Centre for Internet and Society

Zothan Mawii - COVID-19 and Relief Measures for Gig Workers in India

Zothan Mawii (Tandem Research) — 2020-05-19T05:41:57Z

CIS is cohosted a webinar with Tandem Research on the impact of the COVID-19 response on the gig economy on 9 April 2020. It was a closed door discussion between representatives of workers' unions, labour activists, and researchers working on gig economy and workers' rights to highlight the demands of workers' groups in the transport, food delivery and care work sectors. We saw this as an urgent intervention in light of the disruption to the gig economy caused by the nationwide lockdown to limit proliferation of COVID-19. This is a summary of the discussions that took place in the webinar authored by Zothan Mawii, a Research Fellow at Tandem Research.

Re-posted from Tandem Research (April 14, 2020)

List of Participants

Aayush Rathi, Ambika Tandon and Tasneem Mewa, The Centre for Internet and Society, India (Co-organisers)
Zothan Mawii, Iona Eckstein and Urvashi Aneja, Tandem Research (Co-organisers)
Aditi Surie, Indian Institute for Human Settlements
Astha Kapoor, Aapti Institute
Dharmendra Vaishnav, Indian Delivery Lions (IDL)
Janaki Srinivasan, International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore
Kaveri Kaliyanda, The University of Sussex
Pradyumna Taduri, Fairwork Foundation
Rakhi Sehgal, Independent researcher
Shaik Salauddin, Indian Federation of App-based Transport Workers (IFAT)
Simiran Lalvani, Independent researcher
Tanveer Pasha, Ola, Taxi 4 Sure and Uber Drivers and Owners’ Association (OTU)
Vinay Sarathy, United Food Delivery Partners’ Union (UFDPU)

What relief measures do gig workers need during this pandemic?

The coronavirus pandemic has the world in its grips, and exposed the fragility of our economic systems and societal structures. The ensuing lockdown and physical distancing measures put in place by states to control the spread of the virus has impacted citizens differently and largely along class lines. While white collar workers remain relatively insulated as they work from home and have their essentials delivered, it has laid bare the vulnerabilities faced by India’s largely informal workforce. Since announcing the lockdown and the exodus of migrant workers from cities, the central and state governments in India have announced a number of relief measures for workers. However, those working on on-demand platforms have been excluded, while relief measures announced by a few platforms are inadequate to provide meaningful protection, leaving workers to fall at the cracks. Tandem Research and the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) hosted a webinar on 9th April with a group of union leaders and researchers to draft a charter of demands for platforms and government to ensure better protection for gig workers.

We heard from 4 union leaders about the situation facing workers on the ground and the shortcomings of the measures platforms claim to be taking to ensure their workers' safety and protection. This piece recaps some of the issues that were uncovered during the meeting.

Tanveer Pasha, President of Ola, Taxi 4 Sure and Uber Drivers and Owners’ Association (OTU) and Shaik Salauddin, President of the Indian Federation of App-based Transport Workers (IFAT) pointed out that while Ola Cabs and Uber claim to have instructed drivers on safety and hygiene measures and provided personal protective equipment (PPE), in reality their efforts have been wanting. The unions themselves have been conducting these awareness drives while IFAT purchased masks for drivers in Telangana. On-demand food delivery services have also not provided workers with any PPE, although they have been deemed essential workers and must continue to interact with customers and restaurants as they go about their tasks.

High on the list of concerns facing gig workers was income security and the security of their jobs once the lockdown is lifted. Transportation companies Uber and Ola cab have suspended services although some drivers in Bengaluru, working with OTU have pivoted to delivering essential goods or transporting healthcare workers. The number of orders on on-demand food delivery services has dropped drastically too. Gig workers are earning little to no money during this time and have little recourse to savings or other safety nets.

Unions are demanding that workers are paid a sum of money to tide them over during this time, which can be paid back to the platforms without interest. Unions argue that the commissions charged by platform companies can be used to cover these costs and even call for a reduction in the commission after the lockdown is lifted so that workers can recover financially.

Ola Cabs and Zomato have started funds to support their workers, taking donations from the public and from management, but workers are yet to see the benefits of the funds. With little transparency or clarity as to how these funds will operate, unions and workers are left wondering if this is solely a publicity move on the part of platforms. No announcements have been made regarding these funds - who is eligible for the fund? What are the criteria workers will have to meet to receive funds? Will workers have to pay the amount back to the platforms? If yes, will it carry interest? Will workers’ ratings or the hours they’ve logged on the app be used to determine their eligibility?

The government announced a moratorium on EMI and loan repayments, and has directed the RBI to set guidelines. Some state governments have also announced waivers on house rent payments. While these measures should have eased the pressure on gig workers, that hasn’t been the case - informal lenders and non banking financial companies (NBFC) have continued to ask workers for payments, flouting the RBI guidelines. In the absence of enforcement from the government, gig workers are unable to reap the benefits of directives designed to relieve the financial pressure they are currently under.

Delivery workers find themselves in a double bind - they have been deemed essential workers by the government and on-demand services remain up and running. However, with few restaurants remaining open and few orders coming in, they are forced to work long hours for little money, and in risky conditions as roads remain deserted because of the lockdown. Dharmender Vaishnav (Indian Delivery Lions) and Kaveri Kaliyanda (PhD scholar, University of Sussex) raised pertinent questions over the classification of delivery workers as essential workers - Who are the workers essential for? At what personal cost to their health and safety must delivery workers continue to serve the interests of platforms and their middle class customer base? This categorisation also allows on-demand food delivery companies to absolve themselves of the responsibility for ensuring workers receive wages - they can claim services continued to operate and shift the blame onto workers for not logging in. Many of the workers who have gone back to their native towns and villages are anxious that their accounts will be deactivated for not logging in.

