Analyze

This article reports that 200 million people were left out of the only food relief measure for COVID-19 by the government of India. Under the National Food Security Act 2013, 800 million beneficiaries of India's Public Distribution System were to receive additional 5 kilos of grain for COVID-19 lockdown. But according to a press release by the government, 200 million were left out in April. The issue is not of availability, but distribution from godowns. Delhi and Punjab have only distributed 1% of grain mandated so far. The article also notes that even the number of 800 million is not enough. The NFSA is based on the 2011 census, after which India has added 150 million people 

Update on May 7, 2020

The Aarogya Setu app I wrote about below now has 100 million users, according to this article. Though the official line is that its download and use is voluntary, all central government employees have been mandated to use it, along with many private sector employers and landlords. The city of NOIDA (in the state of Uttar Pradesh, a satellite city of Delhi) will fine or imprison upto 6 months its residents and even those entering the city if they do not have the app installed on their smartphones.

I've also noted below that the app, developed by corporate volunteers, is one amongst an entire ecology of app-based contact-tracing efforts. Some of them are being developed by security and surveillance firms with support from state governments. Even though the app is from the government, the list of developers is not public and the code is inaccessible. India has no data privacy law. Its Information Technology Act 2000 is only applicable to the private sector, not to the state. This article dives deeper into the issue, pointing to tensions between two data protection bills under draft, one for personal protection, other for healthcare data. 

Apart from mass surveillance, this article argues that the app's security features are next to non-existent, and it is easy for users to perform "GPS spoofing": users can send requests to the app drawing overlapping circular boundaries around a specific area to arrive at an estimate of number of people with the infection. Sometimes, it is even possible to locate the exact house. Even for dense New Delhi, it was easy for the author to triangulate who was affected. For lesser dense areas, it would be even easier. When this is read alongside vilification of Muslims in India for being super-spreaders, the app could enable targeted attacks, even lynchings. 

Original Post on April 17, 2020

I dived digitally today into the fascinating world of COVID19 tracking and tracing apps and platforms being developed across India. This article reports that at least 19 apps are being used by Indian state governments and the national government to track COVID19 spread, including monitoring and arresting people who violate quarantine. India's lockdown is one of the strictest. Since the past two weeks, I have seen at least 15 videos on social media showing acts of police brutality, targeting migrant and daily wage workers.

As Rohit Negi notes, coronavirus arrived in India at a time when "ongoing centralisation of the polity and its subsumption into a personality-driven hypernationalist regime" have weakened transparency and accountability of public infrastructures. India's data infrastructures have to be located in this moment and in the broader shift towards "e-governance" or, in corporate-speak, data-driven government solution strategies. What do emerging COVID19 data infrastructures in India contribute to the conversation?

Rohini Lakshane writing for CitizenMatters.in has reviewed the many problems of these data infrastructures such as privacy and technical glitches. I find two notable trends in this emerging data infrastructure around COVID19 in India. 

1. Integration of demographic, geospatial, economic, and healthcare databases

In my research on air pollution science and advocacy in Delhi, I often heard that a significant obstacle to a proper public health response is separation of monitoring, epidemiological, and medical databases. Integration of databases is proposed as solution for efficient governance. The dream was to get out of the silos and into a unified data ecosystem, seamlessly connecting provider (the state) and user (citizen). The COVID19 response has shown that such integration is possible. The Indian national government's offical app Aarogya Setu (translates literally to Health Bridge but the connotation of health is holistic and restorative). It has been downloaded 10 million times. The government's IT Ministry asked all service providers in India to send text messages for people to download the app. It generates the user's location data using GPS and Bluetooth through their phone number and cross-references that with the Indian Council of Medical Research's databases. If a user enters an area where someone has been diagnosed positive for COVID19, they receive an alert. 

The Survey of India has created the SAHYOG app (translates to cooperation) to complement Aarogya Setu to connect demographic and geospatial data. It will integrate location information about biomedical waste disposals, containment areas, available hospitals for Covid-19 cases, ICMR testing laboratories, fire services, quarantine camps, banquet halls. The  Survey of India, set up in 1767 as the premier colonial surveying and mapping agency of the British empire, continues under the Department of Science and Technology for independent India. The SAHYOG app would rely on community health workers to supply it with information.

