Centre for Internet and Society

CIS contributes to ABLI Compendium on Regulation of Cross-Border Transfers of Personal Data in Asia

Amber Sinha and Elonnai Hickok — 2018-06-03T15:10:11Z

The Asian Business Law Institute, based in Singapore published a compendium on “Regulation of cross-border transfer of personal data in Asia”. This was part of an exercise to explore legal convergence around issues such as data protection, enforcement of foreign judgments and principle of restructuring in Asia.

The compendium contains 14 detailed reports written by legal practitioners, legal scholars and researchers in their respective jurisdictions, on the regulation of cross-border data transfers in the wider Asian region (Australia, China, Hong Kong SAR, India, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Macau SAR, Malaysia, New Zealand, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam).

The compendium is intended to act as a springboard for the next phase of ABLI's project, which will be devoted to the in-depth study of the differences and commonalities between Asian legal systems on these issues and – where feasible – the drafting of recommendations and/or policy options to achieve convergence in this area of law in Asia.

The chapter titled Jurisdictional Report India was authored by Amber Sinha and Elonnai Hickok. The compendium can be accessed here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/regulation-of-cross-border-transfers-of-personal-data-in-asia

Election Experiment Proves Facebook Just Doesn't Care About Fake News In India

Admin — 2018-05-31T22:56:48Z

Much-hyped fact-checking initiative identified only 30 bits of fake news in month-long Karnataka campaign. Yup — 30!

The article by Visvak was published in Huffington Post on May 30, 2018. Pranesh Prakash was quoted.

On April 16, a little less than a month before Karnataka went to the polls, Facebook announced a partnership with Boom Live, an Indian fact-checking website, to fight fake news during the Karnataka assembly polls.

Five days before the partnership was announced, an embattled Mark Zuckerberg stood before the the US Congress. Under fire for having allowed his platform to be used to manipulate elections, he declared that his company would do everything it could to protect the integrity of elections in India and elsewhere.

Facebook's press-release promised as much:

We have learned that once a story is rated as false, we have been able to reduce its distribution by 80%, and thereby improve accuracy of information on Facebook and reduce misinformation.

Yet, the pilot project in Karnataka suggests Facebook has a long way to go to keep Zuckerberg's promise. In an election cycle widely acknowledged as rife with misinformation, fake polls and surveys, communally coloured rumours, and blatant lies peddled by campaigners, rating stories as "false" proved to be so difficult and time consuming that the Facebook partnership was only able to debunk 30 pieces of misinformation — 25 in the run-up to the polls, and 5 in the immediate aftermath — in the month long campaign.

The much-ballyhooed partnership added up to a small financial contribution from Facebook that allowed Boom to hire two fact-checkers, one in its offices in Mumbai and one based on the ground in Bengaluru, specifically to track the election. The fact-checkers were also given access to a Facebook dashboard that could be used to discover and counter misinformation on the platform.

Boom did not reveal the sum involved or allow HuffPost India access to the dashboard, citing a non-disclosure agreement. Facebook's representatives declined comment on a detailed questionnaire sent to them.

A Gushing Sewer of Fake News

Globally, Facebook's fact-checking initiative is a little over a year old, but the partnership with Boom marks its advent in India, the company's largest market.

"It's a late start, a very late start." says Pratik Sinha, co-founder of AltNews, another prominent fact-checking website. "But they're doing something now, which is good."

Yet Govindraj Ethiraj, Founder-Editor of Boom Live, said the social networking giant's contribution to their fact-checking efforts was of limited utility. "Facebook's involvement didn't really help us," he said. "This was more about us helping them."

Ethiraj identified Facebook-owned WhatsApp as the primary medium for the propagation of fake news during the Karnataka election. Each of the three major parties in the fray reportedly set up tens of thousands of groups on the platform in an effort to spread their message. Facebook is yet to figure out a way to allow fact-checkers into the platform without breaking the end-to-end encryption which makes it impossible for messages to be tracked.

But even on Facebook, which lends itself far more easily to tracking and monitoring, the tools that the company has built to track fake news are not particularly effective.

Facebook allows advertisers to micro-target content at users using specific attributes, and users are unlikely to report content that agrees with their ideological biases.

In his office in the aging Sun Mill Compound in Mumbai's Lower Parel, Jency Jacob, Managing Editor of Boom logged into the dashboard and scrolled through the gushing sewer of user-flagged content pouring in from around the world: stories about dinosaur remains and ancient caves, tales of celebrities battling mysterious diseases, and ordinary people undergoing plastic surgeries to look like celebrities, mixed in with news – both real and fake – that users found objectionable. There's one about the rise in fuel prices and there's even a Huffpost India story, about a Dalit being flogged to death in Gujarat. (The HuffPost India story, the editorial board can affirm, is true.)

"I can't claim that it doesn't affect me," admitted Jacob. "This morning, the first thing I saw after waking up was a video of a woman kicking a 3-year-old baby and slamming her on the ground. We are in the rush of it right now, but I don't think we will enjoy doing this all our lives."

"A lot of it is dependent on how users are reporting," Jacob continued, explaining that the dashboard tool relies on users to flag potentially "fake" news. "If the users aren't reporting it, it isn't going to come into the queue."

This is a blind spot as Facebook allows advertisers to micro-target content at users using specific attributes, and users are unlikely to report content that agrees with their ideological biases.

Everything But English

Facebook's dashboard cannot be used to report non-English content. In India, local language users outnumber English language users and more are coming online every day. The dashboard is also unable to filter stories relevant to a specific location, despite Facebook allowing advertisers to geo-target their advertisements with reasonable accuracy.

Jacob reckons the tool will get better at dealing with the Indian context over time. "This was always intended to be a pilot project. It will take them time to figure out how to get us more relevant leads," he said.

With not much help forthcoming from Facebook, Boom relied on its own tried and tested methods of tracking misinformation. Its fact-checkers monitored pages and websites known to be potential sources of fake news, told friends and family to forward anything suspicious they came across, and maintained their own reporting channel - a dedicated WhatsApp helpline for users to direct suspicious looking links.

These methods threw up about 4-5 actionable leads every day. To fact-check them, Boom deployed a combination of old school journalistic practices, such as getting fact-checkers to call sources, and tech tools like video and image matching software.

Fact-checking is a painstaking process that involves a great deal of manual effort.

"The way we measure virality is a bit of a crude method. We check whether several of us have received it or not, and whether it is being shared on all three platforms."

"Essentially, we are saying what we are saying is true, don't believe others," said Sinha. "That's a very arrogant position to take. To say that in a world full of information, there has to be a process where we take the audience from the claim to the truth. Gathering the information required to do that takes a lot of time."

According to Jacob, it sometimes takes 2-3 people working all day to fact-check a single video. And Boom only has 6 fact-checkers in all, including the two Facebook-funded hires. Given these constraints, they could act on only a fraction of the tip-offs.

"We were not looking at volume, but at impact," said Jacob, indicating that they focused their attention on misinformation that was going viral. "The way we measure virality is a bit of a crude method. We check whether several of us have received it or not, and whether it is being shared on all three platforms."

Jacob admits that there were many more stories that they could have tackled, but he says that it was impossible to address them all with the limited resources available to them.

Sinha reckons that Facebook already has the technology to significantly alleviate the manpower issue. "If you upload a video to Facebook and there's a copyright violation, they pull the video. So they know how to match videos. If they leverage that technology and apply it to fake news, it'll reduce the mundane work we have to do by half," he said.

While Facebook's contribution to Boom's sourcing and fact-checking processes was minimal, it does seem to have had a significant impact on how fact-checks were disseminated. The Facebook dashboard allows fact-checkers to tag content with ratings ranging from 'true' to 'false' with a few options in between and also attach their fact-check articles to the content. The platform then attempts to reduce distribution of the content and display the fact-check article to users whenever they encounter it on the news feed or attempt to share it.

Major Victory

This system claimed its first major victory within a week of the partnership being announced when several major media outlets including NDTV India, India Today and Republic published a list of purported star campaigners for the Congress party that turned out to be fabricated.

Boom rated the articles false and linked their fact-check. Jacob could not verify if this reduced the articles' distribution by the 80% figure touted by Facebook, but said there was a clear impact.

"NDTV India carried the story and we noticed that their traffic dropped after we linked our fact-check to their article," said Jacob. With traffic plummeting and users being shown fake news warnings when interacting with their content, most of the media houses that published the list either issued clarifications or took their articles down.

After the initial success, Boom quickly ran into the limitations of the ratings system. Fact-checks could only be done on links and not on image, video, or text posts. Facebook eventually granted Boom access to image and video posts, but text posts are still beyond the purview of fact-checkers.

While that change was likely a simple fix that only required a switch to be flipped, there are other restrictions on the ratings system that are unlikely to be lifted as easily.

From the beginning of the election cycle, false statements by prominent politicians - including the Prime Minister - were an everyday affair. As is the norm, they were faithfully reported by most media outlets without critique or context. Misinformation masquerading as opinion, wherein a set of legimitate facts are presented out of context to arrive at a blatantly false conclusion, was also a persistent feature during the polls. Such articles add to the whirlwind of campaign misinformation, but are exempted from the rating system.

"Facebook needs to figure out a more aggressive model of showing the explanatory article to the reader."

Sinha believes that misinformation that falls into these grey areas cannot be laid at Facebook's door.

But Pranesh Prakash, Fellow at the Centre for Internet and Society, said such restrictions were "extraordinarily stupid."

"As long as the distinction is made that the publication isn't msiquoting and the politician is saying something that is false - and that's easy enough to do - I can't think of a possible justification," he said, regarding false statements made by public figures.

As for misleading opinion pieces Prakash said, "Most falsehoods are not just statements that present incorrect facts, but that present facts in an incorrect context. It's clearly the context that speaks to how people interpret facts. Fact checkers can't be people who only look at facts as black and white things."

Facebook's suggested method of dealing with such articles is to attach fact-check articles to them while assigning them a 'not eligible' rating. Jacob reckons that this is yet another blind spot.

"Facebook needs to figure out a more aggressive model of showing the explanatory article to the reader. The way it is designed now, with the article showing up below as a related link, not many people will bother to go and click on that."

The Whatsapp Problem

For all its flaws, the fact-checking initiative appears to be making an attempt at solving the problem of misinformation on Facebook's news feed. But the company hasn't even begun to address the 800-pound gorilla that is WhatsApp.

While Facebook has been castigated for playing fast and loose with privacy on its primary platform, the inherently better privacy features of the fully-encrypted Whatsapp platform have made it lethal when it comes to fake news. The lack of third party access, which has prevented Facebook from monetising WhatsApp chats - thus far - and security agencies from spying on them, has also made Whatsapp messages impossible to fact-check.

In Karnataka, WhatsApp was the primary vector for the spread of a series of fake polls, some of which were eventually picked up and published by mainstream media outlets. Unlike fake news that emerges on the Facebook and Twitter, it is impossible to trace the source of misinformation on Whatsapp.

"Just as spam can be flagged and people can be barred if they're flagged as spammers, similarly, if people have been flagged as serial promoters of fake news, you can use that to nudge people's behaviour."

"If Whatsapp had a trending list, our jobs would've been a lot easier," lamented Jacob. "By and large, we have figured out what goes viral on Facebook and Twitter. It might take a day to reach us, but eventually we catch anything that's going viral on these platforms. But Whatsapp is a black box."

Prakash asserts that while encryption is a barrier, it does not make it impossible to police fake news on WhatApp. "Just as spam can be flagged and people can be barred if they're flagged as spammers, similarly, if people have been flagged as serial promoters of fake news, you can use that to nudge people's behaviour."

There are indications that WhatsApp is attempting to develop features to tackle fake news. The platform has beta-tested features that would clearly identifyforwarded messages and warn users if a message has been forwarded more than 25 times. Jacob said that Facebook was working on a product that would throw up fact-check articles when a user interacts with a fake news URL on WhatsApp. If or when any of these features actually make it to users is a matter of conjecture.

Prakash said the slow pace of progress on WhatsApp is just a reflection of the company's priorities. "It speaks to how American a company a Facebook is. Whatsapp is the real network for fake news in India, but it gets the least amount of attention."

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/huffington-post-visvak-may-30-2018-election-experiment-proves-facebook-just-doesnt-care-about-fake-news-in-india

India Proposes Law to Give Indians Complete Control of their Digital Health Data

Admin — 2018-06-01T13:57:42Z

India’s health ministry has proposed a law to govern data security in the healthcare sector that would give individuals complete ownership of their health data.

