Centre for Internet and Society

Digital Activism in Asia Reader

sumandro — 2015-10-24T14:36:44Z

The digital turn might as well be marked as an Asian turn. From flash-mobs in Taiwan to feminist mobilisations in India, from hybrid media strategies of Syrian activists to cultural protests in Thailand, we see the emergence of political acts that transform the citizen from being a beneficiary of change to becoming an agent of change. In co-shaping these changes, what the digital shall be used for, and what its consequences will be, are both up for speculation and negotiation. Digital Activism in Asia marks a particular shift where these questions are no longer being refracted through the ICT4D logic, or the West’s attempts to save Asia from itself, but shaped by multiplicity, unevenness, and urgencies of digital sites and users in Asia. It is our great pleasure to present the Digital Activism in Asia Reader.

The Book

The Reader took shape over two workshops with a diverse range of participants, including activists, change-makers, and scholars, organised by the Researchers at Work (RAW) programme in June 2014 and March 2015. During the first workshop, the participants identified the authors, topics, and writings that should be included/featured in the reader, based upon their relevance in the grounded practices of the participants, who came from various Asian countries. The second workshop involved open discussions regarding how the selected readings should be annotated, from key further questions to strategies of introducing them, followed by development of the annotations by the participants of the workshop. The full list of contributors, annotators, and editors is mentioned at the end of the book.

We are grateful to the Meson Press for its generous and patience support throughout the development process of the book.

Please download, read, and share this open-access book from the Meson Press website.

The Reader has been edited by Nishant Shah, P.P. Sneha, and Sumandro Chattapadhyay, with support from Anirudh Sridhar, Denisse Albornoz, and Verena Getahun.

Excerpt from the Foreword

Compiling this Reader on Digital Activism in Asia is fraught with compelling challenges, because each of the key terms in the formulation of the title is sub-ject to multiple interpretations and fierce contestations. The construction of ‘Asia’ as a region, has its historical roots in processes of colonial technologies of cartography and navigation. Asia was both, a measured entity, mapped for resources to be exploited, and also a measure of the world, promising anorientation to the Western World’s own turbulent encounters. As Chen Kuan-Hsing points out in his definitive history of the region, Asia gets re-imagined as a ‘method’ in cold-war conflicts, becoming the territory to be assimilated through exports of different ideologies and cultural purports. Asia does not have its own sense of being aregion. The transactions, interactions, flows and exchanges between different countries and regions in Asia have been so entirely mediated by powers of colonisation that the region remains divided and reticent in its imagination of itself. However, by the turn of the 21st century, Asia has seen a new awakening. It finds a regional identity, which, surprisingly did not emerge from its consolidating presence in global economics or in globalised structures of trade and commerce. Instead, it finds a presence, for itself, through a series of crises of governance, of social order, of political rights, and of cultural productions, that binds it together in unprecedented ways.

The digital turn might as well be marked as an Asian turn, because with the new networks of connectivity, with Asian countries marking themselves as informatics hubs, working through a circulated logic of migrant labour and dis-tributed resources, there came a sense of immediacy, proximity, and urgencythat continues to shape the Asian imagination in a new way. In the last decade or so, the rapid changes that have emerged, creating multiple registers of modernity, identity, and community in different parts of Asia, accelerated by a seamless exchange of ideas, commodities, cultures, and people have created a new sense of the region as emerging through co-presence rather than competition and conflict. Simultaneously, the emergence of global capitals of information, labour and cultural export, have created new reference points by which the region creates its identities and networks that are no longer subject to the tyranny of Western hegemony...

While the digital remains crucial to this shaping of contemporary Asia, both in sustaining the developmental agenda that most of the countries espouse, and in opening up an inward looking gaze of statecraft and social organisation, the digital itself remains an ineffable concept. Largely because the digital is like a blackbox that conflates multiple registers of meaning and layers of life, it becomes important to unengineer it and see what it enables and hides. The economic presence of the digital is perhaps the most visible in telling the story of Asia in the now. Beginning with the dramatic development of Singapore as the centre of informatics governance and the emergence of a range of cities from Shanghai to Manilla and Bangalore to Tehran, there has been an accelerated narrative of economic growth and accumulation of capital that is often the global face of the Asian turn. However, this economic reordering is not a practice in isolation. It brings with it, a range of social stirrings that seek to overthrow traditional structures of oppression, corruption, control, and injustice that have often remained hidden in the closed borders of Asian countries. However, the digital marks a particular shift where these questions are no longer being excavated by the ICT4D logic, of the West’s attempts to save Asia from itself. These are questions that emerge from the ground, as more people interact with progressive and liberal politics and aspire not only for higher purchase powers but a better quality of rights. The digital turn has opened up a range of social and political rights based discourses, practices, and movements, where populations are holding their governments and countries responsible, accountable, and culpable in the face of personal and collective loss and injustice...

In the face of this multiplicity of digital sites and usages that are reconfiguring Asia, it is obvious then, that the very nature of what constitutes activism is changing as well. Organised civil society presence in Asia has often had a strong role in shaping modern nation states, but more often than not these processes were defined in the same vocabulary as that of the powers that they were fighting against. Marked by a strong sense of developmentalism and often working in complement to the state rather than keeping a check on the state’s activities, traditional activism in Asia has often suffered from the incapacity to scale and the inability to find alternatives to the state-defined scripts of development, growth and progress. In countries where literacy rates have been low, these movements also suffer from being conceived in philosophical and linguistic sophistry that escapes the common citizen and remains the playground of the few who have privileges afforded to them by class and region. Digital Activism, however, seems to have broken this language barrier, both internally and externally, allowing for new visualities enabled by ubiquitous computing to bring various stakeholders into the fray... At the same time, the digital itself has introduced new problems and concerns that are often glossed over, in the enthralling tale of progress. Concerns around digital divide, invasive practices of personal data gathering, the nexus of markets and governments that install the citizen/consumer in precarious conditions, and the re-emergence of organised conservative politics are also a part of the digital turn. Activism has had to focus not only on digital as a tool, but digital also as a site of protest and resistance...

The Reader does not offer an index of the momentous emergence with the growth of the digital or a chronological account of how digital activism in Asia has grown and shaped the region. Instead, the Reader attempts a crowd-sourced compilation that presents critical tools, organisations, theoretical concepts, political analyses, illustrative case-studies and annotations, that an emerging network of changemakers in Asia have identified as important in their own practices within their own contexts.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-activism-in-asia-reader

Decolonizing the Internet’s Languages 2019 - From Conversations to Actions

sneha-pp — 2019-11-01T17:53:40Z

Whose Knowledge? is organising the Decolonizing the Internet's Languages 2019 gathering in London on October 23-24 — with a specific focus on building an agenda for action to decolonize the internet’s languages. Puthiya Purayil Sneha is participating in this meeting with scholars, linguists, archivists, technologists and community activists, to share the initial findings towards the State of the Internet’s Language Report (to be published in 2020) being developed by Whose Knowledge?, Oxford Internet Institute, and the CIS.

Event page: URL

Agenda: Download (PDF)

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/dtil-2019-from-conversations-to-actions

December 2011 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2012-07-23T08:35:03Z

Welcome to the newsletter issue of December 2011. This issue carries a special section on Freedom of Expression as there was much discussion regarding the Union Minister for Communications and Information Technology, Mr. Kapil Sibal’s proposal for pro-active censorship of social media.

Digital Natives with a Cause?

Digital Natives with a Cause? is a knowledge programme initiated by CIS, India and Hivos, Netherlands. It is a research inquiry that seeks to look at the changing landscapes of social change and political participation and the role that young people play through digital and internet technologies, in emerging information societies. The collaboration has produced a four book collective around ‘digital revolutions’ in a post Arab spring world, a position paper, a scouting report and three international workshops in Taipei, Johannesburg and Santiago.

Blog Entry

The Digital Other: Nishant Shah raises his concerns that increasingly, Digital Natives are acting as pure consumers of technology and gadgets, and seem willing to do so. The blog post was published in DML Central, 14 December 2011.

Events

Digital Native Video Contest, jointly organised by CIS and Hivos. Submission guidelines and FAQs are online. Submit your proposal online by 26 January 2012.
Digital AlterNatives Tweet-a-Review, 17 – 26 December 2011: 'Digital Natives with a Cause?' Project invites readers to review essays from the 'Digital AlterNatives with a Cause', a four-book collective published by Centre for Internet & Society and Hivos.

Book Reviews

Unpacking Digital Natives from their Shiny Packaging: “The ‘Digital Natives’ concept is neither necessarily nor inherently positive, as YiPing Tsou highlights in her chapter Digital Natives in the Name of a Cause: From Flash Mob to "Human Flesh Search.” — Argyri Panezi
On Natives, Norms and Knowledge: “It is a text I strongly recommend, especially to those interested in the reasons behind contemporary policies that try to regulate digital activism such as the US SOPA Act.” — Philip Ketzel
Digital Native: Twin Manifestations or Co-Located Hybrids: “Ben-David’s piece is a well-articulated and informed attempt to resolve two of the several conceptual fuzziness of the term Digital Native. She attempts this in a philosophical manner: trying to move away from the ontological who are Digital Natives? to an epistemological when and where are Digital Natives?” — Samuel Tettner

Pathways for Learning in Higher Education

The Pathways Project for Learning in Higher Education is a collaboration between the Higher Education Innovation and Research Applications (HEIRA) at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS) and the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS). The project is supported by the Ford Foundation and works with disadvantaged students in nine undergraduate colleges in Maharashtra, Karnataka and Kerala, to explore relationships between technologies, higher education and the new forms of social justice in India.