2. Collaboration between state governments and AI-based security/surveillance/cloud solutions provider firms based in India:

While Aarogya Setu and SAHYOG seem to be developed within the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MEITY), state governments have developed collaborations with security/surveillance startups. Under MEITY's agenda of e-governance, private-public partnerships are encouraged. These partnerships are not new either. Unlike retrenchment of service provisions by the state elsewhere, one of the ways India cushioned neoliberal structural adjustment policies imposed by IMF and World Bank was to develop public-private partnership models. Apart from apps used by governments of Goa and Puducherry which are developed by Innovacer, a healthcare technology company based in San Fransico, US; the rest are developed by firms based in the urban centers of these states. 

These apps use multiple strategies to help the government manage the COVID19 lockdown. Kerala's Kasaragod district, a Covid-19 hotspot, uses Unmaze, a facial recognition app developed by Innefu Labs, to track 20,000 quarantined individuals.Unmaze works by matching location data of several devices and alerts users if they've come into contact with someone whose phone number or location data matches a positive COVID case. An alert is sent to the administrator to disinfect the area.  Innefu Labs, an "Information Security R&D startup" counts law enforcement agencies and defence research agencies as its clients. A documented client is the Delhi Police, for whom Innefu created an Automated Facial Recognition Software, used recently for identifying protestors and rioters in Delhi during the Citizenship Amendment Act protests. Till now, Unmaze has been used by the district police to catch 3000 violations leading to 200 arrests. Those found violating the lockdown are sent to mass quarantine camps. 

Another strategy being used by government of Karnataka and the city of Surat in Gujarat is to geotag selfies for monitoring home quarantine. The government texts people under quarantine with instructions to download the app. The users must post the selfie every hour, with mandatory geotagging. A backend team analyses these selfies, and if there is a mismatch between identity and location of user, a warning would come after which the person would be sent to a quarantine camp. The Tamil Nadu government uses CoBuddy, an application which sets perimeter limits and notifies district police when a person violates those limits, developed by Chennai-based Pixxon AI Solutions, an AI based solutions provider for video surveillance.

These examples show that the task of integration is at the core of these collaborations, evident in linking demographic, geospatial, and embodied data. Further, these data infrastructures are reconfiguring public health provisioning. The Telangana government has launched a 'T COVID 19' app together with Amazon Web Services, Cisco and Hyderabad-based startup Quantela as a comprehensive health management tool with self-assessment surveys. It is integrated with telemedicine support, remote medical appointment booking, and information about quarantine centers, testing centers. 

They are configuring transport infrastructures as well. The COVA Punjab app, underway in implementation in two Canadian provinces, would streamline curfew passes for emergencies and report mass gatherings and travel histoies. Apart from tracing home-quarantined patients and foreign-returned travellers, it will also process requests for groceries and consultation with doctors. The Chhattisgarh government is similarly using CG COVID-19 e-Pass to streamline the application process of getting permissions for vehicles to move across and between districts, developed by AllSoft Consulting, a web-development start-up located in Chhattisgarh's capital city, Raipur. 

What futures do these emerging data infrastructres point to? Mumbai-based multinational behemoth corporation Reliance Industries together with Facebook now aims to create a SuperApp a one-for-all service provisioning platform. A day after the launch of the Aarogya Setu app, the government of India created a "a committee, to develop and implement a “Citizen app technology platform” over the next three months" with participation of corporate titans, senior bureucrats and experts. Apart from the mandate to "integrate all data", the article also reports that one of the inputs suggested "using the platform to issue and manage ePasses for gig economy workers, something already underway in cities like Bengaluru, New Delhi and Hyderabad".

Tracing and understanding emergent data infrastructures being developed in India in response to COVID19 would be crucial in how we imagine coordinational and integration capacities of data infrastructures. What histories and other responses do these data infrastructures build on? What do they assume (for example, assuming obedience from smartphone users)? What futures would they point to?

Labor histories 

• Somesh Jha (2020) writes in the Business Standard that for the first time in 100 years, Indian workers will have to work for 72 hours per week up from 48 hours as five states (Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Punjab) have amended a labor law for 3 months. Jha gives us a brief legal history of labor law around the working day. Factory Act of 1881 under British rule put a cap on 72 hour work week (12 hours a day for 6 days a week maximum). This act has a global history: pressure from mill owners in Lancashire feared that they were losing out to Indian textile industry. Also part of a world-wide labor struggle for a working-day. In 1886, the Haymarket square protests in Chicago resulted in a clash between protestors and police on May 1, which we celebrate as the May Day. The concept of 8-hour work day based on three divisions of a day: 8 hours for work, 8 hours for sleep, 8 hours for recreation. In 1922, the Factory Act was amended to reduce working week to 60 hours. This happened after India became an ILO signatory of 1919. Other signatories reduced their work weeks to 48, but India was exempted. After the Great Depression, the Royal Commission on Labour submitted a report in 1931 suggesting a further reduction to 54 hours. This change occured in 1934. But because of the WWII, Indian factory workers again worked 60-hour weeks. BR Ambedkar, architect of India's constitution, became a Labour Member to the Viceroy's Council in 1942, advocating for 8-hour working day and 48-hour working week.