The article by Madhur Singh was published as a cover story in IndiaSpend on May 31, 2018. Shweta Mohandas and Amber Sinha were quoted.

Individuals would have the absolute right to refuse or allow data to be generated, collected, accessed, transmitted or used. And data collectors such as hospitals would be prohibited from refusing treatment to those who do not want their data collected or used.

This would make India one of the world’s foremost jurisdictions in the regulation of healthcare data, at a time when governments around the world are scrambling to keep a check on who gets to generate and use data and how, especially as citizens do not completely understand the data privacy and security implications of the innumerable applications they wittingly or unwittingly use.

The draft Digital Information Security in Healthcare Act was proposed by the health ministry on March 11, 2018. The period for stakeholder comment ended April 21, and a bill is currently being finalised. Experts say the health ministry is possibly waiting for a final verdict from the Supreme Court on petitions challenging the constitutional validity of Aadhaar–on which it has just completed the second-longest oral hearing in the history of the court. The ruling is expected in July or August.

The verdict will guide India’s data privacy framework, which is already being prepared by the Committee of Experts on a Data Protection Framework for India being chaired by Justice B. N. Srikrishna. It will also have implications for the health ministry’s proposed law.

Use of data

Digital health data (DHD), or electronic health records of individuals or the public (when aggregated), typically comprise information such as a patient’s age, contact information, vital signs, lab reports, medical history including immunisations, allergies, and current and past medications.

The use of DHD promises to revolutionise healthcare services by providing more comprehensive care using the most accurate records possible, possibly reducing costs and timelines for all involved.

The law would allow anonymised health data, which cannot be traced to individuals, to be used for specified public health purposes, such as early detection and rapid response to public health emergencies such as bioterror events and infectious disease outbreaks.

However, for data in identifiable form, the draft stipulates that explicit prior permission would be needed from the digital data owner before each transmission or use. For instance, often companies offer free medical checkups to all employees. By revealing a pregnancy or a serious chronic condition, these tests could imperil an employee’s situation with their employer. With the proposed law, an employee could refuse to allow the pathology laboratory to share their data with the employer.

In recognition of the serious privacy and security concerns over uses and misuses of digital health data, the proposed law would completely prohibit use of digital health data for ‘commercial purposes’, whether in an identifiable or anonymised form.

This would mean that insurance companies, employers, human resource consultants and pharmaceutical companies would not be allowed to access or use health data, the law firm Trilegal said in an analysis posted on its website on April 11, 2018.

“Currently, employers can process health data for employee benefits, office records and insurance purposes under labour legislations like Maternity Benefits Act, Employee Compensation Act and Employee State Insurance Corporation Act and as part of their internal policies,” Trilegal said, adding that the proposed law would allow the use of digital data only to the extent required by these laws. “However, access, use or disclosure of [digital health data] to employers or human resource consultants for any other purpose is prohibited,” Trilegal noted.

Similarly, insurance companies and drug makers would not be allowed to access or use digital health data, although use for academic, clinical and public health research would be allowed.

The central government would be tasked with establishing ‘health information exchanges’ that would regulate the exchange of DHD between various clinical establishments–hospitals, clinics, diagnostic centres, pathology laboratories, etc.–for purposes and in manners allowed under the law.

Data breach

The responsibility for ensuring data security and privacy would lie with the entity that has custody of the data, which could be penalised for data breach.

Currently, under Indian law, companies in India are not obligated to inform individuals of data breach, with the exception of banks, which are obligated to inform the Reserve Bank of India within six hours. The result is that individuals are often not aware that their details may have been compromised.

The draft law proposes to make breach notification mandatory. Data breaches would be ranked by severity, and the more serious kind would be punishable with a fine of at least Rs 1 lakh and a jail term of up to five years.

Clinical establishments and health information exchanges would have to notify the owner in case of a breach within three days. Data owners could claim compensation from the person who breached the data, and no limit has been prescribed for the compensation amount.

The draft also specifies punishment for various other offences such as unauthorised access and data theft of up to five years’ imprisonment.

Some concerns

The stringent provisions of the proposed law, particularly the blanket ban on use of DHD by insurance and pharmaceutical companies, has raised concerns among these industries.

“Most data protection laws allow healthcare institutes to process data so long as there exists a legitimate interest in doing so,” Rahul Kumar, country manager and director with security solutions company WinMagic India said, adding that provisions debarring insurance and pharmaceutical companies, “while being protective in nature might be excessively harsh under certain circumstances”.

The stringent privacy provisions also put the future of wearable devices in doubt, Shweta Mohandas of The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) told IndiaSpend, “Perhaps a revised draft of the law, or rules framed under the final law, would specify these details.”

The draft does not clearly define the security measures that must be followed to prevent data breach, Mohandas and Amber Sinha, also of the CIS, told IndiaSpend. However, a National Electronic Health Authority proposed to be set up under the law could possibly define a clear set standards for maintaining security, they said.

Also, the draft proposes to allow for the withdrawal of consent but does not say how data would be removed from the system, Sinha and Mohandas said, adding that the roles of the various bodies to be established must be clearly defined.

Most commentators expect the finalised bill, which will be drafted after taking into account stakeholder comment, will iron out these issues.

“This law in its current form and further in its revised version will go a long way to help the industry be more secure,” Kumar said, adding, “Compliance is known to bring in a level playing field for industries and also give the end user the confidence that the critical data is secure.”

Many commentators also have questioned the timing of the health ministry’s draft law, given that India is currently in the process of creating a framework and an overarching legislation on data privacy and security. “It is curious that the Ministry has chosen to not wait for the draft law, before framing and releasing their draft,” Sinha and Mohandas said, “This suggests a lack of coordination between the different ministries, and if due care is not taken, could lead to inconsistencies across sectoral regulations of data.”

However, they said, it is possible that the health ministry will wait for the Supreme Court verdict in the Aadhaar litigation before finalising the bill.

(Singh is a contributing editor with IndiaSpend.)

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/india-spend-madhur-singh-may-31-2018-india-proposes-law-to-give-indians-complete-control-of-their-digital-data

Patanjali's Kimbho swiftly retreats over security scare, ripped on Twitter

Admin — 2018-06-01T14:15:44Z

Swadeshi" messaging app targeted at WhatsApp taken off from app stores hours after launch.

The article by Alnoor Peermohamed and Manavi Kapur was published in the Business Standard on May 31, 2018. Gurshabad Grover was quoted.

The fate of Patanjali’s “swadeshi” instant messaging app Kimbho was sealed in the span of just a few hours, thanks to viral messages being shared on Facebook-owned WhatsApp, the app that the Baba Ramdev-promoted company was trying to combat.

Patanjali on Thursday launched Kimbho with the sole intent of checking the rise of messaging giant WhatsApp in India. However, after Kimbho’s various data vulnerabilities were exposed by the security expert and whistleblower who goes by the pseudonym Elliot Alderson on Twitter, the app made a quiet exit from Google’s Play Store.

Jokes surrounding the app’s quick retreat spread like wildfire on rival platform WhatsApp. It was perhaps the quickest rise and fall in the popularity of a mobile application.

Alderson, who has exposed data breaches in the UIDAI’s website, took to Twitter to rip apart the Kimbho app. “This @KimbhoApp is a joke, next time before making press statements, hire competent developers... If it is not clear, for the moment don't install this app,” he wrote. His next tweet sent alarm bells ringing among users: “The #Kimbho #android #app is a security disaster. I can access the messages of all the users...”

Kimbho, though, claims that every message on its platform is encrypted by the Advance Encryption Standard and that it saves “no data on our servers or cloud”. But Alderson pointed out that the one-time password security could be worked around. “It's possible to choose a security code between 0001 and 9999 and send it to the number of your choice,” he tweeted. Kimbho, explained as a Sanskrit greeting by S K Tijarawala, Ramdev’s spokerperson, on Twitter, is also a patched-up application over the existing Bolo messaging app.

This is most likely the reason the app was taken off the Google Play Store. “There were basic authentication and authorisation related vulnerabilities where an end user can see the data of other users. These flaws may be the reason the developers took down the app. Google flags such things,” said Anand Prakash, a Bengaluru-based ethical hacker.

“WhatsApp uses end-to-end encryption that essentially means even they can’t access the messages you send. But Kimbho, on the other hand, was not using end-to-end security and probably even saving every message as plain text on its server,” adds Gurshabad Grover, policy officer at the Centre for Internet and Society.

Google did not respond to queries about whether the developer took the app down or Google flagged it as unsecure. Kimbho declared on its Twitter handle that its app was removed from the Play Store because of heavy traffic, claiming that it was downloaded 150,000 times in a mere three hours since its launch.

On Apple’s App Store, it was trending in the social networking category at the fourth position in India, just below WhatsApp, Facebook and Facebook’s Messenger, and above popular messaging apps such as Skype, LinkedIn and hike messenger.

Tijarawala had announced Kimbho’s launch on Twitter, calling it an app developed by the “shishyas” (disciples) and “navdikshit sadhus” (newly ordained priests) of Ramdev and Acharya Balkrishna, managing director, Patanjali Ayurved and co-founder, Patanjali Yogpeeth in Haridwar. Tijarawala’s tweet also claimed that this app was built using “swadeshi” techniques, though what these are remains a mystery. Emails, text messages and calls to Tijarawala went unanswered.

In keeping with an “Indian” aesthetic, the app’s logo has a “shankh” (conch shell), perhaps signifying a war cry against foreign-born WhatsApp, which has over 200 million active users in India. The conch shell also blends well with Kimbho’s tag line, “Ab Bharat Bolega” (now India will speak). But that is where its tenuous Indianness begins to crumble.

While the app was registered as a product of Patanjali Ayurved on the Play Store, the developer on Apple’s App Store is Appdios Inc, a San Francisco-based app development company. Aditi Kamal and Sumit Kumar are this company’s founders according to LinkedIn. The duo has worked with technology giants such as Google and Apple and hold masters degrees from University of Southern California in the US. A blonde man features on the screenshots that the app has featured on its landing page on the App Store.

Taking forward Bolo’s keyboard suggestions, cheekily called “Quickies”, Kimbho offers pre-typed messages such as “hugs and kisses”, “what the heck” and “parents are watching”. Whether these millennial-friendly features and Kimbho itself are an attempt to get young millennials in touch with their “swadeshi” roots remains to be seen.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/business-standard-manavi-kapur-alnoor-peermohamed-may-31-2018-patanjali-s-kimbho-swiftly-retreats-over-security-scare-ripped-on-twitter

May 2018 Newsletter

praskrishna — 2018-06-12T14:03:24Z

CIS newsletter for the month of May 2018.

Dear readers,

Previous issues of the newsletters can be accessed here.

Highlights
The Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) has published a collection of stories of the impact of internet shutdowns on people's lives in the country. The stories were provided by 101 Reporters. The project was funded by Facebook and MacArthur Foundation. The report edited by Debasmita Haldar, Ambika Tandon and Swaraj Barooah can be accessed here. Anubha Sinha on behalf of CIS participated in the 36th Session of WIPO SCCR at Geneva from May 28 to June 1, 2018. CIS made statements on Draft Action Plan for Educational and Research Institutions and Persons with Other Disabilities, Draft Action Plan for Libraries, Archives and Museums, Limitations and Exceptions Agenda, and Proposed Treaty for the Protection of Broadcasting Organizations. CIS was one among the 14 NGOs which circulated a letter that raised concerns about the draft Broadcasting Treaty. India's Department of Telecommunications released a draft new telecom policy, titled ‘Draft National Digital Communications Policy 2018’. Anubha Sinha wrote an analysis on this in the Wire on May 6, 2018. Singapore based Asian Business Law Institute published a compendium on “Regulation of cross-border transfer of personal data in Asia”. The compendium contains 14 detailed reports. The chapter titled Jurisdictional Report India was authored by Amber Sinha and Elonnai Hickok. The purpose of privacy notices and choice mechanisms is to notify users of the data practices of a system, so they can make informed privacy decisions, wrote Saumyaa Naidu in a blog post which was edited by Elonnai Hickok. Divij Joshi wrote a report that assesses the compliance of the Indian intermediary liability framework with the Manila Principles on Intermediary Liability, and recommends substantive legislative changes to bring the legal framework in line with the Manila Principles. The report was edited by Elonnai Hickok and Swaraj Barooah. Data is potentially a toxic asset, if it is not collected, processed, secured and shared in the appropriate way wrote Amber Sinha in an article published in the Economic & Political Weekly. Saman Goudarzi, Elonnai Hickok and Amber Sinha wrote a report titled AI in the Banking and Finance Industry in India which seeks to map the present state of use of AI in the banking and financial sector in India. The report was edited by Shyam Ponappa. Mapping was done by Shweta Mohandas. Pranav M Bidare, Sidharth Ray, and Aayush Rathi provided research assistance in preparing this report. The National Register of Citizens (NRC) exercise in Assam focuses on updating the list of Indian citizens in the state. Khetrimayum Monish Singh and Nazifa Ahmed wrote a research paper that has provided a discourse analysis of media content and user opinions on Facebook, and media responses on the NRC official website. All posts related to this study can be found here.

