Centre for Internet and Society

Content Developers/Trainers

praskrishna — 2012-02-29T13:42:51Z

The Centre for Internet and Society is hiring for the full-time position of a content developer/trainer to work on an upcoming project Building Knowledge and Capacity around Telecommunication Policies in India.

The objective is to create an on line repository of telecommunication-related information and learning materials targeted at a multi stakeholder audience; organise interactive public lectures and workshops around the country to disseminate awareness on telecom issues; as well as use traditional and new forms of media to impart information to academia, civil society, policy makers and the general public.

Candidates do not need to have a technical background or be experts in the field of telecommunication; however, some experience/interest in telecom related issues is needed.

Other requirements are:

Excellent analytical and writing skills
Visualization skills
Good communication, presentation and training skills
Basic computer skills

To apply, please send your CV and three examples of writing to yelena@cis-india.org

CIS is committed to equitable employment and is encouraging female job candidates. Please refer to the above e-mail address for further inquiries.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/content-developers-trainers

An Interview with Stephen Song

Yelena Gyulkhandanyan — 2012-02-29T14:08:54Z

Stephen Song, the founder of Village Telco, an initiative to bring practical and inexpensive communication network infrastructure to rural and remote areas, speaks about factors that catalyzed the initiative, the benefits of the network, some challenges, and the Mesh Potato.

Yelena Gyulkhandanyan: When and how did the Mesh Potato come about?

Stephen Song: It came about after I joined the Shuttleworth foundation in 2008. I was aware of the potential of low cost wireless mesh technologies to create affordable infrastructure, but there seemed to be a challenge in getting these technologies to scale, and we had done some interesting pilot work, but nothing had really taken off. And so I convened a workshop in the middle of 2008 with some of the smartest wireless networking people I knew and so began to explore what were the key barriers.

There seemed to be at least a couple of key barriers – one was that setting up a wireless mesh network was a complex procedure that required expertise. And second was that in many areas where we were interested in providing services, people were as interested in voice services as they were in data. Simply delivering data to a particular community, at least to rural communities anyway, seemed to be only solving half of the problem. So the result of that workshop was that we came to the realization, the conclusion, that what we needed was a hybrid of technologies, something that didn’t exist yet, which was a combination of voice and data technologies together.

We were lucky enough to have a brilliant open hardware designer from Australia attending the workshop almost by coincidence, and he said, “Well, why don’t we build our own?” Up until that point I think our dominant way of looking at the world was by asking what sort of North American or European technologies could we take and repurpose in Sub-Saharan Africa to address this issue of access in a more affordable way. The notion of actually manufacturing our own technology wasn’t on the chart at all and it took a little while for the idea to sink in, because it just seemed infeasible at the time. But sink in it did, which led through my fellowship at the Shuttleworth foundation to the funding of a pilot project to see whether it was feasible to complete at least a prototype design. The created prototype design led to a partnership with the manufacturer in Shenzhen, China, and to a short run of production which led to a bigger run of production. And so one thing led to another and now we have our own device that we manufacture.

Yelena Gyulkhandanyan: And how would you describe this device to a regular consumer?

Stephen Song: Well, it is a wireless networking device that works with similar units of its kind to form an autonomous wireless network that delivers voice and data services. So you can open a box of Mesh Potatoes, plug them all in, and instantly have a voice and data network. It is a network for which you don’t require a special voice technology. All you need to do to be able to start making calls is to plug in an ordinary phone into the Mesh Potato. So it doesn’t require any sort of additional smart VOIP hand set technology or anything like that. We deliberately chose to do that because analog handsets are very cheap and lots of people have them already or they cost less than $10 to buy. So it seemed like a very affordable way of creating a voice network.

Yelena Gyulkhandanyan: And how much does a Mesh Potato cost?

Stephen Song: They are about a $100 each.

Yelena Gyulkhandanyan: And how much does it cost to set up a network and what is the largest distance that it can cover?

Stephen Song: The cost of the network is literally just the cost of the Mesh Potatoes and so once you have them and they are powered up, you have network infrastructure that is yours for as long as the technology lasts, which should be many years. So that’s really the core cost; it’s just the cost of the devices. Then if you connect your network to the Internet or to the public switched telephone network you might have to pay for the access to the Internet or for access to voice services.

Each Mesh Potato has a range of about three to four hundred meters but the way the Mesh Potatoes work is each device acts as a repeater for the next one. So as long as the next house that you can see is less than three to four hundred meters away, you can actually build quite a large network, because if you have two houses that are six or seven hundred meters away, as long as you have one house in the middle that’s got a Mesh Potato, then all three of them are connected. Mesh networking has been around for a while but just hasn’t become as mainstream as WiFi hotspots.

Yelena Gyulkhandanyan: And in what frequency range does this technology operate in?

Stephen Song: It works in the 2.4GHz range which is your standard WiFi technology, which means that for most countries you can use it without requiring a spectrum license.

Yelena Gyulkhandanyan: So in what countries, other than South Africa, has this technology been deployed in?

Stephen Song: Our biggest network is in the capital of East Timor in Dili. There is an NGO there called FONGTIL that has set up a large Village Telco network and there are a number of other smaller networks – one in Brazil, some networks in Nigeria and Cameroon, and then multiple other smaller more informal networks as opposed to formal Village Telcos.

Yelena Gyulkhandanyan: Have there been barriers in terms of deploying this technology?

Stephen Song: A barrier for us is bringing the cost of manufacture down. So one of the downsides of being a very small organization is that in terms of negotiating with manufacturers and arranging deals we have very little leverage. So we will want to bring the cost of the Mesh Potatoes down by another 50 percent, which is completely feasible, but it’s a challenge to actually build the relationships with the manufacturers to get things done quickly.

Yelena Gyulkhandanyan: So what company currently manufactures this technology?

Stephen Song: A company called Atcom.

Yelena Gyulkhandanyan: Can you provide a successful case study of this technology being deployed where it has made a difference in the village or where it helped create other social endeavors because people had access to this technology?

Stephen Song: Yeah, I think Dili in East Timor is probably the most successful example, in that the NGO that is running the network, FONGTIL, is kind of an umbrella organization for other NGOs in the region that need to connect and talk to each other on a regular basis. However mobile communication is quite expensive in Dili. So the NGOs have really valued being able to communicate easily and cheaply with their partner organizations through the Mesh Potato network.

Yelena Gyulkhandanyan: Sounds good. Thank you very much for your time.

Stephen Song: All right, bye for now.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/telecom/interview-with-stephen-song

5G Aspirations and Realities

Shyam Ponappa — 2019-07-02T04:29:22Z

What the government can do for 5G and Digital India with a Systems Approach.

The article by Shyam Ponappa was published in Business Standard on June 6 and in Organizing India Blogspot on the same day.

Ah, 5G! The very thought seems to excite so many. What is it? It is a mix of telecom technologies¹ delivering much higher data speeds on more extensive connectivity, using much lower power, with extended battery life, and emitting less radiation, for ways to connect and operate most of the conveniences people use regularly. From smartphones and computers for communications, study, work, research, entertainment, to other devices and machines, such as for managing utilities (electricity and water) at home and the workplace, refrigerators and cooking devices, industrial equipment, transport, and more, so that daily activities are eased considerably. The catch is that 5G is at an early stage in a long process — perhaps a couple of years to manifest in large trials in India, and several more years to be widely available, needing huge investment ($100 billion in India).

Yet, there are compelling reasons for developing India’s capabilities. There is the sheer necessity for India to partially meet its requirements, instead of relying entirely on imports. The big draw is the size of the Indian market and prospective demand, the global market, and the possibility of innovation at this early stage. Domestic capabilities are a prerequisite to afford deployment at a level that would otherwise exceed petroleum imports, with unsustainable effects on our balance of payments. Without domestic capacity, energy imports would limit electronics imports. (This highlights India’s need for solar power development, a separate and equally high priority.)

However, the sobering financial condition of India’s communications industry gives pause. Financial capacity — revenue generation and access to capital, both equity and debt at favourable terms — is required to develop capabilities. After the telecom price wars, even Reliance Jio is reportedly cutting staff. Airtel, meanwhile, having invested heavily in 4G infrastructure, has stated its unwillingness to bid for 5G pectrum unless prices are lower.

The government set up a committee for 5G in September 2017 with a steering group chaired by emeritus professor at Stanford Arogyaswami Paulraj, a pioneer in wireless communications. This committee recommended network deployment as the immediate priority, i.e., rolling out early, efficient and pervasive 5G networks. Technology design and manufacturing capacity were recommended for later phases.

Network deployment needs policy support driven by a Systems Approach, especially for a debt-encumbered sector faced with declining revenues per user, and unused, inaccessible spectrum, even as other countries enhance their lead. This is ironic, because India has real strengths in this sector and a large market, with the potential to catapult productivity and prospects. Yet, government policies have not succeeded in coordinating our reservoir of human resources and potential.

India lags in 5G despite the government’s stated interest in establishing a lead. Spectrum allocation and large trials were scheduled towards the end of 2019, and auctions in 2020. However, government statements this week target 5G trials by September, and auctions by the end of 2019. As spectrum band choices and allocations for trials have yet to be made, this appears overambitious without radical improvement in resolving many such issues.

Also, India’s reserve price for spectrum is seven times Korea’s. As sectoral cash flows are weak, there may be takers only at very low prices unless funding is from external sources as for Reliance. A monopolistic outcome would be undesirable in the public interest. Therefore, shared access with Wireless Resource Virtualisation and Network Function Virtualisation may be a much better solution for network deployment and market development.

Inexplicably, government and the public still view communications as a “government cash-cow” instead of as critical infrastructure, while complaining bitterly about poor delivery from low investment. It is obvious that exorbitant government charges (29-32 per cent of revenues plus corporate tax) crowd out investment. The government can change this, or give up on establishing a lead in communications and 5G. Worse, India will continue to lose out on leveraging communications for development.

Initiate a breakthrough - Apply Systems Thinking

The government can catalyse a breakthrough by doing the following:a) Reduce borrowing costs and taxes for communications as infrastructure. This aim of the National Telecom Policy 2012 (NTP-2012) has been ignored.b) Provide adequate spectrum aligned with global allocations. Given India’s low fibre penetration and need for digital technology, allow shared access to all spectrum and infrastructure, with charges for usage based on revenue sharing.c) Clear administrative impasses through coordination and due process without delay. For example, allocate spectrum immediately for 12 months for trials.Many countries have completed 5G spectrum assignments and are already deploying 5G. These include Korea, Switzerland, Finland, UK, USA, Canada, Australia, Germany, Russia, Italy, and Japan.²There are nearly 300 5G deployments, as shown on an interactive map on Ookla’s site (Chart 1).
Chart 1: 5G Map – June 4, 2019

Source: https://www.speedtest.net/ookla-5g-map
In this context, Huawei’s role in India is contentious. One issue is of non-discriminatory trading terms, or fairness in competition. If an entity such as Huawei achieves global dominance through government support, it competes on terms that cannot be matched because of cost of funds and scale advantages. Such entities can establish dominance in any country against competitors who do not enjoy similar support. Second, while Huawei may be doing nothing different from Nokia or Ericsson, the fact that it is supported by a neighbour with apparently hegemonic behaviour, China, suggests that dependence or entanglement are inadvisable.

To succeed with Digital India and 5G, government can begin by classifying communications as infrastructure, and adopting the approach taken for 5 GHz Wi-Fi. Take pointers from the US FCC, ETSI, and so on; use spectrum and network sharing to leverage equipment and spectrum fully; support local technology champions such as a fabless chip design unit and a network equipment manufacturer in Bangalore, and a wireless equipment manufacturer in Delhi; and focus only on delivery with sustainable revenue generation.

Shyam dot Ponappa at gmail dot com

1: 5G technologies include Multi-User – MIMO (MU-MIMO) to improve reception, small cells for better performance and reduced radiation, WiGig and other high-speed wireless technologies, Software Defined Networks with Network Function Virtualisation, Wireless Resource Virtualisation, and a fibre backbone.

2: Page 8: https://img.lightreading.com/5g/downloads/ webinar-breaking-the-wireless-barriers-to-mobilize-5g-

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/telecom/blog/shyam-ponappa-business-standard-june-6-2019-5g-aspirations-and-realities

Fostering Strategic Convergence in US-India Tech Relations: 5G and Beyond

Justin Sherman and Arindrajit Basu — 2019-07-05T02:19:09Z

The 2019 G-20 summit underscores the importance of fostering strategic convergence in U.S.-India tech relations.

The article by Justin Sherman and Arindrajit Basu was published in the Diplomat on July 3, 2019.

As world leaders gathered for the G-20 summit in Osaka, Japan this past weekend, a multitude of issues from climate to trade to technology came to the fore. Much of the focus was on U.S.-China interactions at the summit, as the two nations are locked in both a trade war and broader technological and geopolitical competition. Despite the present focus on the U.S. and China, however, it is crucial to not overlook another bilateral relationship of ever-growing importance in the process: The tech relationship between the United States and India.

Certainly, the two countries have many disagreements on some technology issues. But this is a geopolitical relationship that is both strategically important for each country, and a vital opportunity for the two largest democracies in the world to collectively combat Chinese-style digital authoritarianism.

Huawei and 5G

First, with respect to national security and 5G roll-outs, the U.S and India are not on the same page. The United States, for several months now, has been on a diplomatic messaging tour of the world to try to convince — with great resistance (some would argue failure) — allies, partners, and potential partners alike to ban Chinese firm Huawei from supplying components of 5G networks. Many officials across Europe, the Middle East, South America, and elsewhere have been reluctant to ban Huawei per the U.S. recommendation, and India is no exception. Indeed, National Security Advisory Board Chairman P.S. Raghavan told The Hindu that “5G is becoming a fault line in the technology cold war between world powers” and that India must avoid getting caught in these fault lines.

In large part, U.S. diplomatic messaging here has fallen short due to heavy conflations of national security- and trade-related risks; and Trump only contributed further to this fact with his latest reference to Huawei, during the G-20, as a potential trade war bargaining chip. The sheer population of India, however, combined with its fast growing technology sectors and desire to digitize, makes the country an important market player when it comes to the 5G revolution. U.S.-India engagement on 5G issues must be managed effectively through robust articulation of each country’s national interests underscored by a clean segregation of trade and security questions in the discussion. This partnership has the potential to wield great influence in the global market, including in ways that could prioritize or deprioritize certain 5G equipment suppliers (like Huawei).

Data Sovereignty and Data Privacy

Data sovereignty is another hot area in which the U.S.-India tech relationship demands careful negotiation. Over the past year, the Indian government has introduced a range of policy instruments which dictate that certain kinds of data must be stored in servers located physically within India — termed “data localization.” While there are a number of policy objectives this gambit ostensibly seeks to serve, the two which stand out are (1) the presently cumbersome process for Indian law enforcement agencies to access data stored in the U.S. during criminal investigations, and (2) extractive economic models used by U.S. companies operating in India.

A range of conflicting developments emerging from the G-20 summit underscore this fact. India, along with the BRICS grouping, focused on the development dimensions of data governance and re-emphasized the need for data sovereignty — broadly understood as the sovereign right of nations to govern data in their national interest for the welfare of their citizens. President Trump reigned in his focus on the need for cross-border data flows and, in direct opposition to some proposals that have emerged from India, explicitly opposed data localization. While India did not sign the Osaka Declaration on the Digital Economy that promoted cross-border data flows, the importance of cross-border data flows in spurring the global economy did find its way into the Final G-20 Leaders Declaration — which, of course, both countries signed.

Geopolitically, the importance of India’s data governance stance cannot be overstated as it could pave the way for the approach adopted by other emerging economies — most notably the BRICS countries. Likewise, the U.S. has important thinking to do around such questions as what shape a national data privacy law could take. Even though the two countries’ views on data may be quite different from one another, the seats that India and the U.S. have at the table for global data governance discussions — alongside others like Japan, China, and the European Union — underscore the value of meaningful interactions and mutual trust and respect on this issue.

