During my last visit to India, I participated in a few meetings on questions such as strengthening the right information act, the role of the PDS, and other social issues. In all these meetings there was a vigorous debate on how mobile phones could be used on each of these issues given the rapid spread of mobiles in rural India. Despite periodic discussion about the use of technology, I did not hear viable ideas among my activist friends. I believe that this is in part because most of them are not advanced users of technology, and they have definitely not indulged in creating any application based on mobile phones. Consequently, they do not have the technical imagination on what could be done and what the limitations of technology are, even when there is a feeling that technology could be put to good use for the causes that they pursue.

While that remains the case with seasoned activists, many new initiatives have come from those who are savvier with technology. These interesting initiatives including an online bulletin board that could be accessed via mobile phones, mobile phone interface between underserved groups and medical professionals, monitoring of elections, platforms for civic complaints, et cetera.

While the applications per se are simple, the process of creating and deploying these applications is made a lot more complex by the fact that they have to deal with telephone operators to get short codes and other infrastructure, negotiate better deals with these operators for getting good rates, get servers (the location of the servers is sensitive since calls/SMS I typically initiated from these locations, and thus they have implications for cost), and deal with a lot of other technical issues that are in some sense peripheral to the project.

In addition to these technical issues, there will now be legal issues including a recent law that permits a maximum of 100 SMSes per SIM card per day. Dealing with all these issues, along with the cost of commercial providers makes mobile based social projects a costly one to undertake, that can be demotivating for most people who wish to take it up.

Given the context where a number of activists are thinking about the use of mobile phones for social causes, and the context in which a number of young people are taking imaginative initiatives, it would be useful to have a foundation that could offer basic mobile-based services on the cloud for public services applications. Such a foundation could accelerate innovations in mobile based applications by reducing the costs of creating such systems.

I imagine that such a service will offer servers that could be used to send and receive SMS messages and voice messages, a set of phone numbers that could be used around India, built in modules for surveys, mass messaging and other common uses. Finally, it should also offer an API for those who wish to build applications based on their need. The foundation can also negotiate good rates with telephone companies and train users on the legal issues.

Services such as Twillio in the US offer many of these capacities on ready-made basis, and services such as SMS-Gupshup have started providing some of these in the Indian context. These are mainly commercial providers, and so they costs are substantial. Public service websites like Kiirti.org provide some services for free, but they do not offer a facility for others to create applications using the website. Google’s SMS channel is a good resource, but it does not allow for customized messages. Thanks to these limitations, there remains the need for a platform with broad based capabilities; I believe that it will go a long way in fostering innovation in using mobile phones for social causes.

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In April 2001 People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) approached the Supreme Court of India arguing that the government has a duty to provide greater relief in the context of mass hunger. The litigation has now become the best known precedent on the right to food internationally. This paper reviews the litigation with a view to understand various strategies used by the litigants to create and enforce far-reaching entitlements in a near legal vacuum on the right to food. This is followed by a discussion on the lessons from this case for rights based approach to development at large.

Citation:  S. Vivek and Basudeb Guha-Khasnobis, “Rights Based Approach To Development: Lessons From The Right To Food Movement,” in Food Insecurity, Vulnerability and Human Rights Failure, Studies in Development Economics and Policy (Basingstoke: UK: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2007).

Click here to download the article.

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“Do you want to wear an anklet or do you want to go to prison?” said a US consular officer in Hyderabad about the tagging of some Indian students in the United States to monitor their movements. These anklets contain a GPS device that closely monitors the movements of the students, and will alert officials in case they move beyond areas that they have been authorised to. The anklets provide a useful analogy to the Unique ID (UID) project by the government of India. Let me explain.

In an article entitled Prison without walls, Graeme Wood argues that such radio tags were originally created by BI (the market leader in such tracking systems) for cows. Radio tags containing a unique ID would be attached to one cow each. When a cow goes to the feeding station, the station would provide the cow with its ration by recognising the ID. Subsequently, if the cow comes back for a second helping, the unique ID would help the feeding station recognise that the cow has already had its share, and will not serve it any additional helping.

The system was later extended to people. For example, such a device (often in the form of anklets) would be attached to someone under house arrest. The radio tag will be monitored constantly by a sensor at the house, and if the person leaves the house, it would immediately intimate the police about it. This system was later extended in powerful ways by adding a GPS device to the radio tag.

