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Your economy, our livelihoods: A policy brief by the All India Gig Workers’ Union
https://cis-india.org/raw/your-econonomy-our-livelihoods-a-policy-brief-by-the-all-india-gigi-workers-union
<b>In this policy brief, the All India Gig Workers’ Union (AIGWU) presents its critique on NITI Aayog’s report on India’s platform economy. Through experiences from over 3 years of organising gig workers across India, they highlight fallacies in the report that disregard workers’ experiences and realities. They present alternative recommendations that are responsive to these realities, and offer pathways towards rights-affirming futures for workers in the platform economy.
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<p><span style="text-align: justify; "><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/raw/files/your-economy-our-livelihoods.pdf">Click to download</a> the full report</span></p>
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<h3>Alternative recommendations towards rights-affirming futures for workers in the platform economy</h3>
<p><strong>Regulating the unchecked rise of platforms and the platform workforce</strong></p>
<p dir="ltr" style="text-align: justify; ">The rise of platforms will not only affect workers in blue collar or grey collar jobs but also engulf other service sectors that currently provide permanent and dignified employment. The platform and gig work paradigm must not be used as a way to further deregulate the Indian economy by subterfuge.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Robust regulatory mechanisms and worker protections must be extended to the gig economy and other forms of perennial employment threatened by the new Central labour codes. Gig workers must be recognised as employees with a clear test of employment enshrined in law.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">A stronger push towards better paradigms of work can only come from alternative models of platform work. It is essential that the government foster the creation of platform cooperatives in certain service sectors. Such platform cooperatives will mitigate market concentration that results from the network effects of large private platforms, offer greater stability than profit-oriented private platforms, and offer genuine pro-people alternatives.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><strong>Securing data rights and employment security</strong></p>
<p dir="ltr" style="text-align: justify; ">Gig workers must be guaranteed individual and collective rights to their data collected and stored by platforms. Workers’ data should belong to the workers. Workers should be able to access verified records of their training (if any) and work contributions. The government should prescribe standards to ensure that these records are machine-readable and universally inter-operable. In addition, workers must have easy access to verified receipts for each successful task performed on the platform.</p>
<p dir="ltr"><strong>Centering gender-responsive protections for workers facing intersectional vulnerabilities</strong></p>
<p dir="ltr" style="text-align: justify; ">Platform work is uncritically accepted as a panacea for women without taking a deeper look at labour practices, and how women workers may be particularly vulnerable to workplace risks and exploitation.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Considering these vulnerabilities, there must be legal and regulatory measures enabling women to participate in the gig economy more fully—for example, creches, sexual harassment prevention measures, equal wages, and proper hours and working conditions. Crucially, there should be safety provisions for all gig workers, especially for women who face greater dangers of harassment. Importantly, accessible and efficient enforcement mechanisms must be introduced to operationalise schemes and rights for women workers.</p>
<p><strong>Securing minimum social protection guarantees for all workers on digital platforms</strong></p>
<p dir="ltr" style="text-align: justify; ">Effective minimum wages of INR 26,000 per month must be enforced as demanded by the Joint Platform of Central Trade Unions in India. This figure must be used to determine the minimum earnings for an hour’s worth of work on a platform.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Provision for Provident Fund (PF) must be introduced, and a bank account that does not require minimum balances or related charges must also be guaranteed. Social insurance measures must be guaranteed including health insurance, personal accident insurance, pension, maternity benefits, and disability benefits. In addition, the state government must consider waiving off charges relating to fuel surcharges and parking expenses/ penalties for gig workers, while on duty.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Security and safety for women workers must be addressed by issuing government ID cards for gig workers. Gig workers are required to travel to unknown localities, where residents tend to be suspicious of them. The government ID card will help workers establish their identity and increase their credibility among the residents.</p>
<p>Social security legislation and a tripartite board (with representation of workers and worker organisations, government, and platforms) must be constituted to ensure registration of all platform-based gig workers and facilitate their access to social security. The law should cover all those persons who are engaged in professions that are using digital platforms for their last mile delivery.</p>
<p><strong>Building accountability mechanisms for financial inclusion measures on platforms</strong></p>
<p dir="ltr" style="text-align: justify; ">While including gig workers into the formal banking system is essential, this must not be used as a pretext to ensnare them into debt traps. Should the government wish to use platforms as a lever for financial inclusion, it must mandate platforms to deposit a minimum amount above and beyond workers’ existing incomes towards their consumption. For platforms, existing schemes must be rejigged—Firstly, the burden of credit schemes must not be borne only by public sector banks; the private sector must also be directed to take on some of the lending. Secondly, interest rates may be lowered for such loans, but this reduced rate must be made conditional on ensuring a certain threshold of working conditions to gig workers.</p>
<p><strong>Developing workforce estimation strategies that reflect workers’ realities</strong></p>
<p dir="ltr" style="text-align: justify; ">Workers in the gig economy must not blindly be lumped with the unorganised sector without an understanding of nuances within the broad definition of the gig economy. Assumptions that workers in the gig economy have alternate sources of income must be refuted. Rather, in the case of gig workers in the Indian context, ground realities show that this work actually constitutes primary sources of income.</p>
<p dir="ltr" style="text-align: justify; ">Primary data must be collected across the country where platform work is seen as a clear option for individuals to choose as a profession. Thus, one can estimate the percentage of the population that depends on the gig economy in a consistent manner. Digital platforms must provide adequate data to state governments on the number of workers registered on the platform in every region (along with work time data) in order for governments to actively prepare for public infrastructure requirements required for such employment generation.</p>
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<h3 dir="ltr" style="text-align: justify; ">Contributors</h3>
<p dir="ltr">Authors: W.C. Shukla, Rikta Krishnaswamy, Rohin Garg, Gunjan Jena, and S.B. Natarajan</p>
<p dir="ltr">Images: All India Gig Workers’ Union (AIGWU)</p>
<p dir="ltr">Design: Annushka Jaliwala</p>
<h3>About the All India Gig Workers’ Union (AIGWU)</h3>
<p dir="ltr">The All India Gig Workers’ Union (AIGWU) is a registered trade union for all food delivery, logistics, and service workers that work on any app-based platforms in India.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Contact: <a href="mailto:contactaigwu@gmail.com">contactaigwu@gmail.com</a></p>
<p>Connect: <a href="https://twitter.com/aigwu_union">Twitter</a>; <a href="https://www.facebook.com/aigwu">Facebook</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The views and opinions expressed on this page are those of their individual authors. Unless the opposite is explicitly stated, or unless the opposite may be reasonably inferred, CIS does not subscribe to these views and opinions which belong to their individual authors. CIS does not accept any responsibility, legal or otherwise, for the views and opinions of these individual authors. For an official statement from CIS on a particular issue, please contact us directly.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/your-econonomy-our-livelihoods-a-policy-brief-by-the-all-india-gigi-workers-union'>https://cis-india.org/raw/your-econonomy-our-livelihoods-a-policy-brief-by-the-all-india-gigi-workers-union</a>
</p>
No publisherW.C. Shukla, Rikta Krishnaswamy, Rohin Garg, Gunjan Jena, and S.B. NatarajanLabour FuturesDigital EconomyGig WorkDigital LabourReserve Bank of IndiaFeaturedHomepage2024-01-31T00:02:12ZBlog EntryWorld Narrow Web
https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/world-narrow-web
<b>Censorship and how govt reacts to it may push us to country-specific networks, writes Pranesh Prakash in an article published in the Indian Express on 4 February 2012. </b>
<p>Twitter, a popular micro-blogging service, recently announced that “[today] we give ourselves the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country — while keeping it available in the rest of the world”. In a move a few weeks ago, Blogger, Google’s blogging service, in effect announced something similar, by saying that default they would redirect Blogger users trying to get to Blogspot.com addresses (like <a class="external-link" href="http://example.blogspot.com">http://example.blogspot.com</a>) to their respective country sites (like <a class="external-link" href="http://example.blogspot.in">http://example.blogspot.in</a>). Twitter’s announcement was greeted with much disapproval by many Twitter users, as a move towards censorship, with some talking (on Twitter) about a boycott. Blogger’s move was hidden away, deep within a help page, and is being noticed now, and is causing quite a stir as caving in to censorship. Are these concerns justified? Before answering that question, let’s look at what the platforms’ announcements really say.</p>
<p>Twitter has given itself the ability to withhold specific tweets and users in particular countries where that content is legally required to be removed (generally with a court order). Their earlier option, they inform us, was to block the offending tweets and users in all countries. Apart from this, they will publish a notice for each tweet/ user that is blocked in a country. They will also be proactively publishing every removal request they receive at ChillingEffects.org, which allows us to hold them to account and question their decision to remove tweets.</p>
<p>Google, by redirecting you to the country-specific Blogger, is allowing for country-level removal of both blogs and individual blog posts. However, they also note that you can circumvent this by using a special “no redirect” address. Google currently forwards all search-related removals, but does not do so for Blogger-related requests, and all copyright-related complaints to ChillingEffects.org. Google does publish aggregate data relating to censorship of Blogger, on which free-speech advocates have been asking them to provide more granular information.</p>
<p>There are three problems. First, while Twitter was just as open to repressive governments’ requests last week, by making this change, they are advertising this fact to such governments. Thailand has noted it, and has congratulated Twitter.</p>
<p>Second, as Rob Beschizza, managing editor of the website Boing Boing, pointed out, there have been no instances of political content having been removed by Twitter. Even British courts’ super-injunctions (injunctions on speech, that prevent you from mentioning the fact that there is an injunction) were defeated by Twitter users, which only showed that attempts to censor material results in even more attention being drawn to it (which is popularly known as the “Streisand Effect”). So, does this now mean that Twitter will start applying local laws to judge “valid and applicable legal requests”, instead of American laws? What if the law is as bad as that which exists in India, where they are required to remove content within 36 hours based on any affected person’s complaint — without a court order? Will they still act on it? If they don’t, will the government or courts order Twitter.com to be blocked in India, finding it liable for illegal omissions?</p>
<p>Third, this trend points increasingly to the fact that we are witnessing a Balkanisation of the Web as more countries start asserting their sovereignty online. As Chinese dissident journalist Michael Anti pointed out recently, it seems we now need visas (read “circumvention techniques”) to visit the international Web. But even then, there is no longer a singular “international” Web, but an Indian Web and a Guatemalan Web, and an Angolan Web. And the government’s recent proposal of requiring companies to locate their servers in India is a move towards this (apart from being a move towards killing cloud computing).<br /><br />That having been said, the reality is that the CEOs of Google, Google India, and Microsoft have been summoned to appear in Indian courts for allowing their users to publish material which they don’t know about, which is in a sealed envelope (and most of the accused companies haven’t been shown yet), and which they weren’t even asked once to remove.<br /><br />The Intermediary Guidelines Rules passed by the Department of Information Technology in April 2011 do not require the user, whose content it is, to be told that there is a complaint, nor to be given a chance to defend themselves. It does not even require public notice that the content has been removed.</p>
<p>The truth is, the transparency around censorship that Google and Twitter are providing is far better than what most other companies are providing. For instance, Big Rock, an Indian DNS provider, suspended the CartoonsAgainstCorruption.com web address on the basis of a seemingly not legal request by the Cyber Cell of the Mumbai Crime Branch, and did so without any public notice and without even informing the cartoonist whose web address it was. At least Google and Twitter are pushing back against non-legal requests, and refusing to remove content that doesn’t violate local laws. Single-mindedly criticising them will only put off other companies from following in their footsteps.<br /><br />Instead of criticising those who are actually working towards transparency in censorship, we should encourage them and others, push intermediaries not to cave in to unreasonable censorship requests, prevent them from over-censoring on their own, and push hard for the government to incorporate their best practices as part of the Intermediary Guidelines Rules.</p>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://www.indianexpress.com/news/world-narrow-web/907579/1">The original article was published in the Indian Express</a></p>
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For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/world-narrow-web'>https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/world-narrow-web</a>
</p>
No publisherpraneshGoogleFreedom of Speech and ExpressionTwitterInternet GovernanceFeaturedCensorship2012-03-27T16:00:24ZBlog EntryWorkshop on Open Data for Human Development - Sessions Report
https://cis-india.org/openness/workshop-on-open-data-for-human-development-2015-06-report
<b>CIS facilitated a workshop on open data policy and tools for government officials from Sikkim, Meghalaya, and Tripura, and those from Bhutan and Maldives, in June 2015. The workshop was co-facilitated with Akvo, DataMeet, and Mapbox, and was supported by International Centre for Human Development of UNDP India. Here we share the workshop report and other related documents. The report is written by Sumandro, along with Amitangshu Acharya of Akvo.</b>
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<h2>Day 01, June 03, 2015</h2>
<p>The first day of the workshop began with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prem_Das_Rai"><strong>Mr. Prem Das Rai</strong></a>, Honourable MP, Loksabha, Sikkim, briefly addressing the participants. He contextualised the workshop against the background of technological changes and emerging opportunities of governance through effective usages of data. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._K._Shiva_Kumar"><strong>Dr. A.K. Shiva Kumar</strong></a>, Director of the <a href="http://www.undp.org/content/india/en/home/operations/projects/human-development/the-international-centre-for-human-development.html">International Centre for Human Development (IC4HD)</a>, UNDP India, welcomed the participants and initiated a panel discussion on data, ICTs and governance. The panel had three speakers: <a href="https://twitter.com/SrivatsaKrishna"><strong>Mr. Srivatsa Krishna</strong></a>, IAS and Secretary, <a href="https://www.bangaloreitbt.in/">Department of Information Technology, Biotechnology, and Science and Technology</a>, Government of Karnataka; <a href="http://www.cgg.gov.in/adg_profile.html"><strong>Dr. B. Gangaiah</strong></a>, Additional Director General, <a href="http://www.cgg.gov.in/">Centre for Good Governance</a>, Hyderabad; and <a href="https://twitter.com/sunil_abraham"><strong>Sunil Abraham</strong></a>, Executive Director, <a href="http://cis-india.org/">the Centre for Internet and Society</a>, Bengaluru and Delhi.</p>
<p><strong>Mr. Krishna</strong> spoke about the strategies adopted in setting up IT and ITES clusters in Cyberabad, Andhra Pradesh and in Bengaluru, Karnataka. He noted that tax cuts and accelerated land allocation are key to incentivising the private sector to set up IT and ITES units. Another major concern is that of ensuring supply of good quality IT workers. He also emphasised on the need for governments to build effective public facing electronic services - either in the form of Nemmadi Kendras, where people can physically go to access various government services, or in the form of mobile applications that bring different civic services into one digital interface, like <a href="https://www.bangaloreone.gov.in/public/default.aspx">Bangalore One</a> and <a href="https://www.mobile.karnataka.gov.in/goken/login.aspx">Karnataka Mobile One</a>.</p>
<p><strong>Dr. Gangaiah</strong> gave an extensive overview of the idea and applications of open data in the contexts of governance and development. He noted that government data (in India) often suffers from criticisms related to quality, as well as the lack of availability of the same in public domain. The key problems, he identified, for opening up government data in India are that most often the data is collected by a government agency for a very specific purpose, and the steps required to ensure wider circulation and use of the same is not taken (such as lack of documentation and interoperability of data); and that the government agencies most often consider the collected data as a source of power, and hence as something to be retained and not disclosed in full details. The slides from Dr. Gangaiah’s presentation can be accessed <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7xi0bhhq-OxcGs3UndvWDZJMlk/view?usp=sharing">here</a>.</p>
