Amrita Vasudevan

In this article published in the Economic & Political Weekly (12 January 2019), Amrita Vasudevan revisits current debates on the liability of internet intermediaries in India, in the context of violence against women online. 

Read the paper here.

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’…

First published in LSE’s Women Peace and Security blog, this article discusses the need for a feminist jurisprudence on violence against women. Laws on online VAW draw from foundational ideas that have informed interpretations of gender-based (in) justice, recognizing the immersion of human society in digital experiences. There is a presence of…

At MC 11, the United States, Japan and European Union are actively pushing for a liberalised e-commerce regime that will reinforce the rules for trade set by the global North. Key to this dominant discourse is the persuasive rhetoric on free cross-border data flows as a means for smaller players to…

IT for Change was invited by the Global Alliance on Media and Gender (GAMAG) to develop a position paper on ‘A feminist perspective on gender media and communication rights in digital times’ for the 62nd session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW 62). The theme for CSW62 is ‘Participation in and access of women to the media, and…

Data protection in India is a fragile concept, heavily reliant on one sided user contracts between corporations and citizens. Read our article on First Post, to know more about how corporation defined 'Terms of Use' have come to dictate users' right to privacy in the glaring absence of legislative protections around data.

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Privacy is no longer just about non-interference from the State but an urgent imperative in the age of digital where citizen data protection is vulnerable to incomplete legal safeguards. Read more on this in our take on the Aadhaar Act in First Post.

This position paper looks at the issue of intermediary filtering in the context of two Supreme Court cases. The first was a petition filed by activist Sabu Matthew George in 2008, asking for a ban on advertisements on search engines related to pre-natal sex determination. The second case was a suo-moto PIL taken up by the…

Nandini Chami and Amrita Vasudevan

The theme for this year’s High-Level Political Forum is “Eradicating poverty and promoting prosperity in a changing world”. And surely, the HLPF cannot chart out an effective programme of action, without accounting for the shifts stemming from pervasive digitalisation and datafication of key domains of…