The GPS device allows authorities to provide additional kinds of restrictions and freedoms. For example, a person under house arrest could be monitored, and it also allows other kinds of geographical restrictions on a person. For example, sex offenders are prohibited from going near schools and other areas that have a lot of children. Alcohol related offenders can be asked to stay away from bars, and a police officer will be intimated if such a person stays close to a bar for more than 60 seconds. It can also be used to monitor if the person attends a meeting of alcoholics anonymous, as they have been mandated to, by monitoring if the person is present at a given location on the given time and date.

Norms, freedoms, influences

The system could be understood by focussing on three key components. First of all, there are a set of norms that detail what the subject should and should not do. In the case of cows, the norm is one ration per segment of the day. For someone under house arrest, she is expected to stay within the geographical boundary of the house. For those who have committed sex/alcohol related offences, they are expected to stay away from certain areas.

Secondly, these norms circumscribe the freedoms of the subject. They selectively allow certain cows, certain students, certain people (the sex offenders), and others to do certain things and they prohibit them from doing certain things. They thus determine what kind of freedoms the subjects enjoy.

Thirdly, the anklets and other such IT devices give those in possession of power tremendous influence over the subjects. They do so by helping those in positions of power to establish the identity of the person. This identity helps the influential to closely monitor the actions of the subjects, and this in turn enables them to carefully permit or deny various actions of the subjects. This is often achieved by the threat of a greater punishment if the subject violates the norm that they are supposed to adhere to.

The UID Project

Different IT devices would be required to monitor different kinds of actions. For example, a GPS device would be able to establish if a person is in a bar, but cannot detect it if a person is having alcohol at home. There are other devices that can monitor alcohol content in the body by measuring the nature of sweating in a person’s body. They too have been used in the United States. The UID project by the government of India belongs to a class of such IT projects that can help those in positions of power to identify, monitor and regulate the freedoms of those within the Indian Territory, and Indian citizens abroad.

For example, the government has announced that it will use UID in the Public Distribution System to provide rations to people. They argue that the UID card will prevent people from overdrawing the rations, especially in the names of those who are either not authorized or those who do not even exist in reality. The home ministry is reportedly building the National Intelligence Grid (NATGRID) that will use the UID to closely monitor where we travel (based on our ticket purchases), who we talk to (using mobile phone data), and an assortment of other things. Such close monitoring will provide the government, especially the security agencies a degree of influence over people: from terrorists to those who oppose corruption vigorously.

By associating such devices with cows and prisons, I may have given a sinister tone to such devices. I should clarify that I’m not entirely against the use of such devices. They are the tools, and their merits should be understood by how they are used, and how they could be used. I will take that up in a subsequent article.

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Compared to most other states in India, Tamil Nadu is noted for widespread provision of education, primary health care, nutrition support, rural roads, electricity, water and other public services. These services are typically well planned and tend to work well. I examine what determines Tamil Nadu’s performance. I argue that widespread and decentralized collective action for public services plays a critical role in it but such collective action is a new phenomenon, dating back to the seventies. I also argue that normative challenges by major social movements, changing influences of various social groups and raising individual capabilities among common people played an instrumental role in enabling such collective action that ultimately had an impact on public services.

Click here to download the dissertation.

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Binayak Sen has just received a life-term jail sentence for sedition or waging war against the state. The specific crime, according to the judgement, was that he conveyed three letters written by a Maoist leader to a Calcutta-based trader. This was supported by a broader claim that Binayak Sen and his wife Ilina have known Maoists, and that Binayak even had Maoist literature at his home!

Callous evidence

The evidence presented for the critical claims of the case have been disputed. He met Narayan Sanyal several times in jail, under the supervision of jailors and was searched before and after the visit that it would not have been easy to get these letters in the first place. There was no concrete proof that Binayak conveyed these letters. Binayank had never met the trader to whom he allegedly conveyed the letters, and no evidence was presented on that account.

Among the evidence to show that Binayak not only knew the Maoists but also acted for them, was a typewritten letter he had allegedly received from a Maoist leader. The letter asked him to send a fact-finding team to Surguja district to probe police atrocities. This letter was allegedly seized when the police raided Binayak’s home. According to the law, seized materials were listed and signed by the police and by the accused during seizure. No such letter was listed during the raid. This letter was subsequently added to this list by the police, with a convenient explanation that it was stuck between some papers. It did not carry his signature that was done on all the other seized materials. Not surprisingly, this letter purportedly written two years ago was a still crisp piece of paper. Other evidence presented of Binayak’s Maoist link included a police testimony that he overheard someone discussing in his village that the Maoist leader Binayak had come to their village.

