--- layout: default title: "Centre for Internet and Society: Annual Report 2009–10" description: "A narrative account of the Centre for Internet and Society's annual report for the year 1 April 2009 to 31 March 2010, covering its research, advocacy, events, teaching, publications, and organisational details." permalink: /cis/annual-report-2009-10/ categories: [Centre for Internet and Society] created: 2026-05-03 --- The **Annual Report 2009–10** of the [Centre for Internet and Society](/cis/) (CIS) documents the organisation's work for the financial year from 1 April 2009 to 31 March 2010. It marked CIS's second full year of operation since its founding in July 2008, and the report reflects a rapidly expanding organisation that had moved from setting up its foundations to running active research programmes, national campaigns, and international engagements across multiple thematic areas. The report is organised into eight thematic areas: Researchers at Work, Digital Identities, Digital Learning and Pedagogy, Accessibility, Intellectual Property Rights, Openness, Internet Governance, and Telecom and Broadband. It also includes a section on other social projects, a record of media coverage, and a compliance section under the Credibility Alliance Norms, which provides organisational and financial data including board composition, staff list, salary distribution, and travel expenditure. ## Contents 1. [Researchers at Work](#researchers-at-work) 2. [Digital Identities](#digital-identities) 3. [Digital Learning and Pedagogy](#digital-learning-and-pedagogy) 4. [Accessibility](#accessibility) 5. [Intellectual Property Rights](#intellectual-property-rights) 6. [Openness](#openness) 7. [Internet Governance](#internet-governance) 8. [Telecom and Broadband](#telecom-and-broadband) 9. [Other Projects](#other-projects) 10. [Media Coverage](#media-coverage) 11. [Organisation and Governance](#organisation-and-governance) 12. [Full Report](#full-report) ## Researchers at Work The Researchers at Work (RAW) programme was CIS's flagship multidisciplinary research initiative. It operated on the premise that understanding the internet required local, contextual accounts of how it intersected with socio-cultural and geo-political structures in India. The programme's two-year theme for this period was "Histories of the Internets in India," and by 2009–10 several of the projects initiated since September 2008 were nearing completion. Five researchers were working under the RAW programme. Asha Achutan (Centre for Contemporary Studies, IISc Bangalore) was completing Rewiring Bodies, a project grounded in critical technology studies that used the women–technology relationship as an entry point. The final monograph was put up for public review, with noted scholars Kavita Philip and Sanil K. agreeing to write the preface and introduction respectively. A curriculum developed from the research was accepted as a pilot course at the Women's Studies Centre, Jadavpur University. Rochelle Pinto, Aparna Balachandran, and Abhijit Bhattacharya (Department of English, University of Delhi; Department of History, University of Delhi; and Centre for the Study of Social Sciences, Kolkata) were working on Archive and Access, which examined how the rise of internet technologies had transformed the notion of archives, the role of archivists, and the relationship between the state and private archives in India. Noted historian Shahid Amin agreed to write the preface. The project received additional support from the Dorabji Tata Trust to conduct capacity-building workshops and build digital catalogues across 20 private collections and archives. A workshop was organised at the Centre for Culture and Society, attended by librarians and archivists from 20 institutions across the country. Zainab Bawa (Centre for the Study of Culture and Society) worked on Transparency and Politics, examining how e-governance initiatives and the rhetoric of "transparency" had reshaped the relationship between the Indian state and its citizens. She produced case studies of both failed and successful e-governance initiatives. A round-table seminar titled Of Transparency: When the State Watches Itself was organised at CIS as part of this project. Namita Malhotra (Alternative Law Forum, Bangalore) contributed Pornography and the Law, a project that offered a historical overview of how the internet had been constructed in public and legal imagination as promoting obscenity. The project also fed into a documentary on Censorship and Surveillance in Asia, supported by the Open Net Initiative, an excerpt of which was aired at the Internet Governance Forum. Ashish Rajadhyaksha (CIDASIA, Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore) worked on Re-thinking the Last Mile Problem, a project arguing that the "last mile" in Indian communications had a specific national variant tied to developmentalist and democratic priorities dating back to the radio era. The project aimed to result in a book. Under new projects initiated during the year, Anja Kovacs (Fellow, CIS) launched Revolution 2.0?, mapping actors, audiences, and methods in online activism in India, with a focus