Norms for a Democratic Digital Future

Finally, as the United Nations Group of Governmental Experts and the Open-Ended Working Group meet to resurrect the norm-formulation process for fostering responsible state behavior in cyberspace, India has some homework to do. Even though it has been a member of five out of the six Group of Governmental Experts set up thus far, India is yet to come out with a public statement delineating its views on the applicability of International Law applies in cyberspace. Further, India has also failed to articulate a cohesive digital strategy — instead relying on a patchwork of hastily rolled out and often ill-conceived regulatory policies, some of which commentators in the West have hastily labeled as digital authoritarianism. The U.S., for its part, amidst a cutback to diplomatic cyber engagement (as part of cutbacks to diplomacy writ large), could also up its support of international engagement on these issues. Its recent repeal of net neutrality protections could also be argued as a step back from long-time international norm promotion around internet openness.

Through a combination of domestic policy gambits and foreign policy maneuvers, both states need to draw lines in the sand that safeguard human rights, international law, and democracy online, while arriving at some balance with each other’s national interests.

A primary example lies with artificial intelligence (AI). AI has found increasing use in digital authoritarianism, as dictators use automated, intelligent systems to boost their surveillance capabilities. The Chinese government has arguably been at the forefront of this enhanced level of authoritarian rule for the digital age.

In addition to focusing on AI applications for everything from natural language processing to self-driving cars — through investments, strategies, policy documents, and so on — Beijing has also been deploying AI in the service of large-scale human-rights abuses. Chinese strategy papers on AI, while similarly emphasizing many commercial or benign applications and raising attention to such issues as algorithmic fairness, concurrently have discussed using AI for “social governance,” censorship, and surveillance. To combat the rising intersection of AI and digital authoritarianism, the U.S. and India could wield enormous leverage — as the two largest democracies in the world — in governing these technologies in a democratic fashion that counters dangerous arms-race narratives and uses of AI for surveillance and repression.

The same goes for paying attention to technology exports and diffusion to human-rights abusers. For instance, companies incorporated in China, among those incorporated elsewhere, have been heavily involved in exports of dual-use surveillance technologies to other countries, including those with questionable or outright poor human-rights records. Although companies incorporated in democracies may engage in such practices as well, most democracies take steps to curtail these practices as much as possible, such as through the multilateral Wassenaar Arrangement — which lays out export controls around conventional weapons and dual-use goods and technologies. The U.S. has long been a party to this agreement, and India officially joined in 2018. Arguments persist about the extent to which Beijing is involved in these dual-use surveillance technology exports, but these exports may only increase going forward as companies increasingly sell not just internet surveillance tools but also dual-use AI tools. In this way, too, India and the U.S. could play an important role in countering the spread of such capabilities to human-rights abusers and standing against the spread of digital authoritarianism in the process.

The relationship here is, therefore, one that requires careful navigation for its significant geopolitical, economic, and ideological consequences. For the future of the technological relationship between the world’s largest democracies—and the extent to which they respect each other’s strategic autonomy while converging on issues of mutual interest—could determine the future of global digital governance.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/telecom/blog/the-diplomat-justin-sherman-and-arindrajit-basu-july-3-2019-fostering-strategic-convergence-in-us-india-tech-relations-5g-and-beyond

July 2017 Newsletter

praskrishna — 2017-08-23T02:03:19Z

Dear readers,

Previous issues of the newsletters can be accessed here.

Highlights
In an article published in the Huffington Post on July 1, 2017, Nirmita Narasimhan stated that imposing taxes on assistive devices is unfair. It is unconscionable that disability aids and assistive technology are considered a luxury and taxed at a higher rate than rough semi-precious stones or cashew nuts. A research paper on patent working requirements and complex products in India authored by Prof Jorge L. Contreras, University of Utah, and Rohini Lakshané, CIS has been accepted for publication in the Jindal Global Law School Law Review 2017. Negotiators from 16 countries met in Hyderabad for discussing a free trade agreement titled Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership. Anubha Sinha along with Arul George Scaria reported this in an article published by Live Law.in. Supreme Court of India while dismissing an appeal by the Indian Reprographic Rights Organization ruled that there was no copyright infringement and no licence was required since the activities fell under the education exception in Indian copyright law. In an article published by EIFL, Anubha Sinha discusses the judgment and what it means for access to educational materials in India. Odia Wikipedians, in conjunction with Indian Athletics Federation and Sports and Youth Services collaborated to document the 2017 Asian Athletics Championships. Hundreds of photos were uploaded and new Wikipedia content added to inform the event’s fans, wrote Sailesh Patnaik and Jnanaranjan Sahu in a blog post. As recently as May 27, 2016, the General Data Protection Regulation (REGULATION (EU) 2016/679 was adopted The Data Protection Directive (1995/46/EC) will be replaced by this Regulation. It is expected that under this Regulation data privacy will be strengthened. Aditi Chaturvedi analyses the developments in a report.

CIS in the news:

UIDAI declining multiple requests by police to share Indian citizens’ biometrics (Justin Lee; Biometrics; July 4, 2017).
Act now to protect yourself against future ransomware attacks (Sanjay Kumar Singh; Business Standard; July 5, 2017).
Reliance Jio data leaked on website : report (Livemint; July 10, 2017).
Supreme Court sets up constitution bench to hear Aadhaar privacy issues (Priyanka Mittal; Livemint; July 12, 2017).
Centre to form panel to 'encrypt' MGNREGA-DBT database and prevent leaks (Sanjeeb Mukherjee; Business Standard; July 14, 2017).
Calls for law change after Indians left in dark over data leaks (Rahul Bhatia and Sankalp Phartiyal; Reuters; July 14, 2017).
Indians Call For More Stringent Data Protection Laws (PYMTNS; July 17, 2017).
Social Activist Alleges Threat By Police Officer Over Possession of Aadhaar (Gaurav Vivek Bhatnagar; Wire; July 16, 2017).

Aadhaar privacy: Key issues that all Aadhaar card holders should bear in mind (Business Today, July 19, 2017).
Data in the open makes it easy for cyber criminals (Kiran Parashar KM; New Indian Express; July 26, 2017).

CIS members wrote the following articles

Why GST Is A Step Backward For The Disabled (Nirmita Narasimhan; Huffington Post; July 1, 2017).
Course Packs for Education Ruled Legal in India (Anubha Sinha; EIFL; July 12, 2017).
Digital native: Not only words (Nishant Shah; Indian Express; July 16, 2017).
Aadhar: Privacy is not a unidimensional concept (Amber Sinha; Economic Times; July 23, 2017).
RCEP IP Chapter: A Serious Threat to Access to Knowledge/ Cultural Goods? (Arul George Scaria and Anubha Sinha; July 27, 2017).
Digital native: Ever on the go (Nishant Shah; Indian Express; July 30, 2017).

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Accessibility & Inclusion
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India has an estimated 70 million persons with disabilities who don't have access to read printed materials due to some form of physical, sensory, cognitive or other disability. As part of our endeavour to make available accessible content for persons with disabilities, we are developing a text-to-speech software in 15 languages with support from the Hans Foundation. The progress made so far in the project can be accessed here.

Article

Why GST Is A Step Backward For The Disabled (Nirmita Narasimhan; Huffington Post; July 1, 2017).

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Access to Knowledge
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Our Access to Knowledge programme currently consists of two projects. The Pervasive Technologies project, conducted under a grant from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), aims to conduct research on the complex interplay between low-cost pervasive technologies and intellectual property, in order to encourage the proliferation and development of such technologies as a social good. The Wikipedia project, which is under a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation, is for the growth of Indic language communities and projects by designing community collaborations and partnerships that recruit and cultivate new editors and explore innovative approaches to building projects.

►Pervasive Technologies and Copyright

Research Paper

Patent Working Requirements and Complex Products: An Empirical Assessment of India's Form 27 Practice and Compliance (Jorge L. Contreras and Rohini Lakshané; SSRN and Jindal Global Law School Review; July 17, 2017).

Participation in Event

19th RCEP Meeting (Organized by Ministry of Commerce, Government of India; July 17 - 28, 2017; Hyderabad). Anubha Sinha participated in the meeting.

►Wikipedia

As part of the project grant from the Wikimedia Foundation we have reached out to more than 3500 people across India by organizing more than 100 outreach events and catalysed the release of encyclopaedic and other content under the Creative Commons (CC-BY-3.0) license in four Indian languages (21 books in Telugu, 13 in Odia, 4 volumes of encyclopaedia in Konkani and 6 volumes in Kannada, and 1 book on Odia language history in English).

Blog Entries

Note: The events were organized earlier but reports were published in July 2017:

Christ University Wikipedia Education Program Internship (Manasa Rao and Ananth Subray; July 5, 2017).
Christ University Wikipedia Education Program Faculty Orientation Report (Ananth Subray; July 7, 2017).
How It Came To Be: Wiki Loves Uniformed Services (Krishna Chaitanya Velaga; July 10, 2017).
Tallapaka Pada Sahityam is now on Wikisource (Pavan Santhosh; July 10, 2017).
Thematic Edit-a-thon at Yashawantrao Chavan Institute of Science, Satara (Subodh Kulkarni; July 11, 2017).
Asian Athletics Championships 2017 Edit-a-thon (Sailesh Patnaik and Jnanaranjan Sahu; July 31, 2017).

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Internet Governance
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As part of its research on privacy and free speech, CIS is engaged with two different projects. The first one (under a grant from Privacy International and IDRC) is on surveillance and freedom of expression (SAFEGUARDS). The second one (under a grant from MacArthur Foundation) is on restrictions that the Indian government has placed on freedom of expression online.

►Privacy

Blog Entry

Data Protection: Understanding the General Data Protection Regulation (Aditi Chaturvedi; July 4, 2017).

Participation in Event

IViR Summer Course on Privacy Law and Policy (Organized by the University of Amsterdam; July 3 - 7, 2017; Amsterdam). Amber Sinha attended the course.

►Free Speech and Expression and Cyber Security

Participation in Events

OHD on Consultation Paper on Net Neutrality (Organized by Telecom Regulatory Authority of India; July 25, 2017). Pranesh Prakash was a speaker.
UNESCO Multistakeholder consultation at 8th Asia Pacific Regional Internet Governance Forum (APrIGF) (Organized by UNESCO; Bangkok; July 26 - 29, 2017). Sunil Abraham was a speaker. Vidhushi Marda also participated in the event.
Cybersecurity Workshop: Spotlight On GCCS 2017 (Organized by Global Partners Digital (GPD) and the Centre for Communication Governance at National Law University, Delhi, in collaboration with Digital Empowerment Foundation, Digital Asia Hub and Open Net Korea; Bangkok; July 25 - 27, 2017). Sunil Abraham was a speaker. Udbhav Tiwari and Vidushi Marda participated in the event.

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Telecom
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CIS is involved in promoting access and accessibility to telecommunications services and resources, and has provided inputs to ongoing policy discussions and consultation papers published by TRAI. It has prepared reports on unlicensed spectrum and accessibility of mobile phones for persons with disabilities and also works with the USOF to include funding projects for persons with disabilities in its mandate:

Participation in Event

Workshop on Public Open Wi-Fi Pilot (Organized by Telecom Regulatory Authority of India; July 25, 2017). Pranesh Prakash was a speaker.

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Researchers at Work
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The Researchers at Work (RAW) programme is an interdisciplinary research initiative driven by an emerging need to understand the reconfigurations of social practices and structures through the Internet and digital media technologies, and vice versa. It aims to produce local and contextual accounts of interactions, negotiations, and resolutions between the Internet, and socio-material and geo-political processes:

Event Organized

Dr. Prerna Prabhakar - Impact of Digitisation of Land Records in Rural India (CIS, New Delhi; July 7, 2017).

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

► Follow us elsewhere

Twitter: http://twitter.com/cis_india
Twitter - Access to Knowledge: https://twitter.com/CISA2K
Twitter - Information Policy: https://twitter.com/CIS_InfoPolicy
Facebook - Access to Knowledge: https://www.facebook.com/cisa2k
E-Mail - Access to Knowledge: a2k@cis-india.org
E-Mail - Researchers at Work: raw@cis-india.org
List - Researchers at Work: https://lists.ghserv.net/mailman/listinfo/researchers

► Support Us

Please help us defend consumer and citizen rights on the Internet! Write a cheque in favour of 'The Centre for Internet and Society' and mail it to us at No. 194, 2nd 'C' Cross, Domlur, 2nd Stage, Bengaluru - 5600 71.

► Request for Collaboration

We invite researchers, practitioners, artists, and theoreticians, both organisationally and as individuals, to engage with us on topics related internet and society, and improve our collective understanding of this field. To discuss such possibilities, please write to Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, at sunil@cis-india.org (for policy research), or Sumandro Chattapadhyay, Research Director, at sumandro@cis-india.org (for academic research), with an indication of the form and the content of the collaboration you might be interested in. To discuss collaborations on Indic language Wikipedia projects, write to Tanveer Hasan, Programme Officer, at tanveer@cis-india.org.

CIS is grateful to its primary donor the Kusuma Trust founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin for its core funding and support for most of its projects. CIS is also grateful to its other donors, Wikimedia Foundation, Ford Foundation, Privacy International, UK, Hans Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, and IDRC for funding its various projects.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/july-2017-newsletter

Folly of Mandating Spectrum Auctions

Jayna Kothari — 2012-12-03T09:47:30Z

The recent failure of the 2G spectrum auctions has brought to the fore serious questions on auctions being the only mode for allocation of spectrum.

This article by Jayna Kothari was published in the Business Line print edition dated November 24, 2012.

It was reported that as against the expectation of Rs 40,000 crore, the Government received bids for just Rs 9,224 crore. The turnout was so weak that only 18 of the 22 telecom circles received a bid.

The auctions were conducted in fulfilment of the mandate given by the Supreme Court — that for spectrum, auctions were the only equitable manner for allocation.

This was first held by the Supreme Court in its judgment in CPIL and Others vs Union of India and Others (“the 2G case”), where the Court set aside the 122 spectrum licences that were allotted on a first-come-first-served basis, and went so far as to declare that for spectrum and all natural resources, auctions would be the only method for allocation that would fulfil the constitutional requirements of fairness, equality and transparency guaranteed in Article 14.

Contrary Positions

This was a highly problematic declaration — to mandate allocation of spectrum and all natural resources through auction. This observation was taken to Supreme Court once again in a Presidential Reference by the Government. In its September 2012 order on the Presidential Reference, the Supreme Court held that for all other natural resources auction cannot be mandated as the only method, but oddly carved out an exception for spectrum.

It reiterated that for spectrum, auctions shall continue to be the only method for allocation. The judgment held that the observations in the 2G case, “….could not apply beyond the specific case of spectrum, which according to the law declared in the 2G case is to be alienated only by auction and no other method.”

On the other hand, in the Presidential Reference it was held repeatedly by the Court that “…it cannot, and shall not, be the endeavour of this Court to evaluate the efficacy of auction vis-à-vis other methods of disposal of natural resources. The Court cannot mandate one method to be followed in all facts and circumstances. Therefore, auction, an economic choice of disposal of natural resources, is not a constitutional mandate.” When this was the opinion of the Court, it is hard to understand why auctions were mandated for spectrum.

Justice Kehar’s separate opinion perhaps provides support for an interpretation that auctions were never meant to be the only mandate for all distribution of resources, even for spectrum.

In the Presidential Reference, the Supreme Court did perhaps not want to appear to interfere in its earlier judgment where the 122 licences were set aside. The government also, in an attempt to not have the entire Reference rejected, conceded that it was not seeking an opinion of the court on spectrum allocation and accepted auctions as the only method for allocation, although several core questions in the Reference were concentrated on spectrum.

An Intervention Brief was filed on behalf of the Centre for Internet and Society urging the Court to reconsider its mandate specifically for spectrum, citing examples of spectrum auction failures around the world.

These arguments were not accepted because both the Court and the Government did not want to touch spectrum allocation — it was a delicate issue, and they tiptoed around it. The mandate of the court on auctions, as being the only method for spectrum allocation, stood firmly reinforced.

Alternatives to Auctions

Are auctions, with all their promises of maximisation of revenue, the only mode in the common public interest for allocation of spectrum? Clearly not, going by the recent auction failure which failed due to underbidding, where none of the promised revenue was recovered.

