Nandini Chami

2021

The Draft Data Accessibility and Use Policy is silent on the norms, rules, and mechanisms to bring to fruition its vision.

In February 2022, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MEITY) released the draft India Data Accessibility and Use Policy 2022 (or Draft Policy) for public consultation. The Draft Policy aims at…

2021

A global market in menstrual apps illustrates a new datafied regime of governmentality that erodes personal autonomy. Emphasizing that bodily sovereignty is integral to data sovereignty, feminist intervention has sought to tackle such violations of personhood by putting bodies back into data governance debates. The 24th working paper of the…

2021

This study, conducted in partnership with DAWN, seeks to undertake a feminist political economy exploration of data policies and practices through close analysis of the erosion of privacy and data autonomy in the menstrual apps market. It looks to examine how self data-tracking practices shape data subjectivity, as well as the policy aspects of…

2021

Karnataka’s Open Data Policy opens up a Pandora’s box of concerns for public interest and citizen rights

Last week, the Government of Karnataka (GoK) notified its Open Data Policy (ODP) to open up government-held personal and non-personal datasets for “innovation, co-creation and research”. The government’s logic fits very much into the…
2021

Parminder Jeet Singh, Anita Gurumurthy, and Nandini Chami contributed a chapter on Open Institutions and Their “Relevant Publics”: A Democratic Alternative to Neoliberal Openness to the book Critical Perspectives on Open Development: Empirical Interrogation of Theory Construction, published by IDRC.

Over the last ten years, “open”…

2020

A steady stream of public commentary is flowing in about the implications of the draft Rules on Social Security Code, 2020, and the Motor Vehicle Aggregators Guidelines, 2020, for the rights of platform workers. We interrogate these developments from a data rights standpoint. The draft Rules on Social Security Code, 2020, propose the creation…

2020

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,…

2020

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…

2020

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…

2019

This is the second issue paper, co-written by Anita Gurumurthy and Nandini Chami, for Feminist Digital Justice -- a collaborative research and advocacy initiative of IT for Change and DAWN (Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era).

In trade policy corridors, an e­-commerce agenda for women’s empowerment has been rapidly gaining…