As Hyderabad expands into a bustling technology and commercial hub, an invisible pollutant is steadily degrading its urban livability: acoustic pollution. Data from the Telangana Pollution Control Board (TGPCB) indicates that ambient noise levels consistently breach permissible national thresholds set by the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) as well as global safety guidelines set by the World Health Organization (WHO).

According to recent TGPCB monitoring, high-density traffic corridors such as JNTU and Gachibowli regularly exceed 70 dB during the day, occasionally spiking past 90 to 100 dBduring peak traffic hours. More alarming is the compromise of designated Silence Zones—such as the University of Hyderabad (HCU) and Nehru Zoological Park—where daytime decibel levels reach between 68 dB and 71 dB, exceeding the statutory 50 dB threshold by nearly 20 decibels.

The primary culprits are well-documented: unyielding vehicular honking (which accounts for roughly 70% of road noise), rapid real estate construction, unmonitored generator usage, and late-night commercial sound systems.

Ambient Noise Thresholds (CPCB / TGPCB Norms)

Regulatory & Statutory Framework

Under the Noise Pollution (Regulation and Control) Rules, 2000(enforced under the Environment Protection Act, 1986), sound-amplifying equipment, DJs, and loudspeakers are prohibited between 10:00 PM and 6:00 AM without specific police sanctions. Simultaneously, Section 268 of the Indian Penal Code covers public nuisance, while the Motor Vehicles Actoutlaws illegal pressure horns and modified exhausts.

Despite these legal provisions, regulatory gaps remain. Automated monitoring experiments—such as acoustic traffic cameras tested by Hyderabad Traffic Police—were phased out post-pandemic, leaving physical enforcement struggling against the volume of daily commuters.

Demographic Impact & Estimated Yearly Incidence

The biological and cognitive toll of chronic noise exposure varies significantly across different stages of human development, contributing to measurable annual health burdens:

1. Children (Ages 0–12): Cognitive Impairment and Auditory Vulnerability

Children possess developing auditory pathways and lower physiological tolerance to chronic sound. Public health reportshighlight that continuous exposure to decibel levels above 65 dB in residential and academic silence zones leads to significant developmental delays.

Impaired Reading & Language Acquisition:High ambient noise interferes with speech perception, slowing down phonetic processing and vocabulary retention.

Elevated Stress Biomarkers:Chronic noise triggers autonomic nervous system responses, elevating cortisol levels and causing early-stage attentional deficits.

Incidence Data:The WHO estimates that globally, over 45,000 Disability-Adjusted Life Years (DALYs)are lost annually among children due to noise-induced cognitive impairment. In Indian metros like Hyderabad, auditory neurologists report that children exposed to noisy traffic signals show a 10–15% drop in auditory processing speedcompared to low-noise environments.

2. Adolescents (Ages 13–19): Circadian Disruptions and Neuro-Fatigue

For teenagers navigating high-academic environments, nighttime noise pollution—frequently exceeding 60 dB in residential neighborhoods—serves as a primary disruptor of sleep architecture.

Disrupted REM Cycles:Ambient noise prevents deep non-REM sleep, resulting in daytime cognitive fatigue, reduced working memory capacity, and emotional dysregulation.

Synergistic Hearing Risk:Combining environmental urban noise with personal headphone usage significantly elevates the risk of early-onset acoustic trauma.

Incidence Data:Sleep disturbances account for over 900,000 lost DALYs globally per year. Regional health surveys indicate that approximately 20–25% of urban adolescentsin high-density corridors report chronic sleep fragmentation linked directly to nighttime traffic noise.

3. Adults & Elderly (Ages 20+): Cardiovascular Stress and Progressive Hearing Loss

For the working population, traffic police, informal vendors, and elderly citizens, prolonged exposure to ambient noise exceeding 85 dB poses direct systemic health risks:

Cardiovascular Disease (CVD) & Hypertension:Chronic acoustic stress activates the sympathetic nervous system, causing nocturnal blood pressure spikes and sustained arterial vasoconstriction. Global epidemiological syntheses published in Circulationand The Lancetindicate that exposure to environmental noise above 80 dB increases the overall risk ratio for hypertension by 81% (RR 1.81).

Irreversible Sensorineural Damage:Prolonged daily exposure to urban hotspots results in permanent hair cell destruction within the cochlea, leading to Noise-Induced Hearing Loss (NIHL) and chronic tinnitus.

Incidence Data (Global & India):

Globally: Epidemiological reviews indicate that over 146 million peopleworldwide are at heightened risk of developing hypertension due to chronic environmental noise exposure.

India & Hyderabad:Public health experts and cardiologists note that with cardiovascular disease already accounting for nearly 25% of all deaths in India, environmental acoustic stress acts as an unaddressed multiplier. ENT specialists and city hospitals in Hyderabad report a 12–15% annual risein early-stage Noise-Induced Hearing Loss and tinnitus cases among regular road commuters and traffic personnel.

Reclaiming the Acoustic Environment

Mitigating Hyderabad's noise crisis requires a combination of structural urban planning and civic enforcement: re-implementing automated acoustic penalty cameras, enforcing strict construction bans during nighttime hours, planting dense multi-layered green belts around silence zones, and fostering civic restraint against unnecessary honking. Without intervention, urban soundscapes will continue to pose a measurable risk to public health across all generations.

Air India finds itself under intense regulatory, technical, and international scrutiny following two major operational crises: the catastrophic crash of Flight 171 in Ahmedabad and a severe in-flight altitude drop on Flight 2379. As technical agencies and civil aviation authorities continue their inquiries, the incidents have raised complex questions regarding regulatory enforcement, international passenger rights, and competing readings of technological causality.

Briefing: How the Two Cases Are Being Handled

Flight 171 (Ahmedabad Crash)

On June 12, 2025, Flight 171—a Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner bound for London Gatwick—crashed seconds after takeoff into a BJ medical college hostel complex, killing 241 on board and 19 on the ground. Notably, in the history of commercial aviation, no other Boeing 787 Dreamliner has suffered a fatal hull-loss crash.

Preliminary findings by India’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB) confirmed both engine fuel control switches moved to "CUTOFF" seconds after liftoff, severing fuel supply. In response, the Director General of Civil Aviation India has ordered an audit of all 787 aircraft operated by Air India, while procedure itself is in all likelihood what requires closer scrutiny.

Flight 2379 (Phuket–Delhi In-Flight Occurrence)

On August 4, 2026, Flight 2379 experienced a sudden 300-foot altitude drop during cruise, injuring 20 passengers and four crew members. One passenger hit their head against the roof of the cabin so hard that a panel cracked. Post-flight screening revealed the pilot-in-command tested positive for marijuana in a confirmatory test. Under Civil Aviation Requirement (CAR) protocols, both flight crew members were off-rostered immediately, and the DGCA initiated license revocation proceedings alongside an AAIB serious incident investigation into the aircraft's flight computer logs. Apparently official accountability has not yet been finalised.

