Digital Technologies and Gender Justice in India

Two decades after the Fourth World Conference on Women and the Beijing Platform for Action, the question of gender justice remains as urgent as ever, to the women's movement. While revisiting the question of gender justice at the current conjuncture, on the eve of the Beijing +20 review, one important axis of societal transformation that cannot be ignored is the emergence of a new, ICT mediated social order. It is evident that the Internet and ICTs are not merely the harbingers of a new communications architecture, but technologies of production and social organisation, re-configuring the social, economic and public-political spheres. Therefore, this brief firmly locates itself in the analytical tradition using an 'information society' framework that identifies the question of digital technologies and gender justice not as an instrumental one pertaining to particular choices for development programming, but as a foundational question about social realignment in an emerging social order.