Public disconnection and private expansion: Digital privatization of village level administration in India
Résumé
Academic literature has substantiated the image of the Indian Administration as cumbersome, ineffective, corrupt, and even uncaring (Gupta, 2012 ; Mathur, 2012). The government of India has been trying to fix this image for the past 15 years through the National e-governance plan and “Digital India” program, both of which are contributing to the massive digitalization of India’s administration. We chose to analyze the big, layered, and complex “Indian Platform State” through one of its core infrastructures, the Common Service Centers (CSC), single point delivery centers that ensure the last mile of the Government-citizen relationship in every village of India. This paper builds on classical STS literature around politics encapsulated in sociotechnical objects (Winner 1980), information infrastructures as powerful sorting agents (Bowker and Star 2000), and technologies used by States to perform modernity (Jasanoff and Kim 2015) especially in postcolonial settings (Breckenridge 2014). We combined this important heritage with the socio-anthropological study of the state, understood as a complex composite, made of a vast nexus of practices (Das et Poole 2004).