Foreign Scrutiny and the Multi-Jurisdictional Framework

With 53 British citizens, 7 Portuguese nationals, and 1 Canadian national aboard Flight 171, foreign scrutiny from the UK and global regulatory bodies has intensified. Under ICAO Annex 13 and international civil law, jurisdiction over the investigation and legal proceedings is distributed across specific domains:

• US NTSB: State of Aircraft/Engine Manufacture (Boeing/GE). |
| Civil Compensation | UK & Indian Courts | Governed by the Montreal Convention, enabling victim families to file civil claims in destination or home courts. |
| Products Liability | US Federal Courts | Potential venue if technical findings point to design or manufacturing flaws in aircraft components. |

Technical Probes & Philosophical Readings of Causality

The BBC Investigation: Human Action vs. Avionics Shorting

Investigations highlighted by the BBC center on a key dispute: did human hands physically manipulate the switches, or did a digital fault falsely register the "CUTOFF" command?

• Human Intervention Hypothesis: Cockpit voice logs recorded one pilot asking why the fuel switches were cut, to which the other replied he had not done so. Proponents argue the mechanical switches require a "lift-and-turn" motion, pointing toward manual activation.
• Systemic Glitch Hypothesis: Defense teams and US lawsuits highlight potential electrical shorting, signal path corruption, or switch locking mechanism defects that could send an uncommanded digital signal shutting down both engines simultaneously.

Slavoj Žižek’s Critique: The Paradox of Digital Logic

In his philosophical critique on technological causality Liberal Fascisms: Essays on Capitalist Realism and Automated Violence, Slavoj Žižek rejects both simple human error and random hardware failure. Instead, he traces the rigorous internal logic of how automated systems collapse through conflicting internal parameters:

1. Premature Gear and RAT Deployment: Physical evidence confirms that immediately upon liftoff, the landing gear remained deployed, and the Ram Air Turbine (the emergency wing-mounted wind propeller) deployed into the slipstream before engine thrust was lost.
2. Contradictory Digital Signals: The flight computer received simultaneously conflicting sensor inputs—air/ground sensors registered weight-off-wheels while airspeed and altitude data lagged. The system interpreted this state as an abnormal, critical flight envelope failure.
3. The Automated Cascade: Based on this corrupted state, automated fail-safe logic commanded the deployment of emergency power assets (the RAT). This emergency bus override subsequently executed an automated fuel cut command.

For Žižek, this is the core mechanism: the crash was a pure digital contradiction, where two independently correct software subroutines collided, producing a fatal command chain that no human pilot could override.

Current Status

Investigative alignment remains active under ICAO rules, with the UK AAIB and US NTSB integrated as accredited representatives. Meanwhile, civil liability claims under the Montreal Convention continue to advance in UK and US courts independently of the multi-year timeline required for the AAIB's final technical report.

Regulatory Questioning

Has the Director General of Civil Aviation, in instituting an audit for Air India’s Boeing 787 fleet, taken into consideration the structural possibility of contradictory mechanical and digital signals leading to platform failure—or is the regulatory apparatus operating on the assumption of isolated human error and routine mechanical degradation, noting that the platform in question, Boeing 787 Dreamliner has otherwise an impeccable aviation record?

It was Walter Benjamin, writing in the shadow of Europe’s mid-century breakdown in 1935, who coined the term exhibition value (Ausstellungswert) in his seminal essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility. Benjamin observed a historic shift in how human culture assigns worth to objects: where traditional art drew its sanctity from cult value—an elusive, ritualistic aura tied to a specific location, accessible only to the few who stood before the hidden altar—the modern machine age ripped the object from its sanctuary. Once an image or sound could be endlessly copied and distributed, its value no longer lay in its quiet, secluded presence, but in its capacity to be seen, displayed, and paraded before the public square.

When transferred to contemporary social media platforms, exhibition value ceases to be merely a trait of mechanical images and becomes the very currency of human identity. On these digital grounds, the ancient, quiet interiority of a person—what once resembled grain kept stored in a dark barn until needed—is continually dragged into the light to prove its worth. The individual becomes both the museum curator and the object inside the glass case. Here lies a stark paradox: to exist in the digital commons, one must transform the lived experience of suffering, joy, or daily labor into a visible artifact, yet the moment a life is fully converted into exhibition value, the authentic marrow of that life is drained, leaving behind only a husk designed for public consumption.

In captive markets—those walled gardens governed by platform monopolies and locked-in digital ecosystems—exhibition value functions as a mandatory tool of extraction. In such spaces, where buyers and sellers cannot easily escape to open air, a product or service no longer competes on raw utility or hidden craftsmanship alone. Instead, its survival depends on its algorithmic legibility—its ability to flash brightly in the digital storefront. The captive market demands that every vendor, artist, or worker endlessly exhibit their metrics, reviews, and credentials to earn a place at the stall. Production is thus reshaped not by what lasts through cold winters, but by what looks striking under the artificial lamps of the marketplace, forcing market actors to prioritize visual signal over structural substance.

This dynamics radically alters how we search for and learn of a person. In days past, understanding a neighbor was a slow, tactile affair, gathered over seasons through direct speech, shared labor, and observable conduct. Today, to search for a person online is to inspect a curated ledger of their exhibition value—a public portrait assembled from fragments, posts, and recorded movements. We are tempted to believe that because we can instantly retrieve a complete archive of someone’s visible outputs, we know them truly; yet this is an illusion born of excess light. What we inspect is not the person, but their digital ghost—an optimized representation designed to survive the harsh scrutiny of the network. We learn the surface contour of their public displays, while remaining entirely blind to the unexhibited depths that truly govern their character.

Whether this unrelenting push toward exhibition value helps hold institutions accountable remains a deeply conflicted proposition. On one hand, forced exposure is a powerful scythe against entrenched power. Institutions long accustomed to operating in secretive, cultic dark—where corrupt dealings lay hidden behind heavy wooden doors—are rendered vulnerable when their internal documents, public failures, or private hypocrisies are suddenly displayed to millions. The sheer visibility enabled by digital reproduction can mobilize swift collective outrage, forcing arrogant rulers to answer to the public square.

On the other hand, a system built entirely on exhibition value possesses an insatiable capacity to neutralize the very critique aimed against it. When accountability is mediated by platforms that profit off raw attention, genuine institutional harm is frequently flattened into mere content—a transient spectacle to be scrolled past alongside advertisements and entertainment. The institution, skilled in the arts of modern public relations, quickly learns to offer performative transparency, issuing polished apologies and symbolic displays that satisfy the demand for exhibition without shifting a single stone of structural power. Sunlight, while a proven disinfectant, can also bake the earth so dry that nothing transformative can take root.

Thus, exhibition value reveals itself as a double-edged tool. It frees us from the closed, authoritarian mysteries of the old sanctuaries, yet it threatens to leave us in a barren, sun-scourged landscape where nothing is permitted to rest in the dark soil of quiet, unobserved growth.

The material reality of modern industrial capital rests upon a foundational element: steel. In the political economy of contemporary India, iron and steel production serves as the central distribution system through which state-led infrastructural ambitions and private capital accumulation are invested. While official narratives celebrate national capacity expansion, an examination of trade valuations, labour relations, and material metallurgy reveals deep structural contradictions within India's industrial matrix.

1. The Metallurgy of Accumulation: Production and Capacity

According to data from the Ministry of Steel, India’s crude steel-making capacity has reached approximately 220 million tonnes per annum, positioning the nation as the second-largest crude steel producer globally, behind China. Total finished steel production stands at over 139 million tonnes annually, alongside pig iron production exceeding 7 million tonnes.