To compensate the loss in production, state governments have amended this labor law, a result of decades-long labor struggles. Because India's COVID measures are very stringent, this has resulted into unemployment as well. It was started by the Congress-ruled Rajasthan government which amended the Act to raise working-day to 12 hours. The extra hours will be treated as overtime and workers will be given double wages for overtime. Congress-ruled Punjab government followed suit. PM Modi asked other states to follow this. BJP-ruled states of Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh did not double wages, but will pay workers in proportion to hours worked overtime. These states also invokved "emergency" law under operation during wartime. This puts undue pressures on especially women workers, who are employed in the essential industries of pharma, textiles, and food processing in large numbers. India's working hours are already one of the longest in the world. 

Emergency law in South Asia 

• Himal Southasian interview (Mar 2020) with Asanga Welikala, lecturer in public law at the University of Edinburgh and a constitutional-law expert. This point is a summary of his interview. He first distinguishes between "state of emergency" and "emergency regulations". The former arise from eminent domain, or the fundamental assumption that the state will act in the public interest. It is a "special regime of of powers and rules" that is brought when the sovereignty and internal cohesion of a nation-state is under threat. The latter are rules that the government makes under a state of emergency. While emergency laws in South Asian states share origin with imperial power and thus the English common law, the pathways have diverged, influenced by years of military rule (Pakistan and Bangladesh), internal conflict (India and Sri Lanka). Democratic constitutions different from authoritarian constitutions as they have to distinguish between states of normalcy and exception and insert that into the legal framework. The core tension is between liberty and security. So for democracies to invoke emergencies is not simple. They have to: declare a state of emergency by identifying an exceptional threat to public good, provisions for extending that state requiring parliamentary approval, a deadline for termination of emergency. However, emergency law can be normalized. He speaks of the Sri Lankan example, when emergency became the normal rule, and used to regulate matters not connected to emergency such as prices, weights, and measures. Protracted emergency rule also builds up a culture of "executive convenience and impunity" [like what Modi has being doing since 2014]. The accountability falls to the legislature or judiciary in a tripartite system, and the results for that in South Asia are quite varied. South Asia has one of most activist judiciaries when it comes to protecting individual rights and freedom (liberty).

So what does this mean for COVID19 pandemic and imposition of emergency law? Australia shutdown Parliament till August. Canada gave its parliament public spending power without parliamentary scrutiny till December, same for UK. Intensification of suppression in Israel and Hungary. What commitment do South Asian states and their subjects have to constitutional democracy? 

UPDATE April 30

Itty Abraham's article (2020) on The India Forum on "Four Future Scenarios". Professor Itty Abraham is a political scientist and STS scholar who works in the Department of Southeast Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore. Abraham talks about the "universal, uneven and endless" moment of COVID19 pandemic, positing four scenarios dominated by:

(1) pro-state progressive optimists: those who see this moment as end of neoliberalism and belief in the capacity of to learn. He gives Korea as an example of a successful public health system resulting from years of popular struggle that wore down authoritarian infrastructure. 

(2) end-of-globalization pessimists: those who believe international cooperation is at an end, the future of "relative international autarky". Gramsci's concept of the interregnum, a state of turmoil, bringing a new world polarity

(3) disaster capitalism pessimists: reinforcement of capitalism during crises exemplified by 9/11 and 2008 financial crisis. Relevant for US specially, close to "living with the bomb" scenarios of WWII. Lessons from the global anti-nuclear movement?

(4) techno-optimists: view this moment as latest challenge to human ingenuity, Whiggish reading of the past, learning from victories over diseases of the past. What lessons from HIV epidemic? 

Original Post April 17

Pedro's and James' responses to this question show the many ways in which thinking about the future post-COVID19 is resolutely tied to thinking about the crises of neoliberalism and sovereignty. They ask critical questions: How would political organization and mobilizing shift in response? Is it possible to imagine a "left-leaning" economics that is not nationalist? I want to respond to and build on these responses by asking one question: For whom is a non-neoliberal future possible?

