departments and functionaries working at different levels in the federal system hierarchy.) In turn, this means that the complexities in government-citizen interfacing – middlemen, opaque procedures, inadequate information, use of personal discretion, mobilization of political, economic and personal networks - are tried to be straightened through the application of technology which is viewed as neutral and capable of enforcing order and uniformity in procedures and service delivery. Therefore, it becomes essential to understand how different government departments function and how various services are delivered in order to assess where technology is/gets situated and how technology reorders/realigns government functionaries in line with the statist notions of law, order and fairness.

By way of a conclusion …: I will end this post here, leaving it for readers to ruminate and think over the ideas presented here. I will return back in the next post with a more concrete history of how and why ICTs, e-governance and Internet have been deployed in India to usher transparency and responsiveness in the functioning of the state via government agencies and departments. The concrete description will help put into perspective some of the conceptual issues and insights discussed in this post.

Till then, adios!

References:

Abrams, Philip. March 1988. “Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State”. Journal of Historical Sociology. Vol. 1 (1): 58-89.

C. J. Fuller and V. Benei (eds). 2000. The Everyday State and Society in Modern India. New Delhi: D. K. Publishers.

Corbridge, Stuart, Glynn Williams, Manoj Srivastava and Rene Veron. (2005) Seeing the State: Governance and Governmentality in India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Elyachar, Julia. 2005. Markets of Dispossession: NGOS, Economic Development and the State in Cairo. Duke University Press: Durham and London.

Moore, Sally Falk. 1973. “Law and Social Change: The Semi-Autonomous Social Field as an Appropriate Subject of Study.” Law and Society Review. Vol. 7 (4): 719-746.

Tarlo, Emma. 2003. Unsettling Memories: Narratives of India’s ‘Emergency’. Delhi: Permanent Black.

Also see …

Gupta, Akhil and James Fergusson. 2002. “Spatializing States: Towards An Ethnography of Neoliberal Governmentality”. American Ethnologist. Vol. 29 (4): 981-1002. See mainly part one on conceptual issues – spatializing states.

[i] The concept of “field” is borrowed from Sally Falk Moore’s (1973) model of the “semi-autonomous social field”. Moore suggests that a ‘field’ is a concrete, observable arena that generates rules and is simultaneously influenced by agencies and forces from outside (720). The notion of the ‘field’ aids in more a concrete and nuanced study of institutions especially the immediate and larger contexts in which institutions function and how this influences their functioning, why actors make particular decisions in certain circumstances, and how rules are formulated, adhered and resisted. Analyses will vary depending on how we map the field and which actors and factors we include/exclude and give primacy to in the given field.

[ii] Here, it is important to note that despite advocacy and practice of independence of judiciary, the judicial system of a nation functions on the principle of the ‘law of the land’ and maintaining the integrity and compositeness of the physical territory. In this respect, belief in the state’s judicial system continues to perpetuate the belief that there is a singular and ultimate source and arbiter of law, in this case the judicial system, even when the judiciary can strike down the decisions made by the executive organs of the state. Therefore, even if the judiciary is independent, the way in which it functions is to maintain and preserve the state system (i.e. the territory) and the statist quo (i.e. the state system and authority).

[iii] Interviews with social workers from community based organizations in Mumbai, conducted between May and November 2009.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/transparency-and-politics/of-the-state-and-the-governments-the-abstract-the-concrete-and-the-responsive

The Responsive State --- Introduction to the Series

zainab — 2011-08-03T09:58:45Z

This post is an introduction to a series of posts on the concept of the 'responsive state'. In this series, I try to explain the various meanings that the term responsiveness has come to acquire when it is used in relation with the discourses surrounding transparency and the deployment of ICTs and the Internet to enforce transparency and thereby create a responsive state. Understanding the notion of responsiveness requires us to revisit and analyze certain concepts and the relations that have been drawn between concepts such as state, government, politics, administration, transparency, effectiveness, government-citizen interface, ICTs and effectiveness, among others. Read on to find more...