These issues facing gig workers will be drafted into a set of demands for platforms and government to provide relief. However, many questions remain unanswered. While these measures may address the hardships gig workers face in the short term, it doesn’t address long standing issues that characterise this line of work. The precarity of gig workers stems from the marginal space they occupy in the labour market. As ‘partners’ or ‘independent contractors’, they are not entitled to social protection measures from the government nor are platforms obliged to provide them. Unlike construction workers or domestic workers-who are also informal workers but enjoy recognition of an organised body and some legislative protections-they remain largely invisible to policymakers and government. Getting gig workers this type of recognition will be crucial to ensure their wellbeing. In Karnataka, there are efforts underway to introduce regulations similar to California’s AB5 bill that recognises gig workers as employers eligible for state and employer sponsored benefits. Gig workers have been included in the draft Code on Social Security. However, regulating platforms to make them more accountable and safeguarding worker welfare is long overdue. It is especially urgent at this time - the economic repression that will follow is likely to push more young jobseekers to the platform economy as a stop gap solution in the absence of suitable employment. The conditions of work platforms engender are far from ideal and should not become the model for jobs in the future.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/zothan-mawii-covid-19-and-relief-measures-for-gig-workers-in-india

You auto-complete me: romancing the bot

sumandro — 2019-12-06T05:00:19Z

This is an excerpt from an essay by Maya Indira Ganesh, written for and published as part of the Bodies of Evidence collection of Deep Dives. The Bodies of Evidence collection, edited by Bishakha Datta and Richa Kaul Padte, is a collaboration between Point of View and the Centre for Internet and Society, undertaken as part of the Big Data for Development Network supported by International Development Research Centre, Canada.

Please read the full essay on Deep Dives: You auto-complete me: romancing the bot

Maya Indira Ganesh: Website and Twitter

I feel like Kismet the Robot.

Kismet is a flappy-eared animatronic head with oversized eyeballs and bushy eyebrows. Connected to cameras and sensors, it exhibits the six primary human emotions identified by psychologist Paul Ekman: happiness, sadness, disgust, surprise, anger, and fear.

Scholar Katherine Hayles says that Kismet was built as an ‘ecological whole’ to respond to both humans and the environment. ‘The community,’ she writes, ‘understood as the robot plus its human interlocutors, is greater than the sum of its parts, because the robot’s design and programming have been created to optimise interactions with humans.’

In other words, Kismet may have ‘social intelligence’.

Kismet’s creator Cynthia Breazal explains this through a telling example. If someone comes too close to it, Kismet retracts its head as if to suggest that its personal space is being violated, or that it is shy. In reality, it is trying to adjust its camera so that it can properly see whatever is in front of it. But it is the human interacting with Kismet who interprets this retraction as the robot requiring its own space by moving back. Breazal says, ‘Human interpretation and response make the robot’s actions more meaningful than they otherwise would be.’

In other words, humans interpret Kismet’s social intelligence as ‘emotional intelligence’...

Kismet was built at the start of a new field called affective computing, which is now branded as ‘emotion AI’. Affective computing is about analysing human facial expressions, gait and stance into a map of emotional states. Here is what Affectiva, one of the companies developing this technology, says about how it works:

‘Humans use a lot of non-verbal cues, such as facial expressions, gesture, body language and tone of voice, to communicate their emotions. Our vision is to develop Emotion AI that can detect emotion just the way humans do. Our technology first identifies a human face in real time or in an image or video. Computer vision algorithms then identify key landmarks on the face…[and] deep learning algorithms analyse pixels in those regions to classify facial expressions. Combinations of these facial expressions are then mapped to emotions.’

But there is also a more sinister aspect to this digitised love-fest. Our faces, voices, and selfies are being used to collect data to train future bots to be more realistic. There is an entire industry of Emotion AI that harvests human emotional data to build technologies that we are supposed to enjoy because they appear more human. But it often comes down to a question of social control, because the same emotional data is used to track, monitor and regulate our own emotions and behaviours...

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/maya-indira-ganesh-you-auto-complete-me-romancing-the-bot

Whose Open Data Community is it? - Accepted Abstract

sumandro — 2015-11-13T05:41:15Z

My paper titled 'Whose Open Data Community is it? Reflections on the Open Data Ecosystem in India' has been accepted for presentation at the Open Data Research Symposium to be held during the 3rd International Open Data Conference in Ottawa, Canada, on May 28-29 2015. The final paper will be shared by second week of May. Here is the accepted abstract.

Where are the NGOs?

On February 04, 2013, several members of the DataMeet group <http://datameet.org/> were invited by the National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy Project Management Unit (NDSAP-PMU) – the nodal agency responsible for developing, implementing, and managing the Open Government Data Platform of India <https://data.gov.in/> – to share thoughts on the status of the implementation of the National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy (NDSAP), the open data policy of India, and discuss potentials for collaboration. A key proposal made by the NDSAPPMU team regarding how DataMeet can contribute to the implementation process, involved DataMeet mobilising the developer community connected to the group to build applications that use the opened up data and demonstrate the value of open government data to drive greater contribution by government agencies and greater utilisation by citizen groups. For DataMeet, a network of open data users and advocates, this invitation to collaborate sets up a slightly different problematic than that in most of the cases of free and open source software development project. The task here is to develop projects that use already available data, which may not offer significantly return to investment at present, but will accellerate the process of opening up of more valuable government data.

