BehanVox: Poll Season Is Upon Us
This week in BehanVox: an interview with Kenyan data workers, SIR-led gender skew, and more. Plus: come join our FEN!
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Hello Behans!
A popular meme doing the rounds is how this insufferably long March simply refuses to end, from war to heat wave to rain to floods to LPG shortage it brought us a fine selection of miseries. Well, April is finally here and it brings another high voltage drama into our lives – assembly elections. Next Thursday, Kerala, Assam and Puducherry will vote, April 23 Tamil Nadu goes to polls and April 23 and 29, West Bengal will pick a party. Every election now is high-decibel but Kerala, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal are particularly with speculation around how the non-BJP incumbents will fare, if and how much of the dent the ruling party can make there and opacity around exactly who is backing who. At the centre of it all, is the very idea of citizenship, what with the SIR process.
At BehanBox, we believe that election journalism needs to go beyond party politics, conspiracy theories, recriminations and backroom reporting. So starting this week, our Feminist Election Newsroom (FEN) goes into high gear. What is FEN you ask? It is our collective practice of democracy as it should be. You can read more about it here.
At FEN, we assert the voices of women and gender diverse persons, as people who exist at many intersections of class, caste, gender, religion, region, disability and many more. We do that by seeking accountability from our political representatives. We also do this by making our issues central to political decision making. Our idea is to cut the noise and uncover the truth so you can make sense of seemingly complex issues and make informed choices.
During the 2024 General Elections, we brought you lucid explainers – Mera First Vote to Suno Behan – and collaborated with our readers and network of journalists to transform election coverage. Two years and over 400 members later FEN now is a year round practice for us as we track Parliament sessions, budgets, and policies. Do join this dynamic space by click of a button here.
Story So Far
Kenyan activist Joan Kinyua was a fan of digital technology and unhappy with her job as a business administrator when a new job came her way. She was not very sure what data annotating entailed but it was tech-centric and intriguing enough to pull her in. The work was wildly varied and did not appear to target a single product or company – street images for self-driving cars one day and photos of homes taken by robot vacuums another; then there were the images of extreme violence and dead bodies.
Then some facts began sinking in – the salary was poor, the workload was unpredictable and often disturbing and there was nothing like a career plan in evidence. When she started speaking up against the work conditions, she was warned of dire consequences, given poor ratings and threatened with isolation. Slowly the idea of unionising took root through a research project where people in the field spoke up about challenges – of poor or no skilling avenues, of mental health issues, of a job market so skewed it left workers with little bargaining power.
Along with a friend Michael Geoffrey Asia, she set up the Data Labellers Association. It was a space where these challenges would be recognised and articulated by workers. It was also very hard work because the collectivising could not be at the cost of the job. “Most people did not know what data labeling is – we had to establish its definition and how important it is in the Artificial Intelligence field. We took it upon ourselves to define these roles. And we took it upon ourselves to speak about how people are being treated, to name and shame these organisations,” says Joan.
What lessons does the association’s work hold for a rising data work centre like India? What should the shape of solidarity be? What can it bring at a time when unemployment is rampant? What is the place of race in data work? Saumya Kalia spoke to Joan and Michael for answers to these and many other questions in the latest edition of BehanBox Talkies.
Read our interview here.
The interview is the latest in our journalistic campaign to bring to light the many opacities that hide the world of digital labour. We have reported on how India’s AI boom runs on women’s unpaid care and cognitive labour and how the dispersed nature of their work, and how opaque AI supply chains and deficient policy have invisibilised millions of digital gig workers in India.
Talking Point
Trans Law: With the President’s assent, the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Bill, 2026 became law this week. This was despite some concerted political opposition to it asking for select committee scrutiny for its impact on transgender persons. And despite, a massive uproar among the transgender community, lawyer and civil society organisations. As Mridula Chari had argued in her fine piece for BehanBox, this law erases the entire trans community and the supportive embrace of its solidarity for the vulnerable.
WB And Its SIR-led Gender Skew: Ratio Election Commission data show that the number of female electors registered to vote in West Bengal has dropped to its lowest in 10 years, and the gender ratio fell for the first time in 13 years following the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in the state, reports Indian Express. An analysis of the EC’s gender data indicates that the gender ratio in West Bengal is the lowest it has been in five years, the report adds. Women’s votes are integral for the two parties who have the most to lose in this electoral fight – the TMC and the BJP.
Assam And Women Candidates: EC data shows that there are fewer women candidates in the fray in the forthcoming Assam assembly elections, reports The Hindu. Women make for 8.17% of the 722 candidates in the fray which may seem marginally higher than the 8.03% fielded in 2021, but the absolute numbers were then higher —76 women out of 946 candidates.
Kidnapped: Shelly Kittleson, a freelance journalist who has covered conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, was kidnapped this week in Baghdad. One of the suspects detained has links to an Iranian-aligned militia group, Kataib Hezbollah, which was said to be plotting to kidnap or kill female journalists, reports BBC. A source added that the journalist had been warned of the risk.
BehanVox Recommends
Istanbul’s Descent Into Darkness: Years of political repression and creeping urban decay have hollowed out the city’s soul, designing dissent out of its once-vibrant streets and erasing its rich cosmopolitan past from popular memory writes Hannah Lucinda Smith.
ChatGPT Dads: ‘When Sam Altman said he “cannot imagine figuring out how to raise a newborn without ChatGPT,” it awakened an anger deep inside me that only internet bros can inspire. So I did what I do when I get angry and wrote a comic about it! Read on to hear all about the downsides of fathers outsourcing the mental work of parenting to AI. (Barf.)’… This is Aubrey Hirsch doodling her angst out. Do check out this comic. At BehanBox, we love comics.
Portraits of a Population: Finally, India has put the wheels in motion for the Census to begin. As we get ourselves counted in, here is a fascinating archive of hand drawn graphs, illustrations and other visuals from the census department over the years documented by Aman Bhargava and Vivek Matthew with illustrations by Aditi Ankush. At BehanBox, we love archives too.
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