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…
Since at least 2012, tech firms have consistently topped the list of companies in terms of market capitalisation, indicating the enormous financial power that the business of data wields. At the same time, governments around the world – including in South Asia – have been harvesting their citizens’ personal data and perfecting methods of…
Four centuries after the East India Company set the trend for corporate resource extraction, most of the world is now in the grip of unbridled corporate power. But corporate power is on the cusp of achieving ‘quantum supremacy’ that social movements in the digital age need to understand in order to shift gears in their struggles. The quantum…
This report aims to investigate the current gaps in protection suffered by users of the platform economy in Europe and to propose legal solutions. The research particularly focuses on the inequalities (understood as information asymmetries affecting the weak party) and unfair practices experienced by end-users (consumers) and providers (workers…
This paper, 'Digital Industrialisation in Developing Countries: A Review of the Business and Policy Landscape', developed for the Commonwealth Secretariat, London, examines, the nature of digital economy in a developing country context, focussing the study partly on Bengaluru, often called the Silicon Valley of the South. It distinguishes…
Parminder Jeet Singh was invited by the Centre for Policy Studies, IIT Bombay to deliver a talk on 'Digital Data - The New Raw Material in the Globalising Economy' as part of the Development Discourse Series. In the talk, Parminder unpacks data collection, use, and regulation from a political economy perspective; and also delves into the…