Workshop Report

The Digital Classroom: Social Justice and Pedagogy: Nishant Shah captures some of the questions that were thrown up and discussed at the 2 day Faculty Training workshop for participant from colleges included in the Pathways to Higher Education programme, supported by Ford Foundation and collaboratively executed by the Higher Education Innovation and Research Application and the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore

Blog Post

Technology, Social Justice and Higher Education by Nishant Shah, 7 December 2011.

Event Organised

Pathways 3rd Faculty Workshop & Regional Facilitators Meeting at CSCS, 8–10 December 2011, CSCS, Bangalore, Nishant Shah participated in the workshop.

Accessibility

India has an estimated 70 million disabled persons who are unable to read printed materials due to some form of physical, sensory, cognitive or other disability. The disabled need accessible content, devices and interfaces facilitated via copyright law and electronic accessibility policies. So far we have organised Right to Read campaigns in the four metro cities of Chennai, Kolkata, Delhi and Mumbai, made a submission to amend the Indian Copyright to the HRD Ministry, researched on accessible mobile handsets in India, analysed the Working Draft of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, and published a policy handbook on e-accessibility and a book on universal service for persons with disabilities.

Publications

Universal Service for Persons with Disabilities: Published by G3ict and CIS in cooperation with the Hans Foundation. The book is co-authored by Axel Leblois, Executive Director, G3ict, Deepti Bharthur and Nirmita Narasimhan.
The Business Case for Web Accessibility: NASSCOM Foundation has published a handbook on web accessibility titled “Understanding Web Accessibility — A Guide to Create Accessible Work Environments”. Nirmita Narasimhan authored a chapter “The Business Case for Web Accessibility”.

Submission

Accessibility in the New Telecom Policy 2011: CIS was part of the 27 organisations that responded to the call for comments on NTP 2011. The submission was made to the Department of Telecommunications, Ministry of Communications & Information Technology, Government of India on 9 December 2011.

Interview

An Interview of Nirmita Narasimhan on ITU Portal: ITU Girls in ICT is now online! ITU interviewed Nirmita and published her profile on their website.

Award

Nirmita receives NIVH Award: Nirmita Narasimhan received the NIVH Excellence Award from Justice AS Anand (retd), former chairman of the National Human Rights Commission, on International Day of Persons with Disabilities at the National Institute for the Visually Handicapped in Dehradun on Saturday, 3 December 2011. The Tribune covered the award ceremony and published this in their newspaper on 3 December 2011.

Upcoming Event

ITU Meeting and Tutorial on Audiovisual Media Accessibility, organized by the International Telecommunication Union, India International Centre, 13 – 15 March 2012. CIS is hosting the workshop in collaboration with the ITU-APT Foundation. More information and registration are available at the ITU website.

Access to Knowledge

Access to Knowledge is a campaign to promote the fundamental principles of justice, freedom, and economic development. It deals with issues like copyrights, patents, and trademarks, which are an important part of the digital landscape. We prepared the India report for the CI IP Watchlist, made submission to the HRD Ministry on WIPO Broadcast treaty, questioned the demonization of pirates, and advocated against laws (such as the PUPFIP Bill) that privatize public funded knowledge.

Comments

CIS Intervention on Future Work of the WIPO Advisory Committee on Enforcement
The seventh session of the World Intellectual Property Organization's Advisory Committee on Enforcement (ACE) was held in Geneva on 30 November and 1 December 2011. Pranesh Prakash participated in the event and made the intervention.
Comment by CIS at ACE on Presentation on French Charter on the Fight against Cyber-Counterfeiting: Pranesh Prakash responded to a presentation by Prof. Pierre Sirinelli of the École de droit de la Sorbonne, Université Paris 1 on 'The French Charter on the Fight against Cyber-Counterfeiting of 16 December 2009 during the seventh session of the World Intellectual Property Organization's Advisory Committee on Enforcement (ACE) held in Geneva.

Blog Post

CIS Hosts Scanned Version of George Orwell’s Books vs. Cigarettes: Verbindingen/Jonctions (V/J), the bi-annual multidisciplinary festival organised by Constant took place on 1 December 2011. CIS hosted the scanned pages of the essay in public domain.

Openness

Innovation and creativity should be fostered through openness and collaboration. The advent of Internet has radically defined what it means to be open and collaborative. The Internet itself is built upon open standards and free/libre/open source software. Our endeavour has resulted in a report on open government data, a report on online video environment in India and a film on oral citations on the Wikipedia.

Award

Inaugural EPT Award for Open Access: The Electronic Publishing Trust for Development is pleased to announce the winners of a new annual award to be made to individuals working in developing countries who have made a significant personal contribution to advancing the cause of open access (OA) and the free exchange of research findings. The winner of the inaugural award is Dr Francis Jayakanth of the National Centre for Science Information, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India.

Internet Governance

The Tunis Agenda of the second World Summit on the Information Society has defined internet governance as the development and application by governments, the private sector and civil society, in their respective roles of shared principles, norms, rules, decision-making procedures and programmes that shape the evolution and use of the internet. CIS partnered with Privacy International and Society in Action Group which has produced outputs in banking, telecommunications, consumer rights, media law, sexual minorities, etc., and submitted seven open letters to Parliamentary Finance Committee on UID covering several aspects, feedbacks on NIA Bill, and IT Rules.

Peer Review

Now Streaming on Your Nearest Screen by Nishant Shah, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Volume 3, Issue 1.
Internet and Society in Asia: Challenges and Next Steps by Nishant Shah, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Volume 11, Number 1.

Book Review

The Historian Wins Over the Biographer “In Walter Isaacson's eponymous biography of Steve Jobs, the multibillion dollar man who is credited with single handedly changing the face of computing and the digital media industry, we face the dilemma of a biographer: how do you make sense of a history that is so new, it is still unfolding.”
Nishant Shah's detailed review of Steve Jobs' biography was published in the Biblio Vol. XV Nos. 11 & 12, November- December 2011

Newspaper / Magazine Articles

Spy in the Web The government’s proposed pre-censorship rules undermine the intelligence of an online user and endanger democracy, Nishant Shah, Indian Express, 18 December 2011.
What is Dilligaf? On the web, time moves at the speed of thought: Groups emerge, proliferate and are abandoned as new trends and fads take precedence. Nowhere else is this dramatic flux as apparent as in the language that evolves online, Nishant Shah, GQ India.
Of Surrogate Futures and Scattered Temporalities: Nishant Shah responds to Michael Edwards through this blog post published in the Broker on 27 December 2011.

Interview

An Interview with Dr. Ann Cavoukian: Elonnai Hickok interviews Dr. Ann Cavoukian, Information and Privacy Commissioner, Ontario, Canada.
When the digital spills into the physical: Nishant Shah tells us why flash mobs are an interesting sign of our times, and not just a passing fad. MidDay published this interview in their newspaper on 18 December 2011.

Video

Phishing Attacks on the Rise: Sunil Abraham was on the TV Channel News 9 on 2 December 2011 speaking about two visual cues to distinguish between the fake and the real websites.

Media Coverage

India’s dreams of web censorship, Financial Time's beyondbrics, 6 December 2011, Sunil Abraham was quoted in this post.
Did He, Didn’t He by Rahul Bhatia, Open Magazine (issue: 7-14 December 2011)
Much at stake for tech sector in UID project by Pranav Nambiar, Economic Times, 12 December 2011. Sunil Abraham was quoted in this article.
On the net, red herring by Javed Anwer, The Times of India, 4 December 2011. Sunil Abraham was quoted in this article.
Twitter, Facebook take the lead in blogosphere as blog searches fall by half by Ameya Chumbhale, Economic Times, 17 November 2011. Pranesh Prakash was quoted in this article.

Event Report

Exposing Data: Art Slash Activism organised by Tactical Tech and CIS in Bangalore on 28 November 2011. Zainab Bawa, Ayisha Abraham, Ward Smith and Marek Tuszinsky gave a talk. Videos of the event are now online.

Upcoming Events

Privacy Matters — Analyzing the "Right to Privacy Bill": Privacy India in partnership with International Development Research Centre, Canada, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, the Godrej Culture Lab, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai and the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore is organising "Privacy Matters", a public conference at IIT, Bombay on 21 January 2012.

The High Level Privacy Conclave: Privacy India in partnership with the International Development Research Centre, Canada, Society in Action Group, Gurgaon and Privacy International, UK is organizing the High Level Privacy Conclave at the Paharpur Business Centre, Nehru Place Greens in New Delhi on Friday, 3 February 2012.

All India Privacy Symposium: Privacy India in partnership with the International Development Research Centre, Canada, Society in Action Group, Gurgaon, Privacy International, UK and Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative is organizing the All India Privacy Symposium at the India International Centre, New Delhi on Saturday, 4 February 2012.

Event Organised

Dialogue Cafe @ Centre for Internet and Society, 2 Dec 2011, Kavita Philip gave a talk.

