Centre for Internet and Society

Unpacking video-based surveillance in New Delhi

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

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

Agenda of the workshop: Download (DOCX)

Slides from the presentation: Download (PDF)

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

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

Facebook sees its salvation with its cryptocurrency Libra

nishant — 2019-07-02T03:58:08Z

Facebook’s Libra is designed to take control of our digital lives.

The article by Nishant Shah was published in the Indian Express on June 30, 2019.

In the early days, when we were still discussing the possible implications of building a data-surveillance system like Aadhaar in India, one of the persistent narratives was that in return, Aadhaar will build the infrastructure that gives legal and financial identity to the homeless, underserved, and the unbanked populations of the country. I remember how, at one consultation, Nandan Nilekani had jokingly mentioned that the single entry login framework of Aadhaar is easy to understand as the “Facebook of government services”. There were actual rumours that Aadhaar was seeking to collaborate with Facebook to see if we could log in to the public delivery systems using Facebook’s technical infrastructure.

The probable Aadhaar-Facebook collaboration never happened, but the other idea of Aadhaar enabling mobile payment, financial inclusion through digital outreach, and the possibility of leapfrogging an entire demography into digital transactions, has a different take. Aadhaar did not necessarily build a public infrastructure for banking. However, in establishing a unique identity, it did pave the way for the notorious demonetisation that pushed people into virtual and cashless transactions, and ironically, opening up the Indian market for the Chinese-controlled Paytm app to take over. Paytm is a clear symptom of China’s digital global dominance where TenCents and Alibaba are monopolising the world financial systems by becoming the de facto digital financial delivery systems for the emerging financial inclusion markets.

A little late in the game, but perhaps with a blockchain advantage, Facebook has entered this business of converting unique identification and engagement into a financial service, with the announcement of their new cryptocurrency endeavour, Libra. Much like those early days of Aadhaar, Facebook has positioned Libra as a pro-poor facilitator of financial inclusion for the large user base who are going to be connected to the Internet for the first time. The progressions of its interest in becoming the naturalised platform for all digital activities, as opposed to its presence as a space for sharing cute cat pictures and passive aggressive videos of relationships, is clear.

By launching Libra — the details are still scarce, but it seeks to create its own currency for the next generation, in collaboration with companies like Uber and Visa — Facebook has thrown its hat into a complete Black Mirror control of our digital lives. They want the user to first get connected to the Internet through Internet.org. Next, they want to control the websites that the users can use for free, by making Facebook the default entry point into digital data sharing. They would then collect and sell the data mined from these free services, and target the users to buy and consume using money developed by Libra. It is a fascinating, if not an ominous, cradle-to-grave scenario.

Currently, Facebook, in its humanitarian guise, is putting forth Libra as a .org service that selflessly seeks to transform the lives of financially excluded populations, who, in one fell swoop, would be online, on Facebook, and using Facebook’s currency in one single access point. However, it is clear to see that Libra is not a service for social good — Facebook is converting its advertisement-based exploitation of user data into clear financial goals. Remember, how we darkly used to laugh that data is the new currency? Well, here is Facebook’s Libra proving that data is not just the new currency, it can be the currency.

Facebook’s wealth has entirely been predicated on data as currency and attention as economy. The last few years have been a revelation of how Facebook has capitalised on its data and attention monopoly. In this new step, Facebook is no longer interested in using data to facilitate the financial expansion — with Libra, Facebook is going to become an actual broker of the money that we use. And once we have bought enough of this currency and use it in our everyday transactions, it can never devalue, because if it’s false, the biggest loser will always be the newly banked individual whose first financial identity is not going to be a banking account but Facebook.

In Libra, Facebook sees its salvation. It has long been critiqued that Facebook is facing obsolescence and threat from other social media networks and Libra is yet another way by which Facebook diversifies its portfolio and secures its future by making it the default service for how we live, work, talk, and love.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-june-30-2019-facebook-sees-its-salvation-with-its-cryptocurrency-libra

Making Humanities in the Digital: Embodiment and Framing in Bichitra and Indiancine.ma

sneha-pp — 2018-06-25T12:50:36Z

The growth of the internet and digital technologies in the last couple of decades, and the emergence of new ‘digital objects’ of enquiry has led to a rethinking of research methods across disciplines as well as innovative modes of creative practice. This chapter authored by Puthiya Purayil Sneha (published in 'Making Things and Drawing Boundaries: Experiments in the Digital Humanities' edited by Jentery Sayers) discusses some of the questions that arise around the processes by which digital objects are ‘made’ and made available for arts and humanities research and practice, by drawing on recent work in text and film archival initiatives in India.

Through an exploration of an online film archive, Indiancine.ma, and a digital variorum of Rabindranath Tagore’s works, Bichitra, developed at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, the chapter engages with the processes of making and studying digital objects as creative and analytical, affective, and embodied. Drawing also on observations from a study on mapping digital humanities work in India, the chapter explores conceptual and material processes of the digital to understand how they affect research and practice in the humanities. These also allow for a new perspectives to understand the condition of digitality we inhabit today, as well as the possibilities it offers for the humanities.

This chapter authored by Puthiya Purayil Sneha was published in Making Things and Drawing Boundaries: Experiments in the Digital Humanities (2017), edited by Jentery Sayers, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, London.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/making-humanities-in-the-digital-embodiment-and-framing-in-bichitra-and-indiancine.ma

Indic Scripts and the Internet

Dibyajyoti Ghosh — 2015-07-10T04:23:35Z

This post by Dibyajyoti Ghosh is part of the 'Studying Internets in India' series. Dibyajyoti is a PhD student in the Department of English, Jadavpur University. He has four years of full-time work experience in projects which dealt with digital humanities and specially with digitisation of material in Indic scripts. In this essay, Dibyajyoti explores the effects the English language has on the Internet population of India.

Internet Usage Statistics in India

According to the latest statistics [1], while the rural mobile tele-density in India is 47.78%, the urban tele-density for mobile phones is 143.08% (which means, more than one registered SIM card per person and this phenomenon is thus also reflected in the rural figures). On the other hand, roughly only 6.5% of the population has access to ‘broadband’ Internet (>= 512 kbps) through a phone or a dongle and only 1.23% has access to a wired-broadband connection. However, roughly 20% of India’s population is roughly connected to the Internet [2]. Thus, roughly 12% of the population has access to low-speed Internet. What these figures do not reveal is the quantum of consumption of data. It can be safely assumed given the comparatively high costs of mobile Internet usage and the difficult method of feeding large tracts of data through a mobile phone, that the quantum of consumption is significantly higher in the case of computer Internet users as opposed to mobile users. Though as these statistics reveal, the chances of India being connected to the Internet depends largely on mobile phones, rather than desktop/ laptop computers.

Thus, the status of the Internet in India is still that of a niche medium. Other than the cost-factor of having access to a device which can access the Internet and paying for the Internet data package, some other factors also hinder the growth of the Internet in India. One of them is the issue of language. Whereas the 1990s saw an over-domination of English on the Internet given the linguistic communities which were developing the world of computers and the world of the Internet [3], by 2015, some of the disparity with offline linguistic patterns has been reduced [4]. However, for Indic scripts, much less development has taken place. If one is studying the Internet in India, chances are one is studying it in English.

Languages the Indian Internet User Encounters Both Online and Offline

What does this hold for the future of these Indic scripts? Given the multi-lingual skills of Indian school-goers and the increasing amount of daily reading time of those connected to the Internet (which is somewhere between 12% and 20% of the population) being devoted to reading on the Internet, chances are reading is increasingly in English.

The importance of English-language skills in India, as indeed in the rest of the world, in 2015 is undeniable [5]. English is also a signifier of class in India. However, despite the three-language policy adopted by schools, schools which offer courses primarily in other Indian languages suffer from an inherent disadvantage that students face when these students enter colleges and universities where the medium of teaching is usually English, and later on take up jobs which require official reports to be written in English. Thus, Indian languages other than English offer much less incentive for parents and students to encourage their study. Whereas oral conversation among the Indian population is largely conducted in languages other than English, written conversation is increasingly being conducted in English. Language is not only a political issue but also a subject of social study, not to mention the issues of linguistics. The larger socio-political issues of language are perhaps too vast to be discussed in connection to Indic scripts and the Internet. Thus, apart from this basic point about the bias towards English, I am not delving into it further.

Indic Script Software and Data Entry

Let me start with discussing natively-digital material. In the digital domain, entering text in Indic scripts is a difficult task. Indic scripts are primarily abugida scripts, which are writing systems ‘in which consonant–vowel sequences are written as a unit: each unit is based on a consonant letter, and vowel notation is secondary’ [6]. This contrasts with the Latin script used to write English, in which vowels have status equal to consonants, and with abjad scripts such as the script used to write Arabic, in which vowel marking is absent or optional. Similar difficulty is also encountered in entering texts in other non-Latin scripts such as Chinese. Mandarin Chinese may be the world’s most-spoken language and China may be one of the software and hardware giants, but supposedly even Chinese is not particularly amenable to the Internet [7]. Entering Indic scripts on a computer is difficult because it usually involves the addition of new software or tweaking existing software which is slightly difficult for the novice/ casual user.

ISIS, developed by Gautam Sengupta of the University of Hyderabad and sponsored by the Government of India, is an early example of Indic script input software [8]. It is available online for free. It is not fully phonetic. iLEAP, developed by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC), a Government of India funded agency, is now no longer extant but CDAC have produced other input software thereafter. Google too offers an Indic language input tool now [9]. For languages such as Bengali, there have been software such as Bijoy, which was made by Mustafa Jabbar of Ananda Computers, Dhaka, Bangladesh, and is sold commercially [10] and the free softwares BanglaWord and Avro. Avro was created in 2003 by Mehdi Hasan Khan of Mymensingh, Bangladesh, and subsequently developed by a team at Omicron Lab, Dhaka [11]. Such software exists for other individual Indic languages. Operating systems such as Windows [12] and Ubuntu [13] offer Indic script input as well, and make use of the InScript keyboard [14] too.

When it comes to mobile phones, prior to the introduction of touchscreen smartphones, text messaging had little option to use the Indic script. With the introduction of multiple keyboards in touchscreen smartphones, there are a few options to use the Indic script. Both Android and iOS offer Indic script keyboards. Yet these are even less easy to use than computer keyboards as one needs to toggle between several sets of keyboards to access all the characters required for Indic script input. Google has recently started handwriting input which supports Indic scripts [15]. It remains to be seen how much the feature is used.

In spite of this availability of input tools in recent years, the most common method of entering Indic language is through transliteration. Just like Pinyin for the Chinese script, Indic scripts too have official transliteration standards. The Indian National Bibliography (Kolkata: Central Reference Library, 2004) maintains one such standard. However, such transliteration mechanisms require diacritical marks, which are again difficult to enter. Thus, more often than not, these transliteration standards are not followed except when one is maintaining strict academic standards.

The point that I am trying to make is that despite the availability of tools for entering Indic scripts and even well-defined standards for transliterating Indic words in the Latin script, neither is universally followed. The reason is it involves extra labour, as opposed to simple transliteration without any standards. Thus, what often one ends up with in casual written communication (which outnumbers formal written communication by a wide margin) in the digital domain, be it in the form of SMSes, messages in Whatsapp or other instant messaging applications or emails, is Indic words in non-standard transliteration into the Latin alphabet. The introduction of SMS lingo and standards two decades back had already prepared the way for the wider acceptance of Indic words in non-standard transliteration into the Latin alphabet. When one comes to a semi-casual/ semi-formal medium, such as blogs and social networks, where the receiver of the message is usually more than one, the forms of expression are slightly different.

Mimetic Desires on Public Platforms

Digital, crowd-sourced public platforms, such as blogs and largely social networks, offer a different kind of discourse. On the one hand, private habits spill into the public realm. Thus, Indic words in non-standard transliteration into the Latin alphabet are a common practice. On the other hand, the public nature of such platforms offers a space for a kind of mimetic desire. Despite the availability of the user-interface of the most commonly accessed sites such as Gmail and Facebook in Indic languages, most prefer to retain their user-interface in the default English mode [16]. It is a different issue that enabling browsers to render Indic scripts correctly is often a difficult task and sometimes despite following every instruction in the manual, the problem remains unsolved. The overall English language and English script overdose on social networks such as Facebook generate a kind of desire to mingle in with the crowd. Thus, instead of typing Indic words in non-standard transliteration into the Latin alphabet, the data entered is actually more often than not in English. Often, other than formal job reports and letters, social networks are the only platform that a lot of Indians get where they can produce verbal communication in English. Thus, in addition to a mimetic desire to fit in with the English-writing crowd, social networks also offer a semi-public platform to write one’s thoughts in English, a platform which for a lot of Indians was perhaps last available to them when they had to write essays for their compulsory English-language paper in high school. Both of these desires further hamper the incentive to write on the Internet using Indic scripts.

Blogs occupy a space somewhere in between formal websites and casual for-the-nonce social network posts. Both the structure of blogs (more structured than a social network but less structured than a website) and the status of blogs lie somewhere in between these two major platforms. Also, with the rise of social networks, the rate of growth of blogs has decreased. Thus, blogs are usually less popular than both websites as well as social networks. On blogs, the content is usually more formal, as is the presentation. Also, the mimetic desire generated by a social network is perhaps less heightened in the case of blogs. Blogs present a more one-to-many approach as opposed to a social network which largely presents a many-to-many structure.

Spelling Skills in Indic Languages

At the other hand of the social class in India, is the class which went to an English-medium school and writes predominantly in English. Oral communication is often carried out in other Indian languages but these languages are not often used for written communication. Even when casual written communication in the digital domain, such as SMSes and other instant messaging applications or emails, is carried out using Indic words, it is in non-standard transliteration into the Latin alphabet. For this class, the problem is the lack of exposure to reading and writing in Indian languages other than English. Thus, even this minimal writing in transliteration mode may further weaken their spelling skills in these Indian languages.

There are of course other categories into which one can group Internet users in India. The equally strong multi-lingual Indian, the equally weak multi-lingual Indian and the Indian strong in one language are three such categories. Irrespective of which class the Indian Internet user belongs to, the Internet user’s exposure to material written in Indic scripts on the Internet is low. So far I have discussed natively-digital resources.

Digitisation of Pre-Digital Resources

Let me now turn to digitsation of pre-digital resources. Digitisation of such resources is a task involving a lot of money and labour. There are several organisations in India which are involved in such tasks. The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC) is one such organisation. The School of Cultural Texts and Records at Jadavpur University, Kolkata is another such organisation [17]. The Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata too is actively involved in digitisation of such material [18]. The West Bengal Public Library repository on Dspace [19] and the Digital Library of India [20] are also significant repositories, as is the portal of the National Archives of India, titled Abhilekh Patal [21]. There are some digital archives focussed on the output of a specific person, such as the MK Gandhi portal [22]. There have been a few instances of making public searchable text files from such digitised material, such as those by the Society for Natural Language Technology Research [23] and Bichitra: Online Tagore Variorum [24]. Other digitisation programmes are in progress, such as the long-running National Mission for Manuscripts [25]. Yet, in spite of this, such efforts are miniscule compared to databases, albeit commercial and not open-access, such as Early English Books Online or Eighteenth Century Collections Online. The Internet, while it offers the opportunity for an equitable digitisation of pre-digital resources in English as well as Indic scripts, does not contain as many resources in Indic scripts as it does in the Latin script. The reasons are because whereas Indic script resources are primarily digitised by Indian organisations where the money needed for such tasks is not available in great amounts, resources in English are digitised from a number of economies with a high per capita GDP. Given the more basic needs of enhancing the reach and level of primary, secondary and tertiary education in the country, an economy with a low per capita GDP such as India does not have the financial means to digitise vast quantities of pre-digital resources, be they in the Latin script or in Indic scripts.

When it comes to electronic books in Indic scripts, the refusal of major platforms such as Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing to list books in Indic scripts [26] is a major barrier for individuals to create e-books in Indic scripts. Whereas most major newspapers in Indic scripts have online editions, the case is not so for major book publishers. Unlike a newspaper which primarily relies on advertising for its revenue, book publishers depend on book sales. There is no infrastructure in place for selling electronic books in Indic scripts. The publishers perhaps also feel that the market for consumption of e-books in such languages is not of a significant scale, and thus do not feel incentivised enough to encourage the creation of e-books. Thus, the entire Kindle reading population in India (which is not very large in the first place [27]) is deprived of the chance of buying e-books in Indic scripts. If they read e-books in Indic scripts on Kindles and tablets, then such e-books are usually pirated scanned copies. There are some sites which make available pirated scanned copies of books printed in Indic scripts. However, such sites and the number of such books is so small, that they make no major dent to the revenues of the Indic-languages publishing industry.