Highlights

The Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) has published a collection of stories of the impact of internet shutdowns on people's lives in the country. The stories were provided by 101 Reporters. The project was funded by Facebook and MacArthur Foundation. The report edited by Debasmita Haldar, Ambika Tandon and Swaraj Barooah can be accessed here.
Anubha Sinha on behalf of CIS participated in the 36th Session of WIPO SCCR at Geneva from May 28 to June 1, 2018. CIS made statements on Draft Action Plan for Educational and Research Institutions and Persons with Other Disabilities, Draft Action Plan for Libraries, Archives and Museums, Limitations and Exceptions Agenda, and Proposed Treaty for the Protection of Broadcasting Organizations. CIS was one among the 14 NGOs which circulated a letter that raised concerns about the draft Broadcasting Treaty.
India's Department of Telecommunications released a draft new telecom policy, titled ‘Draft National Digital Communications Policy 2018’. Anubha Sinha wrote an analysis on this in the Wire on May 6, 2018.
Singapore based Asian Business Law Institute published a compendium on “Regulation of cross-border transfer of personal data in Asia”. The compendium contains 14 detailed reports. The chapter titled Jurisdictional Report India was authored by Amber Sinha and Elonnai Hickok.
The purpose of privacy notices and choice mechanisms is to notify users of the data practices of a system, so they can make informed privacy decisions, wrote Saumyaa Naidu in a blog post which was edited by Elonnai Hickok.
Divij Joshi wrote a report that assesses the compliance of the Indian intermediary liability framework with the Manila Principles on Intermediary Liability, and recommends substantive legislative changes to bring the legal framework in line with the Manila Principles. The report was edited by Elonnai Hickok and Swaraj Barooah.
Data is potentially a toxic asset, if it is not collected, processed, secured and shared in the appropriate way wrote Amber Sinha in an article published in the Economic & Political Weekly.
Saman Goudarzi, Elonnai Hickok and Amber Sinha wrote a report titled AI in the Banking and Finance Industry in India which seeks to map the present state of use of AI in the banking and financial sector in India. The report was edited by Shyam Ponappa. Mapping was done by Shweta Mohandas. Pranav M Bidare, Sidharth Ray, and Aayush Rathi provided research assistance in preparing this report.
The National Register of Citizens (NRC) exercise in Assam focuses on updating the list of Indian citizens in the state. Khetrimayum Monish Singh and Nazifa Ahmed wrote a research paper that has provided a discourse analysis of media content and user opinions on Facebook, and media responses on the NRC official website. All posts related to this study can be found here.

Articles:

The Huawei pointer (Shyam Ponappa; Business Standard and Organizing India Blogspot; May 3, 2018).

India's Draft Telecom Policy Needs to Bridge the Gap Between Intent and Execution (Anubha Sinha; Wire; May 6, 2018).
India's Data Protection Framework Will Need to Treat Privacy as a Social and Not Just an Individual Good (Amber Sinha; Economic & Political Weekly, Volume 53, Issue No. 18, 05 May, 2018).
Digital Native: Web of Wander (Nishant Shah; Indian Express; May 20, 2018).

CIS in the News:

India's National ID Project Brings Pain to Those it Aims to Help (Aayush Soni; Ozy.com; May 11, 2018).
Aadhaar Remains an Unending Security Nightmare for a Billion Indians (Karan Saini; Wire; May 11, 2018).
More errors in Aadhaar data in Andhra Pradesh than in voter database (U Sudhakar Reddy; Times of India; May 18, 2018).
Putting women human rights activists on the world map (Sarumathi K.; Hindu; May 19, 2018).
An open data ecosystem can boost India's GDP by $22 B and double farmer income (Sohini Mitter; Your Story; May 23, 2018).
Complying with Europe’s GDPR will be a “matter of survival” for Indian IT firms (Ananya Bhattacharya; Quartz India; May 24, 2018).
Don't blindly forward WhatsApp messages. You could be sued (Rajitha Menon and Surupasree Sarmmah; Deccan Herald; May 29, 2018).
Alexa’s recording leak in US ‘echoes’ privacy issues here (Mugdha Variyar; Economic Times; May 29, 2018).
Election Experiment Proves Facebook Just Doesn't Care About Fake News In India (Visvak; Huffington Post; May 30, 2018).
India Proposes Law to Give Indians Complete Control of their Digital Health Data (Madhur Singh; India Spend; May 31, 2018).
Patanjali's Kimbho swiftly retreats over security scare, ripped on Twitter (Alnoor Peermohamed and Manavi Kapur; Business Standard; May 31, 2018).

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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.

►Copyright and Patent

Blog Entries

CIS participated in the 36th SCCR held in Geneva from May 28 to June 1, 2018 and made the following statements:

Statement on the Proposed Treaty for the Protection of Broadcasting Organizations (Anubha Sinha; May 28, 2018).
NGOs circulate letter at WIPO SCCR/36 raising serious concerns about draft Broadcasting Treaty (Anubha Sinha; May 29, 2018).
Draft Action Plan for Educational and Research Institutions and Persons with Other Disabilities (Anubha Sinha; May 31, 2018).
Statement on the Draft Action Plan for Libraries, Archives and Museums (Anubha Sinha; May 31, 2018).
Statement on Limitations and Exceptions Agenda (Anubha Sinha; May 31, 2018).

Participation in Event

RightsCon Toronto 2018 (Organized by RightsCon; Beanfield Centre at Exhibition Place, Toronto; May 17, 2018). Maggie Huang, Amba Kak, Rohini Lakshané, Vidushi Marda, Elonnai Hickok and Anubha Sinha were among the speakers at the event. Amber Sinha remotely participated in a private meeting on 'Strategizing Civil Society Roles in the Artificial Intelligence Debate'. Anubha Sinha, Maggie Huang, Rohini Lakshané and Vidushi Marda presented their findings from the Pervasive Technologies project in a panel titled "Cheap and Chipper: IP in India's Affordable Smartphones". Prof Michael Geist moderated the session. Anubha Sinha and Vidushi Marda participated remotely. Elonnai Hickok participated in these sessions: IDRC cyber policy meeting; GNI board meeting; GNI learning session on MLATs; FOC-AN meeting; GNI session on Intermediary Liability.

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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

Reports

Methods workshop on researching Future of Work in India (Natallia Khaniejo and Aayush Rathi; May 10, 2018).
AI in the Banking and Finance Industry in India (Saman Goudarzi, Elonnai Hickok and Amber Sinha; May 14, 2018)
Indian Intermediary Liability Regime: Compliance with the Manila Principles on Intermediary Liability (Divij Joshi; May 20, 2018). The report was edited by Elonnai Hickok and Swaraj Barooah.
Jurisdictional Report India (Compendium on Regulation of Cross-Border Transfers of Personal Data in Asia; Amber Sinha and Elonnai Hickok; May 31, 2018).

Blog Entry

Design Concerns in Creating Privacy Notices (Saumyaa Naidu; May 29, 2018). The blog post was edited by Elonnai Hickok.

Participation in Events

Meeting of Coalition for an Inclusive Approach on the Trafficking Bill (Organized by Alternative Law Forum; Bengaluru; May 3, 2018).
Fairness, Transparency and Accountable AI (Organized by DeepMind; London; May 10, 2018). Amber Sinha participated remotely in the inaugural meeting.
Rootconf 2018 (Organized by HasGeek; Bengaluru; May 11 - 12, 2018). Gurshabad Grover, Natallia Khaniejo and Aayush Rathi attended the event.
Inter Movements Open Forum: Trafficking Bill (Organized by Sangram, Naz Foundation, NNSW, Tarshi and VAMP; India International Centre, New Delhi; May 18, 2018).
IETF Indian Community Meetup: RFCs We Love (IoT edition) (Organized by Indian IETF Community; Zoomcar's office; Bengaluru; May 19, 2018). Gurshabad Grover and Sandeep Kumar attended 'RFCs We Love Meetup'.
Emerging Technologies: Issues & Way Forward (Organized by Technology Policy team at the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy; Bengaluru; May 23 - 24, 2018).
Privacy in the Digital Age: Addressing Common Challenges, Seizing Opportunities (Organized by DG Justice and Consumers and European Union; New Delhi; May 25, 2018).

►Free Speech and Expression

Report

Internet Shutdown Stories (Edited by Debasmita Haldar, Ambika Tandon and Swaraj Barooah; Foreword by Sunil Abraham; May 17, 2018). Case studies from the states of Jammu & Kashmir, Haryana, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Telangana, West Bengal, Tripura, Manipur, Nagaland, and Uttar Pradesh have been highlighted in this compilation.

Blog Entry

DIDP Request #30 - Enquiry about the employee pay structure at ICANN (Paul Kurian and Akriti Bopanna; May 26, 2018).

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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:

Articles

The Huawei pointer (Shyam Ponappa; Business Standard and Organizing India Blogspot; May 3, 2018).
India's Draft Telecom Policy Needs to Bridge the Gap Between Intent and Execution (Anubha Sinha; Wire; May 6, 2018).

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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:

Draft Research Paper

Infrastructure as Digital Politics: Media Practices and the Assam NRC Citizen Identification Project (Khetrimayum Monish Singh and Nafiza Ahmed; May 15, 2018).

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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/may-2018-newsletter-1

Comments on Draft National Policy on Official Statistics

Gurshabad Grover — 2018-06-07T01:58:22Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/files/comments-on-draft-national-policy-on-official-statistics

Network Disruptions Report by Global Network Initiative

akriti — 2018-06-12T01:31:40Z

Around 70% of all known shutdowns in the world took place in India in 2017. The same year Telecom Authority of India (TRAI) released the “Temporary Suspension of Internet Services” giving State and Central Government officials the power to terminate Internet services as per the guidelines.

The report by Global Network Initiative can be read here.

However S.144 of the Criminal Procedure Code as well Section 5 of the Telegraph Act are still used as legal grounds. The former targets unlawful assembly while the latter gives authorities the right to prevent transmission of messages, applicable to messages sent over the Internet as well. A case in the Gujarat High Court challenging the validity of using S.144 of the CrPC was dismissed essentially stating the Government could use the section to enforce shutdowns to maintain law and order.

The right to Internet has been accepted as a fundamental right by the United Nations and one which, cannot be disassociated from the exercise of freedom of expression and opinion and the right to peaceful assembly. These are rights guaranteed by the Constitution, affirmed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and thus should be provided, both, online and offline. Online movements are unpredictable and dynamic making Governments fearful of their lack of control over content hosting websites. Their fear becomes their de facto perception of online services resulting in network shutdowns regardless of the reality on ground.

Given the rising importance of this issue, Global Network Initiative has published a report on such Network Disruptions by Jan Rydzak . A former Google Policy fellow and now a PhD candidate at the University of Arizona, he, conducts research on the nexus between technology and protest. The report, which uses India as a case study calls for more attention on network disruptions, the 'new form of digital repression' and delves into its impact on human rights. Rydzak aims at widening the gambit of affected rights by discussing the civil and political rights of freedom of assembly, right to equality, religious belief and such. These are ramifications not widely discussed so far and helps shine a light on the collateral damage incurred due to these shutdowns. Through a multitude of interviews with various stakeholders, the author brings to forefront the human rights implications of network disruptions on different groups of individuals such as women, immigrants and certain ethnic groups. These dangers are even more when it comes to vulnerable populations and the report does a comprehensive analysis of all of the above.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/network-disruptions-report-by-global-network-initiative

Why NPCI and Facebook need urgent regulatory attention

sunil — 2018-06-12T02:07:42Z

The world’s oldest networked infrastructure, money, is increasingly dematerialising and fusing with the world’s latest networked infrastructure, the Internet.

The article was published in the Economic Times on June 10, 2018.

As the network effects compound, disruptive acceleration hurtle us towards financial utopia, or dystopia. Our fate depends on what we get right and what we get wrong with the law, code and architecture, and the market.

The Internet, unfortunately, has completely transformed from how it was first architected. From a federated, generative network based on free software and open standards, into a centralised, environment with an increasing dependency on proprietary technologies.

