Author: Pratishruti Bandyopadhyay

On January 26, 2010, a woman named Boa Senior died in the Andaman Islands. She was the last person alive who spoke Bo, one of the world’s oldest languages, dating back to pre-Neolithic times. More than 65,000 years of continuous human speech ended in a single afternoon. Today, technology promises that such disappearances need not happen again. Artificial intelligence can record voices, build dictionaries, translate speech and preserve oral traditions. Governments, researchers and technology companies are racing to document languages before their last speakers fall silent. Yet a crucial question remains: can technology alone save India’s vanishing languages? India is…

Every morning, millions of workers open an app to find their work assignments. The delivery rider in Rajasthan, the Uber driver in Kolkata, the Blinkit courier in Delhi, all work within the same established narrative: the platform is neutral, the algorithm decides the work, and human bias has no place in the system because data is everything. That narrative is misleading, and always has been. In India, where society has long been shaped by entrenched caste, class and gender hierarchies, it is particularly useful for those in power to sustain this illusion of neutrality. The real question is not whether…