Effects on the Indian Internet User

As a result, casual Indian Internet researchers and readers often depend on material written in English instead of material written in Indic languages. It is true that the serious researcher will of course make the effort of visiting physical libraries and archives to access books in Indic languages. But for casual reading and research, it is too much of a trouble. For such Internet users, not only are undigitised Indic verbal texts invisible, but the lack of engagement with such texts lead to the effacement of such texts from the public discourse and domain.

For Indian school students studying in schools where the medium of instruction is not English, the absence of such texts from the Internet means that they engage less with the Internet for academic purposes. For them, the Internet becomes more of a resource meant for non-academic purposes if they have trouble reading texts in English. It is true that English is one of the three languages that school students learn yet as the state of education goes, it is not fully satisfactory [28]. On the other hand, given the English language and English script overdose on social networks, the mimetic desire forces students to generate texts in English, not only the script but also the language. As a result, what is generated is often English of a less than satisfactory standard. A political strain of thought treats the language that people generate as ‘the language’. Measuring such an output against other standards of English is considered politically incorrect. In fact, the regional acceptance of such local sub-groups of English has led to the wider acceptance of English and its growing presence across the world. Yet, as the notion of class in India based on the command over English shows, such sub-grouping also leads to the creation of separate classes.

Effects of the Internet on Indic Scripts

Does the Internet alleviate or exacerbate the problem caused by the hierarchy of English over other Indic languages? I guess that the answer is not a simple nod in either direction. On the other hand, I conclude that the Internet increases the mimetic desire to generate written communication in English. Failure to communicate in English according to certain standards of English further exacerbates the creation of the classes based on the command over English. While the Internet, to a certain extent, helps in improving English spelling skills owing to a greater exposure to English, at the same time, it leads to a greater deterioration in spelling skills in Indic languages. Owing to the lack of availability of pre-digital resources in Indic scripts in the digital domain, there is a slow effacement of such resources from the public discourse at large.

Possible Measures to Enhance the Status of Indic Scripts on the Internet

These are some of the effects that the Internet in India has had on Indic scripts. Given that the Internet is a niche medium and those shaping the general discourse are more likely to have access to the Internet in the first place, the low visibility of Indic scripts on the Internet is a cause for concern. However, it is true that with the growing accessibility of the Internet in India, the resources in Indic scripts are bound to increase. It is perhaps dependent primarily on those in power, such as the central and state governments to ensure that their websites and mobile phone applications are in Indic scripts as well and the Indic script versions of their digital resources do not lack any feature of the English-language version of such resources. The private sector, especially the publishing industry also needs to create a market for electronic publication in Indic scripts. Just like e-commerce in India did not come after the entire infrastructure was in place, but rather the infrastructure kept building up as e-commerce kept growing, similarly the publishing industry also needs to create a digital Indic-script market, and then keep building it up. E-commerce, which perhaps has the greatest incentive to build resources, can also significantly alter the scenario by offering e-commerce in Indic scripts. Snapdeal has very limited components of their website in two Indic scripts. Other major e-commerce companies have not followed suit and neither is Snapdeal’s inclusion particularly effective. Yet, as the Flipkart-owned apparel company Myntra’s recent decision to go app-only and completely do away with their website has shown, e-commerce has its ways of incentivising customers to change their habits in a drastic manner. It is with such hope that I would have liked to end this brief essay on studying the Internet in India. Yet, as the language of this essay shows, such hopes are not particularly strong, as most scholarly writing in India on the Internet continues to be in English. Scholarly journals and research platforms in Indic scripts on the Internet continue to be so limited in number that it is hard to find particularly high-impact publications from among them. If one is studying the Internet in India, chances are one is both studying and writing in English.

Endnotes

[1] http://www.trai.gov.in/WriteReadData/PressRealease/Document/PR-34-TSD-Mar-12052015.pdf

[2] http://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users-by-country

[3] Daniel Pimienta, Daniel Prado and Álvaro Blanco, Twelve years of measuring linguistic diversity in the Internet: balance and perspectives, UNESCO publications for the World Summit on the Information Society (2009), http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0018/001870/187016e.pdf

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_used_on_the_Internet and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers

[5] https://hbr.org/2012/05/global-business-speaks-english

[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abugida

[7] http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117608/chinese-number-websites-secret-meaning-urls

[8] http://isis.keymankeyboards.com/

[9] http://www.google.com/inputtools/

[10] http://www.bijoyekushe.net/

[11] https://www.omicronlab.com/

[12] http://www.bhashaindia.com/ilit/

[13] https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ibus

[14] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InScript_keyboard

[15] http://googleresearch.blogspot.in/2015/04/google-handwriting-input-in-82.html

[16] There is no open-access data for this from either Google or Facebook. Third-parties conduct such studies. A study can be found here: http://www.oneskyapp.com/blog/top-10-languages-with-most-users-on-facebook/

[17] http://www.jaduniv.edu.in/view_department.php?deptid=135

[18] http://www.savifa.uni-hd.de/thematicportals/urban_history.html

[19] http://dspace.wbpublibnet.gov.in:8080/jspui/

[20] http://www.dli.ernet.in/

[21] http://www.abhilekh-patal.in/

[22] https://www.gandhiheritageportal.org/

[23] http://www.nltr.org/

[24] http://bichitra.jdvu.ac.in/index.php

[25] http://www.namami.org/index.htm

[26] https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=A9FDO0A3V0119

[27] http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/tech-news/Ebook-readers-fail-to-kindle-sales-in-India/articleshow/45802786.cms

[28] Annual Status of Education Report (Rural) 2014, facilitated by Pratham, pp. 81-82, 86, 88-89, http://img.asercentre.org/docs/Publications/ASER%20Reports/ASER%202014/fullaser2014mainreport_1.pdf

The post is published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, and copyright is retained by the author.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/blog_indic-scripts-and-the-internet

Users and the Internet

Purbasha Auddy — 2015-07-10T04:20:54Z

This post by Purbasha Auddy is part of the 'Studying Internets in India' series. Purbasha is a SYLFF PhD fellow at the School of Cultural Texts and Records (SCTR), Jadavpur University, with more than eight years of work experience in digital archiving. She has also been teaching for the last two years in the newly-started post-graduate diploma course in Digital Humanities and Cultural Informatics offered by the SCTR. In this essay, Purbasha explores the constructions of the ideas of the Indian Internet users through the advertisements that talk about data packages, mobile phones or apps.

A baby [1] is refusing to be born as (as we learn later, ‘his’) parents cannot afford high-speed internet for smartphones but wi-fi plans offered by an internet service provider satisfy the baby as if the baby is being born for the internet.

The baby [2] comes out of the womb, searches the net on a smartphone, cuts his own umbilical cord, takes a selfie with the nurse, opens every possible social media- account, takes his blue baby boy balloons and finds his own way out of the building leaving behind dumbstruck parents.

The two unreal situations that are described above are the two storylines of two advertisements of the same company trying to sell an internet connection. No, this article will not talk about the aesthetic appeal of these ads, but will look into such creative ways to locate the explanation of the internet and its users instead; to be precise internet and its Indian users.

The two ads described at the beginning do not show any Indian-ness but makes the viewer wonder about how far this ‘born for the internet’ baby can travel with an internet-enabled smartphone. Are these two ads trying to define the internet as a smart product or are they trying to classify the users of the internet rather as smart? Moreover how does one define the internet? It means more than a conglomeration of networks. At this point as I am trying to coin a definition of the internet on my own, my thought-process is occupied with the activities I do on the net but I fail to define it.

A personal note…

In 1995, when VSNL launched the internet in India, I was 10, and engrossed in story books and comics. As I was growing up, I was discovering the world around through books, television, radio and newspapers. I was totally unaware of the practicality of the internet and it remained a fact of general knowledge. Not only me! Not a single friend of mine happened to use the internet or discussed keenly about it. My school did not offer a computer course either. After my +10 board exam, I requested (read demanded) my parents to enroll me in a computer training center which was near my house and had a government affiliation. I learnt basics of computer applications, the programming language Foxpro and basics of the internet. I even got to know how to create a basic webpage. Only when I was required to write a dissertation for my graduation, did I start going to a cyber café to type my dissertation and surf the internet. My parents were really apprehensive about what I was doing in a cyber café which was costing 30 rupees per hour!

Though my parents are still uneasy with the fact that ‘my generation’ remains glued to the internet most of the time, they are amazed on the other hand; how we do net banking, shop online, study, Facebook, exchange email, call a cab or order pizza etc. from the internet. They are happy to remain on the other side of the digital divide.

It has been twenty years that the Indian society has seen the ‘wrong side’ of the internet like hacking, phishing and other grave matters related to social networks. India is a complex society and so is the internet. But India, being the one of the largest potential markets, various services related to the internet are encouraging the probable consumers. Through the advertisements and publicity measures, they are trying to cleanse away the negative notions. They are capturing stories and characters that one can relate herself or himself to, very promptly. Even the ideas of Indian-ness, national integrity and the dreams of aspiring Indians are getting linked with the internet as mobile internet is penetrating very fast to balance the digital divide. Various events of online forgery, hacking and getting access to dicey websites (read pornography) and those matters which came as some sort of a cultural shock, made people less confident to use the internet.

Overcoming the fear…

Recently, these notions have been countered by commercials by an antivirus company. The commercial shows a mother [3] who is no longer anxious to let her son surf the internet because now the antivirus allows her to enable parental control. It is helping the mother as she no longer has to keep constant vigil on the internet-related activities of her son. Other commercial shows a retired old man [4] is not sceptical anymore that his son sends money using online banking. His son and the man use the antivirus which offers safe online banking.

There are two more advertisements I want to describe; the first one features a young man [5] shopping online and updating the viewers that an antivirus protection means safe online transactions. In the second ad, a fashion designer [6] is not bothered to use pendrives as the antivirus scan will protect her computer. These four commercials attempt to confront the fear that pesters the minds of the potential consumers. No beautiful models, male or female, no beyond the world creativity, but simple and set with regular characters discussing vital issues were chosen to reach out to these potential customers.

The next commercial I would like to refer to is about an antivirus for smart phones. The ad creates a euphoria that portrays a bunch of college goers [7] who have the power to protect themselves from spyware and malware and can download various applications seamlessly. Thus the point of overcoming the ‘fear’ of the unknown and the uncontrollable is very important. Maybe the two ads featuring the ‘born for the internet’ baby I begun with, find relevance here. And the question should be asked here again: that how far can one travel along the path of life by means of a smartphone with an internet connection? The adverts suggest a very intelligent and exciting life for those who can access to internet. Everything is sorted if you can stay online. A lonely individual [8] can be a Twitter celebrity. Someone can showcase her or his talent [9] through social media; like one ad shows a girl becoming an online singing sensation by garnering lots of ‘likes’ and ‘shares’.

As mobile phones remains with us most of the time, accessing the internet from it is easier (compared to a computer) and a mobile phone is thus able to furnish prompt services. There are quite a few service providers that woo us with different approaches. Compared to selling internet connections, it is perhaps far less complicated to produce campaigns for fast moving consumer goods. At least in the case of FMCG it is easier to explain the product which is within range of our four senses. But it is quiet a troublesome project to explain the internet given the social back drop in a country like India. This article will not take names of any of the service providers. Instead it will point out the strategies they are adopting to touch an emotional chord for the probable consumers keeping the existing ones. Furthermore, it would like to find out the nature and meaning of the internet and outlook of its users in the Indian scenario.

Power redefined…

The internet providers proclaim through the advertisements that an internet connection on one’s mobile is a ‘power’ for her or him. The power that has the ability to bring all the nuances that is available around. Only the burning questions are:

How to use the power? Whether to play online games, immerse oneself in social networking, and use a search engine to search for the unknown or perhaps read an academic article from Jstor? There are immense possibilities to the power.
How long can the power be used (read limited or unlimited connection)?
How much time does it take to get the result of the power (read the speed of the connection)?
And lastly and very importantly how much does this power cost?

These uncertainties are answered by adverts with creativity and almost 20% of the Indian population tries to grab this power. But of course a large segment is still to be included (inclusion may be harder due to various socio-economic conditions that are deep-rooted within the Indian scenario) in the benefit-circle of this power called the internet. The following storyline of another television commercial shows the power called the internet which can allow pictures or videos to be exchanged instantaneously. An ad shows that the internet is a great help for a mother as she sends a picture of her wailing son after a hair-cut, to her husband. As soon as the mother reaches home with her sad boy, the father having got the same hair-cut also returns and is ready to soothe the boy.

Confidence building apparatus…

Thus, through creative commercials, internet service providers are trying to tell that one should keep an internet connection handy to be confident so that Indians cannot be fooled by anybody anywhere. Several adverts are showcasing the following events that will not occur if one has a mobile internet connection. Such events are quite common and thus one can easily associate oneself with them.

Not a single person on earth can fool you [10].
A corrupt political leader cannot go way without fulfilling the promises s/he made [11].
Baseless prediction of religious leaders can be countered [12].
And one of the ads went even further ahead to suggest that the population of India can be controlled if married couples spend time doing various activities that the internet has to offer [13]!

Self-learning tool…

The ads promote that one of the activities could be self-learning. There is an enormous package of everything available and it is a flexible way to learn. A slow learner [14] in school may not be given special attention in order to overcome learning difficulties but the internet is very patient and it will not complain. Learn how to write poems [15], how to cook, how to make a drone [16], learn French [17]. Furthermore these ads suggest that an internet user is a self-sufficient human being who can find her or his own way using a Google map! Just like two friends learning culinary skills from internet and opening up a restaurant.

An institution…

At this point, the creative pursuit of the commercials take a leap and declare the internet (or the internet connection the particular company is providing) as an institution which is very much inclusive in nature. Those who are barred from getting admission in schools, colleges or universities, are welcome to learn through the institution called the internet and can establish themselves in mainstream society or can learn for the sake of learning. In this case, these ads have pointed out girls are not allowed [18] to go to school, a eunuch [19] is refused everywhere. But they are learning from the internet and compete with the more privileged in mainstream society. Other cases show a mother could not complete [20] her study in law, and her daughter is encouraging her to complete it through the internet. Lastly, these ads try to convince that the institution of the internet is cheaper than regular institutions.

Utility…

Besides the ambitions of the internet stated above, the internet influences human minds in several other aspects. For example, generation gap can be healed if the society takes the bridge of the internet. About two years ago a commercial was produced with the one-liner: ‘Made for the young’ [21]. This ad shows an old man who parties with young boys, has a social network account, plays online games late at night, does video chat. These activities of the elderly character, who has a very optimistic approach towards life, are set in a mundane surrounding. Here it seems, the internet is bridging the generation gap by bringing into its fold and into the mainstream those people who might not have thought of using the internet in real life.

The notion of a huge expense that is incurred in maintaining an internet connection was busted when some service providers brought out ads which said that it was letting people watch a video for only one rupee. Very precisely, this one rupee campaign enacted the frequent quarrels [22] between a taxi-driver and his passenger over loose change and the taxi driver somehow not returning one rupee but instead showing a popular video to the passenger from his phone in lieu of that one rupee. The basic point of all the campaigns is to intensify the market and push the consumers to pay for it anyhow as an internet connection can bring magic to the consumers’ lives as the service providers claim. But who will pay for the internet connection? So they bring out campaign such as a family plan campaign [23] in which the earning member of the family is being encouraged to pay the cost for the internet packs of the other mobile connections in the family which are also provided by the same mobile service operator. These adverts show a family consisting of a super-lazy boy, an ever-angry father, a protective mother and a sweet, little sister needing the internet more than any other services like roaming, calls, or SMS [24].

Service provides are also trying to entice the consumers by providing some utilitarian services which are needed in day to day life. The following are examples of the storylines of a few other advertisements that help its service-takers to transfer money without even going to the banks. The service provider keeps the notion of flexibility of the internet, which can be used according to the need of the people of every segment of the society: a taxi driver [25] from the city sends money to his father in the village; a husband sends money to his pregnant wife [26], a college-going boy [27] requesting his elder brother to send money for mending his scooter. These characters are common and can be found in our everyday surroundings but such characters may be afraid to use such an online service for transferring money. The soothing and caring tone of theses adverts try to assure people to use the service.

As some of the adverts aim to clear the dilemma among prospective consumers, another set of ads celebrate friendship and urge consumers to go back to their roots. In this regard, a storyline of another commercial can be taken into consideration. It tells a story about some school friends [28] who become successful in their own vocations and who remain connected with the help of smartphones and internet connections. One of them locates an old ice-cream vendor in front of the school they used to study in. They came together to meet that vendor from whom they used to buy ice-cream to help him in his business. Here the online activities result in something meaningful.