However, building an application that effectively utilise government data to foreground a compelling argument or story requires more than a team of developers – it also require domain experts with a deep sense of the context from which the data is emanating. With a vibrant scene of nongovernmental organisations involved in monitoring, analysis, and implementation of developmental projects, many of such domain experts in India are located within such organisations, with some being in the academic institutes too. Reporting from an open data community meeting organised by the World Bank at Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, on December 10, 2014, Isha Parihar asks: “Where are the NGOs?” She points out that “[t]he discussions around open data [in India] also highlight the absence of nonprofit organisations among the technologyfocused groups, entrepreneurs, and businesses [1].” This observation is especially critical as the meeting was organsied by World Bank not only to gather public responses to be presented to Government of India, but also to take stock of the open data community in India. The absence of NGOs, although, does not indicate at the lack of interest of the nongovernmental research and advocacy organisations in India to work with government data. Such organisations, on the contrary, have a long history of accessing, using, sharing, and communicating government data obtained through both proactive and reactive disclosure mechanism. While surveying such practices in a recent report, Sumandro Chattapadhyay argues [2] that the lack of a common understanding of the open data community in India emerges from both the lack of an established forum where commercial and non-commercial reusers of data discuss and articulate their requirements and demands, and the existence of an established range of actors accessing, using, and resharing government data for commercial and noncommercial purposes who are still uncertain regarding how open government data will exactly transform and augment their existing practices.

Whose Open Data Community is it?

In the context of the emerging open data ecosystem in India, thus, the notion of the open data community comes forward as both the problem – in terms of the community not yet being there to effectively take forward the open data agenda – and the solution – as the component of the ecosystem that can successfully bridge gaps between interests and capacities of various stakeholders. Given the gap and the stakeholder concerned, the open data community is expected to perform various critical functions. This paper tracks these conceptualisations of open data community in India. Based upon conversations with fourteen organisations working across four cities in India, the question of 'whose open data community is it' is explored in this paper following three pathways – (1) by documenting how the understanding of the open data community, and the location of the organisation concerned in reference to that, changes across these organisations, (2) by describing how the idea of who all are included in the open data community in India changes across these organisations, and (3) by identifying how different organisations formulate the intended audiences of the open data community in India. In doing so, I argue that a range of critical challenges being experienced by the open data ecosystem in India often gets articulated as things that can be resolved by a more active and effective open data community. This distorts the distribution of responsbilities across various kinds of stakeholders for contributing to the open data ecosystem. In conclusion, I note the need to stop using open data community as a solution-for-all-open-data-evils, and for a pragmatic approach to understand the kinds of open data challenges it can address, and those that it cannot.

Endnotes

[1] Parihar, Isha. 2015. On the Road to Open Data: Glimpses of the Discourse in India. Akvo. January 14. Accessed on March 02, 2015, from http://akvo.org/blog/on-the-road-to-open-data-glimpses-of-the-discourse-in-india/

[2] Chattapadhyay, Sumandro. 2014. Opening Government Data through Mediation: Exploring Roles, Practices and Strategies of (Potential) Data Intermediary Organisations in India. Accessed on March 02, 2015, from http://ajantriks.github.io/oddc/report/sumandro_oddc_project_report.pdf

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/whose-open-data-community-is-it-abstract

Who Owns Your Phone?

nishant — 2016-09-18T16:18:35Z

The capacity of companies to defy standards that work tells an alarming story of what we lose when we lose control of our devices.

The article was published in Indian Express on September 18, 2016.

We have a conflicted relationship with our digital devices. On the one hand, everything we own is cutting-edge — your regular smartphone does computation that is more advanced and powerful than the computers currently functioning on the space probe on Mars. On the other, everything that we own, is almost on the verge of becoming old — by the time you are used to your phone, a new model with a different letter or a number is in the market. The TV screen which was the crowning glory of your house now feels old because it is not thin enough, sleek enough or big enough; waiting to be replaced by the Next Big Thing.

Strangely, the Next Big Thing is never really big enough for it to have longevity. The next phone that you buy, the new laptop you covet, the app that you update, will already feel temporary. Patricia Fitzpatrick, a historian of new media, calls this phenomenon “Planned Obsolescence”. It means that private corporations think of their digital products as fast-moving and ready to die. They might sell the phone with a 10-year guarantee, but the only guarantee that exists is that in 10 years, they will have discontinued all support for that phone, and you will have forgotten that you owned that device. Planned Obsole-scence is a marketing strategy, where everything that is introduced as a technological innovation has a limited shelf-life and is made to be replaced by something new.

What is interesting about this strategy is that it doesn’t mean that your device has become redundant. In fact, even as you desire the new, you know perfectly well that your existing device has many years of functionality. Hence, the companies often produce the new as path-breaking, innovative and futuristic. They want you to feel primitive or out-of-touch by introducing features that you don’t need, transforming the familiar and the habitual device with something that becomes alien, enchanting and mystical.

While planned obsolescence has its value — it propels innovation and pushes at the boundary of what is possible — it also needs to be understood as a marketing strategy that keeps us consuming as part of our digital habits. One of the best examples to understand this trend is Apple’s latest announcement that it has removed the standard earphone jack from its new iPhone7 and is presenting us with wireless earplugs that work with the new phone. Apple insists that this is the future, and in its hyperbolic presentation, announced that by removing one of the most enduring industry standard for audio hardware, they are revolutionising the future of music listening.

This comes particularly as a shock because ever since the 1990s, Apple’s iconic presence in the music industry has been the white dangling ear-bud wire against black silhouettes, marking the Apple music device as a sign of privacy, maturity, creativity, and elite affordability. By replacing recognisable image with a new one is the company’s way of signalling that every Apple device you now own is ready for trash. It is letting you know that your older Apple music player now needs to be replaced by a new one that uses the wireless ear buds. That the only way you can now listen to music on an Apple iPhone is on Apple’s own standards, so that the regular industry hardware will no longer work with this unique phone that eschews universal standards and seeks to create private monopolies.