The Constitution in Article 39b mandates that the State shall, in particular, direct its policy towards securing that the ownership and control of the material resources of the community are so distributed as best to subserve the common good. Thus, it is clear that the State’s object cannot be merely to maximise revenue but the policy of allocation and distribution of spectrum chosen must be towards securing the common good and keeping the public interest in mind.

There have been several instances worldwide where spectrum auctions have failed. A 2006 Report by Gregory F. Rose and Mark Lloyd, analyses spectrum auctions in the US from 1993 onwards and found that along with problems of overbidding, auctions had also failed due to underbidding in the US. Collectively, these trends of overbidding, pre-emptive bidding and underbidding characteristic only to auctions, sometimes result in disastrous consequences. Thus the argument that auctions maximise revenue, fails in the face of the recent failure of the 2G auctions. This affects the quality of services rolled out to consumers.

The present fiasco shows the danger of mandating any one method, such as auctions, for spectrum allocation. With the Government’s hands tied by the Supreme Court mandate, other possible options for spectrum such as the revenue sharing model, spectrum sharing and the creation of a spectrum commons are now not available. Perhaps these and many other modes of allocation would be in the fulfilment of the common good at a time when auction may not be right.

Courts and Policy

So, where do we go from here? Do we look for an interpretation in these judgments that would give a way out for the government to implement different modes of allocation for spectrum? Or would this give ground to a fresh case for review? These are all possibilities that need to be explored.

It is time we re-look at the role of the courts in policy matters. As far back as in 1995, the Supreme Court, when dealing with airwaves in Secretary, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting and others vs Cricket Association of Bengal and others, held, that, matters of policy are for Parliament to consider and not for courts.

Let us take this principle seriously and learn lessons from this auction failure. Mandating any one mode of allocation as a constitutional mandate can never be in the interest of the larger common good.

The Supreme Court should not have been rigid about allocating spectrum only through auction, given its mixed record the world over.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/telecom/blog/the-hindu-businessline-november-24-2012-jayna-kothari-folly-of-mandating-spectrum-auctions

Extractive Charges on Spectrum & Petroleum

Shyam Ponappa — 2014-04-07T03:57:14Z

The author examines whether government levies on these critical inputs are beneficial or detrimental.

The article published in the Business Standard on March 5, 2014 was mirrored in Organizing India Blogspot on March 6, 2014.

spectrum auction last month ended with over Rs 61,000 crore (about $10 billion) bid for the 900 MHz and 1800 MHz bands. Everyone seems upbeat: the government at high bids, and operators at staking out spectrum so that they can continue offering their services. The public at large seems enthused. Is there reason for good cheer? Consider some of the outcomes and the likely consequences.

Outcomes

Dominant operators, namely, Bharti Airtel, Vodafone and Idea, have won enough spectrum to continue building their businesses. So has a new potential contender, Reliance Jio.
Winners must pay the amounts they've bid, in addition to making further investments in networks. Their financial compulsion will be to increase prices to amortise a payment of nearly Rs 18,300 crore, followed by the remainder to be paid in 10 annual instalments after a two-year moratorium. Competition will provide a countervailing effect against price hikes. The annual payment by all operators after two years will amount to about Rs 4,400 crore. To put this in perspective, Bharti's profits for FY 2013 were around Rs 5,000 crore and Idea's around Rs 800 crore.

This perpetuates the approach of operators paying first for the right to use spectrum, then dividing available spectrum for their mutually exclusive use. The corollary is that unless operators choose to share some of their infrastructure, as some do for mobile towers, each operator must invest in its own infrastructure. In the absence of voluntary infrastructure sharing to the extent permissible, multiple investments are needed to build parallel networks. This is comparable to railways or transportation companies setting up multiple countrywide railroad and road networks, each for their own exclusive use. The result is a very capital-intensive approach requiring much more investment, while not being sufficiently remunerative.

Consequences

To the extent that there are front-loaded government charges, operators have less capital for network investments.
Resource constraints result in service deprivation in low-potential areas, as is prevalent now. In other words, urban areas may be well served, but not less densely populated rural areas where the majority reside. It is for the same reason that metro cities are better served by airlines or transportation services: the profit potential is higher.
The lack of amenities in rural areas means there is continuing demographic pressure to migrate to cities. The overwhelming societal need for the provision-of-urban-amenities-in-rural-areas ("PURA") is entirely sidelined. Yet, these are the amenities people need most for economic empowerment, productivity and better living conditions.

Contrast this with Sweden's approach to broadband, for instance. Sweden is a pioneer in the use of 700 MHz for broadband. A loosely translated quote from Sweden's information technology minister reads: "A hundred years ago, it was the ability to build good railways, good roads and good physical infrastructure that laid the foundation for jobs and growth. Today it is also about fast enough build-out of good mobile telephony." [1]

Another instance of constructive intervention, and that too in a developed metropolis, is the London Enterprise Panel's approach, because London's broadband is considered insufficiently competitive. Funds "will be invested where the market is failing (particularly where this is proving a barrier to business growth)".[2]

In India, the efficient 700 MHz and 800 MHz bands have not yet been assigned except for limited 800 MHz spectrum for CDMA. These bands are most effective for broadband in rural and semi-urban areas. However, auctions and high reserve prices militate against their effective deployment at low cost, thwarting an apparent remedy for our deficient coverage. Also, GSM operators have just bid aggressively in the recent auction to survive, and are loaded with debt. Only the financially strong Reliance Jio, which has not bid as much, can offer high bids. Vodafone may also be able to do so. So, one problem is reduced bidding capacity, but a bigger problem is reduced investment capacity: the higher they bid, the less likely they are to provide countrywide broadband quickly at reasonable prices.

Petroleum Levies

Petroleum levies comprise another range of high government charges on critical inputs. In 2006, the taxes on petrol amounted to 52 per cent of the retail price, and on diesel, 30.4 per cent with Rs 45 to the dollar, (Delhi price: Rs 45/litre when Brent crude was $65/barrel). Tax collections now amount to around 30 per cent for petrol and 18 per cent for diesel, with Brent crude at around $110/barrel, and petrol in Delhi at Rs 74/litre. While the percentages collected are lower, the amounts collected are about 70 per cent higher than in 2006 because of the increase in the price of crude oil at a time when the economy is slumping.

There is a rationale for collecting reasonable charges to cover construction and maintenance, environmental impact mitigation and waste disposal (clean-up), and to provide incentives. But it's time our governments stopped being extractive, and rationalised charges based on objectives and policies in the public interest. Governments and politicians should be addressing these, instead of doles and giveaways. The aim should be to maximise life-cycle benefits, which can be optimised by reducing short-term capture in favour of longer-term accruals from growth, and from policies designed to deploy productive infrastructure including applying the principle of common carrier access.

[1]. "Digital TV [700 MHz band] will now provide frequencies for cell phones", writes IT Minister Anna-Karin Hatt - Dagens Nyheter, February 27, 2014: http://www.dn.se/debatt/digital-tv-far-nu-lamna-frekvenser-till-mobilerna/

[2]. London Enterprise Panel - 2014-2020 European Structural & Investment Funds Strategy for London, January 2014: https://www.london.gov.uk/sites/default/files/London LEP ESIF Strategy 2014-20 (1).pdf

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/telecom/blog/business-standard-march-5-2014-shyam-ponappa-extractive-charges-on-spectrum-petroleum

February 2014 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2014-04-07T07:27:46Z

The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) welcomes you to the second issue of its newsletter (February) for the year 2014:

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Highlights
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We published revised chapters for the states of Mizoram, Dadra and Nagar Haveli, Himachal Pradesh and Haryana, as part of our National Resource Kit project.
In the concluding blog post of a three-part study Ananth Padmanabhan looks at the Indian law in the Copyright Act and the Information Technology Act, and concludes that both those laws restrain courts and private companies from ordering an ISP to block a website for copyright infringement.
Telugu Wikipedia celebrated its 10^th anniversary. An event was co-organized in Vijaywada to celebrate the same.
The second Institute on Internet and Society was held in Pune from February 11 to 17. The proceedings from the workshop are captured in a blog post.
CIS announced an Open Call for Comments for the latest draft of the Privacy Bill, 2013 prepared by Bhairav Acharya.
Forbes India published its “30 Under 30 List”. Pranesh Prakash is featured in the list.
As part of the Making Change Project, Denisse Albornoz wrote a blog post that compares the production behind a performance with the process of storytelling.
Beli gives an introduction to spectrum sharing. The post looks at GSM and CDMA, and touches upon LTE, and how they might share spectrum.

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Jobs
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CIS is seeking applications for the post of Program Officer (Access to Knowledge): http://bit.ly/1fnydB0. There are two vacancies for this post and it is full-time based in Delhi. To apply, please send your resume to Sunil Abraham (sunil@cis-india.org), Nirmita Narasimhan (nirmita@cis-india.org) and Pranesh Prakash (pranesh@cis-india.org) with three writing samples of which at least one demonstrates your analytic skills, and one that shows your ability to simplify complex policy issues.

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Accessibility and Inclusion
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As part of our project (under a grant from the Hans Foundation) on creating a national resource kit of state-wise laws, policies and programmes on issues relating to persons with disabilities in India, we bring you draft chapters for the states of Mizoram, Dadra and Nagar Haveli, Himachal Pradesh and Haryana. With this we have completed compilation of draft chapters for 35 states.

Based upon discussion with the office of the Chief Commissioner for Persons with Disabilities (CCPD) the following chapters were revised:

► National Resource Kit Chapter

The Mizoram Chapter (by CLPR, February 5, 2014): http://bit.ly/1eUSvxW
The Dadra & Nagar Haveli Chapter (by CLPR, February 6, 2014): http://bit.ly/1mv3YhJ
The Haryana Chapter (by Anandhi Viswanathan, February 10, 2014): http://bit.ly/1dVOiKI
The Himachal Pradesh Chapter (by Anandhi Viswanathan, February 12, 2014): http://bit.ly/1jSk03x

► Other

# Participation in Events

National Consultation on Inclusion of Persons with Disabilities in Development Process (organized by CBM India in collaboration with United Nations Solution Exchange for Gender Community, WHO Regional office for South-East Asia, New Delhi, February 12, 2014). Anandhi Viswanathan participated in a panel discussion. She made a presentation on the National Resource Kit project: http://bit.ly/OlkHVq.
Zero Project Conference on Accessibility: Innovative Policies and Practices for Persons with Disabilities (organized by Essl Foundation, the World Future Council and the European Foundation Centre, United Nations Office, Vienna, February 27 and 28, 2014). Pranesh Prakash spoke on Affordable Text-to-Speech Software from India: http://bit.ly/1czo32s. Nominations on e-speak were recognised as examples of innovative practices and policies from India. Pranesh Prakash was also a speaker on Copyright Exception for Accessible Formats: http://bit.ly/1l8HRth.

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Access to Knowledge
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The Access to Knowledge programme addresses the harms caused to consumers and human rights, and critically examines Open Government Data, Open Access to Scholarly Literature, and Open Access to Law, Open Content, Open Standards, and Free/Libre/Open Source Software.

# Analyses

Can Judges Order ISPs to Block Websites for Copyright Infringement? (Part 2) (by Ananth Padmanabhan, February 5, 2014): http://bit.ly/1cddoKm. Analyses the law laid down by the U.S. Supreme Court and the Delhi High Court on secondary and contributory copyright infringement.
Can Judges Order ISPs to Block Websites for Copyright Infringement? (Part 3) (by Ananth Padmanabhan, February 5, 2014): http://bit.ly/1g35mDg. Analyses the Indian law in the Copyright Act and the Information Technology Act.

# Participation in Events

2nd International Conference on Managing Intellectual Property Rights and Strategy (MIPS 2014) (organized by Shailesh J. Mehta School of Management, IIT Bombay with support from the Ministry of Human Resources Development IPR Chair Project, Government of India): http://bit.ly/PsPEbq.
Consultation on Institutional Arrangements for IP management under MHRD (organized by the Planning Commission and Ministry of Human Resource Development, New Delhi, February 21, 2014). Nehaa Chaudhari participated in this consultation: http://bit.ly/1fTCoar.
National Conference on Use of Technology in Higher Education (organized by the Ministry of Human Resource and Development and Planning Commission in partnership with Microsoft Research and British Council, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, February 25, 2014): http://bit.ly/P6u78i. Nehaa Chaudhari participated in the event as a panelist in the session on "Future of Content Creation".

# Media Coverage

Pranesh Prakash: Influencing India's IP Laws (by Samar Srivastava, Forbes India, February 15, 2014): http://bit.ly/1kBzLMq.

The following has been done under grant from the Wikimedia Foundation (http://bit.ly/SPqFOl). As part this project (http://bit.ly/X80ELd), we organised 4 workshops in the month of January, published an article in DNA, and signed a memorandum of understanding with KIIT University and Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences to further the development of Odia Wikipedia:

►Wikipedia

# Articles / Blog Entries

Odia Language's Presence in Digital Media and Wikipedia's Role (by Subhashish Panigrahi, The Samaja, March 2, 2014): http://bit.ly/1ieF3sC.
Indian Wikimedia community coordinates Women’s History Month (by Netha Hussain and Jeph Paul, Wikimedia Foundation, March 6, 2014): http://bit.ly/1cyRfqf,

# Events Co-organized

Cinemathon2014 Bangalore (organized by Pad.ma and CIS-A2K, CIS, Bangalore, February 8-9, 2014): http://bit.ly/MRRkZz.
Tewiki 10th Anniversary (organized by CIS-A2K and Telugu Wikipedia community, February 15, 2014): http://bit.ly/1iI2Pxs. T. Vishnu Vardhan and Rahmanuddin Shaikh were speakers at the event.
Cinemathon2014 Mumbai (organized by Pad.ma and CIS-A2K, CAMP Studio, Mumbai, February 15-16, 2014): http://bit.ly/P5YGL8.
Wikipedia Mangalore Workshop (organized by Roshini Nilaya and CIS-A2K, Mangalore, February 26, 2014). Dr. U.B.Pavanaja gave a presentation on Wikipedia with a special focus on students and women.

CIS gave its inputs to the following media coverage:

# Media Coverage

Father-son duo promote Punjabi online (by Jatinder Preet, Sunday Guardian, February 1, 2014): http://bit.ly/1l87b2h.
୧୦ ବର୍ଷରେ ଓଡ଼ିଆ ୱିକିପିଡିଆ (Rabibara Sambad (Sunday supplement of Odia newspaper The Sambad), February 9, 2014): http://bit.ly/1igMynn. This is a feature about Odia Wikipedia's 10th anniversary and the story of a dead volunteer community reviving after 8 years.
Wikipedia Mangalore Workshop (Prajavani, February 27, 2014): http://bit.ly/1gVMG6f.

# Participation in Event

The Dynamics of Education to Employment Journey: Opportunities and Challenges (organized by KIIT School of Management, KIIT University, Bhubaneswar, February 21-22, 2014). T. Vishnu Vardhan gave a talk: http://bit.ly/1ePwqHc.

Event Organized

Wiki Women's Workshop (ICG – Dona Paula, Goa, March 9, 2014): http://bit.ly/MRRJLy. The event is being organized as part of the commemoration of the International Women's Day.

Openness

# Event Organised

Bitcoin & Open Source with Aaron Koenig (CIS, Bangalore, February 7, 2014): http://bit.ly/1fbN6mP.

# Call for Comments

The Privacy Protection Bill, 2013 (by Bhairav Acharya, February 25, 2014): http://bit.ly/1g3TwIX. CIS announced an Open Call for Comments to the latest version of the bill.

# Articles

The Internet Way (by Nishant Shah, Biblio Vol. 19 No.8 (1&2), January – February 2014): http://bit.ly/1kBp9gJ. Dr. Nishant Shah's review of the book “The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon” by Bantam Press/Random House Group, London can be found on page 16.
Surveillance and the Indian Constitution - Part 3: The Public/Private Distinction and the Supreme Court’s Wrong Turn (by Gautam Bhatia, Indian Constitutional Law and Philosophy Blog, February 25, 2014): http://bit.ly/1kBosnw. This was originally published on Indian Constitutional Law and Philosophy Blog.
Big Democracy, Big Surveillance: India's Surveillance State (by Maria Xynou, Open Democracy, February 28, 2014): http://bit.ly/1nkg8Ho.
Will You be Paid to Post a Picture? (by Nishant Shah, Indian Express, February 18, 2014): http://bit.ly/P65d8L.