The use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and the Internet to enforce transparency is believed to create the ‘responsive state’. A responsive state is one which:

enables citizens to participate in policy-making processes;
provides them with information about the functioning (including roles and responsibilities) of its various arms and functionaries, and the laws governing cities, the nation and other jurisdictions of administration and governance;
delivers services efficiently and in a more transparent manner;
in general, responds to citizens’ needs and demands and pays heed to their opinions, suggestions, grievances and complaints.

In this post I will specifically examine what responsiveness has come to mean in the backdrop of the discourses and practices regarding transparency and the use of ICTs and the Internet to promote transparency and, to thereby, create a responsive state. In some posts, I will backtrack to trace what responsiveness means and how it translates in everyday life when citizens variously interact with their governments and administrative agencies, and how the discourses of transparency and uses of ICTs and the Internet have ushered new meanings of responsiveness. In some of the posts, we will need to re-visit and examine fundamental concepts such as ‘state’, ‘government’, ‘administration’ and ‘politics’, among others, to understand how the meanings and uses of these concepts have changed over time, resulting in new imaginations and beliefs about realities concerning and involving the state, government, administration and politics. Locating and understanding these transformations helps us to get a perspective on elements such as transparency, ICTs and the Internet and their existing and emergent relationships with state, government, administration, politics and citizenship.

Our interest is actually to see how government–citizen interfaces are transformed through the various deployments of ICTs and the Internet to enforce transparency and responsiveness. This is because the notion of responsiveness is premised on particular understandings, beliefs and imaginations regarding:

functioning of the state i.e., non-transparent, inefficient, non-responsive, bureaucratic; and therefore
of government–citizen interface i.e., ineffective, non-transparent and therefore, non-democratic, not producing desirable outcomes.

It is the desire to improve government–citizen interface — mainly reform of government functioning, improving the effectiveness of interactions between governments and citizens and strengthening the possibilities of translating these interactions into outcomes. This desire has led not only non-government organizations (NGOs), social movement and civic groups and international development aid agencies but also the state to take steps towards improvising on and/or bettering avenues and channels through which citizens and governments interact with each other. The Indian state has made efforts to introduce responsiveness among its various arms and functionaries by:

introducing and implementing new laws such as the Right to Information Act (RTI) (through pressures from and in collaboration with social movement, civic groups and the National Advisory Council);
announcing (and mandating government agencies to implement) policies that make it mandatory for municipalities, urban local bodies and other local administrative institutions to publish information that is (considered to be) relevant/necessary/potentially useful for citizens;
by necessitating the creation of websites as a means of information provision and thereby as a novel mode of interaction between governments and citizens;
by making particular kinds of data more easily available to citizens through ICTs;
by developing e-governance policies and frameworks which re-engineer government functioning and facilitate easier and more interaction between governments and citizens (including, among others, electronic delivery of some kinds of basic services).

In this series, we will analyze each of the above steps that the Indian state has taken, either on its own initiative or owing to pressures from other actors and institutions in the polity, to institute responsiveness. Our goal is to critically evaluate the meanings of responsiveness and the consequences of establishing it (in the backdrop of transparency and the use of ICTs and Internet) – essentially what such responsiveness means for different citizen groups as well as, fundamentally, for the abstract notion of the state and the ground realities that reify the state. Given these goals, in the forthcoming posts we will individually look at the relationships between:

State and Government – what do each of these concepts mean, how do they differ as actually existing entities, how do responsiveness and transparency apply independently to each of them as well as in their relations with each other;
Transparency and Responsiveness – why transparency has become a prerequisite for realizing responsiveness;
State and Citizens, Governments and Citizens – how are these relationships distinct and co-related in different contexts and how interfaces developed through the deployment of ICTs and the Internet configure and reconfigure these relationships;
Transparency, Responsiveness and ICTs and Internet – what kinds of imaginations underlie the use of ICTs and Internet to enforce transparency and responsiveness, how do ICTs and Internet reconfigure the meanings and virtues of transparency and responsiveness, and how are the virtues and symbolisms associated with ICT enabled transparency and responsiveness informing our understandings of politics, governance, administration and the state.