<p><strong>Mr. Abraham</strong>’s presentation highlighted several areas of concern when deploying data-driven techniques and solutions for human development challenges. He described how the current phase of open data discussions by central and state governments in India represent the third phase of ‘openness’ in governance in India. While the first phase focused on usage of Free/Libre Open Source Softwares in building electronic governance applications and information systems, the second phase involved embracing of open software standards and formats across government information systems and IT solutions. It is very important to note that with the third phase of openness focusing on opening up of data and information, both of these earlier foci of free and open source softwares, and open standards and interoperability are returning as complementary components to ensure seamless publication of open government data. However, he argued, when deploying data-driven techniques and solutions for human development challenges, it is imperative to remember three things: 1) collection of data is a time- and effort-consuming task, and hence must be optimised so as to not to take away time and effort from actual developmental interventions, 2) bad quality of development data is a structural problem, often emanating from the data being not useful to the person actually collecting it, and 3) availability of data does not automatically change or open up the process of decision-making.</p>
<p>The second session of the day started with a detailed presentation by <strong>Mr. T. Samdup</strong>, Joint Director, Department of Information Technology, Government of Sikkim, on the context, the making, and the salient features of the <a href="http://www.sikkim.gov.in/stateportal/Link/SODAAP%20Policy%20Document.pdf">Sikkim Open Data Acquisition and Accessibility Policy (SODAAP)</a>, 2014. He explained that the Policy mandates setting up of an online state data portal that will host all data sets generated by various agencies of the Government of Sikkim, and making such data available, subject to concerns of privacy and security, across all state government agencies and the citizens in general. The key needs driving this Policy have been that for availability of accurate and timely data on various aspects of human development in the state, as well as for reducing expenses and confusions due to duplication of data collection efforts. The slides from Mr. Samdup’s presentation can be accessed <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7xi0bhhq-OxcktuMm0tTGFMWHc/view?usp=sharing">here</a>.</p>
<p>The presentation by <strong>Mr. Samdup</strong> was followed by one by <a href="https://twitter.com/ajantriks"><strong>Mr. Sumandro Chattapadhyay</strong></a> of the Centre for Internet and Society on an initial set of questions and concerns that should be addressed by the implementation plan of the SODAAP. He took a detailed look at the four objectives mentioned in the Policy document, and discussed what tasks, decisions, and deliberations are needed to achieve each of those. In conclusion, he listed a set of core components of the implementation process that must also be discussed in the implementation plan document, namely: 1) governance and oversight structure for implementation, 2) incentivising government personnel for opening up data across departments, including financial support for the same, 3) metadata, documentation of data collection process, and implementing unique identifiers, and 4) developing processes of sharing of data between the Union and the state government, especially in reference to national Management Information Systems. The slides from Mr. Chattapadhyay’s presentation can be accessed <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7xi0bhhq-OxNUVGM1ZqcGhiUUU/view?usp=sharing">here.</a></p>
<p>These presentations were followed by a general discussion on various aspects of the SODAAP and the challenges to be overcome during its implementation. This session provided a general introduction to the SODAAP, especially for workshop participants who are not from Sikkim, and also set up the key questions to be discussed and answered while preparing the first draft of the SODAAP implementation plan.</p>
<p>After the second session ended, the participants were asked to individually write down the key challenges they identify for the implementation process of SODAAP. These responses were compiled by Sumandro and made available as a reference document for the implementation plan. The chart below summarises these responses.</p>
<p><iframe src="http://ajantriks.github.io/cis/charts/2015.08_sodaap-challenges/index.html" frameborder="0" height="400" width="700"></iframe></p>
<p> </p>
<p>In the third session of the day, <a href="https://twitter.com/joycarpediem"><strong>Joy Ghosh</strong></a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/amitangshu"><strong>Amitangshu Acharya</strong></a> of <a href="http://akvo.org/">Akvo</a> talked about the challenges of collecting structured born-digital data from the grassroots level, and how using mobile-based applications, like <a href="http://akvo.org/products/akvoflow/">Akvo FLOW</a>, can address such challenges. Akvo FLOW runs on all Android-based smartphones, and allows ground level development workers to directly feed data into the phone, as well as collect related materials like GPS location and photographs, based upon a form that is centrally designed and downloaded into their phones by the development workers. The data is then kept in the phone till it is sent back to the main server, where data coming from all different surveyors using the same form is shown on a map-based interface for easy navigation of the data across space and time. In this session, Mr. Acharya first introduced the participants to the issues around digital data collection, touching upon issues of ethics, capacity, prioritisation of data collection process along with tools. Mr. Ghosh then took over to describe the functioning of the tool, and then distributed several smartphones, pre-loaded with Akvo FLOW, among the participants for an applied data collection exercise where the participants walked around the NIAS campus and collected data using the FLOW interface. They returned to see their data mapped and analysed on the online dashboard. Their presentation can be accessed <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0kFsiLLpy0XdDM2TE5tckE5Zlk/view?usp=sharing">here</a>.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Day 02, June 04, 2015</h2>
<p>The second day started with two consecutive presentations by <a href="https://twitter.com/thej"><strong>Mr. Thejesh GN</strong></a> of <a href="http://datameet.org/">DataMeet</a>, and <a href="https://twitter.com/Sramach9"><strong>Mr. Sivaram Ramachandran</strong></a> of <a href="http://mapbox.com/">Mapbox</a> on the tools and techniques for working with statistical data and with geospatial data, respectively. The former presentation took the participants through the stages of working with statistical data: from collecting and finding data, to cleaning and validating, and finally analysing the data. Various free and open source tools for each of these stages were also discussed in brief, such as <a href="https://pdftables.com/">PDF Tables</a><a> and </a><a href="http://tabula.technology/">Tabula</a> for converting PDF tables to spreadsheets, <a href="http://openrefine.org/">Open Refine</a> for cleaning data, and <a href="http://app.raw.densitydesign.org/">RAW</a> and <a href="https://datawrapper.de/">DataWrapper</a> for generating web-based dynamic charts. The latter presentation explored the various ways in which geospatial data can be used to inform and support decision-making, and the tools that can be used to render and present geospatial data in forms that are accessible for decision-makers within government and also for individual users. Mr. Ramachandran presented the various free and open source tools available for working with geospatial data, such as <a href="https://www.mapbox.com/mapbox-studio/">Mapbox Studio</a>, <a href="http://qgis.org/en/site/">Quantum GIS</a>, and <a href="http://leafletjs.com/">Leaflet JS</a>. He also gave a brief introduction to <a href="http://openstreetmap.org/">OpenStreetMap</a>, the wiki-like user-contributed global map data platform. Both the presentations can be accessed <a href="http://thejeshgn.com/presentations/Data_Journalism_Workshop.html">here</a> and <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7xi0bhhq-OxQTB3eVpjNmtTUDg/view?usp=sharing">here</a>, respectively. After this session, the participants were divided into two groups. One group engaged further with tools and techniques of working with statistical and geospatial data. The second group took part in a series of exercises to identify and document the current data flows and bottlenecks thereof across several key departments of Government of Sikkim.</p>
<p>The group engaging in applications of various software tools for working with statistical and geospatial data was facilitated by <strong>Mr. Thejesh</strong> and <strong>Mr. Ramachandran</strong>. This group worked with a sample statistical data set, taking it across the stages of finding, cleaning, analysing, and visualising as discussed earlier. The participants used the online version of <a href="http://www.tableau.com/">Tableau</a> to create dynamic charts. Afterwards, they were introduced to various methods of contributing and downloading data from the OpenStreetMap, including directly adding data points through the online editor named <a href="http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/ID">iD</a>. The participants went out in the NIAS campus to collect geospatial data about various natural and human-made features of the campus, such as trees, pathways, etc.</p>
<p>The second group working on documenting data flows and identifying bottlenecks was facilitated by <strong>Mr. Chattapadhyay</strong>, <strong>Mr. Acharya</strong>, and <strong>Ms. Rajashi Mukherjee</strong> from Akvo. The group was further divided into department-wise teams, one each for the Department of Health, the Department of Economic Statistics, Monitoring, and Evaluation (DESME), the Human Resource Development Department (HRDD), and representatives from Gram Panchayat Units. The exercise began with each of the teams discussing and drawing the flow of data for one of the major data set maintained by the agency concerned. The data flows were drawn by identifying key moments of its processing (such as primary collection, verification, digitisation, analysis, storage, reporting, etc.), the actors involved in that moment, the tools and data formats relevant for each moment, and which agency finally stores and uses the data. Once these processes were described on paper, the next part of the exercise focused on identifying which challenges exist at which part of these data flows. This was followed up by a ranking of all these challenges, in terms of how critically they affect the ability of the agency concerned to use and share the final data. All the teams worked separately, and conversed with the facilitators as needed, to develop the data flow diagrams and identify the key challenges.</p>
<p>The major common challenges noted by these teams were: <strong>1)</strong> delays in collection, verification, and digitisation of data, <strong>2)</strong> inability of state government agencies to access data collected as part of centrally-funded welfare schemes, and <strong>3)</strong> parallel systems of data collection employed by different departments leading to duplication of efforts and data.</p>
<p>Several interesting insights came through in this exercise. For example, data related to education is collected both by the HRDD, and the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan (SSA). However, SSA data is not shared with the HRDD. Also, the HRDD publishes all its data, including the name of students, on their <a href="http://sikkimhrdd.org/Home.aspx">website</a>, making it publicly available. One of the data challenges identified by the HRDD was their difficulty in tracking if scholarship money is reaching the suitable students. When a student moves from one school to another, the records do not get updated easily. This leads to different schools continuing to receive funds for the same scholarship. Aligning school records is important to prevent such leakages.</p>
<p>After these two grouped exercises, all the participants gathered back so that the data flows diagrams and identification of key challenges documented by departmental teams could be presented to the entire group. Each team presented their data flow diagram, and discussed challenges and opportunities. This created a context for different departments to discuss what kind of data they often needed from each other, and how there was neither a platform for inter-departmental discussion on such issues, nor systems that facilitate the same. There was an agreement that an open data platform could address this issue to a great extent. The discussion also highlighted that the most significant data collecting government agency in Sikkim is DESME, however, it does not publish any data in machine-readable formats, and does not even have a website.</p>
<p>This data flow and bottleneck exercise made it very clear that there are several data production and collection processes in place in Sikkim, and also systems that are digesting, processing, and reporting data. Hence, implementing the open data policy will need to negotiate with such complexity.</p>
<p>In the final session of the day, <strong>Dr. Shiban Ganju</strong> made a presentation on applications of open data in healthcare. His talk focused on how converting medical information about a patient being stored at various locations to a combined and shareable Electronic Health Record can save the patient as well as the medical practitioners from duplication of medical tests, easier mobility from one medical institute to another, and a clearer macro-level understanding of key public health indicators. Dr. Ganju discussed the open health data initiatives in the United States, in the United Kingdom, and in Sweden, before discussing the challenges faced in implementing interoperable standards for open health data in India. The slides from Dr. Ganju’s presentation can be accessed <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7xi0bhhq-OxTTczUTY3MWZFbG8/view?usp=sharing">here</a>.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Day 03, June 05, 2015</h2>
<p>The final day started with a set of presentations from <strong>Mr. Garab Dorji</strong>, Deputy Chief IT Officer, Office of the Prime Minister, Thimphu, Bhutan of the Government of Bhutan, <strong>Mr. Birendra Tiwari</strong>, Senior Informatic Officer, Department of Information Technology, Government of Meghalaya, and <strong>Mr. Milan Chhetri</strong> of Melli Dara Paiyong Gram Panchayat Unit, Sikkim, on various technological solutions being explored, implemented, and practiced by the respective governments and administrative units.</p>
<p><strong>Mr. Milan Chhetri</strong>’s presentation was on the operationalisation of Cyber Villages in Sikkim, which had been initiated in 2013 with support from the Honourable Chief Minister of Sikkim, <strong>Pawan Kumar Chamling</strong>. Cyber Villages aim to address digital divide, by empowering local village units with handheld data devices to collect data from every household and connect the same to a real time dashboard. All village related data is expected to be available in one place. At the same time as part of e-governance initiative, SMS based updates on Government programmes and services will be sent to all villagers. Mr. Chhetri ended his presentation with a short promotional video of the concept, which is embedded below.</p>
<iframe src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/ZOqAl8kDwKY?rel=0" frameborder="0" height="360" width="640"></iframe>
<p> </p>
<p>The second session of the day started with a presentation from <a href="https://twitter.com/DurgaPrMisra"><strong>Mr. D. P. Misra</strong></a>, National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy - Programme Management Unit (NDSAP-PMU), National Informatics Centre, Government of India. The presentation focused on the process of implementation of the <a href="http://data.gov.in/sites/default/files/NDSAP.pdf">National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy</a> approved by the Government of India in 2012. Mr. Misra has played a key role in the NDSAP-PMU that was trusted with development of the national open government data platform of India and in setting up the procedures and standards for publication of government data by various central and state government agencies through that Platform. His talk described the technical solutions designed by the NDSAP-PMU to make data accessible for the end-users in various file formats, to make visualisation of available data easy, and to make it possible for users to comment upon existing data and to request for data that is unavailable at the moment. Further, he emphasised the need for outreach initiatives by the government so as to build awareness and activities around the available open government data. The slides from Mr. Misra’s presentation can be accessed <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7xi0bhhq-OxZjZrc0c4cmxpZFk/view?usp=sharing">here</a>.</p>
<p>The presentation by Mr. Misra was followed by a group exercise where various teams, self-selected by the participants, worked on different sections of the SODAAP implementation plan to put together ideas and plans for the first draft of the document. Five groups were formed and each of them worked on a separate section of the implementation plan: <strong>1)</strong> Governance Framework and Budgetary Support, <strong>2)</strong> Data Inventory and Negative List, <strong>3)</strong> Data Acquisition and Open Standards, <strong>4)</strong> Data Publication Process, Licenses, and Timeframes, and <strong>5)</strong> Awareness, Capacity, and Demand of Data. The initial section titled ‘Introduction to the Policy and its Principles’ was put together by Vashistha Iyer on the basis of the SODAAP document. The technical section on the ‘Sikkim Open Data Portal’ was left out of this drafting exercise, as it was decided that the representatives of the Department of Information Technology will prepare this section on the basis of their interactions with the NDSAP-PMU later in June.</p>
<p>The drafting session was followed by presentations by each team working on a separate section, and quick feedbacks from all the participants. These drafts, along with the feedbacks, have been compiled together by Mr. Chattapadhyay, and is shared with the officials from the Government of Sikkim for their further discussion and eventual finalisation of the SODAAP implementation plan document.</p>
<p>The workshop ended with a round of final words and sharing of learning by the participants, and a vote of thanks on the behalf of the organisers.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/openness/workshop-on-open-data-for-human-development-2015-06-report'>https://cis-india.org/openness/workshop-on-open-data-for-human-development-2015-06-report</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroOpen DataOpen Government DataFeaturedSikkim Open Data Acquisition and Accessibility PolicyOpenness2015-08-28T08:16:09ZBlog EntryWorkshop on Open Data for Human Development