This article tried to weave one narrative out of many narratives created by several internet service providers. The main intention of the article was to find out how the internet has been defined in the Indian context and how the users are being defined in the commercials. It is found that the internet may seem super-real (if we are not aware of the technical aspects, it is a real wonder!) at first glance but the commercials through the dramatizing efforts are trying to prove its usefulness in many ways. Just like when a young woman [29] finds out someone is retiring from her office, she starts sending photos of the man to their colleagues and instantly it creates a chain of forwarded messages and then everybody gathers to arrange a surprise farewell party. A happy picture indeed!

However something not bright and prosperous also needs to be mentioned. The internet service providers have been offering high speed internet and portray a happy smart life of Indians irrespective of social background and vocation but almost 80% of India remains untouched and are yet to receive the benefits of an internet connection.

Endnotes

[1] MTS India. 2014. "MTS Internet Baby Full Version." YouTube. February 24. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rg37kafMsWk.

[2] Premium Adverts. 2015. "Baby - MTS TV Commercial Ad." YouTube. February 18. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3krdHUji8A.

[3] Mukherjee, Pamela. 2014. "Quick Heal - TVC (Hin) Mother’s VO." YouTube. November 4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=so-bjUuErBQ.

[4] Thoughtshop Advertising & Film Productions Pvt. Ltd. 2014. "QUICK HEAL 'OLD MAN.'" YouTube. July 16. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1kOcz_1Ra8.

[5] Thoughtshop Advertising & Film Productions Pvt. Ltd. 2014. "QUICK HEAL 'COOL DUDE.'" YouTube. July 16. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2ot0J4ps4A.

[6] Subarna Enterprise. 2014. "Stay protected from virus infected pendrives with Quick Heal Total Security." YouTube. April 10. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rLh0ng70Lc.

[7] Quick Heal. 2013. "Quick Heal Mobile Security TVC (Hindi)." YouTube. March 3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWiomVUHVHk.

[8] MTS India. 2012. "MTS MBLAZE ‘Always On’ LATEST TVC - Anupam Mukerji." YouTube. July 24. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWfyHMbKtsg.

[9] afaqs. 2012. "MTS MBLAZE TVC - Shraddha Sharma." YouTube. July 17. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsaJtPYTUF8.

[10] Idea. 2014. "Idea ‘No Ullu Banaoing’ Anthem TVC." YouTube. August 8. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZhXSnJ8sXY.

[11] Idea. 2014. "Idea ‘No Ullu Banaoing’ Politician TVC." YouTube. March 13. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OahDrQDU24k.

[12] Idea. 2014. "Idea ‘No Ullu Banaoing’ Baba TVC." YouTube. May 11. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mf2hYaHtBF4.

[13] Celeburbia Entertainment Media. 2011. "Idea 3G Funny Ad Campaign - India Over Population - Abhishek Bachchan Sir Ji Ad Series." YouTube. July 23. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqtB-IaeEo8.

[14] Idea. 2015. "Idea Internet Network (IIN) Slow Learner 25 sec TVC." YouTube. May 4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXFk4VL9rWM.

[15] Idea. 2015. "Idea Internet Network (IIN) Military 25 sec TVC." YouTube. May 4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwAP6PmGzRs.

[16] Neela, Pradeep. 2015. "Idea Internet Network IIN TV Ad - Drone wala." YouTube. January 11. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPTC945gsDo.

[17] Idea. 2015. "Idea Internet Network IIN Guide 20 sec TVC." YouTube. May 5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkQma9Tyt8E.

[18] Falguni, Vineet. 2015. "Idea Internet Network IIN Haryanvi 25 sec TVC." YouTube. January 20. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdVRGxw4ROI.

[19] iDiotube. 2015. "Idea Internet Network IIN Eunuch 25 second TVC HD." YouTube. April 26. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIZS_-Qm5Ro.

[20] Idea. 2015. "Idea Internet Network IIN Mother Daughter 20 sec TVC." YouTube. May 5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBHtLU7QGbE.

[21] Indian Tv Commercials. 2013. "Vodafone Commercial(Sep 2013)-Network(Latest Indian TV Ad)." YouTube. September 28. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6ULTFCWBQw.

[22] Airtel India. 2013. "airtel Re 1 Mobile Video - Taxi Ad (TVC)." YouTube. May 22. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hpi2sOOfeIw.

[23] Airtel India. 2015. "Airtel my plan Coffee TVC." YouTube. February 5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ElCIhsobXc.

[24] Airtel India. 2014. "airtel money TVC - Pay Electricity Bills." YouTube. January 19. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFHurfXS9uI.

[25] Vodafone India. 2015. "Vodafone m-pesa™– Babuji – HD." YouTube. March 16. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktgDPTlFxsU.

[26] Vodafone India. 2014. "Vodafone m-pesa™ - Cable TV – HD." YouTube. June 12. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIMYZDzyHeM.

[27] Vodafone India. 2014. "Vodafone m-pesa™ - Scooter – HD." YouTube. June 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQAtnQktHLI.

[28] Advartisement. 2015. "Uncle’s Ice Cream Airtel Network In India." YouTube. March 27. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFsG1G7Ombo.

[29] Nirvana Films. 2015. "VODAFONE – Farewell." YouTube. March 19. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqZVO815MiM.

The post is published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, and copyright is retained by the author.

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Effective Activism: The Internet, Social Media, and Hierarchical Activism in New Delhi

Sarah McKeever — 2015-07-16T08:22:13Z

This post by Sarah McKeever is part of the 'Studying Internets in India' series. Sarah is a PhD candidate at the India Institute, King’s College London, and her work focuses on the impact of social media on contemporary political movements. In this essay, she explores the increasingly hierarchical system of activism on the Internet, based on Western corporate desire for data, and how it is shaping who is seen and heard on the Internet in India.

Background

I will preface this post by stating that as an American, my personal experience of the Internet has been shaped by nearly 18 years as an active user. My experience with digital interfaces, websites, and social media has been formed through my experiences during the Internet revolution in the United States. Academic and personal training have shaped what I determine to be trustworthy, useful, and credible when searching for information. This post is based on field research I am conducting in New Delhi from January through June 2015.

With these preconceptions and standards in mind, I began to research organisations that I felt were credible enough to approach for interviews in January 2015. My current research project investigates the impact that social media has had on the issues of corruption and violence against women in New Delhi, following the social movements on these issues in 2011-2012 and 2012-2013 respectively. I started at an organisational level in order to research the impact that social media and the movements themselves had on organisations working on these issues. Areas of interest include any changes in issue engagement and discourse around gender violence and corruption. I focused exclusively on organisations that have an office in New Delhi and engage in activism in an urban context. Many of these organisations also have a presence in other states and include rural as well as urban projects. I conducted semi-structured interviews in order to engage with the changes wrought by the digital on a qualitative rather than quantitative basis.

Activism and Digital Hierarchy: A Divided Internet?

While conducting initial research, I began to investigate two separate but related areas of inquiry. The first was relatively straightforward: what type of differences were there between groups which actively engaging with the affordances of the Internet and Web 2.0? In my research I examined online awareness groups and campaigns as well as more traditional advocacy and awareness groups that were struggling to translate their work onto the Internet and on social media.

While engaging with the first question, I quickly discovered that the divide between how organisations leveraged the affordances of the Internet - and social media in particular - was stark. Earl and Kimport (2011) write that organisations that directly translate previous advocacy on the ground onto the Internet fail to fully leverage the affordances of the Internet. Organisations that effectively utilise the strengths of the Internet - including flash tactics, crowd-sourcing, and networked leadership - have in fact transformed the world of activism. They have created a new type of “digital activism” through the use of an increasingly digital networked society (Castells 2010, Rainie and Wellman 2012). While this is a simplification of the overall argument – and I personally would argue that in actuality organisations work on a range of digital capabilities and the idea of a spectrum rather than a binary division would be more appropriate at this point – it was clear that both sides were struggling to reach some sort of equilibrium between each other’s capabilities when I conducted interviews with them.

The second inquiry stemmed from my engagement with the first: how was the “active” use of the Internet and social media by an organization translating into an interpretation of their effectiveness? In other words, was an “active” social media presence and a slick website contributing to an impression that they were somehow more impactful than the organisations which lacked these features and is this phenomenon creating a new hierarchy of activism in Delhi?

Many of the organisations that I spoke with who used the Internet and social media “well,” attracted foreign attention and funding. It is clear there is a monetary incentive for organisations to be present and easily accessible via search engines and social media platforms. And while social media has become a huge selling point in India - including in last year’s Parliamentary elections - much of the funding and attention appears to come from outside of India in these particular cases. While social media has become a popular tool for outreach in New Delhi, the emphasis placed on it is possibly being driven by forces outside of India in the activist sphere.

Organisations that had been involved in advocacy and grassroots activism before the Internet boom in India discussed the struggle to make effective use of the affordances of the Internet. My participants unilaterally expressed a desire to engage with the digital audience in India – an audience of approximately 310 million users according to Internet Live Stats (2015) – but were often ill equipped to do so. Stated difficulties included a lack of a dedicated communications and media strategist, lack of experience with social media and web design, and difficulty translating nuanced discussion onto social media sites which are not necessarily designed to facilitate complex and controversial discussions. Some participants directly stated that an online presence, whether it was effective or not, had become essential to obtaining foreign funding and attention, as a digital presence represents a tangible deliverable when applying for foreign grants.

It is clear from any cursory examination of social media sites that the mediums demand an increasing amount of content from its users. Simply put, the more you post, the more you are seen and heard above the increasing noise and chaos of social media. And if being seen and heard represents success, the message itself can get lost in translation. Click bait, sponsored posts, and buzzy headlines attract far more attention and gain more traction than any post attempting to create nuance and demand deeper engagement, at least in the cases I have personally observed and in my experience with activist groups.

The growing popularity of social awareness campaigns and organisations designed for the online world were quite obviously far more successful in utilising social media and web pages to draw attention to a specific issue. These campaigns especially were extremely popular with Delhi youth in particular and effectively used visual displays - such as crowd-sourced images and provocative posters - to highlight issues of gender violence and corruption. Occasionally some participants were outwardly dismissive of older advocacy groups, which they felt were out of step with the times and content to stay in their comfort zones.

In spite of the success of many online campaigns on the issues I researched, few were able to translate the momentum generated by the campaign into a broader discussion and deeper engagement on their chosen issue. While some participants stated this was not necessarily what they desired to do - some chose to remain purely as an awareness campaign without moving into advocacy - other participants stated a desire to do more and engage with the complex cultural, societal, and political constructs surrounding gender and corruption in India. When they attempted to engage in this more nuanced conversation, they often lost momentum on social media and occasionally stopped their campaign efforts altogether.

The rift was clear, and the struggle to merge worlds and effectively translate a variety of skill sets into effective advocacy was fairly well delineated. What troubled me was the implicit assumption that was being made around “effective” and “good” use of the Internet and social media. Why did a glossy website and an “active” social media presence appear to translate into organisational effectiveness? What was driving that assumption? It was an assumption I occasionally found myself making when researching organisations and even in some of my earliest interviews. Why did daily Facebook posts, likes, multiple Tweets, and followers translate into an interpretation of success and impact?

As Western, and in the case of Facebook and Twitter, American publically traded companies, there is a clear business prerogative in encouraging ever-increasing usage of their sites. More posts and tweet equals more data, which can then be analyzed or sold to a variety of different entities that want to utilise this data to create wealth. Facebook and Twitter also happen to be sites that can be used to generate conversation around key issues and act as an easy way to aggregate thousands, if not millions, of users behind a cause. The Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, and the Delhi Rape case mobilisations are only some of the hundreds of cases where social media sites have played a key role in mobilizing political, social, and cultural change.

However there is a corporate prerogative at work that is often ignored in these narratives. It is in a social media companies’ best interest to encourage frequent usage, as this is how free services generate revenue. Those who post the most win the race to be seen and heard. Those who do not - or do not have the funds to pay for sponsored posts or tweets - get lost in the shuffle, viewed as out of step and struggling to adapt to modern urban India, regardless of the quality work they may be doing offline. The “good” user is the most active user, regardless of what the content actually is. It can easily be termed as a binary between quantity versus quality, but this diminishes the extremely effective and thoughtful work of some digital media campaigns, which demands a different type of quality to actually become an impactful movement. It is therefore a more complex phenomenon than blindly generating massive amounts of content, but this is certainly a critical piece to digital success.

My conclusion, and one which was discussed and inspired by an early participant, was that it was the social media platforms – including key sites like Facebook, Twitter, and to a lesser extent YouTube - were partially generating and multiplying the aura of effectiveness around organisations and groups which had heavily emphasized social media as a core part of their outreach strategy. This is not to deny the very real success that several of these campaigns have had in generating conversation and change around critical issues in India. It instead questions why our notion of success and effectiveness has been altered so quickly, especially in an urban and digital context.

Based on my fieldwork, I encountered a digital hierarchy in three different aspects in activist groups. These divisions emerge at the level of search engines and ranking, web page aesthetics, and finally social media usage and statistical data. I will briefly examine these levels in the following sections.

Level I: Search Engines and Page Rankings

The first was generated at the level of the search engine. Higher ranked and frequently visited websites appear higher on any search engine page, based on the search algorithm. In the first searches I conducted, several organisations with well-developed and easily navigable websites always appeared high on the search page, and were the first organisations I made contact with. As I began to dig deeper into partner organisations and get recommendations from my participants, I discovered new organisations that had never appeared in any search I had conducted, in spite of their clear links to the issues I was researching. These organisations have less of an audience and less of a digital voice from the very beginning. This is not even engaging with the issue of language on the Internet, as all of my searches were in English and not in Hindi or any other language spoken in India and were focussed initially only on organisations with an office in Delhi.

A second issue at the level of the search engine was that the organisations that appeared highest on the list had links to larger partner organisations in Europe and the United States, and occasionally had head offices in New York or London. The larger global presence may have had an impact on page ranking, as they were more likely to be searched for and recognised globally. The dominance of English on the Internet may also play a role, limiting the potential set of results, though again I made this decision consciously. Language choice has had a demonstrable impact on what a person sees on the Internet and what appears using the same search term. The burden of visibility influencing potential digital impact is clear, and practically forces some organisations to invest in a digital presence without a clear digital strategy. This can prove extremely detrimental – especially if the web page proves difficult to navigate and use, which I discuss in the following section - and move investment away from advocacy and programmes on the ground. Visibility is also a key concern for groups that exist purely as a digital campaign, as their potential success is based almost solely on how easy they are to find. Failure leads to diminished searches and lower rankings outside of the first results page from a search engine, which few people click beyond, thus dramatically limiting the impact an organisational webpage can have from the very beginning.

Level II: Webpage Aesthetics

The second area consisted of the content and ease of use of the website. As a researcher, I was compelled to look into every recommended organisation that engaged with the issues I was researching. That being said the organisations with more developed websites caught my attention and implicitly created the impression that it was a more desirable contact. This is quite obviously not the case in reality, and often the organisations that had less advanced websites and appeared technologically less capable proved to be highly credible sources doing commendable work. However the difficulty of navigating some of the websites, which included issues such as broken hyperlinks, difficult interfaces, and offered very little information on the activities of the organisations would prove deeply unappealing to an observer with less motivation than myself. Going against my own training and experience and trusting the power of the network of recommendations on the ground proved to be just as useful as fairly random web searches. In terms of first impressions, it is difficult to move beyond these issues of navigation for an outside observer which expects a quality organisation to have a quality website.

Again, organisations with head offices based in the United States or Europe often were easily navigable and had high quality webpage design, representing a clear trend and highlighting the emphasis placed on the digital aboard. It was also very clearly which organisations had started on the Internet, based purely on design and functionality, though there was a certain bias as the Internet campaigners I spoke too had all had had great success as an online campaign. Finding failed campaigns would have added a key counterpoint to my work, but the difficulty of doing so proved insurmountable for this particular project. Design and navigability are key indicators of skill and investment in digital presence from an outsider’s perspective. It is less than representative of the story on the ground and the success of an organisation, especially if it is not a purely digital entity.

Level III: Social Media Use and Statistics

The third and final level I encountered was determined by social media use. For every organization or participant I met I did cursory research on the various social media platforms they used, how many likes or followers they had near the day of my interview, and roughly how often the organization posted and tweeted. About 90% of my participant organisations had a least a Facebook page and a Twitter account. The number of followers varied widely, from about 200 to nearly 200,000 on Facebook and Twitter. Daily posts and variety of content was a key component to the success of the more widely followed groups online. It was immediately clear that groups that posted sporadically and without immediately stimulating content did not generate or gain nearly as much digital attention.

