Public sector software and the revolution: digital literacy in communist Kerala

Background

Kerala state, the smallest of the Indian states in terms of population (2.76 per cent) and area (1.2 per cent) is known for its ‘Kerala Model’ of growth and, in particular, its achievements in health, education and women’s rights (Chakraborty, 2005; Devika, 2010; Devika and Thampi, 2007; Heller et al., 2007; Pani and Jafer, 2010; Sooryarmoorthy and Renjini, 2000). While this growth faltered in the 1990s, Kerala continues to have an enigmatic status in India and globally with respect to its social indicators. Kerala was the first state in the world to elect a communist government through free ballot in 1957, and successive communist governments in Kerala have contributed to the institutionalisation of a broadly democratic style of functioning, pioneered social and land reforms, and decentralised local development projects and processes inclusive of participatory planning, participatory audits and participatory evaluation (Chathukulam and John, 2002; Harilal, 2008; Justino, 2006). Kerala has been the location for a number of progressive social movements involving farmers, fishermen and women, and the rural and urban poor. The people’s science movement, for example, has played a major role in popularising science for people (Isaac et al., 1997) in line with the state’s pro-education policies.

With bi-partisan political support from the Communist and Congress governments, Kerala is now home to numerous free and open source (FOSS)-based public sector software initiatives including IT@School, InSight and the Akshaya telecentres, 600+ open source learning centres across the state (see Venugopal,2011), Health Information Systems (Puri et al., 2009), the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), the National Informatics Centre, the Centre for Advanced Training in Free and Open Source Software, the International Centre for Free and Open Source Software that was established in 2011, and the Society for Promotion of Alternative Computing and Employment (SPACE). The intent is to democratise software solutions, bridge the digital divide and empower local communities via digital literacy initiatives. Kerala celebrated 10 years of state-sponsored FOSS initiatives in 2011, although the history of FOSS in this state is at least a decade older (Sasi Kumar, interview 2007). ¹

Outline

This article explores the theory and practice of FOSS-based public sector software (PSS) with a focus on the specific example of the IT@School project, Kerala. Beginning with an introduction to the ambivalent nature of the informational commodity, it explores the possibilities of PSS, the public good aspect of PSS, issues related to PSS and governmentality, before focusing on an example of public sector software from Kerala, the IT@School project. The methodology used to gather information for this article includes interviews conducted in 2010 in the context of research into communication rights movements in India, including FOSS, and the analysis of documents and texts on FOSS and PSS.

The informational commodity

One of the intriguing aspects of information as a commodity is that it cannot, by its very nature, be completely commodified, unlike the vast majority of physical goods. As an immaterial good and service, its status as property remains elusive and is difficult to map onto the existing system of intellectual property. The project to do with facilitating information for free has pitted libertarians and those linked to the global free software and copyleft movements against those who are anti-monopoly and believe in the need for level playing fields, such as Lawrence Lessig, Siva Vaidyanathan and others. While immaterial labour continues to be the basis for the free software movement, it is also the basis for capital accumulation (see Andrejevic, 2011; Carah, 2011) via a plethora of social networking and prosumer processes through which consumers are engaged in creating brand value through their many acts of consumption. While not denying the fact that information as a commodity, and as goods and services, generates massive amounts of global capital, the disruptive potential of the digital continues to unsettle both governments and corporates. It has been argued, for instance, that the informational mode of production has disrupted the system of labour that is critical to the formation of value in the capitalist economy (see Bauwens, 2009). The worldwide FOSS movement offers compelling evidence of shifts in the production of value. There are conflicting views, however, on whether or not this rupture will usher in a qualitatively different environment for the creation of value or whether or not the redemptive value of the rupture has, in itself, become co-opted within the productive and reproductive cycles of capitalism today. FOSS has, after all, become the basis for sound business models. Even as companies such as Linux and open source packages from Ubuntu and Red Hat may make the ‘source code’ available for free, their revenue streams are generated through their support services. As Ross Daniel (2011: 145) succinctly puts it:

What we find when we are considering FOSS is that it is in fact a highly conflicted entity within the capitalist apparatus of accumulation: simultaneously capable of being commodified, yet acting as reactant of decommodification: consuming commodified wage labour, yet existing as the product of volunteerism.