What if he did convey the letters?

The quality of evidence produced has been callous, to say the least, and we have every reason to believe that these letters are cooked up. As a thought experiment, let us assume for a moment that Binayak did convey these letters.  Is the content of these letters seditious? According to well-established precedents, sedition requires a call to arms and for the violent overthrow of the state. These letters to not do so and there is no evidence ever that Binayak Sen has ever called for violence, leave alone the violent overthrow of the state.

The crime then?

Binayak Sen’s real crime is not an attempt to overthrow the state, but an attempt to change the state of things. As an office bearer of one of India’s finest civil rights organisations, the PUCL, he has consistently questioned state excesses. He has questioned why so many people should go hungry in such a resource rich state. He has questioned extra-legal encounters and other excesses by the police. He has questioned the creation of private armed militia that has ravaged many a village. In all this, he has been a persistent pain in the neck of the state – a great crime indeed.

Victims we can agree on

You, my reader, may be against Naxalism and may support the effort to rout it. I am no sympathiser of Naxal violence either and I agree that the state has to respond to it. But there is the question of how it is to be done. We as a nation may disagree on many issues over this complex thing called Naxalism – but I believe that we will mostly agree on the idea that innocent people and those who have not indulged in violence themselves should not be victimised.

There are tens of thousands of victims today. Thousands of tribal people have been arrested and are languishing in jail without trial, many among those who would have committed no crime. Tens of thousands have been summarily evicted from their villages – for no crime they committed. Paramilitary forces have started accumulating in these regions and even sympathisers have argued that they have to operate with little ‘intelligence’ i.e. they have little or no information on who they are fighting with. Under these circumstances, many many more will be victimised.

I believe that security personnel are as humane as the rest of the society. Among thousands who are engaged in this war, I expect that most of them will exercise restraint, on occasions at the risk of their lives. It is sadly a story that is little said. A good friend of mine was almost killed on two occasions when he was merely on probation as a police officer, for no crime that he had committed. I will never fully understand what he went through, but I can understand his anger or the anger of the police force against Naxals whose targets they have become. There are indeed many victims in this sordid game.

Why we need Binayaks

The war today is happening under this climate of fear and animosity. While many among them are humane, many are human as well. The police and the paramilitary men whose lives are in danger are unlikely to be discerning in all situations. Many among the armed personnel will inevitably carry with them the established prejudices and disregard for tribal people, just as many in our society do. This is combined with a war-like situation and the absolute ignorance of who is who (called “intelligence failure” in more fancy terms). When adherence to law and due process are thrown to the winds, this concoction will inevitably lead to widespread injustice to absolutely harmless people.

Such are the circumstances, and very few of us will disagree that many are victimised unjustly by the state. Most of us will also agree that such injustice should be mitigated, and the victims compensated. Human rights activists are the most potent force working for such justice today, and it would be hard to quarrel against their mission. We cannot quarrel either with their methods of careful documentation, research, writing and the use of petitions and law suits. After all, it is not too much of a crime to demand that the law be implemented.

All this will of course put restraints on the government, and restraints will make it difficult for it to pursue its goals. But then what is a government without constraints? Even the constitution is a constraint, after all! Civil rights activists like Binayak Sen strive peacefully, and work using the law as their tool. Incarcerating him and other such people has made such work impossible in Chhattisgarh, at a time when such work is needed most. It is our task now to ensure that he is back in action, and that activists like him become a powerful force in these troubled times.

In case you wish to contribute to the movement, you could start by signing a petition supporting Binayak here.

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Something in me changed as I saw the young man hold the microphone with his artificial arms and talked of the work he did in NREGA. He took care of the paperwork that every field assistant dreads. A visually challenged person in the same meeting told me about how he joined others in desilting his village lake. There are millions of disabled persons in India who do not find opportunities to work and contribute to the society; NREGA can change that and provide them with opportunity to work, contribute to the society, earn an income and live with dignity.

Unprecedented opportunity

NREGA is an unprecedented opportunity since it is implemented in all villages across India and thus has an unprecedented reach. It provides only 100 days of work at Rs. 100 a day, but this can go a long way in improving economic situation, self-respect, and recognition in the community as a productive member. More than anything else, it can be designed to showcase the abilities of “disabled people” and change the image of disability forever in our society. But as things stand, NREGA is not designed to do any of these today, but with some creative thinking on our part we can change this situation substantially.

