Prof. David Ghertner received his BA from Colby College and MA and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. He is an associate professor in the Department of Geography at Rutgers University where he previously served as the director of the South Asian Studies Program. He is the author of Rule by Aesthetics: World-Class City Making in Delhi (Oxford University Press, 2015) and co-editor of Futureproof: Security Aesthetics and the Management of Life (Duke University Press, 2020) and Land Fictions: The Commodification of Land in City and Country (Cornell University Press, 2021). His research expertise lies in urban geography, and he has published widely on informal housing, property rights, urban aesthetics, and environmental governance. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the American Institute of Indian Studies, the Social Science Research Council, Fulbright, and the American Council of Learned Societies.

A series of digital property reform programs are currently spreading across rural India, utilizing drone mapping and digital technologies to map, title, and enclose landholdings. Digitized property rights are deemed essential to fighting poverty and fostering rural development, but also face technical and political challenges that vary by region and land tenure. The translation of customary rights, bordering of land, and construction of data infrastructure depend upon complex bureaucratic work. Through ethnographic research involving engineers and bureaucrats who are implementing the reforms in Goa and Delhi NCR and by interacting with residents impacted by these reforms, Prof. David Ghertner’s Fulbright-Nehru project is exploring how digital property is reconstituting landownership in India.