Special Section on Freedom of Expression

We usually cover Freedom of Expression under Internet Governance. However, this month there has been much discussion regarding the Union Minister for Communications and Information Technology, Mr. Kapil Sibal’s proposal for pro-active censorship of social media. This special section covers reportage and original content from CIS:

Newspaper / Magazine Articles

Invisible Censorship: How the Government Censors Without Being Seen by Pranesh Prakash: The Indian government wants to censor the Internet without being seen to be censoring the Internet. The article was translated into Marathi and featured in Lokmat, 18 December 2011.
US Clampdown Worse than the Great Firewall by Sunil Abraham: If you thought China’s Internet censorship was evil, think again. American moves to clean up the Web could hurt global surfers. Sunil Abraham wrote this article in Tehelka, Volume 8, Issue 50, 17 December 2011.
That’s the Unkindest Cut, Mr. Sibal by Sunil Abraham: There’s Kolaveri-di on the Internet over Kapil Sibal’s diktat to social media sites to prescreen users’ posts. That diktat goes far beyond the restrictions placed on our freedom of expression by the IT Act. But, says Sunil Abraham of the Centre for Internet and Society, India is not going to be silenced online. Deccan Chronicle, 11 December 2011.

Blog Posts

Online Pre-Censorship is Harmful and Impractical by Pranesh Prakash: The Union Minister for Communications and Information Technology, Mr. Kapil Sibal wants Internet intermediaries to pre-censor content uploaded by their users. Pranesh Prakash takes issue with this and explains why this is a problem, even if the government's heart is in the right place.
Press Coverage of Online Censorship Row: We are maintaining a rolling blog with press references to the row created by the proposal by the Union Minister for Communications and Information Technology to pre-screen user-generated Internet content.

Radio Broadcast

Social media sites refuse Indian censorship request: Sunil Abraham spoke to Radio Australia. Follow the broadcast here

Live Chat

Is the govt bid to regulate content on the Internet a good thing?: Pranesh Prakash answered questions freedom of expression vis-a-vis objectionable content live on CNN-IBN's chat feature, 7 December 2011.

Media Coverage

Caught in the Web: “As it is the status of freedom of speech in India is in a bad shape. Sibal's new rules will only make it worse.”— Sunil Abraham in Hindu Business Line, 13 December 2011.

Online gag: Existing rules give little freedom: “Our criticism is of the policy and not of the websites and Internet entities that are forced to err on the side of caution when faced by such notices.” — Sunil Abraham in the Times of India, 9 December 2011.
Facebook, Google tell India they won’t screen for derogatory content: “Researchers sent mock take-down notices to seven sites, complaining about their content... six sites immediately deleted content. They did not even verify the validity of our flawed complaint. They over-complied.” — Sunil Abraham in Washington Post, 6 December 2011.
‘Any Normal Human Being Would Be Offended’: “Indian law seems to state that it has global jurisdiction but that is not really true. An Indian court might give an order that is unenforceable in the United States or anywhere else.” — Sunil Abraham in the New York Times, 6 December 2011.
IT Inc oppose Sibal’s ‘great’ firewall proposal: “You wouldn’t want to end up with a situation where you are denied access to, say, the website of the University of Sussex because the address contains the word ‘sex’.” — Nishant Shah in Indian Express, 7 December 2011.
Online @ India: “I haven't yet heard of anybody in India going on a rampage because somebody in Pakistan started an 'India hate' page.” — Nishant Shah in the Hindustan Times, 10 December 2011.
How ‘private-censorship’ is making online content disappear, quietly: “Google’s self-reported compliance rate of 51 per cent shows that they are probably over-stepping the law in order to appease the Indian government’s requests.” — Pranesh Prakash in FirstPost, 15 December 2011.
Kapil Sibal to sterilise Net but undercover sting shows 6 of 7 websites already trigger-happy to censor under ‘chilling’ IT Act, Legally India, 7 December 2011. Sunil Abraham was quoted in this blog post.
‘Chilling’ Impact of India’s April Internet Rules by Heather Simmons, New York Times, 7 December 2011.
Govt wants to scrub the Internet clean, Livemint, 7 December 2011. Sunil Abraham was quoted in this article.
India's Techies Angered Over Internet Censorship Plan, NPR, 20 December 2011. Pranesh Prakash was quoted in this blog post.
Internet, social media access should not be blocked: Ban, Oman Tribune, 10 December 2011. Sunil Abraham was quoted in this article.
India entering the Minority Report age?, ioL scietech. Sunil Abraham was quoted in this.
Los internautas indios se oponen a la censura a través de la Red, Diario de Navarra, 7 December 2011. Sunil Abraham was quoted in the Spanish newspaper.
Technological beasts like Facebook, Orkut, YouTube & Google impossible to control by Sunanda Poduwal & Kamya Jaiswal, Economic Times, 11 December 2011. Sunil Abraham was quoted in the article.
Google V/s Kapil Sibal by Sundeep Dougal in Outlook, 8 December 2011. Pranesh Prakash's work at CIS has been extensively quoted in this blog post.
India bid to censor Internet draws flak Phil Hazlewood spoke to Sunil Abraham and published this article for AFP. France 24, Khaleej Times, Physorg.com, TimesLive, Bangkok Post, Yahoo News, MSN News, Emirates 24/7, Business Live and Jakarta Globe also carried the news on their websites, 9 December 2011.

Videos

Censorship — A Death Knell for Freedom of Expression Online: On 8 December 2011, NDTV aired an interesting discussion on internet censorship. Shashi Tharoor, Soli Sorabjee, Shekhar Kapoor, Ken Ghosh and Sunil Abraham participated in this discussion with NDTV's Sonia Singh.
FTN: Should social networking sites be censored?: Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal met the representatives of Facebook, Google and others seeking to device a screening mechanism. Sunil Abraham was on CNN-IBN from 10.00 p.m. to 10.30 p.m. speaking about freedom of expression in India.
Debate: Online content row-1: Sunil Abraham was on Times Now from 9.05 p.m. to 9.45 p.m. on 6 December 2011 speaking about freedom of expression in India.

Event Organised

Free Speech Online in India under Attack? A Panel Discussion, 21 December 2011. Achal Prabhala, Anja Kovacs, Lawrence Liang and Sunil Abraham gave lectures.

Telecom

The growth in telecommunications in India has been impressive. While the potential for growth and returns exist, a range of issues need to be addressed for this potential to be realized. One aspect is more extensive rural coverage and the second aspect is a countrywide access to broadband which is low at about eight million subscriptions. Both require effective and efficient use of networks and resources, including spectrum. In this connection, Shyam Ponappa continues to write his monthly column for the Business Standard.

Newspaper Article

Healing self-inflicted wounds by Shyam Ponappa, Business Standard, 1 December 2011: A spate of dysfunctional actions and retrograde developments has led to an unimaginable mess for India. Can the damage to growth prospects be undone? Does it need to be? If so, how?

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CIS is grateful to Kusuma Trust which was founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin, for its core funding and support for most of its projects.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/december-2011-bulletin

Data Lives of Humanities Text

sneha-pp — 2020-12-23T13:07:43Z

The ‘computational turn’ in the humanities has brought with it several questions and challenges for traditional ways of engaging with the ‘text’ as an object of enquiry. The prevalence of data-driven scholarship in the humanities offers several challenges to traditional forms of work and practice, with regard to theory, tools, and methods. In the context of the digital, ‘text’ acquires new forms and meanings, especially with practices such as distant reading. Drawing upon excerpts from an earlier study on digital humanities in India, this essay discusses how data in the humanities is not a new phenomenon; concerns about the ‘datafication’ of humanities, now seen prominently in digital humanities and related fields is actually reflective of a longer conflict about the inherited separation between humanities and technology. It looks at how ‘data’ in the humanities has become a new object of enquiry as a result of several changes in the media landscape in the past few decades. These include large-scale digitalization and availability of corpora of materials (digitized and born-digital) in an array of formats and across varied platforms, thus leading to also a steady prevalence of the use of computational methods in working with and studying cultural artifacts today. This essay also explores how reading ‘text as data’ helps understand the role of data in the making of humanities texts and redefines traditional ideas of textuality, reading, and the reader.

This essay by Puthiya Purayil Sneha was published in Lives of Data: Essays on Computational Cultures from India (2020) edited by Sandeep Mertia, with a Foreword by Ravi Sundaram as part of the Series on Theory on Demand by Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam.

Read the open access book here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/data-lives-of-humanities-text

Data Infrastructures and Inequities: Why Does Reproductive Health Surveillance in India Need Our Urgent Attention?

Aayush Rathi and Ambika Tandon — 2019-12-30T16:44:32Z

In order to bring out certain conceptual and procedural problems with health monitoring in the Indian context, this article by Aayush Rathi and Ambika Tandon posits health monitoring as surveillance and not merely as a “data problem.” Casting a critical feminist lens, the historicity of surveillance practices unveils the gendered power differentials wedded into taken-for-granted “benign” monitoring processes. The unpacking of the Mother and Child Tracking System and the National Health Stack reveals the neo-liberal aspirations of the Indian state.

The article was first published by EPW Engage, Vol. 54, Issue No. 6, on 9 February 2019.

Framing Reproductive Health as a Surveillance Question

The approach of the postcolonial Indian state to healthcare has been Malthusian, with the prioritisation of family planning and birth control (Hodges 2004). Supported by the notion of socio-economic development arising out of a “modernisation” paradigm, the target-based approach to achieving reduced fertility rates has shaped India’s reproductive and child health (RCH) programme (Simon-Kumar 2006).

This is also the context in which India’s abortion law, the Medical Termination of Pregnancy (MTP) Act, was framed in 1971, placing the decisional privacy of women seeking abortions in the hands of registered medical practitioners. The framing of the MTP act invisibilises females seeking abortions for non-medical reasons within the legal framework. The exclusionary provisions only exacerbated existing gaps in health provisioning, as access to safe and legal abortions had already been curtailed by severe geographic inequalities in funding, infrastructure, and human resources. The state has concomitantly been unable to meet contraceptive needs of married couples or reduce maternal and infant mortality rates in large parts of the country, mediating access along the lines of class, social status, education, and age (Sanneving et al 2013).