on understanding how middle-class internet activism reconstituted older notions of political engagement. Pratyush Shankar (CEPT, Ahmedabad) began Internet, Society and Space in Indian Cities, exploring how IT aesthetics and urban design intersected in globalised Indian cities. Arun Menon (Research Consultant, CIS) worked on Gaming and Gold, examining attention as a currency in game worlds and secondary gaming markets. Nitya Vasudevan and Nithin Manayath (Centre for the Study of Culture and Society and Mount Carmel College, Bangalore) undertook Queer Histories of the Internet, a project that theorised the relationship between technology and queer identity in the Indian context. ## Digital Identities CIS treated Digital Identities as a core research area, exploring how the internet shaped and was shaped by identity across social, political, and cultural dimensions. The major output under this theme was Digital Natives with a Cause?, a knowledge survey and framework written by Nishant Shah and [Sunil Abraham](/sunil/) in partnership with Hivos. The report, published in 2009, mapped the characteristics of "Digital Natives", a generation growing up with internet technologies, and examined their potential as agents of social transformation in developing countries, with a particular focus on the Global South. It critiqued the dominant literature in this area as originating in North-Western countries and took a developmentalist perspective aimed at understanding youth, technology, and political engagement in emerging information societies. As part of this research, CIS partnered with Rangashankara Theatre and IT for Change to host a day-long workshop for digital natives in Bangalore on 28 August 2009. The event, facilitated by theatre practitioner Kirtana Kumar Reddy, brought together 28 young technology users and adults to discuss the changes internet technologies were producing in their lives. Nishant Shah's research paper Promise of Invisibility: Making of an IT City, developed from a seven-month fellowship at Shanghai University funded by the Asia Scholarship Foundation, was accepted for publication in the Foundation's annual peer-reviewed journal. The research was also developed into a course, Imagining the Asian IT City, taught at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Shanghai University. ## Digital Learning and Pedagogy A central activity of CIS in 2009–10 was a major collaboration with the Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, to produce a critical reader on Wikipedia titled Critical Point of View. The collaboration planned three international conferences to build a Wikipedia knowledge network and gather material for the reader. The first event, WikiWars, was hosted by CIS at The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), Bangalore on 12 and 13 January 2010. It brought together 34 participants from 15 countries across four thematic areas: Education, Pedagogy and Knowledge; Resistance, Diversity and Representation; Politics of Free, Open and Exclusion; and Collaboration, Production and Design. The second WikiWars event was held at the Public Library in Amsterdam on 26 and 27 March 2010, building on the discussions initiated in Bangalore, with panels covering Wiki Theory, the Encyclopaedia of Histories, Wiki Art, Wikipedia Analytics, Designing Debate, and Global Issues and Outlooks. CIS also collaborated with the Higher Education Cell at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS) on the Networked Higher Education Initiative (NHEI), a project exploring pedagogy and knowledge production in networked undergraduate colleges. The NHEI comprised three sub-projects. The Pathways Project, supported by the Ford Foundation, worked with nine undergraduate colleges across Karnataka, Maharashtra, and Kerala to develop skills in livelihood, knowledge, and technology for underprivileged students. An orientation was held at CSCS on 19 and 20 February 2010. The Institutional Repositories for Learning project aimed to build a consortium of educational institutions to promote open access repositories for academic material, with the first step being a digital classroom course designed and taught at Christ University in collaboration with CSCS's CIDASIA programme, supported by Nokia Labs. ### Teaching CIS designed and taught courses at numerous institutions during the year: - Centre for Advanced Training in Free and Open Source Software (CATFOSS), Ernakulam: Sunil Abraham lectured on open source software on 13 August 2009. - Centre for Media and Culture Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai: Nishant Shah and Sunil Abraham taught a credit course, Introduction to Cybercultures: An Internet and Society Perspective, from 19 to 21 August 2009. - Mudra Institute of Communications, Ahmedabad: Nishant Shah taught Metaphors and Narratives of the Internet from 24 to 26 August 2009. - Christ University, Bangalore: Nishant Shah taught Digital Natives: Participation and Pedagogy on 27 August 2009. - Women's Studies Centre, Pune University: Nishant Shah taught Technology and Gender in Asia on 24 and 25 September 2009, attended by 40 students and six faculty