Apar GuptaLast week, the Delhi government celebrated an act of mass surveillance, issuing a self-congratulatory press release, as reported in ‘Delhi ahead of NY, London in terms of CCTV cameras installed per sq. mile’ (IE, August 26). The press release marks the CCTV installation as a competitive metric based on a study by the consumer research website Comparitech. It notes that Delhi has 1,826 CCTVs per square mile, ranking it above 150 global cities. This statistic and the press release are symbolic of the populist messaging that comes at the cost of accountable governance.
Reshuffle and Digital Refresh
Centre notifies amendments to the Cable Television Network Rules, 1994
Left Out of Cowin
India is currently in the throes of a catastrophic second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, which has exposed the severe lack of our health infrastructure. Since March 2021, we have seen the situation spiral out of control to the extent that people are now left with no choice but to crowdsource life-saving drugs, oxygen cylinders and hospital beds on the internet. Technology is serving us during this crisis and it is natural for it to be viewed as a measure for vaccination. Here, the principal response has been through the CoWin portal that has been launched by the Government of India to digitise the vaccination drive. It is, however, resulting in vaccine exclusion and a lack of privacy.
Accountability with a Cost
In the polarised environment that we now inhabit, there are few public agreements. One of these rare instances is an agreement that social media is broken. For many commentators, this is an area that needs urgent government intervention. But the form and shape of this intervention becomes again an issue of adversarial contest and controversy. This issue is fundamental to how today’s information ecology operates as large Silicon Valley platforms have become gatekeepers of social behaviours and the tremendous power they hold is anti-democratic.