While the official narrative around the RCH programme transitioned to focus on universal access to healthcare in the 1990s, the target-based approach continues to shape the reality on the ground. The provision of reproductive healthcare has been deeply unequal and, in some cases, in hospitals. These targets have been known to be met through the practice of forced, and often unsafe, sterilisation, in conditions of absence of adequate provisions or trained professionals, pre-sterilisation counselling, or alternative forms of contraception (Sama and PLD 2018). Further, patients have regularly been provided cash incentives, foreclosing the notion of free consent, especially given that the target population of these camps has been women from marginalised economic classes in rural India.

Placing surveillance studies within a feminist praxis allows us to frame the reproductive health landscape as more than just an ill-conceived, benign monitoring structure. The critical lens becomes useful for highlighting that taken-for-granted structures of monitoring are wedded with power differentials: genetic screening in fertility clinics, identification documents such as birth certificates, and full-body screeners are just some of the manifestations of this (Adrejevic 2015). Emerging conversations around feminist surveillance studies highlight that these data systems are neither benign nor free of gendered implications (Andrejevic 2015). In continual remaking of the social, corporeal body as a data actor in society, such practices render some bodies normative and obfuscate others, based on categorisations put in place by the surveiller.

In fact, the history of surveillance can be traced back to the colonial state where it took the form of systematic sexual and gendered violence enacted upon indigenous populations in order to render them compliant (Rifkin 2011; Morgensen 2011). Surveillance, then, manifests as a “scientific” rationalisation of complex social hieroglyphs (such as reproductive health) into formats enabling administrative interventions by the modern state. Lyon (2001) has also emphasised how the body emerged as the site of surveillance in order for the disciplining of the “irrational, sensual body”—essential to the functioning of the modern nation-state—to effectively happen.

Questioning the Information and Communications Technology for Development (ICT4D) and Big Data for Development (BD4D) Rhetoric

Information and Communications Technology (ICT) and data-driven approaches to the development of a robust health information system, and by extension, welfare, have been offered as solutions to these inequities and exclusions in access to maternal and reproductive healthcare in the country.

The move towards data-driven development in the country commenced with the introduction of the Health Management Information System in Andhra Pradesh in 2008, and the Mother and Child Tracking System (MCTS) nationally in 2011. These are reproductive health information systems (HIS) that collect granular data about each pregnancy from the antenatal to the post-natal period, at the level of each sub-centre as well as primary and community health centre. The introduction of HIS comprised cross-sectoral digitisation measures that were a part of the larger national push towards e-governance; along with health, thirty other distinct areas of governance, from land records to banking to employment, were identified for this move towards the digitalised provisioning of services (MeitY 2015).

The HIS have been seen as playing a critical role in the ecosystem of health service provision globally. HIS-based interventions in reproductive health programming have been envisioned as a means of: (i) improving access to services in the context of a healthcare system ridden with inequalities; (ii) improving the quality of services provided, and (iii) producing better quality data to facilitate the objectives of India’s RCH programme, including family planning and population control. Accordingly, starting 2018, the MCTS is being replaced by the RCH portal in a phased manner. The RCH portal, in areas where the ANMOL (ANM Online) application has been introduced, captures data real-time through tablets provided to health workers (MoHFW 2015).

A proposal to mandatorily link the Aadhaar with data on pregnancies and abortions through the MCTS/RCH has been made by the union minister for Women and Child Development as a deterrent to gender-biased sex selection (Tembhekar 2016). The proposal stems from the prohibition of gender-biased sex selection provided under the Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostics Techniques (PCPNDT) Act, 1994. The approach taken so far under the PCPNDT Act, 2014 has been to regulate the use of technologies involved in sex determination. However, the steady decline in the national sex ratio since the passage of the PCPNDT Act provides a clear indication that the regulation of such technology has been largely ineffective. A national policy linking Aadhaar with abortions would be aimed at discouraging gender-biased sex selection through state surveillance, in direct violation of a female’s right to decisional privacy with regards to their own body.

Linking Aadhaar would also be used as a mechanism to enable direct benefit transfer (DBT) to the beneficiaries of the national maternal benefits scheme. Linking reproductive health services to the Aadhaar ecosystem has been critiqued because it is exclusionary towards women with legitimate claims towards abortions and other reproductive services and benefits, and it heightens the risk of data breaches in a cultural fabric that already stigmatises abortions. The bodies on which this stigma is disproportionately placed, unmarried or disabled females, for instance, experience the harms of visibility through centralised surveillance mechanisms more acutely than others by being penalised for their deviance from cultural expectations. This is in accordance with the theory of "data extremes,” wherein marginalised communities are seen as living on the extremes of data capture, leading to a data regime that either refuses to recognise them as legitimate entities or subjects them to overpolicing in order to discipline deviance (Arora 2016). In both developed and developing contexts, the broader purpose of identity management has largely been to demarcate legitimate and illegitimate actors within a population, either within the framework of security or welfare.

Potential Harms of the Data Model of Reproductive Health Provisioning

Informational privacy and decisional privacy are critically shaped by data flows and security within the MCTS/RCH. No standards for data sharing and storage, or anonymisation and encryption of data have been implemented despite role-based authentication (NHSRC and Taurus Glocal 2011). The risks of this architectural design are further amplified in the context of the RCH/ANMOL where data is captured real-time. In the absence of adequate safeguards against data leaks, real-time data capture risks the publicising of reproductive health choices in an already stigmatised environment. This opens up avenues for further dilution of autonomy in making future reproductive health choices.

Several core principles of informational privacy, such as limitations regarding data collection and usage, or informed consent, also need to be reworked within this context.^[1] For instance, the centrality of the requirement of “free, informed consent” by an individual would need to be replaced by other models, especially in the context of reproductive health of rape survivors who are vulnerable and therefore unable to exercise full agency. The ability to make a free and informed choice, already dismantled in the context of contemporary data regimes, gets further precluded in such contexts. The constraints on privacy in decisions regarding the body are then replicated in the domain of reproductive data collection.

What is uniform across these digitisation initiatives is their treatment of maternal and reproductive health as solely a medical event, framed as a data scarcity problem. In doing so, they tend to amplify the understanding of reproductive health through measurable indicators that ignore social determinants of health. For instance, several studies conducted in the rural Indian context have shown that the degree of women’s autonomy influences the degree of usage of pregnancy care, and that the uptake of pregnancy care was associated with village-level indicators such as economic development, provisioning of basic infrastructure and social cohesion. These contextual factors get overridden in pervasive surveillance systems that treat reproductive healthcare as comprising only of measurable indicators and behaviours, that are dependent on individual behaviour of practitioners and women themselves, rather than structural gaps within the system.

While traditionally associated with state governance, the contemporary surveillance regime is experienced as distinct from its earlier forms due to its reliance on a nexus between surveillance by the state and private institutions and actors, with both legal frameworks and material apparatuses for data collection and sharing (Shepherd 2017). As with historical forms of surveillance, the harms of contemporary data regimes accrue disproportionately among already marginalised and dissenting communities and individuals. Data-driven surveillance has been critiqued for its excesses in multiple contexts globally, including in the domains of predictive policing, health management, and targeted advertising (Mason 2015). In the attempts to achieve these objectives, surveillance systems have been criticised for their reliance on replicating past patterns, reifying proximity to a hetero-patriarchal norm (Haggerty and Ericson 2000). Under data-driven surveillance systems, this proximity informs the preexisting boxes of identity for which algorithmic representations of the individual are formed. The boxes are defined contingent on the distinct objectives of the particular surveillance project, collating disparate pieces of data flows and resulting in the recasting of the singular offline self into various 'data doubles' (Haggerty and Ericson 2000). Refractive, rather than reflective, the data doubles have implications for the physical, embodied life of individual with an increasing number of service provisioning relying on the data doubles (Lyon 2001). Consider, for instance, apps on menstruation, fertility, and health, and wearables such as fitness trackers and pacers, that support corporate agendas around what a woman’s healthy body should look, be or behave like (Lupton 2014). Once viewed through the lens of power relations, the fetishised, apolitical notion of the data “revolution” gives way to what we may better understand as “dataveillance.”

Towards a Networked State and a Neo-liberal Citizen

Following in this tradition of ICT being treated as the solution to problems plaguing India’s public health information system, a larger, all-pervasive healthcare ecosystem is now being proposed by the Indian state (NITI Aayog 2018). Termed the National Health Stack, it seeks to create a centralised electronic repository of health records of Indian citizens with the aim of capturing every instance of healthcare service usage. Among other functions, it also envisions a platform for the provisioning of health and wellness-based services that may be dispensed by public or private actors in an attempt to achieve universal health coverage. By allowing private parties to utilise the data collected through pullable open application program interfaces (APIs), it also fits within the larger framework of the National Health Policy 2017 that envisions the private sector playing a significant role in the provision of healthcare in India. It also then fits within the state–private sector nexus that characterises dataveillance. This, in turn, follows broader trends towards market-driven solutions and private financing of health sector reform measures that have already had profound consequences on the political economy of healthcare worldwide (Joe et al 2018).