# Blog Entries

February 11: The Day We Fight Back Against Mass Surveillance (by Divij Joshi, February 14, 2014): http://bit.ly/1e7drCV.
Calcutta High Court Strengthens Whistle Blower Protection (by Divij Joshi, February 24, 2014): http://bit.ly/1cG8v7t.
CIS Welcomes 52nd Report on Cyber Crime, Cyber Security, and Right to Privacy (by Elonnai Hickok, February 24, 2014): http://bit.ly/1oviMJ4.
UIDAI Practices and the Information Technology Act, Section 43A and Subsequent Rules (by Elonnai Hickok, February 25, 2014): http://bit.ly/1fbSfep.

# Events Organized

Nullcon Goa Feb 2014 — International Security Conference (organised by Nullcon, Bogmallo Beach Resort, Goa, February 12 – 15, 2014). CIS is one of the sponsors for this event: http://bit.ly/1lrBu5I.
Counter Surveillance Panel: DiscoTech & Hackathon (co-organized by CIS, MIT Centre for Civic Media Co-Design Lab, Tactical Technology Collective, Hackteria.org, and Shristi School of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore, March 1, 2014): http://bit.ly/NCGMyH

# Participation in Events

First Meeting of the Multistakeholder Advisory Group for India Internet Governance Forum (organized by the Department of Electronics and Information Technology, New Delhi, February 10, 2014). Sunil Abraham participated in this meeting: http://bit.ly/1fKu5xz.
Internet Intermediary Liability: Towards Evidence-based Policy and Regulatory Reform to Secure Human Rights on the internet (organized by Association for Progressive Communications, The Wedgewood, Melville, Johannesburg, February 10-11, 2014): http://bit.ly/1fMAEK2. Elonnai Hickok was a speaker.
Towards an Equitable and Just Internet (organized by IT for Change, New Delhi, February 14-15, 2014). Bhairav Acharya was a speaker: http://bit.ly/1cz9EDt.
Workshop on Media Law & Policy Curriculum Development (organized by the Centre for Communication Governance, National Law University, Delhi and University of Oxford in support with the International Higher Education-Knowledge Economy Partnerships Programme of the British Council, February 16, 2014, National Law University, Delhi): http://bit.ly/1ovoT00. Bhairav Acharya was a speaker.
The Changing Role of the Media in India: Constitutional Perspectives (organized by School of Law, Christ University, February 28, 2014): http://bit.ly/1lB2nTO. Snehashish Ghosh moderated a session at this conference.

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News & Media Coverage
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CIS gave its inputs to the following recent media coverage:

The Dangers of Birdsong (by Namrata Joshi, Outlook, January 25, 2014): http://bit.ly/1kB8J7L.
A Tale of Two Internet Campaigns (by Deepa Kurup, The Hindu, February 11, 2014): http://bit.ly/1lDdRZy.
Dark days for the creative class in India: Siddiqui (by Haroon Siddiqui, thestar.com, February 16, 2014): http://bit.ly/1gdtgbC.
The Forbes India 30 Under 30 List (by Abhilasha Khaitan, Forbes India, February 21, 2014): http://bit.ly/1ovnvKM. Pranesh Prakash features in the list.
India ‘tea parties’ enable politicians to woo urban youth with technology (by Avantika Chilkoti, Financial Times, February 26, 2014): http://bit.ly/1cGfOMm.

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Digital Humanities
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CIS is building research clusters in the field of Digital Humanities. The Digital will be used as a way of unpacking the debates in humanities and social sciences and look at the new frameworks, concepts and ideas that emerge in our engagement with the digital. The clusters aim to produce and document new conversations and debates that shape the contours of Digital Humanities in Asia:

# Blog Entries

Defending the Humanities in the Digital Age (by Nishant Shah, DML Central, February 24, 2014): http://bit.ly/1czdZqg.
Digital Humanities in India- Mapping Changes at the Intersection of Youth, Technology and Higher Education (by Sneha PP, February 21, 2014): http://bit.ly/1qd6xo4.

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Digital Natives
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CIS is doing a research project titled “Making Change”. The project will explore new ways of defining, locating, and understanding change in network societies. Having the thought piece 'Whose Change is it Anyway' as an entry point for discussion and reflection, the project will feature profiles, interviews and responses of change-makers to questions around current mechanisms and practices of change in South Asia and South East Asia:

►Making Change Project

# Blog Entries

Storytelling as Performance: The Ugly Indian and Blank Noise 1 (by Denisse Albornoz, February 24, 2014): http://bit.ly/1jX4qBb.
Storytelling as Performance: The Ugly Indian and Blank Noise 2 (by Denisse Albornoz, February 27, 2014): http://bit.ly/1fKwQil.

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Telecom
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Shyam Ponappa, a Distinguished Fellow at CIS is a regular columnist with the Business Standard. The articles published on his blog Organizing India Blogspot is mirrored on our website:

# Newspaper Column

Centre- or State-Driven Development? (by Shyam Ponappa, Business Standard, February 5, 2014, Observer India Blogspot, February 7, 2014): http://bit.ly/1ceuWFS.

# Blog Entry

An Introduction to Spectrum Sharing (by Beli, February 24, 2014): http://bit.ly/NZlknd.

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Knowledge Repository on Internet Access
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CIS in partnership with the Ford Foundation is executing a project to create a knowledge repository on Internet and society. This repository will comprise content targeted primarily at civil society with a view to enabling their informed participation in the Indian Internet and ICT policy space. The repository is available at the Internet Institute website: http://bit.ly/1iQT2UB.

►Event Organized

Institute on Internet and Society (organised by Ford Foundation and CIS, Yashada, Pune, February 11-17, 2014): http://bit.ly/1fpTdDS. Bishakha Datta, Ravikiran Annaswamy, Kingsley John, Prof. G. Nagarjuna, Nisha Thompson, Prashant Naik, Nehaa Chaudhari, Bhairav Acharya, Manu Srivastav, Dr. Abhijeet Safai, Payal Malik, Nishant Shah, Laura Stein, Sunil Abraham, Madan Muthu and Chinmayi Arun taught at the institute.

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About CIS
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The Centre for Internet and Society is a non-profit research organization that works on policy issues relating to freedom of expression, privacy, accessibility for persons with disabilities, access to knowledge and IPR reform, and openness (including open government, FOSS, open standards, etc.), and engages in academic research on digital natives and digital humanities.

► Follow us elsewhere

Twitter: https://twitter.com/CISA2K
Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/cisa2k
Visit us at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Access_To_Knowledge
E-mail: a2k@cis-india.org

► Support Us

Please help us defend consumer / citizen rights on the Internet! Write a cheque in favour of ‘The Centre for Internet and Society’ and mail it to us at No. 194, 2nd ‘C’ Cross, Domlur, 2nd Stage, Bengaluru – 5600 71.

► Request for Collaboration:

We invite researchers, practitioners, and theoreticians, both organisationally and as individuals, to collaboratively engage with Internet and society and improve our understanding of this new field. To discuss the research collaborations, write to Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, at sunil@cis-india.org or Nishant Shah, Director – Research, at nishant@cis-india.org. To discuss collaborations on Indic language Wikipedia, write to T. Vishnu Vardhan, Programme Director, A2K, at vishnu@cis-india.org.

CIS is grateful to its donors, Wikimedia Foundation, Ford Foundation, Privacy International, UK, Hans Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, IDRC and the Kusuma Trust founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin, for its core funding and support for most of its projects.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/february-2014-bulletin

Comments on the DoT Panel Report via MyGov

pranesh — 2015-09-26T10:16:44Z

On behalf of the Centre for Internet and Society, I must commend the Department of Telecom Panel on its report. Overall, it displays a far better understanding of the underlying issues than the TRAI consultation paper did, and is overall a good effort at balancing the different sides. However, some of its most important recommendations are completely off-mark and would be disastrous if accepted by the government.

It is praiseworthy that the panel emphasizes the separation in regulatory terms between the network layer and the service layer. This also means that telecom carriers should be regulated differently from OTT services.

Licensing of Communication OTT Services

The proposal by the DoT panel of a licensing regime for communication OTT services is a terrible idea. It would presumptively hold all licence non-holders to be unlawful, and that should not be the case; as the panel itself notes, apps that lower the cost of communication are a welcome development and should be encouraged by the government and not made presumptively unlawful.

While it is in India's national interest to want to hold VoIP services to account if they do not follow legitimate regulations, it is far better to do this through ex-post regulations rather than an ex-ante licensing scheme.

A licensing scheme would benefit Indian VoIP companies (including services like Hike, which Airtel has invested in) over foreign companies like Viber, or free/open source technologies like WebRTC. The Universal Licence is designed for a world where all the licencees have an operational presence in India. This is not true of communications OTT services. Therefore a licensing regime would unjustly favour some services over others.

Further, VoIP services need not be provided by a company: a person can choose to run XMPP, SIP, or Mumble — all of which are protocol that support VoIP — on their own computers. Will a licensing regime force such individuals' many of whom may not be Indian nationals — to become licence-holders if they facilitate domestic communications within India? The DoT panel report doesn't say. This would also result in a licensing regime unjustly favouring some services over others.

The report also doesn't say how one would distinguish between OTT communication services and OTT application services, when many apps such as personal assistance apps like HelpChat, are centred around communications. It also does not mention what regulatory distinction exists between text communication services and video/voice communication services, or between purely domestic and international video/voice communications. Stating that certain telecom companies are currently earning most of their revenue from domestic voice traffic will not suffice as a regulatory, just as it did not suffice to say that VSNL's international telephony monopoly earned it a lot of money. Regulatory fairness is the important issue and not protecting specific business models. Thus, there is no rational distinction to be drawn. Even if the panel has some regulatory distinction that it has not stated, this is an impossibility to enforce. Much domestic IP traffic is 'round-tripped', with traffic leaving India and coming back in. How would the regulator propose to regulate that?

Will there be a revenue-sharing mechanism, as is currently the case under the Unified Licence? If so, how will it be calculated in case of services like WhatsApp? These questions too find no answer in the report.

Given these numerous objections and unanswered questions, the government would be well-advised not seek to license OTT communications services. Instead, it would be useful for the government to hold public consultations about:

1. What Universal Licence conditions makes sense in the world of IP-based services, and international services?
2. How can we frame ex-post regulations that address legitimate concerns? Is there overlap with provisions of the IT Act such as s.69, s.69B, s.79, and others?
3. How can we ensure that the regulatory burden for telecom players with respect to their being able to provide IP-based services that are equivalent to OTT communication services?

Net neutrality

While the DoT panel reiterates a number of times that the core principles of Net neutrality should be adhered to, it nowhere defines what these core tenets are. We suggest the following definition:

net neutrality is the principle that we should regulate gatekeepers to ensure they do not use their power to unjustly discriminate between similarly situated persons, content or traffic.

The above definition applies to the way the ISPs treat consumers, treat interconnecting networks, as well as the way they treat traffic internally.
We agree with the panel that in that while Net neutrality should find place in a new law, for the time being Net neutrality principles can be enforced through the licence agreement between the DoT and telecom providers.

Traffic Management

It is unclear what precisely the DoT panel means by "application-agnostic" and "application-specific" network management. Different scholars on this issue — such as Barbara van Schewick and Christopher Yoo — mean different things when they use the word "application". Without a definition, it is difficult to say whether the panel's recommendation on that front are sound.
Instead, we suggest the following tests:
Discrimination between classes of traffic for the sake of network management should only be permissible if:

there is an intelligible differentia between the classes which are to be treated differently, and
there is a rational nexus between the differential treatment and the aim of such differentiation, and
the aim sought to be furthered is legitimate, and is related to the security, stability, or efficient functioning of the network, or is a technical limitation outside the control of the ISP, and
the network management practice is the least harmful manner in which to achieve the aim.

As for the provision of enterprise and managed services, which we more broadly term "specialized services", we would recommend:

Provision of specialized services is permitted if and only if it is shown that
The service is available to the user only upon request, and not without their active choice, and
The service cannot be reasonably provided with "best efforts" delivery guarantee that is available over the Internet, and hence requires discriminatory treatment, or
The discriminatory treatment does not unduly harm the provision of the rest of the Internet to other customers.

Lastly, we would recommend that the above regulatory guidlines only be applied against ISPs, and not against public providers of Internet connectivity, such as a library, a school, an airport, a hotel, etc.

Zero-rating

On the contentious issue of zero-rating, a process that involves both ex-ante and ex-post regulation is envisaged to prevent harmful zero-rating, while allowing beneficial zero-rating. Further, the report notes that the supposed altruistic or "public interest" motives of the zero-rating scheme do not matter if they result in harm to competition, distort consumer markets, violate the core tenets of Net neutrality, or unduly benefit an Internet "gatekeeper".

Much of the discussion around zero-rating has been happening around an assumption of common understanding of the phrase. Unfortunately, that is not true. There is no consensus as to whether a "special Facebok pack of 200MB for Rs.20" offered by a telecom company constitutes zero-rating or not. Without a working definition of zero-rating, not much progress can be made.

We propose the following as a definition:

Zero-rating is the practice of not counting (aka "zero-rating") certain traffic towards a subscriber's regular Internet usage.

The zero-rated traffic could be zero-priced or fixed-price; capped or uncapped; subscriber-paid, Internet service-paid, paid for by both, or unpaid; content- or source/destination-based, or agnostic to content or source/destination; automatically provided by the ISP or chosen by the customer.

We believe that zero-rating can be non-discriminatory in nature, and such zero-rating should not be prohibited. Having a system with both ex-ante and ex-post checks is rather heavy-handed regulation, but since the issue is very contentious in India, we believe it might be merited.

We thank you for giving us this opportunity to comment.
Pranesh Prakash, Policy Director at the Centre for Internet and Society

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/telecom/blog/comments-on-dot-panel-report-via-mygov

Centre- or State-Driven Development?

Shyam Ponappa — 2014-02-12T16:47:43Z

Federalism requires a strong Centre as well as strong states, and effective organisation and coordination -- which can be facilitated by using the Internet.

Shyam Ponappa's article was published in the Business Standard on February 5, 2014, and in Observer India Blogspot on February 7, 2014.

There are opposing views on the merits of centrally driven development compared with states developing on their own approach. At one level, some corporate leaders as well as politicians and members of civil society exhort states to compete for capital investment. This debate extends beyond states going their own way, to community-level local government, as in the Aam Aadmi Party's (AAP's) "Swaraj" through mohalla sabhas (town-hall meetings or open assemblies) for local government.

Basic Weakness: Lack of Organization & Coordination

While the benefits of community-led initiatives for local issues are indisputable, advocates emphasising decentralisation perhaps overlook some fundamental aspects of our reality. These are the extent of the inadequacies in our infrastructure networks, our organisational set-up, and in our ability to achieve effective coordination. Years ago, when Swaran Singh was food and agriculture minister in 1964, he reportedly said that one of our basic weaknesses was "lack of adequate administrative coordination and absence of a unified set-up at different levels" and that it should be "possible to achieve more rapid and lasting progress through a comprehensive and integrated approach than through uncoordinated and isolated efforts of different agencies and organisations operating at different levels…." [1] He couldn't have been more right, even today.

Result: Poor Infrastructure

The lack of unified organisation and effective coordination has a direct bearing on infrastructure. This is what people really need, no matter what else they might want. Take the current focus in Delhi on water and electricity. To these two, we must add roads, transport and communications as elements of essential first-order infrastructure services. People everywhere in the country need these services. Likewise, their second-order service needs include healthcare, education and finance. All these services are subject to network economics, and no local community can be self-sufficient without integration with external linkages. At the appropriate levels ("centres") of city, region, state and country (for example, for national highways or communications networks), these services need "centrally" organised supply and coordinated distribution for effective and efficient delivery. Aside from problems related to corruption, it is in ignoring organisation and coordination, or in handling them ineptly, that our governments fail. Centrally driven development is not just an option we fail at, mostly; it is an absolute necessity to empower ourselves, and until we get it right, we will be hamstrung by this deficiency.