The missing headphone jack in the iPhone 7 is a resounding testimony to what happens when we make our digital hardware subject to closed development and production. Instead of building phones that are more durable, more efficient, more connected, more affordable, and more versatile, Apple just showed us how a private company can arrogantly define the future, by turning almost every existing device into “primitive” or “incompatible” with the new phones that it is making. The capacity of companies like Apple to defy standards that work and build their own unique hardware tells an alarming story of what we lose when we lose control of our devices. The digital cultures scholar Wendy Chun had once sagaciously written, “the more our devices turn transparent, the more opaque they become”. And Apple’s move towards making your new iPhone seamless and without holes, mimics how the phone is being designed to both kill fast and die early, promoting corporate ambitions over public interest.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-september-18-2016-who-owns-your-phone

What's in a Name? Or Why Clicktivism May Not Be Ruining Left Activism in India, At Least For Now

anja — 2011-08-02T09:25:39Z

In a recent piece in the Guardian titled “Clicktivism Is Ruining Leftist Activism”, Micah White expressed severe concern that, in drawing on tactics of advertising and marketing research, digital activism is undermining “the passionate, ideological and total critique of consumer society”. His concerns are certainly shared by some in India: White's piece has been circulating on activist email lists where people noted with concern that e-activism may be replacing “the real thing” even in this country. But is the situation in India really this dire?

Among those who consider themselves activists in a more traditional fashion, critical debates on what it means to be an activist certainly remain alive and well. Among India's social movements, perhaps most prominent, over the past decade, have been those that protest against large-scale “development” projects and the displacement they tend to cause – projects of which especially India's tribal people, or adivasis, often are the victims. In these circles, arguments against the use of the Internet for activism often focus on the elitist character of this tool: in a country where Internet penetration rates continue to hover around a meagre five percent, frequently neither the people affected nor the wider groups that need to be mobilised have access to this resource. Clearly then, organising online is never sufficient and, perhaps not surprisingly, debates about what is called “armchair activism” consequently are both common and intense. In a recent video posted on YouTube, for example, the respected Himanshu Kumar – who everyone will recognise as a grassroots activist – called on the nation to support the adivasis and their causes. In the same video, he also explicitly requested people to get off the Internet:

Is me jo shehero me rehne wale log hai, mujhe unse khas tor se kehna hai ki aap sheher me baithe rahenge, net par thoda sa likh denge – usse sarkar ko koi farak padne wala nahi hai. Na janta Internet padthi hai na sarkar Internet padthi hai. Hum jo activist hai wohi aapas mein Internet par pad lethe hai. Usse sarkar ki koi policiyan nahi badal payenge, sarkar par pressure nahi create kar payenge. Jab tak ham aam janta ke beech mein nahi jayenge, na to hame desh ki problems pata challenge, na ham desh ke logon ko jaga payenge.

[To the people in the cities, I want to especially say that, you keep sitting in the cities, you write something on the Internet - it doesn't make any difference to the government. Neither do people read the Internet, nor does the government read the Internet. Only activists like you and me read on the Internet. Through that, we cannot change the policies of the government, we cannot create pressure on the government. As long as we don't go among/approach the common people, neither will we come to know the country's problems, nor will we be able to awaken the people].

Not everybody I spoke to would have agreed with Kumar's argument. The importance of mass mobilisation and the need to be in touch with grassroots realities are recognised by all movement activists, as is consequently the requirement to get active offline as much as online. But whether mass mobilisation at the grassroots is the only way forward is not something that everyone is convinced of. In the context of the Free Binayak Sen campaign, for example, there is considerable recognition that the website was a vital complement to a well-organised offline campaign to free Dr. Binayak Sen from jail, which kicked off in the spring of 2008. Sen is a community health doctor and civil liberties activist who had worked for more than twenty five years among the adivasis of Chhattisgarh, the heart of the current Maoist conflict, when he was arrested on the basis of what many considered completely baseless, yet non-bailable charges of being a Maoist himself, and left to languish in jail for two years. A regularly updated website, and related Facebook group and email list, soon became the focal point for a massive outpouring of support for Sen from different parts of the world, including in the form of a letter from twenty Nobel Prize winners, as well as an important source of information on the campaign for activists within the country. In May 2009, the Indian Supreme Court finally released granted bail to Dr. Binayak Sen. The Doctor's trial is currently ongoing.

In this context of critical debates, how do those who do see themselves as activists, yet draw on the Internet as a significant tool to publicise struggles, justify themselves? If the Internet can play a role in changing matters at the grassroots, and has proven to do so in the past, does it become possible to intensely use this tool and still be recognised as an activist in a more traditional reading of this word? The fact that most middle-class English speaking cadres of movements are online, despite their protestations against online activism for being elitist, may well play in the favour of advocates of online protest: it does open up a space to argue for the relevance of this medium, even if for a limited group, and for the importance of its responsible use. Indeed, it may well be for this reason that it is possible to watch on YouTube a number of videos in which Himanshu Kumar shares his experiences at the grassroots, his own discomfort with the medium notwithstanding. But it is not this ambiguity that is at the heart of the claims to credibility of advocates of online activism. Rather, as has always been the case, it is their continued connectedness to the grassroots. How much you are in the know of what happens at the grassroots; whether you have physically joined struggles; to what extent you get your hands dirty offline and show up for meetings, rallies, poster pasting, rather than limiting your engagement to the online route – these are the kind of elements that determine whether you are an online activist. What you do offline remains as important as ever. To only work online is not sufficient.

Importantly, such readings are frequently mirrored by those who do not have such connections to the grassroots. In my research, I have more than once come across “online activists” who started their conversation with me by stating that they were not, in fact, activists at all. Interestingly, Maesy Angelina has observed a similar reluctance to identify as an activist among participants in the Blank Noise project (personal communication and Angelina, forthcoming), a campaign to combat street sexual harassment and, with its extensive use of online tools over the seven years of its existence, one of the paragons of online activism in India. While Maesy herself will blog more about how Blank Noise participants understand activism later on here, (earlier posts are available as well) at least in my research, the reason why people refused the “activist” label was generally not because they disapproved of what it might stand for. Rather, they saw a clear difference between their own contribution and that of the full-time activists who ceaselessly mobilise and organise people on the ground, those who in many cases draw on a distinct and easily-recognisable language of protest that infuses everything from the shape protests take to activists' dressing sense in the process – the “jholawallahs”, as one person I follow on Twitter calls them, after the trademark cotton bag that they often carry around. Those who refused the namecard of an “activist” were clear that they would never have chosen such a full-time activist's life; what new technology allowed them to do, however, was to nevertheless make a contribution, even if often on a smaller scale, of their own. As one person put it quite movingly:

I believe that, I think that ordinary people, and I am convinced, that they can do, can use this medium to actually make a difference, you know or bring about change, to change the world. You know, these dreams that you have sometimes, “I want to change the world in some way” [laughs]. You know? I do believe that... it's possible. And you don't have to be an activist or working in an NGO. You can be working anywhere, you can be doing anything as your day job, you know, or your regular job. But, you can contribute.

