Media articles

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…

As employment in India bounces back from the Covid lockdown, platform-mediated work is expected to come into its own. Indian legislation must take the right steps to protect the status and labour rights of gig workers in these changing times, while unions also need to bring these new workers into the fold.

Under the Covid-19 lockdown,…

Disasters are gendered. They play out differently for men, women, and gender non-conforming people. So also the COVID-19 pandemic. In the domestic-private spaces, an incredulous increase in levels of violence against women during these weeks, a “shadow pandemic” — as the UN Under-Secretary-General referred to it — has laid bare the patriarchal…

Recently, governments in France and Australia have introduced measure to make news aggregators such as Google pay for re-use of news. The move will benefit news publishers struggling to navigate the platform-mediated digital era. While the competition regulator in France has effectively pushed Google into negotiating a remuneration deal with…

On March 24, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology issued an advisory to States, asking them to treat e-commerce as an essential service. A few days before, industry body CII had urged the Centre to exempt e-commerce (delivery and shipment) from Covid-19 preventive measures. Being listed as an…

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 percent higher than the last year.

Traders in physical retail must now reckon with the rather disconcerting reality of e-commerce. The press note…

How are booking platforms changing  the global tourism industry and the tourism value chain? Who are the big winners in the platformization of the Indian tourism industry and who is missing out? Does the integration of local tourism businesses into digital booking platforms democratise and  balance economic power structures by allowing for a…

IT for Change's Nandini Chami appeared on BBC Newshour on the 31st birthday of the World Wide Web to talk about the scale of online gender-based violence and the ways in which the web seems to be failing women and girls. The highlights of the discussion were as follows:

The human body is asserting itself more than as a performative spectacle on the streets. From Hong Kong to India, Catalonia, Lebonan, Chile and many more, the body is a signifier of bio-power and hope, defeating surveillance, courting arrest and deliberately seeking the system’s panoptic gaze.

The proliferation of protests suggests a…

The glass is half full.

Voices of resistance to power are everywhere. Students and young people are taking to the streets; women are infiltrating public discourse; and the unlikely activist is joining popular uprisings. Social movements are rejecting tokenism and ‘woke-washing’ from corporations, demanding that governments deal with the…