https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/workshop-on-open-data-for-human-development-2015-06
<b>Sumandro Chattapadhyay and Sunil Abraham will take part in the workshop being organised for government officials from Bhutan, Maldives, Meghalaya, Sikkim, and Tripura, by the International Centre for Human Development (IC4HD) of UNDP India, during June 3-6, 2015. The workshop will be held at the National Institute of Advanced Studies Campus in Bengaluru. Sunil will be one of the panelists in the opening discussion on 'data and transparency in governance,' and Sumandro will provide input for and lead the sessions on developing the draft implementation plan for the Sikkim Open Data Acquisition and Accessibility Policy. Sumandro worked with the IC4HD team to design the objectives and the agenda of the workshop.</b>
<p> </p>
<h2>Sikkim Open Data Acquisition and Accessibility Policy</h2>
<p> </p>
<p>Government of Sikkim passed the <a href="http://www.sikkim.gov.in/stateportal/Link/SODAAP%20Policy%20Document.pdf" target="_blank">SODAA Policy</a> in 2014 so as to streamline and open up the availability of “authentic data to buttress the achievements of the Government of Sikkim and to gather data on key metrics to be able to spur growth in all the areas of human development.” The Policy mandates setting up an open data portal, hosted by the State Data Centre of Sikkim, where data contributed by all the state government agencies will reside, and from which the same data will be made openly accessible to government agencies, non-government organisations, and private individuals alike. Only data that is shareable – data that is not part of negative list prepared by any government agency – and that is non-sensitive – data that does not contain information that can be used to identify any private individual – will be made available through this Sikkim open data portal. The Department of Information Technology of the Government of Sikkim has been assigned the role of being the nodal agency for coordinating and monitoring the implementation “of policy through close collaboration with all State Government Departments and agencies.”</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Objectives of the Workshop</h2>
<p> </p>
<p>The Government of Sikkim understands that data collection, management, and reporting processes at the different departments must go through a structural reconfiguration before systematic and sustainable publication of data through this open data portal can be possible. This work will of course involve a long duration of change, and participation of a wide range of actors. The <a href="http://www.in.undp.org/content/india/en/home/operations/projects/human-development/the-international-centre-for-human-development.html" target="_blank">International Centre for Human Development</a>, at UNDP India, is organising this workshop for Sikkim government officials to conceptualise and develop the outlines of an action strategy towards this goal of streamlining data acquisition and publication processes across government departments.</p>
<p>Discussions in this workshop will focus on the activities of four departments of the Government of Sikkim – Department of Health, Rural Management and Development Department (RMDD), Human Resource Development Department (HRDD), and Department of Agriculture. At least two officials from each of these departments would take part in the workshop. Apart from these departments, officials from Department of Information Technology (DIT), Department of Economic Statistics, Monitoring, and Evaluation (DESME), and others, will also participate.</p>
<p>Apart from government officials from Sikkim, those from Bhutan, Maldives, Meghalaya, and Tripura will also attend the workshop, so as to think ahead towards their respective open data initiatives.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Agenda of the Workshop</h2>
<p> </p>
<h3>Day 1: June 3, 2015</h3>
<p> </p>
<table class="plain">
<thead>
<tr>
<th>Time</th>
<th>Session</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>0930-1000</td>
<td><strong>Welcome and Introductions</strong><br />
A.K. Shiva Kumar, Director, IC4HD<br />
P.D. Rai, Honourable Member of Parliament (LS) from Sikkim</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>1000-1100<br />
<strong>Session 1</strong></td>
<td><strong>Panel Discussion</strong><br />
<strong>Data and Transparency in Governance</strong><br />
Moderator: P. D. Rai<br />
Panellists:
<ul><li>Srivatsa Krishna, Secretary, Department of Information Technology, Biotechnology and Science & Technology, Government of Karnataka</li>
<li>B. Gangaiah, Additional Director General, Centre for Good Governance, Hyderabad</li>
<li>Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, The Centre for Internet and Society</li></ul>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>1100-1130<br />
<strong>Session 2</strong></td>
<td><strong>Sikkim Open Data Acquisition and Accessibility Policy</strong><br />
Moderator: P. D. Rai<br />
Presentation by: T. Samdup, Joint Director, Department of Information Technology, Sikkim</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>1130-1200</td>
<td><strong>Tea Break</strong></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>1200-1300<br />
<strong>Session 3</strong></td>
<td><strong>Implementing an Open Data Policy - Key Components</strong><br />
Moderator: A. K. Shiva Kumar<br />
Presentation by: Sumandro Chattapadhyay, The Centre for Internet and Society</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>1300-1400</td>
<td><strong>Lunch</strong></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>1400-1430<br />
<strong>Session 4</strong></td>
<td><strong>Group Exercise 1</strong><br />
<strong>Challenges of Opening up Government Data in Sikkim</strong><br />
Facilitated by: Sumandro Chattapadhyay</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>1430-1530<br />
<strong>Session 5</strong></td>
<td><strong>Mobile Phone-based Data Collection</strong><br />
<strong>Introduction to Akvo FLOW</strong><br />
Moderator: Meenaz Munshi, IC4HD<br />
Presentation by: Joy Ghosh and Amitangshu Acharya, AKVO</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>1530-1600</td>
<td>Tea Break</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>16:00-1730<br />
<strong>Session 6</strong></td>
<td><strong>Group Exercise 2</strong><br />
<strong>Collecting Data Using Akvo FLOW</strong><br />
Facilitated by: Joy Ghosh and Amitangshu Acharya, AKVO</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p> </p>
<h3>Day 2: June 4, 2015</h3>
<p> </p>
<table class="plain">
<thead>
<tr>
<th>Time</th>
<th>Session</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>0930-1000<br />
<strong>Session 7</strong></td>
<td><strong>Analysing, Visualising, and Publishing Data</strong><br />
Moderator: Amitangshu Acharya<br />
Presentation by: Thejesh GN, DataMeet</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>1000-1045<br />
<strong>Session 8</strong></td>
<td><strong>Collecting, Visualising, and Publishing Geographic Data</strong><br />
Moderator: Amitangshu Acharya<br />
Presentation by: Shiv Ramachandran, MapBox</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>1045-1145<br />
<strong>Session 9</strong></td>
<td><strong>Group Exercise 3</strong><br />
<strong>Organising, Analysing, Visualising, and Publishing Data</strong><br />
Facilitated by: Thejesh GN and Shiv Ramachandran</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>1145-1200</td>
<td><strong>Tea Break</strong></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>1200-1300</td>
<td><strong>Group Exercise 3</strong><br />
<strong>Organising, Analysing, Visualising, and Publishing Data</strong><br />
(Continued)</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>1300-1400</td>
<td><strong>Lunch</strong></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>1400-1500<br />
<strong>Session 10</strong></td>
<td><strong>Open Data and Health Management</strong><br />
Presentation by: Dr. Shiban Ganju, Consultant, Ingalls Health, Harvey, Illinois, Chicago; Chair, Atrimed Health Consulting, Bangalore</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>1500-1600<br />
<strong>Session 11</strong></td>
<td><strong>Open Data and Primary Education</strong><br />
Presentation by: Gautam John, Karnataka Learning Partnership</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p> </p>
<h3>Day 3: June 5, 2015</h3>
<p> </p>
<table class="plain">
<thead>
<tr>
<th>Time</th>
<th>Session</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>0930-1030<br />
<strong>Session 12</strong></td>
<td><strong>Panel Discussion</strong><br />
<strong>Regional Experiences and Reflections on Open Data</strong><br />
Panellists: representative from Bhutan, and from Meghalaya</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>1030-1115<br />
<strong>Session 13</strong></td>
<td><strong>Implementing National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy</strong><br />
Presentation by: D. P. Misra, National Informatics Centre</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>1115-1130<br />
<strong>Session 14</strong></td>
<td><strong>Group Exercise 4</strong><br />
<strong>Drafting the SODAAP Implementation Plan</strong><br />
Facilitated by: Sumandro Chattapadhyay</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>1130-1200</td>
<td><strong>Tea Break</strong></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>1200-1300</td>
<td><strong>Group Exercise 4</strong><br />
<strong>Drafting the SODAAP Implementation Plan</strong><br />
(Continued)</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>1300-1400</td>
<td><strong>Lunch</strong></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>1400-1500<br />
<strong>Session 15</strong></td>
<td><strong>Group Presentations</strong><br />
<strong>Draft SODAAP Implementation Plan</strong><br />
Moderator: P. D. Rai<br />
Facilitated by: Sumandro Chattapadhyay</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>1500-1530</td>
<td><strong>Wrap-Up and Vote of Thanks</strong></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/workshop-on-open-data-for-human-development-2015-06'>https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/workshop-on-open-data-for-human-development-2015-06</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroOpen DataFeaturedWorkshopPolicies2015-06-02T15:34:06ZBlog EntryWikiwars: 12th, 13th January, Bangalore
https://cis-india.org/research/conferences/conference-blogs/wikwarsreg
<b>The Centre for Internet and Society and the Institute of Network Cultures brought together a critical range of scholars, academicians, practitioners, artists and researchers to inquire into the new conditions which emerge with the rise of Wikipedia. The first of two events, WikiWars was the beginning of a knowledge network that shall contribute to a reader titled Critical Point of View, becoming the first resource tool to engage creatively and fruitfully with the diverse range of questions that surround Wikipedia. </b>
<p>The Wikipedia has emerged as the de facto global reference of dynamic knowledge. Different stakeholders – Wikipedians, users, academics, researchers, gurus of Web 2.0, publishing houses and governments have entered into fierce debates and discussions about what the rise of Wikipedia and Wiki cultures means and how they influence the information societies we live in. The Wikipedia itself has been at the centre of much controversy, pivoted around questions of accuracy, anonymity, vandalism, expertise and authority.</p>
<p> The first event, titled WikiWars is scheduled on the 12th and 13th of January 2010. This is the registration page for interested participants who want to join us in the discussions at the WikiWars.</p>
<p>For Event Details look <a href="https://cis-india.org/events/wikiwars" class="external-link"> here</a></p>
<p>For information on Programme, Panels, participants and presentation titles, look <a href="https://cis-india.org/research/conferences/wikiwars" class="internal-link" title="Wikiwars.xls">here</a> (MS Office) or <a href="https://cis-india.org/research/conferences/conference-blogs/uploads/wikiwarsprog1/view" class="external-link">here</a> (PDF document)</p>
<p>For more details on WikiWars and CPOV, look <a href="https://cis-india.org/publications/workshops/conference-blogs/Wikiwars" class="external-link">here</a></p>
<p>We have, apart from the 40 presenters, 45 seats available for interested participants to join the discussions.</p>
<strong>There are no fees for registration, but the seats are limited, available only on first come first serve basis and not expandable.<br /></strong>
<p> </p>
To register, email us on : nishant@cis-india.org
<p>Registrations closes: 10th January, 12:00 midnight, Indian Time.</p>
<p>Make sure you give us the following information in your registration request: <strong>Name, Email address, Cell phone/contact number, Institutional affiliation, Position/Designation, Areas of interest.</strong></p>
<p>We will publish the final list of registered participants on the 11th of January 2010. Registered participants will be provided with a Registration kit and lunch & refreshments during the event.</p>
<p>Please Note: We might not be able to accommodate participants who turn up at the venue without prior registration due to logistical constraints.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/research/conferences/conference-blogs/wikwarsreg'>https://cis-india.org/research/conferences/conference-blogs/wikwarsreg</a>
</p>
No publishernishantFeaturedWikipedia2012-03-13T10:43:09ZBlog EntryWikiWars - A report
https://cis-india.org/research/conferences/conference-blogs/wwrep
<b>The Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore and the Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, hosted WikiWars – an international event that brought together scholars, researchers, academics, artists and practitioners from various disciplines, to discuss the emergence and growth of Wikipedia and what it means for the information societies we inhabit. With participants from 15 countries making presentations about Wikipedia and the knowledge ecology within which it exists, the event saw a vigorous set of debates and discussions as questions about education, pedagogy, language, access, geography, resistance, art and subversion were raised by the presenters. The 2 day event marked the beginning of the process that hopes to produce the first critical reader – Critical Point of View (CPOV) - that collects key resources for research and inquiry around Wikipedia.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The
debates around Wikipedia, the de facto dynamic knowledge production system
online, are very fairly divided into two competing camps. There is a group of
people who swear by Wikipedia – celebrating its democratic processes of
knowledge production, ease of access, and the de-canonisation of knowledge to
produce the ‘WikiWay’; And then there is a group of people who swear at
Wikipedia – raising concerns over authenticity, reliability, vulgarisation of
knowledge and the de-hierarchisation of knowledge systems that Wikipedia seems
to embody. The debates between the two groups are often passionate and situated
in wildly speculative and often personal interests and investments in Wikipedia
and the Web 2.0 Information Revolution that it seems to be a symptom of. The
debates also play out in various international locations, most of them relying
on personal anecdotes, experiences and half hearted data that does not stand
the tests of rigour.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">WikiWars,
then, concentrated on things which are about Wikipedia but also not about Wikipedia.
In many ways, as Geert Lovink, the Director of INC suggested, WikiWars was a
recognition of the fact that Wikipedia has come of age and can now be
systematically and philosophically examined as a work in progress that has
long-term implications about our future. It was the ambition of the Editorial
team (consisting of Geert Lovink, Sabine Nerdeer, Nathaniel Tkacz, Johanna
Niyesito, Sunil Abraham and Nishant Shah) to veer away from the recognised
battle-lines drawn in, around and about Wikipedia, and instead examine the
fault-lines that run under many of our assumptions, prejudices and imaginations
of Wikipedia. And Wikiwars, through careful screening and invested interests,
became one of the first platforms in the world to initiate a critical discourse
on Wikipedia, seeking to engage with its histories, it contemporary
manifestations and practices, and the futures that it seeks to inhabit.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The
different presentations brought in located debates, theoretical and
philosophical concepts and personal experiences to build frameworks that
explain and contextualise Wikipedia as one of the most contested spaces online.
The eight panels across two days dealt with four major thematic areas which
need to be summarised in brief:</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst">1. <strong><u>Education, Pedagogy and
Knowledge:</u></strong> At the very basis of Wikipedia (and
other structures like it) is the question of knowledge production, the
possibility of using it as an educational tool and the potentials it has for
introducing new pedagogies and learning practices in and outside of institutionalised
education. Presenters from various disciplines engaged with these questions in
interesting ways.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst"> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle">Usha
Raman from Teacher Plus in Hyderabad, brought in the question of primary
education, the need for teacher training programmes and the ways by which
infrastructure development needs to be thought through when talking of
Wikipedia and education in the Indian context. The
necessity of locating Wikipedia in a much larger debates on learning were also
echoed by Noopur Rawal and Srikeit Tadepalli, students from Christ University
who brought their experience of Wikipedia and the expectations from classroom
education and learning in their presentation. </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle"> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle">In
the same field, but from a different approach, a panel examined Wikipedia as a site to critique
Western Knowledge production systems. Stian Haklev and Johanna Niyesito
concentrated on the questions of language and knowledge production. Haklev made
an impassioned argument deconstructing the utopian idea of Wikipedia’s
multilingual dreams and instead made a call for recognising the black-holes
when it comes to non-English production and consumption of knowledge on
Wikipedia. He further explored the implications that linguistic imbalance has
on the very governance structure of Wikipedia and its communities. Niyesito
challenged the ‘global’ and ‘cosmopolitan’ image that Wikipedia has built for
itself and posited the idea of Wikipedia as a translingual space where
different languages and cultures negotiate common understandings and processes
of producing knowledge. HanTeng
Liao explored knowledge production through the market economy of key-words to
see how the linguistic biases of search engines that harvest these keywords,
determines the access and visibility of different Wikipedia pages.</p>
<strong><u>Resistance, Diversity
and Representation:</u></strong> While these questions were present as
undercurrents to most of the presentations at WikWars, they were perhaps most
fiercely present in the debates that followed the presentations by Eric Ilya
Lee (Academia Sinica, Taiwan), YiPing Tsou (National Central University,
Taiwan), William Beutler and Eric Zimmerman (IDC, Israel).