Clearly, then, critical readings of what it means to be an activist are common not only among those who are activists in a more traditional sense, but among those who focus on exploring the use of new tools for social change as well: the kind of credibility, based on offline experience, that attaches to more traditional activists is not something they claim for themselves. But what they understand is that new technologies have facilitated a qualitatively new kind of engagement with movements, with activism, with social change. And what such “not-activists” do claim is that this has made it possible for ordinary people to now also make a difference, even though small that difference often may be.

In many ways this type of involvement is actually not new, as contributions of non-activists have always played an important role in the survival and evolutions of movements, especially at times of great urgency: doctors who are ready to treat patients for free; lawyers who supply legal advice without expecting anything in return; people with comfortable jobs in the private sector who one knows one can rely on for donations when required (most movements in India survive financially by relying solely or mostly on donations by private persons). What is new with the introduction of the Internet is that the possibility of contributions by people who are not activists are now extended into new areas, as it has become much easier to contribute to publicising and building community around issues that are close to movements' heart as well.

So how to evaluate White's claim that clicktivism is ruining Left activism in the Indian context then? For one thing, it is important to remember that we simply do not – or not yet at least – have platforms such as MoveOn or Avaaz, that draw, as White explains, on market ideology to conveniently break down a seemingly endless number of political campaigns into little bites for easy individual consumption with the click of a mouse button. Left activism in India, even online, remains firmly embedded in communities of engagement. Surely e-petitions, for example, are popular here as much as elsewhere. But the point to remember is that they rarely circulate in isolation. Instead, they emerge from the email lists, from the postings and repostings as well as conversations on Facebook, from the blogs around which much Left activism online revolves. And crucial to these uses of the Internet as a tool for social change is not clicking, but engagement and conversation. Perhaps it is for this reason that even a landmark campaign such as Free Binayak Sen has hardly received any attention in the international online activists' arena: campaigns such as this do not revolve around the number of clicks they get, nor around flash-points or events shaped to satisfy the hunger of the international media, valuable as some may argue these can be; rather, they are intended for the long haul, as they attempt to build on existing collectives to extend the communities of solidarity around issues that move and drive the Left in this neoliberal age. Even online, the politics can and does infuse the method, at least for now.

This, then, gives something to ponder over. It is true that working among people, offline, remains of crucial importance if Left movements in the country are to achieve their goals. But perhaps it is worth considering more seriously the value and role of this pool of people willing and available to help building such communities in a more or less sustained fashion online (I am not talking about the accidental activist here), without necessarily wanting to take on a core “activist”'s role. Yes, perhaps their work does not amount to activism as we know it. But nevertheless, it may well be that in many cases the efforts of these committed individuals do not amount to distractions, but to gravy: extras that help ensuring that more and more people start to care as the message of social movements is amplified to a much larger audience than might have otherwise been the case, perhaps even getting many more people involved, while also acutely aware of their own limitations when it comes to achieving fundamental, lasting social change. In fact, perhaps the Left would also do well to wonder whether it can afford to lose this valuable support: as I will document in a future blog post, with the rise of the Internet in India, online initiatives have also emerged that take neither of the stances described above, but that instead explicitly, and at times aggressively, seek to present themselves as a forward-looking alternative to the existing progressive politics in this country. A lack of engagement on the part of the Left with supporters online would effectively entail a ceding of the space to such challengers.

The point to remember for now, however, is that many of those active in online campaigns are acutely aware themselves not only of the potential of their work, but also of its limitations. What we do need to do, however, is to keep firmly alive this tension and debate surrounding what it means to be an activist, as well as to remain vigilant that the dazzling charms of the tools do not, in the long term, blind us to our politics. At the moment, it seems to be the continuing vibrancy of the Left in India that makes it difficult for anyone who wants to get seriously involved with movement politics to consider online activism a sufficient replacement. It is the endurance of these attitudes of continuous critical inquiry that will ensure that, clicktivism or not, Left activism will remain firmly alive in this country in the future as well – in the hearts and minds of activists and non-activists alike.

With thanks to Prasad Krishna for assistance with the translation.

References

Angelina, M. (forthcoming). 'Beyond the Digital: Understanding Contemporary Youth Activism in Urban India' (working title). MA thesis. The Hague, International Institute of Social Studies – Erasmus University of Rotterdam.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/revolution-2.0/whats-in-a-name-or-why-clicktivism-may-not-be-ruining-left-activism-in-india-at-least-for-now

We, the Cyborgs: Challenges for the Future of being Human

asha — 2015-10-24T13:42:16Z

The Cyborg - a cybernetique organism which is a combination of the biological and the technological – has been at the centre of discourse around digital technologies. Especially with wearable computing and ubiquitous access to the digital world, there has been an increased concern that very ways in which we understand questions of life, human body and the presence and role of technologies in our worlds, are changing. In just the last few years, we have seen extraordinary measures – the successful production of synthetic bacteria, artificial intelligence that can be programmed to simulate human conditions like empathy and temperament, and massive mobilisation of people around the world, to fight against the injustices and inequities of their immediate environments.