Each of the posts, though individual, will require readers to refer to earlier posts in order to get a grasp of some of the issues being raised in the post they may be reading. On my part, I will make every attempt to cross-reference and provide extensive references to external resources that will help the reader to examine points of views on their own.

The next post will tackle the concepts of state and government. Without much ado, adieu till we meet next …

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/transparency-and-politics/the-responsive-state-introduction-to-the-series

Transparency and Politics: Politically Aware and Participatory Citizenry

zainab — 2011-08-23T04:34:40Z

In this, her fourth blog post on her CIS-RAW project, Zainab Bawa looks at the notions of Stakeholder and Participation.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/transparency-and-politics/internet-politics-and-transparency-2

Internet, Politics and Transparency

zainab — 2011-12-02T09:33:13Z

On 15th April 2009, the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) hosted a talk by Barun Mitra on “Internet, Transparency and Politics”. Barun Mitra is the Chairperson of Liberty Institute, a think tank based in Delhi. Liberty Institute conducts research and advocacy on policy issues ranging from health, environment and trade to democracy and governance.

In 2004, Liberty Institute developed www.EmpoweringIndia.org (henceforth to be referred to as EI) to compile information that electoral candidates provided in the affidavits they filed before elections. These affidavits contain details of the candidate’s assets and liabilities, education background, PAN number, income tax records and criminal records, if any. The purpose of compiling this information was to standardize it and make it available for the voters in a comprehensive format. This, in turn, would enable voters to use the information and make informed choices when casting their votes.

EI has undergone several rounds of iterations and is already in the third generation of its development. The aim has been to build a robust database that will allow citizens to extract information as per their specific and nuanced queries and use it during the elections and afterwards, to enforce accountability on the part of the elected representatives. Barun Mitra began his talk by emphasizing that EI was more than just a website. In the course of his initial presentations to different groups, he found that many audiences perceived EI simply as a website. “I was not interested in merely the information. The larger question driving my initiative was ‘how do we look a politics’?” EI was developed to introduce a different paradigm of understanding politics and participating in it.

The interesting aspect of Barun Mitra’s talk was the question he asked, “What makes information flow?” He decided to move beyond the passé rhetoric of “information is power”. There were two experiences which enabled Barun Mitra to understand what makes information flow. “I had made a presentation to audiences in Kerala about EI in 2008, trying to solicit their support in disseminating the information on the site to local groups in the state. However, the audience in Kerala saw EI only as a website and raised questions accordingly. Following this, I made a presentation to slum dwellers in Delhi who immediately began to demand information about the candidates who were going to contest from their constituencies in the 2008 New Delhi state assembly elections. The slum dwellers and some of the groups working with them even asked me to provide the information in Hindi and local languages. I was surprised by the fact that two vastly diverse audiences responded in such dramatically different ways to EI. That is when I realized that those who have sustained our democracy, namely the poor, need this kind of information. There is a demand for it among them and therefore, we need to supply it. The second experience was from Gujarat. During the 2007 state assembly elections, we found that a number of local media collectives and the panchayats had used the information on EI. This was because the mainstream media was covering the major politicians and candidates in this election while the local groups needed information on all kinds of candidates contesting from their constituencies. I have now come to believe that demand and supply are two aspects to information and it needs to be provided accordingly where the demand for it is emanating from.”

Barun Mitra also reiterated that EI is non-judgmental, in that it leaves it to the audiences to decide how they want to interpret the information. This has been a significant paradigm shift in transparency initiatives that are being developed on the belief that providing more information to people enhances engagement between people and the state. Websites of government departments continue to provide information which they see as important for the citizenry. For instance, see www.bmrc.co.in, the website of the Bangalore Metro Rail Corporation which claims to be transparent and provides particular kinds of information, while concealing other aspects of the project development and implementation. On the other hand, some non-government organizations are focusing on organizing large chunks of information concerning particular aspects of governance, and presenting it to people in a way that allows them to extract that information which they find relevant.

