Description:

Speaker

Pariroo Rattan - Sociology, Northwestern University 

Title

A Marketplace for Populism: The Moral Politics of Digitization in India's Informal Economy

Abstract

Why do citizens in democracies accept technological governance systems that break down, discriminate against them and fail at many levels? Digital India is a flagship policy of the Government of India to foster “economic growth combined with social inclusion.” Central to Digital India is the Aadhaar card, a biometric identification now distributed to 1.3 billion Indians, and a real time mobile payment technology, Unified Payments Interface (UPI), that has significantly replaced cash transactions. This technological transformation was imagined and implemented against the social backdrop of India's large informal economy. Technological promises to improve governance and economic opportunities are often not fully realized and create new sources of friction, especially for marginalized communities. Nevertheless, digital technologies have been taken up by actors in the informal economy, such as street vendors in urban cities like New Delhi. How do street vendors rationalize breakdowns in techno-economic promises? In what ways is the introduction of technology in modern governance systems changing the relationship of marginalized citizens in India to the nation-state, and with what consequences for contemporary populist politics? I draw on multi-year ethnography in New Delhi to illuminate the stakes of technological governance for contemporary democracy theory. Unlike postcolonial India where a large bureaucracy was set up to facilitate the nation's growth, I show how digitization is morally justified through a recasting of mediating institutions like the bureaucracy as a threat to the nation’s progress and invoking citizens themselves as technological nation-builders.

Biography

Pariroo Rattan is a Weinberg College Postdoctoral Fellow in Science in Human Culture and the Department of Sociology at Northwestern University. She will also be teaching at the Department of Anthropology at Northwestern. Pariroo is a recent PhD graduate from Harvard University, where she was a long-standing Fellow at the HKS Science, Technology and Society (STS) program and received a secondary field in Music. Her doctoral dissertation is titled “A Marketplace for Populism: The Moral Politics of Digitization in India’s Informal Economy” and studies the relationship of the digital economy with mediating state institutions and nation-building in India, through an ethnography of street vendors in New Delhi using digital biometric ID Aadhaar and payment system Unified Payments Interface. She also works comparatively on citizen resistance to legal data regulation regimes across the US, EU and China. Apart from digitization, Pariroo is writing about topics relating to the law such as the politics of evidence in the Harvard affirmative action lawsuit, and on the acoustic and sound politics of the urban economy. Her work has been supported by the Wenner Gren Foundation, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard, and the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society among others, and has recently been published by the Economic and Political Weekly.