Technology

How India navigates the many competing forces and interests at play in the social media landscape will be critical in determining the future and health of its democracy.

A proof of identification is necessary for all individuals. But asking trangender persons to undergo medical certification as proof of existence violates their right to privacy.

In Japan, despite the hiking single elderly population, there is a chronic shortage of caregivers for home visit. As many single seniors struggle to find a conversation partner, what about interacting with a robot instead of a human? Recently, the United States introduced communication robots to minimise medical costs incurred from the elderly’s social isolation. What can the world learn from Japan?

At the end of March 2022, Shanghai was plunged into surreal silence, and scarcity. The country’s strictest Covid-19 pandemic lockdown lasted for two months. Never, since decades, had the people minded their three meals that much, to the extent of becoming the only thing they cared about. In their struggles for self-sufficiency and survival, group buying came to rescue. Did dwellers find a new sense of community or were they more fragmented?

Change is all around us; experiencing it can be exciting or worrisome, confusing or even disturbing. By contrast, the idea of “transition” stands to provide a sense of direction, in a sea of change and insecurity. Change may be happening to us; a transition has direction, it can be planned, perhaps even be initiated. It moves into a positive, sustainable direction – or so we hope. The equivalent German term “Wende” and its numerous composite terms play a prominent role in the programme of the German Green and in the international work of Heinrich Böll Stiftung (hbs).

Reclaiming our data bodies from the matrix of capital requires us to move beyond a narrow focus on the protection of sensitive personal data towards a feminist data sovereignty approach

Sagari Ramdas shows how agribusiness use big tech and big data to fulfil their ‘sustainability goals’ from indigenous Adivasi farmers of Andhra Pradesh, India. It turns out to be a case of exploitation in the name of sustainability.

This article explores how State (data) systems in India are designed to surveil upon and certify the humanness of every transgender person in order to access their basic human rights. The intent is to understand the extent of this need to categorise and qualify human bodies within the binary genders and consequent the struggles and violations experienced by transgender persons, both online and offline.

Over the past few years, there has been a drive towards the digitisation of healthcare in India. Though policy frameworks have begun taking cognizance of this increasing datafication of health, they are responding to it within frameworks, which incentivise further datafication by considering health data to be a commodity. Recognising the intimate interconnections between our bodies and data through a feminist lens, an analysis of the health datafication in India through emerging developments under the National Digital Health Mission (NDHM) ecosystem is done, with a focus on private health insurance companies, and the implications for the bodies and rights of patients.

The need for cross-border data sharing throughout the Covid-19 pandemic has shown that the future of multilateral threat management will hinge on steady yet flexible open-data publishing norms and multilateral data-transfer agreements. In many ways, India typifies the perspectives and needs of emerging economies related to data sharing, data flows, and related commercial regulation.

For nearly a decade, India has been deploying various iterations of its ambitious broadband expansion plan, looking to bring those in the country’s remotest areas online. While private sector expansion and proliferation of cheap smartphones gave it a boost, the recent double whammy of the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic and escalating territorial tensions with key trade partner China has put a spanner in the works of the project that has already suffered several delays. Updates to the project now must consider alternative sources of equipment, while ensuring that those at the margins don’t miss the digital bus.