DRAPAC Digital Rights National Meet-up
On 3rd June 2025, the Digital Empowerment Foundation (DEF) participated in the DRAPAC Digital Rights National Meet-up in Bengaluru, a closed-door gathering of civil society organisations, researchers, technologists, and movement-builders working at the intersection of rights, digital governance, and justice in India. Held under the Chatham House Rule, the meet-up created a space for candid exchange on emerging challenges, shared strategies, and opportunities for solidarity in the digital rights landscape.
Representing DEF, Dr. Raina Ghosh joined a breakout group discussions that engaged with issues like digital harms and socio-technical exclusions, contributing insights from DEF’s grassroots engagements with digitally vulnerable populations. The discussion unpacked how exclusion operates not just through lack of access, but through design, invisibilisation, and extractive data infrastructures. Drawing from DEF’s work on community networks, misinformation, and emerging research on the invisible labour behind circular digital economies, Raina highlighted how informal workers in sectors like e-waste and digital repair remain absent from dominant platform and policy narratives.
The group also explored the relational nature of digital harm, how identity markers like caste, gender, ability, and location mediate people’s experiences with platforms, surveillance, and digital services. Participants reflected on the urgent need to challenge ‘neutral’ design logics and foreground justice-based, culturally grounded frameworks that are led by those most affected. Other thematic discussions across the day touched on governance of digital public infrastructure, AI regulation, consent and data protection regimes, and the centrality of community agency in building resilient digital futures. These sessions reaffirmed DEF’s ongoing commitment to amplifying rural and marginalised voices in national and international tech-policy spaces.
The DRAPAC meet-up offered DEF a valuable opportunity to both contribute and learn from peer-organisaitons working on similar domains, especially around framing digital rights not just in terms of access or protection, but in terms of dignity, participation, and structural transformation. As DEF continues its work, we carry forward insights from Bengaluru into our research, advocacy, and program design, anchored in the belief that equitable digital futures can only emerge through shared leadership and deeply contextual knowledge.