Research

2020

Since at least 2012, tech firms have consistently topped the list of companies in terms of market capitalisation, indicating the enormous financial power that the business of data wields. At the same time, governments around the world – including in South Asia – have been harvesting their citizens’ personal data and perfecting methods of…

2020

Four centuries after the East India Company set the trend for corporate resource extraction, most of the world is now in the grip of unbridled corporate power. But corporate power is on the cusp of achieving ‘quantum supremacy’ that social movements in the digital age need to understand in order to shift gears in their struggles. The quantum…

2020

Anonymisation of data is neither a corollary of privacy protection nor is it an oxymoron to the idea of privacy. Instead, it is more likely a gateway to a possible privacy breach which has not been addressed in the government’s Personal Data Protection Bill, 2019 .

The Bill which is heralded as a much-needed safeguard to rein in the…

2020

This policy brief deals with the principles and framework to govern aggregate non-personal data as 'common pool resources'. Such an intervention is necessary in view of the large dividends acquired through the use of such data, the widespread de facto collection of data and its potential as a raw material for the development of Artificial…

2020

The following is our submission to the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology on the Draft Amendment to the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines) Rules 2018 with special reference to gender-based cyberviolence against women

Even as the digital sphere has emerged as a site for new forms of community building, online…

2020

The Srikrishna Committee report on data protection (2018) is based on the fundamental belief that a legal framework for the protection of personal data is imperative for empowerment, progress and innovation in the 21st century.

In the words of Justice Chandrachud in Justice KS Puttaswamy (Retd.) vs Union of India (2017), the “(f)…

2020

During a global discussion led by Brazil in 2014, India maintained that the internet is not merely an open, free, global commons that should remain untouched by major governmental control, but also a resource that needs to reflect the values of an ‘Equinet’ – a platform for commerce, e-governance, national security mechanism, to be achieved…

2019

The percentage enrolment of children in government schools overall, is declining every year and that of private schools increasing, as the statistics collected by the Government of India indicate. ‘Private’ has become a buzzword for ‘quality education’, or at least to making a claim to be better than ‘government’.

 

Privatisation of…
2019

Digital technologies have generated unprecedented ways of being and doing, dramatically changing the social and economic order. Recoding human subjectivity and social interactions, they recast power relationships. Gender relations are centrally implicated in this shift to a networked sociality where the online and offline must be understood as…

2019

This is the report of an exploratory field research on the machinations of gender-based cyber violence, carried out in 2 locations in the state of Karnataka between October 2018 to January 2019 {as part of our Righting Gender Wrongs Project}. It captures the experiences of 335 women in the state of Karnataka and presents an in-depth account of…