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% higher than the last year.
Traders in physical retail must now reckon with the rather disconcerting reality of e-commerce. The press note issued by…
Reorienting "data for development"
"Data for development" enjoys high currency in global policy circles. It has come to stand for the idea that developing countries need to acquire the capacity to produce "quality, accessible, timely and reliable disaggregated data" and use the promise of big data to…
On December 20, 2018, the Union Ministry of Home Affairs issued an order authorizing ten central agencies to intercept, monitor and decrypt any information generated from any computer, drawing legitimacy from the Information Technology Act (2000) and associated rules. It is not clear if the order intends to be an executive fiat for blanket…
We need to move towards a new legal framework for surveillance
Over the past decade, we have been witness to many legal, juridical and executive interventions that comprise the highly contentious terrain of surveillance in digital times — from the amendment to Section 69 of the IT Act in 2008 that expanded the government’s powers of…
The digital paradigm with its arsenal of technologies promises to solve the most pressing social and economic challenges of our time. Breakthroughs in technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, the Internet of Things, block chain, and other developments are being heralded as possible solutions for a diverse range of problems. Yet technology-…
For long, Internet activists considered the Internet as being beyond law, politics and governments. J.P. Barlow made the famous Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace in 1996. It was fine when this phenomenon was just shaping up and challenging established institutions. But with the Internet and data becoming central to new social and…
The recent proposal of the Karnataka government to open English medium sections in 1,000 primary schools has attracted criticism. Primary Education Minister N Mahesh has highlighted the step as a response to declining enrolment in government schools. Parents prefer private schools because they offer instruction in the English medium. Several…
The gagging of free speech and its direct fallout in the form of self-censorship are slowly but steadily moving from being exceptions to becoming the norm in India. Proof of this downward spiral has been the recent backlash following a tweet from IAS officer Shah Faesal of the Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) cadre. The tweet which seemed to…
The criminal legal system is built on a hierarchy of offences. This is evident from the punishment accorded to different crimes which range from the death penalty to a fine. Brutality of an act is one way in which offences are arranged. For instance, the National Crimes Records Bureau has created category of offences titled ‘violent crimes’…
Current trajectories of the network-data complex relying on corporate partnerships cast data and intelligence as purely market goods. Investment by state in public data architectures could show the way for new possibilities in this direction. Read more for Anita Gurumurthy's take on 'data for development partnerships'.
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