This ambivalent nature of information – in particular, its differential valuations at the moment of exchange – reflects, as Murdock (2011) has suggested, the beginnings of an emerging ‘gift economy’, and, as such, is indicative of the deep fault lines that run within the core of the contemporary informational mode of production.

In the context of shrinking public budgets, governments around the world that currently invest billions of dollars in e-government and other online initiatives are keen to maximise the value of information as a public good. The nature of the digital as a non-rivalrous resource and the cost-effective features of FOSS are attractive to governments that are keen to distribute information at zero cost, and benefit from the efficiencies that stem from the inter-operability of systems, the savings from the use of non-licensed software and the potential benefits of network externalities. Furthermore, after having initially been bound to a variety of proprietorial software systems, governments today increasingly value the sovereignty potential in controlling national digital futures. The stakes in this battle between private and public software are high, however. In the context of global and domestic pressure to privatise this sector, along with information governance systems, intellectual property and trade regimes, governments have been forced to accede to market-led software policy. Large corporations such as Microsoft exercise extraordinary power at global and national levels not only in terms of contributing to software policy but also indirectly, via the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and other philanthrophic bodies, in directing and setting the agenda for development. Since software has become absolutely critical to the functioning of government and is deeply embedded in the architectures of governance, control over software by the private sector is perceived to be a ‘risk’ as it gives companies access to large volumes of private and public data. The ownership of information is an issue, especially in the context of large-scale government investments in a variety of activities linked to e-governance.

Public sector software

PSS refers to publicly owned software that is organised on the principles of the public good. It is based on the premise that its availability, affordability and accessibility are critical to the quality of life in the 21st century and that its provision as a good is on a par with other essential goods and services such as food, health and shelter. In the context of what is a global economic crisis, governments throughout the world have typically slashed welfare budgets and have put into place a variety of austerity measures. While investments in IT hardware and software have been curbed as well, public sector investments have increasingly moved towards facilitating the procurement of open source software and implementing either single window or mixed systems for both routine, functional applications and special applications, such as e-government. There is growing evidence of deployment of FOSS at national, city and local levels of government, and by a variety of state-level agencies in both the developed and the developing world (see Applewhite, 2003; Cassell, 2008; Evans, 2006; Jayawardena and Gias, 2011; Miscione and Johnston, 2010; Mutula and Kalaote, 2010; Pare et al., 2009; Schoonmaker, 2009; Schwartz, 2003; Waring and Maddocks, 2005; Weilbach and Byrne, 2011). Information as a public good is among the primary reasons for public sector migration from proprietary to open source software systems. Mark Cassell (2008: 194, 209), for example, in an article on the adoption of a Linux alternative in four cities in Austria and Germany – Vienna, Munich, Schwabisch Hall and Treuchtlingen – points out a number of reasons for these cities to innovate including: ‘cost-savings … greater efficacy’ and the need to ‘maintain autonomy over one’s municipal infrastructure’. As Cassell notes:

In each of the four cities the shift to FOSS transformed the views from employees from thinking of government as an IT consumer to thinking of government as able to develop the capacity to own, develop, and share IT with other public and private actors for the public good. (2008: 194)

While the cost of software and licensing are certainly among the reasons for governments adopting FOSS-based solutions, adoption is precipitated by a range of factors. These include the recognition of the effects of vendor lock-in; the consequences of efficiency deficits linked to the lack of inter-operability of software across sectors and departments; the recognition of the failure of existing software policy and its consequences, particularly a heightened comprehension of risk; the realisation of the need for informational independence and community and civic concerns often articulated by NGOs (non-governmental organisations) and civil society organisations involved in the shaping of informational futures.

