Need for an Inclusive Strategy in Application of Digital Technologies

By Dr Eveleen Kaur Sidana

A decade after Indian independence, the film Naya Daur represented the voices of the poor when a bus competed with a tongawala brilliantly played by the veteran actor Dilip Kumar and defeated and replaced the horse driven tonga. But today and in the recent decades, NGOs and members of civil society can tell a tale of toils in promoting public transport, improving the networks, quality, route efficiency and ridership of buses in big and small cities alike to make them more equitable. Their stories of constant negotiation, collaboration, strategy, and planning highlight one prominent fact among many that access to multimodal transport leads to social inclusion and equity. Once public transport connects different parts of a city and other cities, a new struggle towards inclusion awaits — making public transport safe for women and members from LGBTQ community, differently abled, aged and people vulnerable to injuries. Democratizing technology and infrastructure is a continuous and incremental process but it is also a consultative and social process, one that expands and redefines the domain of equality and rights.

If one begins to delve deeper into evolution of new technologies such as space exploration, one finds several such stories where utilization of technology, the purpose to which it was applied and the incremental manner in which its public purpose was enhanced led to far reaching social and economic changes. Satellite technologies for disaster management in case of floods, earthquakes, forest fires and cyclones, and their use to provide telemedicine in remote areas are but a few examples. The future of space communications also holds the key to internet accessibility in many poorly served areas. Coming back to the earth, inclusion works when we think of technology as a socio-technical entity from the inception without assuming its neutrality and universality. All technologies have in-built exclusions and inclusions in the way they are applied, accessed and used. This is not to say that we look for whose bias inhabits technology but that it is only to acknowledge that designs and technologies prioritize specific problems and solve accordingly. Would it be possible to keep the most vulnerable people in consideration while creating and scaling the technology? It may not be financially viable initially, but the very visualization could be the first step towards inclusion.

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To this effect, Aadhar biometric based authentication when applied to welfare programs such as providing access to food grains, healthcare, banking have worked wonders when the target has been to improve the last mile service delivery and not just reducing fiscal loss or corruption. Economic studies have shown that exclusion from food security could be stemmed in states where alternative options were provided in case biometric authentication failed. Further, where Aadhar has stemmed identity and eligibility frauds, technological application has had limited success in stemming quantity fraud in disbursement of services and provisions. For efficient distribution there is Aadhar but for stemming quantity frauds, other local and social incentives and measures need to be implemented. For example, empirical studies have shown that corruption in NREGA reduced when the implementing agency (the panchayats) and the payment agency (banks and post offices) were separated in addition to implementing Aadhar. But both the institutional measures and Aadhar could not stem corruption due to extortion or collusion. In addition to server issues and internet service disruptions the poor people, old people and women with young children also got excluded either because their fingerprints frequently did not match with those recorded in the system or they could not reach the point of distribution. But then Aadhar also became the aadhar, the foundation, to apply other services in times of crisis. One may recall that the Aadhar database became the platform over which vaccination during the Covid-19 pandemic could be carried out successfully on a large scale. Biometric based authentication continues to be the platform to expand healthcare for the poor through Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission digitizing health records of citizens and providing health insurance cover.

In this backdrop, we can talk about smart cities in India where elements of smartness have become part of our everyday life, and smartness has come to mean everything from state-of-the-art infrastructure, improved governance, conservation of environment and heritage, technological sophistication and improved quality of living. The flagship Smart Cities Mission (SCM) introduced in 2015 in India selected more than hundred cities to be smartened. In Pune, for example, smart city electronic boards came up at various important junctions that were supposed to communicate the traffic situation to the people on different significant routes. During flooding in the monsoon month of July one affected two-wheeler rider said, somewhat frustratingly, that the smart city boards could have also broadcasted which area was going to be flooded so that she could get home in time avoiding standing in knee deep water on the road. While we may think of technology as universal and standardized in itself, the way people localize and spatialize technologies tells us how to make it inclusive, accessible, and equitable, one perspective at a time. We may dismiss perspectives as alternative narratives or mere opinions, but, if we think of them as alternate ways of utilizing technology, the path to inclusivity may not become shorter or appear any less arduous, it may even require more work, but it provides concrete pathways to deal with exclusion.

With the smart city discourse, visualizability got equated with visibility and was quickly assumed to be representative of society. If one was visible on the digital map, one was part of the social, cultural, and economic life otherwise one was excluded. While people were afraid of proximity, digital technologies helped in managing these distances and facilitated interactions and transactions. While many people continued to work remotely, a large population could not earn a living and lost their sources of livelihood. For example, the domestic maid servants who had been working in high rises in cities could not return to work because they could not show on their phones the ‘You are safe’ message of the Aarogya Setu app. Many of them did not have smartphones or even aadhar cards. Some house owners gave smart phones to the domestic servants but that was hardly the norm. Similarly, children whose families could not afford digital devices could not continue with their education. Even if families had digital devices, all members did not use them equally.

Technology served as a threshold enabling interactions for some and as a barrier obstructing interactions for others, while fear also shaped digital interactions and transactions. The local grocery delivery person would insist on being paid through a payment app and was reluctant to receive payments in cash for fear of touch and spread of the Coronavirus. We were reshaping our practices of sociality as digital interactions shaped the in-between spaces or excluded people from these spaces transforming their character and remaking boundaries of exclusion. This was similar to many networking and social media web applications that had their own categories of creating enclosures. But whereas it was one of the many options earlier, it became the only option available and only to those who could afford it. As the pandemic progressed and cities began to open up, where there was fear and suspicion, trust and empathy slowly began to heal the effects of isolation and social spaces began to be rebuilt. Where technology reified boundaries, it also helped rebuild social ties as conditions transformed. The Indian UPI system is undoubtedly a story of scintillating success but with exclusions because the default mode of operation, access, control and expertise has kept certain groups of people out. Acknowledging these exclusions takes us towards working on internet- and finance- literacy for those who have been left out so that they are not left behind. Efforts are being made in this direction, but we need consistent and widely accessible modules in addition to distributing digital devices.

Further, even though anonymity offered by the internet is a powerful tool and its wide reach is very useful to create awareness, the internet could also be used to support neighborhoods. Localized use of the internet gained momentum due to the pandemic and has become one of the envisioned features of managing and governing urban spaces. While local application of the internet – informing residents of government schemes, how to operate and enroll, registering grievances, etc, was in the works earlier, it gained critical mass when the pandemic made people realize its effectiveness. People connect not just to inform and be aware of events but also to highlight and resolve pressing issues in their locality. This indicates that we don’t just need access to correct information but information that matters in improving quality of life in our neighborhoods and localities. For this we need local media literacy modules that teach how to access correct and useful information at the local level.

When we think of the last person in the chain, and we envision policies beyond access to control of access to resources and livelihoods we can orient technologies towards highlighting and solving degrees of exclusion. Leaving equity to market forces will not be sufficient and the government is the most important stakeholder in addition to technical experts, civil society members and motivated youth in making technology equitable. Working towards equity and inclusion is an ongoing process that requires multiple stakeholder participation as it allows not just for consensus building but also consultation including more perspectives at the level decision making increasing the purview of citizenship to technology and infrastructure.