In countries like Myanmar, some citizens misconstrue a single social media website, Facebook, for the internet, according to LirneAsia research. India is another market where Facebook could still get its brand mistaken for access itself by some users coming online. This is Facebook put so many resources into the battle over Basics, in the run-up to India’s network neutrality regulation. an odd corporation.

On hand, its business model is what some term surveillance capitalism. On the other hand, by acquiring WhatsApp and by keeping end-toend (E2E) encryption “on”, it has ensured that one and a half billion users can concretely exercise their right to privacy. At the time of the acquisition, WhatsApp founders believed Facebook’s promise that it would never compromise on their high standards of privacy and security. But 18 months later, Facebook started harvesting data and diluting E2E.

In April this year, my colleague Ayush Rathi and I wrote in Asia Times that WhatsApp no longer deletes multimedia on download but continues to store it on its servers. Theoretically, using the very same mechanism, Facebook could also be retaining encrypted text messages and comprehensive metadata from WhatsApp users indefinitely without making this obvious.

My friend, Srikanth Lakshmanan, founder of the CashlessConsumer collective, is a keen observer of this space. He says in India, “we are seeing an increasing push towards a bank-led model, thanks to National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) and its control over Unified Payments Interface (UPI), which is also known as the cashless layer of the India Stack.”

NPCI is best understood as a shape shifter. Arundhati Ramanathan puts it best when she says “depending on the time and context, NPCI is a competitor. It is a platform. It is a regulator. It is an industry association. It is a profitable non-profit. It is a rule maker. It is a judge. It is a bystander.”

This results in UPI becoming, what Lakshmanan calls, a NPCI-club-good rather than a new generation digital public good. He also points out that NPCI has an additional challenge of opacity — “it doesn’t provide any metrics on transaction failures, and being a private body, is not subject to proactive or reactive disclosure requirements under the RTI.”

Technically, he says, UPI increases fragility in our financial ecosystem since it “is a centralised data maximisation network where NPCI will always have the superset of data.” Given that NPCI has opted for a bank-led model in India, it is very unlikely that Facebook able to leverage its monopoly the social media market duopoly it shares with in the digital advertising market to become a digital payments monopoly.

However, NCPI and Facebook both share the following traits — one, an insatiable appetite for personal information; two, a fetish for hypercentralisation; three, a marginal commitment to transparency, and four, poor track record as a custodian of consumer trust. The marriage between these like-minded entities has already had a dubious beginning.

Previously, every financial technology wanting direct access to the NPCI infrastructure had to have a tie-up with a bank. But for Facebook and Google, as they are large players, it was decided to introduce a multi-bank model. This was definitely the right thing to do from a competition perspective. But, unfortunately, the marriage between the banks and the internet giant was arranged by NPCI in an opaque process and WhatsApp was exempted from the full NPCI certification process for its beta launch.

Both NPCI and Facebook need urgent regulatory attention. A modern data protection law and a more proactive competition regulator is required for Facebook. The NPCI will hopefully also be subjected to the upcoming data protection law. But it also requires a range of design, policy and governance fixes to ensure greater privacy and security via data minimisation and decentralisation; greater accountability and transparency to the public; separation of powers for better governance and open access policies to prevent anti-competitive behaviour.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/economic-times-june-10-2018-sunil-abraham-why-npci-and-facebook-need-urgent-regulatory-attention

Anushka finds support for her anti-litter tirade

Admin — 2018-06-23T01:11:25Z

She is well within her rights to shame the affluent man who threw plastic waste out of his swanky car, many say.

The article by Nina C. George was published in Deccan Herald on June 19, 2018. Swaraj Barooah was quoted.

On Tuesday, movie star Anushka Sharma caught a man throwing out litter from the window his luxury car, and took him to task. In a 17-second-long clip that went viral, she gave a furious dressing down to the man, identified as Arhhan Singh, sitting in a chaffeur-driven sedan.

Arhhan Singh later described her as a “crazy roadside person”. Many started trolling Anushka. Her cricketer-husband Virat Kohli soon jumped in to back her and her cause.

Elli AvrRam

The actor says Anushka was right in shaming Arhhan Singh. “It is everybody’s duty to stop littering,” she says.

Pooja Chopra

The actor says the video is a message loud and clear to all those in chauffeur-driven cars who don’t think twice before littering. “The man who threw out plastic should have apologised. It’s not about Anushka flaunting her celebrity status. I would have also done it had I been in her place," she says.

MK Raghavendra

The well-known film critic feels celebrities have, for once, proved useful. “Anybody who sees people throwing garbage on the street must take exception to it. Throwing garbage is a social nuisance and I think it should be ideally treated as a minor criminal offence."

Rahul Rajashekharan

Actor and Mr. India runner-up says, “She wasn’t rude and was only telling the man not to throw garbage. Educated people throwing garbage on the street is unacceptable.” People in Mumbai have been working towards cleaning their beaches, and movements across the world are campaigning against the use of plastic. She did the right thing by posting the video on social media, he says.

Raghu Dixit

The singer and composer says he has protested against anything that “goes against basic civic sense.” The people he confronts, he says, sometimes apologise, and at other times get defensive. “It’s not about being a celebrity. We should decisively act towards making our country litter-free," he says.

Guru Prasanna, Advocate, HC, Karnataka

It was natural for Anushka to question somebody throwing garbage on the street. The damaging part was perhaps Virat Kohli’s tweet calling Arhhan Singh, the man in the car, “brainless.” Arhhan Singh and his family have taken offence to the public shaming but they don’t really have a legal case against Anushka and Virat. “There is no action here against which a person can claim any sort of injury. If there is a conscious campaign to bring down somebody’s reputation then it could have legal implications."

Swaraj Barooah, senior programme manager, Centre for Internet and Society, Bengaluru

“It may be poor form to shame a private person, as the point about littering could be made as easily without revealing the identity of the person. But it would be incorrect to claim a legitimate expectation of privacy while committing a public act, which is littering, in this case. On the question of whether this is harassment: This is unlikely to be seen as a legal case of harassment, as it is just one act, and not one of many acts. Nor do Virat and Anushka have a history of going about and ‘shaming’ people online.”

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/deccan-herald-june-19-2018-anushka-finds-support-her-anti-litter-tirade

Death By WhatsApp

Admin — 2018-06-25T15:47:41Z

The fatal messages were both in text and in audio. They were in Telugu, Kannada, Tamil, Hindi, Assamese and Gujarati among others.

This was published by News18.com on June 25, 2018. Sunil Abraham was quoted.

Guys please be on high alert10:24 PM

Three kids were kidnapped from my friend’s area this morning.. There were 10 guys giving biscuits and people from that area have caught all 10 n 5 more based on their info...10:24 PM

Cops arrived at scene and informed that 400 people have landed in Hyderabad (or Bangalore or Chennai or KarbiAnglong or Singhbhum or any other place) for child trafficking. Check my next video and repost. Parents pls be on high alert.10:25 PM

The Snowball Effect

No one had any idea where the messages originated from or who was the original sender. But when it comes to the safety of one’s children, these questions become irrelevant.

Maybe, if someone had stopped to ask these questions, this fake WhatsApp message wouldn’t have led to 22 murders in one year. These 22 ‘outsiders’ were lynched by mobs on the mere suspicion of being the non-existent ‘child lifters’.

Phony as a three-dollar bill, the message spread like forest fire from Jharkhand to Tamil Nadu and Assam to Gujarat. In each state, it preyed on the raging ‘local versus outsider’ sentiment. It started doing the rounds of southern states around the time when political discourse was hijacked by the ‘North versus South’ debate.

It might be easy now to scoff at those who believed and further shared the fake message, but hindsight is always a perfect 20/20.

In fact, according to a research by University of Warwick, 40% of fake news cannot be spotted by average educated adults. Even if they do feel something is amiss, only 45% adults can place their finger on what exposes the news as fake.

Social media and internet penetration have only aggravated the problem in India, where the written word is rarely doubted.

Social media and internet penetration have only aggravated the problem in India, where the written word is rarely doubted.

In the last four years, social media usage in the country has gone up by 150% with an 83% increase in smartphone ownership. Such proliferation and the availability of competitive data plans have ensured digital intrusion in areas where people have had no exposure to the concept of fake news or digital privacy.

Caveat emptor does not apply in this case, says Sunil Abraham, the Executive Director of Bangalore-based research organisation Centre for Internet and Society.

A Timeline of Deaths

CHAPTER 1

The Propaganda Machine

WhatsApp has unfortunately become a fertile breeding ground for parasites that prey on fear. At present, it has 200 million active users. These users are potential victims of fake news given the complex form of anonymity that WhatsApp offers. It is mainly to arrest the fake news propaganda that the first step in violence-hit areas is to suspend internet services.

In this case, too, the original culprits took cover in this anonymity and experts believe they may never be unmasked. While Facebook and other social media websites are under pressure to address the menace, an inter-personal software, such as WhatsApp, skirts the scanner.

“Those who are passing the rumours cannot be traced or haven’t been traced purely because they are on WhatsApp groups. My guess is that they would have started it (the rumours) on WhatsApp because it is difficult to trace. Once it starts, it (the message) makes its way to everywhere. Somebody gets it on WhatsApp, they put it on their Facebook profile or forward to other WhatsApp users. It goes across multiple platforms. It is not limited to one platform,” says Alt News co-founder Pratik Sinha.

Those who are passing the rumours cannot be traced or haven’t been traced purely because they are on WhatsApp groups

Given its penetration, WhatsApp has emerged as a cheap medium to propagate hate.

Police officials investigating the murder of senior journalist and Left-leaning thinker Gauri Lankesh in Bengaluru were surprised to find out that a key suspect was an ‘admin’ for hundreds of groups.

KT Naveen Kumar, a college dropout, floated his outfit ‘Hindu Yuva Sena’ in Mandya near Bengaluru three years ago. The Hindutva activist confessed to the police that he created several WhatsApp groups — Hindu Yuva Sena, Jago Hindu Maddur, Bajrang Maddur and Kaveri Boys among others — to propagate his ‘Save Hinduism’ agenda.

Once you create a WhatsApp group and add ‘participants’, you are free to make others the ‘admin’, who in turn can add scores of people to the group. There is no known cap to the number of participants in a WhatsApp group.

How To Spot Fake News

CHAPTER 2

Jharkhand

The fake message on ‘child lifters’ added fuel to fire in Jharkhand, which has been plagued by child abductions and kidnappings for years. Young girls from the state have been known to be abducted and forced into modern-day slavery in other states.

Villagers, who had never heard of the concept of fake news, bought into the rumours. And since a photo can say a 1,000 fake words as well, graphic images freely available on the internet were used alongside the message. The propaganda did the trick and aroused murderous rage among the local tribal population.

At least nine people were killed in separate incidents over as many days in Singhbhum district. Angry mobs beat and hacked the victims to death, assuming they were saving their young ones from ‘child lifting’ gangs that were rumoured to be abducting children for organ trade.

The death toll would have been higher had protest marches against the fake news and the killings not been held in cities like Jamshedpur. While these protests did not get the police to act against hate mongers on social media, the uproar publicised the fact that the message was a fake one.

Over the next few days, alleged ‘child lifters’ were caught in other villages, but were duly handed over to the police.

The disinformation campaign died a natural death in Jharkhand, but moved to a new hunting ground.

CHAPTER 3

Tamil Nadu

More than 2,000 km from Jharkhand, the message landed in Tamil Nadu with an additional detail — be wary of ‘North India people’. It warned of a gang of 400 ‘North Indians’ out to lure children for organ trade. These people, the message added, may try to gain entry inside homes on the pretext of being repair men or hawkers. Again, the images of mutilated bodies did the trick.

No one stopped to think whether a ‘gang of 400 outsiders’ could travel undetected. No one called the 100 helpline to confirm the rumour with the police. The mere ‘police-arrived-at-the-scene’ was enough to convince people of its authenticity.

A man in Thiruvalluvar, north of Chennai, became the state’s first victim of the fake news. A mob beat him mercilessly and hung him from a bridge in Pulicat on May 10.

The mob didn’t even give her a chance to be heard.

The second lynching came in less than 24 hours. This time the victim was an elderly woman identified as Rukmani in the temple town of Thiruvannamalai. She was returning from a temple visit with her relatives when they stopped their car at a village. Rukmani was handing out ‘foreign chocolates’ to local children when word spread that a woman was ‘luring’ kids with sweets.

“The mob didn’t even give her a chance to be heard. Giving out chocolates to children doesn’t make you a child trafficker. I’m scared to even step out after this incident,” says a relative who was in the car with Rukmani and was grievously injured.