Many organisations discussed the struggle to move beyond a closed and familiar network, to reach out to the audience they know is there. But without a clear strategy, and even more importantly without a dedicated communications position, their digital engagement often mirrored their offline audience; a closed network of individuals already dedicated to change in the area the organisation was working in. They often failed to meet the incessant demands of the medium for easy content and had difficulties expanding their reach or message beyond their previously established networks of influence.

Those organisations which were able to attract digital attention on social media, while feeling it was an important tool for outreach – especially for youth in Delhi – and places where conversations on key issues could take place, also discussed the importance of social media statistics as a measurable deliverable. Donors, especially foreign funders, placed an emphasis on growth on social media sites as an indicator of success and growing influence. Whether social media growth can actually be an indicator of influence is still up for debate, but it is indicative of the notion that success means quantity, rather than quality, similar to the Western corporate prerogative of growth. That this is the new measure and standard of success for an activist organization is a troubling trend, and one unlikely to change in the near future.

Conclusion

I have argued that corporate strategies and imperatives are creating this new class system of activism in India. I labelled it a “Western” corporate strategy, based on the American origins of the main players Facebook and Twitter, which are the predominate mediums my participants engaged with and have some of the largest audiences in India. Facebook had 108 million users of May 2014 Twitter has around 19 million users (Statista 2015) in India, though these are estimates and in all likelihood there has been an increase in users. The new hierarchy masks the reality that impact and results cannot be measured by likes and retweets. While there is indeed power in these particular sites, the difficulty in documenting what influence actually translates into in the offline world is a well-documented debate. I do not doubt that the Internet and social media, in urban and increasingly in rural India, have great affordances. But these advances do not have to come at the expense of equally important organisations whose ability to translate these messages digitally is more limited than others, especially when this hierarchy is partially generated by corporate sensibilities whose sole aim is profit generation.

While this hierarchy has been explored as an issue of second-level digital divide- where the issue is not lack of access but lack of training and knowledge of the digital world – I do not believe this is the only issue at stake. The increasing power of large companies to determine the way we interact and the rules of effective communication and transmission are deeply troubling, and leaves little room for alternatives. Collaboration can be an effective way of mitigating some of the differences, but this option is not always available to every group.

While these are questions that require further examination, it is clear that there is a divide between organisation’s digital strategies and whether they are able to leverage the affordances of the Internet and social media applications. I have argued that the operational aspects of social media sites increase this divide in particular, as they demand increasing amounts of data to generate profit. A strong digital presence is increasingly linked to an idea of effectiveness and impact, without investigating offline realities. This in turn can lead to a new hierarchy of activism, which limits the voices of some and magnifies the digital voices of others who are clearly better at manipulating the advantages of the Internet. I do not wish to say that offline activism is more effective than online activism and that we should not engage with digital mediums to promote. I only seek to question how this increasingly digital reality is creating a hierarchal system that is not reflective of offline reality, question what knowledge might be left behind in the process, and critically examine the underlying structures and platforms underlying the growing field of digital activism in India.

References

Castells, M. (2010) Networks of Outrage and Networks of Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age, Cambridge, MA: Polity Press

Earl, J. and Kimport, K. (2011) Digitally Enabled Social Change: Activism in the Internet Age Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

Internet Live Stats (2015) www.internetlivestats.com Accessed 23 May 2015

Rainie, L. and Wellman, B. (2012) Networked: The New Social Operating System, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press Statista (2015) www.statista.com Accessed 25 May 2015

The post is published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, and copyright is retained by the author.

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Studying the Internet Discourse in India through the Prism of Human Rights

Deva Prasad M — 2015-07-22T04:18:37Z

This post by Deva Prasad M is part of the 'Studying Internets in India' series. Deva Prasad is Assistant Professor at the National Law School of India University (NLSIU), Bangalore. In this essay, he analyses key public discussions around Internet related issues from the human rights angle, and explores how this angle may contribute to understanding the features of the Internet discourse in India.

Introduction

The significance of Internet as an important element and tool in day-to-day life of mankind is an established experiential fact. The intrinsic value that Internet brings to our lives has transformed the access to Internet as a necessity. Internet’s intrinsic value acts an enabling tool for information, communication and commerce to be effectively and expeditiously carried forward. It is to due to this enormous intrinsic value attached with Internet that there is an emerging trend of exploring Internet from the perspective of human rights. Moreover, Internet as a medium also helps in furtherance of human rights [1]. Social movements have attained a new lease of life with the digital activism over Internet. Arab spring is an epitome of this phenomenon.

There is an emerging positive trend of linking established norms of human rights with Internet. The Report of the Special Rapporteur on the right to freedom of opinion and expression has vividly explained the possibility and feasibility of extending and extrapolating the right of freedom of opinion and expression to Internet medium (Article 19 of the UDHR and the ICCPR) [2]. The Special Rapporteur also highlights the need to have access to Internet for effective enjoyment of right to freedom of opinion and expression in the digital sphere. The UN High Commissioner on Human Right’s report on‘The Right To Privacy In The Digital Age’ also explicitly highlights the significance of protecting the right to privacy in the internet medium in light of extensive “surveillance and the interception of digital communications and the collection of personal data” [3]. The extensive interception and blocking of the online communication is also a pertinent reason, which calls for human right protection to be extended to Internet.

The WSIS Declaration for Building of Information Society [4] and the Charter of Human Rights and Principles for the Internet [5] also have played a significant role in furthering the inter-linkage between human rights and Internet.

The Internet and human rights policy developments have gathered significant relevance in international human rights law and Internet policy fora. But it is interesting to note that the Indian government and state institutional mechanisms have not yet pro-actively accepted relevance of applying human rights norm to the Internet medium in India.

As an essay in the Studying Internet series, it is important to highlight how human rights acts as underlying factors in many socio-political issues pertaining to Internet in India. Analysis of these issues helps us to understand that, even though the Indian state turns a blind eye to the human rights element in the various socio-political issues relating to Internet, the digitally conscious Indian’s have realized their rights and even fought their own battle for exercising their rights.

In recent years, the Internet discourse in India has witnessed many socio-political concerns. This essay would be exploring the pertinent socio-political issues in Indian context and the underlying link to human rights thread. Globally, exploring Internet from the perspective of human rights brings out multitude of issues, which requires application of established human rights norms of right to privacy, freedom of expression, access. The story in India is no different. In this regard, three socio-political issues relating to Internet, which gained much attention in India roughly in last one year, are being analyzed. Interestingly, all three issues have an underlying thread of human right perspective connecting them and need pertinent deliberation from human rights perspective.

Section 66A and Freedom of Speech and Expression

The lack of freedom of expression on Internet and Section 66A of Information Technology Act, 2000 is an interesting case study. Indian government used Section 66A as a tool for extensive surveillance and had taken criminal legal action against the Internet and social media users for posting the offensive comments and posts. But Section 66A was badly drafted allowing the government to initiate criminal legal action in an arbitrary and whimsical manner. Thus such a provision could be misused by the state for curbing the freedom of expression in the Internet sphere. The rampant usage of the Indian state machinery of Section 66A had led to sharp reaction amongst the Internet and social media users in India. The vagueness in language and unconstitutionality of Section 66A were criticized by legal experts. The action of state machinery in arresting a cartoonist, a professor and two girls in Maharashtra [6] (and many others) for comments and post on social media against politicians, had made it evident the lack of respect for freedom for speech and expression on Internet by the Indian state machinery (Most of these incidents took place during the year 2012). These incidents led to wide spread protest for violation of human right to freedom of speech and expression by the digital media users. When the Public Interest Litigation [7] filed by Shreya Singhal led to the Supreme Court striking down the Section 66A on 24th March, 2015 for lack of due process being followed, it was a water shed moment for internet discourse in India. The significance of human rights (especially the freedom of speech and expression) in the Internet medium got asserted.

Net Neutrality and Internet Access Issue

The recent net neutrality debate in India has also evoked deliberation about the right of equal access to Internet and the need to maintain Internet as a democratic space. The net neutrality debate on keeping Internet a democratic space that is equally accessible to everyone has got much vogue in India. An important point that needs to be emphasized in the debate regarding net neutrality in India is the equal access question being raised. The equal access question is more a product of the lack of regulatory clarity regarding TRAI’s (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India) capacity to regulate the Over-the top (OTT) services; coupled with the lack of well stipulated right to internet access in the Indian context.

The net neutrality rides on the premise that the entire data available on the Internet should be equally accessible to everyone. No discrimination should be allowed regarding access to a particular website or any particular content on the Internet. Tim Wu, a renowned scholar in Internet and communication law has mentioned in his seminal work, Network Neutrality and Broadband Discrimination, that network neutrality signifies “an Internet that does not favor one application” [8].

In this regard, there has been a constructive dialogue between the Federal Communication Commission in United States and the various stakeholders. An interesting development was a proposition, which attempted to classify broadband internet service access as a public utility [9]. There is much relevance for such debates in the Indian context. India also needs public participation (especially strong voices from internet user’s perspective) to highlight these access concerns regarding Internet. Human right’s concerns regarding Internet should be pro-actively brought to the attention of regulatory institutions such as TRAI. There is need to balance the economic and for-profit interest of service providers with the larger public interest based on equal access.

The pressure created by public opinion through online activism upon the TRAI’s proposal to regulate the OTT services helps in understanding the power of public participation in the pertinent human rights issues relating to Internet [10]. The broader design in which the principle of human rights in the context of Internet medium would have to be asserted in India is also vividly seen in the case of protest against OTT regulation.

Right to be Forgotten in EU and Repercussions in India

The repercussions of ‘Right to be Forgotten’ judgment of European Union also had led to debate of similar rights in Indian context. The Google v. AEPD and Mario Cosjeta [11] is an interesting case decided by the Court of Justice of European Union, where the court held that based on the right to privacy and data protection, persons could ask databases (this case was against the search engine Google) on Internet medium to curtail from referring to certain aspects of their personal information [12]. This is basically referred to as ‘right to be forgotten’.

Viktor Mayor Schonberg in his book Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in Digital Age has elaborated the problem of how the digital age coupled with the Internet has led to store, disseminate and track information in a substantially easy way and advocates for the more informational privacy rights [13]. In this judgment, the Court of Justice of European Union has furthered the information privacy rights in the European Union with the ‘right to be forgotten’.

In the Indian context, it is important to note that information privacy rights are yet to evolve to the extent that of European Union with definite privacy and data protection law. But interestingly, there was a request made to a media news website by a person attempting to enforce the right to be forgotten [14]. Even though the application of right to be forgotten is not directly applicable in the Indian context, this event throws light to the fact that Internet users in India are becoming conscious of their rights in the Internet space. The way Indian news media gave relevance to the right to be forgotten ruling also is an example of how there is an implicit recognition of the interlink between human rights and Internet that is slowly seeping into the Indian milieu.

Internet Discourse in India and Human Rights

Discussion of the three issues mentioned above points out to an important fact that human rights are not pro-actively applied to the Internet medium by the Indian state machinery. Even though the international human rights law and various Internet policy organizations are pushing the Internet and human rights agenda, the same is yet to gain momentum in India.

But at the same time, an interesting development that could be witnessed from the above discussion is the manner in which the Internet users are asserting their rights over the Internet and slowly paving the path for an enriching view towards applying the human rights perspective to Internet. In the first instance, the freedom of speech and expression was not pro-actively applied to the digital space and Internet. This has happened when Article 19 of Constitution of India has clearly provided for freedom of speech and expression. The second instance of net neutrality has thrown wide open the lack of clear policy regarding Internet access in Indian context. The public opinion has pointed out to the fact that there is a public interest demand to ensure that there is no discrimination in the case of Internet access. The third instance of looking at ‘right to be forgotten’ in Indian perspective, provides the understanding that the users of Internet are becoming conscious of their individual rights in the digital space in a more affirmative manner.

Further, the operationalization of human rights in these three instances also needs to be critically looked into. The assertion of the freedom of speech and expression in the Internet medium could be made possible effectively due to the fact that Article 19 of the Constitution of India, 1950, protects freedom of speech and expression. The vast amount of precedence existing in the field of freedom of speech and expression relating to constitutional litigation and allied jurisprudence has helped in crafting the extension of the right of freedom of expression to the digital medium of Internet. Further, using the social action tool of Public Interest Litigation, the unconstitutionality of Article 19 of the Constitution of India, 1950 could be brought before the Supreme Court.

But interestingly, the net neutrality issue, which is concerning the access to Internet in a non-discriminatory manner, is yet to be perceived in Indian context from a strong human rights perspective. Internet access as a public utility concept is yet to be evolved and articulated in concrete manner in the Indian context. Further, the Indian network neutrality discourse attempts to operationalize through the free market approach. In the free market approach the entire non-discriminatory access has to be ensured by the market competition with the necessary regulatory bodies. In this sense, the human rights angle of access to Internet will have to be ensured by effective competition in the market along with the proper oversight of regulatory bodies such as TRAI and Competition Commission of India. It is important for the regulatory bodies to have broad goals for furthering public interest by ensuring non-discriminatory access to Internet. Further, with the financial and infrastructure led limitations of government’s capability of ensuring access to Internet for all, the market-led model with sufficient regulation might be the right way forward.

Looking at the issue of the right to be forgotten, it could be easily perceived that the Indian milieu is yet to articulate privacy rights to that high standard. Even though the right to privacy is being understood in the constitutional law context through effective interpretation by the judiciary, the concept of digital privacy has not yet evolved in India. There is no collective understanding, till now, that has emerged regarding right to be forgotten in India. Even though individual attempts to assert the right was witnessed, there is much room for an evolved collective understanding in Indian context. Civil society organizations would have a crucial role to play in this regard.

There is an emerging consciousness amongst a set of Internet users in India, who values and gives importance to the Internet being a democratic space, without unwanted restriction from the government machinery or even the private entities. Hence looking at the Internet discourse of India from the perspective of human rights, there is an implicit way in which the human rights are being applied to the Internet space. The lack of a state’s pro-active approach in asserting human rights to Internet space is highlighted by the assertions being made by the Internet users in India.

Way Forward

For Internet to remain as a democratic space, there is need for pro-active application of these human rights norms and clear understanding in Internet governance. At present, the state of affairs in India regarding application of human rights to Internet is far from satisfactory.

This essay which is part of the ‘Studying Internet in India’ series, has till now done a stock taking analysis of emerging dimension of human rights and Internet in India. Lack of interest from government and state machinery to further the human rights and Internet dimension need to be seriously reconsidered. Attempting to intervene in Internet law and policy in India from the rights based approach should be an important agenda for furthering digital rights in India. For this, civil society organizations have an important role to play. Exploring the public interest could be done effectively with public participation of stakeholders. Here in, platforms such as India Internet Governance Forum could play a crucial role.

Apart from the civil society organizations, it is also pertinent for state and governmental institutional mechanism to also take a pro-active stance. For ensuring that the rights based approach to Internet has to be duly included in the Internet law and policy; and there should be institutional mechanism, which could look into areas pertaining to human rights and Internet. It is a well know fact that India lacks institutional mechanism for looking into communication and privacy issues regulation. Further, the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) also needs to look at the relevance of human rights for Internet. Inspiration could be drawn from the pioneering work of Australian Commission of Human Rights on applying human rights norms and standards to Internet medium [15]. This essay has only flagged the need to apply the established human rights norms to Internet space. Much more issues such as access to Internet by disabled, safety of children and Internet medium are also pertinent areas.

Moreover, it is important to have digital rights of Internet users in India to be explicitly enshrined in a legal framework. Presently, a gap in law and policy framework regarding human rights and Internet is evident, as highlighted in this essay. The pertinent questions regarding access, privacy and freedom of expression are to be taken seriously by the government and state machinery for which clear and well-defined rights relating to Internet space have to be framed. For Internet and human rights to be taken seriously, it is high time that legal and institutional framework to explore these issues also are evolved.

Emphasizing the Right to Communication in India

Further, the present understanding of right to communication in India, which is perceived in narrow manner, could be re-worked with the help of a pro-active application of human rights norms to the Internet governance. The intrusion into the freedom of speech and expression especially in the telecommunication context has to be highlighted. Protection of communal harmony has been used as rationale for capping the number of the SMS messages that could be sent per day during the exodus of people of Northeastern states origin from Bangalore, Pune and other major cities in India.

This move has been criticized for being unreasonable and universality of capping the number of SMS messages [16]. Further, the telecommunication and Internet services (especially Facebook and YouTube) were blocked in Kashmir for restricting the protest [17]. The telecommunication and Internet services were blocked on the grounds of protection of national security. The reasonableness of restrictions that could be imposed on right to communication is a major concern in the above-mentioned instances. Making a blanket ban applicable in a universal manner undermines the right to communication of various genuine users of bulk messaging and social media sites.