One can however argue that there are maximalist and minimalist versions of PSS from the deployments of open source software for the enhancement of intra-governmental information flows and transactions and government-to-public information flows, to public access to and use of data sets hitherto controlled by governments. This can include access to and use of data sets contained in the census and a variety of government surveys.

PSS and the public good

Typically, a public good has two inalienable properties – its non-rivalrous nature and the fact that it is non-excludable. The term ‘non-rivalrous’ refers to the nature of some goods and services whose consumption does not in any way, deplete them, diminish their value or corrupt them. Such goods include the air that we breathe, access to parks and the beach front, and, at least in principle, digital goods. A pirate copy of the Harry Potter series and an original copy are hard to distinguish in terms of picture quality. ‘Non-excludability’ refers to the availability to all citizens of a good or service, irrespective of status, creed, gender or affiliation. Given the nature of these principles, it is not altogether surprising that the concept of the public good is closely linked to the concept of the ‘commons’ – both our physical and informational commons. David Bollier (2007:29) suggests that:

the language of the commons … provides a coherent alternative model for bringing economic, social, and ethical concerns into greater alignment. It is able to talk about the inalienability of certain resources and the value of protecting community interests. The commons fills a theoretical void by explaining how significant value can be created and sustained outside of the market system. The commons paradigm does not look primarily to a system of property, contracts, and markets, but to social norms and rules, and to legal mechanisms that enable people to share ownership and control of resources. The matrix for evaluating the public good is not a narrow economic index like gross domestic product or a company’s bottom line but instead looks to a richer, more qualitative and humanistic set of criteria that are not easily measured, such as moral legitimacy, social consensus and equity, transparency in decision making, and ecological sustainability, among other concerns.

At the core of the concept of the public good is a belief that some goods that are key to the sustainability of individuals and communities are best entrusted to the state rather than to the market. Such goods include the electro-magnetic spectrum, national parks, water and, in the specific instance of PSS, access to and affordable uses of digital information. While the private sector can in theory produce public goods, it is often the case that such initiatives are either subsidised by governments or are an aspect of the firm’s corporate social responsibility functions. It is precisely the concern with corporate enclosures of information that has led to the global diffusion of FOSS as a movement and ethic.

PSS and its abuses: issues with governmentality

There are differing perspectives on whether or not governments are freeing up hitherto controlled information for mainly altruistic reasons or whether this freeing up of data facilitates a more efficient surveillance of the public. In Foucault’s study Discipline and Punish (1977) there is a description of ‘Panopticism’ and the way in which surveillance is manifested through initiatives that extend ‘utility’ towards a largely docile population. This disciplinary society thrives on the reproduction of freedoms that are largely bounded and contained and that do not disturb the status quo. In Foucault’s words:

Our society is one not of spectacle, but of surveillance; under the surface of images, one invests bodies in depth; behind the great abstraction of exchange, there continues the meticulous, concrete training of useful forces; the circuits of communication are the supports of an accumulation and a centralisation of knowledge; the play of signs defines the anchorages of power; it is not that the beautiful totality of the individual is amputated, repressed, altered by our social order, it is rather that the individual is carefully fabricated in it, according to a whole technique of forces and bodies. (1977: 217)

