Digital Democracy in India

The United States’ blacklisting of the Chinese company Huawei — since reversed — represents an important milestone as the world splits digitally around its two digital superpowers, the US and China. Last year, the US disallowed Alibaba’s takeover of Moneygram and later embargoed US supplies to the mobile company ZTE. Amazon and Google recently…

The Department of IT, Government of Rajasthan is developing a 'Jana Suchana' portal. The aim of this portal is to provide a 'panchayat' centric view to citizens, in which all the support agencies/departments information work/programs for the specified geography would be provided. This helps move the information system paradigm from MIS (…

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'.

This post was…

Gurumurthy wrote an article 'Use of Information Technology in promoting transparency' in elections, in the Common Cause publication.

'Digital Democracy in India' is our ongoing attempt to examine the emergence of a new governance paradigm in the country, characterized by the rise of ‘governance by networks’ and ‘rule by data’, from the standpoint of inclusive citizenship. We are primarily concerned with tracing critical directions for institutional overhaul, so that the…

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 article examines the new concerns for privacy emerging in the age of data-based governance, using the UID/Aadhaar scheme in India as a case in point.

IT for Change along with Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), Digital Empowerment Foundation, Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan and the National Campaign for People’s Right to Information (NCPRI) organized a workshop on "Democratic Accountability in the Digital Age", between November 14-15th 2016, in New Delhi.

The workshop was a great…

This paper examines and discuss these shifts in our contemporary democratic fabric by focusing on emerging technological practices in government. It explores key concerns, and articulates the gaps in current legal-policy measures necessary to promote participatory democracy in the digital age.