Centre for Internet and Society: Annual Report 2014–15

The Annual Report 2014–15 of the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) documents the organisation’s work for the financial year from 1 April 2014 to 31 March 2015. The report presents CIS’s activities across accessibility, access to knowledge, internet governance, telecom, digital natives, and institutional compliance, while also recording publications, submissions, events, media coverage, and staffing details drawn from the year under review.

The report is arranged into eight main sections: Highlights, Accessibility and Inclusion, Access to Knowledge, Internet Governance, Telecom, Digital Natives, Researchers at Work, and Credibility Alliance Norms Compliance. Taken together, these sections provide both a programme narrative and a formal organisational record, combining thematic work with governance, financial, and personnel disclosures.

Contents

1. Highlights
2. Accessibility and Inclusion
3. Access to Knowledge
   • Pervasive Technologies
   • World Intellectual Property Organization
   • Openness
   • Wikipedia and CIS-A2K
4. Internet Governance
   • Privacy
   • Free Speech and Expression
   • Cyber Stewards Project
5. Telecom
6. Digital Natives
7. Researchers at Work
8. Organisation and Governance
   • Board and Society Members
   • Staff and Salaries
   • Finances and Staff Distribution
9. Full Report

Highlights

The report opens with a set of programme highlights that together sketch the breadth of CIS’s work during 2014–15. In accessibility, CIS completed the National Compendium of Policies, Programmes and Schemes for Persons with Disabilities in partnership with the Office of the Chief Commissioner for Persons with Disabilities and the Centre for Law and Policy Research, collating data from 35 states for the compendium. It also submitted comments and recommendations on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Bill, 2014 to the Parliamentary Standing Committee in October 2014.

The NVDA project recorded several developments during the year. According to the report, work on support for six languages—Bengali, Punjabi, Gujarati, Telugu, Assamese, and Odia—was closed, while training workshops were initiated in multiple states for Gujarati, Telugu, Bengali, Hindi, Malayalam, Tamil, Oriya, and Punjabi. These developments formed part of CIS’s longer-term effort to build text-to-speech and screen-reader support for Indian languages.

In access to knowledge, CIS continued to participate in the World Intellectual Property Organization’s Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights from a public interest perspective. Three WIPO-SCCR meetings were held in Geneva in April, July, and December 2014, and Nehaa Chaudhari participated in the 27th, 28th, and 29th sessions, where she delivered CIS statements. The report also notes that India became the first country to ratify the Marrakesh Treaty and that the Accessible Books Consortium was launched.

The report also highlights work under the Pervasive Technologies project. Four methodology documents were published during the year: Rohini Lakshané wrote on patent landscaping for the Indian mobile device market, Anubha Sinha on intellectual property in mobile application development in India, Maggie Huang on access to music through the mobile, and Nehaa Chaudhari on sub-hundred-dollar mobile devices and competition law.

The CIS-A2K programme expanded its institutional engagements during the year through memoranda of understanding with Mysore University, Shri Dharmasthala Manjunatheshwara College, Andhra Loyola College, and Nirmala Institute of Education, Goa. These partnerships covered Unicode conversion and relicensing of encyclopaedic material, the introduction of Indian language Wikipedias in undergraduate and postgraduate classrooms, Telugu Wikipedia development, and digital literacy in Konkani in the education sector across Goa.

The report records important open-content releases as well. Ten Telugu books by a single author were released under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 licence on Telugu Wikisource, and six volumes of Kannada Vishwakosha were re-released under a Creative Commons licence on Open Knowledge Day in Mysore on 15 July 2014 by CIS and the University of Mysore. The report describes the Telugu release as a major milestone in making Telugu knowledge resources freely available online.