Rationale

All of these, in some way or the other, hint at new models of cyborgification which we need to unpack in order to understand a few questions which have been at the helm of all philosophical inquiry and practical design around Internet and Society:

How do we understand ourselves as human? What are the technologies that define being human?
How do conceptualise the technological beyond prosthetic imaginations? How do we understand technology (especially the digital) as a condition?
What are the new challenges we shall face in law, ethics, life and social sciences as we increasingly live in Cyborg societies?

We , the Cyborgs, is a first of its kind research inquiry that locates these questions in a quickly digitising India to see the challenges of being human in the time of technological futures. In her seminal body of work on Cyborgs, Donna Haraway had posited the cyborg as a creature of fiction and ironies; a monster, a trickster, a boundary creature that is irreducible to the existing binaries of human-technology, technology-nature, nature-regulation. In imagining the cyborg as simultaneously fictitious and embodied in practices of care and labour, Haraway was further hinting at a set of questions that have never really entered discourse on cyborgs: Who are we when we become cyborgs? What do we do with the cyborgs we have produced? What are the other kinds of cyborgs? What are the new places them? What are the other ways of understanding cyborgs? Asha Achuthan in her monograph Re:Wiring Bodies, maps these questions along the axes of Presence, Access, Inclusion and Resistance to understand ‘attitudes to technology’. Achuthan talks about a moment of elision where technology is separated from the human body in the space of policy and critique. In those moments of separation, there is the production of a cyborg body that is suddenly vulnerable because it does not have the support of the technological which was an essential part of its bodily experience. How does this body get assimilated in our technology practices? What are the axes of discrimination and inequity that are attributed to these bodies in the process of cyborg making? Who are the actors that play a part in designing these cyborg bodies and selves? In the Indian context, where there has been a legacy of being technosocial subjects and cyborg citizens in the nation’s own technoscience imagination of itself, we need to locate the cyborg in new sites and contexts to see what the regulation of technology and its integration in everyday life.

Methodology

Building upon her work, We, The Cyborgs, seeks to locate the cyborg in India, on 3 interdisciplinary but connected sites to examine how bodies, in their interaction with the design and practice of different processes of regulation and control, are in the process of becoming cyborgs. The inquiry locates the cyborg at intersections of Health Care, Planning and Gender, to start unpacking the different futures of the body-technology relationships that have been posited in terms like post-human, techno-social, simulated bodies, bodies as traffic, etc. In the process, it hopes to unravel the questions of methods, frameworks, ethics and practices of bodies in conditions of technology. We, The Cyborgs, aims to bring together a wide range of researchers and practitioners from different disciplinary locations including but not limited to – Art, Anthropology, Law, Planning, Architecture and Design, Gender and Sexuality studies, Cultural Studies, Life Sciences, Medicine, New Media Studies, etc. – to start a debate around some of the key issues around cyborgs and cyborg-making in their fields.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/we-cyborgs/challenges-for-future-of-human

We, the Cyborgs: Challenges for the Future of being Human

kaeru — 2012-12-14T12:15:23Z

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

We, the Cyborgs: Challenges for the Future of being Human

Asha Achuthan — 2012-03-22T04:11:42Z

Rationale

How do we understand ourselves as human? What are the technologies that define being human?
How do conceptualise the technological beyond prosthetic imaginations? How do we understand technology (especially the digital) as a condition?
What are the new challenges we shall face in law, ethics, life and social sciences as we increasingly live in Cyborg societies?

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

User Experiences of Digital Financial Risks and Harms

2023-12-22T16:05:26Z

The reach and use of digital financial services has risen in recent years without a commensurate increase in digital literacy and access. Through this project, supported by a grant from Google(.)org, we will examine the landscape of potential risks and harms posed by digital financial services, and the disproportionate risk that information asymmetry and barriers to access pose for users, especially certain marginalised communities.

Project Background

There is a big evidence gap in the understanding of the financial risks and harms experienced by users of digital financial services. Consequently, adequate consumer protection frameworks and processes to address these harms have been lagging. A survey of 32,000 Indian consumers found only 17% who lost money through banking frauds were able to recoup their funds. Filling this gap is crucial to inform responsive policy making, platform design and data governance.

While a lot more attention is paid to financial frauds and scams, through this study, we aim to situate these alongside experiences of harms that are understudied and sometimes overlooked. Users may also experience financial harm, when negatively impacted by:

Financial misinformation
Loss of control over their assets
Loss of potential income
Difficulty accessing social protection
Financial abuse perpetrated alongside other forms of domestic and family abuse
Unsustainable levels of debt, i.e. over-indebtedness, and
Exclusion from financial services

The Centre for Internet and Society is undertaking a mixed methods study to better understand user awareness, perceptions and experiences of digital financial risks and harms.

For this study, we will survey nearly 4000 users, with differing levels of access to digital devices, digital services and the internet, and undertake semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions with specific target groups and stakeholders. We aim to highlight the experiences of persons with disabilities, gender and sexual minorities, the elderly, women, and regional language first users; to better understand how discrimination and exclusion may increase their burden of risk when using digital financial services.

Key research questions guiding our project are:

How are digital financial risks understood and experienced by users of digital financial services? Which socioeconomic factors amplify risks for different user groups?
What concerns have emerged relating to data privacy, misinformation, identity theft and other forms of social engineering and mobile app based fraud?
How accessible are providers’ and government’s platform based reporting and grievance redressal systems?
What role can fintech platforms, social media platforms, banking institutions, and regulatory bodies play in reducing digital financial risks across the ecosystem?

Project Aims

Through this study, we aim to:

Assess the financial risks and harms users are exposed to when using social media, digital banking, and fintech platforms. While looking at general users, we will also specifically explore this experience for the elderly, gender and sexual minorities, regional language users and persons with visual disabilities.
Develop a framework to categorise the nature of vulnerabilities, risks and harms faced by the concerned user groups
Create a credible evidence base for key stakeholders with regards to experiences of digital financial risks and harm.
Provide recommendations for better policy and platform design to address harms, specifically those arising from lack of accessibility and information asymmetry.
Identify best practices to respond to digital risks and foster safety and equity in digital financial services

Come Talk to Us:

If you have experiences or insights to share, or if you're interested in learning more about our study, please reach out.

