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Where is the Public in the Republic of India?
No full textThe notion of the \u27public\u27 cannot be contained within the framework of state and citizenship. In this timely and compelling article, Salmoli Choudhuri draws on modern Indian political thought to offer an alternative genealogy of the idea. She emphasises Tagore\u27s conception of the public as a differentiated unity , a collective entity where individuals retain their distinctions. At the core of this imagination is the question of ethical association with the other
Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita: Decolonising or Reinforcing Colonial Ideas?
No full textIn December 2023, the Indian Parliament enacted three new criminal codes to replace the Indian Penal Code, 1860 (‘IPC’), the Criminal Procedure Code, 1973 (‘CrPC’), and the Indian Evidence Act, 1872 (‘IEA’). The stated aim of these legislations is to ‘decolonise’ criminal laws of the British era. This piece focuses on the colonial legacy of the IPC and analyses how its replacement—the Bharatiya Nyay Sanhita—falls short of its stated goal of decolonisation. The authors argue that the BNS expands powers of the state and the police, retains offences grounded in archaic morality, and widens the punitive network through broad and vaguely defined offences
Protection of Stakeholders’ Interests in the Indian Corporate Landscape: Examining the ‘Ifs and Buts\u27
No full textIn the last decade, the Indian corporate landscape has undergone a significant transformation, particularly in terms of establishing rights that benefit stakeholders. These reforms are said to prioritize the interests of stakeholders. New corporate legislations and governance codes are heralded as the harbingers of change. This article argues that despite the legislative reforms, the effectiveness of these changes is limited, and the interests of stakeholders remain largely unprotected. The article also traces the history of the idea of “stakeholderism” in India through legislative changes and judicial interpretations to illustrate the non-linear evolution of the concept guided solely by political-economic factors. The article argues that the laws governing corporations vis-à-vis the rights of stakeholders are nothing more than lip service, ultimately leading to a severe mismatch in the policy vision and implementation. After all, a well-intended law fails to achieve its desired objective if it is inadequately enforced
Interpreting the Article 370 Judgment: A Plea for Nuance
No full textExcerpt: In the realm of legal and political discourse surrounding the Indian Supreme Court’s judgment on the abrogation of Article 370, the prevailing narrative often succumbs to the dichotomy of the Court favouring either the government or the opposition. However, a careful reading and analysis of the judgment reveals a more complex and balanced picture. For one thing, the Court’s effort to crystallize the principles for the exercise of the President’s powers to declare President’s rule under Article 356 of the Constitution repays close stud
Evaluating the Electoral Bonds Judgment: A Welcome Development For Indian Democracy That Leaves Some Questions Unanswered
No full textThe Supreme Court’s judgment in Association for Democratic Reforms and Anr. v. Union of India and Ors. (“Electoral Bonds Judgment”) has been widely hailed as a democracy-affirming judgment, for good reason. In this post, the authors dwell into some of the nuances of the judgment, with a view to furthering the debate on its implications
Sharing of children’s health data by health professionals and parents – a consideration of legal duties
No full textChildren’s health data such as blood pressure, X-rays and written notes of medical examinations are produced in a clinical setting through health professionals’ interaction with their minor patients. Health care practitioners owe legal and professional obligations not to disclose such information without consent or other legally recognised authorisation. With the increasing advent of data generated by patients themselves from wearable devices such as continuous glucose monitors and health apps, the patient, or parents, have initial control of the data and decide who to share it with. Where wearable devices have been provided to parents by the child’s health care provider to monitor the child’s health condition, there is an expectation that parents will share that information with the healthcare practitioner, who owes legal and professional duties to maintain the confidentiality of such data. Naturally, parents share information about their children with family and friends and increasingly on social media networks. They may also choose to share their children’s health data on closed social media sites in order to gain support from members of that group for management of their children’s health condition.