Further educational and outreach work is also noted in the highlights. T. Vishnu Vardhan taught a course titled “Digital Wikipedia” at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore on 10 November 2014, and also designed and taught an open course for B.Ed. teacher trainers at Nirmala Institute of Education on 14 November 2014 and again in January 2015. The Department of Computer Science at Andhra Loyola College, in collaboration with the Department of Computer Science at Krishna University, also organised a UGC-sponsored national seminar on 11 and 12 August 2014 at Vijayawada, where T. Vishnu Vardhan delivered the keynote address.

In internet governance, the report highlights CIS’s contribution to discussions around NETmundial, the global stakeholder meeting on the future of internet governance held in São Paulo on 23 and 24 April 2014. Achal Prabhala participated in the event, and CIS published a total of 16 blog entries as part of its research intended to support informed discussion of critical internet governance issues.

The report also notes work on privacy and sectoral policy. CIS conducted an empirical study of five banks—State Bank of India, Central Bank of India, ICICI Bank, IndusInd Bank, and Standard Chartered Bank—to understand existing banking practices and policies in India, and published a Banking Policy Guide. In addition, it held seven roundtable meetings on “Privacy and Surveillance” in collaboration with the Cellular Operators Association of India and the Council for Fair Business Practices, and published a policy guide on privacy in healthcare focused on legal regulation and data flows in the hospital sector.

Other research outputs named in the highlights include a white paper co-authored by Bhairav Acharya and Vidushi Marda on aspects of privacy in Islamic law, six research studies commissioned by HEIRA-CSCS to map digital humanities within a broader inquiry into youth, technology, and higher education in India, and Nishant Shah’s peer-reviewed article “Asia in the Edges: A Narrative Account of the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Summer School in Bangalore,” published in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies on 3 July 2014.

Accessibility and Inclusion

The Accessibility and Inclusion section situates CIS’s work in relation to an estimated 70 million persons with disabilities in India who are unable to read printed materials because of physical, sensory, cognitive, or other disabilities. It frames the programme’s work around accessible content, devices, and interfaces, while also emphasising the importance of copyright law and electronic accessibility policy in enabling access.

During the year, the report identifies two principal accessibility projects. The first was the National Resource Kit project, described here as the National Compendium of Policies, Programmes and Schemes for Persons with Disabilities. Prepared by CIS and the Centre for Law and Policy Research with funding from the Hans Foundation, the publication was completed during the year and was being brought out in collaboration with the Office of the Chief Commissioner for Persons with Disabilities, Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, Government of India. The report states that it would be CIS’s first government publication.

The compendium comprised chapters covering 29 states and 6 union territories, together with summaries of Supreme Court and High Court judgments on disability rights. The report notes that the publication had been finalised and was in the process of being printed. It also lists related blog entries on central government schemes, summary judgments on disability rights, and central guidelines and schemes.

CIS also made a formal submission on disability law reform during the year. Nirmita Narasimhan and Anandhi Viswanathan submitted comments on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Bill, 2014 on 30 October 2014. The section further records associated blog writing on financial inclusion, consultative process, disability rights enforcement, accessibility of government information in the public domain, disability exceptions in copyright legislation, and responses to RTI applications from different states on accessibility.

The report records one event organised under this programme: an Open House Session with George Abraham, co-organised by Ashoka India and CIS in Bangalore on 21 May 2014. It also records Sunil Abraham’s participation in the first meeting of the high-level committee on the National Policy on Universal Electronic Accessibility, organised by the Department of Electronics and Information Technology in New Delhi on 30 December 2014.

Media coverage listed in this section reflects both disability rights and technology access themes. The report includes references to coverage on elections and disability access, the ratification of the Marrakesh Treaty, a disability-focused website launch, and commentary on communication technology and disability. It also notes that Sunil Abraham and Nirmita Narasimhan provided inputs for an issue of Governance Now.

The second major project in this section concerned NVDA and the eSpeak text-to-speech synthesiser. CIS, in partnership with the Daisy Forum of India and with support from the Hans Foundation, continued work on developing enhancements to the open-source NVDA screen reader for Windows and eSpeak synthesisers in 15 Indian languages. During the year, the team worked on issues relating to Excel, PowerPoint, and Microsoft Outlook, while also continuing language-development work across a large group of Indian languages.

