Helping Ensure Ethical Indian Drone Operations

This blogpost was originally posted on the WeRobotics blog (link) on the 8th of October 2020

The global civilian drone industry is currently in a growth phase. From its initial beginnings in the mid-2000s as a hobbyist activity to its warranting regulatory supervision to its current status as a potential game-changer for national economies, the drone industry seems to have weathered it all. Even with the pandemic and associated lockdowns, the drone industry still has the potential to grow, providing as it does the option of ensuring that work gets done safely and hygienically. Over these years, the number of both drone users and the various applications of drone-acquired data have grown massively. 

“It’s possible for a project to comply with existing regulations and legislation, and even be commissioned by the state, and still be deficient from an ethical perspective.”

As with most emerging technologies, drones have influenced and exacerbated a plethora of complex social interactions. When drones are used without adequate consideration of their impact, they can inflict serious harm on individuals and communities. In India, policies, regulations, and social norms around drone use have not kept pace with the technological applications, especially around what constitutes safe and ethical drone use. At Technology for Wildlife, we are conservation geographers and drone pilots; thus, we are also participants in the Indian drone industry. We’ve come to realise that accepting certain work proposals would put us in ethically complicated and questionable situations that could potentially compromise our desire to do good. However, each time we choose to decline a project that does not fit with our values, we know there are enough other drone operators out there for the project to go ahead anyway. It’s possible for a project to comply with existing regulations and legislation, and even be commissioned by the state, and still be deficient from an ethical perspective. There is a clear need to create and implement guidelines for the drone industry regarding the ethical operation of drones to complement the government-mandated regulations.

In this context, in late 2019, we applied for the WeRobotics Unusual Solutions Competition, intending to understand what would be required to have participants in the nascent drone industry commit to conducting ethical operations. Today, we’re pleased to present our work in a report titled: Towards Incorporating Ethical Considerations into Indian Civilian Drone Operations. 

Rather than providing prescriptive rules on ethical operations, we’ve used our research and sectoral knowledge to put together a roadmap to what we believe ethical drone operations should look like in the Indian context, and how and why specific stakeholders should be engaged. This report is intended (to quote from it directly) for “anyone in, or engaging with, the drone industry and will be particularly relevant to those who intend to build solutions that would address the social implications of civilian drone use.” While we have focused on the Indian drone industry, it is quite likely that our work is also applicable to other countries with similar contexts.

We hope that in these troubled times, this report is one of the many pieces required to ensure that drone operations are empathetic, considerate, and ethical, both in India as well as globally.

26 projects approved by the Indian National Board of Wildlife on April 7th 2020

On 7th April 2020, when India was under a national lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Standing Committee of the National Board of Wildlife (NBWL) held a virtual meeting and discussed 31 proposals regarding projects inside or within 10km of protected area. 26 of these projects were approved, of which 9 are for limestone mining near Mukundra Tiger Reserve; we’ve bundled these up together to prepare the 18 stories in the story map below.

Since most citizens are unlikely to read through the dry and detailed minutes of official meetings (PDF here), this story map is meant to be representative and informative of the projects approved in that meeting which, barring a few, we would be unlikely to hear of otherwise.

Civilian technologists should assist the state during the COVID-19 pandemic

This article was published in India in Transition (a policy blog run by the Center for the Advanced Study of India at the University of Pennsylvania) on the 6th of April 2020, and is available at this link: https://casi.sas.upenn.edu/iit/shashanksrinivasan2020

In December 2019, the Government of India enacted the Citizenship Amendment Bill, which sparked widespread protests and counter-protests. Over the next few weeks, large crowds gathered in towns and cities across India, where police and paramilitary armed forces were deployed in large numbers. Violence erupted at some of the protest sites and people were injured and killed in the process. While questions remain as to which factions initiated the violence, it is unquestionable that in some cases, state forces were brutal in their approach and harmed Indian citizens. Recently, the COVID-19 pandemic-linked lockdown across India and its accompanying enforcement by the state have resulted in numerous well-documented instances of police violence. Videos of shoppers, shopkeepers, and vendors being beaten by police forces are easy to find on social media, and reports have emerged of a man in Bengal who was beaten to death by the police for stepping out of his house to buy milk. The state may have the monopoly on the legitimate use of force within its territory, but the violence on display, both in Kashmir and the North-East in the past few decades, as well as across India in the past few months, is illegitimate, violates human rights, and is against the values embodied in the Indian Constitution. In this context, it seems obvious to suggest that civilian technologists should not be helping the state amplify its capacity to harm its own citizens.

In response to the pandemic, individuals, informal consortia, start-ups, and established companies in the Indian technology sector are attempting to use tools at their disposal to assist the state with its response. Some of these actors, however, seem unaware as to the effects their well-intentioned actions may have on the fabric of the country. It is one thing to design 3D-printable valves for ventilators or to retool production lines toward mask production, and quite another to design a quarantine-enforcing geo-fencing app or to deploy drones for lockdown surveillance purposes. Take drones in particular; during the initial violence from December onwards, they were being deployed by unknown actors on behalf of the state to monitor the protests in Delhi, along with numerous uniform-wearing police officials carrying cameras. Subsequently, the Home Minister announced that facial recognition tools were being used to identify individual protestors from video collected during the protests. In the last few weeks, mostly concealed by news of the pandemic, there have been published reports of individuals in North-East Delhi who have been picked up by the police. It is highly probable that drone footage was used to identify them, and whether or not their actions were legitimate, it is certain that drones were used as another tool in the state’s arsenal to suppress dissent.

Today, quarantine regulations have been implemented across India, where people are allowed to leave their homes only for essential services. In practice, these rules mean that people are only able to leave their houses when driven to do so by necessity, as defined by the state, and under fear of illegal assault by state forces. There have been calls to use drones to assist with the enforcement of quarantine regulations by conducting mass surveillance of public spaces, alerting the police when people are gathering and enabling them to “take action.” As this action most often takes the form of coercion with the implied threat of violence, the deployment of drones for this purpose does not qualify as a “drones-for-good” operation.

Similarly, mobile-phones are being utilized to assist the state in tracking quarantined patients. They require the quarantined person to install an app on their phone and provide it with requisite permissions, which is then used to ensure that the person can be located at any point in time. There are no guarantees as to the security of the data, or that the information will even be kept confidential. For example, the Karnataka Health Department has released district-wide lists with the exact addresses of every person under fourteen-day home quarantine in the state, purportedly to allow community enforcement of the quarantine rule. The intentional release of such information beggars belief, and until India’s Personal Data Protection Bill comprehensively protects personal data, building surveillance applications for the government must cease. To present an alternative, South Korea has also developed and deployed a quarantine-enforcing phone app, but it is not mandatory; those quarantined are permitted to opt out of using this system. However, even with South Korea’s more liberal approach to technology deployment, concerns have been raised about the privacy of the individuals being tracked.

In the name of the public good, we are witnessing the creation of state surveillance infrastructure on a massive scale, both in India and across the world. Drones, facial recognition tools, and mandatory geolocation apps are just some of the shinier technologies that are being deployed today. Other more insidious ones, such as those that allow for pattern matching across databases, can be equally deadly to a secular democracy. Such systems will require only a little alteration before they can be combined with other state databases to identify and locate individuals or communities by caste, religion, income bracket, or place of origin. If these are put into place before the proper safeguards are implemented, it is only a matter of time before the least India’s marginalized groups need to fear is being beaten by the police. The onus lies on civilian technologists to ensure that the work they conduct for the state is used for the good of the nation, and not to oppress its people.