One of Barun Mitra’s goals for the future is to develop parameters for judging the performance of elected representatives In the launch of EI in Bangalore on 16^th April, he pointed out that while he can provide information about the attendance records of MPs (Members of Parliament) in the Lok Sabha (House of the People) sessions, it would be inaccurate to judge the MP’s performance on the basis of this criteria. This is because MPs often sign the attendance register but they may not sit through the Parliament session. He therefore feels that more robust criteria have to be developed which will provide a somewhat holistic picture to the people about the performance of their elected representatives.

Finally, Barun Mitra spoke on the issue of authenticity of the information filed in the affidavits. “People often ask, ‘how authentic is this information?’ The election commission does not take it on itself to verify this information. But I would say that authenticity is a secondary issue. First, we have to make information available to the people. People will then, of their own accord, raise questions about the authenticity of the information. For instance, the Criminal Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has filed cases in the Supreme Court challenging the authenticity and sources of the assets declared by current chief minister (CM) of Uttar Pradesh (UP) Mayawati and former CM Mulayam Singh Yadav.” Specifically, Mayawati’s assets in 2003 which amounted to Rs. 1 crore increased to 50 crores in 2007. This information came to light through information from the affidavit which Mayawati had to file before the state assembly elections in UP in 2007. “Filing such a case was possible only because Mayawati and Mulayam Singh were compelled to provide information about their assets to the public.”

Barun Mitra’s talk raises an important question for me: how effective are initiatives like EI in fostering interaction between the state and the citizens? I will address this question in my next blog post where I examine the case of the Digital City project in Amsterdam. I examine the concepts and practices of cyberspace, urban space and citizenship through the Digital City Project and other projects undertaken to foster transparency. I then try to analyze the initiatives undertaken during the 2009 general elections in India and make some tentative remarks on democracy and participation.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/transparency-and-politics/internet-politics-and-transparency-1

Transparency and Politics: Talk by Barun Mitra

zainab — 2011-08-03T09:53:12Z

A talk by Barun Mitra, Chairperson of the Liberty Institute, a Delhi-based think tank, was held at CIS recently, organised by Zainab Bawa in relation to her CIS-RAW project on 'Transparency and Politics'. In this post, the third in a series exploring questions of transparency and politics, Zainab reports on the lecture and discussion.

On April 15, 2009, the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) hosted a talk by Barun Mitra on “Internet, Transparency and Politics”. Barun Mitra is the Chairperson of Liberty Institute, a think tank based in Delhi. Liberty Institute conducts research and advocacy on policy issues ranging from health, environment and trade to democracy and governance. In 2004, Liberty Institute developed www.EmpoweringIndia.org (henceforth to be referred to as EI) to compile information that electoral candidates provided in the affidavits they filed before elections. These affidavits contain details of the candidate’s assets and liabilities, education background, PAN number, income tax records and criminal records, if any. The purpose of compiling this information was to standardise it and make it available for the voters in a comprehensive format. This, in turn, would enable voters to use the information and make informed choices when casting their votes.

EI has undergone several rounds of iterations and is already in the third generation of its development. The aim has been to build a robust database that will allow citizens to extract information as per their specific and nuanced queries and use it during the elections and afterwards, to enforce accountability on the part of the elected representatives. Barun Mitra began his talk by emphasising that EI was more than just a website, contrary to what he found was the initial perception of most audiences. He explained, “I was not interested in merely the information. The larger question driving my initiative was ‘how do we look at politics’?” EI was developed to introduce a different paradigm of understanding politics and participating in it.