We also invite researchers, financial service providers, developers and designers of fintech platforms, and civil society organisations working on digital safety, to speak to us and help inform the study. You may contact garima@cis-india.org

Research Team: Amrita Sengupta, Chiara Furtado, Garima Agrawal, Nishkala Sekhar, Puthiya Purayil Sneha, and Yesha Tshering Paul

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/user-experiences-of-digital-financial-risks-and-harms

Unpacking video-based surveillance in New Delhi

Aayush Rathi and Ambika Tandon — 2019-06-20T05:13:25Z

Aayush Rathi and Ambika Tandon presented at an international workshop on 'Urban Data, Inequality and Justice in the Global South', on 14 June 2019, at the University of Manchester. The agenda for the workshop and the slides from the presentation by Aayush and Ambika are available below.

Agenda of the workshop: Download (DOCX)

Slides from the presentation: Download (PDF)

The aim of the workshop was to present findings from case studies on urban data justice commissioned by the Sustainable Consumption Institute and Centre for Development Informatics at the University of Manchester, on aspects of justice in data systems in cities across the world. Aayush and Ambika presented their study on video-based surveillance in New Delhi, which was conducted across a period of 3 months earlier this year. The study aimed to assess the extent to which CCTV surveillance systems in Delhi support the needs of women in the city, including lower class women and those from informal settlements. The study will be published as a working paper by the University of Manchester in the coming months.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/unpacking-video-based-surveillance-in-new-delhi-urban-data-justice

Unpacking Algorithmic Infrastructures: Mapping the Data Supply Chain in the Healthcare Industry in India

2024-01-05T02:38:22Z

The Unpacking Algorithmic Infrastructures project, supported by a grant from the Notre Dame-IBM Tech Ethics Lab, aims to study the Al data supply chain infrastructure in healthcare in India, and aims to critically analyse auditing frameworks that are utilised to develop and deploy AI systems in healthcare. It will map the prevalence of Al auditing practices within the sector to arrive at an understanding of frameworks that may be developed to check for ethical considerations - such as algorithmic bias and harm within healthcare systems, especially against marginalised and vulnerable populations.

There has been an increased interest in health data in India over the recent years, where health data policies encourage sharing of data with different entities, at the same time, there has been a growing interest in deployment of Al in healthcare from startups, hospitals, as well as multinational technology companies.

Given the invisibility of algorithmic infrastructures that underlie the digital economy and the important decisions these technologies can make about patients' health, it's important to look at how these systems are developed, how data flows within them, how these systems are tested and verified and what ethical considerations inform their deployment.

The Unpacking Algorithmic Infrastructures project, supported by a grant from the Notre Dame-IBM Tech Ethics Lab, aims to study the Al data supply chain infrastructure in healthcare in India, and aims to critically analyse auditing frameworks that are utilised to develop and deploy AI systems in healthcare. It will map the prevalence of Al auditing practices within the sector to arrive at an understanding of frameworks that may be developed to check for ethical considerations - such as algorithmic bias and harm within healthcare systems, especially against marginalised and vulnerable populations.

Research Questions

To what extent organisations take ethical principles into account when developing AI , managing the training and testing dataset, and while deploying the AI in the healthcare sector.
What best practices for auditing can be put in place based on our critical understanding of AI data supply chains and auditing frameworks being employed in the healthcare sector.
What is a possible auditing framework that is best suited to organisations in the majority world.

Research Design and Methods

For this study, we will use a comprehensive mixed methods approach. We will survey professionals working towards designing, developing and deploying AI systems for healthcare in India, across technology and healthcare organizations. We will also undertake in-depth interviews with experts who are part of key stakeholder groups.

We hereby invite researchers, technologists, healthcare professionals, and others working at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence and Healthcare to speak to us and help us inform the study. You may contact Shweta Monhandas at shweta@cis-india.org

Research Team: Amrita Sengupta, Chetna V. M., Pallavi Bedi, Puthiya Purayil Sneha, Shweta Mohandas and Yatharth.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/unpacking-algorithmic-infrastructures

Understanding Feminist Infrastructures: An Exploratory Study of Online Feminist Content Creation Spaces in India

Puthiya Purayil Sneha and Saumyaa Naidu — 2024-03-25T13:02:28Z

This report explores the growth of feminist infrastructures (including the various interpretations of the term), through research on feminist publishing, content creation and curation spaces and how they have informed the contemporary discourse on feminism, gender, and sexuality in India. The rise of online feminist publications, and related digital media content creation and curation spaces, has engendered new forums for debate, networking, and community-building. This report looks at some of the challenges of developing such publications and platforms, and the role of digital infrastructures in mediating contemporary feminist work and politics.

Click here to download the full report.

The internet and digital media technologies have played an important role in contemporary feminist practice – in addition to social media activism, their growing prevalence in academia, advocacy, and creative expression illustrate how digital media contributes to efforts to question asymmetries of power and knowledge. In the last few years, the concept of a feminist internet and forms of feminist infrastructures have emerged as crucial entry points to understand the affordances of the digital and its many challenges, especially for women and other structurally disadvantaged communities.Feminist content creation has been integral to contemporary feminist work in India, and is an entry-point into discussions on what could be a feminist internet. The growth of online feminist publications, and related digital media content creation and curation spaces, has engendered new forums for debate, networking, and community-building. This study looks at the development of feminist infrastructures (including various interpretations of the term) through an exploration of online feminist publishing, content creation and curation spaces, and their impact on the contemporary discourse on feminism, gender, and sexuality in India.

