Indian city workers protest digital surveillance
Railway staff clear the outside of a practice carriage as a safety measure in opposition to COVID-19 at a yard in New Delhi, India on Monday. Picture: AFP
Each night on the finish of his shift, Anil Sharma heads to a rally floor within the Indian metropolis of Chandigarh to hitch a whole lot of colleagues protesting a brand new initiative that lets the native administration maintain observe of metropolis staff utilizing GPS watches.
A municipal gardener within the capital of the northern Punjab state, Sharma has been protesting in opposition to the watches that metropolis staff are being advised to put on to trace their effectivity, a transfer he referred to as “humiliating” and “unethical.”
“I’ve labored for 25 years to maintain this metropolis stunning and now they wish to make me a bonded laborer and humiliate me,” Sharma advised Reuters.
“Apart from, we’ve supervisors who monitor our work and this monitoring can’t be pressured on us. It’s unethical,” he stated in a cellphone interview.
COPYRIGHT_BP: Published on https://bingepost.com/indian-city-workers-protest-digital-surveillance/65997/ by Cecilia Jones on 2020-03-18T19:26:49.000Z
As India pushes forward with its plan to show 100 city facilities into sensible cities, native governments are utilizing expertise like GPS watches to supply information they will use to enhance effectivity and tighten budgets. However metropolis staff, campaigners and expertise specialists have raised issues about privateness and the potential misuse of that information, in addition to the susceptibility of the watches to failure like weak GPS sign or the units switching off.
For 3 months Sharma and his colleagues from numerous departments like horticulture, sanitation and well being have been gathering to demand that officers in Chandigarh, hailed as one in every of India’s cleanest cities, cease utilizing the GPS watches.
They’re amongst a rising variety of municipal staff in a dozen cities throughout India who’re protesting the linking of surveillance information to efficiency and salaries.
Underneath the venture, which was launched in Chandigarh in February, staff are mandated to put on the GPS watches throughout their working hours.
The watches feed a stream of knowledge to a central management room, the place officers monitor the actions of every worker.
If staff take away their watches, they’re penalized, though there is no such thing as a complete information accessible on what number of staff have been fined to date, or by how a lot.
“The effectivity trackers appear to be an overreach,” stated Nandini Chami, deputy director at IT for Change, a Bangalore-based nonprofit.
“Given the character of the employer-employee relationship, it’s important to know what are the boundaries of this surveillance and what will likely be a employee’s proper to attraction any information they wish to contest,” she stated.
Municipal commissioner Ok. Ok. Yadav, Chandigarh’s high civic official, stated in a cellphone interview that this system is about bettering effectivity, including that he additionally wears a watch, to set an instance.
“Their salaries will likely be linked to this tracker and all the info will likely be put within the public area ultimately for growing accountability.”
Yadav famous that there is no such thing as a expectation of privateness for presidency staff whereas they’re at work and that complaints and appeals could be handled on a case-by-case foundation.
On the job
Suresh Kumar Sharma has been driving a sewer-cleaning machine for over 20 years, unclogging road drains all through Chandigarh.
He stated he has raised questions along with his supervisors and different senior officers as he tries to know the necessity for GPS surveillance.
“Typically we obtain 5 complaints [of blocked drains] in a day, however are capable of attend to just one as a result of cleansing blocked drains takes time,” he advised Reuters.
“The GPS tracker goes to mirror that I used to be solely at one place and didn’t attend to the opposite 4 complaints. It can point out that I didn’t full my job and that may mirror in a pay minimize. How is that okay?”
Sharma stated officers have reassured staff that there will likely be a grievance mechanism in place, although no particulars had been offered.
Regardless of issues from rights teams and protests from staff, the effectivity tracker venture has been rolled out throughout India since 2017.
The initiative has been praised by civic our bodies aiming to each make their cities smarter and meet the targets of the Clear India marketing campaign launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2014.
“It’s the want of the hour,” stated Sumedha Kataria, municipal commissioner for Panchkula metropolis in Haryana state.
About 950 metropolis staff in Panchkula have been carrying the watches because the program began there in 2019, stated Kataria.
“There are targets to be met for the Swachh Bharat [Clean India] mission. Additionally, if we’re vying to be a wise metropolis then digital intervention is necessary for us to realize our targets. It’s the sensible factor to do,” she stated in a cellphone interview.
With no complete information privateness legislation in India, the non-public data of the nation’s 1.three billion residents is brazenly accessible, with no regulation over its use or safety for its customers, digital rights campaigners say.
The Private Knowledge Safety Invoice, which is pending parliament approval, will create a framework for information safety dictating what sort of information may be collected, and the way it’s collected, processed and saved.
The invoice additionally introduces hefty penalties for the misuse of that information. However the draft invoice has met with opposition from numerous teams, together with human rights organizations, for not assembly world privateness requirements.
Chami at IT for Change famous that the GPS watches for municipal staff are consistently accumulating doubtlessly delicate information, together with private data and behavioral patterns.
“With out mechanisms to permit the employee to audit his or her tracker information … and attraction [or] contest errors stemming from distant tracker malfunction, staff’ rights will likely be squelched,” she stated.
Wage cuts
Nagpur metropolis, within the western state of Maharashtra, has had greater than 7,000 staff beneath watch since 2017.
Pradeep Dasarwar, who’s in command of the venture in Nagpur, stated that because the venture began, absenteeism has dropped by half, from 15 p.c to 7 p.c, and that wages had been being minimize for contract staff.
Across the metropolis, areas have been just about fenced off, with road names and localities which have been earmarked for every employee fed into their GPS watches, Dasarwar defined.
Not like earlier than, when staff marked their very own attendance initially and finish of the day, the GPS watch venture tracks their whereabouts routinely, making a notice every time they go away their designated work space, he stated.
To Sharma, the gardener, the watches are a digital instrument to “threaten” and exploit staff.
“On the finish of the day, we do not know the way they’ll use this information. Wage cuts are only the start.”
Newspaper headline: Underneath watch
