digital economy

2020

This paper examines the influence of digital platforms on Chinese workers across two booming on-demand service industries: ride-hailing and food-delivery. Though digital platforms have attracted considerable scholarly and legal attention in the past few years, this project is among one of the first to center on worker’s experience, and through…

2020

IT for Change contributed an input on gender and digital technology in the post-Covid moment to a report for the NITI Aayog, titled 'Covid-19: Impact on Women and Girls'. This report was prepared by a group of organizations working for gender equality and women's empowerment. The input is based on our ongoing project, ‘Centering Women in India'…

2020

Data is almost universally recognised as the most valuable economic resource today. Seven out of the top 10 companies globally by market capitalisation are data-centric. In these circumstances, it appears strange that there has hardly been any worthwhile attempt to look at who has economic rights to various kinds of data, and how these rights…

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…

2019

This is the first issue paper under the Feminist Digital Justice Project, co-written by Anita Gurumurthy, Nandini Chami and Cecilia Alemany. It outlines a strategic road map that focuses on new legal­ institutional frameworks and data governance models to counter data extractivism and women’s exploitation. It envisions alternative data­-based…

2019

This is the first issue paper, co-written by Anita Gurumurthy, Nandini Chami and Cecilia Alemany, for Feminist Digital Justice -- a collaborative research and advocacy initiative of IT for Change and DAWN (Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era).

Digital platform companies have emerged as neo­-feudal overlords profiting from a…

2019

Going by the chapter on data in the Economic Survey released on July 4, it seemed that the government’s new Budget would carry new thinking on the digital economy. If data of, for, and by, the people was going to be an important digital mantra, then the Budget had to build on this. However, the BJP government’s digital imaginary, read in the…