As part of the ‘Re-wiring India’s Digitalising Economy for Women’s Rights and Well-being' project, we invited proposals for the second edition of the National Gender Fellowship. Facilitated by the European Commission and Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, the fellowship supports early-career scholars, researchers, and practitioners, in the development of research studies that explore the multifaceted relationship between digital economy, gender, and inclusion in India, focusing on women’s experiences.
Research Outputs from the National Gender Fellowship 2024
Our diverse and interdisciplinary network of 10 fellows is working towards the shared goal of building evidence-based research that can inform policies and practices promoting gender equality in the digital age.
1. Women in Healthcare: ASHA Workers and Digital Transformation in Kashmir
Sadaf Masoodi
In India, frontline health workers–ASHAs (Accredited Social Health Activists) are central to delivering basic health facilities. This paper provides a critical look into the workings of ASHAs in Kashmir, showing them at an intersection of militarization, state surveillance, societal policing, digital exploitation,and gendered labor.
The study aims to shed light on the conditions of ASHA workers from Kashmir valley as co-creators of knowledge, through participatory methodology rooted in feminist and decolonial thought–challenging extractive approaches to research. The interviews reveal how communication blackouts, mobility restrictions, and digital attendance mechanisms intensify the precarity
of these workers while simultaneously invisiblizing their embodied labor.
The paper contributes to the feminist digital labor scholarship by foregrounding the intersection of militarization, gender, and technology. It also lays a path for rethinking digital health policies through frameworks that include complex realities of conflicted regions like Kashmir.
Read the full paper here.
2. Ghost in the Machine: Gender, Human Mediation, and Power in India’s Domestic Work Platforms
Salonie Muralidhara Hiriyur
The platformization of domestic work represents a unique phenomenon shaped by the feminization of care, household-based labor, intimate employment relationships, and the digital gender divide. However, emerging platform scholarship has focused predominantly on masculinized sectors such as ride-hailing and delivery, under-theorizing care work and its
distinct dynamics.
Addressing this gap, this paper draws on empirical evidence from India's platformized domestic work sector to theorize how mediation reshapes workers' employment experiences. The findings challenge dominant platform disintermediation narratives by documenting the persistence of human agents within digital infrastructures and analyzing their influence on workers' employment access and arrangements.
Through qualitative research grounded in Fraser's social justice framework, the paper foregrounds women workers' lived experiences and standpoints to substantiate these claims. In doing so, the paper advocates for feminist analytical approaches within platform studies.
Read the full paper here.
The ethnic conflict that began on 3 May 2023 turned Lamka, a Kuki-Zomi hill town in Manipur, India, into a laboratory of enforced disconnection. Internet shutdowns, damaged power lines, and blocked trade routes rewrote everyday life in a landscape already marked by hill–valley inequality and longstanding state neglect. This study examines how digital and energy blackouts, framed as security measures, converge to disrupt livelihoods, relief networks, and disproportionately endanger women. Drawing on in-depth interviews with micro-enterprise owners, workers, and humanitarian actors, supported by extensive secondary reading on digital exclusion and conflict-zone governance, the study traces how shutdowns reshaped markets, relief camps, and emergent sites such as makeshift internet“cafés” in Internet Service Provider (ISPs) homes and hilltops where residents went to “fetch” network.
Findings reveal that the promises of Digital India and Digital North East 2022 rested on infrastructures built unevenly and withdrawn selectively. Women who sustained small businesses and relief efforts lost income, coordination channels, and protective community ties overnight. Even when connectivity did return, it did without safeguards as videos of sexual violence against Kuki-Zomi women circulated across platforms. Lamka’s digitally dark zone emerges as a structural, gendered violence: a mode of rule in which electricity and connectivity turn on ethnicity, geography, and power, and in which a woman’s ability to connect becomes inseparable from her ability to work, remain safe, and assert dignity.
Read the full paper here.
4. Trans Women’s Digital Visibility in Kerala: Economic Opportunities, Precarity, and Resilience
Aida Thenu
In a state known for its high digital literacy and equally entrenched social conservatism, trans women from Kerala find in the digital space both opportunities and challenges. They create content that ranges from day-in-my-life vlogs, beauty tutorials, reaction videos, to personal stories and social commentary, reaching wide audiences and often creating niche followings. However, their visibility online also comes with risks, as trolling, burnout, platform-based restrictions, and economic instability are a constant reality. Based on interviews with trans women content creators and an analysis of their public online content, this study documents how digital platforms are reshaping what it means to be seen, heard, and economically self-reliant for gender-diverse individuals. It highlights both the practical strategies and emotional labor involved in being a content creator while navigating societal prejudice and platform algorithms.
The study uses a case-based, qualitative approach and reflects on the participants’ willingness, fatigue, and even refusal to engage, treating these moments not as gaps, but as meaningful expressions of agency. Rather than treating these creators as passive subjects, the project recognizes them as active agents in shaping their own digital narratives. This project contributes to conversations on gender, technology, and online livelihoods by focusing on real-world experiences in a specific regional and cultural context. It invites greater attention to how digital platforms, tools, and technologies are being used not only to survive but to thrive, even in the face of systemic exclusion. At a time when digital media plays a central role in public life, understanding how marginalized voices engage with social media platforms is essential for creating more inclusive and equitable digital futures.
Read the full paper here.
Srishti Gulati
This paper focuses on the lived experiences of women with disabilities, particularly visual impairment, from Delhi, India. Using the lens of critical disability studies and critical technology studies, it highlights how technology and gender intersect in intricate ways in a rapidly developing economy like India, where deep-seated structural disparities exist along the axes of other socio-economic determinants such as caste, class, or language.
Insights derived from qualitative data reveal that although cultural attitudes towards disability are largely exclusionary and patriarchal, they govern the negotiations with workplace bias and digital ableism for the most part; community-based movements often challenge technoableist norms, wherein positive gender inclusion becomes possible through mutual care and sharing of technical knowledge among the community members. The problem of ableist digital public infrastructure remains overshadowed by the dominant narrative of the digitalizing nation. As a solution, the development of a robust framework of inclusive digital policy architecture is recommended, involving local grassroots organizations, followed by strong regulatory mechanisms and enforcement.
Read the full paper here.
To read papers published under the first edition of the National Gender Fellowship, head here.