Police officials rounded up at least 30 people and charged them with murder.

CHAPTER 4

Andhra Pradesh & Telangana

The mob madness spread to Andhra Pradesh and Telangana next, again preying on anti-migrant sentiment. The first attack was reported mid-May when 12 people were suspected to be members of ‘Parthi’ gang, a group notorious for dacoity in Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra.

A couple of days later, a mob beat up two beggars in Vishakhapatnam, killing one of them.

Another horrific attack unfolded in Hyderabad where a transgender was stoned to death by a mob of 200. The victim had travelled from Mahabubnagar district with three others to seek alms in the holy month of Ramzan.

Soon, the fake news reached other districts. A man visiting a relative in Nizamabad was killed when he failed to give ‘satisfactory’ explanation to the mob about his presence there.

A murder in Yadadri district of Telangana, an attack on nine people in Vikarabad district and an assault on a woman at the Guntur railway station followed within days.

CHAPTER 5

Karnataka

The mob mentality fuelled by the fake news campaign reached Karnataka, where the ‘local versus outsider’ debate had reached fever pitch during election campaigning.

WhatsApp users in Bengaluru, India’s Silicon Valley, started receiving warnings on ‘child lifters’ in Kannada.

“Don’t leave your kids unattended..if you find such traffickers, tie them up and call the cops (sic),” one such message advised.04:24 PM

A 26-year-old construction labourer from Rajasthan, identified as Kalu Ram, who had come to look for work was tied with a rope, dragged through the streets of Chamarajpet in west Bengaluru. Beaten with bats and other household ‘weapons’, he succumbed to his injuries.

According to Additional Commissioner (West) BK Singh, India saw a similar kind of 'madness’ 20 years ago with the ‘Ganesha drinking milk’ rumour, but WhatsApp has taken it to a dangerous new height.

“This hapless man was walking alone. Two persons standing there saw him and started following him to a shop just 100 metres away. Suddenly, a crowd gathered. People brought whatever they could find in their homes — cricket bats, stumps, ropes etc,” Singh says.

“Once a crowd becomes a mob, you cannot control it. Many of them may be meek persons individually, but they are taken in by the presence of the mob. The mob thinks that if they act collectively, police won’t act and they can get away easily,” Singh adds.

People brought whatever they could find in their homes — cricket bats, stumps, ropes etc.

Around 20 people were arrested based on CCTV footage and videos taken by bystanders, who did nothing to help the hapless victim. One of the main accused is 26-year-old Anbu, who has other criminal cases pending against him. Four women and a minor were among those in custody. All of them face murder charges now.

The spread of the fake news in Tamil Nadu may also have led to the violence.

Pension Mohalla in Bakshi Garden where the attack took place has a dominant Tamil population. Some of them could have been aware of the rumours before it made its way to Bengaluru. When the WhatsApp messages started doing the Silicon Valley’s rounds, it may have been perceived as a confirmation of the fake news.

Another person was killed under similar circumstances in Salem. The state witnessed seven more such attacks.

CHAPTER 6

Assam

The latest casualty of the fake news was reported in Assam, again a state which deals with anti-migrant sentiment.

On June 8, two youths from Guwahati were battered to death in Karbi Anglong district on suspicion of being child lifters. Police said Abhijit Nath and Nilutpal Das were on their way to the Kanthe Langshu picnic spot when their vehicle was attacked by a group of men at Panjuri Kachari village, 16 km from Dokmoka town.

Eyewitnesses said the two boys were brutally beaten with bamboo poles and wood, and tortured to death by a mob of allegedly inebriated villagers.

“It happened when some locals informed a group of villagers about two men travelling in a black car with an abducted child. These few villagers were drinking in the roadside dhaba and immediately called upon more people to trace the car and catch them. The mob stopped the car and surrounded the two boys inside. The village elders tried to stop them from beating the boys, but they would not listen,” said a local shopkeeper.

The two boys were brutally beaten with bamboo poles and wood, and tortured to death by a mob of allegedly inebriated villagers.

This incident was yet again preceded by paranoia fuelled by WhatsApp forwards. The messages warned people of 'sopadhora' (child lifters) being on the prowl. Many in Karbi Anglong, one of the most backward areas of the country, took those messages as gospel.

“We have arrested 35 people so far. Some of them are directly involved in the attack, while one has been arrested for posting objectionable content on social media, inciting communal violence soon after the incident took place. There’s no substance to the rumour of ‘sopadhora’ (child lifters) in the area. But it had created a fear psychosis among people here,” says Agarwal.

Death By Whatsapp

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/death-by-whatsapp

Jindal varsity's international affairs students shine in job market

Admin — 2018-06-26T01:06:11Z

Turning a common perception on its head, international affairs students of O.P. Jindal Global University here have shown that pursuing a so-called "conventional" course can also open several doors of recruitment including in multinational companies, think tanks and international NGOs.

The article was published in Economic Times on June 19, 2018.

This year, Indian Political Action Committee (I-PAC), Care India and Development Alternatives led the recruitment for the students of the Jindal School of International Affairs (JSIA), the university said in a statement on Monday.

The corporate and non-profit institutions which recruited JSIA's students include KPMG, Grant Thornton, Justice and Care, Deloitte, CREA, ESSAR Foundation, CRY, Godrej Culture Lab, Akshaya Patra Foundation, Atma Foundation, Sattva Consulting, The Centre for Internet and Society, and Global Trust.

"In the past, the study of international affairs was seen as leading only to civil service jobs or higher education ending in academic jobs," said C. Raj Kumar, Vice Chancellor, O.P. Jindal Global University.

"JSIA has diversified the field significantly and showed the path to a variety of full-time positions for its graduating students," he added.

JSIA combines the scholarly weights of three inter-related disciplines -- international relations, international law and international business.

"We expect several domestic and international non-profit and for-profit entities to hire from our future graduating batch as several organisations have signed Memorandum of Understanding (MoUs) with our university for offering internships to our students," Sreeram Chaulia, Dean of JSIA.

More than 40 organisations have led JSIA to achieve 95 per cent internship placements in diversified fields this year, the statement said.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/economic-times-june-19-2018-jindal-varsitys-international-affairs-students-shine-in-job-market

'Full belief in fake texts shows cops not trusted'

Admin — 2018-06-26T01:21:04Z

Nilotpal Basu and Abhijeet Nath, an audio engineer and digital artiste, were beaten to death in Assam's Karbi Anglong last week based on rumours that they were kidnappers.

The article was published in the Times of India on June 18, 2018. Pranesh Prakash was quoted. Inputs from Kim Arora.

A manipulated WhatsApp video is said to be the source of the panic. While it is just the medium and not the reason behind the killings, WhatsApp, with its 250-million users in India, allows rumours to travel farther than ever before. "In many non-urban areas, such WhatsApp videos are the first form in which people encounter the internet on their phones. They don't always go online and verify them," says Jency Jacob, who runs the fact checking outlet Boom. This gullibility can't be explained just by class or education, he says. "Technology makes it easy to believe what you want to believe and spread it," says Jacob.

The spread of internet gives wings to rumours in pockets where kidnappings are a real fear. The states where lynchings have been reported are also among those with high figures for child abductions. Technology has helped rumours travel greater distances with greater impunity, says Pranesh Prakash, fellow at Centre for Internet and Society, recalling that child abduction rumours led to a lynching in Tamil Nadu in 2015 too, but this time, "such rumours have spread all over South India". And as the Karbi Anglong killings show, to Assam as well.

WhatsApp being an encrypted platform, police cannot trace the source of the rumourmongering. WhatsApp did not respond to TOI's queries on tracing origins of hate messages, but a spokesperson shared a statement saying they "block automated messages" and are educating people about spotting fake news and hoaxes.

In many cases, law enforcement has failed at a more basic level. Child abduction is a disturbing rumour, designed to provoke an emotional reaction, but other anxieties are at work too. "Rumours tend to escalate when there is a lack of official information, and clearly many feel what happens to them and their children does not get attention at higher levels," says sociologist Dipankar Gupta. It also points to a collapse in the state's credibility, he says. So, Gupta says, "there is no seeking of justice, only reprisal."

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/times-of-india-june-18-2018-full-belief-in-fake-texts-shows-cops-not-trusted

The AI Task Force Report - The first steps towards India’s AI framework

Elonnai Hickok, Shweta Mohandas and Swaraj Paul Barooah — 2018-06-27T14:32:56Z

The Task Force on Artificial Intelligence was established by the Ministry of Commerce and Industry to leverage AI for economic benefits, and provide policy recommendations on the deployment of AI for India.

The blog post was edited by Swagam Dasgupta. Download PDF here

The Task Force’s Report, released on March 21st 2018, is a result of the combined expertise of members from different sectors and examines how AI will benefit India. It sheds light on the Task Force’s perception of AI, the sectors in which AI can be leveraged in India, the challenges endemic to India and certain ethical considerations. It concludes with a set of policy recommendations for the government to leverage AI for the next five years. While acknowledging AI as a social and economic problem solver, the Report attempts to answer three policy questions:

What are the areas where government should play a role?
How can AI improve quality of life and solve problems at scale for Indian citizens?
What are the sectors that can generate employment and growth by the use of AI technology?

This blog will look at how the Task Force answered these three policy questions. In doing so, it gives an overview of salient aspects and reflects on the strengths and weaknesses of the Report.

Sectors of Relevance and Challenges

In order to navigate the outlined questions, the Report looks at ten sectors that it refers to as ‘domains of relevance to India’. Furthermore, it examines the use of AI along with its major challenges, and possible solutions for each sector. These sectors include: Manufacturing, FinTech, Agriculture, Healthcare, Technology for the Differently-abled, National Security, Environment, Public Utility Services, Retail and Customer Relationship, and Education. While these ten domains are part of the 16 domains of focus listed in the AITF’s web page, it would have been useful to know the basis on which these sectors were identified. A particular strength of the identified sectors is the consideration of technology for the differently abled as well as the recognition to the development of AI systems in spoken and sign languages in the Indian context.

Some of the problems endemic to India that were recognized include infrastructural barriers, managing scale and innovation, and the collection, validation and distribution of data. The Task Force also noted the lack of consumer awareness, and inability of technology providers to explain benefits to end users as further challenges. The Task Force — by putting the onus on the individual — seems to hint that the impediment to the uptake of technology is the inability of individuals to understand the benefits of the technology, rather than aspects such as poor design, opacity, or misuse of data and insights. Furthermore, although the Report recognizes the challenges associated to data in India and highlights the importance of quality and quantity of data; it overlooks the importance of data curation in creatinge reliable AI systems.

Although the Report examines challenges to AI in each sector, it fails to include all challenges that require addressal. For example, the report fails to acknowledge challenges such as the lack of appropriate certification systems for AI driven health systems and technologies. In the manufacturing sector, the Report fails to highlight contextual challenges associated with the use of AI. This includes the deployment of autonomous vehicles compared to the use of industrial robots.

On the use of AI in retail, the Report while examining consumer data and its respective regulatory policies, identified the issues to be related to the definition, discrimination, data breaches, digital products and safety awareness and reporting standards. In this, the Report is limited in its understanding of what categories of data can lead to discrimination and restricts mechanisms for transparency and accountability to data breaches. The Report could have also been more forward looking in its position on security — including security by design and security by default. Furthermore, these issues were noted only in the context of the retail sector and ideally should have been discussed across all sectors.

The challenges for utilizing AI for national security could have been examined beyond cost and capacity to include associated ethical and legal challenges such as the need for legal backing. The use of AI in national security demands clear accountability and oversight as it is a ground for legitimate state interference with fundamental rights such as privacy and freedom of expression. As such, there is a need for human rights impact assessments, as well as a need for such uses to be aligned with international human rights norms. Government initiatives that allow country wide surveillance and AI decisions based on such data should ideally be implemented only after a comprehensive privacy law is in place and India’s surveillance regime has been revisited.

Recognizing the potential of AI for the benefit of the differently abled is one of the key takeaways from this section of the Report. Furthermore, it also brings in the need for AI inclusivity. AI in natural language generation and translation systems have the potential to help the large number of youth that are disabled or deprived. Therefore, AI could have a large positive impact through inclusive growth and empowerment.