This output is bifurcated between two distinct regimes of production and labour exploitation:

• Primary Producers: Large-scale conglomerates—such as Tata Steel, JSW Steel, and the state-owned Steel Authority of India Limited (SAIL)—employ integrated Blast Furnace-Basic Oxygen Furnace (BF-BOF) machinery. These primary facilities produce the majority of high-value flat products (hot-rolled and cold-rolled coils).
• Secondary Producers: Decentralized, energy-intensive units utilizing Electric Arc Furnaces (EAF) and Induction Furnaces (IF) powered by domestic sponge iron and scrap metal. Supplying approximately 47% of national output (primarily non-flat items like thermo-mechanically treated rebars), this sector functions largely in the informal domain, relying on unorganized, low-wage manual labour.

2. Sectoral Allocation: How Capital Employs the Metal

The distribution and physical consumption of finished steel reflect the capital expenditure model of the Indian state. Tracking data from the Joint Plant Committee indicates that domestic finished steel is absorbed across key end-user sectors:

• Building & Infrastructure (60–65%): The primary consumer. It relies on thermo-mechanically treated rebars and structural sections to support urban expansion, real estate speculation, and state logistics corridors.
• Capital Goods & Heavy Engineering (10–12%): Employs forging-quality carbon and alloy steels for industrial machinery fabrication.
• Automotive & Transportation (9–10%): Utilizes high-value flat steel, including high-strength cold-rolled sheets and galvanized auto-body panels.
• Energy, Oil & Gas (5–7%): Consumes seamless tubes and electric resistance welded line pipes for hydrocarbon extraction and transport.
• Railways & Defense (4–5%): Requires specialized metallurgy, including head-hardened rails and high-tensile armor plates.

3. Trade Valuation and the Net Importer Paradox

Despite substantial domestic raw material wealth—specifically high-grade hematite deposits extracted from the Odisha-Jharkhand belt at significant social and ecological costs—India faces a structural trade paradox. Reports from the Joint Plant Committee confirm that India transitioned into a net importer of finished steel.

• Import Dynamics: Finished steel imports rose to over 8.3 million tonnes annually, valued at approximately ₹68,193 crores, $8.2 billion US dollars. These imports consist of high-value flat items—such as electrical steel sheets, specialized alloy plates, and cold-rolled coils—sourced from South Korea, Japan, and China.
• Export Dynamics: Exports stood at 7.49 million tonnes, valued at roughly ₹59,157 crores  or $7.1 billion US dollars, comprising lower-margin commodity products (standard hot-rolled coils and galvanized sheets) bound for Europe, the UAE, and Southeast Asia.
• The Valuation Deficit: This dynamic generates a trade deficit in finished steel exceeding ₹9,000 crores annually, illustrating India's dependence on foreign technological capacity for specialized metallurgy.

4. The Political Economy of Labour, Industrial Accidents, and Extraction

A purely trade-centric analysis masks the human toll embedded in steel production, where worker mortality is routinely treated as an acceptable overhead cost.

Casualization and Fatal Explosions: The reliance on a two-tiered labour structure directly compromises plant safety. Contract laborers perform high-risk maintenance without structural protections. An investigative report by Groundxero into the 2018 disaster at SAIL’s flagship Bhilai Steel Plant documented how 14 workers—including contract maintenance workers and firefighters—were burned alive during a gas pipeline explosion while de-blanking a flange. Trade union investigations revealed that post-accident statutory safety recommendations had been ignored, while contract workers were deployed to high-risk zones without basic statutory protections.

Extreme Hazards on the Shop Floor: The physical precarity of the shop floor was again demonstrated in June 2026 at the state-run Visakhapatnam Steel Plant, as reported by The Hindu. A ladle carrying 150 tonnes of molten steel at 1,600°C exploded, spilling superheated liquid metal across the steel melting shop floor. The blast killed eight workers on the spot—including contract laborers Ramana, Trinadh, and N. Appala Raju—and critically injured six others with severe burns.

• Secondary Sector Informalization: In unorganized sponge iron units and rerolling mills across Chhattisgarh and Odisha, informal labour absorbs the shock of volatile scrap metal and electricity prices. When electricity tariffs or coal prices surge, mills cut overhead by accelerating shift rhythms and dismantling safety protocols, leading to unrecorded limb amputations and burn injuries that never enter official statistics.
• Extractive Violence and Coking Coal Vulnerability: While iron ore is mined from forest regions through the displacement of indigenous communities, India lacks domestic high-grade metallurgical coking coal. Consequently, domestic blast furnaces remain dependent on importing over 70% of their coking coal from Australia and Russia, exposing the domestic valuation chain to external price variability.

Ultimately, the evolution of India's steel industry illustrates how intense physical expansion, resource mobilization, and deep technological partnerships can serve as catalysts for modern globalization. By anchoring critical foreign supply chains in high-value technologies, the sector has effectively integrated India's economy into global supply chains—fostering more reliable, trustworthy international relations and unlocking expanded cross-border trade opportunities across complementary and critical industries.

Kotak Institutional Equities in early April presented a note which claimed that petrol prices in India would go up by 25 to 28 rupees per litre following the state assembly elections in Tamil Nadu and West Bengal. The reasons presented for this were the supply constrictions in the strait of Hormuz through which 40% of India’s crude imports passes through. The same institution also reported that state run oil marketing companies are absorbing massive losses to the sum of 270 billion rupees per month. Measures that have been taken by the state government to rectify this situation are the reduction of value added tax and the reintroduction of windfall tax. The former would allow thicker margins for companies while the latter would de-incentivise the export of petroleum by them. This was reported by both Business Today and The Economic Times, in stories. It should be noted however that a week later The Statesman published a story which reported on a speech made by the minister of petroleum and natural gas, Hardeep Singh Puri who clarified that despite the pressures in West Asia, India has not revised its prices of petrol and diesel in the last sixty days. Whether this is to be a conclusive position is yet to be ascertained.

What we should note here however is that when software such as AI draws on sources that are published on the internet that are then used to present hypothesis or arrive at conclusions the tentativeness of such results cannot be ignored. This is not simply a question of the accuracy of AI or the quality of data that it is trained on, though these are indeed significant factors. There are live issues at work in the world whose resolution is not arrived at in the form of a verdict, even if those help streamline processes that we depend on. Also worth noting is that there would be contradictory inputs from recognised business outlets regarding what precisely may be happening. Contradiction itself cannot simply be ignored. A court adjudicates on contesting claims however there are developments which are successive and sometimes later insights carry more information regarding what may be happening than earlier ones. This does not mean that what we learn is always cumulative as the interests of the parties concerned change depending on what may be a ground reality, however there are still constants, such as the demand for petroleum in a country and the fear of inflation.

India is presently the third largest consumer of petroleum in the world behind the US and China. About 5.5 million barrels are utilised per day. To facilitate this 85% of the crude oil requirements are imported. Recently since the US capture of Venezuelan president Nicholas Maduro, India has started importing increasing amounts of oil from Venezuela with the country’s lawmakers presented their backing as of 23^rd January 2026 to open the oil sector to US energy companies.

Interacting with two members of Swecha’s team we gather what the developments are in the organisation’s community centric AI project, the forthcoming release of the data sets that they are trained on, and the application that is presently in development and would be released to the public soon.