The report lists Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Malayalam, Sindhi, Punjabi, Gujarati, Odia, Assamese, Kashmiri, Konkani, Marathi, and Manipuri among the languages under development. Support had been enabled for Punjabi, Gujarati, Odiya, Assamese, Telugu, and Bengali, and training had commenced in partnership with blindness organisations in those states. Hindi and Malayalam had also been improved and were in the training stage, while work on Manipuri had been completed pending a closure certificate from the testing organisation.

At the same time, support was being added to Marathi, Sindhi, Konkani, and Kashmiri, while improvements to Kannada had yet to begin. The report also notes that a manager to oversee and lead all project trainings was hired and based at NAB Delhi. Monthly reports for the project were prepared by Suman Dogra across 2014 and 2015.

A substantial series of trainings is recorded under this project. These included Gujarati eSpeak training in Ahmedabad; Telugu eSpeak training at Hyderabad Central University on 1–2 December 2014; Bangla eSpeak training in Kolkata on 19–20 December 2014; training in basic computing with eSpeak Hindi and NVDA at Dr. Shakuntala Mishra National Rehabilitation University, Lucknow, on 20–22 January 2015; Malayalam training in Thiruvananthapuram on 24–25 January 2015; Tamil training in Chennai on 27–28 January 2015; Hindi trainings in New Delhi on 5–6 February and 13–14 February 2015; Punjabi training in Chandigarh on 20–21 February 2015; and a 15-day Hindi training in Lucknow from 16 to 29 March 2015.

Access to Knowledge

The Access to Knowledge programme examines the harms caused by excessive copyright, patent, and other monopolistic rights over knowledge, while also engaging with open government data, open access to scholarly literature and law, open content, open standards, and free/libre/open source software. During 2014–15, the programme continued to be supported by Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC), which funded CIS to research the relationship between pervasive technologies and intellectual property and to use the outputs to support intellectual property norms that encourage, rather than inhibit, the development of such technologies as a social good.

Pervasive Technologies

The Pervasive Technologies: Access to Knowledge in the Marketplace project sought to identify policy levers that could be used to ensure access to mass-marketed, networked communication technologies within the intellectual property regimes of India and China. The research focused primarily on access to sub-100 dollar mobile phone hardware, software, such as mobile applications, and content, such as music and media. The report notes that the work largely examined patent and copyright law, given the richness of material in those areas.

Several research outputs were published under this project. These included Patent Valuation and License Fee Determination in Context of Patent Pools by Vikrant Narayan Vasudeva, Literature Survey: Patent Landscaping in the Indian Marketplace by Rohini Lakshané, Pervasive Technologies Project Working Document Series: Document 2 Literature Review on Competition Law + IPR + Access to < $100 Mobile Devices by Nehaa Chaudhari, Pervasive Technologies Project Working Document Series: Literature Review on IPR in Mobile app development by Anubha Sinha, and Intellectual Property Rights - Open Access for Researchers by Nehaa Chaudhari for UNESCO.

The programme also submitted policy comments during the year. These included comments on the proposed Intellectual Property Rights Policy to the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion, and CIS comments to the first draft of the National IP Policy. In addition, the programme organised internal and external sessions that supported the research process, including a Master Class on Patents with Professor Jorge Contreras in Bangalore on 21–22 May 2014, a PT Project Workshop on 23–24 May 2014, internal lectures on statistics and quantitative analysis, and a presentation by Sujitha Subramaniam on competition law and intellectual property.

Participation in external events was also substantial. Staff attended or presented at the Future of Music Policy Summit, the 6th MixRadio Music Connects Conference, the conference Ubiquity, Mobility, Globality: Charting Directions in Mobile Phone Studies, The Exchange Conference, the San Francisco Music Tech Summit, DIY Law Workshop, the 2014 Indiearth Xchange Conference, India at Leisure: Media, Culture and Consumption in the New Economy, and the 4th IPR Researchers Confluence. Maggie Huang’s work under this programme also generated a series of blog posts on app developers, semiconductor industry interviews, patent law, and music streaming.