Although the Report examines each of the ten domains in an attempt to provide an insight into the role the government can play, there seems to be a lack of clarity in terms of the role that each department will and is playing with respect to AI. Even the section which lays down the relevant ministries for each of the ten domains failed to include key ministries and departments. For example, the Report does not identify the Ministry of Education, nor does it list the Ministry of Law for national security. The Report could have also identified government departments which would be responsible for regulation and standardization. This could include the Medical Council of India (healthcare), CII (manufacture and retail), RBI (Fintech) etc. The Report also does not recognize other developments around AI emerging out the government. For example, the Draft National Digital Communications Policy (published on May 1, 2018) seeks to empower the Department of Telecommunication to provide a roadmap for AI and robotics. Along similar lines, the Department of Defence Production has also created a task force earlier this year to study the use of AI to accelerate military technology and economic growth. The government should look at building a cohesive AI government body, or clearly delineating the role of each ministry, in order to ensure harmonization going forward.

Areas in need of Government Intervention

The Report also lists out the grand challenges where government intervention is required. This includes data collection and management and the need for widespread expertise contributing to research, innovation, and response. However, while highlighting the need for AI experts from diverse backgrounds, it fails to include experts from law and policy into the discussion. While identifying manufacturing, agriculture, healthcare and public utility to be places where government intervention is needed, the Report failed to examine national security beyond an important domain to India and as a sector where government intervention is needed.

Participation in International Forums

Another relevant concern that the Report underscores is India’s scarce participation as researchers, AI developers and government engagement in global discussions around AI. The Report states that although efforts were being made by Indian universities to increase their presence in international AI conferences, they were lagging behind other nations. On the subject of participation by the government it recommends regular presence in International AI policy forums. Hence, emphasising the need for India’s active participation in global conversations around AI and international rulemaking.

Key Enablers to AI

The Report while analysing the key enablers for AI deployment in India states that positive societal attitudes will be the driving force behind the proliferation of AI. Although relying on positive social attitudes alone will not help in increasing the trust on AI, steps such as making algorithms that are used by public bodies public, enacting a data protection law etc. will be important in enabling trust beyond highlighting success stories.

Data and Data Marketplaces

While the Report identifies data as a challenge where government intervention is needed, it also points to the Aadhaar ecosystem as an enabler. It states that Aadhaar will help in the proliferation of AI in three ways: one as a creator of jobs as related to the collection and digitization of data, two as a collector of reliable data, and three as a repository of Indian data. However, since the very constitutionality of Aadhaar is yet to be determined by the Supreme Court, the task force should have used caution in identifying Aadhaar as a definitive solution. Especially while making statements that the Aadhaar along with the SC judgement has created adequate frameworks to protect consumer data. Additionally, the Task Force should have recognized the various concerns that have been voiced about Aadhaar, particularly in the context of the case before the Supreme Court.

This section also proposes the creation of a Digital Data Marketplace. A data marketplace needs to be framed carefully so as to not create a situation where privacy becomes a right available to only those who can afford it. It is concerning that the discussion on data protection and privacy in the Report is limited to policies and guidelines for businesses and not centered around the individual.

Innovation and Patents

The Report states that the Indian startups working in the field of AI must be encouraged, and industry collaborations and funding must be taken up as a policy measure. One of the ways in which this could be achieved is by encouraging innovations, and one of the ways to do so is by adding a commercial incentive to it, such as through IP rights. Although the Report calls for a stronger IP regime that protects and incentivises innovation, it remains ambiguous as to which aspect of IP rights — patents, trade secrets and copyrights — need significant changes. If the Report is specifically advocating for stronger patent rights in order to match those of China and US, then it shows that the the task force fails to understand the finer aspects of Indian patent law and the history behind India’s stance on patenting. This includes the fact that Indian patent law excludes algorithms from being patented. Indian patent law, by providing a higher threshold for patenting computer related inventions (CRIs), ensures that only truly innovative patents are granted. Given the controversies over CRIs that have dotted the Indian patent landscape, the task force would have done well to provide more clarity on the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of patenting in this sector, if that is their intent with this suggestion.

Ethical AI framework

Responsible AI

In terms of establishing an ethical AI framework, the Task Force suggests measures such as making AI explainable, transparent, and auditable for biases. The Report addresses the fact that currently with the increase in human and AI interaction there is a need to have new standards set for the deployment of AI as well as industrial standards for robots. However, the Report does not go into details of how AI could cause further bias based on various identifiers such as gender and caste, as well as the myriad concerns around privacy and security. This is especially a concern given that the Report envisions widespread use of AI in all major sectors. In this way, the Report looks at data as both a challenge and an enabler, but fails to dedicate time towards explaining the various ethical considerations behind the collection and use of data in the context of privacy, security and surveillance as well as account for unintended consequences. In laying out the ethical considerations associated with AI, the report does not make a distinction between the use of AI by the public sector and private sector. As the government is responsible for ensuring the rights of citizens and holds more power than the citizenry, the public sector needs to be more accountable in their use of AI. This is especially so in cases where AI is proposed to be used for sovereign functions such as national security.

Privacy and Data

The Report also recognises the significance of the implementation of the Aadhaar Act, the privacy judgement and the proposed data protection laws, on the development and use of AI for India. Yet, the Report does not seem to recognize the importance of a robust and multi-faceted privacy framework as it assumes that the Aadhaar Act and the Supreme Court Judgement on privacy and potential privacy law have already created a basis for safe and secure utilization and sharing of customer data. Although the Report has tried to be an expansive examination of various aspects of AI for India, it unfortunately has not looked in depth at the current issues and debates around AI privacy and ethics and makes policy recommendations without appearing to fully reflect on the implementation and potential impact of the same. Similar to the discussion paper by the Niti Aayog, this Report does not consider the emerging principles of data protection such as right to explanation and right to opt-out of automated processing, which directly relate to AI. Furthermore, there is a lack of discussion on issues such as data minimisation and purpose limitation which some big data and AI proponents argue against.

Liability

On the question of liability, the Report only states that specific liability mechanisms need to be worked out for certain categories of machines. The Report does not address the questions of liability that should be applicable to all AI systems, and on whom the duty of care lies, not only in case of robots but also in the case of automated decision making etc. Thus, there is a need for further thinking on mechanisms for determining liability and how these could apply to different types of AI (deep learning models and other machine learning models) and AI systems.

AI and Employment

On the topic of jobs and employment, the Report states that AI will create more jobs than it takes as a result of an increase in the number of companies and avenues created by AI technologies. Additionally, the Report provides examples of jobs where AI could replace the human (autonomous drivers, industrial robots etc,) but does not go as far as envisioning what jobs could be created directly from this replacement. Though the Report recognizes emerging forms of work such as crowdsourcing platforms like Mturk, it fails to examine the impact of such models of work on workers and traditional labour market structures and processes. Going forward, it will be important that the government and the private sector undertake the necessary steps to ensure that fair, protected, and fulfilling jobs are created simultaneously with the adoption of AI. This will include revisiting national and organizational skilling programmes, labor laws, social benefit schemes, relevant economic policies, and exploring best practices with respect to the adoption and integration of AI in work.

Education and Re-skilling

The task force emphasised the need for a change in the education curriculum as well as the need to reskill the labour force to ensure an AI ready future. This level of reskilling will be a massive effort, and a thorough review and audit of existing skilling programmes in India is needed before new skilling programmes are established and financed. The Report also clarifies that the statistics used were based on a study on the IT component of the industry, and that a similar study was required to analyse AI’s effect on the automation component. Going forward, there is the need for a comprehensive study of the labour intensive sectors and formal and informal sectors to develop evidence based policy responses.

Policy Recommendations

The Task Force_, in its policy recommendations, notes that the successful adoption of AI in India will depend on three factors: people, process and technology. However, it does not explain these three factors any further.

National Artificial Intelligence Mission

The most significant suggestion made in the Report is for the establishment of the National Artificial Intelligence Mission (N-AIM) — a centralised nodal agency for coordinating and facilitating research, collaboration and providing economic impetuous to AI startups. The mission with a budget allocation of Rs 1,200 crore over five years aims, among other things, to look at various ways to encourage AI research and deployment. Some of the suggestions include targeting and prototyping AI systems and setting up of a generic AI test bed. These suggestions seems to draw inspiration from other countries such as the US DARPA Challenge and Japan’s sandbox for self driving trucks. The establishment of N-AIM is a welcome step to encourage both AI research and development on a national scale. The availability of public funds will encourage more AI research and development.Additionally, government engagement in AI projects has thus far been fragmentedand a centralised body will presumably bring about better coordination and harmonization. Some of the initiatives such as Capture the flag competition that seeks to centre around the provision for real datasets to catalyze innovation will need to be implemented with appropriate safeguards in place.

Other recommendations

There are other suggestions that are problematic — particularly that of funding “an inter-disciplinary large data integration center in pilot mode to develop an autonomous AI Machine that can work on multiple data streams in real time and provide relevant information and predictions to public across all domains.” Before such a project is developed and implemented there are a number of factors where legal clarity is required; a few being: data collection and use, accuracy and quality of the AI system. There is also a need to ensure that bias and discrimination have been accounted for and fairness, responsibility and liability have been defined with consideration that this will be a government driven AI system. Additionally, such systems should be transparent by design and should include redress mechanisms for potential harms that may arise. This can be through the presence of a human in the loop, or the existence of a kill switch. These should be addressed through ethical principles, standards, and regulatory frameworks.

The recommendations propose establishing operation standards for data storage and privacy, communication standards for autonomous systems, and standards to allow for interoperability between AI based systems. A significant lacuna in this list is the development of safety, accuracy, and quality standards for AI algorithms and systems.

Similarly, although the proposed public private partnership model for research and startups is a good idea, this initiative should be undertaken only after questions such as the implications of liability, ownership of IP and data, and the exclusion of critical sectors are thought through.

Furthermore, the suggestion to ‘fund a national level survey on identification of cluster of clean annotated data necessary for building effective AI systems’ needs to recognize the existing initiatives around open data or use this as a starting place. The Report does not clarify if this survey would involve identifying data.

Conclusion

The inconspicuous release of the Report as well as the lack of a call for public comments results in the fact that the Report does not incorporate or reflect on the sentiments of the public or draw upon the expertise that exists in India on the topic or policies around emerging technologies, which will have a pervasive and wide effect on society. The need for multi stakeholder engagement and input cannot be understated. Nonetheless, the Report of the Task Force is a welcome step towards understanding the movement towards an definitive AI policy. The task force has attempted answering the three policy questions keeping people, process and technology in mind. However, it could have provided greater details about these indices. The Report, which is meant for a wider audience, would have done well to provide greater detail, while also providing clarity on technical terms. On a definitional plane, a list of technologies that the task force perceived as AI for this Report, could have also helped keep it grounded on possible and plausible 5 year recommendations.

Compared to the recent Niti Aayog Discussion Paper, this Report misses out on a detailed explanation on AI and ethics, however, it does spend some considerable amount of time on education and the use of AI for the differently abled. Additionally, the Report’s statement on the democratization of development and equal access as well as assigning ownership and framing transparent rules for usage of the infrastructure is a positive step towards making AI inclusive. Overall, the Report is a progressive step towards laying down India’s path forward in the field of Artificial Intelligence. The emphasis on India’s involvement in International rulemaking gives India an opportunity to be a leader of best practice in international forums by adopting forward looking and human rights respecting practices. Whether India will also become a strong contender in the AI race, with policies favouring the development of a socio-economically beneficial, and ethical-AI backed industries and services is yet to be seen.

The Task Force consists of 18 members in total. Of these, 11 members are from the field of AI technology both research and industry, three from the civil services, one from healthcare research, one with and Intellectual property law background, and two from a finance background. The specializations of the members are not limited to one area as the members have experience or education in various areas relevant to AI. https://www.aitf.org.in// There is a notable lack of members from Civil Society. It may also be noted that only 2 of the 18 members are women

The Report on the Artificial Intelligence Task Force, Pg. 1,http://dipp.nic.in/sites/default/files/Report_of_Task_Force_on_ArtificialIntelligence_20March2018_2.pdf

ibid.

The Artificial Intelligence Task Force https://www.aitf.org.in/

The Report on the Artificial Intelligence Task Force, Pg. 8

The Report on the Artificial Intelligence Task Force, Pg. 9,10.

The Report on the Artificial Intelligence Task Force, Pg. 9

ibid.

Artificial Intelligence in the Healthcare Industry in India https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/files/ai-and-healtchare-report

Artificial Intelligence in the Manufacturing and Services Sector https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/files/AIManufacturingandServices_Report _02.pdf

The Report on the Artificial Intelligence Task Force, Pg. 21.