Praveen Gorla is directly involved with Swecha since 2013 as a student at Jawaharlal Nehru Technical University, and is presently a Research Scientist at Swecha’s community centric AI project.  - Swecha has multiple initiatives in the free and open source software domains. While at JNTU he was part of a GLUG GNU Linux User Group that was conducting activities for SWECHA there. The AI initiative of the Swecha activities is Vishwam which is a centre for excellence in AI in the Global South. Their website can be found here. For Swecha, Praveen, Ranjit and Raja look after the student, developer, activities and the faculty. The faculty for engineering and non-engineering institutions such as pharmacy colleges, are the ones who collaborate with Swecha and are themselves regular employees in colleges. They involve students in activities such as corpus collection initiatives, and shape the research ecosystem of Swecha.

Swecha itself, even before being established in 9^th Feb, 2005 started with the question of how the digital divide can be bridged and to spur innovation. Efforts towards this began from 2002 onwards.  Free and open source softwares with community licences were thought to be the way to go, as opposed to Windows. So the goal was to make software available in local languages, moving towards building a Telugu operating system which would require a glossary of words. The word for the internet for example that is used in Telugu is antarjalam etymologically meaning “within the water”. Swecha Gonthuka, an initiative to create a speech to text recognition software that could understand Telugu, was launched in 2021.

However in coming back to the licence itself, what would that consist of? The Software Freedom Law Centre on the 31st of January would host a panel discussing community AI. Suggestions from the assembled would be welcome. The licence would also be a collaboration between SFLC, Swecha and IIIT. We should note that the presently available licences such as the General Public Licence were originally meant for code and not for massive data sets, which is perhaps another reason why a new licence is being worked towards.

AI’s that are commercially available as of now have not made publicly available the data sets and the large language models that they were trained on, this is something that Swecha is presently in the process of undertaking. Let us take Gotuka as an example, the data sets and LLM’s that it has been trained on has not been made publicly available so far as an appropriate people’s licence is still in the making. There is however the Swecha Telugu Automatic Speech Recognition dataset that is available here, though it does require login access to download. This corpus was collected as a part of the Swecha Gontuka drive.

Ranjit Raj, who was mentioned earlier outlines the tools that Swecha are to release on the 17^th. These include the Swecha Telugu Corpus which is also being used within closed groups and developers. It is a tool that features, transcription and proofreading abilities. Apart from this there is also a peer review feature which allows peers to edit descriptions and the release rights of a file. The corporate server application, which is yet to be released can be thought of as the back end of the corporate user application which is the app itself. The server would be the repository of the uploads from users and where the processing of the information, for example the extraction of a transcript from an audio file happens and this is then relayed back to the app itself, where it can be accessed by the user.

Apart from this there is also plans that are underway for an AI based corpus review. The story generator that was launched earlier built on the Small Language Model of uploads of Chandamama Kathulu is also being updated. It may be found here.

Subsequently the latest version of Swecha’s operating system which is AI enabled will be launched on the day of the organisation’s foundation commemoration. The data sets that this AI would be trained on would include the corpus collection undertaken by volunteers during the Sumer of AI internship programs. These include a collection of audio and text files consisting of recipes, customs, songs and places, rural professions apart from the folk tale collection Chandamama Kathulu. These would be used for example to train the speech recognition system. Apart from this the Summer of AI dataset preparation handbook is available hereon a site run by Swecha but requires sign in credentials to access.

12.01.2026

The AI Days 2024 conference, held in Hyderabad on the 30th and 31^stMarch, championed a people-centric approach to Artificial Intelligence, aiming to demystify AI and leverage its potential to solve real-world problems for the common person in India. The conference featured a diverse array of speakers from leading tech companies, academic institutions, and government, all converging on the theme of "AI for Society."

Challenging the Narrative: AI for the Commons

Y. Kiran Chandra, Founder of Swecha, opened the conference by addressing common misconceptions and fears surrounding AI, particularly the notion that it will lead to widespread unemployment. He emphasised that AI is an inevitable tool for solving societal problems and highlighted a key product launched at the conference: a Telugu language assistant designed to empower farmers and agricultural labourers, enabling them to access information and communicate in their mother tongue, regardless of literacy. This initiative underscored the conference's core message: AI should serve the commons and improve the lives of everyday citizens, from farmers to sanitation workers.

Hyderabad: The Emerging AI Capital

Chaitanya Chokkareddy, CTO of Ozonetel, articulated the vision of establishing Hyderabad as the AI capital of India. He cited the city's robust ecosystem of IT and product companies, research institutes, educational institutions, and a thriving startup scene as key factors. Chokkareddy also presented an alternative model for AI development, challenging the dominance of mega-corporations like OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. He advocated for a community-driven approach to data collection and model building, emphasising open-source licenses to protect data from misuse.

He shared the success story of "Chandamama AI," where 7,000 stories were collected within six hours using student power. Another groundbreaking initiative involved collecting 1.5 million Telugu voice samples through a unique concert where entry was granted in exchange for voice contributions, demonstrating how society can collectively contribute to building massive datasets at a fraction of the cost incurred by large corporations. This data was then used to develop a small, open-source Telugu speech model that runs efficiently on mobile phones, showcasing the potential for AI solutions that are accessible and do not require extensive computing power.

The UPI Approach to AI Innovation

Professor Gaurav Raina from IIT Madras presented a compelling "UPI approach" to AI innovation, drawing parallels with the success of India's Unified Payments Interface. He distilled three key ingredients for solving complex problems and driving innovation:

- Identify a Challenging Situation: Start by addressing one of the most challenging real-world problems within a specific context. For UPI, it was enabling an auto-rickshaw transaction. He underlines that the success of UPI was largely built on the Immediate Payment Service. For AI in India, identifying a challenging situation means focusing on problems relevant to the Indian populace, such as those in education, healthcare, agriculture, and financial services.

- Bring Unlike Minds Together: Foster collaboration between policymakers, government, industry, and academia. The success of UPI was a testament to this collaborative spirit, where diverse perspectives and interests converged to co-create solutions.

- Work Towards a Democratic, High-Quality, Scalable, and Affordable Solution: The goal should be to create solutions that are accessible to everyone, regardless of their socio-economic background. This often necessitates developing smaller, more contextualised models that require less compute power, making them more affordable and scalable for a diverse nation like India.

Professor Raina emphasised that by adopting this framework, India can develop at least "10,000 solutions, 10,000 dreams, 10,000 problems, 10,000 opportunities for innovation" that not only serve the Indian context but also inspire similar adoptions globally. He redefined AI as "Intelligence for the auto-wallah," highlighting the human-centric amplification that AI can provide in various sectors, from education to justice, while also touching on the architecture of AI which can be described as built around three layers, computing, data and models.

AI and Law Enforcement: Addressing Emerging Crimes

Shikha Goel, IPS, Additional DGP, Telangana, provided insights into the intersection of AI and law enforcement. She acknowledged her non-expert status in AI but underscored its pervasive influence on every aspect of life, including the emergence of new-age crimes. Goel highlighted how AI is being used as an accomplice by criminals, citing examples from airline ticket cancellations to impersonating CFOs for financial fraud. She emphasised the need for law enforcement agencies like the Telangana Police to be well-equipped to deal with these evolving threats and expressed a desire for collaboration and learning within the AI community to ensure public safety in the digital age.