Through conversations with select online feminist publishing, content creation, and curation spaces, this study outlines motivations for choosing certain media, nature of content, languages and design, and how such choices inform practice and politics. In addition to the above, we also conducted two workshops on feminist infrastructure wishlists, and feminist principles of design and infrastructure. These conversations have offered several insights on the landscape of feminist content creation in India, and the affordances and challenges of digital technologies in facilitating contemporary feminist work. An overarching aim of the project is to unpack the term ‘feminist infrastructure’ and its interpretations in the context of the transition to digital content creation and publication. We aim to continue these conversations with a focus on the larger, often invisible role of digital infrastructures in the development of discourse on human rights, free speech and safety, to understand what are challenges to, and efforts being undertaken to create an inclusive, accessible and feminist internet.

Contributors

Research and Writing Puthiya Purayil Sneha and Saumyaa Naidu

Review Dr. Padmini Ray Murray, Design Beku

Design Saumyaa Naidu and Yatharth

Copy Editing The Clean Copy

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/understanding-feminist-structures

The Task of the Translator after Google

praskrishna — 2011-10-07T05:36:43Z

Hans Verghese Mathews, a distinguished fellow with the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) will give a public lecture on April 30, 2011.

The talk will consider again ― proceeding upon the increasing 'searchability' of literary corpora that the Web will presumably allow ― the special task assigned the translator by Walter Benjamin: which was the 'restitution' of 'originals' through the 'afterlives' given them by their 'traducings' into other languages. A reformulation of that task will be attempted: but the exercise will be conducted in an illustrative way, in the course of examining the approved translation into English of El Aleph, one of the more famous among the early ficciones of Borges.

Hans Varghese Mathews

Hans Varghese Mathews read philosophy as an undergraduate, at the University of Southern California, studying logic and aesthetics; and went on to obtain a doctorate in mathematics, from the University of Wisconsin, studying algebraic topology primarily, with mathematical logic and philosophy as subsidiary subjects. He has been a research associate with the Indian Statistical Institute, and has written extensively on visual art for Frontline; he currently directs mathematical modelling for an analytics firm, and is a contributing editor to the online journal Phalanx. He has an abiding interest in the formal understanding of painting and poetry; and a more recent and dominating interest in the mathematisation of the social sciences.

VIDEO

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/lecture-by-hans

The Spaces of Digital

sneha-pp — 2015-10-24T13:41:25Z

'The Spaces of Digital’ continues from the work done on the CIS-RAW monograph on the Internet, Society and Space in Indian Cities, by Pratyush Shankar at Center for Environmental Planning and Technology University, Ahmedabad. The premise of this monograph was the debates around making of IT Cities and public planning policies that regulate and restructure the city spaces in India with the emergence of internet technologies.

The Spaces of Digital begins from here to further explore the city as a unit of global development. The rise of digital technologies and the ways in which they produce new metaphors for the domains of life, labour and language, result in the city being reconfigured, reimagined and remapped through the techno-spatial narratives produced by information and network webs. The project will explore this in four stages, namely:

Stage 1: Knowledge Maps

The first phase of the project seeks to build a knowledge network that maps the different actors interested in questions of techno-social cities, generating a dialogue between them and building a knowledge repository that brings in different modes, formats and forms of knowledge to intersect with each other.

Stage 2: Spatial Patterns - Digital Project

The monograph “Internet, Society and Space in Indian Cities” refers to the spatial reconfiguration of many Indian cities that has occurred in the past two decades. An exercise to extract the key spatial patterns will be carried out in form of graphical representation using existing information from the monograph.

Stage 3: Knowledge Networking Building

The mapping and demonstration project will be followed by a curated workshop that invites a dialogue between the identified knowledge partners.

Stage 4: Knowledge Exhibition / Publication

The Knowledge Exhibition will be a hybrid space of online and offline curation and knowledge consolidation, and will be the final product of the project.

Some of the updates on this project may be accessed here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/the-spaces-of-digital

The new language of Internet: A report on the Chutnefying Hinglish Conference

nishant — 2011-04-02T15:10:19Z

The Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, was an institutional partner to India's first Global Conference on Hinglish - Chutnefying English, organised by Dr. Rita Kothari at the Mudra Institute of Communications, Ahmedabad. A photographic report for the event is now available here.

In January of 2009, Dr. Rita Kothari, at the Mudra Institute of Communications, Ahmedabad, organised the first global conference called “Chutneyfying English”, calling in various stakeholders from different walks of life – academics, scholars, researchers, actors, cultural producers, authors and consumers to critically examine the growing phenomenon of Hinglish and how it intersects with our globalised lives. The two day conference brought together a series of presentations, ranging from academic papers to lively round table discussions to panels that looked at the different manifestations of Hinglish and the political and aesthetic potential of this particular form. Scholars like Rita Kothari, Harish Trivedi, Nishant Shah, Daya Thussu, Shanon Finch and Rupert Snell were complemented by cultural producers like Nandita Das, R. Raj Rao, and Shuchi Kothari. Literary stakeholders like Urvashi Bhutalia, Bachi Karkaria, and Tej Bhatia rubbed shoulders with more mainstream practitioners like Prasoon Joshi, Mahesh Bhatt and Cyrus Broacha.

The Centre for Internet and Society was an institutional partner for the event, and supported the panel on New Media, which saw four paper presentations and a discussion moderated by Nishant Shah, Director Research at the CIS. The panel explored diverse presentations from Mattangi Krishnamurthy, Pramod Nair and Supriya Gokarn, who looked at the diverse ways in which the rise of Internet and digital technologies is not only changing the ways in which people express themselves, but they are also leading to complex ways in which new conditions of identity, consumption and politics are manifesting themselves. Nishant Shah responded to the panel by positing the idea of Hinglish as a paradigm, rather than a set of characteristics, which goes beyond the questions of language and actually resides in the aesthetic conditions of the internet technologies.

A photographic documentation of the event with an introduction by Dr. Rita Kothari, the chief organiser and curator for the conference is now available for a free download here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/Hinglish