Panel Description

The Database, the Archive, and the Network have emerged as the most critical cultural icons of the digital age. The Database is not only a simple sorting and arrangement of different materials. The network is a potent metaphor to map the quickly changing topography of the world with the advent of new internet and telecommunication technologies. The Archive contains ephemeral and fluid components like memory, desire, longing and aspirations as conditioned and constructed by the very technologies that build the archive. With digital globalization producing cities, spaces, and identities heavily mediated by the digital technologies, the database becomes the interface through which the cities and bodies and how the state regulates and controls them to produce new conditions of citizenship, can be understood and analysed. The Network links these databases to produce spaces, cities, bodies, and nation states in new transnational orbits. The Archive serves as a way through which belonging to these spaces and subjectivities become possible. As the database adopts fluid architecture, mixing different set of informational archives to produce new identities, the Network emerges as an infinite, interminable set of legitimised objects, identities and spaces in new politics of power and economy.

Paper Abstract (Work in Progress)

In recent years, the government of the state of Karnataka, India, has been at the forefront of various e-governance initiatives across the country. Recent projects include computerisation of the land records system; of the Food and Civil Supplies Corporation, the organisation responsible for distribution of such essentials as grain and cooking gas, and involving building a database of all beneficiary families among the 60 million residents of the state; and the most remarkable yet, a network of 800 rural information kiosks, providing direct access to government records and services. This paper presents the experience of a private company that executed these projects as a case study in order to raise the emerging questions of governance and citizenship as India embraces e-governance and globalization.

When a government defines itself in terms of the citizens it represents, how does it build and maintain a comprehensive database of who these citizens are? Databases contain overlapping information, often recorded in manners that hinder one-to-one mapping, sometimes out of architectural choices (eg: individual vs family records), and sometimes out of technological barriers (eg: incompatible biometric standards). Records are digitised from paper-based originals in processes that are error-prone, thereby necessitating verification processes that may go on to hinder upgrade of technologies, in turn blocking cross-database correlation. Where paper-based originals are no longer available, records are either skipped or created afresh, leading to a politically charged system of getting listed. The technologisation is no longer a simple process of translating records but a mode of making citizenships in/visible to the state.

Traditional migration patterns in India have been from rural to urban areas. Developed countries in turn show an urban to sub-urban migration. If we surmise this to be a network effect, of road networks and access via the automobile, could an information network accessed via a kiosk have comparable effects on migration? How does this affect the economic landscape of a village around the kiosk?

Setting up a kiosk in an area that barely has electric supply, let alone connectivity, is an expensive proposition beyond the means of the state. States have therefore resorted to the instrument of the Public-Private Partnership, whereby a private partner gets to bear the expenses and in return, is allowed use of the infrastructure for other business (within limits). The private partner now has access to an untapped market, with the backing of the state, and becomes the gateway for access by other businesses, with the state obligated to remove resistance by local government (within limits).

This paper sets out to explore the restructuring of informal economies and the enabling of semi-private organizations that appropriate the State's authorial position and create new forms of understanding networks, communities and digitalized citizenships by looking at the specific details of the e-governance projects in Karnataka.

Pictures

Pictures from the Shanghai trip are on Flickr. This way please.