September 2022
Mr. Khaliq Parkar, Universite Paris Cite, gave a guest talk on Digitalising Urban Governance: Decoding Platformisation and Datafication of Indian Cities at the Human Sciences Research Groups (HSRG)’s Weekly Talk Series on 28 September.
Mr. Parkar started his talk by introducing different aspects of his research and briefed about the history of the central theme – the digitalisation of India. He briefly discussed the central government’s policies and initiatives to help push India forward in the race towards a digital world. Early digitalisation in e-Governance was driven by Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM 2005) and National e-Governance Plan (NeGP 2006). These plans developed digital infrastructure to improve access and ease citizens’ access to government. Though revolutionary, the policies did not see much success, which led to the Smart Cities Mission (SCM 2015). SCM involved 100 cities chosen and funded by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs through competition. Although the definition of a smart city was vague, they still had some vision of it. Nevertheless, early experiences proved disheartening because of a lack of ‘Data Culture’. Finally, DataSmart Cities Strategy (2018) was brought by the MoHUA, which laid guidelines on how data should be collected, stored, standardised and shared among different authorities. This strategy was driven by two concepts, namely, Platformisation and Datafication. While the prior focused on providing digital infrastructure, the latter focused on capturing data. The speaker then discussed the case of Bhubaneswar, a city with a population of less than a million, a city with no legislative body in 2018, but a city still won the contest. He discussed Bhubaneswar’s administrative setup and how it was able to implement different platforms for e-governance. He further discussed the role of India Urban data Exchange (IUDX) in managing the data collected by cities and reflected on the topics covered so far. He concluded his talk with a brief introduction to the National Urban Digital Mission (NUDP 2021). This was followed by a Q&A session. Privacy concerns relating to data collection and sharing with private firms for building solutions were raised in the Q&A session. Mr. Khaliq answered them by mentioning the policies under use for data compliance, some involving the city’s consent as to which data will be shared and which not, but also acknowledged the weak implementation. He added to the answer by mentioning the drawbacks of giving control of data to municipal authorities by taking the example of environmental data, which the authorities might choose to keep private, hindering development in the field.
Mr. Khaliq Parkar is currently a Ph.D Researcher at CESSMA-IRD, Universite Paris Cite. His research, with use of interviews with administrators, consultants, and vendors in Bhubaneswar (Odisha) shows how digitalisation takes place in practice. In his research, he illustrates the sensors, apps, portals and other digital infrastructures that connect to various platforms that are implemented for citizens’ engagement, municipal service delivery, traffic regulation and surveillance. He also shows how data collected through these platforms is utilised for automated decision making and data-driven solutions, and is driven by global IT and consultancy firms. Further he connects city-level analysis to national platforms such as the India Urban Data Exchange to show how datafication involves the creation and exchange of big data across multiple cities. Finally, he argues that the Smart Cities Mission lays the ground for further platformisation and datafication in governance through the National Urban Digital Mission (2021).
