ABSTRACT:Mumbai's rapid adoption of digital and infrastructural technologies, from the Smart Cities Mission and municipal e-governance platforms to surveillance networks, app-based mobility, and slum digitisation, has reshaped how the city is governed, monitored, and lived in. Yet this pace of adoption has outstripped deliberation on its ethical and distributive consequences, particularly for the city's informal, low-income, and migrant populations. This paper adopts an interdisciplinary lens, drawing on Science and Technology Studies (STS), urban political ecology, and distributive justice theory, to examine how technological innovation in Mumbai intersects with equity, privacy, and participation. Using a qualitative, case-study methodology supported by a structured stakeholder survey of 100 respondents, comprising city administrators, technologists, civil society representatives, and informal workers/slum residents, the paper analyses four domains: municipal digital governance, public surveillance, the platform-based gig economy, and technology-mediated slum and water governance. Percentage analysis, Likert-scale analysis, and chi-square testing are used to examine stakeholder perceptions. Findings show a recurring pattern in which innovation is designed around formal, digitally literate citizens, while informal and marginal groups bear disproportionate risks of exclusion, data misuse, and loss of livelihood autonomy. The study argues that ethical innovation cannot be achieved through technical or legal safeguards alone, and proposes a four-part Engineering-Ethics-Law-Community (EELC) framework to operationalise socially just innovation in dense, unequal, rapidly digitising cities such as Mumbai and other cities of the Global South.
KEYWORDS: ethical innovation; urban technology; smart cities; social justice; interdisciplinary research; Mumbai; digital divide; algorithmic governance; surveillance; platform economy
ETHICAL INNOVATION IN MUMBAI:
INTERDISCIPLINARY APPROACHES TO URBAN TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE
DR. PRIYA V PANDHARPATTE