The right to communication especially in the digital and telecommunication media needs to be emphasized. Applying human rights perspective and norms to Internet governance would help in articulating and evolving the right to communication in India. With adequate institutional oversight, the human rights norms could make the digital right to communication an effective right.

To conclude, the Internet discourse in India has already paved path for human rights norms to be applied to Internet space. The seriousness that could be attributed to those rights is evident by the assertions by the Internet users in India. But the state and government machinery in India also should explore the human rights and Internet agenda seriously.

Endnotes

[1] Frank La Rue, Report Of The Special Rapporteur On The Promotion And Protection Of The Right To Freedom Of Opinion And Expression, Available at http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/docs/17session/A.HRC.17.27_en.pdf (Last accessed on 25/05/2015).

[2] Ibid, Special Rapporteur in the Report points out that the language of Article 19 of ICCPR is media neutral and is applicable to online media technological developments also. Para 20 and 21 of the Report.

[3] UN High Commissioner on Human Right, Report on ‘The Right To Privacy In The Digital Age’, Available at http://www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/HRC/RegularSessions/Session27/Documents/A.HRC.27.37_en.pdf (Last accessed on 25/05/2015).

[4] WSIS Declaration for Building of Information Society, Available at http://www.itu.int/wsis/docs/geneva/official/dop.html. (Last accessed on 25/05/2015). Article 58, WSIS Declaration reads as follows: “The use of ICTs and content creation should respect human rights and fundamental freedoms of others, including personal privacy, and the right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion in conformity with relevant international instruments”.

[5] Charter of Human Rights and Principles for the Internet Available at http://internetrightsandprinciples.org/site/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/IRP_booklet_final1.pdf, (Last accessed on 25/05/2015).

[6] See Section 66A:Six Cases That Sparked Debate, Available at http://www.livemint.com/Politics/xnoW0mizd6RYbuBPY2WDnM/Six-cases-where-the-draconian-Section-66A-was-applied.html, (Last accessed on 25/05/2015). Also see, Facebook Trouble:10 Cases of Arrest Under Section 66A of IT Act, Available at http://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/facebook-trouble-people-arrested-under-sec-66a-of-it-act/article1-1329883.aspx (Last accessed on 25/05/2015).

[7] Shreya Singhal v. Union of India, Available at http://indiankanoon.org/doc/110813550/ (Last accessed on 25/05/2015).

[8] Tim Wu, Network Neutrality, Broadband Discrimination, Available at https://cdt.org/files/speech/net-neutrality/2005wu.pdf (Last accessed on 25/05/2015).

[9] F.C.C. Approves Net Neutrality Rules, Classifying Broadband Internet Service as a Utility, Available at http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/27/technology/net-neutrality-fcc-vote-internet-utility.html (Last accessed on 25/05/2015).

[10] The online campaign by www.savetheinternet.in and the AIB video have played a crucial role in gathering public support.

[11] Court of Justice of European Union, Case C-131/12.

[12] Rising like a Phoenix: The ‘Right to be Forgotten’ before the ECJ, Available at http://europeanlawblog.eu/?p=2351 (Last accessed on 25/05/2015).

[13] Viktor Mayor Schonberg, Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in Digital Age, Princeton University Press (2009).

[14] Right to be Forgotten Poses A Legal Dilemma in India, Available at http://www.livemint.com/Industry/5jmbcpuHqO7UwX3IBsiGCM/Right-to-be-forgotten-poses-a-legal-dilemma-in-India.html, (Last accessed on 25/05/2015). Also see We received a Right to be Forgotten request from an Indian user, Available at http://www.medianama.com/2014/06/223-right-to-be-forgotten-india/ (Last accessed on 25/05/2015).

[15] Human Rights and Internet, Available at https://www.humanrights.gov.au/our-work/rights-and-freedoms/projects/human-rights-and-internet (Last accessed on 25/05/2015).

[16] Chinmayi Arun, SMS Block as Threat to Free Speech, Available at http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/www-the-hindubusinessline-op-ed-sep-1-2012-chinmayi-arun-sms-block-as-threat-to-free-speech (Last accessed on 15/07/2015).

[17] Pamposh Raina and Betwa Sharma, Telecom Services Blocked to Curb Protests in Kashmir, Available at http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/21/telecom-services-blocked-to-curb-protests-in-kashmir/?_r=0 (Last accessed on 15/07/2015).

Author's Note: All the views expressed are my own and in no way are linked to the opinion of my employers. I thank CIS for this opportunity to explore Internet and Human Rights interface in India as part of the Studying Internet in India essay series.

Note: The post is published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, and copyright is retained by the author.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/blog_studying-the-internet-discourse-in-india-through-the-prism-of-human-rights

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

Civil Society Organisations and Internet Governance in Asia - Open Review

sumandro — 2015-11-13T05:54:33Z

This is a book section written for the third volume (2000-2010) of the Asia Internet History series edited by Prof. Kilnam Chon. The pre-publication text of the section is being shared here to invite suggestions for addition and modification. Please share your comments via email sent to raw[at]cis-india[dot]org with 'Civil Society Organisations and Internet Governance in Asia - Comments' as the subject line. This text is published under Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.

You are most welcome to read the pre-publication drafts of other sections of the Asia Internet History Vol. 3, and share your comments: https://sites.google.com/site/internethistoryasia/book3.

Preparations for the World Summit on the Information Society

The World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) conferences organized by the United Nations in Geneva (2003) and Tunis (2005) initiated crucial platforms and networks, some temporary and some continued, for various non-governmental actors to intensively and periodically take part in the discussions of governance of Internet and various related activities towards the goals of inclusive development and human rights. Many of the civil society organizations taking part in the WSIS conferences, as well as the various regional and thematic preparatory meetings and seminars, had little prior experience in the topic of Internet governance. They were entering these conversations from various perspectives, such as local developmental interventions, human and cultural rights activism, freedom and diversity of media, and gender and social justice. With backgrounds in such forms of applied practice and theoretical frameworks, members of these civil society organizations often faced a difficult challenge in articulating their experiences, insights, positions, and suggestions in terms of the (then) emerging global discourse of Internet governance and that of information and communication technologies (ICTs) as instruments of development. At the WSIS: An Asian Response Meeting in 2002, Susanna George, (then) Executive Director of Isis International, Manila, succinctly expressed this challenge being faced by the members of civil society organizations:

For some feminist activists however, including myself, it has felt like trying to squeeze my concerns into a narrow definition of what gender concerns in ICTs are. I would like it to Cinderella’s ugly sister cutting off her toe to fit into the dainty slipper of gender concerns in ICTs. The development ball, it seems, can only accommodate some elements of what NGO activists, particularly those from the South, are concerned about in relation to new information and communications technologies. (George 2002)

The above mentioned seminar, held in Bangkok, Thailand, on November 22-24, 2002, was a crucial early meeting for the representatives from Asian civil society organizations to share and shape their understanding and positions before taking part in the global conversations during the following years. The meeting was organised by Bread for All (Switzerland), Communication Rights in the Information Society Campaign (Netherlands), Forum-Asia (Thailand), and World Association for Christian Communication (United Kingdom), as a preparatory meeting before the Asia-Pacific Regional Conference of WSIS, with 34 organizations from 16 Asian countries taking part in it. The Final Document produced at the end of this seminar was quite a remarkable one. It highlighted the simultaneity of Asia as one of the global centres of the information economy and the everyday reality of wide-spread poverty across the Asian countries, and went on to state that the first principle for the emerging global information society should be that the '[c]ommunication rights are fundamental to democracy and human development' (The World Summit on the Information Society: An Asian Response 2002). It proposed the following action items for the efforts towards a global inclusive information society: 1) strengthen community, 2) ensure access, 3) enhance the creation of appropriate content, 4) invigorate global governance, 5) uphold human rights, 6) extend the public domain, 7) protect and promote cultural and linguistic diversity, and 8) ensure public investment in infrastructure (ibid.).

Immediately after this Conference, several Asian civil society organizations attended the Asian Civil Society Forum, organised as part of the Conference of Non-governmental Organizations in Consultative Relations with the United Nations (CONGO), held in Bangkok, Thailand, during December 9-13, 2002. Representatives of Dhaka Ahsania Mission (Bangladesh), OneWorld South Asia (India), GLOCOM (Japan), Foundation for Media Alternative (Philippines), Korean Progressive Network – JINBONET (Republic of Korea), Friedrich Naumann Foundation (Singapore), International Federation of University Women (Switzerland), and Forum Asia (Regional) drafted a Joint Statement emphasising that a 'broad-based participation of civil society, especially from those communities which are excluded, marginalized and severely deprived, is critical in defining and building such a [true communicative, just and peaceful] society' (Aizu 2002). In the very next month, the Asia-Pacific Regional Conference was held in Tokyo during January 13-15, 2003, 'to develop a shared vision and common strategies for the “Information Society' (WSIS Executive Secretariat 2003: 2). The conference saw participation of representatives from 47 national governments, 22 international organizations, 54 private sector agencies, and 116 civil society organizations across the Asia-Pacific region. The Tokyo Declaration, the final document prepared at the conclusion of the Conference, recognized that:

[T]he Information Society must ... facilitate full utilization of information and communication technologies (ICT) at all levels in society and hence enable the sharing of social and economic benefits by all, by means of ubiquitous access to information networks, while preserving diversity and cultural heritage. (Ibid.: 2)

Further, it highlighted the following priority areas of action: 1) infrastructure development, 2) securing affordable, universal access to ICTs, 3) preserving linguistic and cultural diversity and promoting local content, 4) developing human resources, 5) establishing legal, regulatory and policy frameworks, 6) ensuring balance between intellectual property rights (IPR) and public interest, 7) ensuring the security of ICTs, and 8) fostering partnerships and mobilizing resources. It is not difficult to see how the focus of necessary actions shifted from an emphasis on concerns of community and human rights, and public investments and commons, towards those of legal and policy mechanisms, multi-partner delivery of services, and intellectual property rights. Civil society organizations, expectedly, felt sidelined in this Conference, and decided to issue a join statement of Asian civil society organizations to ensure that their positions are effectively presented. The first two topics mentioned in this document were: 1) '[c]ommunication rights should be fully recognized as a fundamental and universal human right to be protected and promoted in the information society,' and 2) '[t]he participation of civil society in the information society at all levels should be ensured and sustained, from policy planning to implementation, monitoring and evaluation' (UNSAJ et al 2003). The joint statement was endorsed by 30 civil society organizations: UDDIPAN (Bangladesh); COMFREL (Cambodia); ETDA (East Timor); The Hong Kong Council of Social Services (Hong Kong); Food India, IT for Change (India); Indonesian Infocom Society (Indonesia); Active Learning, CPSR, Forum for Citizens' Television and Media, JTEC, Kyoto Journal, Ritsumeikan University Media Literacy Project, UNSAJ (Japan); Computer Association Nepal, Rural Area Development Programme (Nepal); APC Women's Networking Support Programme, Foundation for Media Alternatives, ISIS International (Philippines); Citizens' Action Network, Korean Progressive Network – Jinbonet, Labor News Production, ZAK (Republic of Korea); e-Pacificka Consulting (Samoa); National University of Singapore (Singapore); Public Television Service, Taiwan Association for Human Rights (Taiwan); Asian-South Pacific Bureau for Adult Education, FORUM ASIA, and TVE Asia Pacific (Regional) (Ibid.).

Participation in the WSIS Process

The first WSIS conference was held in Geneva in December 2003. Through the processes of organizing this conference, and the second one in Tunis in November 2005, United Nations expressed a clear intention of great participation of actors from the private companies, civil society, academia, and media, along with the governmental organizations. During the first meeting of the WSIS Preparatory Committee (PrepCom-1) in Geneva, during July 1-5, 2002, the civil society organizations demanded that they should be allowed to co-shape the key topics to be discussed during the first conference (2003). There was already an Inter-Governmental Subcommittee on Contents and Themes, but no equivalent platform for the civil society organizations was available. With the approval of the Civil Society Plenary (CSP), the Civil Society Subcommittee on Content and Themes (WSIS-SCT) was instituted during PrepCom-1 (WSIS-SCT 2003b). At the second WSIS Preparatory Committee meeting (PrepCom-2) in Geneva, during February 17-28, 2003, the WSIS-SCT produced a summary of the views of its members titled 'Vision and Principles of Information and Communication Societies,' and also a one page brief titled 'Seven Musts: Priority Principles Proposed by Civil Society' to be used for lobbying purposes (Ibid.). This brief mentioned seven key principles of Internet governance identified by the civil society organization taking part in the WSIS process: (1) sustainable development, (2) democratic governance, (3) literacy, education, and research, (4) human rights, (5) global knowledge commons, (6) cultural and linguistic diversity, and (7) information security (WSIS-SCT 2003a).

Asian civil society organizations that took part in the PrepCom-2 meeting included United Nations Association of China (China); CASP - Centre for Adivasee Studies and Peace, C2N - Community Communications Network (India); ICSORC - Iranian Civil Society Organizations Resource Center (Iran); GAWF - General Arab Women Federation (Iraq); Daisy Consortium, GLOCOM - Center for Global Communications (Japan); Association for Progressive Communication, Global Knowledge Partnership (Malaysia); Pakistan Christian Peace Foundation (Pakistan); WFEO - World Federation of Engineering Organization (Palestine); Asian South Pacific Bureau of Adult Education, Foundation for Media Alternatives, ISIS International – Manila (Philippines); Korean Progressive Network - Jinbonet (Republic of Korea); IIROSA - International Islamic Relief Organization (Saudi Arabia); and Taking IT Global (India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, and Turkey) (ITU 2003a).

All these efforts led to development of the Civil Society Declaration to the World Summit on the Information Society, which was prepared and published by the Civil Society Plenary at the Geneva conference, on December 08, 2003. The Declaration was titled 'Shaping Information Societies for Human Needs' (WSIS Civil Society Plenary 2003). The Asian civil society organization that took part in the Geneva conference were BFES - Bangladesh Friendship Education Society, Drik, ICTDPB - Information & Communication Technology Development Program, Proshika - A Center for Human Development (Bangladesh); China Society for Promotion of the Guangcai Programme, Chinese People's Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries, United Nations Association of China (China); The Hong Kong Council of Social Service (Hong Kong); CASP - Centre for Adivasee Studies and Peace, Childline India Foundation / Child Helpline International, DAWN - Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (India); Communication Network of Women's NGOs in Iran, Green front of Iran, ICTRC - Iranian Civil Society Organizations Training and Research Center, Islamic Women's Institute of Iran, Institute for Women's Studies and Research, Organization for Defending Victims of Violence (Iran); ILAM - Center for Arab Palestinians in Israel (Israel); Citizen Digital Solutions, Forum for Citizens' Television and Media, GLOCOM - Center for Global Communications, JCAFE - Japan Computer Access for Empowerment, Soka Gakkai International (Japan); LAD-Nepal - Literary Academy for Dalit of Nepal (Nepal); Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Union, Global Knowledge Partnership (Malaysia); PAK Educational Society / Pakistan Development Network, SMEDA - Small & Medium Enterprise Development Authority (Pakistan); Palestine IT Association of Companies (Palestine); Isis International – Manila, Ugnayan ng Kababaihan sa Pulitika / Philippine Women's Network in Politics and Governance (Philippines); Citizen's Alliance for Consumer Protection of Korea, Korean Civil Society Network for WSIS (Republic of Korea); Youth Challenge (Singapore); Association for Progressive Communications (India and Philippines), CITYNET - Regional Network of Local Authorities for the Management of Human Settlements (India. Mongolia, and Philippines), Taking IT Global (India and Philippines) (ITU 2003b).

As the preparatory meetings and consultations towards the second WSIS conference advanced during the next year, the Asian civil society organizations attempted to engage more directly with the global Internet governance processes on one hand, and the national Internet and ICT policy situations on the other. Writing about their encounters at and before the second Preparatory Committee meeting of the Tunis conference, held in Geneva during February 17-25, 2005, Anita Gurumurthy and Parminder Jeet Singh made several early observations that have continued to resonate with the experiences of Asian civil society organizations throughout the decade (Gurumurthy & Singh 2005). Firstly, they indicated that the government agencies present in the dialogues tend to take diverging positions in international events and domestic contexts. Secondly, there was a marked absence of formal and informal discussions between the governmental and the civil society representatives of the same country present at the meeting. The government agencies were clearly disinterested in involving civil society organizations in the process. Thirdly, the civil society actors present in the meeting were mostly from the ICT for Development sector, and the organizations working in more 'traditional' sectors – such as education, health, governance reform, etc. – remained absent from the conversations. This is especially problematic in the case of such developing countries where there does not exist strategic linkages between civil society organizaions focusing on topics of technologized developmental interventions, and those involved in more 'traditional' development practices. Rekha Jain, in a separate report on the Indian experience of participating in the WSIS process, re-iterates some of these points (Jain 2006). She notes that '[w]hile the Secretary, [Department of Telecommunications, Government of India] was involved in (PrepCom-1) drafting the initial processes for involvement of NGOs, at the national level, this mechanism was not translated in to a process for involving the civil society or media' (Ibid.: 14).

