My doctoral work at CESSMA, Université Paris Cité focused on the digitalization of urban governance in India. I tracked how India's Smart Cities Mission transformed the city of Bhubaneswar. My PhD was funded by the French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development and the Agence Française de Développement. I also had the opportunity to work as a Fellow at the Weizenbaum Institut, Berlin during this time.
My current and future research explores and evaluates policies and practices around digital technology and governance. There are three focal points of this research – (i) public policies of digitalization (ii) design and installation of digital infrastructures such as platforms, sensors, networks, and databases (iii) the use and practices of digital tools and data by government agencies, bureaucracies and citizens.
I look forward to working with students and researchers working on working on urbanization, public policies and programs on digitalization, and the politics and practices around data. I am particularly keen on projects that can combine research methods between computer science and social sciences.
Upcoming Research Projects
If you are a student researcher working\interested in working on digitalization and governance, and would like to talk about potential research projects, please write to me at khaliq.parkar@iiit.ac.in
Publications
Parkar, Khaliq and Tawa Lama, Stephanie (Editors). “Introduction. The Digitalization of Urban Governance in India: Ideas, Instruments and Practices”. South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, No. 30 (2023).
Parkar, Khaliq. “Digital Legacies and Distressed Capacities: Evaluating Platforms of Spatial Governance in Bhubaneswar”. South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, No. 30 (2023).
Parkar, Khaliq, Zerah, Marie-Helene and Mittal, Gaurav. “Platformisation, Infrastructuring, and Datafication: Regional Variations in the Digitalization of Indian Cities”. Economic & Political Weekly, Vol. 57, No. 14, pp. 53-60 (2023).
Parkar, Khaliq and Uttara Purandare. “Decoding Digitalization of Urban Governance in India: Policy, People and Processes of the Smart Cities Mission and National Urban Digital Mission”. Working Paper, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi (2023).
Purandare, Uttara, and Khaliq Parkar. ““Eyes and Ears”: Surveillance in the Indian Smart City” Handbook of Smart Cities. Springer (2020).