Oblivious to Sewerage & Sanitation

As an aside, another major failure in not appreciating the systems required for basic infrastructure is in ignoring the linkage of water supply with sewerage and sanitation, historically and even now. Sewerage is concomitant with water supply; having water entails having to deal with sewage. Water and sanitation systems need significant "central" design - in the sense of overarching integrated systems at the appropriate level - with expert inputs in system development and implementation. This is usually not feasible at the local-community level alone. Ignoring this results in open sewage, polluted water bodies, unhygienic conditions and stinking surroundings. In this context, while building new smart cities is good, the dire need is to upgrade the systems in our existing cities, towns and villages, so that we live better. Such steps may not grab the headlines, but this is the stuff of our lives.

Virtual Mohalla Sabhas (Townhall Meetings)

Next, consider the approach to community participation in local government. There is certainly considerable potential for community participation, but not through methods like the "janata darbar" open assembly last month by the AAP in Delhi, or the Nationalist Congress Party's limited online interaction sessions. Doing so effectively and with efficiency is likely to require well-designed and deployed processes using Web-based technologies and methods, rather than, by way of example, the AAP's approach of live mohalla sabhas. Press reports suggest the AAP plans 2,700 mohalla sabhas in Delhi, the idea being that government representatives will attend these open assemblies, where issues will be discussed and resolved.[2] This seems like it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to achieve in practice. Instead, if the proponents of these ideas adopted the approach of online town-hall meetings or virtual mohalla sabhas, governments could design and implement Internet-based systems using asynchronous communications - eliciting inputs and recommendations from domain experts and discussion by citizens for decision making by authorised functionaries. Such systems could also allow for realistic project time frames and ensure follow-ups on water and sanitation, electricity, transport, health, education, or whatever else. If political parties, especially the experienced administrators and engineers/MBAs supporting these parties, bend their minds to these tasks, we are likely to have better systems with more impressive results on the ground.

For instance, take garbage clearing. This might well improve if ward committees oversaw the work of sanitation workers, as mentioned here [3]; but the prerequisite is a system-wide design in place with processes that work, as suggested in this broad critique. [4] These services need overarching system design and implementation far beyond the scope of any mohalla sabha, except at the local deployment level.

Internet-Based Systems & Procedures

Many political parties use Internet technology for fund-raising and membership mobilisation. It should be feasible for them to consider extending this to governance - although this will be quite a stretch in terms of their understanding and adopting the principles of organisation, logical processes and systems when compared with the relatively simple tasks of membership drives and fund-raising. But this is how our politics and governance need to evolve. We need systematic processes using the Internet. This could facilitate and channel discussions to explore and define objectives, generate and evaluate alternatives, make trade-offs, order priorities, and arrive at actionable decisions implemented over an extended period, with sound project management methodologies and tools. There's off-the-shelf software available, such as Microsoft's TownHall and others like OnlineTownHalls and MindMixer. Perhaps there's scope for systems developed specifically for our purposes. What's needed is to adopt this systems approach, regardless of the software.

[1]. Lack of coordination", Swaran Singh, 1964, The Hindu: http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-miscellaneous/this-day-that-age-dated-february-4-1964/article5651028.ece

[2]. http://indianexpress.com/article/cities/delhi/aap-plans-2-700-mohalla-sabhas-in-city/99/

[3]. http://m.ibnlive.com/blogs/vivianfernandes/1878/64973/can-aam-aadmi-partys-mohalla-sabhas-work.html

[4].http://www.ndtv.com/article/opinion/op-ed-the-problem-with-aap-s-mohalla-sabhas-467074

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/telecom/blog/organizing-india-blogspot-shyam-ponappa-centre-or-state-driven-development

An Introduction to Spectrum Sharing

beli — 2014-03-20T09:34:06Z

We will look at how current technology – mainly GSM, but also CDMA and touching upon LTE - shares spectrum, how they might share spectrum, the trade-off between spectral (in this case, 'trunking') and 'economic' efficiency in the traditional, purely intra-operator shared scenario, and how it might be overcome by inter-operator sharing.

The Current Scenario – Wi-Fi, GSM and CDMA: A Primer from the Perspective of Spectrum Coordination

Sharing spectrum is not a radically new idea: it's probably being shared in many places in your living room. Your family's phones could be communicating with your laptops using Bluetooth; your Wi-Fi router is sharing Wi-Fi spectrum with your next door neighbor's. There is no central brain that tells each device how to share spectrum, but each device pair (phone+laptop, for example) has some unique identifier (a code) that enables them to hear each other over the “noise” created by the other devices, as though they were speaking different languages. Each device can access the same frequencies at the same time and place, but does not know in advance which other devices are going to use them, and as long as there aren't too many such devices close to each other, the scheme works well.

From a technological standpoint, this is one of two kinds of spectrum coordination that's currently in wide use: the second is where each device is given a narrow sliver of frequency to itself for a specified period of time.[1] This is what happens with GSM cellphone technology: the service provider's tower allocates frequency — from the pool of frequencies available — to users on a per-call basis: this is called Frequency Division Multiple Access, or FDMA. GSM further divides access between different users in the same frequency channel in the time domain with bursts of data of the order of milliseconds, something called Time Division Multiple Access or TDMA; you'd be sharing your frequency channel with up to seven other people[2] and your content would be sent in sub-millisecond bursts approximately every five milliseconds.

Code Division Multiplexing, or CDMA, Is concept that assigns a user a 'code' for the duration of her call that effectively makes interference from other users, with other codes, appear as noise. The following picture illustrates FDMA, TDMA and CDMA:[3]

The preceding discussion would suffice for a single cell tower, alone in a desert. In the real world, there's more than one tower, so we'll have to create a system so that no two adjacent towers end up allocating the same frequency at the same time. The simplest way to do that, and the only one currently used, is splitting the available spectrum such that the range of frequencies available to a tower does not intersect with that available to any of its neighbors, ever – that way, a tower can only allocate from its own set of frequencies, but it need not concern itself with what its neighbors are doing. If adjacent towers were to share spectrum, then the preceding condition only needs to apply at that exact moment in time – at that precise instant a tower should be aware of the frequencies being used by all towers that are close enough to interfere with it, and pick a frequency outside that set, which it can use for the duration of a call.

Frequency Reuse

When there weren't so many cellphones crowding up the spectrum, it did not make economic sense to invest in the extra infrastructure required to make neighboring towers 'talk' to each other with low latency, so the solution we have now, even within the towers of a single service provider, is that any tower's neighbors do not intrude upon the spectrum assigned to that particular tower — what a neighbour is in this statement is qualified below. To start with, let's look at how towers could ideally be placed. We want to place towers on the ground in some regular pattern that makes them end up equidistant from each other: there are as many ways of doing that as there are of tiling a plane, which you can think of as tiling a bathroom with regular shapes (called 'regular polygons' by the pedantic).

Starting from the simplest, we can do it with tiles shaped like triangles, squares or hexagons, and a little thought will convince you that these are the only choices. Since a tower's signal would be 'strong enough' only up to some maximum radius, we'd ideally like to tile our plane with circles, but if we settle for the next best thing, the closest shape to a circle with which to tile the plane is a hexagon, in a honeycomb pattern; if you're looking at it from above, the towers would be placed as in the diagram below.[4]

This is just a part of a much larger honeycomb on the ground; the towers go in the center of the hexagons, where the numbers are; why the numbers are as they are will become clear in a couple of lines. Let's focus at tower 1 in the center of the diagram for our example. If the signals decay slow enough — so that the signals radiated from the nearest neighbors (towers surrounding 1, i.e. 2 through 7) and the next-nearest neighbors (towers two steps away from 1, with numbers from 2 through 7), interfere significantly with tower 1 in the center, but the next-to-next-nearest neighbors (three steps away from 1) do not, then the frequency reuse pattern can be like what we see in the diagram above, with towers denoted by the same number (and only the same number) using same exclusive set of frequencies. In this example, the closest towers with the same frequency as the central tower are the 1's in the hexagons at the edge – the frequency reuse factor is 3 (see footnote). In this diagram, the ordering of the numbers makes no difference – the situation would be the same if we exchanged the position of every, say, 1 and 3.

In reality the grid of towers of a particular operator covering a city is rarely hexagonal, due to local constraints, so what needs to be taken care of is not to use the frequencies that the nearest neighbors, next-nearest neighbors and so on are using depending upon the frequency reuse factor.[5] It's clear that without the towers being able to communicate in near-real time, with and FDMA/TDMA system like GSM, this is the optimal — and, in fact, the only — way to go.

Neighbouring towers sharing spectrum

Everything changes, though, if the towers can communicate and coordinate fast enough — in theory, at least, all the service provider's towers could pick spectrum from a common pool.[6] In fact, every service providers could put their spectrum into a common pool from which frequencies can be allocated to users as before. This would increase trunking efficiency and thereby the maximum number of users per tower dictated by quality of service limits (both terms are defined in the next section), making more efficient use of the spectrum.

The Current Trade-off between Trunking and 'Economic' Efficiency: The Principal Argument for (Inter-operator) Shared Spectrum

Imagine the following scenario:

We have 5 MHz of spectrum split it into five channels of one MHz each;
Five thousand people own cell phones and each is assigned a channel so that there are a thousand cellphone users per channel;
People call infrequently: calls are randomly distributed but on average, in each channel, five people attempt to make a call every minute and each call is ten seconds long.

In this way, a lot of people can use a few channels with a reasonable hope that their calls will be connected, a phenomenon called 'trunking'. Chances are high, however, that at least one person's going to make a call before the previous caller on her channel is done, and end up being blocked. The probability that a call will go through is factored into the Quality of Service (QoS) through the Erlang B Formula; roughly speaking, the less chance there is of a caller being blocked, the higher your QoS. It's essentially a question of queuing: the same logic can be applied to beds at a hospital. The number of hospital beds in a town would be much fewer than the number of people, but it works because everyone's not sick all the time; if people are sick more often, or for longer durations, the chances that someone won't get a bed would be higher:[7]

Suppose someone own an Airtel phone and Airtel's channels are all in use, but Vodaphone has a channel free at the time. Let's look at two alternatives:

a) she's not allowed to switch, and cannot make her call;
b) she's allowed to switch to the empty channel, and her call goes through.

Clearly, the second choice is better — and it has greater trunking efficiency.

In the current scenario, service providers get exclusive rights to chunks of spectrum. Naively, the more competitors (in this case, service providers like Airtel and Vodaphone) you have in a market, the better the competition. This, unfortunately, leads to a decrease in trunking efficiency — it's inversely proportional to the number of players in the market because every chunk of frequencies split between two service providers (every successive split) increases the chances for an event such as the one described above happening. The question that logically follows is: what is the optimal number of service providers for the Indian market? This is hard to find, and differs depending on who you ask — incumbents, for instance, may quote a smaller number, whereas prospective new entrants may quote a larger one. The number is controversial within policy-making circles as well, and is being debated as this article is being written. We note in passing that the number of competitors — and thus fragmentation of spectrum — is higher in the Indian market than most others.

If spectrum were shared, however, all this would be moot. This, therefore, is the primary argument towards spectrum sharing: better trunking efficiency as well as more competition — you can , in this instance, have it both ways.

CDMA and Spectrum Sharing

GSM is a simple example, where both the difficulty and the benefits of intra-operator spectrum sharing are readily apparent. Things get more difficult conceptually if we talk about newer technologies, so we'll have to get a little deeper into the technicalities. Code Division Multiple Access, or CDMA, allows phones to communicate using the same frequencies at the same time and place, but differentiated by codes — similar to WiFi but using different encoding schemes and technology. CDMA might look (from the analogy with Wifi) to require no central planning, but quality of service guarantees require that various phones in a 'cell' coordinate, and the coordinating agent happens to be that cell's tower. Two things need to happen: one, the code allocated to each phone needs to be sufficiently different,[8] at least with respect to other nearby phones, which means the tower has to allocate codes. Additionally, the distance involved between cellphone and tower (as against laptop and router) causes the near-far problem.[9]

For synchronous CDMA, the concept analogous to frequency reuse is code reuse — a tower needs to take into account the codes being used by its nearest neighbors, next-nearest neighbors and so on, which might be easier than coordinating timing in a TDMA system. For asynchronous CDMA (the most commonly used variant), even that is not required — the low cross-correlation pseudorandom codes that are used have so many possibilities that the likelihood of a collision would be small, though other users would appear as gaussian noise, so just like GSM, the number of users is limited by QoS limits. This makes intro-operator sharing of spectrum between adjacent towers easier and asynchronous CDMA ends up with a frequency reuse factor of 1, meaning that a tower can access the same set of frequencies as its (intra-operator) neighbor, hypothetically making it easier to use in a shared-spectrum system.

LTE

LTE uses Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing, or OFDM, which can be – very roughly — thought of as combining ideas used in FDMA as well as CDMA, in that information is redundantly split between several frequencies ('subcarriers' in the literature) and each frequency can have more than one channel, using an orthogonal coding schemes like (synchronous) CDMA, where, as mentioned earlier, a mobile phone can distinguish its channel by its code. As it's an FDMA system, the benefits of frequency sharing for LTE can be inferred as above for GSM.

The Regulatory Perspective

The European Commission has this to say about shared spectrum:[10] “From a regulatory point of view, band sharing can be achieved in two ways: either by the Collective Use of Spectrum (CUS), allowing spectrum to be used by more than one user simultaneously without a license; or using Licensed Shared Access (LSA), under which users have individual rights to access a shared spectrum band”.

CUS is how unlicensed spectrum like Wi-Fi is currently used, which does not require a central 'brain' allocating spectrum to users. It requires no setup or organization before or during use. LSA is what shared spectrum would have to be like when used by service providers: it requires setup and organization but could offer better efficiency and quality of service because the central 'brain' — in this case the CPU at the cellphone tower — can figure out the most efficient way to allocate spectrum to users, just like a city's traffic lights coordinate the flow of traffic to prevent jams, and for that multiple towers — or multiple transmitters on a single tower — would have to coordinate somehow. In other words, you don't require approval before setting up your Wi-Fi router in your living room, but (depending upon the router, how many neighbors have routers, how close they are, and how far you are from your router) your connection might get dropped; this kind of thing is okay because there usually aren't that many people with routers living that close to each other, though that's fast changing. The 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi band is further crowded in by other microwave radio technologies, like Bluetooth and microwave ovens. Cellphones are a different thing altogether, because you wouldn't want your cellphone to stop working in the middle of a crowded bus if you're late en route to meeting someone at a coffee shop, or if you're being mugged and need to call the police. Therefore it is the service providers' and regulatory agencies' responsibility to provide a high (minimum) quality of service. This classification is symbolized by the following diagram:[11]

CUS falls on the left, being contention-based – that is, different user devices (eg, laptops) could contend with each other for the attention of the base station (eg, Wi-Fi router — random access, CSMA), whereas LSA is conflict-free (which would be the case if the router decides, period). The potential for conflict exists in CUS, there being multiple devices asking for spectrum, whereas for LSA, a central authority decides which device to allocate spectrum to at any particular point in space and time. CUS isn't total chaos, however: it would now be appropriate — taking a leaf from ex-FCC chief technology officer Jon M. Peha – to introduce the concepts of coexistence and etiquette.

In our Wi-Fi example, the Wi-Fi routers merely coexist, and the technological standard allows them to try and use the codes/spectral bands that are in their best interests, to best communicate with their client devices (though actual Wi-Fi routers also follow some sort of etiquette with other routers). One could additionally introduce some sort of etiquette into the equation by requiring that one router should, for example, “wait in the cue” for another — and vice versa — as and when required, as well as other requirements for cooperation depending upon the technology used. This minimal cooperation would be enough for them to, in Mr Peha's words, “greatly improve efficiency if and only if designed appropriately for the applications in the band” - depending upon the technology used, being too 'polite' could cause longer wait times that decrease efficiency. The situation is complicated by the existence of multiple technologies at the same spot – for example, your Bluetooth receiver, two-way radio and Wifi router working in the same room. If there is potential for interference, common communication protocols could be implemented to enable all those devices to 'talk' to each other and effectively follow some form of wireless etiquette so that they can cooperate and not get in each others way. This is all the more important as Wi-Fi will become an essential part of the cellphone communication network for 4G.

