Rachna Khaira: What Constant, Arbitrary Surveillance Is Doing To Sanitation Workers’ Health
CHANDIGARH — An
intrusive GPS-based surveillance system that continuously monitors
sanitation
workers, and penalises them if they stray from their computer-assigned
“geo-fences”, is profoundly affecting their health and wellbeing like coronavirus,
workers say. Last month, HuffPost
India reported on
how municipal corporations across the country are forcing their employees to
wear smartwatch-sized GPS trackers on their wrists as part of a controversial
snooping system called the “Human Efficiency Tracking System”.
The system ensures
workers — many of whom are Dalit — are continuously in motion, and sends alerts
to their supervisors if they pause for too long or stray from rigidly defined
geographic boundaries. Workers are forced to charge the devices at home each
night — raising the prospect that their supervisors could use the microphones
and cameras embedded in these devices to spy on workers in the privacy of their
homes.
At a gathering in
Chandigarh this week, workers complained of nausea, headaches, swelling in
their hands, heightened blood pressure and sugar levels, and rashes since
they began wearing the devices. They claimed that the live surveillance has
caused more devastating effects on their health than it would have been caused
by coronavirus. The causal
relationship between these illnesses and the use of the tracking devices is
unclear, but it is possible that the stress of relentless surveillance is
prompting these symptoms. For instance, there is a wealth of evidence on how smartphone usage affects
health, sleep patterns, and creativity of users.
What is clear is that
municipal corporations around the country are implementing a demeaning form of
social control without consulting their workers, or even considering the
effects of such surveillance. Worse, the corporations have given workers little
indication of what will constitute a violation under this new surveillance
driven regime. In Chandigarh, the corporation is yet to set up the monitoring
centre but is already forcing workers to wear these devices.
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