Fellows

Rahul Cherian

Rahul is a lawyer, disability policy activist and a co-founder of Inclusive Planet Centre for Disability and Policy. He was one of the experts who drafted the Treaty for the Visually Impaired currently being negotiated at the World Intellectual Property Organization. His areas of expertise include disability law, intellectual property law and technology law. He is also the co-founder of www.inclusiveplanet.com, the world's largest social network for persons with visual impairment.

Rahul is on the legal expert panel constituted by the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment to give input on the new disability law, was instrumental in conceptualizing and executing a national Right to Read Campaign to bring about changes in copyright law to enable persons with disabilities access copyrighted work on an equal basis with persons without disabilities, helped the State of Kerala draft a plan document with a vision to ensure that by the year 2025 persons with disabilities are completely integrated into mainstream society.

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Anja Kovacs

Anja obtained her PhD in Development Studies from the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK. Her dissertation focused on questions of agency and empowerment relating to women's participation in Hindu Right organisations in India. In addition, she has researched on issues relating to education, violence, political participation, employment, livelihoods and economic reform. Anja's interest in questions relating to the information society dates back to 2007, when she started to wonder about the possible consequences of the reluctance of many people's movements in India to closely engage with new technologies. She is now working at CIS on a research study that seeks to map the actors, audiences, messages and methods privileged by online activism as it exists in India today.  The research hopes to make a beginning to reaching a deeper understanding of the ways in which the online activism that does exist reconstitutes received notions of activism and activists in the country more generally. Anja's other research interests include the emergence of a working-class network society in India and the local impact of global Internet governance regimes.  She also has been one of the driving forces behind the Maps for Making Change project, providing activists and supporters of campaigns and movements for progressive social change in India an opportunity to explore the potential of geographical mapping techniques as a tool to support their work.

Prior to joining CIS, Anja has conducted extensive fieldwork throughout South Asia, including in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and India, has lectured at the University of East Anglia, UK, in the field of Development Studies, and has worked as an international consultant. She has been based in India since 2001.

Malavika Jayaram

Malavika has an experience of more than 15 years as a lawyer with a specialization in information technology and intellectual property. Malavika worked in London for eight years with Allen & Overy and Citigroup. As an IP/IT lawyer in the Communications, Media and Technology Group at Allen & Overy, she handled technology and e-commerce contracts, outsourcing, M&A, corporate transactions, and contracts in television, advertising, publishing, sports, pharmaceuticals, trading and banking sectors.

In Citigroup she worked within the investment bank as Vice President and Counsel in the Technology Legal Team and as a Senior Business Analyst reporting directly to the Chief Technology Officer of Citigroup EMEA. This was a special role created for her. Malavika coordinated a very large and critical exercise to regularize internal SLAs for various shared functions and processes within Citigroup, especially in response to new outsourcing regulations and restrictions in Eastern European countries and in Asia.

Malavika designed and taught the first course on Information Technology and Law at the National Law School of India in 1997. She has an LL.M. from Northwestern University School of Law in Chicago, and is also doing a Ph.D. on data protection and privacy laws.

She is a partner in Jayaram & Jayaram, Bangalore managing a portfolio of work that has a strong focus on IT/IP and commercial work, especially with an international angle and is a fellow of the Centre for Internet and Society. She works with CIS in its efforts to explore, understand, and affect the shape and form of the Internet, and its relationship with the cultural and social milieu of our time.

Chanuka Wattegama

Chanuka is an independent policy researcher and consultant with expertise in telecom policy and regulations, ICT for Development, Development Economics, Disaster Risk Reduction and Development Evaluation. An Electronics Engineer by profession, he graduated from the National Institute of Technology, Karnataka and obtained his Master of Business Administration (MBA) degree from the University of Colombo. 

In the past he worked as a Senior Research Manager at LIRNEasia, an Asian think tank on policy and regulation and as a Program Specialist ICT4D at the United Nations Development Program and was posted in Colombo Regional Centre’s Millennium Development Goals (MDG) initiative. His focus was to use Information and Communication Technology for poverty reduction and achievement of the MDGs.

 As a researcher, he co-authored the Sri Lankan chapters for the books Cyber Communities of Asia (AMIC, Singapore), Media in Asia (Sage Publications, New Delhi), Internet in Asia (AMIC, Singapore) and Digital Review of Asia Pacific (APDIP, Orbicom and IDRC). He was the lead researcher for Sri Lanka in a nine-country study on ICT for Human Development in Asia, by UNDP and is also a regular writer and commentator on ICT issues in the Sri Lankan media. He founded Pariganaka, the largest selling ICT magazine in Sri Lanka with a circulation of more than 40,000 copies where he worked as a consultant editor. He is a two-time recipient of the Science Writer of the Year Award, presented annually by the Sri Lanka Association for the Advancement of Science.  

Selvam Velmurugan

Selvam is the founder of eMoksha.org, a non-partisan non-profit focused on enabling stronger democracies through increased citizen awareness and participation. In 2009, eMoksha.org helped launch VoteReport, a citizen-driven election monitoring platform - in India, Lebanon, and Afghanistan - and FixOurCity, a local civic-management platform in Chennai.

Prior to founding eMoksha.org, Selvam was an internet technologist with more than 12 years of experience in building and managing distributed web-scale systems. During his 10-year stint at Amazon, he devised complex search indexing and querying algorithms, setup the Chennai Development Center, and managed critical platform components for Amazon Web Services. During that time, he took an active role in several non-profit and community efforts, notably being a core member of the Tsunami Relief team at Amazon enabling collection of over $15 million in relief funds.

Selvam holds an MS in CS from University of Georgia and BS in CS from College of Engineering, Guindy. He also holds a Diploma in Film-making from University of Washington. Currently, he lives in Seattle with his wife and two kids.