To conclude, there are many ways shared spectrum technology could hypothetically work, and in practice the core technologies that are used would dictate the details of the spectrum sharing solution. Spectrum sharing would reduce the regulatory conundrum that is spectrum allocation, and make more efficient use of spectrum — most obviously through trunking efficiency, though there may be other technological benefits depending upon the core technology used. For maximum efficiency and robustness, there would have to be some kind of rules followed, so that devices apply for spectrum like people in a cafeteria queue as opposed to the scrum you might find trying to get into an Indian bus; the etiquette we were talking about earlier should be baked into the design of the communication infrastructure. Some services (like voice calling) by their nature, need a guaranteed high QoS — need to be conflict-free — and therefore need Licensed Shared Access. Others need a minimum of regulation — but with the movement of what used to be CUS-appropriate devices (In many plans for 4G LTE-Advanced, specifically Wi-Fi) towards LSA-appropriate applications, a careful optimization needs to be done in deciding where to draw the line.

The Big Question: Infrastructure Sharing

We've gone through a thought experiment on intra- and inter-operator sharing of spectrum for the particular case of mobile towers in adjacent cells, and come to the general conclusion that the solution is in principle a question of fast and efficient coordination between the geographically separated towers, toward which there are two driving forces at present: the demand for more efficient use of spectrum by a growing body of users with growing data needs, and the supply of low latency, cheaper and higher bandwidth communication options using fiber-optic cables.

There are essentially two parts to the big question we're going to ask: one, what happens when there are multiple operators serving the same geographical area, and two, is it necessary to have multiple towers standing right next to each other for multiple operators?

To answer the first question, one could have a 'roaming' agreement between multiple operators at the same spot: if all the channels of one operator are busy, the user just has to switch to a channel of an operator which isn't. For the second, a single tower (the physical tower structure as well as the transmitting equipment on it) could serve any operator, who could rent it's usage on a per-call basis. That, in fact, already seems to be the case: Airtel and Vodaphone, for instance, each own a 42% share in India's largest tower corporation Indus Towers, the remaining 16% belonging to Idea Cellular.

To answer the first question, one could have a 'roaming' agreement between multiple operators at the same spot: if all the channels of one operator are busy, the user just has to switch to a channel of an operator which isn't.

For the second, a single tower (the physical tower structure as well as the transmitting equipment on it) could serve any operator, who could rent it's usage on a per-call basis. That, in fact, already seems to be the case: Airtel and Vodaphone, for instance, each own a 42% share in India's largest tower corporation Indus Towers, the remaining 16% belonging to Idea Cellular.

Infrastructure sharing will be explored further in a forthcoming post.

Coarse-grained Spectrum Sharing

For completeness, we should point out that there are more course-grained (simpler but less efficient) means of sharing in time as well as geography: the appropriate thought experiment is to imagine a radio station at the base of a hill that only has two shows, one for breakfast and one for dinner. Using its radio spectrum on the other side of that hill, or beyond the area it serves, would be fine at anytime; using it's spectrum in between the morning and evening shows would be fine anywhere.

Caveats

It must be emphasized at this point that the above is a purely hypothetical scenario, and not a prescription. Getting this to work would involve technical hurdles that a brief overview such as the one above could not bring up, that could only be discovered in the process of bringing the technology to market. Each technological solution – GSM, CDMA and LTE – would present its own difficulties, which may become apparent only when the product is shipped, so to speak. Fine technical judgments would need to be made: an example of the difficulty involved could be gauged from the early debates comparing the first CDMA standard (IS-95) with GSM at the time.

The economic model to use for shared spectrum and shared infrastructure is also something under intense discussion right now, and a number of scholarly papers have already been written up.

[1]. This is what you'd get in your first few Google search results when you look for “shared spectrum”, because the former has become so widely accepted that it's now part of the linguistic background.

[2]. Explained on http://www.radioraiders.com/gsm-frequency.html, referring to 3GPP spec http://www.3gpp.org/ftp/Specs/latest/Rel-7/45_series/45005-7d0.zip

[3]. From http://www.umtsworld.com/technology/cdmabasics.htm

[4]. From Mike Buehrer, William Tranter-Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA)-Morgan & Claypool Publishers (2006).

[5]. There are multiple definitions; the simplest one is “how many steps (in cells) that you have to walk from the tower before you can reuse the frequency”, which will suffice for us.

[6]. Of course, it's going to be messier in practices.

[7]. From http://www.vumc.com/branch/PICA/Software/

[8]. Orthogonal for synchronous CDMA, or 'sufficiently' orthogonal for asynchronous CDMA

[9]. Remember that the receiver on the tower has to demux (split) the signals received from many cellphones, and while a Wifi router would perhaps service multiple laptops in the same building, a CDMA tower has to work for a couple of hundred phones at varying distances – some a building-length away and some, many kilometers away. Every receiver has its own maximum signal to noise ratio, where the strength of the signal received has to be more that a certain fraction (which can be quite small, for a good receiver) of the strength of the electromagnetic (radio) noise it receives from other sources; cellphone towers have to deal with much larger signal to noise ratios than Wifi routers. For an FDMA or TDMA system, different users' data arrives at different frequency or time-slots, so as long as those slots are properly differentiated, one user's signal won't be another user's noise. For the commonly used asynchronous CDMA system, however, this is not the case, so at a receiver on a tower, the signal transmitted by a distant cellphone could be swamped by that from a much closer phone. The way this is dealt with is to have phones closer to the tower decrease their transmission power. So even in CDMA, the tower is still telling the phone what to change, only in this case it's the transmission power as opposed to the exact frequency and time.

[10]. http://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/en/promoting-shared-use-europes-radio-spectrum

[11]. From Mike Buehrer, William Tranter-Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA)-Morgan & Claypool Publishers (2006)

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/telecom/blog/an-introduction-to-spectrum-sharing

December 2013 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2014-02-25T13:51:47Z

Our newsletter for the month of December 2013 can be accessed below.

We at the Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) wish you all a great year ahead and welcome you to the twelfth issue of its newsletter (December) for the year 2013:

-------------------------------
Highlights
-------------------------------

The National Resource Kit team has published a draft chapter highlighting the state of laws, policies and programmes for persons with disabilities in the state of Gujarat.
Government of India has passed the National Electronic Accessibility Policy. CIS had worked with the Department of Electronics and Information Technology to formulate this policy. We bring you a brief analysis of the policy and provisions therein in a blog post.
Nehaa Chaudhari on behalf of CIS submitted comments on the Proposed WIPO Treaty for the Protection of Broadcasting Organizations to the Ministry of Human Resource Development.
CIS-A2K team has published a report highlighting the key accomplishments about the work accomplished on Konkani Wikipedia from September to December 2013.
Vipul Kharbanda has provided an analysis of the laws and regulations that apply to Bitcoin in India concluding that government can regulate Bitcoin.
We released the first documentary film (DesiSec) on cyber security in India in Bangalore on December 11.
In the module on Global Histories of the Internet (part of the Knowledge Repository on Internet Access project) Nishant Shah analyses the understanding of the internet, cyberspace and everyday life and why do we need to know the history of the internet.
The second "Institute on Internet and Society" will be held in Yashada, Pune from February 11 to 17, 2014.
As part of the Making Change project, Denisse Albornoz provides an analysis of the benefits and limitations of increasing access to information to enable citizenship and political participation.

-----------------------------------------------
Jobs
-----------------------------------------------
CIS is seeking applications for the posts of Program Officer (Access to Knowledge) and Program Officer (Internet Governance): http://bit.ly/1aA57K6. There are two vacancies each for these posts and these are full-time based in Delhi. To apply, please send your resume to Sunil Abraham (sunil@cis-india.org) and Pranesh Prakash (pranesh@cis-india.org) with three writing samples of which at least one demonstrates your analytic skills, and one that shows your ability to simplify complex policy issues.

----------------------------------------------
Accessibility and Inclusion
----------------------------------------------
As part of our project (under a grant from the Hans Foundation) on creating a national resource kit of state-wise laws, policies and programmes on issues relating to persons with disabilities in India, we bring you draft chapters for the states of Madhya Pradesh and Arunachal Pradesh, and the union territory of Daman and Diu. With this we have completed compilation of draft chapters for 27 states and 5 union territories. Feedback and comments are invited from readers for the following chapter:

► National Resource Kit Chapter

The Gujarat Chapter (by Anandhi Viswanathan, December 31, 2013): http://bit.ly/Kxbg3b.

Note: All of the chapters published so far in this project are early drafts and will be reviewed and updated.

►Other

# Media Coverage

An “Advocacy” Saga and the Inspiring Legacy of Rahul Cherian (by Shamnad Basheer, Spicy IP, December 16, 2013): http://bit.ly/1a5B7sU.

# Blog Entry

National Policy on Universal Electronic Accessibility – An Analysis (by Anandhi Viswanathan, December 27, 2013): http://bit.ly/1dfCW3I.

# Submission

Comments on Proposed WIPO Treaty for the Protection of Broadcasting Organizations (by Nehaa Chaudhari, December 7, 2013). CIS submitted its comments to the Ministry of Human Resource Development: http://bit.ly/1hpWeuu.

# Events Participated In

3rd Global Congress on IP and the Public Interest & Open A.I.R. Conference on Innovation and IP in Africa (organized by University of Cape Town, December 9-13, 2013). Sunil Abraham participated as a speaker in the sessions on Bridging into the Global Congress: Global Issues, Local Answers?, User Rights Track: What Medicines Can Teach Tech: Exploring Patent Pooling and Compulsory Licensing in the Indian Mobile Device Market (http://bit.ly/1f74yir), User Rights Track: Reclaiming the World Trade Organisation: A Modest Proposal for a WTO Agreement on the Supply of Global Public Goods (http://bit.ly/1f74yir), and was a keynote speaker on The Freedom Continuum (http://bit.ly/1dH1WEM). Nehaa Chaudhari also participated in this event: http://bit.ly/1bJArFJ.
Twenty-Sixth Session of the Standing Committee on Copyrights and Related Rights (organized by WIPO, Geneva, December 16 – 20, 2013). CIS gave its statement on Limitations and Exceptions for Libraries and Archives (http://bit.ly/JWnjq7) and on Limitations and Exceptions for Education, Teaching and Research Institutions and Persons with Other Disabilities (http://bit.ly/JWnjq7). Nehaa Chaudhari participated as a speaker. India and the United States introduced 6 proposals on the WIPO Broadcast Treaty: http://bit.ly/1edqvr3.

The following has been done under grant from the Wikimedia Foundation (http://bit.ly/SPqFOl). As part this project (http://bit.ly/X80ELd), we held 3 workshops in the month of December, published a detailed report of key accomplishments of the work done in Konkani Wikipedia, a report on Train the Trainer Program held in the month of October and published an article in DNA.

►Wikipedia

# Article

Telugu Wikipedia completes 10 years (by Rahmanuddin Shaik, DNA, December 16, 2013): http://bit.ly/19OAvUV. The article was edited by Rohini Lakshané.

# Report

CIS-A2K: Work Accomplished on Konkani Wikipedia (by Nitika Tandon, December 31, 2013): http://bit.ly/1l6ttmp. The report throws some light on the work accomplished on Konkani Wikipedia from September to December 2013.

# Blog Entries

First ever Train-the-Trainer Program in India (by Nitika Tandon, December 5, 2013): http://bit.ly/1euwSXt.

The following are videos of participants from the Konkani Vishwakosh Digitization project (jointly organised by CIS-A2K and Goa University) speaking on their experiences with Wikimedia projects.

Priyadarshini Tadkodkar on Konkani language (by Subhashish Panigrahi, November 17, 2013): http://bit.ly/1hldNM8. We are featuring this here as we didn’t carry this in the last newsletter.
Varsha Kavlekar on Konkani Wikipedia Incubator (by Nitika Tandon, December 12, 2013): http://bit.ly/KmxyFo.
Darshan Kandolkar on Konkani Vishwakosh Digitization Process (by Nitika Tandon, December 13, 2013): http://bit.ly/1cqKyQ2.
Darshana Mandrekar speaks on Konkani Wikipedia (by Nitika Tandon, December 16, 2013): http://bit.ly/1keWyya.
Pooja Tople on Wikimedia Projects (by Nitika Tandon, December 17, 2013): http://bit.ly/1hlbubU.

# Events Organised

You Too Can Write on Wikipedia! — Training workshop (National Institute of Tourism and Hotel Management, Gachibowli, Hyderabad, December 5, 2013): http://bit.ly/1edmx1z.
Telugu Wikipedia Training Workshop (KBN College, Vijaywada, December 16, 2013): http://bit.ly/1i8ScnL.
Kannada Wikipedia Workshop at Alvas Vishva Nudisiri Virasat (Moodabidre, December 19 – 22, 2013). Dr. U.B. Pavanaja gave a presentation about Kannada Wikipedia and also conducted a workshop on Kannada Wikipedia as a parallel track. The event was covered by Prajavani (December 22), Hosadigantha (December 22), and Deccan Herald (December 22): http://bit.ly/1dGTBkw.

# Events Co-organised

Wikipedia Orientation Workshop (organised by CIS-A2K and Christ University, Bangalore, December 2, 2013): http://bit.ly/1lrkwEy.
Wikipedia Training Session @ Tiruvur (organised by CIS-A2K and Telugu Wikipedia community, Srivahini College, Tiruvur, December 19, 2013). T. Vishnu Vardhan and Rahmanuddin Shaik conducted the workshop: http://bit.ly/1e3oQX7. It was covered by Andhraprabha (http://bit.ly/1bU5VsQ), Eenadu (http://bit.ly/19fsttf), Sakshi (http://bit.ly/1e3pQdU), and Prajasakthi (http://bit.ly/JJs7ja) on December 19, 2013.

# Event Participated In

A Wikipedia Workshop at IISC (organised by the Assamese Wikipedia community, Bangalore, December 1, 2013). CIS-A2K team and Wikipedian Shiju Alex supported this event: http://bit.ly/1dSutY2.

# Media Coverage

CIS gave its inputs for the following media coverage:

A Feature on Telugu Wikipedia (Namaste Telengana Newspaper, December 8, 2013): http://bit.ly/19Yjwj6.
Odisha: Odia Wikipedia reaching 5000 article mark! (Odisha Diary Bureau, December 17, 2013): http://bit.ly/1dGU2vc.

-----------------------------------------------
Internet Governance
-----------------------------------------------
CIS is doing a project (under a grant from Privacy International and International Development Research Centre (IDRC)) on conducting research on surveillance and freedom of expression (SAFEGUARDS). So far we have organised seven privacy round-tables and drafted the Privacy (Protection) Bill. This month we bring you an analysis on whether Bitcoin can be banned by the government and a blog post on misuse of surveillance powers in India. As part of its project (funded by Citizen Lab, Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto and support from the IDRC) on mapping cyber security actors in South Asia and South East Asia a film DesiSec: Episode 1was screened. We also did an interview with Pranesh Prakash on cyber security. With this we have completed a total of 13 video interviews so far:

# Analysis

Can Bitcoin Be Banned by the Indian Government? (by Vipul Kharbanda, December 24, 2013): http://bit.ly/1lJrnGF.

# Blog Entries

Misuse of Surveillance Powers in India (Case 1) (by Pranesh Prakash, December 6, 2013): http://bit.ly/1donbaJ.
Brochures from Expos on Smart Cards, e-Security, RFID & Biometrics in India (by Maria Xynou, December 18, 2013): http://bit.ly/1f714fN.
India’s Identity Crisis (by Malavika Jayaram, December 31, 2013 Internet Monitor Annual Report: Reflections on the Digital World, published by Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society): http://bit.ly/1lTRuuz.

# Upcoming Events

Digital Citizens: Why Cyber Security and Online Privacy are Vital to the Success of Democracy and Freedom of Expression (CIS, Bangalore, January 14, 2014): http://bit.ly/KucEU5. Michael Oghia will give a talk.
CPDP 2014 Reforming Data Protection: The Global Perspective (Brussels, January 22 – 24, 2014): http://bit.ly/KsgCws.
Nullcon Goa Feb 2014 — International Security Conference (organised by Nullcon, Bogmallo Beach Resort, Goa, February 12 – 15, 2014). CIS is one of the sponsors for this event: http://bit.ly/1lrBu5I.