Making Science More Accessible with AI

Dr. Somdatta Karak, a scientist at Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biologyand a science communicator, advocates for using AI to make science more accessible. She highlightedthe inequity of information in society and aims to bridge the gap between scientific research and the public, including policymakers and non-experts. Dr. Karak emphasizedAI's potential in content generation and platform development for science communication, particularly for creating inclusive and engaging content in various languages. She also addressedthe challenges of fighting misinformation and building science-empowered communities, suggesting AI tools can help democratize reliable information and alert experts to viral misinformation.

Dr. Jaideep Ganguly's keynote at AIDAYS 2024 covered 50 years of AI development, emphasizing that we still don't fully understand intelligence. He discussed early knowledge-based systems and machine learning, highlighting that ML is primarily classification, not intelligence. Ganguly then delved into neural networks, explaining their simplistic model compared to the complex, digital and analog functions of the human brain. He critiqued the current understanding of neurons and synapses in AI models, noting their limitations in replicating true cognition.

The talk concluded with an analysis of GPT, explaining it as a statistical machine that predicts words based on probabilities, not genuine understanding. He cautioned that GPT is prone to "hallucinations" (statistical errors) and doesn't grasp complex concepts like "African elephant" as a unified entity as it grasps that as two separate words and builds a statistical analyses based on them.Ganguly stressed that the future of AI lies in better understanding brain functions and translating that into more realistic computational models, rather than relying solely on current statistical approaches.

In essence, AI Days 2024 served as a powerful platform to advocate for an inclusive, community-driven, and contextually relevant approach to AI development in India. The conference underscored the immense potential of AI to transform lives, provided a roadmap for home-grown innovation, and highlighted the critical need for responsible AI development to address both societal challenges and emerging criminal activities.

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Google announces Workspace Studio to help users create custom AI-powered agents, December 4^th2025

Google announced Workspace Studio to enable businesses to leverage custom generative AI models—known as "agents"—for automating workflows and transforming business processes. The core functionality of the platform acts as a centralized toolkit that integrates Google's large language models (LLM) with a user's proprietary data and systems (APIs). Workspace Studio is designed to make the creation of these custom agents accessible, allowing users without deep coding knowledge to configure specialized AI tools. These customized AI agents can be deployed across popular Google products like text Gmail, Docs, Sheets, and Meet to handle specialized tasks such as generating reports or automating customer support summaries. The move aims to cement Google's position in the enterprise AI market by facilitating the development of secure, tailored AI solutions that respect data privacy and enterprise security protocols. The launch accelerates the shift toward personalized, domain-specific AI that goes beyond general-purpose chatbots, allowing organizations to maximize productivity and efficiency within their existing infrastructure.

A smarter way for large language models to think about hard problems December 4, 2025

The Problem with Current LLMs is that existing methods give LLMs a fixed computational budget for reasoning, causing them to waste resources on simple questions or fail on intricate problems requiring more "thought." The solution is dynamic allocation. MIT researchers developed instance-adaptive scaling, a technique that enables LLMs to dynamically adjust the computation they use based on the difficulty of the specific question. The method utilizes a Process Reward Model PRM to score the likelihood that a partial solution or reasoning step will lead to the correct answer. By reducing the number of reasoning trajectories when the LLM is confident and expanding them when the problem is complex, the new approach usedhalf the computation while maintaining comparable accuracy to existing methods. This increase in efficiency couldreduce the energy consumption of generative AI systems and make smaller, less resource-intensive LLMs perform as well as or better than larger models. The ultimate aim is to create AI agents that can "learn on the job" and understand "what they don't know," allowing them to operate safely and adapt to new, high-stakes situations.

News Brief: Google DeepMind Releases Open-Source Medical AI, 3rd December, 2025

Google DeepMind has launched MedGemma, a powerful new family of open-source models for healthcare AI, signaling a dramatic shift in the industry's economic landscape. Released quietly on Hugging Face, MedGemma is capable of reading and interpreting medical data like X-rays, CT scans, pathology slides, and EHR notes with the competence of a senior clinician. The model, available in 4B and 27B parameter versions, is free to download without paywalls or API limits, immediately collapsing the economic barrier for advanced medical AI from proprietary licenses costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. This open-source approach allows hospitals to run the model on their own servers, fine-tune it locally, and deploy it in weeks, addressing previous nightmares related to vendor lock-in and patient privacy compromises. The model demonstrates strong performance, scoring 87.7% on the MedQA exam and producing clinically sufficient chest X-ray reports, proving that the future of medical AI may be decentralized, localized, and led by thousands of developers globally.

The Software Freedom Law Centre, in collaboration with Vishwam.ai, Free and Open Source Software and the Linux Foundation organised an event consisting of consultations between stakeholders under the title 'Understanding Trust and Safety in AI from: Code to Creativity.   This began with an introduction to two round table discussions on harvesting open source AI and on AI innovation and copyright. The opening remarks were delivered by the director of IIIT Hyderabad Professor Sandeep Kumar Shukla. A chief concern he raises is the findings from a conference on neural information processing systems where there was evidence of hallucinatory references found in papers that were in all likelihood the result of an improperly developed AI system. Another issue that was raised was the question of which data sets AI has been trained on and whether there are biases in there.

Subsequently, the founder of Swecha Kiran Chandra said that data is the key driver and that it requires to be verifiable, and that the owner of the data should be acknowledged. Further, he presented that the questions which are required to be considered are how do we protect the interests of those who produce the data and how does that data contribute back to society.

Mishi Choudhary the erstwhile legal director and founder of the Software Freedom Law Centre, Addressed the Gen AI Copyright Report, specifically critiquing the Department of Promotion of Industry and International Trade’s proposal for a "hybrid licensing model." She argued that it removes creator autonomy by legitimising data scraping under the guise of innovation.

Poruri Sai Rahul the Chief Executive Officer of the Free and Open Source Software United represented the developer community's interest in maintaining open weights and transparent methodologies, especially when public money is used for AI research.

Before addressing the conference itself, consisting of the two round table discussions, we should mention a concerning problem that appears which is that of dark patterns, which are deceitful interfaces that try and solicit users into buying overpriced insurance or signing up for recurring bills. Regarding these, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Consumer Report created a tip line to collect information about dark patterns and to provide them to the public.

In a panel discussion Professor Rahul De presented his observations regarding how for a while, until just six months, companies were unwilling to commit to a particular model but this had  recently changed. The other issue which came up is the issue of transparency which could potentially mitigate risks by providing for the opportunity to researchers and authorities to audit model performance, as well as the need for incentives for these audits to be conducted. There is also the risk that open source AI if dispersed without restriction may potentially fall into the hand of bad actors. Further, the scale of investment in AI particularly in research and development in India has not kept pace with developments in China. The worry was also presented that developments in India might be reduced to API wrapper companies. There is also the issue of how AI is to be regulated. What if AI were to be tasked to learn something wrong? What of the possibility of AI companies copying data?