The frequent lack of interest of national governments, especially in the Asian countries, to engage with civil society organizations on matters of policies and projects in Internet governance and ICTs for development (Souter 2007), further encouraged these organization to utilise the global discussion space opened up by the WSIS process to drive the agendas of democratisation of Internet governance processes, and protection and advancement of human rights and social justice. The second WSIS conference held in Tunis, during November 16-18, 2005, however, did not end in a positive note for the civil society organizations as a whole. The sentiment is aptly captured in the title of the Civil Society Statement issued after the Tunis Conference: 'Much more could have been achieved' (WSIS Civil Society Plenary 2005). Apart from producing this very important critical response to the WSIS process, within a month of its conclusions, the civil society organization contributed effectively in one of the more longer-term impacts of the process – the establishment of the Internet Governance Forums (IGFs). Immediately after the publication of the Report of the Working Group on Internet Governance (Desai et al) in June 2005, the Center for Global Communications (GLOCOM), Japan, acting on behalf of the Civil Society Internet Governance Caucus, came forward with public support for 'the establishment of a new forum to address the broad agenda of Internet governance issues, provided it is truly global, inclusive, and multi-stakeholder in composition allowing all stakeholders from all sectors to participate as equal peers' (WSIS Civil Society Internet Governance Caucus 2005: 3).

Asian Civil Society Organizations at the IGFs

In 2006, the WSIS Civil Society Internet Governance Caucus was reformed and established as a permanent 'forum for discussion, advocacy, action, and for representation of civil society contributions in Internet governance processes' (Civil Society Internet Government Caucus 2006). Representatives from Asian civil society organizations have consistently played critical roles in the functionings of this Caucus. Youn Jung Park of the Department of Technology and Society, SUNY Korea, co-founded and co-coordined the original Caucus in 2003. Adam Peake of the Center for Global Communications (GLOCOM), International University of Japan, was co-coordinator of the original Caucus from 2003 to 2006. Parminder Jeet Sing of IT for Change, India, was elected as one of the co-cordinators of the newly reformed Caucus in 2006, with the term ending in 2008. Izumi Aizu of the Institute for HyperNetwork Society and the Institute for InfoSocinomics, Tama University, Japan served as the co-coordinator of the Caucus during 2010-2012.

The first Internet Governance Forum organized in Athens, October 30 – November 2, 2006, saw participation from a very few Asian civil society organizations, mostly from Bangladesh and Japan (IGF 2006). The second Internet Governance Forum in Rio de Janeiro, November 12-15, 2007 had a wider representation from Asian civil society organizations: Bangladesh NGOs Network for Radio and Communication, BFES - Bangladesh Friendship Education Society, VOICE – Voices for Interactive Choice and Empowerment (Bangladesh); China Association for Science and Technology, Internet Society of China (China); University of Hong Kong (Hong Kong); Alternative Law Forum (via Association for Progressive Communications - Women's Networking Support Programme), Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi, IT for Change (India); GLOCOM, Kumon Center, Tama University (Japan); Sustainable Development Networking Programme (Jordan); Kuwait Information Technology Society (Kuwait); Assocation of Computer Engineers – Nepal, Rural Area Development Programme, Nepal Rural Information Technology Development Society (Nepal); Bytesforall – APC / Pakistan, Pakistan Christian Peace Foundation (Pakistan); Foundation for Media Alternatives, Philippine Resources for Sustainable Development Inc. (Philippines); and LIRNEasia (Sri Lanka). At the Open IGF Consultations in Geneva, on February 26 2008, the Internet Governance Caucus made two significant submissions: 1) that, although structuring the IGF sessions in Athens and Rio de Janeiro around the large themes of access, openness, diversity, and security have been useful to open up the multi-stakeholder dialogues, it is necessary to begin focused discussions of specific public policy issues to take the IGF process forward (Civil Society Internet Governance Caucus 2008a), and 2) that the Multi-Stakeholder Advisory Group (MAG), which drives the IGF process and events, should be made more proactive and transparent, and expanded in size so as to better include the different stakeholder groups who may self-identify their representatives for the MAG (Civil Society Internet Governance Caucus 2008b).

On one hand, the IGF Hyderabad, December 3-6, 2008, experienced a decline in the percentage of participants from civil society organizations and a rather modest increase in the percentage of participants from Asian countries (see: 6.1.5. Annexe – Tables), especially since this was the first major international Internet governance summit held in an Asian country. On the other hand, the Civil Society Internet Governance Caucus succeeded to bring forth the term 'enhanced cooperation,' as mentioned in the Tunis Agenda, to be addressed and discussed in one of the main sessions of the Forum (IGF 2008). The next IGF held in Sharm El Sheikh, November 15-18, 2009, saw further decline of participation from both the representatives of civil society organizations, and the attendees from Asian countries (see: 6.1.5. Annexe – Tables). In this context, Youn Jung Park made the following statement in the Stock Taking session of the summit:

As a cofounder of WSIS Civil Society Internet Governance Caucus in 2003, I would like to remind you ... [that] Internet Governance Forum was created as a compromise between those who supported the status quo Internet governance institution under one nation's status provision, and those who requested for more balanced roles for governments under international supervision of the Internet. While IGF has achieved a great success of diluting of such political tension between those who have different views of how to institutionalize Internet governance, ironically Internet governance forum became a forum without governance... [We] have to admit [that] IGF failed to deliver another mandate of the U.N. WSIS: Continuing discussion of how to design Internet governance institutions... The current IGF continues to function as knowledge transfer of ICANN's values to other stakeholders, while those who want to discuss and negotiate on how to design Internet governance institutions should have another platform for that specific U.N. WSIS mandate. (IGF 2009)

The first Asia Pacific Regional Internet Governance Forum (APrIGF) was held in Hong Kong on June 14-16, 2010. The organising committee included three civil society / acadmic organizations – Center for Global Communications (GLOCOM), Internet Society Hong Kong, and National University of Singapore – and three indpendent experts – Kuo-Wei Wu (Taiwan), Norbert Klein (Cambodia), and Zahid Jamil (Pakistan). Though the Forum had dominant presence from government and private sector participants, several representatives from Asian civil society / academic organizations spoke at the sessions: Ang Peng Hwa (Singapore Internet Research Centre, Nanyang Technological University), Charles Mok (Internet Society Hong Kong), Christine Loh (Civic Exchange), Chong Chan Yau (Hong Kong Blind Union), Clarence Tsang (Christian Action), Ilya Eric Lee (Taiwan E-Learning and Digital Archives Program, and Research Center for Information Technology Innovation), Izumi Aizu (Institute for HyperNetwork Society, and Institute for InfoSocinomics, Kumon Center, Tama University), Oliver “Blogie” Robillo (Mindanao Bloggers Community), Parminder Jeet Singh (IT for Change), Priscilla Lui (Against Child Abuse in Hong Kong), Tan Tin Wee (Centre for Internet Research, National University of Singapore), and Yap Swee Seng (Asian Forum for Human Rights and Development). As Ang Peng Hwa noted at the beginning of the summit, its key objective was to provide a formal space for various stakeholders from the Asia-Pacific region to discuss and provide inputs to the IGF process (APrIGF 2010). The regional forum was successful in enabling newer civil society entrants from the Asia-Pacific region to familiarize themselves with the IGF process, and to contribute to it. Oliver “Blogie” Robillo, represented and submit recommendations from Southeast Asian civil society organizations at IGF Vilnius, September 14-17, 2010, which was the first time he took part in the summit series. He emphasised the following topics: 1) openness and freedom of expression are the basis of democracy, and state-driven censorship of Internet in the region is an immediate threat to such global rights, 2) coordinated international efforts need to address and resolve not only global digital divides, but also the divides at regional, national, and sub-nationals scales, 3) the right to privacy is an integral part of cybersecurity, as well as a necessary condition for exercising human rights, 4) global Internet governance efforts must ensure that national governments do not control and restrict abilities of citizens to express through digital means, and it should be aligned with the universal human rights agenda, and 5) even after 5 years of the IGF process, a wider participation of civil society organizations, especially from the Asia-Pacific regions, remains an unachieved goal, which can only be achived if specific resources are allocated and processes are implemented (IGF 2010).

Internet Censorship and Civil Society Responses

Throughout the decade of 2000-2010, censorship of Internet and restriction of digital expression remained a crucial Internet rights concern across the world, and especially the Asian countries. One of the earliest global reports on the matter was brought out by the Reporters without Borders. In 2006, it published a list of countries marked as 'Internet Enemies' that featured 16 countries, out of which 11 were from Asia: China, Iran, Maldives, Myanmar (then, Burma), Nepal, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam (Reporters without Borders 2006). The list was updated in 2007, and three of these countries – Libya, Maldives, and Nepal – were taken off (Ibid.). The unique contradictions of the Asian region were sharply foregrounded in the 2006-07 report on Internet censorship by OpenNet Initiative, which noted:

Some of the most and least connected countries in the world are located in Asia: Japan, South Korea, and Singapore all have Internet penetration rates of over 65 percent, while Afghanistan, Myanmar, and Nepal remain three of thirty countries with less than 1 percent of its citizens online. Among the countries in the world with the most restricted access, North Korea allows only a small community of elites and foreigners online. Most users must rely on Chinese service providers for connectivity, while the limited number North Korean–sponsored Web sites are hosted abroad... [T]hough India’s Internet community is the fifth largest in the world, users amounted to only about 4 percent of the country’s population in 2005. Afghanistan, Myanmar, and Nepal are among the world’s least-developed countries. Despite the constraints on resources and serious developmental and political challenges, however, citizens are showing steadily increasing demand for Internet services such as Voice-over Internet Protocol (VoIP), blogging, and chat. (Wang 2007)

The report further described the strategy used by various Asian governments of 'delegation of policing and monitoring responsibilities to ISPs, content providers, private corporations, and users themselves' (Ibid.) These mechanisms enforce self-surveillance and self-censorship in the face of threats of loss of commercial license, denial of services, and even criminal liability. Defamation suits and related civil and criminal liability have also been used by several Asian governments to silence influential critics and protesters. Direct technical filtering of Internet traffic (especially inwards traffic) and blocking of URLS via government directives sent to Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have also been common practice in key Asian countries (Ibid.). Expectedly, such experiences of oppression led to widespread campaigns and communications by the Asian civil society organizations, as can be sensed from the above mentioned submission by Oliver “Blogie” Robillo at IGF Vilnius.

Among the Asian countries, the comprehensive technologies of censorship developed and deployed by China has been studied most extensively. The Golden Shield Project was initiated by the Ministry of Public Security of China in 1998 to undertake blanket blocking of incoming Internet traffic based on specific URLs and terms. Evidences of the project getting operationalised became available in 2003 (Garden Networks for Freedom of Information 2004). Censorship of Internet in China, however, has not only been dependent on such sophisticated systems. In 2003, it was made mandatory for all residents of Lhasa, Tibet, to use a specific combination and password to access Internet, which was directly linked to their names and address. An Internet ID Card was issued by the government to implement this (International Campaign for Tibet. 2004). Tibet Action Institute has been a key civil society organization at the forefront of cyber-offensive of the Chinese government. A recent documentary by the Institute, titled 'Tibet: Frontline of the New Cyberwar,' has narrated how it has worked closely with the Citizen Lab, Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto, to identify, trace, and resist the malware- and other cyber-attacks experienced by the civil society actors and websites in favor of independence of Tibet (Tibet Action Institute 2015). Not only activists supporting the Tibetan cause, digital security training emerged as an important aspect of the life of civil society organizations during the decade. Asian organizations like Bytes for All (Pakistan) and Myanmar ICT for Development Organization (Mynamar), as well as international organizations like Front Line Defenders and Citizen Lab have educated and supported civil society activities much beyond the Internet governance sphere with tools and techniques for effectively using digital channels of communications, and defending themselves for cyber-threats.

Combination of traditional forms of civil society mobilizations and digital techniques have often been used resist attempts by Asian governments to control the online communication space. Huma Yusuf has extensively studied the emergence of hybrid media strategies, using both old media channels like newspapers and new media channels like blogs and video sharing platforms, among citizen journalists and civil society activists in Pakistan as the government took harsh steps towards control of both traditional and online media during 2007-2008 (Yusuf 2009). She has carefully traced how possibilities of new forms of information and media sharing enabled by Internet were initially identified and implemented by citizen journalists and student activists, which was quickly learned and re-deployed by more formal organisation, such as print and electronic news companies, and civil society organizations like those involved in election monitoring (Ibid.). Malaysia also experienced fast-accelerating face-off between the government and the civil society during 2007-2010, as the former started intervening directly into censoring blogs and newspaper websites. On one hand, the government took legal actions against critical bloggers, either directly or indirectly, and on the other it instructed ISPs to block 'offensive content.' It also borrowed the 'Singapore-model' to mandate registration of bloggers with government authorities, if they are identifed as writing on socio-political topics. The civil society actors responded to these oppressive steps by setting up a new blog dedicated to coverage of the defamation cases (filed against prominent bloggers), and publicly sharing instructions for circumvention of the blocks imposed by ISPs. The National Alliance of Bloggers was soon formed, which organised the “Blogs and Digital Democracy” forum on October 3, 2007 (Thien 2011: 46-47). Similarly, Bloggers Against Censorship campaign took shape in India in 2006 as the government first directed ISPs to block specific blogs hosted on Blogspot, TypePad, and Yahoo! Geocities, and then went for complete blocking of Yahoo! Geocities as the ISPs failed to block specific sub-domains of the platform (Bloggers Collective Group 2006). Learning from this experience, the following year Indian government decided to work directly with Orkut to take down 'defamatory content' about a politician (The Economic Times 2007). This is common for other Asian governments too, as they have continued to develop more legally binding and technically sophisticated measures to monitor and control online expression.

In the 'Internet Enemies Report 2012,' Reporters without Borders listed 12 countries as 'enemies of the Internet,' out of which 10 were from Asia – Bahrain, China, Iran, Myanmar, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam – and it named 14 countries that are conducting surveillance on its citizens, out of which 7 were from Asia – India, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and United Arab Emirates (Reporters without Borders 2012). At the APrIGF held in Tokyo, July 18-20, 2012, a group of delegates from civil society organizations working in the South-East Asian region issued a joint statement with a clear call for global action against the shrinking space for freedom of (digital) expression in the region (Thai Netizen Network et al 2012). They specifically noted the following national acts as examples of the legislative mechanisms being used by different Asian governments to criminalize online speech and/or to harass public dissenters:

Burma – The 2004 Electronic Transactions Act
Cambodia – The 2012 Draft Cyber-Law, the 1995 Press Law, and the 2010 Penal Code
Malaysia – The 2012 Amendment to the Evidence Act and the 2011 Computing Professionals Bill
Indonesia – The 2008 Law on Information and Electronic Transaction and the 2008 Law on Pornography
The Philippines – The 2012 Data Privacy Act
Thailand – The 2007 Computer Crimes Act, the Article 112 of the Penal Code, and the 2004 Special Case Investigation Act
Vietnam – The 1999 Penal Code, the 2004 Publishing Law, the 2000 State Secrets Protection Ordinance, and the 2012 Draft Decree on Internet Management. (Ibid.)

The statement was co-signed by Thai Netizen Network, Thai Media Policy Centre, The Institute for Policy Research and Advocacy (ELSAM), Southeast Asian Press Alliance (SEAPA), Southeast Asian Centre for e-Media (SEACeM), Victorius (Ndaru) Eps, Community Legal Education Center (CLEC), Sovathana (Nana) Neang, Asian Forum for Human Rights and Development (FORUM-ASIA), and was endorsed by ICT Watch (Indonesian ICT Partnership Association).

Annexe – Tables

Table 1: Participation from Asian Countries and of representatives from Asian civil society organisations in IGFs, 2006-2010

Event	Participants from Asian Countries	Participants from Civil Society Organizations
IGF Athens 2006	11%	29%
IGF Rio de Janeiro 2007	13%	32%
IGF Hyderabad 2008	56% from India, and 15% from other Asian countries	25%
IGF Sharm El Sheikh 2009	17%	19%
IGF Vilnius 2010	Not Available	Not Available

Source: Reports available on Internet Governance Forum website (http://igf.wgig.org/cms).