This is a society where power is exercised continuously and what better way than through online means through which discipline and biopower are reinforced. Surveillance studies (see Lyon, 2007) has intentionally dealt with the exercise of power and new technologies and Andrejevic (2007) has made links with online interactivity as a form of control mainly exerted by businesses associated with the mining of personal information (Dataveillance) but also by governments. Henman (2010: 33) has written of the ‘Governmentality of E-government’, while other scholars have explored the vast increase in the state’s investments in technology-mediated governmentalities (see Drake, 2011; Lippert, 2009; Mehta and Darier, 1998; Valentine, 2000). One of the ways to deal with this conundrum is to conceive of the liberal state’s relationship with its citizenry as inherently ambivalent. Whether one describes the state in India as democratic, populist, authoritarian or competitive authoritarian, the reality is that the state is capable of extending freedoms through measures such as the Right to Information and the Food Security Bill while also denying such rights through the extension of draconian measures such as the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act that gives the army impunity in regions such as the north-east of India to suppress secessionist movements. PSS reflects this ambivalence given that its purpose is to strengthen state sovereignty against, in this case, the corporate sector that is widely seen to have made inroads into the very business of the public sector. The government sees PSS as an attempt to ‘disintermediate’, in this case to lessen the influence of corporates such as Microsoft that are seen to exert an unhealthy control over the software market in the country. This ambivalence of the state is reflected in the fact that this very same neoliberal state remains a keen supporter of the market, economic liberalisation and privatised information futures.

PSS and digital literacy in Kerala

While it is tempting to describe the history of the movement in Kerala in terms of the role played by FOSS pioneers, the success of FOSS in this state is arguably a direct consequence of the specific political environment that is supportive of grassroots democracy and people’s rights and their involvement in development and social change. More than any other single factor, it is this tradition of state–people partnerships that arguably has enabled the development and dissemination of FOSS-based solutions in Kerala. The IT@School project began in 2002 and its major aim was to impart IT-enabled education. In 2009, this project covered 8000 state schools. The project began with a tie-up between the state government (then run by the Congress Party), Microsoft and Intel. However a series of anti-piracy raids initiated by Microsoft on schools rebounded and led to a massive campaign by trade unions such as the Kerala State Teachers Association (KSTA) and the Free Software Foundation against the use of proprietorial software in public education (see Prabhaker and Arun, n.d. for a blow-by-blow account). The KSTA’s threatened boycott of exams led to the government relenting and to the deployment of FOSS. In addition, an attempt by Microsoft to claim copyright over e-governance software used by the state-wide, FRIENDS Integrated Citizen Services strengthened bi-partisan political resolve to support FOSS. The court ruled that ‘a computer software developed for Government purposes will always be a Govt. work falling under Section 2(k) of the Copy Right Act’ (C-DIT Newsletter, 2004: 18). In 2006 and following a change of government, with the Communist-led Left Democratic Front back in power, FOSS became the preferred software of choice in government.

As Kasinathan (2009: 2) has highlighted in a Policy Brief:

The program has created ‘mobile hardware clinic’ teams, which regularly visit schools for inspection, checking hardware and doing most of the required maintenance and repair work. A policy of cannibalising computers that cannot be repaired has two benefits; it substantially lowers costs of maintenance while ensuring higher uptime. Teachers are trained to install software and to also do routine software upgrades. The program disproves a commonly held belief that school teachers in India’s public education system are not capable of, and/or are unlikely to be interested in, engaging with ICTs beyond being simple users.

I would argue that this approach is in many ways in the Freirean tradition with its accent on demystifying technology, enabling users to understand how it works and getting people to use software for their own ends – in this case in the context of secondary education. As significantly, the story of FOSS in Kerala is that of people realising that software is a tool that can and should be adapted to local ends and that knowledge-making is a process involving teachers, students and technology. Hardware clinics and content development classes are frequently held and the school wikis help in the creation of collaborative content. Not only has FOSS been customised to teachers’ needs, it is available in Malayalam, the local language, and all material is owned by the public and is shareable. A further reason for the success of this project is that it has been integrated with other capacity-building initiatives such as the state-wide women’s empowerment project ‘Kudumbashree’ (see Devika and Thampi, 2007). Chandrasekar and Prakash (2010: 37) mention the 151 women-run, IT@School units within the Kudumbashree project that provides ‘computer software and hardware training to the government aided secondary school students’.