These initiatives are, in many ways, emblematic of the growing adoption of network governance reform by the Indian state (Newman 2001). This is a stark shift from its traditional posturing as the hegemonic sovereign nation state. This shift entails the delayering from large, hierarchical and unitary government systems to horizontally arranged, more flexible, relatively dispersed systems.^[2] The former govern through the power of rules and law, while the latter take the shape of self-regulating networks such as public–private contractual arrangements (Snellen 2005). ICTs have been posited as an effective tool in enabling the transition to network governance by enhancing local governance and interactive policymaking enabling the co-production of knowledge (Ferlie et al 2011). The development of these capabilities is also critical to addressing “wicked problems” such as healthcare (Rittel and Webber 1973).^[3] The application of the techno-deterministic, data-driven model to reproductive healthcare provision, then, resembles a fetishised approach to technological change. The NHSRC describes this as the collection of data without an objective, leading to a disproportional burden on data collection over use (NHSRC and Taurus Glocal 2011).

The blurring of the functions of state and private actors is reflective of the neo-liberal ethic, which produces new practices of governmentality. Within the neo-liberal framework of reproductive healthcare, the citizen is constructed as an individual actor, with agency over and responsibility for their own health and well-being (Maturo et al 2016).

“Quantified Self” of the Neo-liberal Citizen

Nowhere can the manifestation of this neo-liberal citizen can be seen as clearly as in the “quantified self” movement. The quantified self movement refers to the emergence of a whole range of apps that enable the user to track bodily functions and record data to achieve wellness and health goals, including menstruation, fertility, pregnancies, and health indicators in the mother and baby. Lupton (2015) labels this as the emergence of the “digitised reproductive citizen,” who is expected to be attentive to her fertility and sexual behaviour to achieve better reproductive health goals. The practice of collecting data around reproductive health is not new to the individual or the state, as has been demonstrated by the discussion above. What is new in this regime of datafication under the self-tracking movement is the monetisation of reproductive health data by private actors, the labour for which is performed by the user. Focusing on embodiment draws attention to different kinds of exploitation engendered by reproductive health apps. Not only is data about the body collected and sold, the unpaid labour for collection is extracted from the user. The reproductive body can then be understood as a cyborg, or a woman-machine hybrid, systematically digitising its bodily functions for profit-making within the capitalist (re)production machine (Fotoloulou 2016). Accordingly, all major reproductive health tracking apps have a business model that relies on selling information about users for direct marketing of products around reproductive health and well-being (Felizi and Varon nd).

As has been pointed out in the case of big data more broadly, reproductive health applications (apps) facilitate the visibility of the female reproductive body in the public domain. Supplying anonymised data sets to medical researchers and universities fills some of the historical gaps in research around the female body and reproductive health. Reproductive and sexual health tracking apps globally provide their users a platform to engage with biomedical information around sexual and reproductive health. Through group chats on the platform, they are also able to engage with experiential knowledge of sexual and reproductive health. This could also help form transnational networks of solidarity around the body and health (Fotopoulou 2016).

This radical potential of network-building around reproductive and sexual health is, however, tempered to a large extent by the reconfiguration of gendered stereotypes through these apps. In a study on reproductive health apps on Google Play Store, Lupton (2014) finds that products targeted towards female users are marketed through the discourse of risk and vulnerability, while those targeted towards male users are framed within that of virility. Apart from reiterating gendered stereotypes around the male and female body, such a discourse assumes that the entire labour of family planning is performed by females. This same is the case with the MCTS/RCH.

Technological interventions such as reproductive health apps as well as HIS are based on the assumption that females have perfect control over decisions regarding their own bodies and reproductive health, despite this being disproved in India. The Guttmacher Institute (2014) has found that 60% of women in India report not having control over decisions regarding their own healthcare. The failure to account for the husband or the family as stakeholder in decision-making around reproductive health has been a historical failure of the family planning programme in India, and is now being replicated in other modalities. This notion of an autonomous citizen who is able to take responsibility of their own reproductive health and well-being does not hold true in the Indian context. It can even be seen as marginalising females who have already been excluded from the reproductive health system, as they are held responsible for their own inability to access healthcare.

Concluding Remarks

The interplay that emerges between reproductive health surveillance and data infrastructures is a complex one. It requires the careful positioning of the political nature of data collection and processing as well as its hetero-patriarchal and colonial legacies, within the need for effective utilisation of data for achieving developmental goals. Assessing this discourse through a feminist lens identifies the web of power relations in data regimes. This problematises narratives of technological solutions for welfare provision.

The reproductive healthcare framework in India then offers up a useful case study to assess these concerns. The growing adoption of ICT-based surveillance tools to equalise access to healthcare needs to be understood in the socio-economic, legal, and cultural context where these tools are being implemented. Increased surveillance has historically been associated with causing the structural gendered violence that it is now being offered as a solution to. This is a function of normative standards being constructed for reproductive behaviour that necessarily leave out broader definitions of reproductive health and welfare when viewed through a feminist lens. Within the larger context of health policymaking in India, moves towards privatisation then demonstrate the peculiarity of dataveillance as it functions through an unaccountable and pervasive overlapping of state and private surveillance practises. It remains to be seen how these trends in ICT-driven health policies affect access to reproductive rights and decisional privacy for millions of females in India and other parts of the global South.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/data-infrastructures-inequities-reproductive-health-surveillance-india

Data for Governance, Governance of Data, and Data Anxieties

sumandro — 2016-07-03T05:59:48Z

The Center for International Media Assistance (CIMA) organised a panel discussion on 'The Data Explosion – How the Internet of Things will Affect Media Freedom and Communication Systems?' at Deutsche Welle's Global Media Forum 2016, held in Bonn, Germany during June 13-15, 2016. Sumandro Chattapadhyay was invited as one of the panelists.

Introduction to the Panel

The emerging Internet of Things (IoT) will result in a vast network of Internet-connected devices that generate enormous volumes of data about human behavior and interactions. This data explosion will potentially reshape how media organizations both collect and report news, while at the same time fundamentally shifting how communications networks are organized worldwide. Yet currently most of the discussion about the IoT has focused on its spread in developed countries via the popularization of Internet-connected consumer devices.

In this panel we will discuss how the IoT may develop differently in the Global South and how it could present either a threat to open access to data and information, or an opportunity to improve media systems worldwide. We will also examine the impact of the data explosion in developing countries and what mechanisms need to be created in order to ensure the huge new mountain of data is used and governed responsibly.

The discussants were Carlos Affonso Souza (Director, Institute for Technology and Society of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), Lorena Jaume-Palasi (Director for Communications, European Dialogue on Internet Governance, or EuroDIG, Switzerland), and Sumandro Chattapadhyay (Research Director, the Centre for Internet and Society, India); and the conversation was led by Mark Nelson (Senior Director, Center for International Media Assistance, or CIMA, USA).

Source: Deutsche Welle.

Audio Recording

Things/Writings I have Mentioned

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/data-for-governance-governance-of-data-and-data-anxieties

Data bleeding everywhere: a story of period trackers

sumandro — 2019-12-06T05:03:09Z

This is an excerpt from an essay by Sadaf Khan, 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: Data bleeding everywhere: a story of period trackers

Sadaf Khan: Media Matters for Democracy and Twitter

...By now there are a number of questions buzzing around my head, most of them unasked. Are users comfortable with so much of their data being collected? Are there really algorithms that string together all this data into medically-relevant trends? How reliable can these trends be when usage is erratic? Are period tracking apps pioneering, fundamental elements of a future where medical aid is digital and reliable data is inevitably linked to the provision of medical services? And if so, are privacy and health soon to become conflicting rights?

I also want to find out how users understand data collection and privacy before giving apps consent to utilize their data and information as they will. Hareem says she gives apps informed consent. ‘If my data becomes a part of the statistics aiding medical research, why not? There is no harm in it. I am getting a good service, and if my data helps create a better understanding as a part of a larger statistical pool, they are welcome to use it.’

But is she really sure that this information will be used only as anonymised data for medical research? ‘Look at the kind of information that is being collected,’ she answers. ‘Dates, mood, consistency of mucus, basal temperature. What kind of use does one have for this data?’

Naila, in turn, says: ‘Honestly, I have never really thought about what happens to the data the application collects. Obviously I enter detailed information about my cycle and my moods and my sex life. But a), my account is under a fake name and b), even if it wasn’t, who would have any use for stuff like when my period starts and ends and what my mood or digestive system is like at any given moment?’

In fact, this sentiment is shared among all the women interviewed for this piece — what use would anyone have for this data?

As users, we often imagine our own data as anonymised within a huge dataset. But as users, we don’t have enough information about how our data is being used — or will be used in future. The open and at times vague language of a platform’s terms and conditions allows menstrual apps to use data in ways that I may not know of. Some apps continue to hold customer data even after an account is deleted. Even though I may technically ‘agree’ to the terms and conditions, is this fully informed consent?

One of the big concerns around this kind of medical information being collected is the potential for collaborations with big pharmaceuticals and other health service providers. With apps sitting on a goldmine of users’ fertility and health information, health service providers might mine their data for potential consumers and reach out directly to them. While this is like any targeted marketing campaign, the fact that the advertiser is likely to be offering medical services to women suffering from infertility and are at their most vulnerable, raises totally different ethical concerns.

And these apps and their businesses might grow in directions that users haven’t taken into consideration. Take Ovia’s health feature for companies to buy premium services for their employees. While the gesture is packaged as a goodwill one, it also means that an employer has access to extremely private and intimate medical information about their women employees. And while the data set is anonymised, it is still possible to figure out the identity of users based on specific information. For example, how many women in any company are pregnant at any given time?...

