Research

2020

IT for Change is engaged in a project that addresses gender-based hate speech in the online public sphere. Supported by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Canada, the project responds to the current reality in India where women are not only speaking up against patriarchy, but also claiming public-political space despite…

2020

The advent of a digital society is fundamentally transforming our social and economic relationships. The nature of the dominant model of digital society means that global digital corporations – based in the US, and some in China – are dictating the terms and shaping the global socio-economic architecture for the new digital era, with very…

2020

The tourism industry across the world is staring at bleak prospects in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. In India, the sector is staring at a potential loss of Rs 1.25 trillion over the next two quarters while 38 million jobs stand in grave danger in the coming months.

In 2019, we undertook a study, with support from Bread for the World…

2020

On March 24, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology issued an advisory to States, asking them to treat e-commerce as an essential service. A few days before, industry body CII had urged the Centre to exempt e-commerce (delivery and shipment) from Covid-19 preventive measures. Being listed as an…

2020

In October and November 2018, during the Great Indian Festival season in India, online retail giants — Amazon, Flipkart and Paytm Mall — sold goods worth $4.3 billion (Rs 29,947 crore), 43 percent higher than the last year.

Traders in physical retail must now reckon with the rather disconcerting reality of e-commerce. The press note…

2020

Statement of the APRCEM S&T Constituency on COVID-19.

The world is presently facing a global health pandemic as many countries battle the widespread transmission of COVID-19 that has already cost the lives of almost 42,000 and afflicted nearly 858,000 people. The healthcare community across nations is engaged in desperate attempts to…

2020

How are booking platforms changing  the global tourism industry and the tourism value chain? Who are the big winners in the platformization of the Indian tourism industry and who is missing out? Does the integration of local tourism businesses into digital booking platforms democratise and  balance economic power structures by allowing for a…

2020

IT for Change's Nandini Chami appeared on BBC Newshour on the 31st birthday of the World Wide Web to talk about the scale of online gender-based violence and the ways in which the web seems to be failing women and girls. The highlights of the discussion were as follows:

As IT for Change's previous research has already demonstrated, women…
2020

The human body is asserting itself more than as a performative spectacle on the streets. From Hong Kong to India, Catalonia, Lebonan, Chile and many more, the body is a signifier of bio-power and hope, defeating surveillance, courting arrest and deliberately seeking the system’s panoptic gaze.

The proliferation of protests suggests a…

2020

The glass is half full.

Voices of resistance to power are everywhere. Students and young people are taking to the streets; women are infiltrating public discourse; and the unlikely activist is joining popular uprisings. Social movements are rejecting tokenism and ‘woke-washing’ from corporations, demanding that governments deal with the…