It is primarily to address these latter concerns that a new Open Language Justice Licence has been created which seeks to meet the challenges of the responsible attribution of linguistic data and its relation to AI development. There was an evaluation of existing regulatory models and an assessment of what may be required in a hybrid model.  What was said to be required was legally ordained access to data so that developers could feed their AI models to learn from, fair compensation to copyright holders, rate setting via a quick transparent process, a mechanism to review these rates, upholding the basic principles of copyright and reward for creativity, and to limit the risk of litigation and dispute. A worrying scenario is that data companies may harvest from the commons, create black box models and not share their weights or parameters with the public so that it does not contribute back to the commons. Having said that there may be advantages and indeed necessities of closed and private channels of communication between businesses in the interest of industry so that competitors do not misuse that data, misrepresent agents, or sell insider information to influence stocks. The verifiability of the origins of the data is key in inculcating data provenance.

The key contributors to the discussion were Nidhi, who managed logistics and timing updates, Ana Enriquez and Jatin Gandhi who tested audio and asked about sessions logistics, Swaraj Paul Baruah who shared copyright sources, and the admin who shared the links for the data licence draft for collaborative review.

A point of deliberation that came up was the relation between journalism and tech companies and how AI has been changing this situation. The question of whether journalism can survive in the present economy was a concern that was brought up and the example was presented of Australia where tech companies actually pay journalists, as a possible model that may make the industry sustainable via synergy.

There was a pronounced interest by the audience in the transcripts and recordings so that the discussion may be revisited.

The  “Jallianwalla Bagh massacre”  in which General Dyer opened fire on a  peaceful assembly resulted in the death of more than a  thousand people. This incident, that shook the nation was a result of the inhumane colonial British policy that sought to divide us and continue to rule. Today, we are witnessing a revival of the same divide-and-rule policy, enforced through the systematic spread of misinformation and the forcible imposition of Internet Shutdowns.

On the 26^th of January,   farmers of India undertook a massive one lakh tractor parade from all over the country towards the national capital. This is the culmination of the long and arduous struggle they have been leading since November  2020, against the new Farm Laws which seek to privatize the Indian agriculture sector and destroy the farmers’ livelihood.

On the day of the tractor parade, the farmers were stopped from entering the routes planned for the rally, attacked with tear gas shells, and treated with nothing but brutal violence injuring thousands in the process. During the rally and in the aftermath, the central government imposed an Internet Shutdown in parts of Delhi followed by the state government of Haryana suspending internet services in 17 (out of 22) districts. SMS services have been stopped too.

In 2019, India topped the list of countries that shutdown Internet with 121 shutdowns [1].

What do Internet Shutdowns achieve ?

The govt says that it is suspending the Internet to protect  ‘law-and-order and regulate misinformation in social media. If that is the intention,  Internet Shutdowns are vague as they cannot tackle specific cases of misinformation and completely ineffective tools as they completely block the exchange of information  Regulation of social media and spread of fake news can be achieved by implementing a strong data protection framework with precise laws and commensurate measures.  No effort has been made in this regard even as the spread of misinformation on platforms like WhatsApp and Facebook continue to plague us. Moreover, Internet Shutdowns make it difficult for people to communicate and avail necessary resources such as food and medical supplies of which the farmers are in great need.

Internet Shutdowns violate the freedom of speech guaranteed in the constitution of India. The Supreme Court of India ruled that an undefined restriction of internet services would be illegal and that orders for internet shutdown must satisfy the tests of necessity and proportionality. The court said that the government must establish a  possible goal and assess the existence of any alternate mechanism in furtherance of the goal and impose a shutdown only as a last resort. The goal of ‘maintaining law-and-order during a peaceful protest and the hasty imposition of the shutdown both, go against the ruling of the apex court [4].

Misinformation – no, Mal-information.

While the govt cautions us of misinformation, what we are indeed seeing is a case of rabid mal-information. This is nothing but misinformation deceit purposely cloaked as information and news. The recent accusations that the farmer's movement is a front for Khalistanis and that they are  Pakistani terrorists [7], the public media-trial on the death of the actor Sushant Singh Rajput orchestrated on TV channels, are the prime examples of mal-information, It has become impossible for anybody to access even a glimmer of objective truth because we are bombarded constantly with a barrage of mal-information by TV news channels. The seeming choice we have in these channels is but an illusion as all these channels are owned by a handful of media corporations. Reacting to the farmers protesting against Reliance, the company said that ‘it had nothing to do with the farm laws’. It is evident that this statement was a lie and the farmers were impeccably prescient in this issue as  Network-18, the largest news network owned by Mukesh Ambani, Asia’s richest man [2], with all its media outlets, enthusiastically participated in maligning the farmers’ movement.

The Internet as it exists today is a more democratic medium than the TV  but, let us make no mistake, the digital monopolies act as restrictive and manipulative gateways to it. With Google showing each individual different information for the same query, we are already put in  ‘filter bubbles filled with repetitive content. Facebook on the other hand has recently blocked without any warning, the page of ‘Kisaan Ekta  Morcha’ represents the farmers’ movement and has lakhs of followers. Whatever information that could seep out of an ever-tightening filter can be censored arbitrarily lawlessly by these social media companies.

While the mal-information is being systematic disseminated and broadcasted,  the Internet shutdown makes it extremely difficult for the farmers to  provide any information about the events unfolding during the protest.

Internet Shutdowns in the Age of Mass Surveillance

Not only was the internet suspended in the midst of a peaceful protest on Republic Day but, this was also accompanied by anti-riot drones [5].  Suppression of freedom of speech is not the only issue here but,  stifling farmers’ voices while deploying military-grade surveillance on them coupled with tracking their online activity creates a situation where the protesters can neither coordinate among themselves nor communicate with people outside the location. At the same time, it gives the government unprecedented control over the protesters and the narrative.

Our online social media activity includes the Facebook pages we like, the friends we talk to, the events we attend, the places we visit, the news we read, the terms we search, the videos we watch, and much more. All this activity is used to build a profile on us. With this profile and the profiles of those who are associated with us, our behavior can be predicted accurately. This is the data that the social media companies use to show us advertisements and sell us products. As they also share this data with the government, on the day of protest, while the farmers themselves are deprived of the internet and hence made information blind,  the government already has detailed profiles of all of them and the movement as a whole. The government can anticipate the immediate future of the situation and control it whereas the farmers are kept in the dark.

The farmers need not be enclosed by walls for the govt to exert this level  of control, just by suspending the internet they can largely achieve it.  This is a prison in all but name.

Internet Shutdowns as a tool to crush protests : A threat to our unity

The Anarchical and Revolutionary Crimes Act of 1919, popularly known as the Rowlatt Act,  was introduced to crush even the whisper of Independence. The British formulated this to label any and every activity, even a peaceful gathering as a ‘conspiracy’ and used it to justify numerous arrests, impose severe restrictions, and suppress any activities of the Independence movement brutally. Crucially, press freedom was severely curtailed and no information about any of these activities was allowed to be published.