<p> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle">For
Lee and Tsou, the responses to the Chinese language Wikipedia from popular
media and personal experiences, were demonstrative of the fact that the lack of
diverse means of representation and participation lead to a strong resistance
of Wikipedia in Taiwan. Beutler
looked at the heavily contested editorial space and policies of Wikipedia to
make a point about how lack of effective governance systems based on
mutual tolerance and diversity lead to
stressful and often traumatic experiences for users who might not be
represented through the mainstream ideas and
ideologies of an English speaking populace.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle">Zimmerman
took a startling position, calling for a regime of attribution and dissolving
the pseudonymous structures of knowledge production in Wikipedia in order to
build designs of trust and verification into the system, thus leading to better
and more credible research tools and representations.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle">The
tone of debates was altered with presentations by Mark Graham (Oxford Research
Institute) and the team of artists Nathaniel Stern and Scott Kildal, the team
responsible for the Wikipedia Art Project. Graham
showed the complexity of visualising space and how the production of space (or
physical geography) on Wikipedia often reflects the virtual density of access
and presence online. Showing a nuanced set of images that help mapping these
new geographies for a richer diversity and representation, Graham showed how
systems like Wikipedia ‘cannot know what they cannot know’ despite the reliance
on the wisdom of crowds.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle">Stern
and Kildall, in giving an account of their project which used Wikipedia’s
policies to undermine and challenge it, show how the institutionalisation of a
space and its ‘canonisation’ can quickly lead to a new set of problems where
the space becomes the very thing it had set itself against.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle"> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle">3. <strong><u>Politics of Free, Open
and Exclusion:</u></strong> The rhetoric of free and open have been
built into all popular discourses around Wikipedia. However, the presentations
at WikiWars showed that these need to be taken with at least a pinch of salt
and further examined for what they signify. Alok
Nandi of Architempo made a dramatic and creative revisit of these guiding
principles of Wikipedia. He showed how an inquiry into rituals of
participation, distortion and access on Wikipedia can promote, not merely
looking at the politics of exclusion but also at the politics of inclusion and
the problems therein.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle"> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle">Dror
Kamir’s evocative narrative of ‘Your side, my side and Wikipedia’ illustrated
how the question of boundaries, of knowledges, of facts and truths get
distorted as language, community, nationality, etc. come into play in recording
and documenting knowledge on Wikipedia. Concentrating on conflict zones in the
Middle East, he talked about the lack and perhaps the impossibility of
producing neutrality the way in which Wikipedia demands of its users. These
ideas resonated with the propositions that ShunLing Chen from Harvard had
floated in the opening panel to explore the ‘boundary work’ of Wikipedia and
how it defines and produces itself in relation to external forces and
controversies. These
discussions on the politics of presence, absence, inclusion and exclusion were
further layered by presentations by Linda Gross, Elad Weider, Heather Ford and
Nathaniel Tkacz who produced a critique of the Free and Open, taking a
cautionary step away from accepting these as inherently good.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle"> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle">While
Gross explored the structure of egalitarianism that Wikipedia builds for
itself, Ford presented an analysis of the licensing regimes of the knowledge
produced within Wikipedia and the problems they pose to traditional knowledges
and non-mainstream information. Weider,
trained as a lawyer, critiqued the neo-liberal discourse around Wikipedia and
tried to correlate the communities with markets. Tkacz’s historical overview of
Free and Open, resulted in a compelling inquiry into the very structures that
inform the shape and functioning of objects like Wikipedia.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Twitter:
#WikiWars <a href="http://twitter.com/wikiwars">http://twitter.com/wikiwars</a>
and <a href="http://www.twitter.com/jackerhack/wikiwars">www.<strong>twitter</strong>.com/jackerhack/<strong>wikiwars</strong></a><cite></cite></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Flickr:
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/30479432@N03/sets/72157623193288710/">http://www.flickr.com/photos/30479432@N03/sets/72157623193288710/</a></p>
<p>
CPOV blog : <a href="http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/cpov/">http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/cpov/</a></p>
<p> </p>
<p>The videos fom the Wikiwars event are embedded below:</p>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHM_HIA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHM_QoA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHM_RgA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHM_z4A"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHN2T4A"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHN2gMA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHN2iUA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHN2z0A"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHN3C4A"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHN3QYA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHN3QYA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHOgCwA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHOgGgA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHOgiUA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHOqA4A"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHOqxYA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHOrhIA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHOrm4A"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHOrycA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHOzEoA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHQoxAA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHQo3MA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHSrGAA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHSsTcA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHToz8A"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHUuGIA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHUuTIA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHUugsA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHUvW8A"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHUvk8A"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHVuwwA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHdpxMA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHdz3IA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHd0DMA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHd0iYA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHf4nkA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHf404A"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHf43AA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHf5EIA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHf5zYA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHghjkA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHgh0EA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHgiAIA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHgiFcA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHgiUMA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHgijUA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHgjjIA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHgjyAA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHgjzwA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHgj1QA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHgkCQA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHgkE8A"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHgkHEA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHgkTcA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHg3n8A"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHg3zgA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHg4GIA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHg5ykA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHg52gA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHhjUEA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHhr04A"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHhsAcA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHh10oA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHh114A"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHh%2B0AA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHh%2B2EA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHh_AcA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHh_A8A"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHh_lQA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHh_w4A"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHjmiIA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHjnHEA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHjuxkA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHjuzwA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHjvRUA"></embed>
<embed height="270" width="320" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/AYHj4kEA"></embed>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/research/conferences/conference-blogs/wwrep'>https://cis-india.org/research/conferences/conference-blogs/wwrep</a>
</p>
No publishernishantDigital GovernanceWikipediaFeaturedCyberculturesWorkshopCPOV2010-10-06T11:21:56ZBlog EntryWikisource Handbook for Indian Communities
https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/wiki-source-handbook-for-indian-communities
<b>Wikisource is one of the trending Wikimedia projects. Many new editors and new books to Indic language Wikisource's get added over a period of time. However, new editors as well as existing editors face numerous problems while working with the content online. The Centre for Internet & Society's Access to Knowledge (CIS-A2K) team, to help the editors, has created this Handbook. CIS invites feedback to the first draft of this Handbook. CIS-A2K will continue to work with the Wikipedia communities to improve their efforts towards developing Wikisource. </b>
<h2>Preface</h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Currently, CIS-A2K is working with five Indian-languages Wikimedia communities (Kannada, Konkani, Marathi, Odia, and Telugu) and one focus project area (Wikisource with punjabi community). While working with the above mentioned Indic Wikimedia communities, we noticed that there are many similarities between the issues and challenges faced by these communities. So, we decided to create this “Wikisource Handbook for Indian Communities”.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">At first, we went through the Wikisource of each language and noted the status. Then we talked to Indic Wikipedians to know more about the Wikisource related issues that they are facing. We also asked for the feedback on the first draft of this handbook. Our actual work will start after the release of this book, when we’ll work with the communities to improve their efforts towards developing Wikisource.</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Click to download the <b><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/a2k/files/wikisource-handbook-for-indian-communities">Wikisource Handbook for Indian Communities</a></b> co-authored by Bodhisattwa Mandal and Ananth Subray P V. with graphics support from Saumya Naidu.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/wiki-source-handbook-for-indian-communities'>https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/wiki-source-handbook-for-indian-communities</a>
</p>
No publisherBodhisattwa Mandal and Ananth Subray P. V.CIS-A2KAccess to KnowledgeWikimediaWikipediaFeaturedHomepage2018-09-19T02:18:40ZBlog EntryWiki Women's Day in Goa
https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/wiki-womens-day-in-goa
<b>International Women's Day (IWD), also called International Working Women's Day, is celebrated on March 8, every year. There were a series of Wikipedia events organised this year with the aim of increasing participation of women contributing to Wikipedia. One such event was organised by the Access to Knowledge team at the Centre for Internet and Society and the Wikimedia India Chapter at the Nirmala Institute of Education (NIE), a Secondary Teacher Education College in Panaji, Goa on March 8, 2013.</b>
<p align="JUSTIFY">NIE is a respected institution providing pre- and in-service teacher education to thousands of teachers and about a 100 of them (99 per cent of the participants being women) joined in to learn Wikipedia editing and increase women related content on Wikipedia.</p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">Rohini Lakshane from the Wikimedia India Chapter and Nitika Tandon from Access to Knowledge, CIS lead the session jointly. The session began with the introduction of Wikipedia, Wikipedia volunteers, the five pillars, motivation of volunteers to contribute to Wikipedia tirelessly and a brief of different activities that are being organised to strengthen the Wikimedia movement in India. Most of the students and faculty members were curious about two main things:</p>
<ol>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">How to integrate the new community of editors in Goa with the larger Indian and global community?</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">How can teachers and students use Wikipedia to advance students' knowledge and add useful content to Wikipedia?</li>
</ol>
<table class="listing">
<tbody>
<tr>
<th>
<p><img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/NethasVideo.png/@@images/7c6006be-6dee-4a10-b4bf-982ca38cf478.png" title="Netha's Video" height="247" width="330" alt="Netha's Video" class="image-inline" /></p>
<p style="text-align: center; ">Participants watching Netha's video</p>
</th>
<td style="text-align: justify; ">
<p>To answer the first part, participants were informed about regular Wiki meet ups in different cities, several city based and language based Wikipedia mailing lists where one can find volunteer friends, active use of user talk pages and village pumps, Wikimedia India Facebook page amongst many others.</p>
<p>To address the second part there was also a brief discussion about wiki project classroom coordination with specific examples from universities around the world. The teachers and faculty members will be sent a detailed outline of the program, list of universities with on-going projects, list of teachers who have used Wikipedia as a teaching tool and are willing to serve as a contact to help others set up a similar teaching courses.</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p align="JUSTIFY">The session was planned to go on until late evening with hands on editing in the computer lab. But unfortunately, we (Rohini and Nitika) were informed that the session will have to close before the scheduled closing time as participants had to leave. Except for two or three participants coming on stage and making their user accounts and another 3-4 article edits, we couldn't include more editing as a part of the outreach session, primarily due to time constraint. We're hoping that at a small percentage of participants would try actual editing at home and contribute to women related articles and some of them will be successful in using Wikipedia as a teacher's tool. We have their contact details and we'll try and monitor their on Wiki activities and provide them support whenever needed.</p>
<table class="invisible">
<tbody>
<tr>
<th><img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/NIEWikipediaWorkshop.png" alt="NIE Wikipedia Workshop" class="image-inline" title="NIE Wikipedia Workshop" /></th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="text-align: center; ">A picture of participants doing Wiki editing at the NIE workshop in Goa</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/wiki-womens-day-in-goa'>https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/wiki-womens-day-in-goa</a>
</p>
No publishernitikaAccess to KnowledgeWikimediaWikipediaFeaturedWorkshopOpenness2013-03-19T06:32:25ZBlog EntryWhose Change is it Anyway?
https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/hivos-knowledge-programme-june-14-2013-nishant-shah-whose-change-is-it-anyway
<b>This thought piece is an attempt to reflect critically on existing practices of “making change” and its implications for the future of citizen action in information and network societies. It observes that change is constantly and explicitly invoked at different stages in research, practice, and policy in relation to digital technologies, citizen action, and network societies. </b>
<p>The White Paper by Nishant Shah was <a class="external-link" href="http://www.hivos.net/Hivos-Knowledge-Programme/Themes/Civic-Explorations/Publications/Whose-Change-is-it-anyway">published by Hivos recently</a>.</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify;">However, we do not have adequate frameworks to address the idea of change. What constitutes change? What are the intentions that make change possible? Who are the actors involved? Whose change is it, anyway?</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Drawing on the Hivos Knowledge Programme and on knowledge frameworks around youth, technology, and change from the last four years, this thought piece introduces new ways of defining, locating, and figuring change. In the process, it also helps understand the role that digital technologies play in shaping and amplifying our processes and practices of change, and to understand actors of change who are not necessarily confined to the category of “citizen”, which seems to be understood as the de facto agent of change in contemporary social upheavals, political uprisings, and cultural innovations.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Methodologically, this thought piece attempts to make three discursive interventions: It locates digital activism in historical trajectories, positing that digital activism has deep ties to traditional activism, when it comes to the core political cause. Simultaneously, it recognises that new modes of political engagement are demanding and producing novel practices and introducing new actors and stakeholders. It looks at contemporary digital and network theories, but also draws on older philosophical lineages to discuss the crises that we seek to address. It tries to interject these abstractions and theoretical frameworks back into the field by producing two case studies that show how engagement with these questions might help us reflect critically on our past practices and knowledge as well as on visions for and speculations about the future, and how these shape contemporary network societies. It builds a theoretical framework based on knowledge gleaned from conversations, interviews, and on-the-ground action with different groups and communities in emerging information societies, and integrates with new critical theory to build an interdisciplinary and accessible framework that seeks to inform research, development-based interventions, and policy structures at the intersection of digital technologies, citizen action, and change by introducing questions around change into existing discourse.</p>
<hr />
<p><a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/whose-change-is-it-anyway.pdf" class="internal-link">Click to download the full White Paper here</a> (PDF, 321 Kb)</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/hivos-knowledge-programme-june-14-2013-nishant-shah-whose-change-is-it-anyway'>https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/hivos-knowledge-programme-june-14-2013-nishant-shah-whose-change-is-it-anyway</a>
</p>
No publishernishantDigital ActivismRAW PublicationsDigital NativesYouthFeaturedPublicationsHomepage2015-04-17T10:56:47ZBlog EntryWhite Paper on RTI and Privacy V1.2
https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/white-paper-on-rti-and-privacy-v-1.2
