Policy commentary and rights advocacy by Vikas Gupta — IIM Ahmedabad alumnus writing on AI governance, economic opportunity, disability justice, and the institutions that shape young lives.
As AI systems increasingly gatekeep access to services and opportunity, their hidden assumptions about normalcy risk encoding new forms of exclusion for persons with disabilities.
Structural inaccessibility in India's criminal justice system violates the rights of persons with disabilities — an argument that the design of detention itself becomes a pre-conviction sentence.
Headline employment figures count anyone who works at all — an examination of what these numbers conceal about the quality, security and productivity of Indian jobs.
Employability is only half the equation — even a perfectly skilled workforce needs an economy with the demand to absorb it.
Certificates without jobs — an examination of why India's skilling investment hasn't converted into employability, and what the gap reveals about the real bottleneck.
A demographic dividend is not automatic — without productive employment, India's young population becomes a liability rather than the wealth-creating asset it is assumed to be.
For millions of disabled Indians, justice is inaccessible not only in time but in understanding — physical, intellectual, and legislative barriers compound at every step of the legal process.
While private schools integrate AI tools, India's public education system is being left behind — deepening a digital divide that compounds across every year of schooling.
AI-driven optimisation in hiring and promotion is quietly recasting diversity as an inefficiency — with disproportionate consequences for persons with disabilities and other marginalised groups.
Democratic identity in India is fracturing along a fault line: the periodic voter and the continuous citizen are no longer the same person — and institutions are being built around the former.
When private sector failures become public crises, the burden falls on citizens — an examination of how corporate negligence is repackaged as systemic inevitability.
Weaponised agencies, institutional silence, and political imprisonment — the ruling party has not dismantled the Congress system. It has inherited it, polished it, and called it governance.
On paying taxes, dying in silence, and the democracy you get when you mourn only your own. India is a hard country to be a taxpayer in — especially if you are in the upper brackets.
When market logic colonises rights discourse, rights become priced goods — and the cost of being Indian is that the market almost always sides with those who can afford to pay.
A systemic examination of how 27 million disabled Indians are excluded from the rights and protections the law promises — and why the gap between policy and practice remains so wide.
Over ten years, India's opposition ceded the human rights agenda — allowing the terms of democratic contestation to be redrawn without a credible counter-narrative.
On corporate negligence, public embarrassment, and the particular cost of being alive — and disposable — in a country where accountability is reserved for those who can afford to demand it.