I ask this question because I want to be attentive to people who have been thinking and practicing non-neoliberalism long before COVID showed how fragile neoliberalism of the global North is. I want to build on those who have long before realized how the logics of neoliberal capitalism were: (1) constituted in the global North through testing and experimenting elsewhere; (2) built on ongoing racial capitalism projects globally; (3) resisted in multiple ways globally. By asking this question, I want to build upon the work of scholars who have shown that neoliberalism was, and continues to be, a transnational project. And that the ways of resistance and organizing would therefore be transnational too. Is it possible to think about a future without stitching the past? In my response, I provide links to the works I have read before, or I am currently reading, that ask similar questions. 

When I hear and read about how COVID-19 has disrupted neoliberalism in an unprecedented way, I am reminded of the tendency to exceptionalize Trump, analysed in an exceptional way by Jonathan Rose and Yarimar Bonilla (2017), who point to a crisis of liberalism that the election of Trump brought upon many public intellectuals and scholars. They ask, "Has anthropology produced the kind of knowledge about the United States as a settler state that is required to understand the current moment?" Can we invoke an inclusive United States that never was? I am reminded of one of the CENHS podcasts I listened to, where Kyle Powys Whyte talked about "settler apocalypticism" in thinking about the Anthropocene and climate futures, in thinking about conceptions of time, morality and responsibility in times of crisis. His words will stay with me:  "What does it mean to think of an indigenous futurity when we don’t take today’s world for granted, but actually look at it as a apocalyptic and dystopian world?". Do we take today's world for granted when we think about how COVID has disrupted neoliberalism? For Whyte, the world at present is dystopic.

What vocabularies do we have to talk about crises when we live in a world that is a palimpsest of crises? I think we could look elsewhere, places that have been exceptionalized as places of ever-unfolding crises. Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nutall, in their article on "Writing the World from an African Metropolis" (2004), contemplate how to write about African cities in a way that doesn't portray them as failed projects of incomplete modernity arising out of colonial European encounters. When we talk about African cities, they ask, why is it that we are left with images of decay and breakdown on one hand, and survival and velocity against all odds on the other? Why are we left with images of weakened or ineffectual state, even in scholarly conversations? These questions are important because precisely these images were used as justifications for testing and experimenting neoliberal policies in the structural adjustment programmes of the 1980s-present, which would replace a weak and inefficient state in the global South.

I point to Mbembe and Nutall's line of questioning also because they recognise that crisis-thinking is epistemological, it points to the "limits to the capacity of epistemological imagination, to pose questions about what we know and where we know that from”. How do we talk about African cities like we talk about other cities? They argue that the first step would be to recognize that African cities are already fully located, and have been, even before trans-Atlantic trades, in global circuits of finance, labor, and capital. This does not mean that we don't talk about failure, but that failure is not exceptionalized in a way that feeds Africa's representation as "intractable, mute, abject, other-worldly”. The challenge is to think with subjects and places that cannot be easily located. This bibliography on how migration/borders is intersecting with COVID-19 is one example where we would need vocabularies that neither exceptionalize nor provincialse. 

The question of political organizing and mobilizing in times of crisis therefore needs to build on movements and organizing that have resulted out of long histories of exclusion. How does movement-building look like from those who have learned to organize in a state that was to them mostly oppressive and withdrawn? Corinna Mullin and Azadeh Shahshahani (2020) reflect on what a transnational perspective on movement-building and organizing looks like. Their excellent article points to early Black radical internationalism and organizations, indigenous internationalism, the international peasant and ecological movement of Via Campesina, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, Black for Palestine and The Red Nation movements, for example. In short, we have much to learn from responses by ongoing anti-imperialist movements during COVID-19 which have called for cancellation of neocolonial debt, land repatriation, reconfiguration of gig and hustle economies, just to give a few examples. 

In thinking about future and learning, I also found reading Guilberly Louissaint's (2020) article “Hygiene” is the Future: Lessons from “Post”-Cholera Haiti quite refreshing. Reflecting on the aftermath of COVID-19 responses, he notes: "the haunting of the COVID-19 epidemic will remain, not just in the memories of the things and ones that have been lost, but also in a haunted public. Governments will be consumed by the constant effort to manage our new enemy by implementing rigid, authoritarian policies, in which hygiene predominates and the invisible world becomes a target... I depart with the wisdom of Clyde Woods’ “Haiti is the Future.” It is poetic to think that worlds that were seen with no future, but ruins have lived the current reality of COVID-19 time and time again."