members. - Shanghai University, China: The Imagining the Asian IT City course was taught at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. - New Media Lab, Jadavpur University: CIS participated in an international seminar on the Future of Celluloid. - Goethe Institute and Khoj Artist Collective, Delhi: Nishant Shah lectured on Technology and Culture at the Art Think South Asia fellowship programme on 23 March 2010. ## Accessibility CIS's accessibility work was among its most visible and politically active areas in 2009–10. The organisation anchored its efforts in a basic constitutional argument: the Constitution of India guarantees citizens the right to life, dignity, speech, expression, and information. With an estimated 70 million persons with disabilities in India unable to read printed materials, and with accessible book availability as low as 0.5 per cent in the country, CIS argued that the copyright framework was a structural barrier to the exercise of these rights. ### Right to Read Campaign CIS was a co-organiser of the nationwide Right to Read (R2R) Campaign, run in partnership with the Daisy Forum of India and Inclusive Planet. The campaign was affiliated with the global R2R campaign started by the World Blind Union in April 2008, and its chief objective was to accelerate amendments to the Indian Copyright Act, 1957, to permit the conversion of books into accessible formats for persons with print impairment. - Chennai (26 September 2009): The campaign was launched at Loyola College, with approximately 800–1,000 persons attending, including 400 students from 100 colleges and 150 NSS volunteers. - Kolkata (7 November 2009): Held at the National Institute of Juridical Sciences (NUJS), with prominent attendees including Dr. Suranjan Das, Vice Chancellor of Calcutta University. - New Delhi (11 November 2009): Co-organised with the National Institute for the Visually Handicapped and the Daisy Forum of India, in honour of the visit of the Director General of WIPO. The Director General expressed support for the Treaty for the Blind, Visually Impaired and Other Reading Disabled. - Delhi (30 January 2010): Held at Lal Chowk, Pragati Maidan, with 300–400 persons with various disabilities attending. Participants included Chris Friend (World Blind Union), G.R. Raghavender (Registrar of Copyrights), and Javed Abidi (Disabled Rights Group). ### Other Accessibility Work CIS worked with the Department of Information Technology (DIT), the National Centre for Promotion of Employment for Disabled People, and other civil society organisations to formulate a National Policy for Electronic Accessibility. Sunil Abraham and Nirmita Narasimhan attended a draft policy meeting on 17 August 2009 in New Delhi. CIS collaborated with G3ict (the Global Initiative for Inclusive ICTs, a UN-GAID initiative) on a white paper comparing internet accessibility policies and legislative frameworks across 17 countries. Nirmita Narasimhan was a member of the editorial team. The paper was published on the G3ict website and formed part of the e-Accessibility Policy Toolkit jointly published by G3ict and the International Telecommunication Union. CIS was a strategic partner of Inclusive Planet, the largest online portal for visually impaired persons in India, both for policy advocacy and by powering its content database. The portal had over 2,000 registered users across 75 countries and 14,300 books at the time of reporting. Three Inclusive Planet staff members worked from the CIS office. A Wiki on Accessibility was created using Wikipedia technology and standards for the National Internet Exchange of India, hosting approximately 125 articles. A grant of ₹2,00,000 was sanctioned by NIXI for this project. CIS, along with Loyola College Chennai, organised a three-day National Conference on ICTs for the Differently-abled/Under Privileged Communities from 1 to 3 December 2009, covering three tracks: technology and research, web accessibility for developers, and capacity building for visually impaired students. ## Intellectual Property Rights CIS approached intellectual property rights from the perspective that access to knowledge and culture is essential for creativity, innovation, and reducing the development gap between the Global South and the developed world. Its work in this area during 2009–10 covered copyright, patents, and the reform of domestic and international IP frameworks. Pranesh Prakash prepared India's country survey for the Consumers International IP Watchlist, which ranked countries by the fairness and balance of their copyright regimes, in contrast to the USTR's Special 301 Report. CIS actively campaigned against the Protection and Utilisation of Public Funded Intellectual Property (PUPFIP) Bill, which was introduced in the 2008 winter session of the Rajya Sabha. The bill sought to vest IP rights over publicly funded research in grant recipients or the government, modelled on the US Bayh-Dole Act. CIS argued that this would redirect research towards commercially viable topics, promote secrecy, and harm open access publishing and scholarly communication. Pranesh Prakash engaged in multiple meetings on this