“  … The spread of revolutionary propaganda must be checked forthwith;  violent and seditious crimes must be promptly punished; the men behind  them must be removed and interned; the mischievous activities of  newspapers must be curtailed, and every precaution must be taken to  ensure that the poisonous teaching of open rebellion was kept both  from the army and from the people .. ” - General O’Dwyer  Lieutenant  Governor of Punjab, quoted in The Anarchical and Revolutionary  Crimes Act of 1919, popularly known as the Rowlatt Act

The restriction of the Independence movement became indistinguishable with the surveillance and censorship imposed on the people. Even under such repression, protests continued with vigor and hunger for national integration and unity. Hiding under the shadows of this act, On  13^th April 1919,   General Dyer and his troops opened fire  in Jallianwalla Bagh on a  peaceful gathering resulting in the death of a  1000 people.

The horrific incident of the Jallianwalla Bagh massacre isn’t an aberration or an isolated incident but it is a result of the British policy to keep India in shackles at all costs. The mass firing of peaceful protesters was in fact repeated by the British in Ireland and Kenya. The  Jallianwalla Bagh massacre itself is an act of brutality carried out as a result of colonial determination to divide the increasing unity of the Indian people across the religious differences and rule them in the ensuing chaos.

The divide-and-rule policy was then carried out to create chasms between Hindus and Muslims. Today, these Internet shutdowns and mal-information campaigns intend to make it impossible for us to know the ground truth and interact with the farmers. It precludes the possibility of an ‘informed’ citizen which is the foundation of our democracy. With allegations that the whole movement is a conspiracy  [6], denouncing farmers for their supposed lack of patriotism,  attributing violence to a peaceful protest, today’s situation is reminiscent of the days of the colonial past. The new divide-and-rule policy effectively divides the citizens at large and the farmers who are struggling for their rights. That the government chooses to divide us on Republic day while boasting empty words of patriotism is a cruel irony.

Censorship of press suppresses freedom of speech by arbitrarily deciding what can be published and what cannot be. An Internet shutdown during a protest is a blanket suppression of the voices of protesters. It isn’t just a censorship, it is a declaration of a martial law on information. It is effectively, an imposition of Emergency. At this time, it falls on us to oppose this inherently divisive move and a terrible restriction on the people. We have to demand that the shutdowns be lifted and that further shutdowns are never imposed.

Please sign FSMI's statement condemning the use of Internet Shutdowns to suppress Farmers' protests : https://struggles.in/MobilisationCampaign/StopInternetShutdown

Akhil Reddy Patolla

Business Intelligence, often called BI, is the process of exploring precious insights or trending in data to make more efficient decisions in the business/organization.

Primary component to implementing a BI solution is the raw data. This data can be anything like sales data, log level data, advertising portfolio etc. Then a data warehouse is the logistics platform that connects to all the different operational databases withholding the above-mentioned raw data and allows use to create relationship between them. Once all the data is connected and communicating to each other in different data models, it is time to analyze it and extract actionable insights. This step often blends well when a BI tool is overlayed on top of this because of the ability to present the tabulated data in a pictorial format. This interactive dashboard enables us to perform business decisions and the ability to track, monitor and report on our data.

How are BI tools applicable in a real-world use case?

BI tools are correct example of the “80-20 Principle”. In an organization/business 80% of your results come from 20% of your actions/platforms. Implementation of a BI can enable and guide one to decrease the amount of time it takes to do a sale, identify customers purchase behavior, planning successful marketing strategies, Improve operations etc.

Using BI tools to build modern analytics Platform.

Problems in Solutioning a modern Platform

A human mind holds more data through examples and visuals when contrasted with perusing or considering numbered documents. In the business world, perception is basic in understanding the importance of information. Let us comprehend with a model.

An online business organization gets a huge number of requests every day. For considering the week by week execution, a graphical plot demonstrating the quantity of requests every day will bring about quicker understanding than a bookkeeping page including the request subtleties.

Subsequently, visual information portrayal is a ground-breaking strategy. It helps organizations in dissecting patterns and increasing important experiences which further aides in dynamic.

Open-source Business Information platform like Redash, Metabase, and Apache Superset are picking up fame as the expectation to learn and adapt is not steep for non-specialized clients. Countless new businesses are utilizing Metabase, Redash, and Superset to question, work together, and envision.

In the above scenario maintaining an open source BI also enable the organization to make better decisions which will help the organization to grow.

Powering BI requirements

• Democratize Analytics and Enable Self-Serve
• Ease of Use and Low Learning Curve
• Speed and Connectivity to Varied Databases
• Build a Modern Client Facing Platform
• Provide Actionable Insights on Platform
• Decrease Development Time
• Maintain Metrics Integrity and Reduce Copies

Platform Development Requirements

• Ability and Ease of Embedding – A BI tool should be able to export the charts that are created via iframe or JavaScript rendering
• Flexibility in Embedding Dashboards / Charts –
• Ability to Appear Native – User Experience should be as seamless as possible.
• Cross Chart Interaction –
• Ability to Pass Filters to Preload Data –
• Chart Customization –

How to select a BI Tool? (Tool selection methodology)

BI tools must be chosen based on final desired design / goal of the platform. Here are few examples of the features that you might need to look to select a BI tool for your use case. Keep in mind that they might vary based on your end goal / platform.

• Mobile Friendly – Charts should be responsive when embedded and viewable on a mobile device.
• Easy Chart Building – level of complexity to build and develop charts.
• Cross Chart Interaction – charts ability to Interact with the users actions.
• Coolness Factor – This is purely a UI / UX choice.
• Connection to Live DBs – Tools ability to connect to multiple databases such as mysql, postgres, druid, mongo etc.

• Embedding  – Ability / options to embed the charts on a Web Platform.
• Speed  – Loading time for a chart when embedded.
• Stability – How stable are the charts when embedded. One must be cautious of any Error message that is being displayed from the Embedded chart.

Solutioning the Analytics Platform

• Embed Charts with Parameterized Filters -
• OAuth 2.0 Authentication
• Angular 8 / REACT + NODE (Tech Stack)

Solutioning Open-Source BI tools In Contrast to other Enterprise tools:

Domain of data & business intelligence have emerged rapidly for the past few years and this unfold a new chapter of enterprise and open source alternatives. For an example Tableau is an Enterprise BI tool and Superset is an excellent alternative to it. Here is an one to one comparison of the tools features and pricing.

Authentication is an important element for reception of BI dashboard into an endeavor. Here is an outline of upheld verification backends.

Pricing might vary based on multiple factors, but according to multiple source the below mentioned is an average quote.

Superset – FREE

Tableau Desktop - $35 per user per month (billed annually)
Tableau Desktop Professional - $70 per user per month (billed annually)
Tableau Server - $35 per user per month (billed annually)
Tableau Online (hosted server) - $42 per user per month (billed annually)

Conclusion

• Model Data in Warehouse before Ingesting/Presenting in  a BI tool is the key to be able to have a successful and smooth presentation.
• Design & Speed is Bound by the Embed Strategy
• Choosing right BI tool with required Embed strategies is the Key
• One can Leverage a BI Tool to Release Analytics Platform in Record Time as well as maintain.
• Embedding is Powerful and Easy to Use

(Akhil has been associated to Swecha since 2012, currently working with Madison Logic for more than 2 years, and dons both a Big Data engineering and Data Science role. Prior to Madison logic, Akhil was working as a researcher at US department of Energy: Argonne National Laboratory. He graduated with a Masters in Data Science from Northern Illinois University. His expertise are in NLP, game designing, and building analytical platforms. Akhil has developed analytical packages for the MIRA supercomputer.)