This paper identifies obligations of privacy and confidentiality owed by healthcare professionals in Australia and India in respect of children’s health data. I contrast how parents freely share information about their children on social media sites —‘sharenting’ —and address the adequacy of protections against future harms arising from dissemination of children’s health data and suggest the limits of appropriate sharing
Protecting Privacy in India: The roles of consent and fairness in data protection
No full textThe Indian Personal Data Protection Bill 2019 provides a unique approach to balancing the elements of individual consent and fairness-based limitations that are used in data protection regimes in other parts of the world. Drawing on the fundamental values and interests recognised in KS Puttaswamy v. Union of India (2017) and the report of the Committee of Experts, the Bill requires consent of the data subject to data processing, and puts in place standards that consent must meet to be more than a forced formality. Its novelty lies in also proposing substantive obligations of fair and reasonable data processing, and by making organisations responsible, as statutory ‘data fiduciaries’, for complying with obligations protecting the interests of the data subject. The requirement that processing be fair, also written into European data protection law, is an opportunity to put data controllers under an obligation to protect the interests of data subjects. Data processing ought not to have a negative impact upon an individual’s interests, values and freedoms disproportionate to their positive gains. If robustly interpreted and applied, this could be an effective protection against the shortcomings of consent as a safeguard for protecting individual interests. European data protection law has yet to fully embrace this opportunity. If it did, then there would be less pressure to ensure a data subject’s consent meets ideal standards of ‘free and informed’, which is increasingly unrealistic in a modern information society.
Considering the merits of these different approaches, with different degrees of relative emphasis upon individual consent and objective tests of fairness, prompts reflection upon the proper function of privacy and data protection legislation within society. Is it purely to enable individual expressions of informational self-determination — irrespective of whether the deal done is a good one? Or does data protection law also have a role in expressing community expectations by promoting norms and standards of fair dealing that are conducive to individual well-being and to civil society as a whole
Women’s Work in Livestock Raising: Evidence from Time Use Surveys in India
No full textWomen’s contribution to livestock raising, in terms of both work participation and hours of work, is underestimated in India as elsewhere in the world. This is primarily because of limitations of data available in labour force surveys, many of which can be addressed by time use surveys (TUSs). This paper, first, explores data from a small TUS conducted in two villages of Karnataka. Insights from our ground-level study are tested econometrically by applying a two-way Heckman model to unit data from India’s first national TUS, 2019. We estimated that 11 per cent of rural women participated in livestock raising and spent an average of 16 h a week. Age and education were significant factors: younger and educated women were less likely to engage in livestock raising, an observation linked to current technology and drudgery of work. Women’s participation was higher in peasant households from privileged social groups than in poorer wage worker households
An Empire of Artificial Intelligence: Exploring an Intersection of Politics, Society, and Creativity
No full textThe ongoing creative upscaling of AI at the behest of OpenAI and the advent of ChatGPT are both remarkable and alarming. As things stand, this lesser-understood and unregulated field is riddled with futuristic speculations. And the techno-scientific nuances of AI cannot be imagined to function in silos, away from their sociopolitical implications. This article undertakes an overall critique of the philosophical underpinnings of AI—its sociopolitical and creative aspects. Methodologically, the article primarily locates the empire of AI phenomenon conceptually and consequently undertakes a theoretically-bound qualitative analysis of four key personal interviews of people engaged in the creative fields of art, writing, graphic design, and learning and development in India. The article conceptualizes an ‘empire of AI’ which substitutes a geo-centric notion of empire with a globalized, technologically armored, and all-pervasive empire. An ‘empire of AI’ encompasses the entire spectrum of lived reality and even influences social relations to create the world it inhabits. An ‘empire of AI’ unravels the politics of AI which gets more complex at an intersection of sociopolitical (related to the macro-effect of AI at a global scale) and creativity (linked to the micro-effect on individuals as the unit of analysis). This ‘empire of AI’ is a byproduct of a theoretical amalgamation of the AI Empire and neoliberal governmentality. The former discusses the deterritorialized structures of global oppression—digital colonialism, tech hegemony, and surveillance at the behest of the AI Empire. The latter focuses on how neoliberalism expands its invisible tentacles of governmental control through bio-power which seemingly engages in the production of subjects as “free” individuals and consumers of the market rationale