Submission to the Committee of Experts on a Data Protection Framework for India, Centre for Internet and Society https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/files/data-protection-submission

The Report on the Artificial Intelligence Task Force, Pg. 22

Draft National Digital Communications Policy-2018, http://www.dot.gov.in/relatedlinks/draft-national-digital-communications-policy-2018

Task force set up to study AI application in military,https://indianexpress.com/article/technology/tech-news-technology/task-force-set-up-to-study-ai-application-in-military-5049568/

It is not just technical experts that are needed, ethical, technical, and legal experts as well as domain experts need to be part of the decision making process.

The Report on the Artificial Intelligence Task Force, Pg. 31

Constitutional validity of Aadhaar: the arguments in Supreme Court so far, http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/constitutional-validity-of-aadhaar-the-arguments-in-supreme-court-so-far/article22752084.ece

ibid.

CIS Submission to TRAI Consultation on Free Data http://trai.gov.in/Comments_FreeData/Companies_n_Organizations/Center_For_Internet_and_Society.pdf

The Report on the Artificial Intelligence Task Force, Pg. 30

Section 3(k) of the patent act describes that a mere mathematical or business method or a computer programme or algorithm cannot be patented.

Patent Office Reboots CRI Guidelines Yet Again: Removes “novel hardware” Requirement

https://spicyip.com/2017/07/patent-office-reboots-cri-guidelines-yet-again-removes-novel-hardware-requirement.html

The Report on the Artificial Intelligence Task Force, Pg. 37

The Report on the Artificial Intelligence Task Force, Pg. 7

ibid.

The Report on the Artificial Intelligence Task Force, Pg. 8

National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence: http://niti.gov.in/writereaddata/files/document_publication/NationalStrategy-for-AI-Discussion-Paper.pdf

Meaningful information and the right to explanation,Andrew D Selbst Julia Powles, International Data Privacy Law, Volume 7, Issue 4, 1 November 2017, Pages 233–242

The Principle of Purpose Limitation and Big Data, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/319467399_The_Principle_of_Purpose_Limitation_and_Big_Data

M-Turk https://www.mturk.com/

For example a lesser threshold of minimum wages, no job secuirity etc, https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guilty-planet/httpblogsscientificamericancomguilty-planet20110707the-pros-cons-of-amazon-mechanical-turk-for-scientific-surveys/

The Report on the Artificial Intelligence Task Force, Pg. 41

Report of Artificial Intelligence Task Force Pg, 46, 47

ibid.

The DARPAChallenge https://www.darpa.mil/program/darpa-robotics-challenge

Japan may set regulatory sandboxes to test drones and self driving vehicles http://techwireasia.com/2017/10/japan-may-set-regulatory-sandboxes-test-drones-self-driving-vehicles/

Mariana Mazzucato in her 2013 book The Entrepreneurial State, argued that it was the government that drives technological innovation. In her book she stated that high-risk discovery and development were made possible by government spending, which the private enterprises capitalised once the difficult work was done.

https://tech.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/technology/govt-of-karnataka-launches-centre-of-excellence-for-data-science-and-artificial-intelligence/61689977,https://analyticsindiamag.com/amaravati-world-centre-for-ai-data/

The Report on the Artificial Intelligence Task Force, Pg. 47

Report of Artificial Intelligence Task Force Pg. 49

The Report on the Artificial Intelligence Task Force, Pg. 47

The AI task force website has a provision for public comments although it is only for the vision and mission and the domains mentioned in the website.

National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence: http://niti.gov.in/writereaddata/files/document_publication/NationalStrategy-for-AI-Discussion-Paper.pdf

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/the-ai-task-force-report-the-first-steps-towards-indias-ai-framework

Tech transformation: how agriculture is being redefined through digital innovation and startups

Admin — 2018-07-06T15:39:53Z

At a recent YES Bank panel and digital startup competition, it was evident that India’s digital boom was lending the Indian startup ecosystem a distinctly agri-flavour.

The blog post was published in Your Story on June 29, 2018. CIS was mentioned in the report.

The convergence of mobile networks, broadband internet, cloud platforms, IoT, AI and open data is helping transform one of the world’s oldest professions. This is of great significance as agriculture and related sectors like dairy production form the backbone of the Indian workforce. Today, tradition is merging with technology as the IT services sector is helping open up new opportunities for both seasoned and emerging entrepreneurs.

New fronts are opening up across the sector from organic farming and hydroponics to drones and agri apps. Startups are also playing a key role in transforming agriculture, which accounts for half of India’s workforce, but only about 13 percent of its GDP.

Entrepreneurship trends

An interesting trend to watch for is the rise of the number of agri-entrepreneurs, many of whom have no background in agriculture. There is more interest now in this sector compared to even five or ten years ago. Another indicator is the number of agri-tech competitions, awards and investors that are emerging. India’s demographic dividend is also attracting more youth segments to the agricultural sector, with cross-fertilisation across states, economic sectors, and scientific fields.

The challenges seem formidable, but need to be acknowledged and tackled. Thousands of farmers commit suicide each year due to debt problems, as documented by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB). This is a sad reality in states such as Maharashtra, Odisha, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka, Punjab, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, and others.

Many issues being tackled by startups relate to productivity and distribution, according to Sahil Kini, Vice President, Aspada Investment. There are large yield gaps in Indian farming as compared to its global counterparts, due to inadequacies in domains ranging from farm inputs and equipment to farming practices and retail connects. Multiple intermediaries, poor refrigeration during transportation, small farm sizes, and lack of fairness in financial stakeholders are other challenges.

Agri-tech startups

Today, the agri-tech sector is witnessing a number of startups in India disrupting everything from organic farming and equipment rentals to connected supply chains and cloud-based analytics. The startups in this report showcase the diversity in the sector, followed by an analysis of the broader ecosystem. Some cover pricing of produce, others include equipment marketplaces; still others cover digital workflow and smart supply chains.

Farms2Fork offers farmers water monitoring solutions that ensure better productivity by reducing water wastage. The solution includes IoT wireless soil sensors, AI support, and real-time analytics. While earlier agri-tech solutions were based on batch processing of data, Farms2Fork operates on real-time data.

Agribolo, founded in 2015, is a farming services platform spanning activities such as information dissemination, quality input procurement, market linkages, irrigation facilities and farming equipment. The franchise network, launched in Rajasthan, uses the aggregator model to connect farmers to experts, development institutions, financial services, and training institutes.

AgroWave, founded by an IIT Delhi alumna in 2017, aims to optimise agriculture supply chain using research, analytics, and technology. Demand and supply analytics connect farmers in Panipat, Sonipat, Harpur, and Rajasthan to caterers, retail shops, restaurants, and canteens.

Truce, founded by an IIT Bombay alumnus, is a B2B web and mobile platform that directly connects farmers and suppliers to wholesalers and retailers. The app is available in Hindi, English, Marathi and Gujarati, and enables tracking quotes and orders.

Farm Again has converted 2,500 acres of land into organic farms, along with tech tools to trace the product’s origin, when sold in outlets such as Reliance Retail, Big Bazaar, and More. IoT devices are used to monitor and record moisture content and soil conditions, with pipes for water and fertiliser inputs.

Crofarm, a Delhi-headquarted agri-supply chain startup founded in 2016, buys fresh produce directly from farmers and supplies them to online and offline retailers. It supplies nearly 8-10 tonnes of fruits and vegetables from its two distribution centres in Delhi NCR, and connects 100 retailers to more than 5,000 farmers.

Aibono improves farm yields by using AI on a cluster of parameters like weather and soil condition. The testing and measurement services indicate parameters such as crop stress, along with recommendations on the right fertiliser mix to be used based on the soil condition.

Gold Farm, founded in 2012, helps farmers book farm equipment such as solar-powered pumps in districts of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. Beneficiaries have included over 25,000 farmers on ground, who tap the services of 250 booking agents and over 500 tractor owners connected via a mobile app. The equipment is also tracked with IoT devices, resulting in rich data sets for analysis and forecasting.

Earthy Tales, founded in NCR in 2016, works with farmers across 11 states to provide chemical-free fruits, vegetables, groceries, and dairy products. These include snacks, jams, preserves, and pickles, provided direct to consumers. Other services include mentoring for farmers and farm cooperatives.

ONganic Foods works with small farmers to boost their organic produce. Based on contract farming, it identifies higher-priced grains and spices and gives quality inputs to farmers to increase their yield. It connects farmers to various government schemes as well as e-commerce platforms such as Amazon and Spencer’s Retail.

Oxen Farm Solutions offers agricultural equipment on rent using a ‘Farming as a Service’ (FaaS) model. The platform connects farmers, farm equipment manufacturers, and government schemes. Access to such machinery can boost farm productivity in an affordable manner. The company operates in Punjab, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, and Odisha, and connects to corporates such as PepsiCo and Yes Bank.

Farmizen is a mobile-based platform that lets users grow vegetables and fruits on mini-farms, and monitor the process of growing food on a real-time basis. Located in the outskirts of Bengaluru, users get pictures and live videos of their farm plots. The startup also provides recommendations based on real-time inputs from the field as well as pre-defined schedules for over 50 different types of crops.

Harvesting, founded by in 2016, has offices in California and Bengaluru, and offers smart farming solutions based on analytics and AI. It also uses farmer profiles to build creditworthiness profiles for financial organisations. The idea is to provide both increased farm productivity and better financial services.

SatSure uses IoT and Big Data to provide financial security to farmers, via its 15-year database of satellite images. It makes recommendations clustering techniques for farmers to get an estimate of the total agriculture production, and provides this data to agri-insurance companies as well.

Organic Thelawala enables a transparent pricing mechanism so that the consumer knows the price of the produce as well as how much of the selling price actually goes to the farmer. It is s assisting 13,000 farmers to switch to organic farming, thereby, creating a positive impact on bio-diversity, soil contamination, water, and air pollution. Further, by providing free thelas (pushcart), the team promotes micro-entrepreneurship among pushcart vendors and farmers.

Earth Food, based in Pune, provides chemical-free produce at market price. It has collaborated with Reliance Fresh and Nature Fresh. It uses a healthy mix of traditional methods and innovation to keep pollution and wastage to a minimum, thereby benefitting both consumers and the environment.

Jayalaxmi Agrotech, founded by alumni of IIMB and VEC helps farmers minimise crop loss and improve productivity via its many crop- specific mobile applications in local languages that provide timely information on agriculture and animal husbandry.

Gramophone, based in Indore, is a platform that combines both advisory and sale of inputs under a single roof. Farmers can access mentors for help with everything from crop selection to land productivity and more.

Triton Foodworks, based in Delhi, is a hydroponics startup growing fruits and vegetables. It has reportedly set up more than 2 lakh sq ft of hydroponic farms across three locations in India, and produces more than 700 tons of fruits and vegetables each year.

vDrone, based in Bengaluru, uses drones and thermal imaging to increase yield. It analyses areas of the farm that need attention, and helps the farmer cater to these needs. Parameters include soil, cropping pattern, and use of fertilisers.

Ninjacart, based in Bengaluru, enables retailers and merchants to source fruits and vegetables directly from farmers without resorting to middlemen. It connects 2,500 farmers and handles 14,000 tons of fruits and vegetables, accounting for revenue of around Rs 4 crore every month.

BigHaat, based in Bengaluru, is an online agro e-store for farmers that lets them buy seeds, crop protection nutrients and solutions, and agro instruments. Last-mile connectivity is enabled via logistics partners like India Post and Ship Rocket. The footprint spans 50,000 farmers across 20 states.

Ravgo is an agri-equipment rental marketplace based on the model of the sharing economy. It is solving the farm mechanisation problem among India farmers who cannot afford to buy the farm machinery. The target market is currently small farmers based in Punjab.

Kisanmade, launched in Moradabad, UP is an e-commerce platform set up in Moradabad to empower farmers by eliminating the intermediary between the farmer and the consumer. It also aims to increase the farmer’s income and decrease the kitchen’s expense by 10-15 percent.

FlyBird Innovations, founded in Bengaluru, uses sensors in the soil to detect moisture content and control irrigation in farms across South India. The information is used to optimise irrigation practices, improve crop yield, and save water, time, and labour. It claims 25-30 percent savings of water and improvement of crop yield by 10-15 percent.

Kamal Kisan reduces labour costs with innovative agri-equipment, with reported savings of up to 50 percent. Tools include sugarcane planters, versatile mulch layers, bed makers, vegetable handy planters, and power weeders.

farMart connects farmers who own machinery with those who need it but don’t have access to it. Large farmers put underutilised agri-machinery up for rent on the farMart platform, and are connected to farmers who need such machinery; they can then book it via app or call centre. The database includes 300 villages and 1,500 farmers.

AgroStar, a Pune-based m-commerce startup, sells agricultural inputs directly to farmers. The platform can be accessed online or giving the company’s 1800 number a missed call. Products are sourced from national and multinational brands, and include seeds and nutrients.