<b>This white paper explores the relationship between privacy and transparency in the context of the right to information in India. Analysing pertinent case law and legislation - the paper highlights how the courts and the law in India address questions of transparency vs. privacy. </b>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; "><b>Introduction</b></h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Although the right to information is not specifically spelt out in the Constitution of India, 1950, it has been read into Articles 14 (right to equality), 19(1)(a) (freedom of speech and expression) and 21 (right to life) through cases such as <i>Bennet Coleman</i> v. <i>Union of India</i>,<a href="#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1">[1]</a> <i>Tata Press Ltd. </i>v.<i> Maharashtra Telephone Nigam Ltd.</i>,<a href="#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2">[2]</a> etc. The same Articles of the Constitution were also interpreted in <i>Kharak Singh</i> v.<i>State of U.P.</i>,<a href="#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3">[3]</a> <i>Govind</i> v. <i>State of M.P.</i>, <a href="#_ftn4" name="_ftnref4">[4]</a> and a number of other cases, to include within their scope a right to privacy. At the very outset it appears that a right to receive information -though achieving greater transparency in public life - could impinge on the right to privacy of certain people. The presumed tension between the right to privacy and the right to information has been widely recognized and a framework towards balancing the two rights, has been widely discussed across jurisdictions. In India, nowhere is this conflict and the attempt to balance it more evident than under the Right to Information Act, 2005 (the "<b>RTI Act</b>").</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Supporting the constitutional right to information enjoyed by the citizens, is the statutorily recognized right to information granted under the RTI Act. Any potential infringement of the right to privacy by the provisions of the RTI Act are sought to be balanced by section 8 which provides that no information should be disclosed if it creates an unwarranted invasion of the privacy of any individual. This exception states that there is no obligation to disclose information which relates to personal information, the disclosure of which has no relationship to any public activity or interest, or which would cause unwarranted invasion of the privacy of the individual unless the larger public interest justifies the disclosure of such information. <a href="#_ftn5" name="_ftnref5">[5]</a> The Act further goes on to say that where any information relating to or supplied by a third party and treated by that party as confidential, is to be disclosed, the Central Public Information Officer or State Public Information Officer has to give written notice to that party within five days of receiving such a request inviting such third party (within ten days) to make its case as to whether such information should or should not be disclosed.<a href="#_ftn6" name="_ftnref6">[6]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">A plain reading of section 11 suggests that for the section to apply the following three conditions have to be satisfied, i.e. (i) if the PIO is considering disclosing the information (ii) the information relates to the third party or was given to a Public Authority by the third party in confidence; and (iii) the third party treated the information to be a confidential. It has been held that in order to satisfy the third part of the test stated above, the third party has to be consulted and therefore a notice has to be sent to the third party. Even if the third party claims confidentiality, the proviso to the section provides that the information cannot be withheld if the public interest in the disclosure outweighs the possible harm or injury that may be caused to the third party, except in cases of trade or commercial secrets.<a href="#_ftn7" name="_ftnref7">[7]</a> The Courts have also held that section 11 should be read keeping in mind the exceptions contained in section 8 (discussed in detail later) and the exceptions contained therein. <a href="#_ftn8" name="_ftnref8">[8]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">This principle of non disclosure of private information can be found across a number of common law jurisdictions. The United Kingdom's Freedom of Information Act, 2000 exempts the disclosure of information where it would violate the data protection principles contained in the Data Protection Act, 1998 or constitute an actionable breach of confidence.<a href="#_ftn9" name="_ftnref9">[9]</a> The Australian Freedom of Information Act, 1982 categorizes documents involving unreasonable disclosure of personal information as conditionally exempt i.e. allows for their disclosure unless such disclosure would be contrary to public interest.<a href="#_ftn10" name="_ftnref10">[10]</a> The Canadian Access to Information Act also has a provision which allows the authorities to refuse to disclose personal information except in accordance with the provisions of the Canadian Privacy Act. <a href="#_ftn11" name="_ftnref11">[11]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">An overview of the RTI Act, especially sections 6 to 8 seems to give the impression that the legislature has tried to balance and harmonize conflicting public and private rights and interests by building sufficient safeguards and exceptions to the general principles of disclosure under the Act. <a href="#_ftn12" name="_ftnref12">[12]</a> This is why it is generally suggested that section 8, when applied, should be given a strict interpretation as it is a fetter on not only a statutory right granted under the RTI Act but also a pre-existing constitutional right. <a href="#_ftn13" name="_ftnref13">[13]</a> Logical as this argument may seem and appropriate in some circumstances, it does present a problem when dealing with the privacy exception contained in section 8(1)(j). That is because the right to privacy envisaged in this section is also a pre-existing constitutional right which has been traced to the same provisions of the Constitution from which the constitutional right of freedom of information emanates.<a href="#_ftn14" name="_ftnref14">[14]</a> Therefore there is an ambiguity regarding the treatment and priority given to the privacy exception vs. the disclosure mandate in the RTI Act, as it requires the balancing of not only two competing statutory rights but also two constitutional rights.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; "><b>The Privacy Exception </b></h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">As discussed earlier, the purpose of the RTI Act is to increase transparency and ensure that people have access to as much public information as possible. Such a right is critical in a democratic country as it allows for accountability of the State and allows individuals to seek out information and make informed decisions. However, it seems from the language of the RTI Act that at the time of its drafting the legislature did realize that there would be a conflict between the endeavor to provide information and the right to privacy of individuals over the information kept with public authorities, which is why a privacy exception was carved into section 8(1)(j) of the Right to Information Act. The Act does not only protect the privacy of the third party who's information is at risk of being disclosed, but also the privacy of the applicant. In fact it has now been held that a private respondent need not give his/her ID or address as long as the information provided by him/her is sufficient to contact him/her.<a href="#_ftn15" name="_ftnref15">[15]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">It is interesting to note that although the RTI Act gives every citizen a right to information, it does not limit this right with a stipulation as to how the information shall be used by the applicant or the reason for which the applicant wants such information. <a href="#_ftn16" name="_ftnref16">[16]</a> This lack of a purpose limitation in the Act may have privacy implications as non sensitive personal information could be sought from different sources and processed by any person so as to convert such non-sensitive or anonymous information into identifiable information which could directly impact the privacy of individuals.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The exception in S. 8(1)(j) prohibits the disclosure of personal information for two reasons (i) its disclosure does not relate to any public activity or interest or (ii) it would be an unwarranted invasion into privacy. The above two conditions however get trumped if a larger public interest is satisfied by the disclosure of such information.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">One interesting thing about the exception contained in section 8(1)(j) is that this exception itself has an exception to it in the form of a proviso. The proviso says that any information which cannot be denied to the central or state legislature shall not be denied to any person. Since the proviso has been placed at the end of sub-section 8(1) which is also the end of clause 8(1)(j), one might be tempted to ask whether this proviso applies only to the privacy exception i.e. clause 8(1)(j) or to the entire sub-section 8(1) (which includes other exceptions such as national interest, etc.). This issue was put to rest by the Bombay High Court when it held that since the proviso has been put only after clause 8(1)(j) and not before each and every clause, it would not apply to the entire sub-section 8(1) but only to clause 8(1)(j), thus ensuring that the exceptions to disclosure other than the right to privacy are not restricted by this proviso.<a href="#_ftn17" name="_ftnref17">[17]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Scope of Proviso to section 8(1)(j)</b><br />Though the courts have agreed that the proviso is applicable only to section 8(1)(j), the import of the proviso to section 8(1)(j) is a little more ambiguous and there are conflicting decisions by different High Courts on this point. Whereas the Bombay High Court has laid emphasis on the letter of the proviso and derived strength from the objects and overall scheme of the Act to water down the provisions of section 8(1)(j), <a href="#_ftn18" name="_ftnref18">[18]</a> the Delhi High Court has disagreed with such an approach which gives "undue, even overwhelming deference" to Parliamentary privilege in seeking information. Such an approach would render the protection under section 8(1)j) meaningless, and the basic safeguard bereft of content.<a href="#_ftn19" name="_ftnref19">[19]</a> In the words of the Delhi High Court:</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">" <i> The proviso has to be only as confined to what it enacts, to the class of information that Parliament can ordinarily seek; if it were held that all information relating to all public servants, even private information, can be accessed by Parliament, Section 8(1)(j) would be devoid of any substance, because the provision makes no distinction between public and private information. Moreover there is no law which enables Parliament to demand all such information; it has to be necessarily in the context of some matter, or investigation. If the reasoning of the Bombay High Court were to be accepted, there would be nothing left of the right to privacy, elevated to the status of a fundamental right, by several judgments of the Supreme Court. </i> "</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The interpretation given by the Delhi High Court thus ensures that section 8(1)(j) still has some effect, as otherwise the privacy exception would have gotten steamrolled by parliamentary privilege and all sorts of information such as Income Tax Returns, etc. of both private and public individuals would have been liable to disclosure under the RTI Act.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Unfortunately, the RTI Act does not describe the terms "personal information" or "larger public interest" used in section 8(1)(j), which leaves some amount of ambiguity in interpreting the privacy exception to the RTI Act. Therefore the only option for anyone to understand these terms in greater depth is to discuss and analyse the case laws developed by the Hon'ble Supreme Court and the High Courts which have tried to throw some light on this issue.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">We shall discuss some of these landmark judgments to understand the interpretations given to these terms and then move on to specific instances where (applying these principles) information has been disclosed or denied.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Personal Information</b><br />The RTI Act defines the term information but does not define the term "personal information". Therefore one has to rely on judicial pronouncements to understand the term a more clearly. Looking at the common understanding and dictionary meaning of "personal" as well as the definition of "information" contained in the RTI Act it could be said that personal information would be information, information that pertains to a person and as such it takes into its fold possibly every kind of information relating to the person. Now, such personal information of the person may, or may not, have relation to any public activity, or to public interest. At the same time, such personal information may, or may not, be private to the person. <a href="#_ftn20" name="_ftnref20">[20]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The Delhi High Court has tried to draw a distinction between the term "private information" which encompasses the personal intimacies of the home, the family, marriage, motherhood, procreation, child rearing and of the like nature and "personal information" which would be any information that pertains to an individual. This would logically imply that all private information would be part of personal information but not the other way round. <a href="#_ftn21" name="_ftnref21">[21]</a> The term 'personal information' has in other cases, been variously described as "identity particulars of public servants, i.e. details such as their dates of birth, personal identification numbers",<a href="#_ftn22" name="_ftnref22">[22]</a> and as including tax returns, medical records etc.<a href="#_ftn23" name="_ftnref23">[23]</a> It is worth noting that just because the term used is "personal information" does not mean that the information always has to relate to an actual person, but may even be a juristic entity such as a trust or corporation, etc.<a href="#_ftn24" name="_ftnref24">[24]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Larger Public Interest</b><br />The term larger public interest has not been discussed or defined in the RTI Act, however the Courts have developed some tests to determine if in a given situation, personal information should be disclosed in the larger public interest.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Whenever a Public Information Officer is asked for personal information about any person, it has to balance the competing claims of the privacy of the third party on the one hand and claim of public interest on the other and determine whether the public interest in such a disclosure satisfies violating a person's privacy. The expression "public interest" is not capable of a precise definition and does not have a rigid meaning. It is therefore an elastic term and takes its colors from the statute in which it occurs, the concept varying with the time and the state of the society and its needs. This seems to be the reason why the legislature and even the Courts have shied away from a precise definition of "public interest". However, the term public interest does not mean something that is merely interesting or satisfies the curiosity or love of information or amusement; but something in which a class of the community have some interest by which their rights or liabilities are affected.<a href="#_ftn25" name="_ftnref25">[25]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">There have been suggestions that the use of the word "larger" before the term "public interest" denotes that the public interest involved should serve a large section of the society and not just a small section of it, i.e. if the information has a bearing on the economy, the moral values in the society; the environment; national safety, or the like, the same would qualify as "larger public interest".<a href="#_ftn26" name="_ftnref26">[26]</a> However this is not a very well supported theory and the usage of the term "larger public interest" cannot be given such a narrow meaning, for example what if the disclosure of the information could save the lives of only 10 people or even just 5 children? Would the information not be released just because it violates one person's right to privacy and there is not a significant number of lives at stake? This does not seem to be what all the cases on the right to privacy, right from <i>Kharak Singh<a href="#_ftn27" name="_ftnref27"><b>[27]</b></a></i> all the way to <i>Naz Foundation</i>, <a href="#_ftn28" name="_ftnref28">[28]</a> seem to suggest. Infact, in the very same judgment where the above interpretation has been suggested, the Court undermines this argument by giving the example of a person with a previous crime of sexual assault being employed in an orphanage and says that the interest of the small group of children in the orphanage would outweigh the privacy concerns of the individual thus requiring disclosure of all information regarding the employee's past.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In light of the above understanding of section 8(1)(j), there seem to be two different tests that have been proposed by the Courts, which seem to connote the same principle although in different words:</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">1. The test laid down by <i>Union Public Service Commission</i> v. <i>R.K. Jain</i>:</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(i) The information sought must relate to „Personal information‟ as understood above of a third party. Therefore, if the information sought does not qualify as personal information, the exemption would not apply;</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(ii) Such personal information should relate to a third person, i.e., a person other than the information seeker or the public authority; AND</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(iii) (a) The information sought should not have a relation to any public activity qua such third person, or to public interest. If the information sought relates to public activity of the third party, i.e. to his activities falling within the public domain, the exemption would not apply. Similarly, if the disclosure of the personal information is found justified in public interest, the exemption would be lifted, otherwise not; OR (b) The disclosure of the information would cause unwarranted invasion of the privacy of the individual, and that there is no larger public interest involved in such disclosure. <a href="#_ftn29" name="_ftnref29">[29]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">2. The other test was laid down in <i>Vijay Prakash</i> v. <i>Union of India</i>, but in the specific circumstances of disclosure of personal information relating to a public official:</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(i) whether the information is deemed to comprise the individual's private details, unrelated to his position in the organization;</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(ii) whether the disclosure of the personal information is with the aim of providing knowledge of the proper performance of the duties and tasks assigned to the public servant in any specific case; and</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(iii) whether the disclosure will furnish any information required to establish accountability or transparency in the use of public resources. <a href="#_ftn30" name="_ftnref30">[30]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Constitutional Restrictions</b><br />Since there is not extensive academic discussion on the meaning of the term "larger public interest" or "public interest" as provided in section 8(1)(j), one is forced to turn to other sources to get a better idea of these terms. One such source is constitutional law, since the right to privacy, as contained in section 8(1)(j) has its origins in Articles 14,<a href="#_ftn31" name="_ftnref31">[31]</a> 19(1)(a) <a href="#_ftn32" name="_ftnref32">[32]</a> and 21<a href="#_ftn33" name="_ftnref33">[33]</a> of the Constitution of India. The constitutional right to privacy in India is also not an absolute right and various cases have carved out a number of exceptions to privacy, a perusal of which may give some indication as to what may be considered as 'larger public interest', these restrictions are:</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">a) Reasonable restrictions can be imposed on the right to privacy in the interests of the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States, public order, decency or morality, or in relation to contempt of court, defamation or incitement to an offence; <a href="#_ftn34" name="_ftnref34"><sup><sup>[34]</sup></sup></a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">b) Reasonable restrictions can be imposed upon the right to privacy either in the interests of the general public or for the protection of the interests of any Scheduled Tribe;<a href="#_ftn35" name="_ftnref35"><sup><sup>[35]</sup></sup></a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">c) The right to privacy can be restricted by procedure established by law which procedure would have to satisfy the test laid down in the <i>Maneka Gandhi case</i>.<a href="#_ftn36" name="_ftnref36"><sup><sup>[36]</sup></sup></a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">d) The right can be restricted if there is an important countervailing interest which is superior; <a href="#_ftn37" name="_ftnref37"><sup><sup>[37]</sup></sup></a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">e) It can be restricted if there is a compelling state interest to be served by doing so; <a href="#_ftn38" name="_ftnref38"><sup><sup>[38]</sup></sup></a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">f) It can be restricted in case there is a compelling public interest to be served by doing so; <a href="#_ftn39" name="_ftnref39"><sup><sup>[39]</sup></sup></a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">g) The <i>Rajagopal tests - </i>This case lays down three exceptions to the rule that a person's private information cannot be published, <i>viz. </i> i) person voluntarily thrusts himself into controversy or voluntarily raises or invites a controversy, ii) if publication is based on public records other than for sexual assault, kidnap and abduction, iii) there is no right to privacy for public officials with respect to their acts and conduct relevant to the discharge of their official duties. It must be noted that although the Court talks about public records, it does not use the term 'public domain' and thus it is possible that even if a document has been leaked in the public domain and is freely available, if it is not a matter of public record, the right to privacy can still be claimed in regard to it.<a href="#_ftn40" name="_ftnref40"><sup><sup>[40]</sup></sup></a></p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; "><b>Section 8(1)(j) in Practice <br /></b></h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The discussion in the previous chapter regarding the interpretation of section 8(1)(j), though (hopefully) helpful still seems a little abstract without specific instances and illustrations to drive home the point. In this chapter we shall endeavor to briefly discuss some specific cases regarding information disclosure where the issue of violation of privacy of a third party was raised.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Private Information of Public Officials</b><br />Some of the most common problems regarding section 8(1)(j) come up when discussing information (personal or otherwise) regarding public officers. The issue comes up because an argument can be made that certain information such as income tax details, financial details, medical records, etc. of public officials should be disclosed since it has a bearing on their public activities and disclosure of such information in case of crooked officers would serve the interests of transparency and cleaner government (hence serving a larger public interest). Although section 8(1)(j) does not make any distinction between a private person and a public servant, a distinction in the way their personal information is treated does appear in reality due to the inherent nature of a public servant. Infact it has sometimes been argued that public servants must waive the right to privacy in favour of transparency.<a href="#_ftn41" name="_ftnref41">[41]</a> However this argument has been repeatedly rejected by the Courts, <a href="#_ftn42" name="_ftnref42">[42]</a> just because a person assumes public office does not mean that he/she would automatically lose their right to privacy in favour of transparency.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">If personal information regarding a public servant is asked for, then a distinction must be made between the information that is inherently personal to the person and that which has a connection with his/her public functions. The information exempted under section 8(1)(j) is personal information which is so intimately private in nature that the disclosure of the same would not benefit any other person, but would result in the invasion of the privacy of the third party.<a href="#_ftn43" name="_ftnref43">[43]</a> In short, the Courts have concluded that there can be no blanket rule regarding what information can and cannot be disclosed when it comes to a public servant, and the disclosure (or lack of it) would depend upon the circumstances of each case.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Although the earlier thinking of the CIC as well as various High Courts of the country was that information regarding disciplinary proceedings and service records of public officials is to be treated as public information in order to boost transparency,<a href="#_ftn44" name="_ftnref44">[44]</a> however this line of thinking took almost a U-turn in 2012 after the decision of the Supreme Court in <i>Girish Ramchandra Deshpande </i>v. <i>Central Information Commissioner,<a href="#_ftn45" name="_ftnref45"><b>[45]</b></a></i> and now the prevailing principle is that such information is personal information and should not be disclosed unless a larger public interest is would be served by the disclosure.