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 upcoming work extends to digitalization policies and programs across governance sectors. I evaluate digitalization policies, explore how government technologies are designed, and understand how agencies and bureaucracies adopt these. I also trace how public data is acquired, consolidated, and processed.
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).