World Intellectual Property Organization

CIS participated in three sessions of the WIPO Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights during the year: the 27th session in Geneva from 28 April to 2 May 2014, the 28th session in Geneva from 30 June to 4 July 2014, and the 29th session in Geneva from 8 to 12 December 2014. Nehaa Chaudhari participated in all three sessions and delivered CIS interventions and statements.

At the 27th session, CIS delivered statements on technological measures of protection, limitations and exceptions for libraries and archives, orphan works, retracted and withdrawn works, works out of commerce, and the proposed treaty for the protection of broadcasting organisations. At the 28th session, CIS issued a statement on the proposed broadcasting treaty, as well as statements and comments on limitations and exceptions for libraries and archives. At the 29th session, CIS delivered an intervention on the proposed broadcasting treaty, a second brief intervention, a statement on the broadening of definitions in the proposed broadcast treaty, questions to Professor Kenneth Crews on his updated study on limitations and exceptions for libraries and archives, and a statement on limitations and exceptions for education, teaching, research institutions, and persons with disabilities.

The report also records related blog entries and media coverage. These included posts on the signing and ratification of the Marrakesh Treaty, the WIPO Director General’s meeting with NGOs, and France, Greece, India, and the European Union signing the Marrakesh Treaty. Media references include coverage in IP Watch, Knowledge Ecology International, and SUNS.

The report further notes a side event titled The Broadcasting Treaty: A Solution in Search of a Problem? held at WIPO on 10 December 2014, where Nehaa Chaudhari was a speaker. The report identifies this event as having been originally published by Knowledge Ecology International.

Other A2K Work

Beyond Pervasive Technologies and WIPO participation, the report groups additional Access to Knowledge work under the headings of open licensing, intellectual property policy, and related research and advocacy. CIS submitted comments on the open licensing policy guidelines of the National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technology in May 2014, and it also submitted comments on the proposed Intellectual Property Rights Policy to the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion in November 2014.

Blog entries under this broader A2K work included a two-part series on mapping institutions of intellectual property in India, a post on preventive detention for copyright violation, a note on legislative competence in relation to the Karnataka Goondas Act, a letter to the Prime Minister on Indo-US bilateral relations on intellectual property, a post on the development of the National IPR Policy, a note on MHRD IPR Chairs and underutilisation of funds, and a post on guidelines for examination of computer related inventions. The report also lists media coverage on open governance, intellectual property protection for new ventures, and the adoption of open source software in e-governance projects.

Participation in events during this broader work included the Yogyakarta Meeting on Open Culture and Critical Making, where Sharath Chandra Ram was a panelist; the Global Intellectual Property Convention in Mumbai, where Rohini Lakshané attended; the Library and Information Professionals Summit 2015, where Nehaa Chaudhari took part in a panel on internet technology and challenges for libraries in an IPR regime; and the Conference on Standards Setting Organisations and FRAND, where Rohini Lakshané participated.

Openness

As part of its work on Openness, CIS critically examined alternatives to existing intellectual property regimes, transparency and accountability, and open government data, open access to scholarly literature, open access to law, open content, open standards, and free/libre/open source software. The report presents this work as a continuation of CIS’s broader commitment to open knowledge and public-interest digital policy.

The section records one journal article: Heads I Win, Tails You Lose: The Intransigence of STM Publishers by Subbiah Arunachalam, Perumal Ramamoorthi, and Subbiah Gunasekaran, published in the Proceedings of the Indian National Science Academy in December 2014. It also notes a submission on the Department of Biotechnology and Department of Science Open Access Policy by Anubha Sinha in August 2014.