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">It would also be helpful to look at a list of the type of information regarding public servants which has been disclosed in the past, gleaned from various cases, to get a better understanding of the prevailing trends in such cases:</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(i) Details of postings of public servants at various points of time, since this was not considered as personal information; <a href="#_ftn46" name="_ftnref46">[46]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(ii) Copies of posting/ transfer orders of public servants, since it was not considered personal information; <a href="#_ftn47" name="_ftnref47">[47]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(iii) Information regarding transfers of colleagues cannot be exempted from disclosure, since disclosure would not cause any unwarranted invasion of privacy and non disclosure would defeat the object of the RTI Act;<a href="#_ftn48" name="_ftnref48">[48]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(iv) Information regarding the criteria adopted and the marks allotted to various academic qualifications, experience and interview in selection process for government posts by the state Public Service Commission;<a href="#_ftn49" name="_ftnref49">[49]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(v) Information regarding marks obtained in written test, interview, annual confidential reports of the applicant as well as the marks in the written test and interview of the last candidate selected, since this information was not considered as personal information; <a href="#_ftn50" name="_ftnref50">[50]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(vi) Information relating to the appointment and educational certificates of teachers in an educational institution (which satisfies the requirements of being a public authority) was disclosed since this was considered as relevant to them performing their functions. <a href="#_ftn51" name="_ftnref51">[51]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The performance of an employee/officer in an organization is primarily a matter between the employee and the employer and normally those aspects are governed by the service rules which fall under the expression "personal information", the disclosure of which has no relationship to any public activity or public interest. To understand this better below is a brief list of the type of information that has been considered by the Courts as personal information which is liable to be exempt from disclosure under section 8(1)(j):</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(i) (a) Salary details, (b) show cause notice, memo and censure, (c) return of assets and liabilities, (d) details of investment and other related details, (e) details of gifts accepted, (f) complete enquiry proceedings, (g) details of income tax returns;<a href="#_ftn52" name="_ftnref52">[52]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(ii) All memos issued, show cause notices and orders of censure/punishment etc. are personal information. Cannot be revealed unless a larger public interest justifies such disclosure;<a href="#_ftn53" name="_ftnref53">[53]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(iii) Disciplinary information of an employee is personal information and is exempt under section 8(1)(j); <a href="#_ftn54" name="_ftnref54">[54]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(iv) Medical records cannot be disclosed due to section 8(1)(j) as they come under "personal information", unless a larger public interest can be shown meriting such disclosure;<a href="#_ftn55" name="_ftnref55">[55]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(v) Copy of personnel records and service book (containing Annual Confidential Reports, etc.) of a public servant is personal information and cannot be disclosed due to section 8(1)(j);<a href="#_ftn56" name="_ftnref56">[56]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(vi) Information regarding sexual disorder, DNA test between an officer and his surrogate mother, name of his biological father and step father, name of his mother and surrogate step mother and such other aspects were denied by the Courts as such information was considered beyond the perception of decency and was an invasion into another man's privacy.<a href="#_ftn57" name="_ftnref57">[57]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">It is not just the issue of disclosure of personal details of public officials that raises complicated questions regarding the right to information, but the opposite is equally true, i.e. what about seemingly "public" details of private individuals. A very complicated question arose with regard to information relating to the passport details of private individuals.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Passport Information of Private Individuals</b><br />The disclosure of passport details of private individuals is complicated because for a long time there was some confusion because of the treatment to be given to passport details, i.e. would its disclosure cause an invasion of privacy since it contains personally identifying information, specially because photocopies of the passport are regularly given for various purposes such as travelling, getting a new phone connection, etc. The Central Information Commission used a somewhat convoluted logic that since a person providing information relating to his residence and identity while applying for a passport was engaging in a public activity therefore such information relates to a public activity and should be disclosed. This view was rejected by the Delhi High Court in the case of <i>Union of India</i> v. <i>Hardev Singh</i>,<a href="#_ftn58" name="_ftnref58">[58]</a> and the view taken in<i>Hardev Singh</i> was later endorsed and relied upon in <i>Union of India </i>v. <i>Rajesh Bhatia</i>, <a href="#_ftn59" name="_ftnref59">[59]</a> while hearing a number of petitions to decide what details of a third party's passport should be disclosed and what should be exempt from disclosure.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">A list of the Courts conclusions is given below:</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><i><span>Information that can be revealed:</span></i></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(i) Name of passport holder;</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(ii) Whether a visa was issued to a third party or not;</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(iii) Details of the passport including dates of first issue, subsequent renewals, dates of application for renewals, numbers of the new passports and date of expiry;</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(iv) Nature of documents submitted as proof;</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(v) Name of police station from where verification for passport was done;</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(vi) Whether any report was called for from the jurisdictional police;</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(vii) Whether passport was renewed through an agent or through a foreign embassy;</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(viii) Whether it was renewed in India or any foreign country;</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(ix) Whether tatkal facility was availed by the passport holder;</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><i><span>Information that cannot be revealed:</span></i></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(i) Contents of the documents submitted with the passport application;</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(ii) Marital status and name and address of husband;</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(iii) Whether person's name figures as mother/guardian in the passport of any minor;</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(iv) Copy of passport application form;</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(v) Residential address of passport holder;</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(vi) Details of cases filed/pending against passport holder;</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(vii) Copy of old passport;</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(viii) Report of the police and CID for issuing the passport;</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(ix) Copy of the Verification Certificate, if any such Verification Certificate was relied upon for the issue of the passport.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Other Instances </b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Apart from the above two broad categories of information that has been the subject of intense judicial discussion, certain other situations have also arisen where the Courts have had to decide the issue of disclosure under section 8(1)(j), a brief summary of such situations is given below:</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(i) names and details of people who received money as donations from the President out of public funds was considered as information which has a definite link to public activities and was therefore liable to be disclosed;<a href="#_ftn60" name="_ftnref60">[60]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(ii) information regarding the religion practiced by a person, who is alleged to be a public figure, collected by the Census authorities was not disclosed since it was held that the quest to obtain the information about the religion professed or not professed by a citizen cannot be in any event; <a href="#_ftn61" name="_ftnref61">[61]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(iii) information regarding all FIRs against a person was not protected under section 8(1)(j) since it was already a matter of public record and Court record and could not be said to be an invasion of the person's privacy;<a href="#_ftn62" name="_ftnref62">[62]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">(iv) information regarding the income tax returns of a public charitable trust was held not to be exempt under section 8(1)(j), since the trust involved was a public charitable trust functioning under a Scheme formulated by the District Court and registered under the Bombay Public Trust Act as such due to its character and activities its tax returns would be in relation to public interest or activities.<a href="#_ftn63" name="_ftnref63">[63]</a></p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; "><b>Conclusion</b></h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">A discussion of the provisions of section 8 and 11 of the RTI Act as well as the case laws under it reveals that the legislature was aware of the dangers posed to the privacy of individuals from such a powerful transparency law. However, it did not want the exceptions carved out to protect the privacy of individuals to nullify the objects of the RTI Act and therefore drafted the legislation to incorporate the principle that although the RTI Act should not be used to violate the privacy of individuals, such an exception will not be applicable if a larger public interest is to be served by the disclosure. This principle is in line with other common law jurisdictions such as the U.K, Austalia, Canada, etc. which have similar exceptions based on privacy or confidentiality.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">However it is disappointing to note that the legislature has only left the legislation at the stage of the principle which has left the language of the exception very wide and open to varied interpretations. It is understandable that the legislature would try to keep specifics out of the scope of the section to make it future proof. It is obvious that it would be impossible for the legislature or the courts to imagine every single circumstance that could arise where the right to information and the right to privacy would be at loggerheads. However, such wide and ambiguous drafting has led to cases where the Courts and the Central Information Commission have taken opposing views, with the views of the Court obviously prevailing in the end. This was illustrated by the issue of disclosure of passport details of private individuals with a large number of CIC cases taking different views till the High Court of Delhi gave categorical findings on the issue in the <i>Hardev Singh</i> and <i>Rajesh Bhatia</i> cases. Similar was the issue of service details of public officials since before the decision of the Supreme Court in the case of <i>Girish Ramchandra Deshpande</i> in 2012 the prevailing thinking of the CIC was that details of disciplinary proceedings against public officials are not covered by section 8(1)(j), however this thinking has now taken a U-turn as the Supreme Court's understanding of the right to privacy has taken stronger roots and such information is now outside the scope of the RTI Act, unless a larger public interest in the disclosure can be shown.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The ambiguity that arises in application when trying to balance the right to privacy against the right to information is a drawback in incorporating only a principle and leaving the language ambiguous in any legislation. This paper does not advocate that the legislature try to list out all the instances of this problem that are possibly imaginable, this would be too time consuming and may even be counterproductive. However, it is possible for the legislature to adopt an accepted practice of legislative drafting and list certain instances where there is an obvious balancing required between the two rights and put them as "<i>Illustrations</i>" to the section. This device has been utilised to great effect by some of the most fundamental legislations in India such as the Contract Act, 1872 and the Indian Penal Code, 1860. An alternative to this approach could be to utilize the approach taken in the Australian Freedom of Information Act, where the Act itself gives certain factors which should be considered to determine whether access to a particular document would be in the public interest or not.</p>
<h2 style="text-align: justify; "><b>List of References</b></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><b>Primary Sources</b></span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">1. Australia Freedom of Information Act, 1982.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">2. <i>Bennet Coleman</i> v. <i>Union of India</i>, AIR 1973 SC 106.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">3. <i>Bhagat Singh </i>v. <i>Chief Information Commissioner, </i>2008 (64) AIC 284 (Del).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">4. Calcutta High Court, WP (W) No. 33290 of 2013, dated 20-11-2013.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">5. Canadian Access to Information Act.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">6. <i>Canara Bank</i> v. <i>Chief Information Commissioner</i>, 2007 (58) AIC Ker 667</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">7. Constitution of India, 1950.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">8. <i>Govind</i> v. <i>State of M.P.</i>, Supreme Court of India, WP No. 72 of 1970, dated 18-03-1975.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">9. <i>Haryana Public Service Commission </i>v. <i>State Information Commission, </i>AIR 2009 P & H 14.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">10. <i>Jamia Millia Islamia v. Sh. Ikramuddin</i>, Delhi High Court, WP(C) 5677 of 2011 dated 22-11-2011.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">11. <i>Jitendra Singh</i> v. <i>State of U.P.</i>, 2008 (66) AIC 685 (All).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">12. <i>Kharak Singh</i> v. <i>State of U.P.</i>, AIR 1963 SC 129.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">13. <i>Maneka Gandhi </i>v. <i>Union of India</i>, Supreme Court of India, WP No. 231 of 1977, dated 25-01-1978.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">14. <i>Naz Foundation</i> Delhi High Court, WP(C) No.7455/2001 dated 02-07-2009.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">15. <i>P.C. Wadhwa</i> v. <i>Central Information Commission</i>, Punjab and Haryana High Court, LPA No. 1252 of 2009 dated 29-11-2010.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">16. <i>Paardarshita Public Welfare Foundation</i> v. <i>Union of India and others</i>, AIR 2011 Del 82.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">17. <i>President's Secretariat</i> v. <i>Nitish Kumar Tripathi</i>, Delhi High Court, WP (C) 3382 of 2012, dated 14-06-2012.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">18. <i>Public Information Officer</i> v. <i>Andhra Pradesh Information Commission</i>,2009 (76) AIC 854 (AP).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">19. <i>R. Rajagopal v. Union of India</i>, Supreme Court of India, dated 7-10-1994.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">20. <i>Rajendra Vasantlal Shah</i> v. <i>Central Information Commissioner, New Delhi</i>, AIR 2011 Guj 70.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">21. <i>Rajinder Jaina</i> v. <i>Central Information Commission</i>, 2010 (86) AIC 510 (Del. H.C.).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">22. Right to Information Act, 2005</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">23. <i>Secretary General, Supreme Court of India</i> v. <i>Subhash Chandra,</i> Delhi High Court - Full Bench, LPA No.501/2009, dated 12-01-2010.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">24. <i>Srikant Pandaya</i> v. <i>State of M.P.</i>, AIR 2011 MP 14.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">25. <i>Surendra Singh </i>v. <i>State of U.P</i>, AIR 2009 Alld. 106.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">26. <i>Surup Singh Hyra Naik</i> v. <i>State of Maharashtra</i>, 2007 (58) AIC 739 (Bom).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">27. <i>Tata Press Ltd. </i>v.<i> Maharashtra Telephone Nigam Ltd.</i>, (1995) 5 SCC 139.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">28. U.K. Freedom of Information Act, 2000.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">29. <i>UCO Bank</i> v. <i>Central Information Commissioner and another</i>, 2009 (79) AIC 545 (P&H).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">30. <i>Union Centre for Earth Science Studies </i>v. <i>Anson Sebastian, </i>AIR 2010 Ker. 151</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">31. <i>Union of India</i> v. <i>Hardev Singh</i> WP(C) 3444 of 2012 dated 23-08-2013.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">32. <i>Union of India </i>v. <i>Rajesh Bhatia</i> WP(C) 2232/2012 dated 17-09-2013.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">33. <i>Union Public Service Commission </i>v. <i>R.K. Jain</i>, Delhi High Court W.P.(C) 1243/2011 & C.M. No. 2618/2011 ( for stay), dated 13-07-2012.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">34. <i>Vijay Prakash</i> v. <i>Union of India</i>, 2009 (82) AIC 583 (Del).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><b>Secondary Sources</b></span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">1. "Country Report for U.K.", Privacy International, available at <a href="https://www.privacyinternational.org/reports/united-kingdom">https://www.privacyinternational.org/reports/united-kingdom</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">2. "Country Report for Australia", Privacy International, available at <a href="https://www.privacyinternational.org/reports/australia">https://www.privacyinternational.org/reports/australia</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">3. "Country Report for Canada", Privacy International, available at <a href="https://www.privacyinternational.org/reports/canada">https://www.privacyinternational.org/reports/canada</a>.</p>
<div style="text-align: justify; ">
<hr />
<div id="ftn1">
<p><a href="#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1">[1]</a> AIR 1973 SC 106. This case held that the freedom of the press embodies in itself the right of the people to read.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn2">
<p><a href="#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2">[2]</a> (1995) 5 SCC 139.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn3">
<p><a href="#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3">[3]</a> AIR 1963 SC 129.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn4">
<p><a href="#_ftnref4" name="_ftn4">[4]</a> Supreme Court of India, WP No. 72 of 1970, dated 18-03-1975.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn5">
<p><a href="#_ftnref5" name="_ftn5">[5]</a> Section 8(1) in its entirety states as follows:</p>
<p>(1) Notwithstanding anything contained in this Act, there shall be no obligation to give any citizen,-</p>
<p>(a) information, disclosure of which would prejudicially affect the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security, strategic, scientific or economic interests of the State, relation with foreign State or lead to incitement of an offence;</p>
<p>(b) information which has been expressly forbidden to be published by any court of law or tribunal or the disclosure of which may constitute contempt of court;</p>
<p>(c) information, the disclosure of which would cause a breach of privilege of Parliament or the State Legislature;</p>
<p>(d) information including commercial confidence, trade secrets or intellectual property, the disclosure of which would harm the competitive position of a third party, unless the competent authority is satisfied that larger public interest warrants the disclosure of such information;</p>
<p>(e) information available to a person in his fiduciary relationship, unless the competent authority is satisfied that the larger public interest warrants the disclosure of such information;</p>
<p>(f) information received in confidence from foreign Government;</p>
<p>(g) information, the disclosure of which would endanger the life or physical safety of any person or identify the source of information or assistance given in confidence for law enforcement or security purposes;</p>
<p>(h) information which would impede the process of investigation or apprehension or prosecution of offenders;</p>
<p>(i) cabinet papers including records of deliberations of the Council of Ministers, Secretaries and other officers:</p>
<p>Provided that the decisions of Council of Ministers, the reasons thereof, and the material on the basis of which the decisions were taken shall be made public after the decision has been taken, and the matter is complete, or over:</p>
<p>Provided further that those matters which come under the exemptions specified in this section shall not be disclosed;</p>
<p>(j) information which relates to personal information the disclosure of which has no relationship to any public activity or interest, or which would cause unwarranted invasion of the privacy of the individual unless the Central Public Information Officer or the State Public Information Officer or the appellate authority, as the case may be, is satisfied that the larger public interest justifies the disclosure of such information:</p>
<p>Provided that the information which cannot be denied to the Parliament or a State Legislature shall not be denied to any person.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn6">
<p><a href="#_ftnref6" name="_ftn6">[6]</a> Section 11 of the RTI Act.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn7">
<p><a href="#_ftnref7" name="_ftn7">[7]</a> <i>The Registrar General</i> v. <i>A. Kanagaraj</i>, (Madras High Court, 14 June 2013, available at http://www.indiankanoon.org/doc/36226888/.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn8">
<p><a href="#_ftnref8" name="_ftn8">[8]</a> Arvind Kejriwal v. Central Public Information Officer, (Delhi High Court, 30 September 2011, available at http://www.indiankanoon.org/doc/1923225/.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn9">
<p><a href="#_ftnref9" name="_ftn9">[9]</a> Sections 40 and 41 of the U.K. Freedom of Information Act, 2000.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn10">