The interesting aspect of Barun Mitra’s talk was the question he asked--“What makes information flow?” He decided to move beyond the passé rhetoric of “information is power”. Two specific experiences enabled Barun to understand this question around the flow of information. “I had made a presentation to audiences in Kerala about EI in 2008, trying to solicit their support in disseminating the information on the site to local groups in the state. However, the audience in Kerala saw EI only as a website and raised questions accordingly. Following this, I made a presentation to slum dwellers in Delhi who immediately began to demand information about the candidates who were going to contest from their constituencies in the 2008 New Delhi state assembly elections. The slum dwellers and some of the groups working with them even asked me to provide the information in Hindi and local languages. I was surprised by the fact that two vastly diverse audiences responded in such dramatically different ways to EI. That is when I realized that those who have sustained our democracy, namely the poor, need this kind of information. There is a demand for it among them and therefore, we need to supply it. The second experience was from Gujarat. During the 2007 state assembly elections, we found that a number of local media collectives and the panchayats had used the information on EI. This was because the mainstream media was covering the major politicians and candidates in this election while the local groups needed information on all kinds of candidates contesting from their constituencies. I have now come to believe that demand and supply are two aspects to information and it needs to be provided accordingly where the demand for it is emanating from.”

Barun also reiterated that EI is non-judgmental, in that it leaves it to the audiences to decide how they want to interpret the information. This has been a significant paradigm shift in transparency initiatives that are being developed on the belief that providing more information to people enhances engagement between people and the state. Websites of government departments continue to provide information which they see as important for the citizenry. For instance, see www.bmrc.co.in, the website of the Bangalore Metro Rail Corporation, which claims to be transparent and provides particular kinds of information, while concealing other aspects of the project development and implementation. On the other hand, some non-government organisations are focusing on organising large chunks of information concerning particular aspects of governance, and presenting it to people in a way that allows them to extract that information which they find relevant.

One of Barun Mitra’s goals for the future is to develop parameters for judging the performance of elected representatives At the launch of EI in Bangalore on April 16, he pointed out that while he can provide information about the attendance records of MPs (Members of Parliament) in the Lok Sabha (House of the People) sessions, it would be inaccurate to judge the MP’s performance on the basis of this criteria. This is because MPs often sign the attendance register but they may not sit through the Parliament session. He therefore feels that more robust criteria have to be developed which will provide a somewhat holistic picture to the people about the performance of their elected representatives.

Finally, Barun Mitra spoke on the issue of authenticity of the information filed in the affidavits. “People often ask, ‘how authentic is this information?’ The election commission does not take it on itself to verify this information. But I would say that authenticity is a secondary issue. First, we have to make information available to the people. People will then, of their own accord, raise questions about the authenticity of the information. For instance, the Criminal Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has filed cases in the Supreme Court challenging the authenticity and sources of the assets declared by current chief minister (CM) of Uttar Pradesh (UP) Mayawati and former CM Mulayam Singh Yadav.” Specifically, Mayawati’s assets in 2003, which amounted to Rs. 1 crore, increased to Rs. 50 crores in 2007. This information came to light through the affidavit which Mayawati had to file before the state assembly elections in UP in 2007. “Filing such a case was possible only because Mayawati and Mulayam Singh were compelled to provide information about their assets to the public.”

Barun Mitra’s talk raises an important question for me: how effective are initiatives like EI in fostering interaction between the state and the citizens? I will address this question in my next blog post, where I will examine the case of the Digital City project in Amsterdam. I will look at the concepts and practices of cyberspace, urban space and citizenship through the Digital City Project and other projects undertaken to foster transparency. I will then try to analyse the initiatives undertaken during the 2009 general elections in India and make some tentative remarks on democracy and participation.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/transparency-and-politics/internet-politics-and-transparency

Transparency and Politics: An Introduction [II]

zainab — 2011-08-03T09:59:07Z

In this post, the second in a series documenting her CIS-RAW project, Zainab Bawa explains how transparency is embedded in particular institutional contexts. This impacts the ways in which transparency materially manifests and also has implications for administrative politics.

In the last post , I briefly tried to explain how the concept of transparency has evolved since the early 1990s and the changes it has undergone over time. My aim in this post is to explain how transparency is not a neutral concept but is embedded in the dynamics that exist in political institutions and government agencies. I will present the case of the municipal corporation in Mumbai city, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (popularly referred to as the BMC) to drive home my point. By the end of the post, I also hope to draw some connections between politics and transparency.

