IT for Change

IT for Change is a Bengaluru-based research-advocacy NGO, founded in 2000, that works at the intersection of digital technology and social justice. Registered as a not-for-profit society under the Karnataka Societies Registration Act 1960, it has grown into a multi-disciplinary team of researchers, lawyers, educators, technologists, and community practitioners. The organisation holds Special Consultative Status with the UN Economic and Social Council and sits at the Global South's cutting edge of critical scholarship on data governance, AI, and the platform economy. Its core mission is a society in which digital technologies contribute to human rights, social justice, and equity — a premise it pursues by challenging the market-driven and techno-utopian approaches that dominate mainstream digital-governance discourse.

Founding and leadership

IT for Change was founded in 2000 in Bengaluru by practitioners working at the intersection of development, gender, and technology. Co-founders include Anita Gurumurthy (Executive Director and Senior Fellow, Research & Policy Engagement), Gurumurthy Kasinathan (Director, Education and Technology), and Parminder Jeet Singh (Director, internet governance and digital economy). President Srilatha Batliwala — a long-standing feminist scholar and gender-and-development practitioner — anchors the governance structure. Deputy Director Nandini Chami leads research and policy on digital rights, development, and the political economy of women's rights.

The Research & Policy team includes specialists in surveillance and antitrust law, AI supply chains, labour exploitation in the digital economy, government technology systems in India, online gender-based violence, and social media regulation. This breadth reflects an organisational commitment to connecting grassroots community experience with high-level regulatory and policy engagement.

Research and policy: data governance and AI

IT for Change's research programme articulates critical alternatives to dominant frameworks on data governance, AI, and the platform economy, with a particular emphasis on equity, feminist perspectives, and Global South interests.

Intelligent Infrastructures (2021–) examines essential digital systems that require democratic oversight, arguing against the privatisation of critical data infrastructure and developing models of public ownership and community governance for digital commons.

Future of Rights and Citizenship in the Digital Age (2020–) builds an evidence-based framework for algorithmic governance in India, tracing how automated decision-making systems — in welfare, credit, policing, and employment — affect civil, political, and economic rights, and developing legal and policy approaches to accountability.

ReGenAI: A New Deal for AI Economy challenges the current AI development paradigm's concentration of ownership, labour precarity, market exclusion, and ecological harm, proposing regenerative alternatives grounded in democratic ownership and just distribution of AI-generated value.

Centering Equity and Justice in Global Data Governance engages scholar-practitioners at the intersection of data justice and longstanding development challenges, producing case studies that demonstrate the stakes of data governance choices for communities in the Global South.

Global Digital Compact (2023–) works to expand civil society voices — particularly from the Global South — in the UN-led process shaping norms and governance architecture for the digital future.

IT for Change has contributed directly to multilateral processes: the organisation submitted input to the UN zero-draft Pact for the Future, and Anita Gurumurthy serves on the UN Secretary-General's 10-Member Group supporting the Technology Facilitation Mechanism and on the Paris Peace Forum's working group on algorithmic governance. Gurumurthy also sits on the board of ETC Group. Parminder Jeet Singh's internet governance engagement spans decades: he was the first elected co-coordinator of the Internet Governance Caucus, one of five civil society members selected for the UN Working Group on Enhanced Cooperation on Internet-related public policy issues, a special advisor to the UN Internet Governance Forum, and a contributor to UNCTAD's inaugural Digital Economy Report in 2019. A 2020 policy brief on Cross-Border Data Flow with Data Rights proposed a rights-based framework to govern data flows across jurisdictions.

Platform economy and labour

Reform the Gig (2020–) investigates labour conditions and social security for platform workers, producing research on gig worker value creation, social reproduction, and the structural precarity embedded in platform business models. The team's labour research extends to automation's impact on women workers in India's apparel industry and to the algorithmic management of informal and domestic workers — connecting platform-economy critiques to frontline worker realities.

The organisation has framed the platform economy not only as a labour or competition issue but as a question of data sovereignty and democratic governance: who owns the data generated by platform workers and consumers, and what collective governance structures could give workers and communities a stake in digital value chains.

Feminist digital justice

IT for Change's feminist strand integrates gender analysis across all major research programmes and runs dedicated initiatives on women's digital rights. The FemFirst Research Observatory supports mid- to senior-career women and nonbinary-identifying researchers contributing original research on feminist AI futures in South and Southeast Asia — building a regional scholarly community at the intersection of feminist theory, technology criticism, and policy advocacy. Research on online gender-based violence, social media regulation, and women's access to digital welfare systems grounds feminist framing in structural economic and legal analysis rather than treating gender as a separate add-on to technology policy.

Education and community programs

The organisation's education strand, active since 2009 through the Centre for Education and Technology, integrates EdTech into public school STEM and foundational language learning across government and aided schools in Karnataka. The model builds on teachers' own knowledge and agency rather than bypassing them, producing participatory demonstration projects that public education systems and other organisations can build on. Prakriye — the field centre — runs community informatics work including Namma Mahithi Kendras (community telecenters) that bring digital access and community media production to rural and peri-urban communities, grounding the organisation's policy work in on-the-ground community experience.

Position in the movement

IT for Change is one of the most prominent Global South voices in the governance of AI and digital technology. Its distinctiveness within the broader digital-rights and data-governance field lies in combining three elements that do not often travel together: rigorous critical scholarship on data governance and AI articulated from a Global South and feminist standpoint; deep integration into multilateral processes — ECOSOC consultative status, IGF, UNCTAD — that gives that scholarship institutional reach; and sustained community-facing work through telecenters and public education that keeps the organisation anchored in grassroots realities rather than policy rooms alone. IT for Change's consistent framing of data governance as a development-and-democracy question — not just a privacy-compliance or technical matter — has shaped how civil society globally approaches data governance debates. At a moment when AI governance is rapidly being captured by industry standards bodies and narrow technical frames, the organisation's insistence on labour rights, feminist politics, and Global South stakes makes it a distinctive and influential voice in the coalition working to make AI broadly beneficial.