Making it accessible

NREGA today mainly provides unskilled manual work. Traditionally works have been designed such that they are most suitable for young, able bodied couples working together in a project. Ashagram tried some interesting experiments in Madhya Pradesh to make these works accessible, mainly by identifying parts of the work that disabled people can do. They pointed out that distributing water, mixing cement, and an assortment of other tasks can be performed easily by people with disabilities. Ashagram’s list will go a long way in making NREGA accessible, but I feel that it is inadequate for many reasons.

Exclusive & inclusive work

NREGA is designed to provide employment when people do not have alternate work. Availability of alternate work is radically different for disabled people, and relying merely on inclusive works cannot help create stable and predictable employment for them. We have to create a class of works that could be done mainly by disabled people when they wish to find work. In creating some projects exclusively for the disabled we can also allow for some skilled work, some of which can be done from their homes.

Many disabled people in Tamil Nadu are trained in weaving chairs. Their talents could be used to provide basic furniture to schools, child care centres and government offices. St. Joseph’s hospital in Trichy trains blind people to cultivate vegetables; it should be possible to create a kitchen garden for all schools and anganwadis using such talent. Educated people could be used to maintain paperwork in NREGA and other Panchayat work that often takes a huge amount of time. Other possibilities abound.

Tweaking the design

Apart from designing accessible works, NREGA needs some tweaking to make it work for disabled persons. Today’s schedule of rates assesses how much work an average able person can do in a day. A new SoR should be developed that reflects diversity in human abilities. Secondly, it is not practical to expect our overworked engineers and block officials to create appropriate designs, do separate measurements of work, and to transition into an accessible system. It would be useful to appoint 2-3 trained social workers in each block who will be mainly in charge of this task. Andhra Pradesh has expanded the guarantee of work to 150 days for families with disabled persons. Instead, it would be meaningful to provide unlimited individual guarantee of work at least to disabled persons. Finally, it would be meaningful to include some skilled work.

These changes are well within our reach, and all it requires is some thought and a lot of care on our part. The fundamental idea of NREGA is to use unused human resources to create assets that we cannot live without; some tweaking of NREGA can help us as a country to tap into the talents and energy of at least 5% of the population towards this end. I guess this is one thing no one can complain about!

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Obama’s ability to draw attention across the globe is incredible. There are even posters of him with a local political leader in many parts of Madras – something I have never seen of a foreign leader before. His appeal was clear in other parts of the world as well seen from the clamour in Israel and the crowds in Berlin. While he has the charisma to influence, I feel that he’s too stuck in the idioms of the past to bring any change in international relations.

While he talks a lot of changing partitions and a globalising world, Obama’s division of the world as the West and Rest is clear throughout the speech. He had little to talk of the rest that was positive. His references to the rest of the world was littered with terms like poverty, poppy seeds, terror, leaks of nuclear secrets, etc. The only positive reference was that of the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. He was also firmly stuck in the idiom of the “white man’s burden” of bringing prosperity, liberty, and peace to the world. There is no recognition in this man that the West has played a dual role in this matter. While the West has taken significant efforts to help the poor, it has also swindled. While the West has tried its hand at bringing liberty it has both imperialised nations and supports dictators.

Ignoring West’s dual role enables Obama to claim that Afgan people need “our” [Western] support against Taliban without a touch of irony. He could talk of supporting the Blogger in Iran and voter in Zimbawe but is silent on prisoner in Guantanamo or Abu Gharib. The world has seen with horror West coming to the “rescue” people of other countries time and again for many centuries as of today.

Let me reiterate here that there are two contradictory things happening at the same time: one on hand, there are people genuinely concerned in the West about people elsewhere. There is genuine commitment of money, time and lives to assist unknown people elsewhere. This is wonderful, and it must continue. At the same time the West has been the worst of colonisers and it continues to support dictators around the world. West’s role in creating and supporting Taliban, Saddam, Osama himself, and many other dictators should not be forgotten. Obama will do little service to the world by extending the idiom of White man’s burden. If he wants to bring a real politics of hope in international relations he has to start dealing with the likes of School of Americas, stop propping up puppet regimes, stop interfering with domestic politics elsewhere, stop arming dictators, and stop waging useless wars.

It would be remarkable if he could bring these issues into the public domain with the same grit and charisma the he showed when talking of race. Acknowledging West’s dual role and promising to end the oppressive side of it would be the really radical step that can bring a hopeful turn to international relations. But going by Obama’s idioms at Berlin, hope has no hope on this front.