Pregnant a year after my miscarriage, I initially downloaded multiple apps in a bid to find a good fit. I don’t know which one of these was in communication with Facebook. But almost immediately, my Facebook timeline started becoming littered with ads for baby stuff — clothes, shoes bibs, prams, cribs, ointments for stretch marks, maternity wear, the works.

It makes me think of those old school clockwork-style videos. You drop a ball and off it goes: making dominos fall, knocking over pots and pans, setting in motion absurd, synchronized mechanisms. Similarly, I drop my data and watch it hurtle into my life, on to other platforms, off to vendors. Maybe to stalkers? To employers? Who knows.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/sadaf-khan-data-bleeding-everywhere-a-story-of-period-trackers

Critical Point of View: WikiWars II

praskrishna — 2011-04-05T04:12:17Z

The Centre for Internet and Society (Bangalore), in collaboration with the Institute of Network Cultures (Amsterdam) is hosting the second Critical Point of View (WikiWars) conference in Amsterdam on March 26 and 27, 2010. In this two day event that seeks to engage with different aspects of Wikipedia across different disciplines and practices, we invite students, researchers, Wikipedians and interested stakeholders to come and join us at WikiWars.

WikiWars brings together more than forty scholars, students, practitioners, artists and experts who have been critically reflecting upon the emergence of Wikipedia in various contexts of education, politics, resistance, art theory and practice, knowledge production, learning, pedagogy and new and alternative forms of interaction and community building.

Dates: 26th, 27th March, 2010.

Venue: Public Library Amsterdam

Programme for the event has International and National delegates presenting in panels on Wiki-Theory, Encyclopedia Histories, Wiki Art, Wikipedia Analytics, Designing Debates and Global Issues and Outlooks.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/wikiwars-amsterdam

Critical Point of View: WikiWars

nishant — 2011-04-05T04:18:33Z

The Centre for Internet and Society (Bangalore), in collaboration with the Institute of Network Cultures (Amsterdam), brings together an international range of scholars, researchers, practitioners, artists and users, to critically think through the emergence and spread of Wikipedia in the last few years. In this two day event that seeks to engage with different aspects of Wikipedia across different disciplines and practices, we invite students, researchers, Wikipedians and interested stakeholders to come and join us at WikiWars

Dates: 12th, 13th January, 2010.

Venue: The Bangalore International Centre, The Energy and Resources Institute, 4th Main, Domlur II Stage, Bangalore - 560 071 Karnataka

Programme for the event has 40 International and National delegates presenting in panels on Wiki-Theory, Global Politics of Exclusion, Critique of Free and Open, Wikipedia and Education, Wikipedia and the Place of Resistance, Wikipedia and Western Knowledge Production, and Wikipedia and Art.

Registration opens on 5th January 2010 and ends on 10th January 2010. Registration is free but limited and available on a first come first served basis.
http://www.cis-india.org/research/conferences/conference-blogs/wikwarsreg

For more information on WikiWars, click here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/wikiwars

CPOV : Wikipedia Research Initiative

nishant — 2011-08-23T02:52:25Z

The Second event, towards building the Critical Point of View Reader on Wikipedia, brings a range of scholars, practitioners, theorists and activists to critically reflect on the state of Wikipedia in our contemporary Information Societies. Organised in Amsterdam, Netherlands, by the Institute of Network Cultures, in collaboration with the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, the event builds on the debates and discussions initiated at the WikiWars that launched off the knowledge network in Bangalore in January 2010. Follow the Live Tweets at #CPOV

Second international conference of the CPOV Wikipedia Research Initiative :: March 26-27, 2010 :: OBA (Public Library Amsterdam, next to Amsterdam central station), Oosterdokskade 143, Amsterdam.

Wikipedia is at the brink of becoming the de facto global reference of dynamic knowledge. The heated debates over its accuracy, anonymity, trust, vandalism and expertise only seem to fuel further growth of Wikipedia and its user base. Apart from leaving its modern counterparts Britannica and Encarta in the dust, such scale and breadth places Wikipedia on par with such historical milestones as Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia, the Ming Dynasty’s Wen-hsien ta- ch’ eng, and the key work of French Enlightenment, the Encyclopedie. The multilingual Wikipedia as digital collaborative and fluid knowledge production platform might be said to be the most visible and successful example of the migration of FLOSS (Free/ Libre/ Open Source Software) principles into mainstream culture. However, such celebration should contain critical insights, informed by the changing realities of the Internet at large and the Wikipedia project in particular.

The CPOV Research Initiative was founded from the urge to stimulate critical Wikipedia research: quantitative and qualitative research that could benefit both the wide user-base and the active Wikipedia community itself. On top of this, Wikipedia offers critical insights into the contemporary status of knowledge, its organizing principles, function, and impact; its production styles, mechanisms for conflict resolution and power (re-)constitution. The overarching research agenda is at once a philosophical, epistemological and theoretical investigation of knowledge artifacts, cultural production and social relations, and an empirical investigation of the specific phenomenon of the Wikipedia.

Conference Themes: Wiki Theory, Encyclopedia Histories, Wiki Art, Wikipedia Analytics, Designing Debate and Global Issues and Outlooks.

Follow the live tweets on http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23CPOV

Confirmed speakers: Florian Cramer (DE/NL), Andrew Famiglietti (UK), Stuart Geiger (USA), Hendrik-Jan Grievink (NL), Charles van den Heuvel (NL), Jeanette Hofmann (DE), Athina Karatzogianni (UK), Scott Kildall (USA), Patrick Lichty (USA), Hans Varghese Mathews (IN), Teemu Mikkonen (FI), Mayo Fuster Morell (IT), Mathieu O’Neil (AU), Felipe Ortega (ES), Dan O’Sullivan (UK), Joseph Reagle (USA), Ramón Reichert (AU), Richard Rogers (USA/NL), Alan Shapiro (USA/DE), Maja van der Velden (NL/NO), Gérard Wormser (FR).

Editorial team: Sabine Niederer and Geert Lovink (Amsterdam), Nishant Shah and Sunil Abraham (Bangalore), Johanna Niesyto (Siegen), Nathaniel Tkacz (Melbourne). Project manager CPOV Amsterdam: Margreet Riphagen. Research intern: Juliana Brunello. Production intern: Serena Westra.

The CPOV conference in Amsterdam will be the second conference of the CPOV Wikipedia Research Initiative. The launch of the initiative took place in Bangalore India, with the conference WikiWars in January 2010. After the first two events, the CPOV organization will work on producing a reader, to be launched early 2011. For more information or submitting a reader contribution.

Buy your ticket online (with iDeal), or register by sending an email to: info (at) networkcultures.org. One day ticket: €25, students and OBA members: €12,50. Full conference pass (2 days): €40, students and OBA members: 25.

Organized by the Institute of Network Cultures Amsterdam, in cooperation with the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore, India.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/research/conferences/conference-blogs/cpov

COVID-19 Charter Of Recommendations on Gig Work

Aayush Rathi and Ambika Tandon — 2020-05-13T08:53:02Z

Tandem Research and the Centre for Internet and Society organised a webinar on 9 April 2020, with unions representing gig workers and researchers studying labour rights and gig work, to uncover the experiences of gig workers during the lockdown. Based on the discussion, the participants of the webinar have drafted a set of recommendations for government agencies and platform companies to safeguard workers’ well being. Here are excerpts from this charter of recommendation shared with multiple central and state government agencies and platforms companies.

Summary of discussions from the COVID-19 and Gig Economy webinar, authored by Zothan Mawii, Tandem Research

Contributors

Aayush Rathi, Ambika Tandon and Tasneem Mewa, The Centre for Internet and Society, India
Aditi Surie, Indian Institute for Human Settlements
Anita Gurumurthy and Nandini Chami, IT for Change
Astha Kapoor, Aapti Institute
Dharmendra Vaishnav, Indian Delivery Lions (IDL)
Janaki Srinivasan, International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore
Kaveri Medappa, University of Sussex
Pradyumna Taduri, Fairwork Foundation
Rakhi Sehgal, Gurgaon Shramik Kendra
Sangeet Jain, Researcher
Shaik Salauddin, Indian Federation of App-based Transport Workers (IFAT)
Shohini Sengupta, Assistant Professor of Research, Jindal School of Banking and Finance
Simiran Lalvani, Independent researcher
Tanveer Pasha, Ola, Taxi 4 Sure and Uber Drivers and Owners’ Association (OTU)
P. Vignesh Ilavarasan, Researcher and professor, IIT Delhi
Vinay Sarathy, United Food Delivery Partners’ Union (UFDPU)
Vinay K. Sreenivasa, Advocate, Alternative Law Forum
Zothan Mawii, Iona Eckstein and Urvashi Aneja, Tandem Research

Context

The nationwide lockdown in response to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has had a devastating impact on ‘gig workers’ working for on-demand service platforms such as those providing ride-hailing, home-based work and food delivery services and also e-commerce companies. Those driving for on-demand transportation companies have lost their source of livelihood as services remain suspended.

Workers for on-demand delivery and home-based services, on the other hand, have been deemed “essential” and continue to work although demand has fallen drastically. Earnings for delivery workers have fallen to as low as INR 100-300 per day for a whole day’s work. Workers face a high risk of contracting COVID-19 due to their exposure to multiple customers. Apprehensions are rising after a delivery worker for Zomato tested positive for COVID-19 in New Delhi. Demand has fallen further but delivery workers must continue to put themselves and their families’ health and safety at risk with limited or no provisions for personal protective equipment or other safety measures offered by companies.