Table 2: Internet Society Chapters in Asia

Chapter	Year of Establishment	URL
Afghanistan	In formation	Not available
Bahrain	2001	http://www.bis.org.bh/
Bangladesh	2011	http://www.isoc.org.bd/dhaka/
Hong Kong	2005	http://www.isoc.hk/
India (Bangalore)	2010	http://www.isocbangalore.org/
India (Chennai)	2007	http://www.isocindiachennai.org/
India (Delhi)	2002. Rejuvenated in 2008.	http://www.isocdelhi.in/
India (Kolkata)	2009	http://isockolkata.in/
India (Trivandrum)	2015	Not available
Indonesia	2014	http://www.isoc.or.id/
Israel	1995	http://www.isoc.org.il/
Japan	1994	http://www.isoc.jp/
Lebanon	2010	http://www.isoc.org.lb/
Malaysia	2010	http://www.isoc.my/
Nepal	2007	http://www.internetsociety.org.np/
Pakistan (Islamabad)	2013	http://www.isocibd.org.pk/
Palestine	2002	http://www.isoc.ps/
Philippines	1999. Rejuvenated in 2009.	https://www.facebook.com/isoc.ph/
Qatar	2011	http://www.isoc.qa/
Republic of Korea	2014	Not available
Singapore	2011	http://isoc.sg/
Sri Lanka	2010	http://www.isoc.lk/
Taipei	1996	http://www.isoc.org.tw/
Thailand	1996	http://www.isoc-th.org/
United Arab Emirates	2007	http://www.isocuae.com/
Yemen	2013	http://isoc.ye/

Source: Details of chapters available on Internet Society website (http://www.internetsociety.org/).

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Civil Society Organisations and Internet Governance in India - Open Review

sumandro — 2015-11-13T05:51:03Z

This is a book section written for the third volume (2000-2010) of the Asia Internet History series edited by Prof. Kilnam Chon. The pre-publication text of the section is being shared here to invite suggestions for addition and modification. Please share your comments via email sent to raw[at]cis-india[dot]org with 'Civil Society Organisations and Internet Governance in India - Comments' as the subject line. This text is published under Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.

You are most welcome to read the pre-publication drafts of other sections of the Asia Internet History Vol. 3, and share your comments: https://sites.google.com/site/internethistoryasia/book3.

Early Days

The overarching context of development interventions and rights-based approaches have shaped the space of civil society organizations working on the topics of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and Internet governance in India. Early members of this space came from diverse backgrounds. Satish Babu was working with the South Indian Federation of Fishermen Societies (SIFFS) in mid-1990s, when he set up a public mailing list called 'FishNet,' connected to Internet via the IndiaLink email network, (then) run by India Social Institute to inter-connect development practitioners in India. He went on to become the President of Computer Society of India during 2012-2013; and co-founded Society for Promotion of Alternative Computing and Employment (SPACE) in 2003, where he served as the Executive Secretary during 2003-2010 [Wikipedia 2015]. Anita Gurumurthy, Executive Director of IT for Change and one of the key actors from Indian civil society organizations to take part in the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) process, had previously worked extensively on topics related to public health and women's rights [ITfC b], which deeply shaped the perspectives she and IT for Change have brought into the Internet governance sphere, globally as well as nationally [Gurumurthy 2001]. Arun Mehta initiated a mailing list titled 'India-GII' in 2002 to discuss 'India's bumpy progress on the global infohighway' [India-GII 2005]. This list played a critical role in curating an early community of non-governmental actors interested in the topics of telecommunication policy, spectrum licensing, Internet governance, and consumer and communication rights. As Frederick Noronha documents, the mailing list culture grew slowly in India during the late 1990s and early 2000s. However, they had a great impact in organizing early online communities, sometimes grouped around a topical focus, sometimes functioning as a bridge among family members living abroad, and sometimes curating place-specific groups [Noronha 2002].

The inaugural conference of the Free Software Foundation of India [FSFI] in Thiruvananthapuram, on 20 July 2001, galvanized the Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) community in India. The conference was titled 'Freedom First,' and Richard Stallman was invited as the chief guest. It was a vital gathering of actors from civil society organizations, software businesses, academia, and media, as well as the Secretary of the Department of Information Technology, Government of Kerala (the state where the conference was held). The conference laid the basis for sustained collaborations between the free software community, civil society organizations, emerging software firms in the state, and the Government of Kerala for the years to come. Two early initiatives that brought together free software developers and state government agencies were the Kerala Trasportation Project and the IT@School project, which not only were awarded to firms promoting use of FLOSS in electronic governance project, but facilitated a wider public dialogue regarding the need think critically about the making of information society in India [Kumar 2007]. The inter-connected communities and overlapping practices of the FLOSS groups, civil society organizations involved in ICT for Development initiatives, telecommunication policy analysts and advocates, and legal-administrative concerns regarding life in the information society – from digital security and privacy, to freedom of online expressions, to transparency in electronic governance infrastructures – have, hence, continued to shape the civil society space in India studying, discussing, responding, and co-shaping policies and practices around governance of Internet in India.

Key Organizations

IT for Change was established in 2000, in Bengaluru, as a non-governmental organization that 'works for the innovative and effective use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to promote socio-economic change in the global South, from an equity, social justice and gender equality point of view' [ITfC]. It has since made important contributions in the field of ICTs for Development, especially in integrating earlier communication rights practices organised around old media forms with newer possibilities of production and distribution of electronic content using digital media and Internet [ITfC e], and in that of Internet governance, especially through their participation in the WSIS and Internet Governance Forum (IGF) processes and by co-shaping the global Souther discourse of the subject [ITfC d]. It has also done significant works in the area of women's rights in the information society, and have been a core partner in a multi-country feminist action research project on using digital media to enhance the citizenship rights and experiences of marginalized women in India, Brazil, and South Africa [ITfC c]. IT for Change has co-led the formation of Just Net Coalition in February 2014 [JNC].

Digital Empowerment Foundation (DEF) was founded by Osama Manzar, in New Delhi in 2002, with a 'deep understanding that marginalised communities living in socio-economic backwardness and information poverty can be empowered to improve their lives almost on their own, simply by providing them access to information and knowledge using digital tools' [DEF c]. DEF has contributed to setting up Community Information Resource Centres across 19 states and 53 districts in India, with computers, printers, scanners, and Internet connectivity [DEF]. DEF organises one of the biggest competitions in Asia to identify, foreground, and honour significant contributions in the area of ICT for Development [DEF d]. This annual competition series, titled 'Manthan Award' (Translation: 'manthan' means 'churning' in Sanskrit), started in 2004. It has alllowed DEF to create a detailed database of ICT for Development activities and actors in the South Asia and Asia Pacific region. Since 2011, DEF has started working with Association for Progressive Communications on a project titled 'Internet Rights' to take forward the agenda of 'internet access for all' in India [DEF b].

The Society for Knowledge Commons was formed in New Delhi 2007 by 'scientists, technologists, researchers, and activists to leverage the tremendous potential of the ‘collaborative innovation’ model for knowledge generation that has lead to the growth of the Free and Open Source Software community (FOSS) around the world' [Society for Knowledge Commons]. It has championed integration of FOSS into public sector operations in India – from electronic governance systems to use of softwares in educational institutes – and has made continuous interventions on Internet governance issues from the perspective of the critical importance of shared knowledge properties and practices for a more democratic information society. It is a part of the Free Software Movement of India [FSMI], an alliance of Indian organizations involved in advocating awareness and usage of FOSS, as well as a founding member of the Just Net Coalition [JNC].

The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) was established in Bengaluru in 2008 with a research and advocacy focus on topics of accessibility of digital content for differently-abled persons, FOSS and policies on intellectual property rights, open knowledge and Indic Wikipedia projects, digital security and privacy, freedom of expression and Internet governance, and socio-cultural and historical studies of Internet in India [CIS]. In one of the key early projects, CIS contributed to the making of web accessibility policy for government websites in India, which was being drafted by the Department of Information Technology, Government of India [CIS 2008]. In the following years it took part in the Internet Governance Forum summits; submitted responses and suggestions to various policies being introduced by the government, especially the Information Technology (Amendment) Act, 2008, National Identification Authority of India (NIA) Bill, 2010, and the Approach Paper for a Legislation on Privacy, 2010; produced a report on the state of open government data in India [Prakash 2011b], and undertook an extensive study on the experiences of the young people in Asia with Internet, digital media, and social change [Shah 2011].

Software Freedom Law Centre has undertaken research and advocacy interventions, since 2011, in the topics digital privacy, software patents, and cyber-surveillance [SFLC]. The Internet Democracy Project, an initiative of Point of View, has organised online and offline discussions, participated in global summits, and produced reports on the topics of freedom of expression, cyber security and human rights, and global Internet governance architecture since 2012 [IDP].

The first Internet Society chapter to be established in India was in Delhi. The chapter began in 2002, but went through a period of no activity before being revived in 2008 [Delhi]. The Chennai chapter started in 2007 [Chennai], the Kolkata one in 2009 [Kolkata], and the Bengaluru chapter came into existence in 2010 [Bangalore]. Asia Internet Symposium have been organised in India twice: 1) the Kolkata one, held on on 1 December 2014, focused on 'Internet and Human Rights: Empowering the Users,' and 2) the Chennai symposium, held on 2 December 2014, discussed 'India in the Open and Global Internet.' The newest Internet Society chapter in India is in the process of formation in Trivandrum [Trivandrum], led by the efforts of Satish Babu (mentioned above).

Global and National Events

The first World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) conference in Geneva, held on 10-12 December 2003, was not attended by many civil society organizations from India. Several Indian participants in the conference were part of the team of representatives from different global civil society organizations, like Digital Partners, Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN), and International Centre for New Media [ITU 2003]. Between the first and the second conference, the engagement with the WSIS process increased among Indian civil society organizations increased of the WSIS process, which was especially led by IT for Change. In early 2005, before the second Preparatory Committee meeting of the Tunis conference, it organized a discussion event titled 'Gender Perspectives on the Information Society: South Asia Pre-WSIS Seminar' in partnership with DAWN and the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, which was supported by UNIFEM and the UNDP Asia-Pacific Development Information Programme [Gurumurthy 2006]. In a separate note, Anita Gurumurthy and Parminder Jeet Singh of IT for Change have noted their experience as a South Asian civil society organization engaging with the WSIS process [Gurumurthy 2005]. The second WSIS conference in Tunis, held on 16-18 November 2005, however, neither saw any significant participation from Indian civil society organizations, except for Ambedkar Centre for Justice and Peace, Childline India Foundation / Child Helpline International, and IT for Change [ITU 2005]. This contrasted sharply with the over 60 delegates from various Indian government agencies taking part in the conference [ITU 2005].

Two important events took place in India in early 2005 that substantially contributed to the civil society discourses in India around information technology and its socio-legal implications and possibilities. The former is the conference titled 'Contested Commons, Trespassing Publics' organized by the Sarai programme at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Alternative Law Forum, and Public Service Broadcasting Trust, in Delhi on 6-8 January 2005. The conference attempted to look into the terms of intellectual property rights (IPR) debates from the perspectives of experiences in countries in Asia, Latin America, and Africa. It was based on the research carried out by the Sarai programme and Alternative Law Forum on contemporary realities of media production and distribution, and the ways in which law and legal instruments enter into the most intimate spheres of social and cultural life to operationalise the IPRs. The conference combined academic discussions with parallel demonstrations by media practitioners, and knowledge sharing by FLOSS communities [Sarai 2005]. The latter event is the first of the Asia Source workshop that took place in Bengaluru during 28 January - 4 February 2005 . It brought together more than 100 representatives from South and South-East Asian civil society organizations and technology practitioners working with them, along with several leading practitioners from Africa, Europe, North America, and Latin America, to promote adoption and usage of FLOSS across the developmental sector in the region. The workshop was organized by Mahiti (Bengaluru) and Tactical Technology Collective (Amsterdam), with intellectual and practical support from an advisory group of representatives from FLOSS communities and civil society organizations, and financial support from Hivos, the Open Society Institute, and International Open Source Network [Asia Source].

While the participation of representatives from Indian civil society organizations at the IGFs in Athens (2006) and Rio de Janeiro (2007) was minimal, the IGF Hyderabad, held on 3-6 December 2008, provided a great opportunity for Indian civil society actors to participate in and familiarize themselves with the global Internet governance process. Apart from various professionals, especially lawyers, who attended the Hyderabad conference as individuals, the leading civil society organizations participating in the event included: Ambedkar Center for Justice and Peace, Centre for Internet and Society, Centre for Science, Development and Media Studies, Digital Empowerment Foundation, Internet Society Chennai chapter, IT for Change, and Mahiti. The non-governmental participants from India at the event, however, were predominantly from private companies and academic institutes [IGF 2008].

IT for Change made a critical intervention into the discourse of global Internet governance during the Hyderabad conference by bringing back the term 'enhanced cooperation,' as mentioned in the Tunis Agenda for the Information Society [ITU 2005 b]. At IGF Sharm El Sheikh, held during 15-18 November 2009, Parminder Jeet Singh of IT for Change explained:

[E]nhanced cooperation consists of two parts. One part is dedicated to creating globally applicable policy principles, and there is an injunction to the relevant organizations to create the conditions for doing that. And I have a feeling that the two parts of that process have been conflated into one. And getting reports from the relevant organizations is going on, but we are not able to go forward to create a process which addresses the primary purpose of enhanced cooperation, which was to create globally applicable public policy principles and the proof of that is that I don't see any development of globally applicable public policy principles, which remains a very important need. [IGF 2009]

This foregrounding of the principle of 'enhanced cooperation' have since substantially contributed to rethinking not only the global Internet governance mechanisms and its reconfigurations, but also the Indian government's perspectives towards the same. It eventually led to the proposal made by a representative of Government of India at the UN General Assembly session on 26 October 2011 regarding the establishment of a UN Committee for Internet-Related Policies [Singh 2011].

Internet Policies and Censorship

One of the earliest instances of censorship of online content in India is the blocking of several websites offering Voice over IP (VoIP) softwares, which can be downloaded to make low-cost international calls, during late 1990s. The India-GII mailing list initiated by Arun Mehta, as mentioned above, started almost as a response to this blocking move by Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited (VSNL), the government-owned Internet Service Provider (ISP). Additionally, Mehta filed a case against VSNL for blocking these e-commerce websites, which might be identified as the first case of legal activism for Internet-related rights in India [India-GII 2001]. During the war between India and Pakistan during 1999, the Indian government instructed VSNL to block various Pakistani media websites, including that of Dawn. Like in the case of websites offering VoIP services, this blocking did not involve direct intervention with the websites concerned but only the ability of Indian users to access them [Tanna 2004]. The first well-known case of the Government of India blocking digital content for political reasons occurred in 2003, when a mailing list titled 'Kynhun' was banned. Department of Telecommunications instructed all the But the previously deployed URL-blocking strategy did not work in the new situation of mailing lists. Blocking the URL of the group did not stop it from being used by members of the group to continue sharing email through it. Government of India then approached Yahoo directly to ensure that the mailing list is closed down, which Yahoo declined to implement. This resulted in imposing of a blanket blocking of all Yahoo Groups pages across ISPs in India during September 2003. By November, Yahoo decided to close down the mailing list, and the blanket blocking was repealed [Tanna 2004]. Further blocking of several blogs and websites continued through 2006 and 2007, where the government decided to work in collaboration with various platforms offering hosted blog and personal webpage services to remove access to specific sub-domains. In resistance to this series of blocking orders by the government, there emerged an important civil society campaign titled 'Bloggers Against Censorship' led by Bloggers Collective Group, a distributed network of bloggers from all across India [Bloggers 2006].

A few weeks after the IGF Hyderabad, the Government of India passed the Information Technology (Amendment) Act 2008 on 22 December 2008 [MoLaJ 2009], although it was notified and enforced much later on 27 October 2009 [MoCaIT 2009]. This amendment attempted to clarify various topics left under-defined in the Information Technology Act of 2000. However, as Pranesh Prakash of the Centre for Internet and Society noted, the casual usage of the term 'offensive content' in the amendment opened up serious threats of broad curbing of freedom of online expression under the justification that it caused 'annoyance' or 'inconvenience' [Prakash 2009]. The sections 66 and 67 of the amended Information Technology Act, which respectively address limits to online freedom of expression and legally acceptable monitoring of digital communication by government agencies, have since been severely protested against by civil society organizations across India for enabling a broad-brushed censorship and surveillance of the Internet in India. The section 66A has especially allowed the government to make a series of arrests of Internet users for posting and sharing 'offensive content' [Pahwa 2015].