CIS organised two events under this theme. These were the NASA International Space Apps Challenge 2014 in Bangalore on 12–13 April 2014 and The Fifth Elephant at the NIMHANS Convention Centre on 25–26 July 2014, where CIS served as a community outreach partner. The report also records participation in events such as Connecting the Next Two Billion: The Role of FOSS, the panel discussion on crypto-currencies, Tech for Citizen Engagement 2014, and Swatantra 2014: Fifth International Free Software Conference, Kerala.

Blog entries and coverage under this section include posts on Mozilla community events, the release of open access policies by the Department of Biotechnology and the Department of Science and Technology, privacy versus transparency, and the adoption of open access policy by the two departments. Media coverage includes references to open access to science research, public access to publicly funded research, and support for open source software in e-governance projects.

Wikipedia and CIS-A2K

The CIS-A2K programme is described as a mandate to further the open knowledge movement in Indian languages by growing open knowledge repositories such as Wikipedia and strengthening open knowledge communities in India. The report states that, by this period, the programme had reached more than 3,500 people through over 100 outreach events held in cities and towns across India.

The programme also facilitated the release of encyclopaedic and related content under Creative Commons licences in multiple Indian languages. The report states that 51 Telugu books, 13 Odia books, 4 Konkani encyclopaedia volumes, 6 Kannada volumes, and 1 English book on Odia language history were released, totalling 75 books and 16,600 pages. It also records print, web, and electronic media coverage of the programme’s work across Kannada, Konkani, Odia, and Telugu.

The CIS-A2K team for the year is listed as consisting of five members based in Bangalore: T. Vishnu Vardhan, Dr. U.B. Pavanaja, Subhashish Panigrahi, Rahmanuddin Shaik, and Tanveer Hasan. Nitika Tandon had left the organisation in the previous year. The programme also continued to build institutional partnerships for language and knowledge work.

The report lists memoranda of understanding with Mysore University, Shri Dharmasthala Manjunatheshwara College, Andhra Loyola College, and Nirmala Institute of Education, Goa. The Mysore University agreement concerned converting the university’s encyclopaedia to Unicode and re-releasing it under a Creative Commons licence. The agreement with Shri Dharmasthala Manjunatheshwara College focused on introducing Indian language Wikipedias in undergraduate and postgraduate classrooms. The Andhra Loyola College agreement aimed to enhance Telugu Wikipedia through increased contributions and free licensing, while the Goa agreement focused on digital literacy in Konkani in the education sector.

CIS-A2K also designed and rolled out Wikipedia-related work in classrooms and at the community level. The report notes a Wikipedia programme in the undergraduate classroom at Christ University with a reach of 610 students working in Hindi, Kannada, Sanskrit, and Tamil Wikisource, as well as an Odia Wikisource programme at the Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences in Odisha. A MoU with KISS had been signed in January 2014, and the report says CIS-A2K played a catalytic role in bringing the Odia Wikisource project live.

The section concludes with additional language-community and training activity. T. Vishnu Vardhan trained 100 undergraduate faculty members through two national workshops on Openness and Knowledge Production in Vijayawada, and he was invited by Jagotik Konkani Sangathan to join the steering committee of the Global Konkani Language Conclave.

Internet Governance

Internet Governance remained a central policy area for CIS in 2014–15. The report describes this work as focusing on privacy, freedom of expression, surveillance, the Information Technology Act, and intermediary liability, and notes that it was carried forward through the SAFEGUARD project and a project on restrictions placed on online freedom of expression by the Indian government.

A major output of the year was the continued development and public discussion of the Privacy (Protection) Bill, 2013. CIS had been holding privacy roundtables in collaboration with FICCI and DSCI since April 2013, and the report states that seven roundtables were held during this period in New Delhi, Bangalore, Chennai, Mumbai, Kolkata, and again in New Delhi. Following these discussions, the bill was revised, and a version drafted by Bhairav Acharya was later put up for public comment.

The report also describes CIS’s work on a privacy book prepared in partnership with Privacy International, UK, and the Society in Action Group, Gurgaon. Draft chapters covered freedom of expression and privacy, health and privacy, e-governance, identity and privacy, telecommunications and internet privacy, consumer privacy, and law enforcement, national security, and privacy.

