Kerala's Chief Minister Put a Webcam in His Own Office

What was Oommen Chandy's webcam experiment?

Little Brother is watching you — or rather, the other way around.

Soon after becoming chief minister of Kerala in 2011, Oommen Chandy had webcams installed in his office and chamber and put the live feed on the chief minister's website, viewable by anyone, round the clock. The gesture was meant as an anticorruption experiment: nothing to hide, everything visible. The New York Times covered the initiative in July 2011, framing it as a stand against a culture where kickback scandals touched the highest reaches of government and petty bribes at police stations and motor vehicle departments were widely treated as a matter of course.

Was it substance or tokenism?

Critics, including the Centre for Internet and Society's Sunil Abraham, called the move tokenism — bribes, after all, can be arranged outside any office. But Abraham added that even tokenism of this kind was useful: it might check the behavior of not just the chief minister but his underlings and the powerful executives and politicians who came to visit him. Chandy himself put it plainly: "Instead of taking action against corruption, I believe that we have to create an atmosphere where everything should be in a transparent way. The people must know everything."

The experiment did not become the template its advocates wanted. Abraham suggested webcams would be far more powerful in police stations, licensing offices, and welfare agencies — the places where ordinary citizens actually meet officials who sometimes demand bribes for routine work. And in May 2016, when Pinarayi Vijayan succeeded Chandy as chief minister, the cameras came down from the Chief Minister's Office.

Chandy's webcam now reads as a product of a particular moment — the pre-Anna-Hazare summer of 2011, when Indian anticorruption sentiment was cresting and symbolic gestures carried real political currency. It was theater, yes. But in a country where public servants were rarely this eager to be watched, the theater had a point.