issue, including at the 97th Indian Science Congress in Thiruvananthapuram (3–5 January 2010) and a meeting with the Department of Biotechnology and the Department of Science (Delhi, 7 February 2010), where he presented suggestions that fed into a consensus document for the Minister of Science and Technology. CIS ran a campaign to educate Indian software professionals about the dangers of software patents, distributing 10,000 handbills and 250 posters, and using Twitter for viral outreach. The organisation contributed a written response to the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting's stakeholders meeting on the WIPO Broadcast Treaty, arguing that webcasting should not be included within its scope. CIS also commissioned a comic book, Learning to Floo, by graphic artist and videogame consultant Anand Ramachandran, to communicate the harms of an overly restrictive IP regime to a general audience. ## Openness CIS's work on openness covered free and open source software, open standards, and open access to knowledge and legal information. CIS sent its comments to version 2 of the Draft National Policy on Open Standards for e-Governance, released by the National Informatics Centre. Sunil Abraham and Pranesh Prakash attended the second FOSSCOMM (Free and Open Source Solutions Community Network India) meeting at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi on 4 July 2009, and Pranesh Prakash attended the Karnataka FOSSCOMM meeting on 15 January 2010. CIS was also a signatory to a letter to the Education Secretary, Government of Karnataka, advocating the adoption of free and open source software at state IT academies. The Free Access to Law project, funded by the Open Society Institute and the International Development Research Centre, partnered CIS with the South African Legal Information Institute and LexUM, Montreal, to examine the sustainability of open access legal publishing in Asia. CIS received USD 50,000 to oversee research in India, Indonesia, Hong Kong, and the Philippines over 18 months. Grace Armstrong (Yale University intern) travelled across Southeast Asia to identify researchers, and Sunil Abraham and local researcher Prashant Iyengar attended the orientation meeting in Johannesburg. Professor Subbiah Arunachalam continued advocacy for open access within India's scientific establishment. As a result of his efforts, the Indian Academy of Sciences agreed to set up an open access portal providing free access to the full text of all papers by all fellows, and all 19 journals published by NISCAIR (CSIR) became open access. He was also a special invitee to the working committee meetings of the National Mission on Education through ICT (NMEICT), a government fund of around one billion dollars to produce open educational resources. CIS organised the Open Video Summit in Bangalore to explore the possibilities and politics of open video, modelled on a similar event at Yale University in 2008. It also co-organised the Mozilla Open Web Talk (TERI, 16 December 2009) and a Mozilla Developer's Day (CIS Bangalore, 27 February 2010), where Pranesh Prakash presented on software patents and the open web. Wikipedia and Wikimedia meet-ups were held regularly at the CIS office, including the Bangalore Wikipedia meet-up series (16 August, 13 September, and 11 October 2009) and language-specific meet-ups for Sanskrit (23 January 2009) and Malayalam (21 March 2009) Wikipedias. ## Internet Governance CIS's internet governance work was grounded in its commitment to a people-centred, inclusive, and development-oriented information society, as articulated in the WSIS Geneva Principles. The Internet Governance Forum (IGF), as the primary multi-stakeholder dialogue body emerging from the WSIS process, was CIS's principal arena of engagement. At the 2009 IGF in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, CIS participated in several capacities: - Sunil Abraham co-organised the workshop on Open Standards: A Rights-based Approach alongside Knowledge Ecology International, with Sir Tim Berners-Lee (W3C), Renu Budhiraja (DIT, India), Steve Mutkoski (Microsoft), and Rishab Ghosh (UNU-MERIT) as fellow panellists. - Anja Kovacs delivered the civil society statement at the closing ceremony of the IGF. - Anja Kovacs and Sunil Abraham were part of the civil society delegation to UN Under-Secretary General Sha Zukang to discuss the continuation of the IGF. - CIS co-organised the workshop on Content Regulation, Surveillance and Sexuality Rights together with the Association for Progressive Communications, Women's Networking Support Programme, and the Alternative Law Forum. - Sunil Abraham moderated the Dynamic Coalition on Open Standards (DCOSS) meeting; CIS also joined the DCOSS secretariat. - In December 2009, Anja Kovacs was re-elected as a steering committee member of the Internet Rights and Principles Dynamic Coalition. CIS commissioned Ananth Padmanabhan, a Chennai-based advocate, to provide a primer and commentary on the new Information Technology (Amendment) Act, 2008 and its draft rules. The report highlighted provisions enabling state interception and decryption of data, blocking of