Automated Oppression: Workers Are Fighting Swachh Bharats Human Tracking System

CHANDIGARH — When 53-year-old Vedpal, a sanitation worker at the city municipal corporation, asked for half a day off to attend his nephew’s funeral, his supervisor professed his helplessness.

“He said ‘Ask the watch’,” Vedpal recalled, referring to the watch-sized GPS-enabled “Human Efficiency Tracker” that all sanitation workers in the city are now required to wear. “How can a machine understand human emotions and respond to our concerns?” 

“Earlier, humans used to control technology, this is an era where the technology governs us and it’s scary,” Vedpal said. “These watches have even made our officials helpless in granting us half an hour leave even during health exigency.”

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Earlier this year, HuffPost India reported on how municipalities across the country are spending large sums on deeply invasive worker surveillance technology even as they skimp on basic health and safety equipment like gloves and helmets. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s much-touted Swachh Bharat Abhiyan has incentivised human-tracking by awarding 10 extra-points to municipalities who implement such technologies.

These programmes have been rolled out with little oversight, no worker consent, and no public conversation on how this data is being stored, tracked or analysed. Many of these human tracking experiments are being conducted on the most marginalised members of India’s workforce — such as sanitation workers who are predominantly Dalit.

Workers and officials at the municipal corporation independently confirmed that the municipality was yet to circulate any written rules, regulations or instructions on just how the system would operate, its implications for the health, safety, and security of workers, and the penalties – if any– for any violations.

Now workers are fighting back. Last month, sanitation workers in Chandigarh went on strike to demand that the local municipal corporation stop the GPS tracking project. The strike has been temporarily called off while the corporation debates the project, but sanitation workers have made clear that their agitation will end only once the GPS tracking project, implemented by a company called Imtrac, is rolled back for good.

Interviews with workers, union members and officials in the municipal corporations suggest that the new system epitomises the worst fears about surveillance at the workplace.

While workers complain they have no recourse for the glitchy and error-prone tracking system that often incorrectly marks them absent and arbitrarily deducts their wages; their supervisors say they are powerless to correct system errors. 

“In one such case, the system showed one of our employees’ location to be in Kedarnath. When checked, he was found to be working at his location in sector 33,” said an official at the municipal corporation.

“We have become helpless. The watch will mark employees late even if they get late by a second and we cannot alter or update it. The entire control to process or update the data is with the company. We are only mute spectators in the whole process,” the official said.

Surveillance Nightmare

In theory, the Human Efficiency Tracking System (HETS) offers a seemingly simple solution to concerns that sanitation workers do not spend enough time sweeping the streets of their allotted areas. 

The system requires workers to wear a GPS-enabled smartwatch that continuously beams a workers location to a central monitoring station. The system is supposed to notify a worker and their supervisor if they step out of their notified area, and automatically penalises workers and deducts their wages for not checking in at their respective geo-locations every morning.

The smartwatch also has a camera and microphone — which can be remotely monitored, raising privacy red flags.

HuffPost India reached out to the company’s headquarter in Oman but the officials refused to divulge any details on the ‘empyreal’ project pertaining to the HETS implemented in various MCs across India. Even the authorities based in India refused to speak on the issue. 

“We do not directly entertain any media queries. Only the concerned MC can reply to all your concerns,” said Pooja, company’s coordinator for Chandigarh over the phone.  

In practice, the system has proved to be a nightmare: Documents obtained by HuffPost India say Chandigarh’s sanitation workers have filed over 500 complaints against the watch in the past 3 months — 388 are regarding charging problems with the watches.

As HuffPost has previously reported, rather than employees coming to work every morning to pick up the devices, municipal officials insist that employees take the devices home with them and charge them through the night.

“The watches do not show any charging sign and hence the workers don’t even know if the watch gets charged,” said Arun Sood, a municipal councillor and former mayor of Chandigarh. 

Sood said many workers are not very tech-savvy and so only realise their trackers are not working on paydays when they find their salaries have been deducted because their watches are offline.

As a consequence, the Chandigarh municipal corporation has now begun to mark daily attendance in person at specific attendance spots across the city — one of the key problems that the GPS trackers were supposed to solve.

“The MC has paid around  51 lakhs to the company in the last three months but is still not able to take the online attendance due to faulty watches,” Sood said.

Krishan Lal Chaddha, President of the Chandigarh Municipal Sanitation workers union said the system doesn’t even account for the fact that most sanitation workers are paid so little that they cannot afford homes with proper electricity connections.

“Some of our workers who stay in slums do not have an electricity connection. They find it difficult to charge their watches,” Chaddha said. But when officials were informed of this, Chaddha said, they told the workers they should charge their watches using illegal electricity connections if needed. 

Workers Exploited

Sood, the municipal councillor, said several aspects of the tracking system deserved greater scrutiny as they appear to violate existing government policy.

For instance, Sood said government regulations state that workers cannot be asked to pay to replace government-issued equipment damaged while they are on duty. A state-transport driver, for instance, is not expected to pay for the cost of repairing and maintaining his bus.

Yet, sanitation workers — most of whom are paid approximately Rs 12000 to Rs 15000 a month — are personally responsible for their watches and have to pay Rs 8,000 for loss of or damage to the smart-watches.

“Five employees have so far paid the entire cost of watches to the MC authorities,” Sood said.

Workers said that if they refused to pay for the watches, they cannot get the new ones to mark attendance and hence must forego their salaries.

“They have tied us with these trackers like cattle,” said Dhanno, a sanitation worker. “Some of us are facing chronic diseases like high blood pressure and diabetes and even stress. These watches have made our health worse.”

Last week, bowing to the pressure, the MC authorities have deferred the migration of the system from online to app mode. 

“We were to migrate the system from online to app mode so that the officials can monitor it on their mobiles while in the field but this has now been deferred for an indefinite period,” said Dr. Amrit Pal Warring, Medical Officer of Health, MC. 

As HuffPost India has previously reported, sanitation workers in the neighbouring municipality of Panchkula are deeply uncomfortable with the mindless and relentless monitoring of their movements.

The presence of a remotely controlled camera and a microphone has traumatized women workers in particular, who fear going to the toilets while wearing the tracker. The fact that the device has to be taken home every night has cast a pall over intimate household conversations as off-duty workers fear that their supervisors might switch on the microphone without their knowledge or consent.

The strikes against the GPS smartwatches offer an indication that workers are now fighting back. On October 29, Chandigarh’s municipal corporation agreed to constitute a committee of councillors, officers and sanitation workers to re-assess the project.

The workers are back at work for now, but their fight against the tyranny of surveillance continues.