News Type: News

NLSIU’s HUPA Chair on Urban Poor and the Law organised a book talk on ‘Experimental Times: Startup Capitalism and Feminist Futures in India‘ by Dr. Hemangini Gupta, Lecturer, Gender and Global Politics, Department of Politics, University of Edinburgh. The talk took place at the Training Centre at the NLS campus on July 25, 2025.

About the Book

Experimental Times: Startup Capitalism and Feminist Futures in India is an in-depth ethnography of the transformation of Bengaluru/Bangalore from a site of “backend” IT work to an aspirational global city of enterprise and innovation. In this talk, we journeyed alongside the migrant workers, technologists, and entrepreneurs who shape and survive the dreams of a “Startup India” knitted through office work, at networking meetings and urban festivals, and across sites of leisure in the city. Tracking techno-futures that involve automation and impending precarity, the author will detail the everyday forms of experimentation, care, and friendship that sustain and reproduce life and labour in India’s current economy.

About the Speaker

Dr. Hemangini’s interests include feminist and queer theory; activism; postcolonial and decolonial theory; cities; labour; capital; technoscience; and racialisation. She has a PhD in Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies from Emory University, Atlanta, US. Her research and teaching interests include transnational feminisms, capitalist spaces and temporalities, and labour and technology in the South.

Her current research unfolds along two major strands:

One project is concerned with the transforming conditions of social reproduction under entrepreneurial and platform capitalism. Within this, she has also undertaken collaborative and multimodal ethnographic fieldwork with workers in entrepreneurial companies to innovate with new methods needed to understand work that is fragmented and dispersed across city spaces. Her research focusses on forms of difference within entrepreneurial economies to understand how historical structures of oppression shape access to finance, funding, and possibilities for labour mobility.

A second strand of research queries the ecological costs and entanglements of large scale data projects. Interrogating technological visions for environmental justice, she asks how we might trace the changes in land and water that accompany a move to “cloud” economies. Offering a grounded and historical context to imaginations and practices of ecological futures, this project situates technological future-making within the infrastructural and logistical architectures through which it is materialised.

Speaking to us, Hemangini said:

“My book ‘Experimental Times’ is about the remaking of Bangalore from a site of backend work to a city that is now celebrated by middle class entrepreneurs and state officials as a global ‘ecosystem’ for innovative startup work. I ask how this refashioning happens – and the question led to fieldwork at accelerator labs, Startup Festivals, and networking meetings but also to the workers who power this economy. I based myself at small and midsize entrepreneurial companies, working alongside a young and often migrant workforce, to understand how this new economy shapes life and labour.

I came to this research wanting to understand what changes in women’s lives with economic shifts – do they enjoy different forms of independence, freedom in the city, and more decisions in their personal and familial lives?”

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NLS faculty Diya Deviah, Assistant Professor of Law, is headed to Yale University for a fully funded six-year PhD in History, starting August 2025. She has also been granted a research award at the University as a Whitney Humanities Center Fellow in the Environmental Humanities.

About the fellowship

Diya was nominated and selected to be a 2025-26 Whitney Humanities Centre Fellow in the Environmental Humanities — where she will receive a top-up stipend and join a select group of doctoral fellows from across disciplines, including Anthropology, English, Medieval Studies, and East Asian Languages and Literatures, who share interests in the Environmental Humanities.

Area of study

Diya proposes tracing a global history of the coal commodity frontier in Dhanbad, India’s coal capital, to examine the making of corporate power in modern South-Asia. She is interested in how coal emerges not just as an extractive resource but as a dynamic force, continually reshaping legal, social, and economic boundaries while extending the reach of extractive capitalism into new, often invisible, terrains of power. Through local and archival studies of the company town, railway lines and energy grids, she aims to study how capital works recursively across fossil fuel commodity frontiers in the Indian Ocean.

Closer to her previous work on the entanglements of corporations and the state within constitutional law, one of her central questions examines the historical relationship between law and capital in shaping modern corporate sovereignty. The corporation’s status as a ‘legal person’ grants it special, and foundational, legal immunities, which have been crucial to its ability to exercise sovereign powers. In her doctoral project, she is interested in examining the modes of legal immunity by which corporate sovereignty is sustained over both the colonial and postcolonial periods.

Speaking to us, Diya said, “My project lies at the intersection of histories of capitalism, law, and empire. By integrating my interest in environmental studies and science and technology studies (STS), this work extends existing scholarship on corporations, mining and labour into an interdisciplinary exploration of ecology, power, law, and the global networks that shape frontier landscapes and the lives of the actors who inhabit them.”