Other work under this programme included clause-by-clause comments on the Human DNA Profiling Bill, 2012, submitted by Bhairav Acharya, and the creation of the India Privacy Monitor Map by Maria Xynou with assistance from Srinivas Atreya. The map compiled information on UID, NPR, CCTNS, CCTV installations, and the use of drones across the country.

The programme organised a wide range of events during the year. These included cryptoparties in Bangalore, Delhi, Dharamsala, and Chennai; talks by Bernadette Längle, Maria Xynou, Marialaura Ghidini, Abhayraj Naik, and Michael Oghia; discussions on cyber security, public law, cloud computing, biometrics, and surveillance; and jointly organised events with NLSIU, the Federal Trade Commission, and various tactical media and civic technology groups.

The report also records numerous participation events in India and abroad. Staff and fellows took part in conferences, consultations, roundtables, and workshops in Istanbul, Oxford, Toronto, Hamburg, Hyderabad, Delhi, Brussels, San Francisco, Singapore, Cambridge, and elsewhere. These engagements covered internet governance, privacy, surveillance, identity, cryptography, digital economy policy, intermediary liability, global internet governance, broadband regulation, and cyberlaw.

Privacy

The privacy-focused work under Internet Governance was supported by the SAFEGUARD project, which CIS carried out in partnership with Privacy International and with funding from the same year’s research support. The report emphasises privacy as a core area of concern in relation to law, technology, and public policy. It also notes that the project investigated legal and policy questions around surveillance and public interest oversight.

A central element of this work was public consultation. The seven privacy roundtables brought together stakeholders in multiple cities to discuss the contents and possible future of privacy legislation in India. The report presents these roundtables as part of the process that led to the revision of the Privacy (Protection) Bill, 2013.

The report also mentions the India Privacy Monitor Map as a research and documentation tool. It brought together information on identity systems and surveillance infrastructure, including UID, NPR, CCTNS, CCTV installations, and drones. The mapping exercise is presented as a means of making visible the range of privacy-related systems present across the country.

Free Speech and Expression

The report states that CIS’s internet governance work also addressed restrictions on online freedom of expression in India through a project supported by the MacArthur Foundation. This strand of work is described as examining how state restrictions affect speech online and how such restrictions interact with intermediary liability, surveillance, and privacy.

The report does not provide a separate detailed sub-section with outputs under this heading, but it places freedom of expression alongside privacy and surveillance as one of the key themes in CIS’s internet governance work during the year. It also connects this theme to the legal and policy discussions around the Information Technology Act and the drafting of privacy law.

Cyber Stewards Project

CIS participated in the Cyber Stewards project during the year, working with the Citizen Lab and IDRC on mapping cyber security actors in South and South East Asia. The report identifies this work as part of a broader effort to understand the policy and institutional landscape of cyber security in the region.

The section does not provide a long list of outputs, but it notes that the project involved research and collaboration across borders. It fits within CIS’s broader concerns about surveillance, state capacity, technical policy, and the governance of digital infrastructure.

The report also records writings and media attention associated with Internet Governance work, including columns and articles in Indian Express, Economic Times, New York Times, Frontline, The Hoot, and Down to Earth. These writings covered privacy, surveillance, intermediary liability, digital rights, and related policy questions.

Telecom

CIS’s telecom work during the year focused on telecom policy, spectrum, mobile phone accessibility for persons with disabilities, and consultations before the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India. The report states that CIS prepared reports on unlicensed spectrum and on the accessibility of mobile phones for persons with disabilities, and that it also worked with the Universal Service Obligation Fund on including projects for persons with disabilities within its mandate.

Digital Natives

Under the Digital Natives heading, the report presents work concerned with social change and political participation by young people in emerging information societies. It describes Digital Natives with a Cause? as a project that consolidated knowledge from Asia, Africa, and Latin America and built a global network of knowledge partners critically engaging with the discourse on youth, technology, and social change, while also examining alternative practices and ideas in the Global South.