The relief works announced by the central and state governments do not specifically provide for ‘gig workers’. At the same time, the measures announced by on-demand service companies are inadequate, ambiguous and inconsistent. The eligibility, manner and quantum of relief and the process of availing relief is unclear to workers.

We urge you to bolster the socio-economic and healthcare protections for ‘gig workers’ in India in light of the outbreak of COVID-19. Any efforts aimed at directing relief to ‘gig workers’ will have to be combined, involving the central and state governments and on-demand service companies.

We suggest that the measures adopted incorporate the recommendations outlined below. The recommendations have been drafted after discussion between civil society actors including labour unions from delivery and transportation sectors, researchers, and activists. A summary of the discussions leading to this charter of recommendations can be found here.

Charter of Recommendation on Gig Work

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/covid-19-charter-of-recommendations

Consultation on Figures of Learning in the Digital Context - Report

sneha — 2015-11-13T05:37:04Z

The Researchers at Work (RAW) programme at the Centre for Internet and Society organised a consultation on ‘Figures of Learning in the Digital Context’ on September 22, 2014 in Bangalore.

Conducted as part of its ‘Making Methods for Digital Humanities’ project, the discussion was an attempt to examine changes in the learning environment with the advent of digital technologies and new modes of knowledge production by mapping concepts and changes around a set of figures of learning, old and new, to understand the discursive shifts that produce and locate them in the contemporary moment. (See the concept note here).

The Making Methods project seeks to make specific interventions in structures of learning, methods of storing and documenting information, and processes of interaction and interface design, in an effort to describe and queer the contours of what we understand as the field of Digital Humanities today.

The consultation brought together a small but diverse set of people from different fields. Participants presented on figures of learning drawn from their own fields of research and practice. Archana Prasad, artist and founder of JAAGA, Bangalore spoke about the organisation and its growth as an alternative space for learning through collaborative processes in art, design and technology – the studio space made of pallet racks, its various projects and groups that converge at JAAGA reflect this diversity and interdisciplinarity. She spoke about changes in her own role from being a facilitator for diverse groups to come together, to becoming more of a mentor in the later years, the problems of sustainability of such a space and the efforts made through different projects in emphasising learning though peer-to-peer methods. Interesting projects in focus were the participatory artwork and reality game called Investmentzone which is an effort to collaboratively work and transform public spaces and the JAAGA residential study programme. The discussions were useful in understanding processes that can be used to foster alternative and participatory learning environments.

Asim Siddiqui, Ph.D. student at the Manipal Centre for Philosophy and Humanities, used the figure of the ‘performer’ to talk about his research enquiry into the philosophy of performative art traditions and the role of the body, performance and practice in learning. He spoke about the relative passivity of the body in the classroom, and the predominance of certain normative discourses within which teaching-learning practices operate and therefore produce a sort of instrumental form of knowledge, which he found problematic. He drew from examples of embodied action in dance, theatre and music to look at how some of these nuances and conflicts may be brought into classroom pedagogy to make it more illustrative and inclusive. This led to an interesting discussion around problems with current teaching-learning practices and the lack of adequate measures to make them contextual and relevant to students’ lived experience. The digital now bringing in a different dimension to learning and the lack of an understanding of the body in the digital space as preventing the possibility of a somatic element to knowledge was also discussed. The problem of disciplinary constraints and the separation of humanities and social sciences came up with reference to technology becoming more prominent in classrooms.

Bitasta Das, instructor and coordinator of the UG Humanities programme at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore spoke further on this issue of separation of the disciplines from her experience of teaching in the UG programme. Her presentation on the ‘distracted inventor’ focussed on the role of technology in the classroom, and how there is a need for teachers to constantly innovate to keep students engaged, particularly in a course such as this. The notion of distraction was a useful contrast to the attention economy debates that have become increasingly prevalent. The possibility of distraction as serendipitous and productive, particularly in science which is also a space of invention and discovery was discussed as one way of taking the idea forward. Some of the work done by students in the programme, under the larger rubric of integration of disciplines, was also presented in the consultation.

Nishant Shah presented on the idea of the production of error in computing, which is also the result of a deliberate and long process or history which can be traced from scribes copying texts to print culture and now to the machine itself, which also produces or re-produces error. He spoke about the gap between the interface and the information that a person consumes in the digital context, which is contrary to what is understood by abbreviations such as Garbage In Garbage Out (GIGO). He sought to critically examine this notion of transparency that the digital supposedly provides, when in effect the notion of error is as much present, but is being effectively effaced in various ways. The production of error therefore is an interesting process in signifying the limits of knowledge, and he proposed the idea of using the figure of the hipster to further explore this process of error or the glitch as a productive one.

Ekta Mittal , media practitioner and one of the founder-members of the media and arts collective Maraa presented on the figure of the worker, drawing on her research and work on a film on the Bangalore Metro construction workers. The attempt was to break through the existing discourse and simple binaries to present multiple meanings of the city, migrant labour, development, and new narratives of freedom and pleasure. Through documentation of the lives of labourers who belong to different parts of the country and their stories of migration, some of them illegal, and the question of identity and livelihood the film tries to dislocate the figure of the worker from a certain predominant discourse of the marginalised and invisible. The figure of the worker as a ghost, poet, wanderer, and now a lurker who often favours his condition of anonymity and invisibility is something that the presentation also focussed on as a way to take these ideas forward.

The consultation brought together a small but interesting set of people and ideas, this time specifically looking at diverse art and classroom teaching - learning practices. It also brought to the fore several unconventional processes of learning such as gamification, distraction, performance and embodied action that are outside the traditional notion of learning in the context of digital technologies. These ideas would contribute to further initiatives in engaging with larger questions about technology and processes of knowledge production.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/consultation-new-figures-of-learning-in-digital-context

Consultation on Figures of Learning in the Digital Context

praskrishna — 2015-11-13T05:39:00Z

The Centre for Internet and Society welcomes you to a consultation on new figures of learning in the digital context at its office in Bangalore on September 22, 2014 from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m.

The increasing prevalence of the internet and digital technologies today has engendered a new kind of learning environment, which is connected and collaborative, yet also focussed on the individual, with an emphasis on practice. The pervasive influence of technology in teaching-learning practice has also resulted in new tools, processes and platforms, which have added dimensions to learning, and led to the creation of new bodies of knowledge in the digital context. These new figures, spaces, objects and processes, often challenge and inflate given notions of expertise and authority, increasingly locating them outside the familiar framework of the university and a traditional classroom-based approach to learning.

While the processes of knowledge production have been rapidly changing in the last couple of decades, some examples being data mining, distant reading, cultural mapping and design thinking as new ways of parsing, organising, curating and processing information or knowledge, traditionally the point of reference for authoritative ‘figures’ of learning remains the same. These are that of the teacher, facilitator, reader, student, participant etc. However, with the emergence of such new processes of knowledge-making which are largely located in the digital context, one can see the presence of some non-traditional figures of knowledge as well – such as the geek, hacker, blogger, story-teller, worker, designer, activist etc. There are figures which, consciously or unconsciously subvert and redefine certain conventions of knowledge-making practices, by inventing new terms or redefining old ones. More importantly, the emergence of this nomenclature is symptomatic of a change in the predominant discourse that constitutes a particular kind of ‘digital subject’ or entity that inhabits the digital in a particular way.

The present consultation is an exercise to map these concepts and changes around a set of figures of learning, old and new, to understand the discursive shifts that produce them and locate them in the contemporary moment. Participants from diverse areas of research and practice would be invited to make a short ten minute presentation on one such figure, drawn from their area of interest and work, and examine the concepts or notions behind them. This will be followed by group discussions and a 30 minute writing sprint at the end of the consultation to consolidate the discussion.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/consultation-on-new-figures-of-learning-in-digital-context

Comments to the United Nations Human Rights Commission Report on Gender and Privacy

Aayush Rathi, Ambika Tandon and Pallavi Bedi — 2019-12-30T17:40:20Z

This submission to UNHRC presents a response by researchers at the CIS to ‘gender issues arising in the digital era and their impacts on women, men and individuals of diverse sexual orientations gender identities, gender expressions and sex characteristics’. It was prepared by Aayush Rathi, Ambika Tandon, and Pallavi Bedi in response to a report of consultation by a thematic taskforce established by the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Privacy on ‘Privacy and Personality’ (hereafter, HRC Gender Report).

HRC Gender Report - Consultation version: Read (PDF)

Submitted comments: Read (PDF)

The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), India, is an 11-year old non-profit organisation that undertakes interdisciplinary research on internet and digital technologies from policy and academic perspectives. Through its diverse initiatives, CIS explores, intervenes in, and advances contemporary discourse and regulatory practices around internet, technology, and society in India,and elsewhere. Current focus areas include cybersecurity, privacy, freedom of speech, labour and artificial intelligence. CIS has been taking efforts to mainstream gender across its programmes, as well as develop specifically gender-focused research using a feminist approach.

CIS appreciates the efforts of Dr. Elizabeth Coombs, Chair, Thematic Action Stream Taskforce on “A better understanding of privacy”, and those of Professor Joseph Cannataci, Special Rapporteur on the Right to Privacy. We are also grateful for the opportunity to put forth our views and comment on the HRC Gender Report.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/comments-to-the-unhrc-report-on-gender-and-privacy

Comments on the RBI's Consultation Paper on Peer to Peer Lending

sumandro — 2016-06-01T20:21:13Z

The Reserve Bank of India published a Consultation Paper on Peer to Peer Lending on April 28, 2016, and invited comments from the public. CIS submitted the following response, authored by Elonnai Hickok, Pavishka Mittal, Sumandro Chattapadhyay, Vidushi Marda, and Vipul Kharbanda.