websites, and broadly drafted offences, including criminalising emails causing "annoyance or inconvenience". It also submitted specific recommendations to the Department of Information Technology. Anja Kovacs published a blog analysis of the ICANN–US Department of Commerce Affirmation of Commitments (signed 30 September 2009), assessing whether the new governance arrangement advanced or undermined the internet as a global public good. CIS also wrote to ICANN objecting to its attempt to impose a charter on the Non-Commercial Stakeholder Group, in place of the one drafted by the Non-commercial Users Constituency. ## Telecom and Broadband CIS's telecom work focused on India's urgent need for expanded rural broadband coverage. At the time, India had only about eight million broadband subscriptions and rural connectivity was approximately 20 per cent of the country. CIS collaborated with the LINK Centre, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, to organise a lecture tour by Sagie Chetty from 19 to 30 October 2009, covering IIT Chennai, IIT Mumbai, IIIT Bangalore, IGNOU, NISTADS, and Jamia Millia Islamia University in Delhi, and concluding with meetings with TRAI officials. Shyam Ponappa, a Distinguished Fellow at CIS, published a series of articles on telecom reform in the Business Standard, covering spectrum management, broadband development, and rural coverage alternatives. He also submitted a detailed response to TRAI Consultation Paper No. 6/2009 on spectrum management and licence conditions, recommending policies to maximise public benefit through broadband access, facilities sharing, cost reduction, and active monitoring of unreasonable profits in oligopolistic market structures. ## Other Projects Under its "other projects" umbrella, CIS organised Maps for Making Change, a five-month project run in partnership with Tactical Tech. The project provided activists working on progressive social change in India with skills and tools in digital mapping, covering causes including migrant labour, slum development, human rights monitoring in Chhattisgarh, and sex worker services. The first workshop was held at the India Islamic Cultural Centre, New Delhi on 3 December 2009, and the second at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad from 1 to 3 February 2010. A third workshop was planned. ## Media Coverage CIS and its researchers received substantial media coverage during 2009–10, with mentions in publications including The Hindu, Times of India, Livemint, DNA, Down to Earth, Frontline, Deccan Herald, The Telegraph (Kolkata), Business Standard, Bangalore Mirror, NDTV, and international outlets including the UN News Centre and the WIPO website. Key stories covered the Right to Read campaign, the WikiWars event, digital mapping, software patents, internet addiction, open source software, and broadband policy. ## Organisation and Governance ### Board The board of CIS as on 31 March 2010 comprised seven members:
Name Position Occupation Area of Competency
Sunil Abraham Invitee Engineer IPR Reform
Achal Prabhala Invitee Researcher IPR Reform
Lawrence Liang Secretary Lawyer IPR Reform
Nishant Shah Invitee Researcher Cybercultures
Subbiah Arunachalam Chairman Scientist (Retired) Open Access and ICT4D
Vibodh Parthasarathi Member Associate Professor Media
Atul Ramachandra Member Social Worker ICT4D
### Staff The full-time staff as on 31 March 2010 were: - [Sunil Abraham](/sunil/), Executive Director - Nishant Shah, Director–Research - Nirmita Narasimhan, Programme Manager - Pranesh Prakash, Programme Manager - Prasad Krishna, Publications Manager - Ajoy Kumar C., Administrator - Radha Rao, Executive Assistant - Velankanni Royson, Office Assistant - Abul Hasim, System Administrator - Anisha Pucadyil, Research Assistant - Geeta, Housekeeper Distinguished Fellows included Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam, Lawrence Liang, and Shyam Ponappa. Fellows included Dr. Anja Kovacs, Selvam Velmurugan, and Malavika Jayaram. Interns included Grace Armstrong (Yale University), Rebecca Schild (University of Toronto), Asma Tajuddin (National Law School of India), Snehashish Ghosh (Christ University), Prashant Ramdass (Gujarat Law University), and Amlan Mohanty (National Law School of India). ### Finances The total travel expenditure recorded in the report was ₹20,80,056. The highest monthly remuneration paid to a staff member was ₹1,40,000, the second highest was ₹96,000, and the lowest was ₹4,500. The staff comprised 11 full-time employees: seven male and four female. The organisation's primary donor was the Kusuma Trust. Other funders acknowledged in the travel records include Hivos, the Open Society Institute, LexUM/IDRC, the International Telecommunication Union, the Commonwealth Foundation, the University of Toronto, APC, and the Inter Asia Cultural Typhoon programme. The registered office at the time of the report was No. 194, 2nd 'C' Cross, Domlur 2nd Stage, Bangalore 560071. The organisation's bankers were the State Bank of India, Race Course Road Branch, Bangalore, and its auditors were Nath Associates. ## Full Report

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