<p><a href="#_ftnref10" name="_ftn10">[10]</a> Section 11A read with section 47-F of the Australia Freedom of Information Act, 1982.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn11">
<p><a href="#_ftnref11" name="_ftn11">[11]</a> Section 19 of the Canadian Access to Information Act.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn12">
<p><a href="#_ftnref12" name="_ftn12">[12]</a> <i>Public Information Officer</i> v. <i>Andhra Pradesh Information Commission</i>,2009 (76) AIC 854 (AP).</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn13">
<p><a href="#_ftnref13" name="_ftn13">[13]</a> <i>Bhagat Singh </i> v. <i>Chief Information Commissioner, </i>2008 (64) AIC 284 (Del).</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn14">
<p><a href="#_ftnref14" name="_ftn14">[14]</a> Articles 14, 19(1)(a) and 21 of the Constitution of India, 1950.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn15">
<p><a href="#_ftnref15" name="_ftn15">[15]</a> Calcutta High Court, WP(W) No. 33290 of 2013, dated 20-11-2013.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn16">
<p><a href="#_ftnref16" name="_ftn16">[16]</a> <i>Jitendra Singh</i> v. <i>State of U.P.</i>, 2008 (66) AIC 685 (All).</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn17">
<p><a href="#_ftnref17" name="_ftn17">[17]</a> <i>Surup Singh Hyra Naik</i> v. <i>State of Maharashtra</i>, 2007 (58) AIC 739 (Bom).</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn18">
<p><a href="#_ftnref18" name="_ftn18">[18]</a> <i>Surup Singh Hyra Naik</i> v. <i>State of Maharashtra</i>, 2007 (58) AIC 739 (Bom), para 14. Where the Court held that since the medical records of a convict cannot be denied to Parliament or State legislature therefore they cannot be exempted from disclosure under the Act.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn19">
<p><a href="#_ftnref19" name="_ftn19">[19]</a> <i>Vijay Prakash</i> v. <i>Union of India</i>, 2009 (82) AIC 583 (Del).</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn20">
<p><a href="#_ftnref20" name="_ftn20">[20]</a> <i>Union Public Service Commission </i> v. <i>R.K. Jain</i>, Delhi High Court W.P.(C) 1243/2011 & C.M. No. 2618/2011 ( for stay), dated 13-07-2012.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn21">
<p><a href="#_ftnref21" name="_ftn21">[21]</a> <i>Union Public Service Commission </i> v. <i>R.K. Jain</i>, Delhi High Court W.P.(C) 1243/2011 & C.M. No. 2618/2011 ( for stay), dated 13-07-2012.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn22">
<p><a href="#_ftnref22" name="_ftn22">[22]</a> <i>Vijay Prakash</i> v. <i>Union of India</i>, 2009 (82) AIC 583 (Del).</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn23">
<p><a href="#_ftnref23" name="_ftn23">[23]</a> <i>Secretary General, Supreme Court of India</i> v. <i>Subhash Chandra,</i> Delhi High Court - Full Bench, LPA No.501/2009, dated 12-01-2010.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn24">
<p><a href="#_ftnref24" name="_ftn24">[24]</a> <i>Jamia Millia Islamia v. Sh. Ikramuddin</i> , Delhi High Court, WP(C) 5677 of 2011 dated 22-11-2011.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn25">
<p><a href="#_ftnref25" name="_ftn25">[25]</a> <i>Union Public Service Commission </i> v. <i>R.K. Jain</i>, Delhi High Court W.P.(C) 1243/2011 & C.M. No. 2618/2011 ( for stay), dated 13-07-2012.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn26">
<p><a href="#_ftnref26" name="_ftn26">[26]</a> <i>Union Public Service Commission </i> v. <i>R.K. Jain</i>, Delhi High Court W.P.(C) 1243/2011 & C.M. No. 2618/2011 ( for stay), dated 13-07-2012.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn27">
<p><a href="#_ftnref27" name="_ftn27">[27]</a> AIR 1963 SC 129.<i> </i></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn28">
<p><a href="#_ftnref28" name="_ftn28">[28]</a> Delhi High Court, WP(C) No.7455/2001 dated 02-07-2009.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn29">
<p><a href="#_ftnref29" name="_ftn29">[29]</a> <i>Union Public Service Commission </i> v. <i>R.K. Jain</i>, Delhi High Court W.P.(C) 1243/2011 & C.M. No. 2618/2011 (for stay), dated 13-07-2012. This ruling was overturned by a Division Bench of the High Court relying upon a subsequent Supreme Court ruling, however, it could be argued that the Division Bench did not per se disagree with the discussion and the principles laid down in this case, but only the way they were applied.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn30">
<p><a href="#_ftnref30" name="_ftn30">[30]</a> <i>Vijay Prakash</i> v. <i>Union of India</i>, 2009 (82) AIC 583 (Del).</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn31">
<p><a href="#_ftnref31" name="_ftn31">[31]</a> Right to equality.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn32">
<p><a href="#_ftnref32" name="_ftn32">[32]</a> Freedom of speech and expression.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn33">
<p><a href="#_ftnref33" name="_ftn33">[33]</a> Right to life.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn34">
<p><a href="#_ftnref34" name="_ftn34">[34]</a> Article 19(2) of the Constitution of India, 1950.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn35">
<p><a href="#_ftnref35" name="_ftn35">[35]</a> Article 19(5) of the Constitution of India, 1950.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn36">
<p><a href="#_ftnref36" name="_ftn36">[36]</a> <i>Maneka Gandhi </i> v. <i>Union of India</i>, Supreme Court of India, WP No. 231 of 1977, dated 25-01-1978. The test laid down in this case is universally considered to be that the procedure established by law which restricts the fundamental right should be just, fair and reasonable.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn37">
<p><a href="#_ftnref37" name="_ftn37">[37]</a> <i>Govind </i> v.<i> State of M.P</i><i>.</i>, Supreme Court of India, WP No. 72 of 1970, dated 18-03-1975.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn38">
<p><a href="#_ftnref38" name="_ftn38">[38]</a> <i>Govind </i> v.<i> State of M.P</i><i>.</i>,<i> </i>Supreme Court of India, WP No. 72 of 1970, dated 18-03-1975.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn39">
<p><a href="#_ftnref39" name="_ftn39">[39]</a> <i>Govind </i> v.<i> State of M.P</i><i>.</i>, Supreme Court of India, WP No. 72 of 1970, dated 18-03-1975. However the Court later used phrases such as "reasonable restriction in public interest" and "reasonable restriction upon it for compelling interest of State" interchangeably which seems to suggest that the terms "compelling public interest" and "compelling state interest" used by the Court are being used synonymously and the Court does not draw any distinction between them. It is also important to note that the wider phrase "countervailing interest is shown to be superior" seems to suggest that it is possible, atleast in theory, to have other interests apart from public interest or state interest also which could trump the right to privacy.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn40">
<p><a href="#_ftnref40" name="_ftn40">[40]</a> <i>R. Rajagopal v. Union of India</i> , Supreme Court of India, dated 7-10-1994. These tests have been listed as one group since they are all applicable in the specific context of publication of private information.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn41">
<p><a href="#_ftnref41" name="_ftn41">[41]</a> <i>Vijay Prakash</i> v. <i>Union of India</i>, 2009 (82) AIC 583 (Del).</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn42">
<p><a href="#_ftnref42" name="_ftn42">[42]</a> <i>Secretary General, Supreme Court of India</i> v. <i>Subhash Chandra,</i> Delhi High Court - Full Bench, LPA No.501/2009, dated 12-01-2010. Also see <i>Vijay Prakash</i> v. <i>Union of India</i>, 2009 (82) AIC 583 (Del).</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn43">
<p><a href="#_ftnref43" name="_ftn43">[43]</a> <i>Canara Bank</i> v. <i>Chief Information Commissioner</i>, 2007 (58) AIC Ker 667. This case also held that information cannot be denied on the ground that it would be too voluminous.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn44">
<p><a href="#_ftnref44" name="_ftn44">[44]</a> <i>Union Centre for Earth Science Studies </i> v. <i>Anson Sebastian, </i>AIR 2010 Ker. 151; <i>Union Public Service Commission </i>v. <i>R.K. Jain</i>, Delhi High Court W.P.(C) 1243/2011 & C.M. No. 2618/2011 (for stay), dated 13-07-2012</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn45">
<p><a href="#_ftnref45" name="_ftn45">[45]</a> 2012 (119) AIC 105 (SC).</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn46">
<p><a href="#_ftnref46" name="_ftn46">[46]</a> <i>Girish Ramchandra Deshpande</i> v. <i>Central Information Commissioner</i>, 2012 (119) AIC 105 (SC).</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn47">
<p><a href="#_ftnref47" name="_ftn47">[47]</a> <i>Girish Ramchandra Deshpande</i> v. <i>Central Information Commissioner</i>, 2012 (119) AIC 105 (SC).</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn48">
<p><a href="#_ftnref48" name="_ftn48">[48]</a> <i>Canara Bank</i> v. <i>Chief Information Commissioner</i>, 2007 (58) AIC Ker 667.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn49">
<p><a href="#_ftnref49" name="_ftn49">[49]</a> <i>Haryana Public Service Commission </i> v. <i>State Information Commission, </i>AIR 2009 P & H 14.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn50">
<p><a href="#_ftnref50" name="_ftn50">[50]</a> <i>UCO Bank</i> v. <i>Central Information Commissioner and another</i>, 2009 (79) AIC 545 (P&H).</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn51">
<p><a href="#_ftnref51" name="_ftn51">[51]</a> <i>Surendra Singh </i> v. <i>State of U.P</i>, AIR 2009 Alld. 106.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn52">
<p><a href="#_ftnref52" name="_ftn52">[52]</a> <i>Girish Ramchandra Deshpande</i> v. <i>Central Information Commissioner</i>, 2012 (119) AIC 105 (SC).</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn53">
<p><a href="#_ftnref53" name="_ftn53">[53]</a> <i>Girish Ramchandra Deshpande</i> v. <i>Central Information Commissioner</i>, 2012 (119) AIC 105 (SC).</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn54">
<p><a href="#_ftnref54" name="_ftn54">[54]</a> <i>R.K. Jain</i> v. <i>Union Public Service Commission</i>, Delhi High Court, LPA No. 618 of 2012, dated 12-11-2012.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn55">
<p><a href="#_ftnref55" name="_ftn55">[55]</a> <i>Secretary General, Supreme Court of India</i> v. <i>Subhash Chandra,</i> Delhi High Court - Full Bench, LPA No.501/2009, dated 12-01-2010.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn56">
<p><a href="#_ftnref56" name="_ftn56">[56]</a> <i>Srikant Pandaya</i> v. <i>State of M.P.</i>, AIR 2011 MP 14.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn57">
<p><a href="#_ftnref57" name="_ftn57">[57]</a> <i>Paardarshita Public Welfare Foundation</i> v. <i>Union of India and others</i>, AIR 2011 Del 82. It must be mentioned that this case was not exactly under the procedure prescribed under the RTI Act but was a public interest litigation although the courts relied upon the provisions of the RTI Act.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn58">
<p><a href="#_ftnref58" name="_ftn58">[58]</a> WP(C) 3444 of 2012 dated 23-08-2013.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn59">
<p><a href="#_ftnref59" name="_ftn59">[59]</a> WP(C) 2232/2012 dated 17-09-2013.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn60">
<p><a href="#_ftnref60" name="_ftn60">[60]</a> <i>President's Secretariat</i> v. <i>Nitish Kumar Tripathi</i>, Delhi High Court, WP (C) 3382 of 2012, dated 14-06-2012.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn61">
<p><a href="#_ftnref61" name="_ftn61">[61]</a> <i>P.C. Wadhwa</i> v. <i>Central Information Commission</i>, Punjab and Haryana High Court, LPA No. 1252 of 2009 dated 29-11-2010.</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn62">
<p><a href="#_ftnref62" name="_ftn62">[62]</a> <i>Rajinder Jaina</i> v. <i>Central Information Commission</i>, 2010 (86) AIC 510 (Del. H.C.).</p>
</div>
<div id="ftn63">
<p><a href="#_ftnref63" name="_ftn63">[63]</a> <i>Rajendra Vasantlal Shah</i> v. <i>Central Information Commissioner, New Delhi</i>, AIR 2011 Guj 70.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/white-paper-on-rti-and-privacy-v-1.2'>https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/white-paper-on-rti-and-privacy-v-1.2</a>
</p>
No publishervipulFeaturedHomepageInternet GovernancePrivacy2014-11-09T02:53:51ZBlog EntryWhat’s up with WhatsApp?
https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/asia-times-april-20-2018-aayush-rathi-sunil-abraham-what-s-up-with-whatsapp
<b>In 2016, WhatsApp Inc announced it was rolling out end-to-end encryption, but is the company doing what it claims to be doing?</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The article by Aayush Rathi and Sunil Abraham was published in <a class="external-link" href="http://www.atimes.com/article/whats-up-with-whatsapp/">Asia Times</a> on April 20, 2018.</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Back in April 2016, when WhatsApp Inc announced it was rolling out end-to-end encryption (E2EE) for its billion-plus strong user base as a default setting, the messaging behemoth signaled to its users it was at the forefront of providing technological solutions to protect privacy.</p>
<p class="p4" style="text-align: justify; ">Emphasized in the security white paper explaining the implementation of the technology is the encryption of both forms of communication – one-to-one and group and also of all types of messages shared within such communications – text as well as media.</p>
<p class="p4" style="text-align: justify; ">Simply put, all communication taking place over WhatsApp would be decipherable only to the sender and recipient – it would be virtual gibberish even to WhatsApp.</p>
<p class="p4" style="text-align: justify; ">This announcement came in the backdrop of <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/feb/17/apple-ordered-to-hack-iphone-of-san-bernardino-shooter-for-fbi">Apple locking horns with the FBI</a> after being asked to provide a backdoor to unlock the San Bernardino mass shooter’s iPhone. This further reinforced WhatsApp Inc’s stand on the ensuing debate between the interplay of privacy and security in the digital age.</p>
<p class="p4" style="text-align: justify; ">Kudos to WhatsApp, for there is <a href="http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/FreedomOpinion/Pages/CallForSubmission.aspx">growing discussion</a> around how encryption and anonymity is central to enabling secure online communication which in turn is integral to essential human rights such as those of freedom of opinion and expression.</p>
<p class="p4" style="text-align: justify; ">WhatsApp may have taken encryption to the masses, but here we outline why WhatsApp’s provisioning of privacy and security measures needs a more granular analysis – is the company doing what it claims to be doing? Security issues with WhatsApp’s messaging protocol certainly are not new.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Man-in-the-middle attacks</h3>
<p class="p4" style="text-align: justify; ">A <a href="https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/713.pdf">study</a> published by a group of German researchers from Ruhr University highlighted issues with WhatsApp’s implementation of its E2EE protocol to group communications. Another <a href="https://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.857/2016/files/36.pdf">paper</a> points out how WhatsApp’s session establishment strategy itself could be problematic and potentially be targeted for what are called man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks.</p>
<p class="p4" style="text-align: justify; ">An MITM attack takes the form of a malicious actor, as the term suggests, placing itself between the communicating parties to eavesdrop or impersonate. The Electronic Frontier Foundation also <a href="https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/10/where-whatsapp-went-wrong-effs-four-biggest-security-concerns">highlighted</a> other security vulnerabilities, or trade-offs, depending upon ideological inclinations, with respect to WhatsApp allowing for storage of unencrypted backups, issues with WhatsApp’s web client and also with its approach to cryptographic key change notifications.</p>
<p class="p4" style="text-align: justify; ">Much has been written questioning WhatsApp’s shifting approach to ensuring privacy too. Quoting straight from <a href="https://www.whatsapp.com/legal/#privacy-policy-affiliated-companies">WhatsApp’s Privacy Policy:</a> “We joined the Facebook family of companies in 2014. As part of the Facebook family of companies, WhatsApp receives information from, and shares information with, this family of companies.” Speaking of Facebook …</p>
<p class="p4" style="text-align: justify; ">Culling out larger issues with WhatsApp’s privacy policies is not the intention here. What we specifically seek to explore is right at the nexus of WhatsApp’s security and privacy provisioning clashing with its marketing strategy: the storage of data on WhatsApp’s servers, or ‘blobs,’ as they are referred to in the technical paper. Facebook’s rather. In WhatsApp’s words: “Once your messages (including your chats, photos, videos, voice messages, files and share location information) are delivered, they are deleted from our servers. Your messages are stored on your own device.”</p>
<p class="p4" style="text-align: justify; ">In fact, this non-storage of data on their ‘blobs’ is emphasizes at several other points on the official website. Let us call this the deletion-upon-delivery model.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">A simple experiment</h3>
<p class="p4" style="text-align: justify; ">While drawing up a rigorous proof of concept, made near-impossible thanks to WhatsApp being a closed source messaging protocol, a simple experiment is enough to raise some very pertinent questions about WhatsApp’s outlined deletion-upon-delivery model. It should, however, be mentioned that the Signal Protocol developed by Open Whisper Systems and pivotal in WhatsApp’s rolling out of E2EE is <a href="https://github.com/signalapp">open source</a>. Here is how the experiment proceeds:</p>
<p class="p4" style="text-align: justify; "><i>Rick sends Morty an attachment.</i></p>
<p class="p4" style="text-align: justify; "><i>Morty then switches off the data on her mobile device.</i></p>
<p class="p4" style="text-align: justify; "><i>Rick downloads the attachment, an image.</i></p>
<p class="p4" style="text-align: justify; "><i>Subsequently, Rick deletes the image from his mobile device’s internal storage.</i></p>
<p class="p4" style="text-align: justify; "><i>Rick then logs into a WhatsApp’s web client on his browser. (Prior to this experiment, both Rick and Morty had logged out from all instances of the web client)</i></p>
<p class="p4" style="text-align: justify; "><i>Upon a fresh log-in to the web client and opening the chat with Morty, the option to download the image is available to Rick.</i></p>
<p class="p4" style="text-align: justify; ">The experiment concludes with bewilderment at WhatsApp’s claim of deletion-upon-delivery as outlined earlier. The only place from which Morty could have downloaded the image would be from Facebook’s ‘blobs.’ The attachment could not have been retrieved from Morty’s mobile device as it had no way of sending data and neither from Rick’s mobile device as it no longer existed in the device’s storage.</p>
<p class="p4" style="text-align: justify; ">As per the Privacy Policy, the data is stored on the ‘blobs’ for a period of 30 days after transmission of a message only when it can’t be delivered to the recipient. Upon delivery, the deletion-upon-delivery model is supposed to kick in.</p>
<p class="p4" style="text-align: justify; ">Another straightforward experiment that leads to a similar conclusion is seeing the difference in time taken for a large attachment to be forwarded as opposed to when the same large attachment is uploaded. Forwarding is palpably quicker than uploading afresh: non-storage of attachments on the ‘blob’ would entail that the same amount should be taken for both.</p>
<p class="p4" style="text-align: justify; ">The plot thickens. WhatsApp’s Privacy Policy goes on to state: “To improve performance and deliver media messages more efficiently, such as when many people are sharing a popular photo or video, we may retain that content on our servers for a longer period of time.” The technical paper offers no help in understanding how WhatsApp systems assess frequently shared encrypted media messages without decrypting it at its end.</p>
<p class="p4" style="text-align: justify; ">A possible explanation could be the usage of metadata by WhatsApp, which it discloses in its Privacy Policy while simultaneously being sufficiently vague about the specifics of it. That WhatsApp may be capable of reading encrypted communication through the inclusion of a backdoor bodes well for law enforcement, but not so much for unsuspecting users.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">The weakest link in the chain</h3>
<p class="p4" style="text-align: justify; ">Concerns about backdoors in WhatsApp’s product have led the French government to start developing their <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-privacy/france-builds-whatsapp-rival-due-to-surveillance-risk-idUSKBN1HN258">own encrypted messaging service</a>. This will be built using Matrix – an open protocol designed for real-time communication. Indeed, the Privacy Policy lays out that the company “may collect, use, preserve, and share your information if we have a good-faith belief that it is reasonably necessary to respond pursuant to applicable law or regulations, to legal process, or to government requests.”</p>
<p class="p4" style="text-align: justify; ">The Signal Protocol is the undisputed gold standard of E2EE implementations. It is the integration with the surrounding functionality that WhatsApp offers which leads to vulnerabilities. After all, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Assuming that the attachments stored on the ‘blobs’ are in encrypted form, indecipherable to all but the intended recipients, this does not pose a privacy risk for the users from a technological point of view.</p>
<p class="p4" style="text-align: justify; ">However, it is easy lose sight of the fact that the Privacy Policy is a legally binding document and it specifically states that messages are not stored on the ‘blobs’ as a matter of routine. As a side note, WhatsApp’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Service are refreshing in their readability and lack of legalese.</p>
<p class="p4" style="text-align: justify; ">As we were putting the final touches to this piece, <a href="https://wabetainfo.com/whatsapp-allows-to-redownload-deleted-media/#more-2781">news from <i>WABetaInfo</i></a>, a well-reputed source of information on WhatsApp features, has broken that newer updates of WhatsApp for Android are permitting users to re-download media deleted up to three months back. WhatsApp cannot possibly achieve this without storing the media in the ‘blobs,’ or in other words, in violation of its Privacy Policy.</p>
<p class="p4" style="text-align: justify; ">As the aphorism goes: “When the service is free, you are the product.”</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/asia-times-april-20-2018-aayush-rathi-sunil-abraham-what-s-up-with-whatsapp'>https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/asia-times-april-20-2018-aayush-rathi-sunil-abraham-what-s-up-with-whatsapp</a>
</p>
No publisherAayush Rathi and Sunil AbrahamSocial MediaPrivacyInternet GovernanceFeaturedWhatsAppHomepage2018-04-23T16:45:51ZBlog EntryWelcome to r@w blog!