In 2011, the Government of India introduced another critical piece of policy instrument for controlling online expressions – the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines) Rules, 2011 [MoCaIT 2011] – targeted at defining the functions of the intermediaries associated with Internet-related services and communication, and how they are to respond to government's directives towards taking down and temporary blocking of digital content. The draft Rules were published in early 2011 and comments were invited from the general public. One of the responses, submitted by Privacy India and the Centre for Internet and Society, explicitly highlighted the draconian implications of the (then) proposed rules:

This rule requires an intermediary to immediately take steps to remove access to information merely upon receiving a written request from “any authority mandated under the law”. Thus, for example, any authority can easily immunize itself from criticism on the internet by simply sending a written notice to the intermediary concerned. This is directly contrary to, and completely subverts the legislative intent expressed in Section 69B which lays down an elaborate procedure to be followed before any information can be lawfully blocked. [Prakash 2011]

The policy apparatus of controlling online expression in India took its full form by the beginning of the decade under study here. The 'chilling effect' of this apparatus was made insightfully evident by a study conducted by Rishabh Dara at the Centre for Internet and Society, where fake takedown notices (regarding existing digital content) were sent to 7 important Internet intermediaries operating in India, and their responses were studied. The results of this experiment demonstrated that:

[T]he Rules create uncertainty in the criteria and procedure for administering the takedown thereby inducing the intermediaries to err on the side of caution and over-comply with takedown notices in order to limit their liability; and as a result suppress legitimate expressions. Additionally, the Rules do not establish sufficient safeguards to prevent misuse and abuse of the takedown process to suppress legitimate expressions. [Dara 2012]

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[Asia Source] Tactical Technology Collective, Asia Source. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from https://tacticaltech.org/asiasource.

[Tanna 2004] Tanna, Ketan, Internet Censorship in India: Is It Necessary and Does It Work?. Sarai-CSDS Independent Fellowship. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://www.ketan.net/INTERNET_CENSORSHIP_IN_INDIA.html.

[CIS] The Centre for Internet and Society. About Us. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://cis-india.org/about/.

[CIS 2008] The Centre for Internet and Society. 2008. Annual Report. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://cis-india.org/accessibility/annual-report-2008.pdf.

[Sarai 2005] The Sarai Programme, Contested Commons, Trespassing Publics. January 12. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://sarai.net/contested-commons-trespassing-publics/.

[Wikipedia 2015] Satish Babu. Wikipedia. Last modified on June 25. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satish_Babu.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/civil-society-organisations-and-internet-governance-in-india-open-review

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

Simiran Lalvani - Workers’ Fictive Kinship Relations in Mumbai App-based Food Delivery

Simiran Lalvani — 2020-05-19T06:25:54Z

Working in the gig-economy has been associated with economic vulnerabilities. However, there are also moral and affective vulnerabilities as workers find their worth measured everyday by their performance of—and at—work and in every interaction and movement. This essay by Simiran Lalvani is the first among a series of writings by researchers associated with the 'Mapping Digital Labour in India' project at the CIS, supported by the Azim Premji University, that were published on the Platypus blog of the Committee on the Anthropology of Science, Technology, and Computing (CASTAC). The essay is edited by Noopur Raval, who co-led the project concerned.

Originally published by the Platypus blog of CASTAC on July 4, 2019.

Summary of the essay in Hindi: Audio (mp3) and Transcript (docx)

Anthropologists have studied the role of kinship relations at the workplace in terms of how employers (De Neve, 2008) and workers use them (Parry, 2001). By contrast, digital labour scholars focus more on economic wellbeing and questions of fair work. But we know from the work of Mauss, Hart (Hart, 2000; Mauss, 2002) and others that all economic exchanges are also social relations. Additionally, economic and moral logics are different manifestations of the same ‘kernel of human relationships’ (Kofti, 2016). In the context of app-based food delivery work in Mumbai, workers’ actions and decisions were guided by them putting themselves in another’s shoes. Such moral acts of understanding and having understood were, as I will demonstrate, instances of Max Weber’s conception of verstehen or interpretative understanding which was important to understanding individuals’ participation in social relationships. This led me to explore gig-workers’ kinship relations at work, and their role in the existence and reproduction of these workers and this ‘new’ work.

This essay unpacks the values and expectations from the kinship term bhai (brother) in order to understand the morality invoked through its usage by app-based food delivery workers in Mumbai. In doing so, it considers the implications of such kinship sedimentations on the experience of workers in the gig economy, their negotiation with the discipline imposed by the employer and the experience of women workers who operate out of these kinship ties. I was compelled to notice the figure of the bhai – a male friend or acquaintance who would not only recruit but also provide various kinds of support on the job, helping app-based platforms maintain their workforce. I also interviewed female delivery workers in Mumbai and noticed that this brotherhood did not extend to them in the same way.

Bhai is a Hindi word for ‘brother’ but in Bambaiyya Hindi (a non-canonical form of Hindi spoken in Mumbai) it signifies an influential or respected male figure who offers support and is trustworthy due to relatedness. Bhai and variations like bhaiyya lubricate daily transactions between auto-rickshaw drivers, grocers, watchmen or any unrelated man and woman with a sociality of kinship.

The role and functions of understanding by bhais in gig work

Acts of brotherly help and disciplining reveal that material actions are intertwined with an ethic of care, thereby illustrating the role of kinship as central to the economic work in the gig economy. Historically, the informal work of food delivery in Mumbai has been organised along the lines of caste, region (Quien, 1997) and familial networks. Within gig work, belonging to the city is a requirement as bhais recruit, advice and protect new joinees from their neighbourhood or communities as older brothers. Team leaders who occupy a position between the worker and the middle management at these companies are bhais that discipline, control and maintain the workforce for the company.

Prior to joining, newbies would ask friends about their experience and even make deliveries with their friends to understand the work. Bhais offer support by riding pillion, arriving at ‘unsafe’ delivery locations at night or assisting a worker if the customer was drunk or unwilling to pay for their order.

Like other gig work communities that network to produce tacit knowledge about work (Gray, Suri, Ali, & Kulkarni, 2016) the relationships of brotherhood in food delivery help workers gain knowledge about the rules of the company, while also helping them find a way around the rules. A bhai might offer to make an ID on behalf of those who were unable to do so due to lack of documents or offer an existing ID to those who may have been disabled or blocked by the company.

Bhais, on the basis of relatedness due to experience of gig work, understand the needs of other gig workers. I suggest that this is verstehen and not simply a reflexive understanding since they, much like sociologists, also understood the nature of the situation (Tucker, 1965) that creates this relationship of relatedness and the importance of such a relationship in sustaining their future in this work as well as the future of this work.

Leaning on brotherhood to ‘safely’ deliver food as gig workers

Companies push a narrative of how working-class, male food delivery workers are safe to interact with because this work leads to working class men now arriving at the doorstep of the protected middle-class domestic sphere. Discourses of safety and trustworthiness are crucial to companies due to the middle-class, Indian anxiety around the separation of working-class men, considered dangerous and potential perpetrators of crime, from middle-class women, the victims of such crimes (Phadke, 2007).

In India, leaving one’s footwear outside before entering ‘sacred’ spaces like homes and temples is considered respectful. A notice outside an Uber Dost office in suburban Mumbai reads jootey-chhapal baahar nikaley or please leave your footwear outside – revealing an extension of the sacredness associated with familial spaces to the work place. (Image credit: author)

Since working class men are considered dangerous occupants of public space, how do workers feel safe and carefree in the everyday? The bhai who understands offers material support, protects and guides workers but is also understood as enabling a carefreeness in workers that makes this work and working-class men’s navigation of the public possible. Consider the case of Adarsh, an 18-year-old app-based worker who makes deliveries using a bicycle. Workers started helping him by offering to drop him to the delivery location on their motorcycles if they were headed in the same direction. As he described to me, he felt at ease knowing someone had his back: Abhi ye log support ke liye rehte hai toh apne ko tension nahi rehta hai chalo bhai support ke liye apne peeche khada hai. (One does not feel tense if one knows that there is a brother backing one up).

Exclusions from brotherhood in the gig economy

App-based food delivery has opened up the historically male-dominated line of work to women in India but that has not insulated it from patriarchal norms.

Food delivery work in Mumbai has historically been male dominated work – be it the ubiquitous dabbawallas (carriers of home-cooked meals) or those working as delivery ‘boys’ in udupis, restaurants, fast food companies and with hawkers. (Image credit: author)

One married woman worker expressed her discomfort with male riders referring to women workers as bacchi (Bambaiyya slang for younger brother) since it collapsed a sense of formality and familiarity that could be acceptable to young, unmarried girls. Women workers were aware that women have a high attrition in food delivery. They cannot afford to reject kinship constructions because such relations make work possible and tolerable in the everyday so they modulate the correct amount of kinship ties with a ‘respectable distance.’

The brotherhood of workers is not uniform or homogeneous since men’s ability to participate in this fictive kinship can be constrained either due to their identities or inability to support strikes.

Brotherhood absorbs risks for workers and allows workers to be bindaas, presenting an opportunity for tactical resistance. Leveraging brotherhood as a platform (Gillespie Tarleton, 2010), workers would strike and companies having understood the role of brotherhood too, would offer the position of 'team leader' to leaders of such strikes. Most bhais chose moral and affective bonds of brotherhood over such a 'promotion.'

Working in the gig-economy has been associated with economic vulnerabilities, however there are also moral and affective vulnerabilities as workers find their worth measured everyday by their performance of—and at—work and in every interaction and movement. Such a display of verstehen by the delivery workers is a response to engaging with a world of work that continuously measures one’s credibility and ties it to material rewards. It can be read as an attempt to secure an income and guard one’s sense of self.

References

De Neve, G. (2008). ‘We are all sondukarar (relatives)!’: Kinship and its morality in an urban industry of Tamilnadu, South India. Modern Asian Studies, 42(1), 211–246. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X0700282X

Gillespie Tarleton. (2010). Politics of Platforms. New Media and Society, 12(3). https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444809342738

Gray, M. L., Suri, S., Ali, S. S., & Kulkarni, D. (2016). The Crowd is a Collaborative Network. Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing – CSCW ’16, 134–147. https://doi.org/10.1145/2818048.2819942

Hart, K. (2000). Kinship, Contract and Trust: The Economic Organization of Migrants in an African City Slum. In D. Gambetta (Ed.), Trust: Making and Breaking Cooperative Relations (pp. 176–193). University of Oxford.

Kofti, D. (2016). Moral economy of flexible production: Fabricating precarity between the conveyor belt and the household. Anthropological Theory, 16(4), 433–453. https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499616679538

Mauss, M. (2002). The gift: The form and reason for exchange in archaic societies. London: Routledge.

Parry, J. P. (2001). Ankalu’s Errant Wife: Sex, Marriage and Industry in Contemporary Chhattisgarh. Modern Asian Studies, 35(4), 783–820. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X01004024

Phadke, S. (2007). Dangerous Liaisons: Women and Men: Risk and Reputation in Mumbai. Economic and Political Weekly, 42(17), 1510–1518.

Quien, A. (1997). Mumbai’s Dabbawalla: Omnipresent Worker and Absent City-Dweller. Economic and Political Weekly, 32(13), 637–640.

Tucker, W. T. (1965). Max Weber’s Verstehen. The Sociological Quarterly, 6(2), 157–165. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1533-8525.1965.tb01649.x

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/simiran-lalvani-workers-fictive-kinship-relations-app-based-food-delivery-mumbai

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

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

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

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

List of Participants

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

What relief measures do gig workers need during this pandemic?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Compilation of Research on the Gig Economy

Aayush Rathi, Ambika Tandon, Sumandro Chattapadhyay — 2020-05-19T08:20:20Z

Over the past year, researchers at CIS have been studying gig economies and gig workers in India. Their work has involved consultative discussions with domestic workers, food delivery workers, taxi drivers, trade union leaders, and government representatives to document the state of gig work in India, and highlight the concerns of gig workers. The imposition of a severe lockdown in India in response to the outbreak of COVID-19 has left gig workers in precarious positions. Without the privilege of social distancing, these workers are having to contend with a drastic reduction in income, while also placing themselves at heightened health risks.

On gig economy during the COVID-19 pandemic

Supported by Feminist Internet Research Network led by the Association for Progressive Communications (APC) and funded by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC)

Along with Tandem Research, we spoke to leaders of four unions that represent gig workers across the country about the risks and vulnerabilities that they are having to contend with in the face of the COVID-19 crisis. Zothan Mawii (Tandem Research), Ambika Tandon, and Aayush Rathi share key reflections in this essay published on The Wire. (link).
Based on the discussion, a charter of recommendations was prepared with contributions from participants, and was shared with public and private stakeholders. (link)

On domestic workers in the platform economy

Supported by Feminist Internet Research Network led by the Association for Progressive Communications (APC) and funded by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC)

We discussed our ongoing research on the platformisation of domestic work in India with domestic workers, union members, and representatives from the Karnataka Labour Department in November 2019. Tasneem Mewa documented the rich discussion from this consultation. (link)

CIS worked with members of the Domestic Workers Rights Union to conduct field research on the lives and challenges of domestic workers in the platform economy. The following essays published on GenderIT capture their experiences of doing this research:

Parijatha G.P. writes about a “gated society management app,” MyGate, and the experiences of surveillance of migrant workers in Bengaluru. (link)
Radha Keerthna writes about the similarity in the conditions of domestic workers in the traditional and platform economy, particularly the precarity and invisibility of labour. (link)
Sumathi, a union leader, reflects on and her experience as an activist-researcher interacting with domestic gig workers through the course of our study. (link)
Zeenathunissa shares the difficulty of speaking to domestic workers in the gig economy, especially when workers undergo constant surveillance by employers and companies. (link)

On economic, algorithmic, and affective vulnerabilities of gig workers

Supported by Azim Premji University

CIS commissioned a set of four field studies of platform workers delivering food and driving taxis for platform companies in Mumbai and New Delhi. The researchers involved wrote a series of essays that were published by Platypus blog of CASTAC:

Anushree Gupta explores women’s presence as workers as well as passengers/customers in the ride hailing platform economy in Mumbai and related concerns of safety and risk mitigation. (link)
Sarah Zia highlights how algorithmic management of work and revenue targets of gig workers impact their everyday lives and plans for the future. (link)
Kinship networks are a critical source of safety and security for workers in the gig economy. Simiran Lalvani writes about the network among transportation workers in Mumbai, also reflecting on implications for those who are excluded. (link)
Noopur Raval and Rajendra Jadhav describe the unregulated and exploitative temporal structures of gig work, and how work-time of gig workers get configured by customer-facing promises of platform companies. (link)
The four researchers, led by Noopur Raval (co-PI for the project, held a roundtable discussion to reflect on methods, challenges, inter-subjectivities and possible future directions for research on the gig economy and its workers. (link)

The consultants - Noopur Raval, Anushree Gupta, Rajendra Jadhav, Sarah Zia and Simiran Lalvani - involved in this project on mapping digital labour in India’s platform economies (in Mumbai and New Delhi) gathered in Bengaluru on July 19, 2019 to share their preliminary field insights along with reflections on what it meant to do such studies, how they went about studying gig-work, and challenges that arose in their work. Watch the livestream from this discussion here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/a-compilation-of-research-on-the-gig-economy

Ethics and Human Rights Guidelines for Big Data for Development Research

Amber Sinha, Manjri Singh, Rajashri Seal, Pranav Bhaskar Tiwari, Pranav M Bidare — 2020-05-20T07:56:48Z

This is a four-part review of guideline documents for ethics and human rights in big data for development research. This research was produced as part of the Big Data for Development network supported by International Development Research Centre, Canada

Part #1 - Review of Principles of Ethics in Biomedical Science: Download (PDF)

Part #2 - Review of Principles of Ethics in Computer Science: Download (PDF)

Part #3 - Summary of Review of Codes of Ethics for Big Data and AI: Download (PDF)

Part #4 - Extended Review of Codes of Ethics for Big Data and AI: Download (PDF)

The rapid expansion in the volume, velocity, and variety of data available, together with the development of innovative forms of statistical analytics, is generally referred to as “big data”; though there is no single agreed upon definition of the term. Big data promises to provide new insights and solutions across a wide range of sectors. Despite enormous optimism about the scope and variety of big data’s potential applications, many remain concerned about its widespread adoption, with some scholars suggesting it could generate as many harms as benefits. The predecessor disciplines of data science such as computer sciences, applied mathematics, and statistics have traditionally managed to stay out of the scope of ethical frameworks, based on the assumption that they do not involve humans as subject of their research. While critical study into big data is still in its infancy, there is a growing belief that there are significant discontinuities between the rapid growth in big data and the ethical framework that exists to govern its use. In this set of documents, we look at them in detail.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/bd4d-ethics-human-rights-guidelines