RECENT PUBLICATIONS
The Partition of British India in 1947 triggered a huge refugee crisis in India. In addition, low agricultural yields and high population growth fueled food insecurity. The memories of the Bengal Famine of 1943 were still fresh and the Indian Government aimed to prevent further famines. How did international cooperation and the collaborative development of new technologies power India's Green Revolution? What were the negative externalities? What lessons can be drawn from the experience, particularly in light of the global Coronavirus Pandemic?
Democratic governments need digital tools and personal data to combat the crisis, but too much sharing can be dangerous to individuals. How can they strike the right balance? We propose that the Covid19 crisis underscores the urgent need for a global digital rights framework that protects how the vast data collected during the pandemic will be employed by governments and corporations for years to come.
The coronavirus crisis puts our daily lives, our work, our social relations under pressure. It also undermines the idea of democracy and freedom: who would have thought that walking in the streets could become, overnight, prohibited, punishable by fine? In a matter of days, habits and beliefs that were once thought to be deeply ingrained were overturned. What does these radically changed circumstances hold for expectations of digital privacy in Europe today?
Are fake news and the misuse of personal data just unintended consequences of a new technology or the product of misguided business models? We argue that tech investors have an ethical imperative to head off potential harms to democracy early on. We focus on the case of Facebook and the road to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, proposing that early investors help construct internal governance systems that evolve with tech startups, guarding against ethical blunders.
Built from the ground up by three thousand Sikh and Hindu refugees in the aftermath of the Partition of India in 1947, the town of Nilokheri in East Punjab emerged as an unlikely centre of agricultural education and scientific exchange. With support from the Ford Foundation, Indian and American scientists and development planners worked through the 1950s to transform the refugee township into a model of technological innovation and community development.
Through the 1950s in South Asia, development experts associated with American philanthropic organizations and new international agencies took an active role in transforming the divided Punjab. Following partition in 1947, World Bank worked to adjudicate the Indus River Basin dispute between India and Pakistan over the division of the region’s hydrological and agricultural resources, using technological investment as an incentive for cooperation.