Anita Gurumurthy

2022

Through this policy brief, our colleagues ask us to think beyond the current exploitative digital paradigm & re-imagine the rules of development, distribution, & use of tech, based on a feminist social contract grounded in human rights, social justice, & gender equality.

We're thrilled that this document was included in the…

2022

The 23rd working paperfor Data Governance Network by Anita Gurumurthy and Nandini Chami presents the building blocks of an economic governance regime for data that can contribute to the growth of the digital economy by unlocking the potential of data. The de facto enclosure of data by platform monopolies not only creates a skewed market place…

2022

India’s Budget 2022 presents digital infrastructure as key to economic recovery for the pandemic-hit economy. Several proposals suggest the ambition for digital resilience: Universal last-mile broadband connectivity, DESH-Stack e-portal for digital enskillment and jobs, delivery of hi-tech services to farmers, and digitalied backbones for…

2021

Anita Gurumurthy, Khawla Zainab, and Sadhana Sanjay conducted a study of Indian women workers on Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) in the post-pandemic moment, and this research report extensively lays out its rationale, process, and findings. Through a qualitative study based on interviews with AMT workers, the report shows how an intertwining of…

2021

This policy brief takes stock of the current multilateral approaches to new 'Digital Public Goods' (DPGs), and provides critical reflections, chalking out some future directions for global and national-level actions, in line with the vision of inclusive development in Agenda 2030.

We wrote this as a science-policy brief on emerging…

2021

The Draft Data Accessibility and Use Policy is silent on the norms, rules, and mechanisms to bring to fruition its vision.

In February 2022, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MEITY) released the draft India Data Accessibility and Use Policy 2022 (or Draft Policy) for public consultation. The Draft Policy aims at…

2021

A global market in menstrual apps illustrates a new datafied regime of governmentality that erodes personal autonomy. Emphasizing that bodily sovereignty is integral to data sovereignty, feminist intervention has sought to tackle such violations of personhood by putting bodies back into data governance debates. The 24th working paper of the…

2021

Karnataka’s Open Data Policy opens up a Pandora’s box of concerns for public interest and citizen rights

Last week, the Government of Karnataka (GoK) notified its Open Data Policy (ODP) to open up government-held personal and non-personal datasets for “innovation, co-creation and research”. The government’s logic fits very much into the…
2021

The new Intermediary Guidelines (IL Guidelines), require messaging platforms that have over 50 lakh registered users (such as WhatsApp) “enable the identification of the first originator of the information”.

The challenge from WhatsApp is that this impinges on an individual’s constitutional right to privacy and is therefore…

2021

Parminder Jeet Singh, Anita Gurumurthy, and Nandini Chami contributed a chapter on Open Institutions and Their “Relevant Publics”: A Democratic Alternative to Neoliberal Openness to the book Critical Perspectives on Open Development: Empirical Interrogation of Theory Construction, published by IDRC.

Over the last ten years, “open”…