For the past two years, Kamala Rajpal, a cleaner in the northwestern Indian city of Chandigarh, has been hesitant to take her bathroom break. It is a flashing light. It feels like you’re being spying on in the bathroom,” a tired Kamala told the Daily Dot.
Rajpal is one of the city’s 4,000 health workers forced to wear a smartwatch with a GPS tracking device. Since February 2020, Rajpal, 50, had been running around with a sense of unease.
Over the past decade, India has emerged among emerging countries as an early adopter of generation in its administrative activities. From expanding app-based assistance regulations to mandatory biometric identification, the country has noticed an increase in digitization efforts, driven by the right-wing authoritarian government of Narendra Modi.
While the Indian government has the world’s largest repository of biometric knowledge and promotes surveillance technologies such as facial recognition, critics warn of India’s move toward “Chinese-style surveillance capitalism. “This technology, Modi’s authoritarian government has harnessed the force of surveillance to its advantage.
But as the Indian government seeks to advance the timetable for a “modern” and “technologically advanced” society, activists and experts have raised considerations about privacy, access and the forced imposition of those technologies on millions of others across the country, adding the poorest and most vulnerable.
Among them are the five million “Safai Karamcharis”, or sanitation throughout the country.
Most Indian sanitation comes from the most marginalized Dalit castes, as part of the country’s hierarchical and oppressive caste system. Historically, many Dalits have even been forced to perform the dehumanizing “manual cleaning” paintings, a practice of cleaning and collecting human waste. of open defecation sites, dry toilets and gutters. Although declared illegal, the practice continues to exist. Of the estimated five million sanitation facilities in the country, the majority are Dalits.
Bhuwneshwar Kewat, a worker leader from the town of Ranchi in India’s Jharkhand tribal belt state, said: “In the past, Dalits were forced to tie brooms around them, to show the world that they are minor castes related to small cleaning. “These GPS watches look like an imposition contrary to your human dignity and privacy.
For centuries, many Dalit staff members have been forced to paint in conditions of deep exploitation. With the advent of these devices, experts have highlighted how this segregation of surveillance “amounts to slavery. “As of 2020, sanitation staff in more than a dozen villages around the world are now dressed in GPS tracking devices. Most of those cities, such as Chandigarh, Indore, Lucknow and Nagpur, are governed by municipalities controlled by the far-right Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), to which Indian Prime Minister Modi belongs.
Equipped with cameras and microphones, these trackers allow their surveillance through the civic government their hours of operation and mark their presence.
But even though the government says generation brings efficiency, for many, the devices have only added to their problems at work. Workers, many now lament the loss of their privacy and pay.
The MCC says the advent of such follow-ups has ensured increased attendance and an “enhanced cash presence” of sanitation workers.
But for Jaipal Bagri, 48, wearing watches has become a “nuisance. “their salaries. ” I may only scan in Chandigarh, but the watch showed my position in Patiala (a city more than 40 miles away), or even Delhi. If someone is shown elsewhere, how will they be paid?Hours? Asked.
During a shift, the device tracks their GPS locations and sends them to a central room in the CMC office. In case of technical difficulties or failures, each staff organization reports to a technical manager. Bagri says this manager intends to regularly fix those watches “on the same day, in a matter of hours. “
Veteran union leader Krishan Kumar Chadha agrees with the problems. Speaking to the Daily Dot, Chadha, the former head of the Chandigarh Sewer Workers Union, pointed out that the location is incorrect. I would estimate that, on average, between 500 and 600 of the city’s 4,000 sanitation employees may lose a fraction of their daily wages because of those failures.
The union leader said that from the roughly $200 earned by a sanitation worker in a month, the salary has been reduced from $85 to $100.
Chadha also points out how tracking devices work on battery chargers. “Sometimes staff don’t have chargers and their device’s battery drains for hours, and then their salary is reduced. “
The confidence of the Indian authorities in such an invasive generation of supposed transparency and potency for the running categories is nothing new.
In early April 2022, the Indian government made it mandatory for millions of salaried employees under the National Rural Employment Guarantee (NREGA) scheme to sign their assistance to structure sites through a flawed application. During COVID-19, a “contact tracing” app for government and personal sector personnel raised knowledge privacy considerations.
But experts have warned that they oppose the need for such moves. In 2017, India’s Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling, which well identified the right to privacy as a basic right. the High Court formed to draft a law covering knowledge for the country. Four years after India’s Personal Data Protection Act, the government withdrew the bill from Parliament. Although a revised edition of the law may now be published, the lack of an express law for coverage of non-public knowledge remains a concern.
Anushka Jain, a political associate at the Internet Freedom Foundation, believes that surveillance of such personnel violates their basic rights. She exceeded the 4 thresholds set in the privacy trial and claimed that the watches comply with any of the established measures.
“[A] threshold considers procedural guarantees, that there will be no misuse of such a device. But those workers, women, have no legal cover when it comes to their fears of being watched.
In early May 2022, the Internet Freedom Foundation and the All India Lawyers Association for Justice (AILAJ) wrote a joint letter raising considerations about the surveillance of those workers. The letter addressed to the National Commission of Sanitation Workers, and in September the commission ordered government in at least 4 indigenous peoples to present a factual report addressing the considerations raised.
For women like Divya, 36, watches have invited paranoia. Divya tries to take it away while going to the bathroom, “because there are cameras that can spy on me. “Watches up to the ankles or waist because it is uncomfortable. And we have to be hypervigilant now, just because we are afraid that our salaries will be reduced just because of technical problems in the clock or battery failure.
Sanitation workers like Kamala and Divya face the double burden of being monitored as staff and as women. These considerations are compounded by the fact that they are Dalits. Union leader Bhuwneshwar Kewat added: “This is just surveillance, but it also reinforces the centuries-old caste practices we have observed in this country.
Lawyer Anushka Jain also pointed out how sanctioning the surveillance of health workers, most of whom belong to traditionally discriminated communities, “is also very harmful. . . Surveillance is largely carried out through other people of the upper caste and upper elegance and is carried out in the marginalized castes. This takes away the dignity of other people, those gadgets violate their right to dignity.
As the implementation of those schemes has developed, staff in some cities have struggled to roll back. In the western city of Pune in Maharashtra state, sanitation and street sweeping personnel operating in a part of the city were ordered to wear the uniform. devices. ” The staff made the resolution to refuse to use the watches on their own. They sold those devices to the company and they were never put into operation,” said Deepak Bhalerao, leader of the sanitation workers’ union.
However, for most, this imposition has now gradually been accepted as inevitable. Krishan Kumar Chadha from Chandigarh admitted: “We protested several times, including once introducing a four-day strike in the city, but we had to give in to pressure from the municipality. This is not a watch designed to improve anyone’s efficiency, it is a forced imposition through the government for its own whims.