[13] At IIT, he was the editor of the campus magazine Alankar in his fourth (senior) year and received the institute's Order of Merit in Literary Activities and Dramatics.
He won the Alumni Cup, given to the best allrounder, in his second and third years, over twenty Institute medals in Debate and Dramatics, and the Medury Bhanumurthy Memorial Prize awarded to a graduating student adjudged to be the best in extra-curricular activities.
[21] His white paper on the Hindutva ideology became a subject of controversy that led to significant backlash, including hate comments and trolling from right-wing Hindu nationalists.
[23] In response, the Aotearoa Alliance of Progressive Indians published an article dismissing the attempt to equate Hindutva and Hindu Nationalism with Hinduism and Hindus as a "nugatory exercise".
[24] The Media Council in New Zealand upheld a complaint he raised about the right-wing platform The Indian News based on lack of accuracy, balance, and fairness.
He has written over 700 blog entries on whiteness, racial capitalism, settler colonialism, Hindutva, far-right Zionism and interconnected systems of oppression, outlining strategies of resistance through communication.
[29] His research on the poor living conditions and food insecurity experienced by migrant workers in Singapore was covered in Time Magazine,[30] National Public Radio,[31] and South China Morning Post.
[32] Dutta has researched poverty, health, development communication, social justice, labor rights, democracy, and academic freedom in Asia, conducting studies in India, Singapore, Nepal, Bangladesh, Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, and China.
The book offers a culture-centered framework of social change, developing a methodology for building what he describes as voice infrastructures in communities, mobilized in resistance to settler colonialism, extractive racial capitalism, patriarchy, and imperialism.
[37] In collaboration with Graham D. Bodie, he addressed the widening health-related disparities in America and advocated for incorporating health literacy into an Integrative Model of eHealth Use.
[48] Additionally, he examined the role of communication in planned social change and investigated how marginalized communities resist neoliberal interventions by actively participating in popular politics.
[50] In 2019, he analyzed the Christchurch terror attack as a manifestation of global Islamophobia, investigating the dissemination of racist hatred through media, think tanks and grassroots groups.
[51] In the context of the genocide in Gaza being carried out by Israel, he highlighted the work of building voice infrastructures that listen to Palestinian accounts of settler colonial violence and apartheid.