‘Research must ask the right questions, sensitise technologists, communicate effectively to stakeholders’

Can you give an overview of CITAPP and what it does?

We set up CITAPP in 2012. It stands for Centre for IT and Public Policy. We realised that technology was becoming a very important part of various discussions and dialogues, and finding applications in various aspects of life, having social implications.

By 2010 India had become the world’s largest software services exporter. But there were also questions about why is it that India exports only services and doesn’t have product companies like Microsoft or Adobe. This was on the supply side. The question on the demand side was how we can ensure that this technology finds beneficial outcomes for the underprivileged.

So, we wanted to think about issues on the demand and the supply side and how we could conduct research to bring these kinds of issues to the attention of the public as well as other stakeholders.  

The other reason for doing this was while all this excitement of IT was going on, there was very little in terms of research, especially in terms of policy. While there are many centres of public policy in the country, CITAPP is the only one devoted to exclusively thinking about public policy through the lens of information technology.

The research spans a range of topics from spectrum allocation, to disability in technology, to Aadhaar and its implications, e-governance, data justice, labour technology, human-computer interaction, healthcare, the software industry, implications of automation for work, and so on. One of the earliest studies on e-governance was undertaken here. The first-ever study on the policy implications of e-waste was also done here through the master’s thesis of a student. We’ve also done some of the initial research in this country on things like information accessibility.

Our goal as academics is to show, through our research, what questions to ask, how to frame things and then allow others to act on those issues. Being at a technology institution, our role is also to sensitise technologists and then communicate it effectively to the public.

What are some of the works you have been doing in relation to Bengaluru or Karnataka? 

Some colleagues have worked on transportation issues and so on, building sophisticated algorithms for transport routing. But our work is not just about solving a local problem. That’s what consulting companies do. We may collect data from here, but as academics, we operate at a slightly broader level. You can take our findings and recommendations and see how they can potentially fit a Bengaluru or a Mysuru or a Dharwad. We help the government think about how we need to frame these issues.  

What would be some of these issues? 

In all the areas that we work in, we are always framing questions and passing it on to the government.

For example, a favourite topic of governments is to create the next Silicon Valley in Bengaluru. It makes little sense. People who say that don’t understand Silicon Valley at all. Every city or every region has its own history. You can’t go back and replicate it. But what can we learn from different parts of the world? That’s what we look at.  

We are telling you what questions to ask rather than clone something. At a slightly abstract level, we come up with certain broad answers and recommendations and then it is up to people in decision-making positions to take a call.

Many of the problems in Bengaluru – like traffic congestion or flooding or pollution – are seen in other Indian cities too. So, what are the right questions we should ask?

Start asking what the sources of these problems might be. For example, flooding. In a place like Bangalore, you have lakes which have been built upon. You take a city like Kolkata, it is low-lying. So the source of the problem is different.  Then you look at who is being affected.

Take the example of pollution. Delhi has a very specific problem of stubble burning in Punjab and Haryana. In Bhopal, the source was Union Carbide. What does it tell you about future planning processes for each of these cities?

So, what you do is to look at history and then come up with recommendations for the future based on these kinds of contexts. And then you try and look at a broad range of possibilities and create broad categories.

For example, Bengaluru represents a category of cities where real estate development has run amok and, therefore, areas that were natural catchment areas or drainage areas have suffered. Then you start formulating the problem differently. Formulating the problem in broad terms allows you to take it to another city and pose these questions – what are the sources, who are being affected, why are they being affected at all, and so on.

The other thing that’s extremely critical to ask is who holds power. There are certain things that might be amenable to what you might broadly call technical solutions. But then there are issues where you need to understand the politics of it. The problems need to be understood in terms of the political structures that govern them.

That’s why putting more signal lights on the road or building more flyovers become short-term solutions. It’s only like putting band-aid when you are bleeding without understanding what’s causing it. So, the job is to ask these questions and make sure that you go beyond band-aid thinking..

In Electronic City, why was it that they built the flyover first and not the metro? Answering this question requires an understanding of who has access to power.

You can’t also pretend to know all the answers either. I can give you a broad framework and say, if it’s not working, come back and tell me what’s the problem. Then we can tweak it.

I think one of the important things is to be able to be open to international influence. You can’t think only in terms of Bengaluru, Karnataka or even India.  Maybe some lessons come from Brazil and that could tell you something.

Do you feel that sometimes AI obsession tends to go a little overboard?

Yes. But that’s also because you don’t have other ways of solving the problems of the world. Once people learn to understand what it is and figure it out, then they’ll be able to step back and see the specific ways it can help us. 

It is going to change our lives. But nobody knows how much and to what extent. Until then everybody is going to say all kinds of bizarre things. The multiplicity of ways in which you can engage and use these technologies is something that we can’t often predict.  

Also, technology itself is not a fixed thing. With AI there are two issues. One is that it’s a very broad term. It doesn’t refer to one technology. It’s a basket of technologies and the shape of the basket and its content is changing every day. There is a lot of hype. Maybe in five years, they’ll be talking about something else.

But if the right questions are posed and if there is a political will to implement it, can AI be a powerful tool to solve?

No two ways about that. But just don’t make wild claims about it without asking or studying why certain outcomes and possibilities exist. We have AI signals, AI cameras…you have to be aware of why you’re doing what you’re doing. There must be the willingness to backtrack and make changes, there must be feedback mechanisms. If you’re very blindly wedded to it, then you’re asking for trouble.