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Digital Empowerment Foundation (DEF) is a Delhi-based nonprofit organization working towards empowering people to gain access to better healthcare, education, skills and livelihood opportunities through digital literacy and digital tools. The organization¡¯s main focus is to make technology easily accessible to the masses, to empower women, youth, persons with disabilities and the elderly through providing functional digital literacy, media literacy, and digital up-skilling across agriculture, micro and nano-business, health, education, livelihood, and entrepreneurial skills. Over the last 20 years, the organization has been actively engaged in digitally empowering local communities through its 2,000 Community Information Resource Centers. These centers are supported by a widespread network of 10,000 digital foot soldiers located across 24 states and 135 districts in rural, tribal, marginalized and unreached areas. DEF has directly impacted the lives of more than 30 million people including people from below the poverty line, women, artisans, youth, persons with disabilities, and the elderly.

DEF¡¯s past initiatives toward uncovering the social, political, economic, and cultural impacts of AI have been in the form of workshops, reports, and edited volumes since 2019 mostly after the National Policy made by the Indian central government in the form of National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence #AIforAll made by NITI Aayog to boost AI development in the field of ¨C Health, Agriculture, Education, Smart Cities and infrastructure, Smart Mobility, and Transportation. The national-level policy interference aimed at bringing AI interference in almost every social, economic, and political field. DEF has recognized the everyday developments in the technological aspects of ICT don¡¯t impact only the white-collar workers, and the knowledge economy partners, but the impact is on the welfare of the population who are at the receiving end of the development policies and programs. DEF has always taken the task to disseminate the use, and challenges of ICT in the everyday lives of rural and vulnerable communities. The recent research work from DEF has been towards editing a book volume on - Conversation on Data Justice in India Combatting Algorithmic Exclusions and Building Fairer Frameworks (2023). This volume brought to the forefront the critical relation of social justice, technology, and the impact of the growing data paradigm on the communities. Apart from this, some of the earlier works of DEF in the domain of AI and related spheres are as follows: ? Conversation on Data Justice in India Combatting Algorithmic Exclusions and Building Fairer Frameworks (2023) In this edited volume, an attempt was made to uncover the various dimensions of ¡®datafication¡¯ of society and throw light on multifaceted dimensions of data justice, specifically in the context of emerging AI and ML systems and their governance. This volume sheds light on the power dynamic inherent in the deployment of AI/ML systems, the adverse inclusions, absolute exclusions, the lack of representativeness in the development of these systems, the absence of grievances redressal mechanisms, and the potential of these technologies in achieving more equitable access to resources. ? Advancing Data Justice Research and Practice (2023) This booklet on Data Justice Report is based on research conducted by DEF as Policy Pilot Partners of the Alan Turing Institute and the Global Partnerships on AI to provide a broader frame and attempt to fill gaps in existing research on the issue beyond the present narrower ones of compliance matter of individualised privacy or ethical design. This report has examples from India where hastily planned use of AI and Data-driven systems have led to social injustices. For example, Bhoomi is a digital registry of ¡®rights, tenancy and crops¡¯ produced by the state government of Karnataka, India as ¡®open data¡¯ effort, but informal and historical knowledge that supports these claims cannot be easily accommodated in the flattened landscape. The data was not accessible to people with no computational and interpretive skills. ? Understanding Institutional AI: Sectoral Case Studies from India (2020) In this working paper, there are cases on education, health, and law enforcement because they represent different stages of institutional application of AI and the incidence of impact on privacy for different sections of the citizenry as well as different types of institutional arrangement with private service providers and at the same time the difference categories of data used and datasets used, proposed to be used, linked and combined. ? AI for all (workshop) AI for All workshop was self-learning online program that aims to make AI accessible to people and provide a great overview of AI and its possibilities, as well as concerns and ethics. The program was divided into two sections, AI Aware and AI Appreciate, which provide an in-depth understanding of AI and its application.