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Here’s a news item from the Real news network on India’s refusal to sign the cluster bomb treaty along with China, US (not surprisingly), Israel, Russia and Pakistan.What is shocking though is the paltry coverage it got in Indian media for an issue that is clearly important. ToI, NDTV, Zee News, Economic Times, and a few others carried an article straight from Associated Press or other services. Given that India had not signed this treaty, some home work could have been done here – but NOTHING was done. This is true of the highly celebrated Hindu as well. No interviews, no commentaries, no reasons offered as to why India did not sign the treaty…the silence is total.

Short video on the treaty

Poor coverage in Indian media

The coverage by Indian media is so un-reflecting that Zee News could carry the headline “111 nations adopt cluster bomb treaty, but not US”…being an Indian media outlet, were they not obliged to highlight India’s stand? The issue was so hushed up, that I had to discover it through Al Jazeera that carried the video above. Thanks to Indian media’s slience, we know not why India did not even participate in the treaty.

Poor media coverage is not a reflection of media’s priorities alone. It reflects the fact that no one in India must have campaigned actively for India to join the treaty. It’s a failure on the part of the civil society here. Even if a small group had taken interest, it would have made it to the media.  Unfortunately, the way a lot of international treaties work is through Western mediation with an agenda set in the West without much domestic consultation.

It looks like India is one of the major producers of cluster bombs. It is unlikely that commercial interests will make way for moral and social concerns without strong public support – no effort has gone into securing it in this country.

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The rights based approach to development and the human development perspective have both become popular in the recent past.  Despite a similar philosophical base, they were both developed in distinctly different communities and so they have different strengths and weaknesses in practice.  One of the major strengths of the human development approach is that it has a lot of statistical techniques that have been developed by economists involved with the approach over many years.  The rights approach always had a legal-political leaning and so it did not have the same kind of statistical tools for planning and for assessment.  Rights based approach can be enriched by the rich information that HDA can provide with its vast array of reports and statistical tools.  HDA can in turn be enriched by the legal and political tools of RBA so that the issues that HDA raises can materialise effectively.  This paper highlights some such possibilities.

This paper was developed for mid-career government officials in India for a training programme at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences.   Click here to download.

S. Vivek, “Exploring linkages of rights based approach to development & the human development approach,” produced for Course on human rights and human development (Bombay, India: Tata Institute of Social Sciences, 2009).

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Right from the word go combating corruption in the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) has been a major agenda of activists of the Right to Food Campaign. Needless to say, it brings activists into conflict with the vested interests that are deeply rooted in India today. This week in Palamu, a young and committed activist – Lalit Kumar – was murdered, perhaps a result of his actions to secure the poorest of people their rights. I am reproducing an appeal below from the website of the right to food campaign on this issue:

We are deeply disturbed by the recent murder of Lalit Kumar Mehta, member of Vikas Sahyog Kendra (Palamau District), who was brutally killed on 14 May 2008 as he was returning from Daltonganj to Chhattarpur on a motorcycle.

The circumstances of this murder are disturbing. Lalit (aged 36), an active member of the right to food campaign and Gram Swaraj Abhiyan, has been working in this area for more than 15 years on issues related to the right to food and the right to work. He was a very gentle person and his work was widely appreciated. However he was also fearless in exposing corruption and exploitation, and often came in the way of vested interests.

At the time of this incident, Lalit was helping a team of volunteers from Delhi and elsewhere to conduct a social audit of NREGA works in Chainpur and Chhattarpur Blocks of Palamau District. Attempts had already been made to dissuade the team from conducting this investigation, particularly in Chainpur Block. Is it a coincidence that Lalit was murdered just one day after the investigation began?

If this murder was an act of intimidation, it did not succeed. Friends and supporters from all over Jharkhand gathered at Vikas Sahyog Kendra on 17 May. They unanimously resolved to continue the campaign against corruption and exploitation in this area.

A public hearing of NREGA will be held in Chhattarpur on 26 May. We appeal to all those who stand in solidarity with Lalit and his work to participate in this event.

Our immediate demands: (1) CBI enquiry into this incident; (2) strict action on all the complaints and irregularities emerging from this social audit of NREGA.

Balram (Right to Food Campaign), Jean Drèze (Allahabad University), Jawahar (Vikas Sahyog Kendra), Meghnath (Akhra, Ranchi), Vinoy Ohdar (ActionAid) and others including all members of Gram Swaraj Abhiyan.

Local contact: 06566-290013 (Vikas Sahyog Kendra) or rozgar@gmail.com

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