The main project highlighted under this section in 2014–15 is Making Change. CIS describes this research as an effort to explore new ways of defining, locating, and understanding change in network societies. The report identifies Nishant Shah’s white paper Whose Change is it Anyway?, published by Hivos on 18 June 2013, as the conceptual point of entry for this work.

The report also lists two blog posts by Denisse Albornoz under this heading, one on methods of conceiving and condensing social change and another on Tactical Technology. The publications and blog posts under this programme focused on social change, networked participation, and digitally mediated political and cultural processes.

Researchers at Work

The Researchers at Work section records a peer-reviewed article by Nishant Shah, Asia in the Edges: A Narrative Account of the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Summer School in Bangalore, published in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies on 3 July 2014. The report describes this work as part of a broader reflective and scholarly engagement with knowledge production in Asia.

The report also notes six research studies commissioned by HEIRA-CSCS between November 2013 and March 2014 as part of a collaborative exercise with CIS to map Digital Humanities within a broader inquiry into youth, technology, and higher education in India. The report records this collaboration under the Researchers at Work section as part of CIS’s engagement with Digital Humanities research.

Organisation and Governance

The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) continued to function as an interdisciplinary non-profit research organisation working on issues relating to internet governance, privacy, accessibility, access to knowledge, intellectual property reform, digital cultures, and telecommunications policy. Alongside its programme activities, the annual report records the organisation’s governance arrangements, staffing structure, financial disclosures, and compliance information as part of its commitment to transparency and accountability.

As of 31 March 2015, CIS operated from its office at 194, 2nd ‘C’ Cross, Domlur 2nd Stage, Bangalore 560071. The organisation’s accounts were maintained with the State Bank of India, Race Course Road Branch, Bangalore, and audited by Nath Associates. The report also records compliance information submitted under the Credibility Alliance norms framework.

Board and Society Members

As of 31 March 2015, the governance structure of CIS included the following members:

Staff and Salaries

During the reporting period, CIS employed researchers, programme managers, technical specialists, administrative personnel, and support staff working across its various programmes.

The report records the following staff positions and monthly remuneration figures:

Other members of staff during the year included Rahmanuddin Shaik, Nehaa Chaudhari, Elonnai Hickok, P. P. Sneha, Prasad Krishna, Jyoti Panday, Rohini Lakshane, K. N. Medini, Anubha Sinha, Geeta Hariharan, Ajoy Kumar C., Usha Nandini, Velankanni Royson, Mithilesh, Sikandar, Chandhussain, and Hussain.

Finances and Staff Distribution

The organisation maintained a diverse workforce across its programme and administrative functions. According to the annual report, the staff composition included both male and female employees across research, programme management, technology development, administration, and support services.

The report records a staff strength of twenty employees, comprising twelve men and eight women. Salary distribution data indicates twenty-three paid staff positions during the reporting period, including fourteen men and nine women.

The three highest monthly salaries paid by the organisation during the year were ₹2,00,000, ₹1,88,000, and ₹1,16,685 respectively. The lowest monthly salary reported was ₹7,500.

Financial statements, audit information, and detailed statutory disclosures are included in the annual report and provide a comprehensive account of the organisation’s income, expenditure, assets, liabilities, and programme spending during the year.

Acknowledgements

The report acknowledges the support of numerous partners, collaborators, donors, researchers, volunteers, and community members who contributed to the organisation’s work.

Support for various programmes was received from organisations including the Wikimedia Foundation, International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Privacy International, the Hans Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, Hivos, the Kusuma Trust, and several academic and civil society partners.

These collaborations enabled CIS to continue its research, advocacy, and public engagement activities across a wide range of technology policy issues.

Full Report

📄 This page was created on 24 June 2026. You can view its history on GitHub, preview the fileTip: Press Alt+Shift+G, or inspect the underlying source.