The Municipality and Autonomy: Every city has a municipal corporation. Municipalities have often been deemed as corrupt, inefficient, self-serving and negligent of the state of affairs in cities. This is so because the corrupt practices which municipalities are usually associated with, i.e., bribes in issuing birth and death certificates, water connections, licenses and permissions, are experienced by most citizens on a daily basis and are also more visible than the forms of corruption in which the higher levels of governments engage. People also experience civic problems on a daily basis and these are automatically attributed to the inefficiency in the municipal administration, because the municipality is seen as the agency responsible for resolving these problems. However, the powers of the municipality are constrained by higher level government agencies as well as by the dearth of financial resources. For example, the municipal corporation of Mumbai, the BMC, is headed by the commissioner who is directly appointed by the Maharashtra state government. This allows the state government to control the municipality and the city. Thus, the actions of the BMC and the decisions it makes are directly influenced by the state government.

Political Party Competition and the Municipality: Each municipality has an elected council comprising of directly elected municipal councilors. In the BMC, the Shiv Sena party has a majority in the municipal council. However, the state government is Congress-led. This introduces political party competition that manifests on the city. The Congress government is likely to introduce laws and policies, as well as constitute administrative bodies which will reduce the power of the Shiv Sena-led municipal council and bring the council under the control of the state government. This impacts the executive powers of the municipal councilors who may have to seek permission to carry out civic works from the state government-constituted administrative bodies. The independently constituted administrative bodies also have the powers to levy taxes, which then cut into the amount of overall tax that could have been collected by the municipality were it operating independently.

Internal Competition within Municipalities: Another dynamic in municipalities concerns the relationship between the senior bureaucrats and the municipal councilors and between the senior bureaucrats and the executive staff of the municipality. In all the municipalities across India, senior bureaucrats are drawn from the Indian Administrative Services (IAS) cadre. They determine the annual budgetary allocations to all the departments within the municipality and also frame policies for the city. A great deal of power is therefore vested in the senior bureaucrats. The policies framed by the senior bureaucrats have to be implemented by the executive staff of the municipality, such as the water and sanitary department engineers and the clerks and the administrative staff of the various departments in the municipality. This executive staff is in regular contact with the various constituencies served by the municipality. But they operate via multiple rationalities.

For example, while the water department engineers may follow strict rules in issuing temporary water connections to builders undertaking construction work, they may exercise personal discretion in providing water to people living in the slums. Such personal discretion ‘bypasses’ the rules and laws that determine who is eligible for a water connection. Thus, it is known that in many Indian cities, the engineers of the water departments often issue water connections to the slum dwellers on humanitarian grounds, operating under the morality that people cannot be denied access to water because of their apparently 'illegal' status. Such individual rationalities are classed as 'corrupt' practices. These also irk the senior bureaucrats who would like their policies to be implemented in the exact letter and spirit in which they were framed. Senior bureaucrats therefore devise the discourse of transparency in order to bring the junior administrative staff under their control.

At the same time, there is a high degree of animosity and tension in the relationship between the elected municipal councilors and the senior bureaucrats. The latter actively brand the former as corrupt, whereas the councilors see the actions of the senior bureaucrats as impediments in their ability to serve their constituencies. Both the councilors and the senior bureaucrats have the powers to sanction contracts and appoint contractors to carry out civic works, such as laying down of water pipelines, repairs and maintenance of roads, and repairs of sewerage infrastructure. The appointment of contractors can be discretionary and often, some contractors are favoured over others. The councilors and bureaucrats compete with each other in the appointment of contractors because such appointments can bring them monetary rewards from the contractors. The bureaucrats attempt to conceal their ‘discretionary’ practices by labeling the councilors as corrupt. The bureaucrats are also safeguarded by the perception of their status i.e., the IAS officers are often seen as non-corrupt and are known to have a high level of integrity. The councilor therefore becomes the natural target.