In Kerala more than 100,000 teachers have been trained in FOSS. Irrespective of the moral and ethical reasoning behind the use of FOSS, users – in particular the central and state governments, civil society organisations and small and medium businesses – will primarily deploy FOSS on the basis of evidence related to cost-savings. It is common knowledge that software vendors such as Microsoft, Oracle and others make the bulk of their profits from the licensing of their products. While state government’s use of computers varies, they typically use 50,000+ desk computers and laptops. The savings related to the use of FOSS in the context of licensing, service, distribution, migration and exit can be enormous. A recent study by Rahul De (2009) from the Indian Institute of Management, in a study of the economic impact of FOSS in government, education and the commercial sector, contrasts for example, the cost of licensing 50,000 computers in the IT@School Project using the Microsoft platform at Rs 500 million (US$9m; Rs 10,000 per unit, US$180) as opposed to the zero costs associated with FOSS. There are also substantive savings in teacher training and overall savings to the government of Kerala in the region of Rs 490 million (US$8.8m) (De, 2009: 7). The study also highlights the case of the Life Insurance Corporation of India, one of the largest of its kind in the world. In 2003–4 all its servers had migrated to Linux and, by 2009, 60 per cent of its desktops were also running on FOSS platforms. Their saving was in the region of $420 million (2009: 11). The report also points out the benefits that accrue to scalability, improved performance, security and the lack of vendor lock-in (2009: 19). Another study on E-governance in Local Governments of Kerala, carried out by the Centre for Development Studies (RULSG, 2010: 35), indicates the unsustainability of capital expenditures on software licensing – around Rs 500,000 (US$9000) per local government out of a total outlay for computerisation of Rs 1m (US$18,000) – that is, 50 per cent.

So what are some of the ways in which this case study offers us possibilities to broaden our understanding of a ‘public good’? Without a doubt, access to and use of software has increasingly begun to define our ‘quality of life’. Information and knowledge have become a basic right and, as such, the provision of PSS can be seen as the means to extend this right. Arguably, however, this is not a ‘pure’ public good in the sense that governments, even socialist ones such as Kerala, also have to provide the space for the private sector to trade in and accumulate exclusive knowledge – hence the armoury of intellectual property legislations and opportunities for patenting and copyright. What Kerala has done is to balance access to knowledge via a system that recognises the rights of citizens to software. What is perhaps most significant in this case study is the recognition that, in an unequal society, access to information indeed requires to be seen as a public good and that PSS can be the means to deliver this public good. PSS has become an enabling mechanism in the sense that it has begun to have a positive impact on the scalability of education, but also through its ownership and use of knowledge, thus contributing to the enhancement of the very concept of the public good. The public use, adaptation and sharing of software suggests a qualitatively different public to one that is merely the recipient of provision by any given government.

Conclusions

While the example of IT@School, along with other PSS initiatives in Kerala, highlights an alternative approach to dealing with the digital divide that is broadly based on access to FOSS, one can argue that a ‘public goods’ based approach can be difficult to sustain within a national context that favours private sector involvement in every sector. A large company such as Microsoft has a national imprint and their software continues to fuel the majority of e-government initiatives at a central and state levels. E-literacy in most parts of India is based on the Windows platform and the company has the political power to ensure the continuing monopoly of proprietorial software. In the neighbouring state of Tamilnadu, a populist ‘laptop for every child’ initiative, originally scheduled to feature FOSS, will now be based on the Windows platform. Sai Manish (2011), in an article in the investigative magazine Tehelka, highlights the visit to neighbouring Tamilnadu on 21–2 July 2011 by the US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, as critical to Microsoft’s strategy. This visit ensured that close to 7 million laptops that will be given away to secondary students over a five-year period, will now use the Windows platform. While Kerala’s approach might seem like an anomaly, the general retreat of the organised Left in India during the last decade has by no means dented the desire by ordinary Indians to take back democracy. Access to software will remain part of this struggle.