Dr. Nirmita Narasimhan is a Senior Fellow and Programme Director with the Global Initiative for Inclusive ICT. At G3ict, she is responsible for overseeing management of key global tools and resources such as the e-accessibility toolkit for policy makers and developing programmes for the Asia Pacific region. She has over a decade of experience working on issues of accessibility for persons with disabilities.
She was a founding member of the Bangalore based not-for-profit research organization Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), where she built up the Accessibility and Inclusion programme on digital accessibility, which gained significant recognition within India and internationally. She is presently Fellow at CIS.
Nirmita has considerable expertise in policy-making, capacity building for multi-stakeholder groups and researching various aspects of digital inclusion for persons with disabilities. Nirmita has served on several Government committees, such as the Committee to draft the National Policy on Universal Electronics accessibility and the committee to revise the Guidelines for Indian Government websites. She has been involved in the drafting of key ICT accessibility related policies both for the Government of India, as well as other country governments. She has provided inputs and submissions on key policy issues on ICT accessibility, education, employment, copyright, procurement, smart cities and telecom.
Nirmita has contributed to several key global publications such as the report on Making Mobile phones accessible for persons with disabilities; and the reports on accessibility to financial services, disaster and emergency preparedness, Universal Service; web accessibility policy-making and the e-accessibility handbook for policymakers. In her capacity as ITU consultant, she has prepared reports on making ICTs and mobile phones accessible for persons with disabilities in Nepal and Afghanistan and also prepared reports for UNESCO.
Nirmita participates regularly as an expert speaker on accessibility in national and international events. She also performs and teaches classical music. She has been the recipient of several awards in recognition of her work in the field of accessibility including the National award for the empowerment of persons with disabilities from the President of India in 2010.