This is not to say that councilors do not engage in corruption. They often do, but their corrupt practices need to be read in specific contexts rather than from normative standpoints. Thus, during interviews with municipal councilors in 2006, I found that some councilors extend help to the poor groups in their constituencies from their personal expenditures. One councilor elected from one of the wards in South Mumbai had then explicitly mentioned to me, 'The council does not pay me a high salary for my work. There are many poor people in my constituency who need immediate medical help and I do not hesitate to give them whatever monetary help I personally can. I make sure that the building department officials do not harass those poor people in my area who have built a loft inside their houses in order to carry out manufacturing activities from within the house and thus sustain themselves financially. I also ensure that the hawkers who temporarily set up stalls in the month of Ramzaan are not evicted from my area because I am eventually answerable to God for the actions I commit during the holy month. But when a contractor, whose contract I have helped to pass for carrying out civic works in my area, offers me a gift (of money) of his own volition, I accept it. I do so because I also spend a good deal from my own pocket and I need to compensate myself, as well as maintain a cash flow which will help me to serve the people.'

Transparency and Politics: The institutional context that I have presented above is by no means exhaustive. The alliances and oppositions in the scheme of administrative politics are also not permanent. These shift according to the context and are shaped by the contests for power. The discourse and practices of transparency are located in this context. By referring to transparency, senior bureaucrats, policy makers and aid agencies seek to control the multiple rationalities and everyday discretionary practices that are rife in administration and streamline the decision-making process. This has implications for different socio-economic groups who also come under the radar of visibility when administrative staff are sought to be disciplined. Accordingly, the relationship between the different state agencies and citizen groups gets shaped.

For example, around 2003, a non-government organization called Praja introduced a centralized, online system for complaint management in the BMC. The aim of this system was to simplify the process of lodging complaints about civic problems and introduce efficiency and accountability in the administration in terms of resolving citizens’ complaints. The BMC received many complaints concerning hawkers and vending on the streets. A section of researchers and activists initially felt that the centralized complaint system was working against hawkers. However, over time, it came to be realized that the evictions of hawkers in Mumbai did not take place owing to the complaints lodged by the citizens. The complaints no doubt gave (negative) visibility to the hawkers and the problem of occupied streets and pavements. One of the officers in the municipality who I interviewed in 2007 mentioned, 'When a shopping mall owner is irked by the presence of hawkers outside his mall, he will not go online and register a complaint on the centralized complaint system. He will simply make a personal appointment with the commissioner, make his case before the commissioner, and ensure that the hawkers are removed. The online centralized complaint system is not used by such persons.' This comment is instructive because it also shows us that despite the introduction of transparency, bypasses and slippages continue to take place since the engagement between the state and its citizens is fashioned by multiple rationalities, ability and resources to access government agencies and authorities, the ability to influence them, and by particular contexts.

In the next post, I will present my findings on the relationship between transparency and access to information. How does the framework of rights enable access to information? How is access to information variously influenced when information is published for the sake of broadcast as against when information is made available in certain ways to enhance participation?

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/transparency-and-politics/transparency-and-politics-an-introduction-to-the-project-part-ii

Transparency and Politics: An Introduction [I]

zainab — 2011-08-23T04:34:50Z

This is the first in a series of blog posts documenting Zainab Bawa's CIS-RAW project on Transparency and Politics. This post briefly explains how the notion of transparency has developed over time, and the changes that it has been through.

Since 2005, I have been carrying out ethnographic research on cities, particularly on issues of governance, politics and economic practices in cities. In 2004, I began working for an organization in Mumbai named Praja. Here, I was introduced to the concepts of transparency, accountability and governance. These were the buzzwords of that time, articulated vociferously by some of the civil society organisations that had sprung up in Mumbai and Bangalore to cleanse the city of maladministration. However, the notion of transparency originated earlier, in the 1990s. It was conceptualised as an antidote which would help to pull the state out of the morass of corruption and bribery that it had fallen into. Governments seeking loans from international agencies such as the World Bank and USAID for reforming their departments and for improving the delivery of civic services were asked to make their functioning transparent as a necessary prerequisite.