A delegation of faculty and students from NLSIU participated in the 7th International Conference on Public Policy (ICPP) held from July 1-4, 2025 in Chiang Mai, Thailand.

About the Conference

Organised by the International Public Policy Association every alternate year, ICPP is the largest public policy conference in the world. This edition of ICPP saw 1050 registered participants from 70 different countries.

The NLS Delegation

This year’s delegation is the largest from NLSIU to participate in any edition of ICPP till date. It included:

*Prof. (Dr.) Sony Pellissery, Professor & Co-Director, Centre for the Study of Social Inclusion
*Dr. Devyani Pande, Assistant Professor, Public Policy
*Mr. Manish, Assistant Professor of Law
*Mr. Anubhav Bishen, PhD Scholar
*Mr. Devesh Pandey, PhD Scholar

Contributions of the NLS Delegation

The NLS delegation participated in three panels, as chairs, discussants, and presenters. They also co-chaired a roundtable.

 

Panels

‘Constitutional Economics for Public Policy’
*Dr. Sony Pellissery chaired the panel.
*Manish and Anubhav Bishen presented a paper at this panel titled “Committed Judiciary and Transitioning Economic Regimes: Policy Challenges to Economic Democracy in India.”

‘Policy Transfer from the Global South’
*Dr. Pellissery was a discussant on the panel.
*In addition, he presented a paper titled “Divergent epistemologies for policy transfer: Comparative Examination of the disciplines of ‘Development Studies’ and ‘Public Policy’,” and was the discussant for the panel.

‘Regulating AI: Governance Challenges and Policy Implications’
*Dr. Devyani Pande co-chaired a session and was a discussant for one of the two sessions within the panel. In the first session, she also presented a co-authored research article on “Public preferences of measures to build trust in high-risk AI:  Variations across Singapore, Seoul, and Tokyo” with Dr. Shaleen Khanal and Dr. Araz Taeihagh (National University of Singapore).
*Devesh Pandey and Anubhav Bishen also presented a paper at this panel, titled “The Right to have a ‘Right to Explanation’: A Global South Perspective.”

Roundtables

Dr. Pande was the co-chair for a roundtable on ‘Governing AI in the Global South: Balancing the Needs, Benefits, and Challenges’ at the conference.

We kicked off the new academic year’s faculty seminars with a presentation by Dr. Rahul Hemrajani, Assistant Professor of Law, NLSIU, on ‘A Ranking System for Indian Legal Journals.’ The seminar was held on July 9, 2025, in the Ground Floor Conference Hall at NLSIU’s Training Centre at 2:30 pm.

The co-authors include NLS students Tvisha Vasudevan [IVth year BA LLB], Shrishty Chhaparia [Vth year BA LBB] and Riddhi Puranik [IInd year LLB (Hons)].

Abstract

The Indian Legal Scholarship Indexing Project (ILSIP) is an initiative to create an empirical map of India’s legal‑research landscape, beginning with journal articles published in Indian law reviews. By documenting what kinds of work are published, who the authors are, and how those writings influence scholarship and legal practice, we aim to provide a clear, data‑driven picture of contemporary Indian legal research.

One of the first major outputs of this project —the Indian Law Journals Ranking System (ILJRS) — is an open and systematic ranking system tailored specifically for Indian law journals. Our ranking methodology employs a multi-factor approach, considering elements such as the credentials and affiliations of contributing authors, available citation metrics, and practices like transparent peer-review processes and editorial standards. The initial phase of this project has indexed and ranked 29 generalist law journals, including both faculty-edited and student-edited publications.

The Queer Archive for Memory Reflection and Activism (QAMRA) hosted a panel discussion titled ‘From Archive to Activism: Queer & Trans* Cultural Work’ at the Museum of Art and Photography, Bengaluru, on July 13, 2025.

About the panel discussion

This event brought community organisers, academics, and activists together in conversation about how the worlds of queer-and-trans community-building, knowledge production and information dissemination, and progressive social change, intersect.

The panellists shared a unique connection with QAMRA, an autonomous community archive at the National Law School of India University in Bengaluru. Through their lightning talks and a moderated roundtable, they reflected on the past, present, and future of queer and trans* cultural organising, involving distinct forms of resistance and joy.

*(*) In Trans acknowledges the diversity of gender identities and expressions beyond the binary, reflecting the inclusive scope of this conversation.