# Events Organised

Big Democracy: Big Surveillance - A talk by Maria Xynou (CIS, Bangalore, December 3, 2013): http://bit.ly/19YnA31.
DesiSec: Episode 1 - Film Release and Screening (CIS, December 11, 2013): http://bit.ly/1lJt2fm.
Legal Issues pertaining to Cloud Computing (NLSIU Campus, Bangalore, December 14-15, 2013): http://bit.ly/1cvcmGq.
Biometrics or Bust? Implications of the UID for Participation and Inclusion (CIS, Bangalore, January 10, 2014). Malavika Jayaram will give a talk: http://bit.ly/1lJZhuK.

# Events Participated In

Convention on Crisis of Capitalism and brazen onslaught on Democracy (organized by INSAF, December 6, 2013). Snehashish Ghosh participated as a speaker: http://bit.ly/1gAxmNy.
International View of the State-of-the-Art of Cryptography and Security and its Use in Practice (IV) (jointly organized by Microsoft Research India, Indian Institute of Science, and Indian Institute of Technology Madras, December 6, 2013). Sunil Abraham was a panellist: http://bit.ly/1eAXl5t.
Technology in Government and Topics in Privacy (organized by Data Privacy Lab, CGIS Cafe, Cambridge Street, Harvard University Campus, December 9, 2013). Malavika Jayaram participated as a speaker on Biometrics in Beta – India's Identity Experiment: http://bit.ly/1bJDqht.
Cyberscholars Working Group at MIT (organized by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University, December 12, 2013): Malavika Jayaram made a presentation on Biometrics or Bust - India’s Identity Crisis: http://bit.ly/1eIpHef.
Seventh NLSIR Symposium on “Bridging the Security-Liberty Divide” (organised by National Law School, Bangalore, December 21-22). Chinmayi Arun and Bhairav Acharya were speakers at this event: http://bit.ly/1gjsxYe.

--------------------------------
News & Media Coverage
--------------------------------
CIS gave its inputs to the following media coverage:

MongoDB startup hired by Aadhaar got funds from CIA VC arm (by Lison Joseph, Economic Times, December 3, 2013): http://bit.ly/1f77bRg.
A Three-Way Race Draws Delhi’s Young, and Everyone Else, Out to Vote (by Betwa Sharma, New York Times, December 4, 2013): http://bit.ly/1gAxoFf.
India for UN body to resolve internet governance issues (by Kim Arora, The Times of India, December 5, 2013): http://bit.ly/JWESqe.
Card transactions with Aadhaar validation need more time: experts (by Kirti V. Rao and Moulishree Srivastava, Livemint, December 5, 2013): http://bit.ly/1hq35UL.
Indian government wakes up to risk of Hotmail, Gmail (originally published by AFP, December 7, 2013): http://bit.ly/19LrlOS. This was also mirrored in The Times of India (http://bit.ly/1hpYEJu), Reuters (http://bit.ly/1gaHhZk), Dawn (http://bit.ly/1azuV95), NDTV (http://bit.ly/19Ys7lS), Yahoo News (http://yhoo.it/JCSreE), The Malaysian Insider (http://bit.ly/1eAPAMW) and Asia One Digital (http://bit.ly/JWuw9R). A slightly modified version was published by Silicon India on December 11: http://bit.ly/1gAtzjd.

# Announcement

Pranesh Prakash has been elected as the Asia-Pacific representative to the executive committee of the NonCommercial Users Constituency (NCUC) (part of the Non-Commercial Stakeholders Group, which is in turn part of the Generic Names Supporting Organization, which is in turn part of ICANN): http://bit.ly/KuIVeC.

--------------------------------
Telecom
-------------------------------
Shyam Ponappa, a Distinguished Fellow at CIS is a regular columnist with the Business Standard. The articles published on his blog Organizing India Blogspot is mirrored on our website:

# Newspaper Column

For a Telecom Revival (by Shyam Ponappa, Business Standard, December 4, 2013 and Organizing India Blogspot, December 5, 2013): http://bit.ly/1avRDii.

# Blog Entry

The Conflict of Konigsberg (by Anirudh Sridhar, December 17, 2013): http://bit.ly/1cEXhhU.

►Making Change Project

# Blog Entries

Tactical Technology: Information is Power? (by Denisse Albornoz, December 26, 2013): http://bit.ly/1cEUrcY.
Tactical Technology: Designing Activism (by Denisse Albornoz, December 27, 2013): http://bit.ly/1a9IuzH.

►Other

# Newspaper Column

Digital Native (by Nishant Shah, Indian Express, December 22, 2013): http://bit.ly/1f7mU2P.

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Knowledge Repository on Internet Access
------------------------------------------------------------
CIS in partnership with the Ford Foundation is executing a project to create a knowledge repository on Internet and society. This repository will comprise content targeted primarily at civil society with a view to enabling their informed participation in the Indian Internet and ICT policy space. The repository is available at the Internet Institute website: http://bit.ly/1iQT2UB.

# Upcoming Event

Institute on Internet and Society (organised by Ford Foundation and CIS, Yashada, Pune, February 11-17, 2014): http://bit.ly/180mQi9. Registrations are closed for this event.

# Modules

History of the Internet: Building Conceptual Frameworks (by Nishant Shah, December 31, 2013): http://bit.ly/19WRHLb.
Internet Privacy in India (by Elonnai Hickok, December 31, 2013): http://bit.ly/19SNk6v.

► Follow us elsewhere

Twitter:https://twitter.com/CISA2K
Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/cisa2k
Visit us at:https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Access_To_Knowledge
E-mail: a2k@cis-india.org

► Support Us

► Request for Collaboration:
We invite researchers, practitioners, and theoreticians, both organisationally and as individuals, to collaboratively engage with Internet and society and improve our understanding of this new field. To discuss the research collaborations, write to Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, at sunil@cis-india.org or Nishant Shah, Director – Research, at nishant@cis-india.org. To discuss collaborations on Indic language wikipedia, write to T. Vishnu Vardhan, Programme Director, A2K, at vishnu@cis-india.org.

CIS is grateful to its donors, Wikimedia Foundation, Ford Foundation, Privacy International, UK, Hans Foundation and the Kusuma Trust which was founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin, for its core funding and support for most of its projects.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/december-2013-bulletin

April 2016 Newsletter

sunil — 2016-05-10T06:26:09Z

Welcome to the CIS newsletter for April 2016. The key issues we worked on this month included the Aadhaar Act 2016, Standard Essential Patents, cyber security of smart grids, and involvement of international agencies in the smart cities project in India.

Early last year, thanks to the fund raising efforts of a friend of CIS - Suhail Kazi, we received Rs. 1.9 lakhs as donations from 19 individuals. In January this year, we set up an online giving feature on our website which would ease the donation process, but we haven’t got a single donation so far! This could be because many of you may be under a false impression that CIS is very wealthy and does not need more support. Unfortunately, this is no longer true. Today, we are unable to find a single donor who is interested in our Accessibility, Telecom, or RAW programmes. In other words, we need your support. Would you to consider making a small donation to CIS? Click here to donate.

Previous issues of the newsletters can be accessed here: http://cis-india.org/about/newsletters.

Highlights
CIS prepared an FAQ on the Aadhaar / UIDAI project and the Aadhaar (Targeted Delivery of Financial and Other Subsidies, Benefits and Services) Bill, 2016. Further, two infographics were produced to highlight on the questions of "Can the Aadhaar Act 2016 be Classified as a Money Bill?" and "Can the Matters Dealt with in the Aadhaar Act be the Objects of a Money Bill?". NVDA team prepared a report on the progress of the project for the month of April 2016. CIS submitted its comments to the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion's Discussion Paper on Standard Essential Patents and their Availability on FRAND Terms. CIS has offered its assistance on other matters aimed at developing a suitable policy framework for SEPs and FRAND in India, and, working towards the sustained innovation, manufacture and availability of mobile technologies in India. A summary of the comments can be accessed here. Responses to the Discussion Paper is available here. Rohini Lakshané's paper titled Patents and Mobile Devices in India: An Empirical Survey has been accepted for publication by the Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law. Kiran A.B. in a blog post has documented the availability and openness of data sets in India that are relevant for monitoring the targets under the SDGs. Low-cost Aakash tablet and its previous iterations in India have gone through several phases of technological changes and ideological experiments wrote Sumandro Chattapadhyay and Jahnavi Phalkey in an article published in the Economic and Political Weekly.

-----------------------------------
CIS in the News
-----------------------------------

CIS gave inputs to the following media coverage:

India's biometric database crosses billion-member mark (AFP and Daily Mail, UK; April 4, 2016).
The Panama Papers and the question of privacy (Big News Network; April 6, 2016). This was originally published by Privacyinternational.org.
Daunting task ahead for investigative agencies with WhatsApp's end-to-end encryption (Neha Alawadhi; Economic Times; April 8, 2016).
PMO’s no to smart cards, insists on Aadhaar (Somesh Jha; Hindu; April 10, 2016).
2014 showed the power of Twitter, now every Indian politician wants a handle (T.V. Jayan, Smitha Verma,Sonia Sarkar and V. Kumara Swamy; Telegraph; April 10, 2016).
Why is the UIDAI cracking down on individuals that hoard Aadhaar data? (Alnoor Peermohamed; Business Standard; April 13, 2016).
You will need a license to create a WhatsApp group in Kashmir (Governance Now; April 19, 2016).
Will Facebook, Twitter relocate servers to India? (Taru Bhatia; Governance Now; April 23, 2016).
Government keeps experts out of cyber security discussions (Amrita Madhukalya; DNA; April 23, 2016).
CCTV plays Sherlock (Raj Shekhar, Arun Dev, V Narayan & A Selvaraj with inputs from Sindhu Kannan and Somreet Bhattacharya; The Times of India; April 24, 2016).

CIS members wrote the following pieces:

Sunil Abraham wrote an article in the July 15 edition of Frontline arguing that the Aadhaar project’s technological design and architecture is an unmitigated disaster and no amount of legal fixes in the Act will make it any better.
Amber Sinha wrote an article in The Wire arguing that the Aaddhaar Act is not a money bill, and the Supreme Court may very well question the decision by the Lok Sabha speaker to classify it as such.
Sumandro Chattapadhyay also wrote on The Wire arguing that "the last chance for a welfare state doesn’t rest in the Aadhaar system."
Subhashish Panigrahi's article on the 8 challenges that Indian language Wikipedias have to overcome was published by Global Voices. The article had earlier been published in the Wire.
Elonnai Hickok and Vanya Rakesh co-authored an article on Cyber Security of Smart Grids in India that was published by Dataquest.
Shyam Ponappa in his monthly column published in the Business Standard tell us that it's time the government accepts that current policies are not enough to bring about Digital India.

►NVDA and eSpeak

►Pervasive Technologies

Comments

Comments on Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion Discussion Paper on Standard Essential Patents and their Availability on Frand Terms (Anubha Sinha, Nehaa Chaudhari and Rohini Lakshané; April 23, 2016).
Responses to the DIPP's Discussion Paper on SEPs and their Availability on FRAND Terms (Anubha Sinha, Nehaa Chaudhari and Rohini Lakshané; April 23, 2016).
Summary of CIS Comments to DIPP’s Discussion Paper on SEPs and their availability on FRAND terms (Anubha Sinha; April 26, 2016).

Blog Entries

Global Congress 2015 - A Collection of Resources (Pervasive Technologies Team; April 1, 2016).
Compilation of Mobile Phone Patent Litigation Cases in India (Rohini Lakshané; updated on April 15, 2016).
Joining the Dots in India's Big-Ticket Mobile Phone Patent Litigation (Rohini Lakshané; updated on April 29, 2016).
MHRD IPR Chair Series: Information Received from Tezpur University (Karan Tripathi; April 26, 2016).
National IPR Policy Series : Sectoral Innovation Councils on Intellectual Property Rights – RTI Requests + DIPP Responses (Nehaa Chaudhari and Saahil Dama; April 30, 2016). Nisha S. Kumar assisted in compilation of the document.

Participation in Events

Fifth Annual IP Teaching Workshop (Organised by the Centre for Innovation, Intellectual Property and Competition at National Law University Delhi in association with National Academy of Law Teaching, NLU-D; Delhi; March 31 and April 1, 2016). Nehaa Chaudhari was a speaker.
First Round-table on Innovation, IP and Competition (Organized by the Centre for Innovation, Intellectual Property & Competition (CIIPC) at the National Law University, Delhi; India Habitat Centre; New Delhi; April 1-2, 2016). Nehaa Chaudhari and Anubha Sinha attended the round-table.
Brainstorming Workshop on PG Programme on Media Studies for UGC E-Pathshala Programme (Organized by Jamia Milla Islamia; New Delhi; April 5, 2016).
Sensitization Seminar on IPR for Electronics & ICT Sectors (Organized by Andhra Pradesh Technology Development & Promotion Centre (APTDC) of Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), in association with Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY); Vishakhapatnam; April 21, 2016).

►Wikipedia

Work Plan

CIS - A2K Work Plan: July 2016 - June 2017 (CIS-A2K Team; April 2, 2016): We have revised the work plan template taking into account the changed proposal plan sent out by WMF and in light of the feedback that we have received from FDC assessment during last proposal application. The FDC feedback is taken into account at the level of design, RoI and ensuring quality for all our activities.

Article

Eight Challenges Indian-Language Wikipedias Need to Overcome (Subhashish Panigrahi; Global Voices; April 21, 2016). A version of this post was previously published on The Wire.

Media Coverage

Odia gets more space in e-world (Anwesha Ambaly; The Telegraph; April 7, 2016).
Exercise to Correct articles in Tulu Wikipedia begins (Raviprasad Kamila; The Hindu; April 28, 2016).

Event Organized

Tulu Wikipedia Editathon to Improve Quality of Articles in Tulu Wikipedia (Shri Ramakrishna PU College; Mangaluru; April 26 - 30, 2016).

-----------------------------------
Openness
-----------------------------------

Our work in the Openness programme focuses on open data, especially open government data, open access, open education resources, open knowledge in Indic languages, open media, and open technologies and standards - hardware and software. We approach openness as a cross-cutting principle for knowledge production and distribution, and not as a thing-in-itself.

Monitoring Sustainable Development Goals in India: Availability and Openness of Data (Part II) (Kiran A.B.; April 12, 2016).

-----------------------------------
Internet Governance
-----------------------------------

►Cyber Security

Cyber Security of Smart Grids in India (Elonnai Hickok and Vanya Rakesh; April 25, 2016).

►Big Data

Blog Entry

RTI regarding Smart Cities Mission in India (Paul Thottan; April 21, 2016).

►Privacy

Blog Entries

FAQ on the Aadhaar Project and the Bill (Elonnai Hickok, Vanya Rakesh, and Vipul Kharbanda; April 13, 2016).
Aadhaar Act and its Non-compliance with Data Protection Law in India (Vanya Rakesh; April 14, 2016).
Can the Matters Dealt with in the Aadhaar Act be the Objects of a Money Bill? (Pooja Saxena; April 24, 2016).

Articles

Will Aadhaar Act Address India’s Dire Need For a Privacy Law? (Nehaa Chaudhari; Quint; March 31, 2016).
The Last Chance for a Welfare State Doesn’t Rest in the Aadhaar System (Sumandro Chattapadhyay; April 19, 2016).
The Aadhaar Act is Not a Money Bill (Amber Sinha; April 25, 2016).

Participation in Events

RightsCon Silicon Valley 2016 (Organized by RightsCon; March 31 and April 1, 2016). Elonnai Hickok attended the event.
Panel Discussion on UID/ Aadhar act 2016 and its impact on Social, Security (Organized by Students Christian Movement of India at SCM House; Bangalore; April 25, 2016). Sunil Abraham was a panelist.
The Centre for the Study of Law and Governance (CSLG), Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), organised a roundtable discussion on Tuesday, April 26, to discuss the Aadhaar project and Act. Along with Prasanna S, Apar Gupta, and Dr. Chirashree Dasgupta, Sumandro Chattapadhyay was one of the discussants.
Aadhaar by Numbers (Organized by National Institute of Public Finance and Policy; New Delhi; April 29, 2016). Sunil Abraham was a speaker.