1. Preliminary

1.1. This submission presents comments and recommendations by the Centre for Internet and Society (“CIS”) on the Consultation Paper on Peer to Peer Lending (“the consultation paper”) by the Reserve Bank of India (“RBI”) [1].

2. The Centre for Internet and Society

2.1. The Centre for Internet and Society, CIS [2], is a non-profit organisation that undertakes interdisciplinary research on internet and digital technologies from policy and academic perspectives. The areas of focus include digital accessibility for persons with diverse abilities, access to knowledge, intellectual property rights, openness (including open data, free and open source software, open standards, open access, open educational resources, and open video), internet governance, telecommunication reform, digital privacy, and cyber-security. The academic research at CIS seeks to understand the reconfiguration of social processes and structures through the internet and digital media technologies, and vice versa.

2.2. This submission is consistent with CIS’ commitment to safeguarding general public interest, and the interests and rights of various stakeholders involved. The comments in this submission aim to further the concerns of citizens’ and users’ rights in the context of products, services, and transactions facilitated by digital media technologies, the , the principle that regulation should be defined around functions of the acts concerned, and not the technologies of delivery. Our comments are limited to the clauses that most directly have an impact on these concerns.

3. Response

3.1. Whether there is a felt need for regulating peer to peer lending platforms?

3.1.1. Peer to peer (“P2P”) lenders are platforms serving as marketplaces for the lenders and the borrowers of funds to connect. Their very business model does not render them as a provider of finance, as they aspire to function as pure intermediaries to enable lending and borrowing.

3.1.2. The Section 45I.(f)(iii) of the RBI Act, 1935 [3], provides RBI the authority to classify any financial institution as a non-banking financial company (“NBFC”) “with the previous approval of the Central Government and by notification in the Official Gazette.” Since the P2P lending platforms do not provide any finance themselves, undertake acquisition of financial instruments, deliver financial and/or insurance services, or collect financial resources directly, the only ground for classifying such companies as “financial institutions” [4] appears to be their involvement in “managing, conducting or supervising, as foreman, agent or in any other capacity, of chits or kuries as defined in any law which is for the time being in force in any State, or any business, which is similar thereto” [5]. P2P lending platforms can be considered to be brokers and thus there are other aspects that merit scrutiny such as antitrust issues, obligations of either party, company activities and the transactional system involved, as we will discuss in this document.

3.1.3. The consultation paper itself states that the balance sheet of the platform cannot indicate any borrowing / lending activity, which entails that the platform cannot itself provide finance or receive any funds for the provision of loans to others. Platforms are not allowed to determine the interest rates as they are not a party to the transaction. Neither would they be liable in cases of default by the borrower. These rules, standard for P2P platforms in other jurisdictions as well, confirm the assumption that the platform itself is not providing finance and thus, cannot be entrusted with any liability, obligation from the transaction.

3.1.4. Further, with RBI raising the threshold asset size for an NBFC to be considered systemically important (NBFC-ND-SI) from Rs. 100 Crores to Rs. 500 Crores [6], and Economic Times reporting that one of the biggest Indian P2P lending platform’s enterprise valuation (which can be taken as indicative of its net assets) is Rs 50 Crores [7], we may assume that most P2P lending platforms will have net assets worth less than 500 crore, at least in the near future; although there is a possibility for exponential growth with some companies.

3.1.5. Given the limited sphere of operation, restricted ability (by design) of these platforms to shape interest rates and other features of financial instruments, and their generally non-systemically-important nature, we would submit that the regulation of such P2P lending platforms are kept to an absolute minimum, so that their economic viability is not undermined, and at the same time the key risks associated with their operations are addressed by RBI.

3.2. Is the assessment of P2P lending and risks associated with it adequate?

3.2.1. CIS observes that the following are the key risks involved with the operations of the P2P lending platforms, and these are being respectively addressed by, or can be addressed by RBI in the following manners.

Insufficient information about the conditions of lending, leading to defrauding of the borrower: The borrower may not receive appropriate information about the terms of the loan, and/or the P2P lending platform may not act in a “fair” manner (say, in case of collusion between the P2P lending platform and the lender, or the lending platform and the borrower), which may lead to defrauding and/or economic loss of either party. By classifying P2P lending platforms as NBFCs, RBI will ensure that these companies follow the Guidelines on Fair Practices Code for NBFCs [8], which extensively addresses concerns related to this type of risks.
Insufficient information about the borrower, or her/his ability to repay the loan, may lead to non-repayment and economic loss of the lender: If the P2P lending platform allows the lender to offer loans to borrowers without acquiring and/or providing sufficient information to the lender about the borrower’s credit history and/or ability to repay the loan, modes of formulating security for loans, this may heighten the risks of non-repayment of loans. By classifying P2P lending platforms as NBFCs, RBI will ensure that these companies follow the Master Circular – 'Know Your Customer' (KYC) Guidelines – Anti Money Laundering Standards (AML) - Prevention of Money Laundering Act, 2002 - Obligations of NBFCs [9], which extensively addresses concerns related to this type of risks.
Credit-related information of the lenders and the borrowers collected by P2P lending platforms may not be made available to other financial institutions and that will lead asymmetry in credit information available across various actors in the sector: Credit information, related to both lending and borrowing practices of entities using the platform concerned, is a key asset of the P2P lending platforms. Lack of sharing of such information with Credit Information Companies, for economic reasons or otherwise, may however, lead to information asymmetry within the financial sector, which will structurally weaken the entire sector (with pieces of credit information being distributed across actors and not being shared internally). By classifying P2P lending platforms as NBFCs, RBI will ensure that these companies follow the Credit Information Companies (Regulation) Act, 2005 [10], which extensively addresses concerns related to this type of risks.
P2P lending platforms diversifying their financial operations without informing RBI and hence without appropriate regulatory control: It is possible that P2P lending platforms may decide to diversify their activities. There have been similar examples in other related sectors, say e-commerce marketplaces, that have started their own product re/selling companies that use the same online marketplace concerned. By classifying P2P lending platforms as NBFCs, RBI will ensure that these companies provide RBI with detailed and regular reports of their economic activities and investments, which is expected to address concerns related to this type of risks.

3.3. Are there any other risks which ought to be addressed?

3.3.1. CIS observes that as part of the usual transaction related activities of the P2P lending platforms, the companies will come into possession of what has been defined as “sensitive personal data or information” by the Information Technology (Reasonable security practices and procedures and sensitive personal data or information) Rules, 2011 [11]. The concerns related to this type of risk is directly addressed by the Rules concerned, and may not require additional attention from the RBI.

3.3.2. CIS observes that as borrowers and lenders start using specific P2P lending platforms, the data regarding their credit histories and/or “financial reputation” will be owned by these companies. While such information might be shared internally within the financial sector through the Credit Information Companies, the borrowers and lenders themselves may not get direct access to such data. Hence, the borrowers and lenders will not be able to move easily and smoothly to a new P2P lending platform and make use of their existing credit information and/or “financial reputation” when accessing services offered via the new P2P lending platform. In other words, the borrowers and lenders may face a service provider lock-in, and inability to move between P2P lending platforms easily, without explicit access to their own credit history/reputation, and will not have the ability to migrate such information from one P2P lending platform to another (or to any other agency, for that matter). CIS submits that RBI must provide a mechanism to allow users to migrate between platforms as it has not been discussed in the consultation paper.

3.4. Is the proposed approach to regulating these platforms adequate?

3.4.1. CIS observes that while classification of P2P lending platforms will appropriately address key risks associated with their operations (as listed in 3.2.1. A-D), it will not address a major risk emerging out of their operations that is unique to the technological basis of the business concerned (as mentioned in 3.3.2.), and further, it will impose substantial financial and management obligations that have a very high probability of undermining the economic viability of this emerging and niche sector of intermediated direct lending and borrowing.

3.4.2. CIS observes that these financial and management obligations may involve the following topics among others discussed: 1) minimum net worth requirement for registration, 2) minimum investments required to be made government securities, 3) transferring of minimum percentage of net profits to RBI, 4) guidelines regarding corporate governance [12], etc.

3.4.3. Given this, CIS submits that instead of classifying P2P lending platforms as “Misc NBFCs,” a new sub-classification is created under the category of NBFC for such platforms, that directly addresses the key risks associated with businesses of P2P lending platforms, and protects lenders as well as borrowers while enhancing transparency in operations. This new sub-classification of P2P lending companies should also be divided into systemically-important and non-systemically-important like other NBFCs, and requirements regarding financial operations and corporate management should only be enforced for the former category of P2P lending companies.

3.5. Any other relevant issues pertaining to P2P lending

Beyond the issues already discussed above, CIS seek clarity from the RBI around the following aspects:

Transactional system pertaining to P2P lending:
1. What are the requirements and prerequisites for mandating the collection of user identity?
2. Establishing a maximum sum that can be transferred per transaction.
Company activities:
1. Fees that can be charged by platforms.
2. How data security can be best addressed.
3. How the financial transactions are brokered.
4. Modes of redressal.
5. Restitution to users if something goes amiss in the transaction.
6. Insurance that the company has to buy or capital on hand to support.