India’s digital public infrastructure (DPI) is growing in a way that reproduces social exclusions on an unprecedented scale, said Anita Gurumurthy, executive director of the Bengaluru-based non-profit organisation IT for Change, during a panel discussion on how digitalisation and technology have impacted Hyderabad and Bengaluru.
At the discussion ‘Tales of Two Cities and ICTs’ held during the 2025 Monsoon School on Digitalisation and Contested Modernities at the Human Sciences Research Centre, Indian Institutes of Information Technology (IIIT) Hyderabad, Anita said that while digital interventions in health, agriculture, finance, microfinance, or transport by powerful private entities are being seen as ‘public innovation’, “whether there is innovation, and whether it’s adequately public isn’t scrutinised enough”.
Anita, who leads research and advocacy on data and AI governance at IT for Change, said that citizens must reimagine digital democracies and the ways in which we claim digital spaces. She also spoke about how digital platforms are redefining the relationship between the State, the citizen, and people’s collective memories.
Another panelist, Ashhar Farhan, who is the co-founder of Lamakaan cultural centre, spoke about how exclusions in physical spaces are reproduced in access to digital technology. Speaking of the shrinking inclusive physical public spaces in the city for leisure, social interactions, cultural expression, and community engagement, he pointed out how offline and online policing and surveillance activities such as the infamous Operation Chabutra have targeted and eroded public spaces where young people could meet in the less affluent parts of the city.
In Hyderabad, policing of young men under ‘Operation Chabutra’ is turning violent.
Ashhar also spoke about how the surge in IT jobs in the city, together with gig platforms, has widened the gap between the majority of Hyderabad who form the ‘service sector’ for a minority, employed as their drivers, cooks, househelps, and delivery workers.
“If you look at areas such as Old City, Ashok Nagar, or Narayanguda, there is a stark difference in cost of living [compared to the IT corridor ]. There is an increasing economic polarisation of Hyderabad. In other thriving cities in the world, we see concerted effort to bridge that gap—the push for rent control in New York for example. But in Hyderabad, we pride ourselves over expensive real estate. People are worried when real estate prices, and effectively the cost of living, goes down,” he said.
Nazia Akhtar, assistant professor at IIT Hyderabad whose research involves the literary history of Hyderabad, talked about another aspect of collective memory and digitisation—the challenges in digitising people’s personal archives.
Nazia’s work on Hyderabadi Urdu women’s literature includes The Deccan Sun, a translation of Zeenath Sajida’s writings.
Zeenath Sajida, a forgotten Deccan icon, revisited through careful translation
“When I work on a writer’s oeuvre, I find their processes in their notebooks, places where they doodle, letters to friends where they complain that they couldn't put a certain metaphor together. This is why I am interested in the private papers of writers—things they scribble among grocery lists, backs of calendars, receipts, etc,” Nazia, who is building an online archive of such texts, said.
Often, families of deceased writers have huge volumes of unpublished writing, including diaries that they hope someone else can preserve and make accessible for researchers. “In such cases, digital technology appears to be a saviour. But there are questions of how much private details to put out, who can access these, what is our responsibility towards writers or their families, who may not be in a position to negotiate for themselves,” she said.
“A fourth generation relative of a writer had huge masses of her writing material, like travelogues, poetry, novels. But since the family doesn’t read or speak Urdu anymore, they asked if they could use artificial intelligence to translate it all. As a translator of creative writing, I would tell them it’s probably not a good idea, but these are some interesting questions thrown up by rapid technological advances in the realm of heritage and conservation,” she said.