Access - The Podcast Esya Centre

On 21st December of last year, the Election Law (Amendment) Bill, 2021, was passed; this law allowed the linking of Aadhaar data with electoral roll data. The Union government argued that this move would make the electoral process clearer and more credible, as linking Aadhaar data would help identify duplicate entries, remove bogus voters and more.  That being said, there have been some major concerns about instituting this practice; the possibility of disenfranchisement, severe data privacy concerns, and the efficacy of the Aadhaar itself as a source of relevant information, all form issues that have to be considered.  In Episode 6 of The Impact, we speak with O.P. Rawat, the 22nd Chief Election Commissioner of India, and Shivam Shankar Singh, Political Analyst and Author (How To Win An Indian Election), to learn more about this. The Impact, our new video series created in collaboration with The Bastion, examines how technology impacts Indian society.

As the internet began to spin its web across the subcontinent, at the hands of the State, India began to simultaneously witness a different kind of disruption: internet shutdowns. There have been 553 internet shutdowns ordered by governments since 2012, whether of mobile internet or broadband services. We’ve already registered a shutdown barely one month into 2022, and in Jammu and Kashmir alone, a staggering 319 shutdowns have taken place in recent years. Of these, the longest shutdown lasted for 552 days.  Why does the government shut down internet services? Why do these shutdowns seem more likely to happen in specific parts of the country? What do they have to do with maintaining ‘security’? And, in a rapidly digitising India, what are the real impacts of living without the internet on human lives?  We explore these answers and more in the latest series of The Impact, our new video series created in collaboration with Esya Centre examining how technology impacts Indian society. Megha Bahree, journalist and Fellow at Esya Centre, speaks to Shehlat Maknoon Wani, a journalist based in Kashmir, and Ranju Dodum, a journalist based in Arunachal Pradesh, to uncover how internet shutdowns impact humans and their rights in regions of conflict.

India’s fake news problem has been around for a while, but the production, dissemination and consumption exploded over the last decade. More than 400 million Indians now have access to and make use of the internet, but digital literacy and social media regulation are yet to catch up.  So how exactly is misinformation or fake news spread? Who is producing this? How can social media companies help curb the spread of fake news? And what kind of policies should be put in place that can tackle fake news? Megha Bahree, Fellow at Esya Centre, speaks to Pratik Sinha, Co-Founder of Alt News to find out, in this episode of The Impact.

About: The Impact is made in partnership with The Bastion, where we look at government policies and business decisions, or the lack of those, in a geopolitical and geoeconomics context. The idea is to understand how those decisions affect India’s role in the world both politically—if it’s a power play or a lost opportunity—and economically.

The Indian state’s tryst with surveillance burst into the spotlight earlier this year, with the revelation that a kind of spyware—Pegasus—was used to track over 300 Indian ministers, opposition leaders, political strategists, journalists, activists, minority leaders, supreme court judges and more. And the Pegasus issue is only the latest in a larger trend of governments, both Central and State, engaging in such big-brother like activities over time; the first big instance of the same can be traced back all the way to the 1980s. 

So how and why has this been a feature of India’s governance for so long? What are some of the underlying frameworks that enable such surveillance? And will privacy matter enough for citizens to impact who they vote for? Meghna Bal, Fellow at Esya Centre, explains these questions and more, in this episode of The Impact.

About: The Impact is made in partnership with The Bastion, where we look at government policies and business decisions, or the lack of those, in a geopolitical and geoeconomics context. The idea is to understand how those decisions affect India’s role in the world both politically—if it’s a power play or a lost opportunity—and economically.

In our second episode of The Impact Interview Series from Esya Centre and MediaBrief.com, our Fellow, Megha Bahree speaks with, Udbhav Tiwari, Public Policy Advisor, Mozilla to discuss the question: What does it take for tech companies to do business in India?

This interview was first published on Esya's YouTube channel in Sept. 2021.

In our first episode of The Impact Interview Series from Esya Centre and MediaBrief.com, our Fellow, Megha Bahree speaks with Anand Raghuraman, Vice-President at The Asia Group on the topic of, Ideology and Tech policy.

This interview was first published on Esya's YouTube channel in August 2021.