Meenakshi N Ambujam is a sociocultural anthropologist and a postdoctoral researcher supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation’s Postdoc.Mobility Return Grant. She has previously held appointments at the University of Oxford’s Department of International Development (SNSF Postdoc.Mobility Fellow) and the Czech Academy of Sciences’ Oriental Institute. She earned her PhD in Anthropology and Sociology from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, in 2022. She is part of the editorial team of Grassroots, a section of the Journal of Political Ecology, and curates Unruly Dialogues, a public-facing platform on environmental issues. Her research has been supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Swiss National Science Foundation, and the Czech Academy of Sciences.

Meenakshi’s project examines the entanglement of digital technology, bureaucracy, and transparency-making through the lens of land record modernisation in Telangana, India. Building on earlier research (2024-26) into Telangana’s Integrated Land Record Management System, this project interrogates how the digitisation of land records and the capture of spatial land data negotiate conditions of uncertainty, opacity, and illegibility inherent in land administration. In doing so, this research uniquely contributes by foregrounding the role of tech companies and consultancies as influential actors in digital land governance, demonstrating how their interventions reshape conventional bureaucratic authority over land data. Through ethnographic methods—including participant observation, interviews, and document analysis—this research aims to deepen scholarly understanding of digital governance practices and their socio-material implications.