Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, the banking world witnessed a huge surge in transactions, one such payment infrastructure was AePS in India. Many providers and government DBT schemes resorted to AePS which led to a huge demand for cash withdrawal by the vulnerable part of the society. This became a much severe issue during the migrant worker's crisis who had to uproot their lives and depend on microATMs for their travel and survival. The issue got accentuated when reports of a spike in transaction failure rates started flooding in. This had serious consequences for the masses who desperately needed to access and remit cash to stay afloat during the crisis. In this episode, we are joined by Malavika Raghavan to talk about the role of technology in enabling financial inclusion, especially among lower-income individuals. 

Malavika joined London School of Economics this September as a Ph.D. candidate. She is an interdisciplinary researcher working on data protection & privacy, inclusion, technology and consumer protection in finance. She founded and led the Future of Finance Initiative for Dvara Research in partnership with the Gates Foundation from 2016 until 2020, anchoring its research agenda and policy advocacy on issues at the intersection of technology, finance and inclusion. She serves on the Steering Committees of the Digital Identity Research Initiative (DIRI) at the Indian School of Business, and the Steering Committee of the Data Governance Network at the IDFC Institute. She is a member of the Asian Privacy Scholars Network.

In this episode, we discuss the role of technology in enabling financial inclusion, especially among lower-income individuals. The discussion draws on Malavika's research into the gaps in the AePS and their implications (conducted in May 2020). You can find the link to the report titled, "Transaction failure rates in the Aadhaar enabled Payment System: Urgent issues for consideration and proposed solutions", below:

The current era of our datafied society is still grappling with the effects of its first pandemic. In a race to represent it, our efforts to manage and report the crisis seem to be a numbers game for the most part. This data-driven approach by governments and public discourse has silenced many untold stories from the margins. To explore the pandemic from the perspective of individuals and communities at the margins in the Global South(s), we have with us Silvia Masiero and Soumyo Das.

Silvia is an Associate Professor in the Department of Informatics at the University of Oslo and one of the editors of the book 'Covid-19 from the Margins'. Her research is in the area of ICT4D and is currently working with Health Information Systems Programme (HISP). She is the Secretary of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) 9.4 Working Group on the Social Implications of Computers in Developing Countries, a member of the Association for Information Systems (AIS), and a member of the UNESCO Chair in ICT4D.

Soumyo is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Management at Emlyon Business School, France. He is also an alumnus of M.Sc. by Research in Information & Society program of IIIT Bangalore. Soumyo authored a chapter in the book which delves deep into the issues raised due to technological interventions like Aarogya Setu in pandemic management particularly in a society like India.

Link for the book: https://networkcultures.org/blog/publication/covid-19-from-the-margins-pandemic-invisibilities-policies-and-resistance-in-the-datafied-society/

Link for the blog: https://data-activism.net/blog-covid-19-from-the-margins/

After a short break, we are back with season 2 of the podcast! This season will be a mini-series of 5 episodes focused on Covid-19 where we bring to you engaging critical discussions on the many ways digital technologies have shaped our lives during the pandemic. We will be joined by experts in economics, law, public policy, and public health to reflect on the role that technology has played during Covid-19, all of the success stories, cautionary tales, episodes of breakdown - we will talk through them.

IIIT Bangalore's flexible and holistic curriculum ensures engineering students of the integrated MTech program take up courses from the fields of economics, sociology, web sciences, HCI and so on. This enables students with critical thinking skills and sensitivity to various aspects of technology development. So far in the past episodes, we discussed a few of these aspects with faculty members but as season one comes to an end we wanted to capture the experience of the students who took some of these courses. We have 4 iMTech students across various batches: Aditya Gulati (2016-21), Nithin Raj (2017-22), Aarushi Goenka (2018-23) and Neetha Reddy (2018-23) who share their stories and perspectives over the integration of Humanities and Social Studies (HSS)/Digital Society courses with core engineering curriculum.

Over the past year, digital technologies were rapidly designed and developed or adapted for various healthcare needs. This could be a contact tracing system, or vaccination portals, online consulting, and so on. What does it take to build such digital platforms and technological systems for healthcare needs? To discuss this, we are joined by Prof. T.K. Srikanth, who heads the E-Health Research Centre at IIIT Bangalore. We specifically talk to him about the Centre’s work on mental health in the public healthcare system. To learn more about the E-Health Research Centre, visit the website given below.

E-Health Research Center: https://ehrc.iiitb.ac.in/

As the world wide web evolved over the years from a few pages to search engines, e-commerce sites, wikis, and social media platforms, how has it impacted us, humans? We talk about this in detail with Prof. Srinath Srinivasa, who offers an interesting course called the web and the mind that traces the evolution of the web and how it influences our lives. Prof. Srinath is the Dean of Research and Development at IIIT Bangalore and heads IIITB’s Web Science lab which strives to understand the impact of the web on different facets of human life. You can learn more about the lab and his work from the link below:

When millions of Indians access their food entitlements each month through the Public Distribution System - the largest food distribution network in the world, their access is mediated through a biometrics-based authentication system. How do beneficiaries of PDS navigate these biometrics-based systems to access their food entitlements? What tensions have the biometrics devices caused among dealers who run the PDS fair price shops? In this episode, we discuss these aspects and more with Prof. Preeti Mudliar drawing on her extensive work on the use of Aadhaar in India’s Public Distribution System.

To know more about Prof. Preeti Mudliar's work discussed in the podcast, please follow the links below:

In this episode of Technology Together, we turn to design researcher and visiting faculty member at IIIT Bangalore, Dr. Linus Kendall, who is an expert in participatory approaches to design. We explore the lesser-known side of Digital Design, one which engages with users and encourages designing with them than for them. We also discuss Dr. Kendall's research with farmers in Bengal, his course on Human Computer Interaction and much more!

On this episode of ‘Technology, Together’ we have with us 2 guests, Dr. Balaji Parthasarathy and Pradyumna Taduri, who have worked extensively on deconstructing the platform economy in general and the state of platform labour within the Indian context. Drawing on their experiences in the Fair Work project, they discuss some of the ground realities surrounding platform work, the fundamental principles of fairness that they use to assess platform work, and what this could mean for all the actors involved in the long run.