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The Queer Archive for Memory Reflection and Activism (QAMRA) is hosted a workshop on ‘Archives and Queer Counter-Narratives’ at the Museum of Art and Photography, Bengaluru, on July 12, 2025. The workshop was conducted by Mira Brunner, Chief Archivist at QAMRA.

About the workshop

This workshop brought together two powerful tools of counter-narrative—art and the queer archive—to explore how we can use them in tandem to tell stories of our own. Together, as participants and facilitators, we experimented with ways of broadening our relationship with history, critically examining the present, and imagining the futures we hope for and work towards.

Through a series of hands-on exercises and discussions, we explored three key themes:

Preservation
What do we choose to preserve, and how? We engaged with a range of materials to think about preservation both practically and politically.

Organisation
How does the structure of memory storage shape how it is understood? We reflected on different archival logics and the possibilities of queering archival organisation.

Access
How do we dream through the archive? We imagined the audiences of the future and consider how we want our saved materials to speak to them.

This workshop was an invitation to think, feel, and make within the space of collective memory and queer futurity.

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The National Law School of India University (NLSIU), Bengaluru, had undertaken a research project on Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in India, funded by the Samagata Foundation. The research culminated in a report titled, “The Rise of FOSS in India: Empirical Evidence and Insights from Cross-Sectoral Case Studies.”

The report was launched officially at the “Round Table on FOSS in India,” jointly organised by National Law School of India University; Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, Delhi (IIIT-Delhi); and FOSS United on July 11, 2025.

Mr. Abhishek Singh, Director General, National Informatics Centre (NIC), and Additional Secretary, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), Government of India, delivered the keynote address via a video message.

About the report

The report analyses the adoption of FOSS in India, primarily through case studies across four sectors (healthcare, education, finance, and software and IT services) and different types of organisations (start-ups, non-profits, medium, large, and public sector organisations). The study highlights both the benefits and challenges experienced by organisations using FOSS. The study illustrates that while organisations benefit from increased innovations, cost/ time savings, flexibility, and enhanced security, they also face challenges such as lack of enough skilled personnel and limited community support. Organisations are also seen taking a cautious approach to licensing, favouring permissive licenses over restrictive ones. Based on the diverse empirical findings, the report also recommends some policy reforms including mandating FOSS adoption for government bodies, integrating FOSS in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) education, and updating procurement guidelines to mandate FOSS solutions when they are available.

Read The Report

In the Press

Ensure govt. uses open source software, says report | The Hindu

Session Schedule

Report Release and Keynote Address
11:00 AM – 12:00 PM
Welcome remarks by: Arul George Scaria, Professor, NLSIU, and Pankaj Jalote, Founding Director and Distinguished Professor, IIITD
Keynote talk by: Abhishek Singh, DG NIC & Additional Secretary, MeitY; Government of India

Session 1- Strategic Importance of FOSS for India
12 PM – 1 PM
Chair: Venkatesh Hariharan, India Representative, Open Invention Network; Renuka Sane, MD- Trustbridge; Jaijit Bhattacharya – President, Center for Digital Economy and Policy; Parminder Singh – Independent Researcher; Rahul Sai Poruri – CEO, FOSS United

Session 2 – Role of FOSS In India’s BFSI Sector
2 PM – 2:45 PM
Chair: Suryaprakash Mishra, Associate Professor, NLSIU; Sairee Chahal, Founder, Mahila Money; Sushil Kurri, CTO, PocketATM; Shuvam Misra, Founder Chairman, Remiges; Vishnu Sudhakaran, Engineer, Zerodha

Session 3 – Role of FOSS in Indian IT
2:45 PM – 3:30 PM
Chair: Rahul De, Independent Consultant, Retired professor & Dean, IIM Bangalore, author of AI for Manager; Akhila Somanath, Co-founder and COO, Tech4GoodCommunity; Kishore Bhargava, CEO, LinkAxis & Open Source veteran; Vineet Dahiya, Director & Promoter, InfoAxon

Session 4 – Education Sector & FOSS
4 PM- 4:45 PM
Chair: Rahul Sai Poruri – CEO, FOSS United; Shobha Tyagi, MRIIRS; Karkee U, Founder of Villipuram GNU Linux User Community; Vigneswara Ilavarasan, IIT Delhi

Concluding Remarks by: Venkatesh Hariharan, Open Invention Network and Suryaprakash Mishra, NLSIU

Glimpses from the Sessions