Arriving in Tso Moriri (Ladakh Lakes #5)

Tso Moriri (as seen from the perspective of Arva, our Mavic 2 Pro)

My diary entry for the 27th of August 2019  begins with “Today was my favourite day in the field by far”. We had  arrived in the small village on the shores of Tso Moriri the previous evening and I took to the place immediately. Wherever I stood, I could see the deep blue of Tso Moriri stretching across for miles. We were lucky to have found a  sweet old couple’s home to stay in, and had already gulped down several cups of the butter tea they provided us with. 

The kitchen in our homestay in Korzok, with a thermos full of hot butter tea.

We began the day at 7.30 am with a drive around the north-western portion of the lake stopping at various points to conduct our surveys.  After a drone flight along the lake shore, we documented the garbage, and then used our Trident to conduct transects along the lake bed. Tso Moriri was the first lake at which we found clear water,  which allowed us to collect some breathtaking footage using the Trident. Since we didn’t have any other travel planned for the 27th, we were all able to take turns to operate the Trident and it was just fun to be able to use it in such a special place. Besides, who can get over this view?

Varaha, our Trident, returning to shore after an excursion in the clear waters of Tso Moriri

We called  a halt to field work by lunch, which was wheat momos and fried rice at a little restaurant in the village. After the ‘mandatory’ afternoon nap, I went out for a cup of tea at a shop near our homestay. The women running the shop lived in Leh, but were working in this village for the summer. They were very warm and welcoming, and we had a nice chat until I asked them what was done with the plastic waste in the area. The conversation stopped abruptly and when I asked again, they pointedly engaged themselves in other activities. A gentleman sitting nearby  answered for them; he organised treks in the area and said they always disposed off the waste responsibly. When I asked how,the conversation ended again. I’m not sure why there was so much hostility around the subject of waste, but I didn’t push anymore.

After tea-time, I joined Gabriella and Shashank for a little excursion. Topden, our driver/guide in Ladakh, knew both the area and some people in a nearby nomadic settlement well, and took us to their campsite for a visit. When we got there, Topden spoke with them and a short while later, we were invited into their tent for tea. Some butter tea, yak cheese, broken conversation and compensating smiles later, we headed back outside. Shashank was carrying the aerial drone with him and Topden asked the crowd whether we met with them whether they would be interested in seeing it in action. Suddenly, the number of people tripled around us, and  after we communicated what was going to happen next, we launched the drone. As the drone flew overhead, a crowd gathered around us. We asked them what they would like to see and they pointed to their grazing sheep. We started to fly the drone in that direction but the sheep began running away from the direction of noise. We switched directions of the flight immediately and showed them images of the pasture, the surrounding mountains, and of themselves, on the drone controller. It was interesting to see even the smallest child was looking at both the flying drone and stream on our phone, seemingly able to make the connection between the two. It was a really fun and fulfilling evening with new firsts for us all. A drone flight for them and yak cheese for me :)

The author flying Arva and showing mmembers of the community an aerial view of their campsite.

Once we returned to the homestay, we sat on the carpet in the dining room and ate dinner while making silly jokes. Before bed, we all watched a few episodes of Avatar: The Last Airbender, and when I finally went to bed, my last thought was that this wasn’t too shabby a workday!

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.

A day in the field: Chilling Tso and Ryul Tso (Ladakh Lakes #4)

On the morning of August 28, we left beautiful Korzok (by the banks of Tso Moriri) to survey Ryul Tso and Chilling Tso, the two most remote - and highest of the high-altitude lakes - that we had chosen to map using our underwater and aerial robots. These lakes are located to the east of Karzok and Tso Moriri and are separated from the lake only by a massif adorned by the peaks of Chamser Kangri, Lungser Kangri and Mentok Kangri. The weather over the last couple of days in Karzok had been largely kind, with bouts of light rainfall and gentle winds. Across the lake, however, angry-looking rainclouds had hung heavy over the Chamser, Lungser and Mentok peaks. Our (second) excellent driver and guide, Thopten, was constantly looking across at the clouds with not quite his usual smile, telling us that the bad weather was where we were headed, and expressing his doubts about the likelihood of us reaching the lakes without any trouble.

Dark clouds across Tso Moriri on the evening of 27th August.

Our plan for August 28 was to head north from Karzok and drop off our bags at the monastery at Mahe, where Thopten had kindly asked his friends (the monks) to allow us to stay for a couple of nights, and who had, even more kindly, agreed. From Mahe, we would then head south-east, towards the high-altitude rangelands of the Changthang plateau, where our twin lakes lay. We freshened up at the toilet complex outside the monastery at Mahe, had some tea offered by the monks, and decided to push to the lakes and prayed fervently to the powers that be, for good weather.

The drive to Mahe, on a road lying alongside the Indus, was beautiful, flanked as we were by purple-hued peaks that seemed to made of little more than dirt at times, with patterns that reminded us that this barren land of high passes was once seabed. Marmots ran across the landscape, lugging their bottoms that were weighed down by the fat they were accumulating for the looming winter. Herds of kiang grazed, occasionally regarding us with a glance but not really fazed by the presence of humans at a safe distance. The cherry on the cake, however, were the pair of black-necked cranes we saw on the Indus floodplain, wading for food in the marshy grasses, mere feet beyond the road shoulder!

A pair of black-necked cranes on the highway

Passing through hamlets with golden-hued barley fields, the road eventually turned into a dirt track and then just flattened gravel. We paused briefly while a truck, carrying rations to the army camps up ahead, was repaired and then we went up into seemingly pristine hills without any permanent human habitation; and only the occasional military green tent to remind us that we were not the first to venture here. Up, up and into the widest expanse of land I have ever seen. At an an altitude of about 5000 m, we were flanked by towering peaks that appeared flattened by the distance they were at. Ryul Tso spread out before us, its expanse not visible at first because of the complete lack of any gradient in the land. White tents of the pastoral nomads dotted the landscape, mostly Changpas who had been camping at these lands for about three weeks now - pasturing their herds of prized pashmina goat and sheep.

Herds of pashmina goat and sheep on the shores of Ryul Tso

We stopped a while from Ryul Tso. It was afternoon by now and the weather at  these altitudes is extremely unpredictable - we had to work fast. We surveyed the lake rapidly - the drone held up well under the able remote-piloting of Shashank, in spite of the high winds and the rarefied air. Tired, we trudged back to the car to carry on to Chilling Tso, which was still a half hour's ride away. Thopten surprised us all when we got to the car - he had arranged for refreshments. Tashi, a Changpa lady, invited us into her tent - where she served us Maggi, tea, fresh Pashmina butter and curd.

The view from Tashi’s tent

I am not a foodie, and I seldom relish a meal - but this assortment of fresh and fragrant rarities, and the kindness of our hosts who laboured in the harshest of worlds for their food, yet were willing to share it at the slightest sign of need - this will stay with me. Reinvigorated, we headed back into the car and south across the rangelands towards Chilling Tso for another set of rapid surveys.

Chilling Tso

The weather was becoming increasingly chilly, so we wrapped up work quickly and left for base. We made it back to the monastery in time for a hot meal at the gompa kitchen, and a hastily put-together serradura in a condensed milk tin with a matchstick as a candle to mark the end of our expedition and incidentally, the birthday of our expedition leader and my companion on many a mountain now, our beloved Shanks!

The author holding The World's Best Puppy in Mahe Gompa.