https://cis-india.org/raw/welcome-to-raw-blog
<b>We from the researchers@work programme at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) are delighted to announce the launch of our new blog, hosted on Medium. It will feature works by researchers and practitioners working in India and elsewhere at the intersections of internet, digital media, and society; and highlights and materials from ongoing research and events at the researchers@work programme.</b>
<p> </p>
<h4>r@w blog: <a href="https://medium.com/rawblog" target="_blank">Visit</a> (Medium)</h4>
<hr />
<h3>A space for reflections on internet and society, r@w blog is also an attempt to facilitate conversations around contemporary debates and foster creative engagement with research and practice through text, images, sounds, videos, code, and other media forms offered by the internet.<br /><br /></h3>
<h3>r@w blog opens with an essay on ‘<a href="https://medium.com/rawblog/information-offline-labour-surveillance-and-activism-in-the-indian-it-ites-industry-903c71567d1a" target="_blank">Information Offline: Labour, Surveillance, and Activism in the Indian IT & ITES Industry</a>’ by Rianka Roy - as part of an <a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/call-for-essays-offline" target="_blank">essay series</a> exploring social, economic, cultural, political, infrastructural, and aesthetic dimensions of the "offline" - and audio recording from a session titled <a href="https://medium.com/rawblog/iloveyou-167665a5145a" target="_blank">#ILoveYou</a> by Dhiren Borisa and Dhrubo Jyoti, which was part of the <a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc18" target="_blank">Internet Researchers’ Conference 2018 - #Offline</a>.<br /><br /></h3>
<h3>We will publish our (including commissioned/supported) writings and works on this blog, as well as submitted and compiled materials. Please write to raw[at]cis-india[dot]org to submit your works to be considered for publication. Copyright to all material published on this blog are owned by CIS and author(s) concerned, and they are shared under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.</h3>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/welcome-to-raw-blog'>https://cis-india.org/raw/welcome-to-raw-blog</a>
</p>
No publishersneha-ppHomepageRAW BlogResearchers at WorkFeaturedInternet Studies2019-01-02T11:48:04ZBlog EntryWeb Accessibility Policy Making: An International Perspective
https://cis-india.org/accessibility/web-accessibility-policy-making-an-international-perspective
<b>G3ict and CIS are pleased to announce the publication of a new, improved edition of the Web Accessibility Policy Making: An International Perspective. The report published in cooperation with the Hans Foundation provides an updated synopsis of the many policies that governments have implemented around the world to ensure that the Internet and websites are accessible to persons with disabilities. </b>
<p>The report contains a Foreword by Axel Leblois, Founder and Executive Director of G3ict, an introduction and studies from countries like Australia, Canada, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, South Korea, New Zealand, Philippines, Portugal, Sweden, Thailand, United Kingdom, United States, and the European Union. The report contains contributions from Prashanth Ramadas, Asma Tajuddin, G Aravind, Katie Reisner, Sucharita Narasimhan, Bama Balakrishnan and Nirmita Narasimhan. Axel Leblois, Donal Rice, Immaculada Placienca Porrero, Kevin Carey, Licia Sbattella and Sunil Abraham are the expert reviewers.</p>
<h2>Foreword by Axel Leblois</h2>
<p>This third edition of our joint report with CIS “WEB ACCESSIBILITY POLICY MAKING: AN INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVE” provides an updated synopsis of the many policies that governments have implemented around the world to ensure that the Internet and web sites are accessible to persons with disabilities. With 153 countries parties to the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities as of December 2011, an increasing number of governments are now in the midst of developing policies and programs to ensure that web sites and services under their jurisdictions are accessible.</p>
<p>Indeed, the Preamble of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities recognizes “the importance of accessibility to the physical, social, economic and cultural environment, to health and education and to information and communication, in enabling persons with disabilities to fully enjoy all human rights and fundamental freedoms”. Its article 9 stipulates that: “To enable persons with disabilities to live independently and participate fully in all aspects of life, States Parties shall take appropriate measures to ensure to persons with disabilities access, on an equal basis with others, to the physical environment, to transportation, to information and communications, including information and communications technologies and systems” (1). It further specifies that “State Parties shall also take appropriate measures to … Promote access for persons with disabilities to new information and communications technologies and systems, including the Internet” (2.g).</p>
<p>There is therefore no doubt that all State Parties have an obligation to act upon those commitments. However, as this report demonstrates it clearly, web accessibility policies and their levels of enforcement vary considerably among countries with some common denominators such as the compliance with the W3C – WAI guidelines on web accessibility.</p>
<p>G3ict and CIS hope that this new, improved edition, which will now be available in print as well as in electronic format, will help accelerate the development of web accessibility policies and programs around the world. We want to express our sincere appreciation to Nirmita Narasimhan, programme manager at CIS and editor of the G3ict Publications and Reports for her dedication to this report which would not have been made possible without her incredible work and motivation as Disability Advocate.</p>
<p><a href="https://cis-india.org/accessibility/web-accessibility.pdf" class="internal-link" title="Web Accessibility Policy Making">Download a PDF of the Web Accessibility Policy Making here</a> [335 KB]</p>
<p><a href="https://cis-india.org/accessibility/daisy-file" class="internal-link" title="Web Accessibility (Daisy) File">Download the Daisy File</a> [23412 KB]</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/accessibility/web-accessibility-policy-making-an-international-perspective'>https://cis-india.org/accessibility/web-accessibility-policy-making-an-international-perspective</a>
</p>
No publishernirmitaFeaturedAccessibilityAccess to Knowledge2012-09-25T05:33:25ZBlog EntryVote for the Everyday Digital Native Video Contest!
https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/vote-for-digital-natives
<b>The Centre for Internet & Society and Hivos are super excited to present the final videos in the Everyday Digital Native Video Contest. We invite readers to vote for the TOP 5 Videos. The finalists will each win EUR500! Voting closes March 31, 2012</b>
<h2>Who’s the Everyday Digital Native? This global video contest has the answer</h2>
<p><em>They effect social change through social media, place their
communities on the global map, and share a spiritual connection with the
digital world - Meet the Everyday Digital Native</em></p>
<p>The Everyday Digital Native video contest has got its pulse on what
makes youths from diverse socio-cultural backgrounds connect with one
another in the global community – it’s an affinity for digital
technologies and Web 2.0-mediated platforms coupled with a drive to
spearhead social change. The contest invited people from around the
world to make a video that would answer the question, ‘Who is the
Everyday Digital Native?’. Following a jury-based selection process, the
final videos are now online and open for public voting.</p>
<p>Run by the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet & Society (CIS)
with the support of Dutch NGO HIVOS, the contest will see the top five
videos with the most votes declared winners on April 1, 2012. The 12
finalists in the video, who come from different parts of the globe, are
each vying for the top prize of USD 500 and a chance to have their
shorts screened in a film screening and panel discussion hosted by CIS. <br /><br />Referring
to the theme of the contest, Dr Nishant Shah, Director of Research and
Co-founder of the Centre, says that the contest aims at highlighting the
alternative users of digital technologies. These are people who are
often not accounted for either in mainstream discourses of changemakers
or in academic biopics on digital natives. “The 12 video proposals show
that the everyday digital native does not wake up in the morning and
think, ‘hmmm today I will change the world’. And yet, in their everyday
lives, when they see the possibility of producing a change in their
immediate environments, they turn to the digital to find networks that
can start a change”, says Shah. <br /><br />Apart from the top five public
selections, the jury members will be instrumental in picking their two
favorites among the finalists. Talking about the range of ideas that
participants sent in jury member Leon Tan, a media-art historian,
cultural theorist and psychoanalyst based in Gothenburg, Sweden, says,
“The contest is an exciting project as it has the potential to portray
the lives of digital natives from different corners of the world. The
generosity of the contestants in creating video proposals is commendable
as is the range of ideas suggested. The ideas address both the
opportunities and risks of what we might call digital life.” <br /><br />Adds
Shashwati Talukdar, a filmmaker and jury member from India, “It was
really interesting to see how different all the proposals were. Some of
them were taking the notion of digital native as a personal one and some
were very clearly political and sought an intervention in the real
world. Dutch digital media artist and jury member Jeroen van Loon refers
to a proposal from the USA where the participant wanted to explore the
possibility of unplugging from his digital life. “It’s very interesting
how digital natives question their own world. The proposals are good
examples of how technology and culture constantly change each other. We
can learn a lot from the global digital natives.” </p>
<p><a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest" class="external-link">Profiles of the finalists and their videos can be viewed here</a>.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/vote-for-digital-natives'>https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/vote-for-digital-natives</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaVideoFeaturedResearchers at WorkDigital Natives2015-05-08T12:32:00ZBlog EntryUser Experiences of Digital Financial Risks and Harms
https://cis-india.org/raw/user-experiences-of-digital-financial-risks-and-harms
<b>The reach and use of digital financial services has risen in recent years without a commensurate increase in digital literacy and access. Through this project, supported by a grant from Google(.)org, we will examine the landscape of potential risks and harms posed by digital financial services, and the disproportionate risk that information asymmetry and barriers to access pose for users, especially certain marginalised communities. </b>
<h3>Project Background</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong> </strong>There is a big evidence gap in the understanding of the financial risks and harms experienced by users of digital financial services. Consequently, adequate consumer protection frameworks and processes to address these harms have been lagging. A survey of 32,000 Indian consumers found <a href="https://www.businessinsider.in/india/news/42-indians-experienced-financial-fraud-in-last-3-years-report/articleshow/93341725.cms">only 17%</a> who lost money through banking frauds were able to recoup their funds. Filling this gap is crucial to inform responsive policy making, platform design and data governance.</p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr">While a lot more attention is paid to financial frauds and scams, through this study, we aim to situate these alongside experiences of harms that are understudied and sometimes overlooked. Users may also experience financial harm, when negatively impacted by:</p>
<ol>
<li>Financial misinformation</li>
<li>Loss of control over their assets</li>
<li>Loss of potential income</li>
<li>Difficulty accessing social protection</li>
<li>Financial abuse perpetrated alongside other forms of domestic and family abuse </li>
<li>Unsustainable levels of debt, i.e. over-indebtedness, and </li>
<li>Exclusion from financial services</li></ol>
<ol dir="ltr"></ol>
<p dir="ltr">The Centre for Internet and Society is undertaking a mixed methods study to better understand user awareness, perceptions and experiences of digital financial risks and harms.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr">For this study, we will survey nearly 4000 users, with differing levels of access to digital devices, digital services and the internet, and undertake semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions with specific target groups and stakeholders. We aim to highlight the experiences of persons with disabilities, gender and sexual minorities, the elderly, women, and regional language first users; to better understand how discrimination and exclusion may increase their burden of risk when using digital financial services.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr"><strong>Key research questions guiding our project are:</strong></p>
<ol>
<li style="text-align: justify;">How are digital financial risks understood and experienced by users of digital financial services? Which socioeconomic factors amplify risks for different user groups?</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">What concerns have emerged relating to data privacy, misinformation, identity theft and other forms of social engineering and mobile app based fraud?</li>
<li>How accessible are providers’ and government’s platform based reporting and grievance redressal systems?</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">What role can fintech platforms, social media platforms, banking institutions, and regulatory bodies play in reducing digital financial risks across the ecosystem?</li></ol>
<h3 style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr">Project Aims</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr">Through this study, we aim to:</p>
<ol>
<li style="text-align: justify;">Assess the financial risks and harms users are exposed to when using social media, digital banking, and fintech platforms. While looking at general users, we will also specifically explore this experience for the elderly, gender and sexual minorities, regional language users and persons with visual disabilities.</li>
<li>Develop a framework to categorise the nature of vulnerabilities, risks and harms faced by the concerned user groups</li>
<li>Create a credible evidence base for key stakeholders with regards to experiences of digital financial risks and harm.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">Provide recommendations for better policy and platform design to address harms, specifically those arising from lack of accessibility and information asymmetry.</li>
<li>Identify best practices to respond to digital risks and foster safety and equity in digital financial services</li></ol>
<h3 style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr">Come Talk to Us:</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify;" dir="ltr">If you have experiences or insights to share, or if you're interested in learning more about our study, please reach out.<br /><br />We also invite researchers, financial service providers, developers and designers of fintech platforms, and civil society organisations working on digital safety, to speak to us and help inform the study. You may contact <a class="mail-link" href="mailto:garima@cis-india.org">garima@cis-india.org</a></p>
<hr />
<p><strong>Research Team</strong>: Amrita Sengupta, Chiara Furtado, Garima Agrawal, Nishkala Sekhar, Puthiya Purayil Sneha, and Yesha Tshering Paul</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/user-experiences-of-digital-financial-risks-and-harms'>https://cis-india.org/raw/user-experiences-of-digital-financial-risks-and-harms</a>
</p>
No publisherAmrita Sengupta, Chiara Furtado, Garima Agrawal, Nishkala Sekhar, Puthiya Purayil Sneha, and Yesha Tshering PaulFinancial TechnologyFinancial PlatformsDigital Financial HarmsResearchers at WorkFeaturedRAW BlogAccessibilityDigital LendingRAW ResearchResearchHomepage2023-12-22T16:05:26ZBlog Entry