-----------------------------------
Telecom
-----------------------------------
CIS is involved in promoting access and accessibility to telecommunications services and resources, and has provided inputs to ongoing policy discussions and consultation papers published by TRAI. It has prepared reports on unlicensed spectrum and accessibility of mobile phones for persons with disabilities and also works with the USOF to include funding projects for persons with disabilities in its mandate:

Article

Breakthroughs Needed For Digital India (Shyam Ponappa; Business Standard; April 6, 2016 and Organizing India BlogSpot; April 7, 2016).

Article

Buying into the Aakash Dream - A Tablet’s Tale of Mass Education (Sumandro Chattapadhyay and Jahnavi Phalkey; Economic & Political Weekly; April 23, 2016).

Announcement

Call for Proposal: Big Data for Development – Initial Field Studies (Sumandro Chattapadhyay; April 29, 2016).

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

► Follow us elsewhere

Twitter: http://twitter.com/cis_india
Twitter - Access to Knowledge: https://twitter.com/CISA2K
Twitter - Information Policy: https://twitter.com/CIS_InfoPolicy
Facebook - Access to Knowledge: https://www.facebook.com/cisa2k
E-Mail - Access to Knowledge: a2k@cis-india.org
E-Mail - Researchers at Work: raw@cis-india.org
List - Researchers at Work: https://lists.ghserv.net/mailman/listinfo/researchers

► Support Us

► Request for Collaboration

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/april-2016-newsletter

December 2011 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2012-07-23T08:35:03Z

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

Digital Natives with a Cause?

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

Blog Entry

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

Events

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

Book Reviews

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

Pathways for Learning in Higher Education

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

Workshop Report

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

Blog Post

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

Event Organised

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

Accessibility

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

Publications

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

Submission

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

Interview

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

Award

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

Upcoming Event

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

Access to Knowledge

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

Comments

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

Blog Post

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

Openness

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

Award

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

Internet Governance

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

Peer Review

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

Book Review

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

Newspaper / Magazine Articles

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

Interview

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

Video

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

Media Coverage

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

Event Report

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

Upcoming Events

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

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

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

Event Organised

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

Special Section on Freedom of Expression

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

Newspaper / Magazine Articles

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

Blog Posts

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

Radio Broadcast

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

Live Chat

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

Media Coverage

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

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

Videos

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

Event Organised

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

Telecom

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

Newspaper Article

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

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

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

November 2011 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2012-07-24T02:37:09Z

Welcome to the Centre for Internet and Society newsletter! In this issue we bring you the updates of our research, events, media coverage and videos of some past events organized by us during the month of November 2011.

Digital Natives with a Cause?

Digital Natives with a Cause? examines the changing landscape of social change and political participation in light of the role that young people play through digital and Internet technologies, in emerging information societies. Consolidating knowledge from Asia, Africa and Latin America, it builds a global network of knowledge partners who critically engage with discourse on youth, technology and social change, and look at alternative practices and ideas in the Global South:

Key Research

On Fooling Around: Digital Natives and Politics in Asia
by Nishant Shah, Director-Research
Youths are not only actively participating in the politics of its times but also changing the way in which we understand the political processes of mobilisation, participation and transformation, writes Nishant. The paper was presented at the Digital Cultures in Asia conference at the Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan.

Links in the Chain

Analog Relics in the Digital Age, volume 8, issue 4
Guest Editor: Nilofar Ansher
“The scale of inventions has not really leaped, so much as mutated. We had Twitter and Facebook ... (remember notice boards, community centers and pamphlets); they just weren’t so instant, hyperlinked and global in scale. We still use the medium of a mouthpiece and speaker to talk to each other long distance, the difference is in the changed aesthetics of the 21st century – it’s all squarish curves and scratch-proof glass that are more appealing today. Blackboards, writing material, listening devices and memory aids have undergone unprecedented transformations of function and usage, but it’s still about having a blank canvas to write upon with a chalk, pen, paper or iClick”, writes Nilofar in this issue of the Digital Natives newsletter.

Articles/Columns

In Search of the Other: Decoding Digital Natives: Nishant Shah charts the trajectories of our research at the Centre for Internet and Society (Bangalore, India) and Hivos (The Hague, The Netherlands) to see how alternative models of understanding these relationships can be built. This blog post by Nishant Shah was published in DML central on 24 October 2011.

Staff Quoted in the Media

The Write Stuff, Deccan Chronicle, 14 November 2011. Nishant Shah has been quoted in this article.

Pathways for Learning in Higher Education

The Pathways Project for Learning in Higher Education is a collaboration between the Higher Education Innovation and Research Applications (HEIRA) at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS) and the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS). The project is supported by the Ford Foundation and works with disadvantaged students in 9 undergraduate colleges in Maharashtra, Karnataka and Kerala, to explore relationships between Technologies, Higher Education and the new forms of social justice in India.

Article Published by the Media

Learn it Yourself: The peer-to-peer world of online learning encourages conversations and reciprocal learning, writes Nishant Shah. The article was published by the Indian Express on 30 October 2011.

Video of Event Participated

Mobility Shifts 2011 — An International Future of Learning Summit: The summit was organised by the New School and sponsored by MacArthur Foundation and Mozilla. It was held from October 10 to October 16, 2011 at the New School, New York City. Nishant Shah participated in the summit and spoke on Digital Outcasts: Social Justice, Technology and Learning in India. The video of the event is online.

Accessibility

Estimates of the percentage of the world's population that is disabled vary considerably. But what is certain is that if we count functional disability, then a large proportion of the world's population is disabled in one way or another. At CIS we work to ensure that the digital technologies, which empower disabled people and provide them with independence, are allowed to do so in practice and by the law. To this end, we support web accessibility guidelines, and change in copyright laws that currently disempower the persons with disabilities.

Publication

e-Accessibility Policy Handbook for Persons with Disabilities (Russian Version)
Edited by Nirmita Narasimhan
The e-Accessibility Policy Handbook for Persons with Disabilities is now available in Russian. The handbook is a joint publication of ITU, G3ict and the Centre for Internet and Society, in cooperation with the Hans Foundation. Dr. Hamadoun I. Toure, Secretary-General, International Telecommunication Union wrote the preface. Dr. Sami Al-Basheer, Director, ITU-D wrote the introduction and Axel Leblois, Executive Director, G3ict wrote the foreword.

Blog Post

The case for Accessible Banking by Dinesh Kaushal.

Access to Knowledge

The Access to Knowledge programme addresses the harms caused to consumers, developing countries, human rights, and creativity/innovation from excessive regimes of copyright, patents, and other such monopolistic rights over knowledge:

Key Research

Of Jesters, Clowns and Pranksters: YouTube and the Condition of Collaborative Authorship
by Nishant Shah, Director-Research, Centre for Internet and Society
The idea of a single author creating cinematic objects in a well-controlled scheme of support system and production/distribution infrastructure has been fundamentally challenged by the emergence of digital video sharing sites like YouTube, writes Nishant Shah in this essay published in the Journal of Moving Images.

Blog Posts

CIS Hosts Scanned Version of George Orwell’s Books vs. Cigarettes

Comments / Statement

CIS Intervention on Future Work of the WIPO Advisory Committee on Enforcement: The seventh session of the World Intellectual Property Organization's Advisory Committee on Enforcement (ACE) is being held in Geneva on November 30 and December 1, 2011. Pranesh Prakash intervened during the discussion of future work of the ACE with this comment.
Comment by CIS at ACE on Presentation on French Charter on the Fight against Cyber-Counterfeiting: The seventh session of the World Intellectual Property Organization's Advisory Committee on Enforcement is being held in Geneva on November 30 and December 1, 2011. Pranesh Prakash responded to a presentation by Prof. Pierre Sirinelli of the École de droit de la Sorbonne, Université Paris 1 on 'The French Charter on the Fight against Cyber-Counterfeiting of December 16, 2009' with this comment.
Statement of CIS on the WIPO Broadcast Treaty at the 23rd SCCR: The twenty-third session of the Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights is being held in Geneva from November 22, 2011 to December 2, 2011. Pranesh Prakash delivered this statement on a new proposal made by South Africa and Mexico (SCCR/23/6) on a treaty for broadcasters.

Openness

The 'Openness' programme critically examines alternatives to existing regimes of intellectual property rights, and transparency and accountability. Under this programme, we study Open Government Data, Open Access to Scholarly Literature, Open Content, Open Standards, Open Access to Law, and Free/Libre/Open Source Software:

Featured Research

Know Your Users, Match their Needs!
As Free Access to Law initiatives in the Global South enter into a new stage of maturity, they must be certain not to lose sight of their users’ needs. This blog post gives a summary of the “Good Practices Handbook”, a research output of the collaborative project Free Access to Law — Is it Here to Stay? undertaken by LexUM (Canada) and the South African Legal Institute in partnership with the Centre for Internet and Society. Rebecca Schild and Prashant Iyengar from CIS were part of the research team.

Event Organised

Open Access to Academic Knowledge, organised by the Indian Institute of Science and CIS at National Centre for Science Information, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore on 2 November 2011. Tom Dane participated in this event.

Event Participated

3rd Canadian Science Policy Conference, organised by Canadian Science Policy Conference from16 to 18 November 2011 at the Ottawa Convention Centre. Sunil Abraham spoke in the session on Global Implications of Open and Inclusive Innovation.

Announcement

The Wikimedia India Program Trust. A new entity, the “Wikimedia India Program Trust”, has been registered in Delhi. Sunil Abraham is one of the trustees.

Internet Governance

The Internet Governance programme conducts research around the various social, technical, and political underpinnings of global and national Internet governance, and includes online privacy, freedom of speech, and Internet governance mechanisms and processes:

Comments / Submissions

CIS Comments on Finance Committee Statements to Open Letters on Unique Identity: The Parliamentary Finance Committee responded to the six open letters sent by CIS through an email on 12 October 2011. CIS has commented on the points raised by the Committee.
Comments on the National Policy of Information Technology: The NPIT 2011 has the laudable goal of making India a ‘knowledge economy with a global role’ by developing and deploying ICT solutions in all sectors to foster development within India and at a global level. CIS appreciates this initiative of the Department of Information Technology and offers brief comments to strengthen the draft.
CIS Comments on the Draft National Policy on Electronics: CIS submitted its comments to the request for comments put out by the Department of Information Technology on its draft 'National Policy on Electronics'.

Statement

India's Statement Proposing UN Committee for Internet-Related Policy: India made its statement at the 66th session of the United Nations General Assembly, its proposal for the UN Committee for Internet-Related Policy was presented.

Podcast

Professor Balaram talks Open Access : Tom Dane spoke with Professor P Balaram, Director of the Indian Institute of Science about the Open Access movement. A podcast of the interview is online.

Event Report

The 2nd IJLT-CIS Lecture Series — A Post-event Report : The 2nd IJLT-CIS Lecture Series was organised by the Indian Journal of Law and Technology and CIS on the 21st and 22nd of May 2011 at the National Law School of India University, Nagarbhavi, Bangalore. The main theme for this year was Emerging Issues in Privacy Law: Law, Policy and Practice.

Essay in Peer Reviewed Journal

Material Cyborgs; Asserted Boundaries
by Nishant Shah, Director-Research
Nishant explores the possibility of formulating the cyborg as an author or translator who is able to navigate between the different binaries of ‘meat–machine’, ‘digital–physical’, and ‘body–self’, using the abilities and the capabilities learnt in one system in an efficient and effective understanding of the other. The essay was published in the European Journal of English Studies, Volume 12, Issue 2.

Articles/Columns

What is Dilligaf? On the web, time moves at the speed of thought: Groups emerge, proliferate and are abandoned as new trends and fads take precedence. Nowhere else is this dramatic flux as apparent as in the language that evolves online. While SMS lingo – like TTYL (Talk To You Later) and LOL (Laughing Out Loud)– has endured and become a part of everyday language, new forms of speech are taking over. This article by Nishant Shah was published in GQ India.
The Book of Jobs The man who made the computer personal, who changed the face of the digital media industry, who was inspired by Zen philosophy to create an eight-billion-dollar empire, Steve Jobs, died last month. Just a few weeks before his death, in the midst of his painful illness, he told Walter Isaacson, the man chosen to write his authorised biography, “I really want to believe that something survives”. And Isaacson wrote him a fairy tale which will make sure that Jobs will be remembered beyond the gizmos and gimmicks, writes Nishant Shah in this article published in the Indian Express on 12 November 2011.

Staff Quoted in the Media

Is Facebook tracking your virtual footprints? by Sheetal Sukhija in MidDay, 22 November 2011. Sunil Abraham was quoted in this article.
M-governance gains momentum by Vasudha Venugopal in the Hindu, 20 November 2011. Nishant Shah was quoted in this article.
SOPA: The bill that could kill the Internet by Suw Charman-Anderson in Firstpost.Technology, 16 November 2011.
Broadband user base still has a long way to go, by Leslie D’Monte & Deepti Chaudhary in Livemint, 15 November 2011. Sunil Abraham has been quoted in this article.
‘Not mandatory’ but maids, guards get fingerprinted by Hemanth Kashyap in Bangalore Mirror, 9 November 2011. Sunil Abraham has been quoted in this article.
Netizen Report: Transparency Edition by Rebecca MacKinnon in Global Voices Online, 7 November 2011.
Blocking online content: Google gets more requests than govt by Pallavi Polanki in Firstpost.com, 2 November 2011. Pranesh Prakash has been quoted in this article.

Blog Posts

Sources of CIS Funding by Pranesh Prakash on 9 November 2011.

TRAI urged to take action against P2P throttling and DNS hijacking by Anand on 9 November 2011.

Events Organised

Exposing Data: Art Slash Activism organised by Tactical Tech and CIS at CIS office in Bangalore on 28 November 2011. Ward Smith and Stephanie Hankey (Co-founders of TTC), Ayisha Abraham (Filmmaker, Srishti School of Art Design) and Zainab Bawa (Research Fellow, CIS) gave a lecture.

Droidcon India, first Android Conference in Bangalore, organised by CIS in collaboration with Droidcon.com, Bangalore Android User Group, MobileMonday Bangalore and Android Advices on 18 and 19 November 2011 at the MLR Convention Centre, Bangalore.

Events Participated

Western Ghats Portal: Workshop on Biodiversity Informatics organised by the Western Ghats Portal team at the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and Environment, 25 November 2011. Sunil Abraham spoke in the session on Scientific Commons and Policy.
Names Not Numbers Mumbai, 26 November 2011. Nishant Shah spoke in a panel on “The New Digital Individual: Is New Technology Liberating or Enslaving?”. The event was organised by Editorial Intelligence and partners which included the British Council and Financial Times, BBC World News, Mumbai first, Vodafone, Trident and Godrej India Cultural Lab.

Upcoming Events

Dialogue Cafe @ Centre for Internet and Society, 2 December 2011, Centre for Internet & Society, 4 p.m. to 6 p.m.
The High Level Privacy Conclave, 3 February 2011, Paharpur Business Centre, Nehru Place Greens New Delhi, 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. This is a closed-door meeting. For participation, get in touch with Elonnai (elonnai@cis-india.org).
All India Privacy Symposium, 4 February 2011, India International Centre, New Delhi. This is a public meeting. For participation, get in touch with Elonnai (elonnai@cis-india.org).

Video

Facebook Resistance Workshop at CIS. This was a workshop for people to learn on how to think beyond the rules and limitations of Facebook, to tweak and play around the features and design to generate useful, creative, and funny concepts and explore how this creative intervention can be turned into a real software developed by the Facebook Resistance.

Telecom

While the potential for growth and returns exist for telecommunications in India, a range of issues need to be addressed. One aspect is more extensive rural coverage and the other is a countrywide access to broadband which is low. Both require effective and efficient use of networks and resources, including spectrum:

Column

Telecom Path-Breaker? (by Shyam Ponappa): Does the draft National Telecom Policy-2011 reflect true brilliance or smoke-and-mirrors? It will be a game-changer if a shared network is implemented effectively, writes Shyam Ponappa in this article published in the Business Standard on 3 November 2011.

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

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