Making government transparent mainly involved introducing the double entry accounting system for keeping a record of all the assets that the government owns (which could then be mortgaged in case the government defaulted on loan repayments), and to track all expenditures against the available balance in order to show where and how the money has been spent and to prevent over-spending. Transparency was also enforced through the imposition of some models for implementing infrastructure. For instance, in Mumbai, under the sewage disposal programme, the World Bank gave a large grant for building toilets in the slums. The actual construction of the toilets would, however, be the responsibility of community organisations working in the slums. This model was imposed because of the assumption that community organisations are more aware of the needs of the slum dwellers and they would not engage in the rent-seeking behavior which is (presumed to be) characteristic of municipal officials and elected councilors. An analysis of the toilet construction programme is available here. For our purposes, we need to keep in mind that reform in municipal budgeting and prescribing models which would reduce the scope for corruption were some of the early materialisations of the notion of transparency.

We now move to the next important phase in the history of transparency--the conception and the gradual implementation of the Right to Information (RTI) Act in India. RTI is based on the idea that the citizen should have access to any kind of information that she requires. Under RTI, transparency was sought to be implemented in the process by which the citizen asks for information from the state. This means that whereas earlier, the citizen could have acquired the same information by giving bribes to government officials and/or through various other circuits and means, now she could legitimately ask for the information and the state became bound by law to give it. There was also a stamp of legitimacy to the information that was eventually given. It could be used to challenge government officials, make the state accountable for its actions and reform governing practices in a much larger public domain than what could be possible before. I will not evaluate the RTI Act here; I will leave it for a subsequent post. But what interests me is the relationship between regulation and transparency. Can transparency be enforced through law? What implications does such enforcement have on governing practices as well for different socio-economic groups? Does enforcement cause the state to become transparent in some area and opaque in others?

The next major impetus to the development of the notion of transparency came with:

The increasing penetration of the Internet in India,
Implementation of e-governance policies which made it mandatory for municipalities and government agencies to publish information about their departments, budgets, and the welfare schemes and programmes on offer from them
Coupling Right to Information with Duty to Publish which meant that while the citizen had the right to seek information, the state and its agencies had a duty to voluntarily publish more and more information about themselves
A demand from existing and emerging civil society organisations as well as institutions such as the World Bank to improve the delivery of civic services by eliminating middle-men and all those processes which increase the possibility of bribe giving and taking,
A further demand from the same organisations that the processes by which decisions are made and the reasons/logic of these decisions should be made available for public eyes, the aim here being that the decision-making process should be made uniform and ‘objective’.

It is interesting to note how the Internet gets linked to the concept of transparency. The Internet does provide a vast space for publishing information, but that is not all. The ‘virtual space’ of the Internet is very closely linked with the way we want our cities to be i.e., absolutely visible, monitorable and manageable. This can be achieved partly by making information about the various aspects of urban governance available online, and partly by publishing information about all those population groups and political practices that are classed as ‘informal’ and ‘illegal’. In the course of this project, I will try to further develop the link between the space of the Internet and that of the city by describing some of the initiatives and case studies about transparency and politics.

It is also important to remember that transparency is not a static concept. It emerges in and is shaped by contexts. For example, the increased emphasis on municipalities to introduce double entry accounting systems in order to make the budgetary process transparent, particularly between 2004 and 2006, was linked to the fact that international financial institutions, who wanted to invest in urban infrastructure development during this period, could now see what assets municipalities possessed and whether these assets could be cashed in (both metaphorically and materially) in future. In this case, transparency translated as particular kinds of visibilities for particular groups. Transparency can be also used as a trope to justify interventions such as cleaning of voter lists, introduction of identification cards and removing certain decision-making powers from local governments and transferring them to other government bodies. We will need to bear these aspects of transparency in mind as we understand it and evaluation its implications.

In this post, I have tried to explain how the notion of transparency has developed over time, and the changes that it has been through. This provides the first part of the background to the project. In the next post, I will explain what politics means in practice and how transparency now enters and modifies the realm of politics.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/transparency-and-politics/transparency-and-politics-an-introduction-to-the-project-part-i

Post 1

zainab — 2009-02-09T06:41:00Z

Articles linked for the first post.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/transparency-and-politics/uploads/post-1