CropIn leverages GIS and data science to deliver a range of services apps to farmers and other players in the agri chain. It feeds real-time data and advice on practices related to a range of crops.

Other notable agri startups are NubeSol (soil fertility maps) and Sree Sai Aerotech Innovations (drones for monitoring crop health). Some industry players are also leveraging the platform model – such as Trringo, launched in 2016 by India’s largest tractor maker company, Mahindra and Mahindra. The franchisee network enables farmers to access tractors at an affordable price. Over 100,000 farmers have signed up, from West and South India.

There are also international players in the Indian agri market, such as PEAT. The German startup is working with 30,000 farmers across India to help mitigate crop damage. It identifies patterns of plant diseases, pests, or nutrient deficiencies via crop images.

Ecosystem

The broader agri startup ecosystem includes a number of think tanks, research labs, incubators and accelerators. For example, ONganic is supported by the Technology Development Board, Government of India and Ministry of Small and Medium Enterprise and incubated at the Indian Institute of Management, Kolkata.

Goa has an agri-focused incubator called Centre for Innovation and Business Acceleration (CIBA). TiE Bangalore and NUMA have held startup showcases in collaboration with Villgro, featuring agri-entrepreneurs.

At the recent YES Bank Transformation Series (YBTS) speakers and panelists included Ramanathan Ramanan, Mission Director, Atal Innovation Mission, NITI Aayog; Raju Kapoor, Head, Corporate Affairs, Dow AgroSciences India; Hemendra Mathur, Venture Partner, Bharat Innovations; Nitin Puri, Senior President, Food and Agribusiness Strategic Advisory and Research, YES Bank; and Amardeep Sibia, CEO, SatSure.

At the 2017 edition of YBTS three agri-tech winners were awarded out of 15 finalists. Winners included teams from IIM Shillong (Rs 5 lakh for a smart soil sensor proposal), IIM Bangalore (Rs 3 lakh for a solar-powered drip technology proposal), and ISB Hyderabad (Rs 2 lakh for IoT-based SIM-enabled farm data sensors).

The Government of India is also catalysing agri- entrepreneurship with programmes like the Agri-Udaan Accelerator and the Agri Grand Challenge. Government-backed funding agencies like the Credit Guarantee Fund Trust for Micro and Small Enterprises (CGTMSE) is incentivising banks to lend at highly affordable rates to startups.

Incubators in this space include Villgro, a-IDEA, ABI-ICRISAT, Startup Oasis, IIMC Innovation Park, IIT Kanpur SIIC, KIIT TBI, and CIIE, IIMA. They provide mentorship and connects to farmer cooperatives, NGOs, channel partners, and individual farmers in some cases.

Indigram Labs Foundation (ILF), supported by Department of Science and Technology via the National Science and Technology Entrepreneurship Development Board, Government of India, is a technology-based incubator founded in 2015 to promote creativity and innovation in agriculture, renewable energy, and rural healthcare industry. Its host organisation is Indian Society of Agribusiness Professionals (ISAP).

ISAP has set up more than 1,800 agri-based ventures through its Agri-Clinics and Agri-Business Centres (ACABC) programme and has around 50 agri-business experts in various verticals who help in mentoring incubates, according to Manisha Acharya, CEO, Indigram Labs Foundation.

It has graduated 18 startups, such as New Leaf Dynamic Technologies(refrigeration system powered by farm waste), Intello Labs (AI-based deep-tech solution for crop inspection and agricultural products grading), Sainhun Ventures(honey by-products), Nutrelis Agro Foods (organic groceries, beverages), and Innosapiens Agro Technologies (phenomics device for pre-detection of pests).

Indigram takes an equity of up to 5 percent in the startup. In the long run, agri incubators need support in areas like trained manpower, pilot testing costs, rural outreach, and patent advisory services, according to Acharya.

International Crops Research Institute for Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) hosted an agri-business investors camp in Hyderabad on June 12. The camp addressed three themes: agri-technology, agri-engineering and food processing.

IIM Ahmedabad’s technology business incubator, Centre for Innovation Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE), has launched a food and agri-business accelerator in partnership with a-IDEA, the business incubator at Indian Council of Agricultural Research’s (ICAR) National Academy of Agricultural Research Management (NAARM). Top teams are provided seed investment of up to Rs 30 lakhs each. CIIE also has a sustainability focused fund called Infuse Ventures.

Funding

Recent reports have tracked the investment line-up for Agricx Lab (Ankur Capital, CIIE), Agrostar (IDG Ventures, Aavishkaar Venture Management), Agrowave (Daffodil Software), Airwood (StartupXseed Ventures), Arya Collateral (Aspada), Farm Taaza (Epsilon Venture Partners), Farmizen (Venture Highway), FarmLink (Pioneering Ventures, Syngenta), Gobasco (Matrix Partners India), KisanHub (Notion Capital, IQ Capital, Calibrate Management), KrishiHub (INVENT accelerator, Villgro Innovation Fund), NinjaCart (Trifecta Ventures), RML AgTech (IvyCap Ventures), Utkal Tubers (CapAleph Indian Millennium SME Fund, Zephyr Peacock India), and VillFarm (Unitus Seed Fund, Rianta Capital).

Crofarm has received funding from angels such as Rajan Anandan (MD, Google India) and Jitendra Gupta (MD, PayU India). Gold Farm raised funds from Infuse Venture and the Mahindra Group. Truce was funded by 3one4capital, Beenext, FreeCharge founders, Snapdeal founders and Anupam Mittal, CEO, People Group. CropIn, raised funds from Ankur Capital; Agrostar received investments from Aavishkar. Other active agri-focused funds include Omnivore Partners and Rural Agri Ventures; Germany development agency GIZ has also roped in international partners for further cooperation.

Among Indian states, Karnataka formalised an agri-startup fund in 2017 through K-BITS with a corpus of Rs 10 crore, with an additional Rs 8 crore planned for 21 agri-startups this year. A centre of excellence for agriculture is also planned, where startups will work with farmers.

Other government initiatives, according to Sahil Kini of Aspada Investment include Agricultural Debt Waiver and Debt Relief Scheme, 2008; and Money Lending (Regulation) Act, 2008.

Entrepreneur tips

A number of mentor panels and pitch jurors have offered guidance for agri-entrepreneurs. These include, for example, the importance of customer immersion. Here are some of the tips they have shared.

On-the-ground realities in emerging economies are shifting rapidly, and founders should have a finger on the pulse of effective trends and aspirations.
Disciplines like design thinking offer useful and actionable frameworks.
Metrics should be holistic and include activity, business, and social impacts. There should be one or two key success metrics for primary focus, and the rest should be supporting or complementary metrics. This helps founders monitor their progress and assists investors in assessing the long-term viability of the venture.
Founders should build a well-rounded team, with a mix of engineering, design, and social science backgrounds. Sometimes founders get too carried away with the technology; having a holistic mix in the core team will help contextualise the offerings, use and impact.
India’s social problems call for bold and ambitious innovators who can tackle challenges at scale. The social cost of failure is high for social enterprises (as compared to merely pivoting an app design); hence collaborative partnerships are important.
Social entrepreneurs should learn how to work with partners who are not social enterprises. They should be clear about their offerings, values, and philosophy. Partnerships are an art and a science. Partners should be picked carefully, and the relationship should evolve over time.
Founders will frequently need to pitch to funders, investors, partners, regulators, customers, and employees. The pitch should focus less on product features and more on problem resolution. Techniques like storytelling are effective here.
Founders should enumerate the range of risks involved, eg. regulatory and lack of ecosystem trust. Secondary impacts should also be assessed, since some risks are more indirect than others.

The road ahead

This is a great time to integrate different domains of knowledge and skills in agri-innovation. In addition to fresh farm produce, there are lucrative opportunities in processed products such as pickles, papads, chutneys, and murabbas. This calls for effective post-harvest management infrastructure such as storage, preservation, cold chain and refrigerated transportation.

New models such as the FaaS model can lead to more sustainable paths to profitability. The platform model can leverage data analytics to identify emerging business trends and opportunities and thus attract more venture capital, according to a report published by Bain and Company in partnership with Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. Such models are also getting significant corporate backing, such as Trringo by Mahindra and Mahindra for tractor rentals and John Deere (with EM3 Agri Services) for harvester fleets.

Smartphones powered by affordable mobile broadband networks are helping improve workflow of farms and dairies. This opens the door to new pay-per-use business models and innovation stacks, connecting the farm to the fridge and fork. Banks and financial organisations also need to step up to the challenge and offer more creative models of financing for farmers, entrepreneurs, incubators, and accelerators.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has announced a target for farmers’ incomes to be doubled by 2022, India’s 75th year of Independence. Schemes like the government’s Startup Agri India scheme, the Digi Gaon (Digital Village) initiative, and Bharat Net project can all work together towards making this a reality. Initiatives like agri-hackathons can also bring together aspiring entrepreneurs from diverse sectors.

However, there are certain challenges:
Pricing decisions should be made more transparent and less politically driven (particularly before elections), with sufficient market validity and testing. This includes setting the price of onions and sugar, and promising ‘free’ electricity for farmers.
Increased promotion and adoption of open data are other trends to watch for. An open data ecosystem can grow India’s GDP by $22 billion by 2020, according to report by YES Bank and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY). India’s Open Government Data (OGD) platform can step up to this challenge.
The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) is pushing for these initiatives to reach ordinary people and marginalised communities. Other sources of data include rural internet kiosks, community e-centres, and online agricultural systems.
Agri-tech entrepreneurs can go beyond incremental change to truly effect exponential change, and transform the agricultural sector while also giving back to society. Successful agri-preneurs in India can also take their innovations global.

The agricultural sector is now shedding its rustic persona to emerge as a trendy space to be in. Inclusive, sustainable, and scalable solutions are the way ahead.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/your-story-june-29-2018-tech-transformation-agriculture-redefined-digital-innovation-startups

CIS contributes to the Research and Advisory Group of the Global Commission on the Stability of Cyberspace (GCSC)

Arindrajit Basu — 2018-07-05T16:00:02Z

The Global Commission on the Stability of Cyberspace (GCSC) is an initiative of the Hague Centre for Strategic Studies and the East West Institute that seeks to promote mutual awareness and understanding among various cyberspace communities. It seeks to develop norms and policies that advance the stability and security of cyberspace.

Chaired by Marina Kaljurand, and Co-Chaired by Michael Chertoff and Latha Reddy, the Commission comprises 26 prominent Commissioners who are experts hailing from a wide range of geographic regions representing multiple communities including academia industry, government, technical and civil society.

As a part of their efforts, the GCSC sent out a call for proposals for papers that sought to analyze and advance various aspects of the cyber norms debate.

Elonnai Hickok and Arindrajit Basu’s paper ‘ Conceptualizing an International Security Architecture for Cyberspace’ was selected by the Commissioners and published as a part of the Briefings of the Research and Advisory Group.

Arindrajit Basu represented CIS at the Cyberstability Hearings held by the GCSC at the sidelines of the GLOBSEC forum in Bratislava-a multilateral conference seeking to advance dialogue on various issues of international peace and security.

The published paper and the Power Point may be accessed here.

The agenda for the hearings is reproduced below

GCSC HEARINGS, 19 MAY 2018

HEARINGS: TOWARDS INTERNATIONAL CYBERSTABILITY

Venue: “Habsburg” room, Grand Hotel River Park 15:00-15:15

Welcome Remarks by Marina Kaljurand, Chair of the Global Commission on the Stability of Cyberspace (GCSC) and former Foreign Minister of Estonia 15:15-16:45

Hearing I: Expert Hearing

This session focuses on the topic Cyberstability and the International Peace and Security Architecture and includes scene settings, food-for-thought presentations on the new GCSC commissioned research, briefings and open statements by government and nongovernmental speakers.

“Scene setting: ”Cyber Diplomacy in Transition” by Carl Bildt, former Prime Minister of Sweden

“Commissioned Research I: Lessons learned from three historical case studies on establishing international norms” by Arindrajit Basu, Centre for Internet and Society, India

Commission Research II: The “pre-normative” framework and options for cyber diplomacy” by Elana Broitman, New America Foundation

“Some Remarks on current thinking within the United Nations”, by Renata Dwan, Director United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR) (Registered Statements by Government Advisors) (Statements by other experts)

(Open floor discussion) 16:45-17:15

Coffee Break

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/cis-contributes-to-the-research-and-advisory-group-of-the-global-commission-on-the-stability-of-cyberspace-gcsc