Hari Sai

Code For Change (C4C) is an initiative of Swecha - with an aim to develop and increase the usage of free software based social projects in the public domain. Why Free Software? Incorporation of free software based technologies is the only way for progressive development of the society. As part of C4C, there are many projects related to each and every section of society. These projects are developed by Students and IT developers. Here are a few projects which have been initiated under Swecha:

Swecha OS:
Swecha is a project that aims to localise GNU/Linux and other Free Software to Telugu. The project bridges the language barrier that is a major reason behind the digital divide.

We have a working system in which most common tasks like writing and printing documents, browsing the web, sending/receiving emails, chatting, editing graphics etc. can all be in Telugu. The screen shot below shows you the Swecha desktop, a GNOME desktop localized to Telugu. Most of this work will ultimately reach all the GNU/Linux distributions. It is also packed into an easy to use LiveCD distribution. The project has also developed a Telugu text-to-speech system and integrated it with the desktop. Since, one can hear the text on the desktop or web page by pointing at it, illiterate people may use it to access the desktop, read news on the web etc.

BalaSwecha OS:
BalaSwecha is a Swecha initiative which focuses on bridging the digital divide at the school level. The primary objective of BalaSwecha is to bridge the growing digital divide in education between privileged and underprivileged in India. Schools for the underprivileged in India, for example the government schools, face a lot of problems including lack of continuous electricity, infrastructure and personnel. However, the government has invested in providing computers and other infrastructure to some of these schools. Proprietary software have been installed on these computers, the licenses for which have expired a long time ago. Teachers in corporate schools are equipped with digital resources to teach students, while the teachers in the schools for the underprivileged do not have access to such resources and the students from government schools do not have access to computer-aided-education which enables an experiential approach to learning.

BalaSwecha is a GNU/linux based operating system which is developed by students under the guidance of academicians and IT employees. It is packaged with multimedia content and GPL applications which create interactive lab environment. Students are exposed to interactive applications which provide them with an opportunity to learn and explore beyond their books.

Eswecha OS:
We know that colleges spend huge amounts of money on purchasing licenses for the proprietary OS and tools. E-Swecha is an operating system for the engineering students, by the engineering students. It consists of all the free software stack required by the engineering students of all disciplines. E-swecha is an operating system which can be used by engineering students to IT professionals

At this stage it aims in covering all the syllabus of JNTU and it has the plans of generalising it for all the universities. This project consists of reading material for all the branches along with lab manuals and free software tools for simulations such as octave for signal processing, vscodium ide, free cad etc.

For details: Visit Here

Free Software Conferencing and Streaming:
A greater portion of the world’s work is moving onto digital platforms and tools that facilitate connection and productivity: video conferencing, messaging apps, healthcare and educational platforms, and more. It’s important to be aware of the ways these tools may impact your digital privacy and security during the COVID-19 crisis.

Remote work has become an integral part of our life during this pandemic. This has been enabled by conferencing and streaming solutions. However, the privacy and security concerns of proprietary platforms are striking and are of great importance. At Swecha, we enriched the existing Free Software conference technologies and built a completely free software streaming solution.

virtual.swecha.org is a BBB(BigBlueButton) instance which is a Free Software web conferencing tool. This has a wide variety of features for online conferencing. Our work developed a low latency live conference tool which runs seamlessly on any device which can handle thousands of users.

For Details: visit here

(Harisai is a coordination committee member at Swecha and a Software Engineer)

Ranjith Raj

To study any program to know it works, access to source code is a precondition. While we enjoy many features of popular apps, it is intrinsic that to verify the privacy claims of these apps is by exploring their source code, for which public access is a precondition. We never know what's being tracked, and what's being not tracked if it is proprietary software where source code is not available.

Users have to be cautious about the dangers of proprietary software seeping into the 'privacy market' with vicious claims of not collecting the user's personal and sensitive data, but their actions say otherwise. With growing resistance against surveillance capitalism, corporations instead of offering them actual privacy alternatives, they are jumping into aggressive marketing sprees to deceive people, in various forms, like dubious & unsubstantiated claims or half-lies.

Starting with dubious claims of making source code publicly available, but indeed never doing what's publicly announced. Let's look at the famous case of Aarogya Setu app which has more than 160 million downloads.

Aarogya Setu is a contract-tracing app released by Govt. of India in partnership with Private parties.  The app didn't solve the problems that the govt. claims it can (it's design technically can't achieve the stated purpose), and the government's mega-campaign to force feed it to citizens by making it mandatory (to an extent services are denied for not installing it) is a live example of how the state gaslights its own citizens to push them into a dystopia built on the fabric of surveillance capitalism.

To avoid the criticism coming from strong resistance movement against force-feeding, led by hacktivists demanding to make the source code public, the CEO of NITI Aayog performed a fake PR stunt to deceive people that source code is made public, but indeed hacktivists have exposed the fakery by finding out that the android version source code released is different from the app in Google Playstore; and from the release it's turned out to be a dead repository on the very first week with no pull requests merged.

(https://www.firstpost.com/tech/news-analysis/aarogya-setu-not-open-source-in-real-sense-claim-cybersecurity-activists-say-server-code-must-be-made-public-8480011.html)

Let's assume someday soon with increasing pressure from hackitivists, the govt. might make the source code of the client-side software publicly available, still the problem won't be solved. The server-side code of Aarogya Setu is not yet released, and no one exactly knows if it will be released ever. Aarogya Setu is not alone in following such model or pioneer of this trend.

Here we come to look at next-level of same problem, in which 'Only client-side code is public, but never the server-side code' : Welcome to the world of 'proprietary platforms'

To understand this model, we can consider NewPipe & Invidious, which are best examples of clients with publicly available source code to access the proprietary platform Youtube. It's good that at least in-app tracking can be avoided by switching to these apps, in unavoidable conditions where we don't have an option to skip platforms like YouTube.

Here comes the Unicorns like Telegram & VC-funded DuckDuckGo trying to seep into 'privacy market' by piggy-backing on user's everyday struggle to protect them from surveillance dystopia we are living in. It should be seen as malicious attempts by these corporations to dilute the widely growing movements against the surveillance capitalism and to curb the trend to switching to Free Software alternatives, and deceive people by making them believe in illusionary sense of privacy offered by these services, by their 'creative' marketing campaigns.

Shady networks of monopoly-backed 'privacy organisations'  NGO/NPO-Industrial Complex) and media outlets play key role in increasing the credibility of these proprietary apps by funding them (or promoting their fund campaigns), and promoting these proprietary applications in their circles in the garb of privacy alternatives.

The widely growing privacy awareness is an outcome of struggle of hacktivists in people's movements across the globe and can't be allowed to be appropriated by the same surveillance capitalism mafia which benefits from doing aggressive surveillance on general public.

Proprietary Software and Surveillance Capitalism mafia - aka Digital Monopolies are co-opting the movement and iconography of the same people it marginalised and oppressed (before they were seen as profitable) in order to de-fang free software movement and preserve their own hegemony. We can't allow this. It's our responsibility as hacktivists to educate the larger sections of society about everything these monopolies do under their criminal business models to hinder the progress of our society.

(Ranjith Raj is an Executive Committee Member of Swecha and a General Council Member of Free Software Movement of India. He is currently a researcher at International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad)